1. What are the issues involved in using “civilization” as an organizing principle in world history?
2. What is the most common source of change: connection or diffusion versus independent invention?
3. Developing agriculture & technology
- Emergence of agriculture and technological change
- Nature of village settlements
- Impact of agriculture on the environment
- Introduction of key stages of metal use
4. Basic features of early civilizations in different environments: culture, state, and social structure
Mesopotamia
Egypt
Indus
Shang
5. Classical civilizations
Major political developments in China, India, and the Mediterranean
Social and Gender structures
Major trading patterns within and among Classical civilizations; contracts with adjacent regions
Arts, sciences, and technology
6. Major belief systems: Basic features of major world belief systems prior to 600 C.E. and where each belief system applied by 600 C.E.
- Hinduism
- Judaism
- Confucianism
- Daoism
- Buddhism
- Christianity
- Polytheism
7. Late Classical period (200 C.E.)
Collapse of empires (Han China, loss of western portion of the Roman Empire, Gupta)
Movements of peoples (Huns, Germans)
8. Comparisons of the major religions and philosophical systems including some underlying similarities in cementing a social hierarchy, e.g., Hinduism contrasted with Confucianism.
9. Understanding of how and why the collapse of empire was more severe in western Europe than it was in the eastern Mediterranean or in China
10. Compare the caste system to other systems of social inequality devised by early and classical civilizations, including slavery
11. Describe interregional trading systems, e.g., the Indian Ocean trade
12. Economic and social results of the agricultural revolution, but not specific date of the introduction of agriculture to specific societies
13. Political heritage of classical China, (emperor, bureaucracy) but not specific knowledge of dynastic transitions, e.g., from Qin to Han
14. Diffusion of major religious systems
