Toplumsal

(İng. social)

Göndermeler

Diğer

The culture of agrarianate citied society can be characterized as a distinct type in contrast both to the pre-literate types of culture that preceded it and to the Modern technicalistic culture that has followed. In contrast to precitied society —even to agricultural society before the rise of cities— it knew a high degree of social and cultural complexity: a complexity represented not only by the presence of cities (or, occasionally, some organizational equivalent to them), but by writing (or its equivalent for recording), and by all that these imply of possibilities for specialization and large-scale intermingling of differing groups, and for the lively multiplication and development of cumulative cultural traditions. Yet the pace of the seasons set by natural conditions imposed limits on the resources available for cultural elaboration, moreover, any economic or cultural development that did occur, above the level implied in the essentials of the symbiosis of town and land, remained precarious and subject to reversal —in contrast to the conditions of Modern times, of our Technical Age, when agriculture tends to become one 'industry' among others, rather than the primary source of wealth (at least on the level of the world economy as a whole).

As innovations accumulated, especially in the West, the result was a qualitative change in the level and kind of human social organization. This shift he likens to that which civilization underwent at Sumer in the emergence of agrarianate citied life. It was this new cultural attitude, and not industrialization, which was the hallmark of the modern age. (Denmark, he explains, is indubitably modern, yet predominantly agricultural.)

Although the majority of jar burials excavated at Byblos were devoid of lavish grave goods, at least 20 contained rich inventories of gold and silver jewellery and copper weapons, thus suggesting a socially stratified society.

Instead, economic historians are now beginning to approach ancient economies from the perspective of social and commercial networks, seeking to understand how these networks were organised, operated and maintained (an approach which is starting to yield far more positive results).