ITB 234 - The Rise of Civilizations

Course Objectives

The aim of this course is to expose students to the roots of the modern civilizations while enabling them to ask and answer more in-depth questions about the persisting issues such as socio-economic inequalities, political injustice, disparities in economic growth, various types of racism (i.e., ethnic, cultural, environmental), environmental disasters, political and economic collapse. Consequently, students that study how these relationships evolved through time will be better equipped to develop solutions to such problems in the near future.

Course Description

This course focuses on the last 10,000 years of the humanity, from the start of agriculture in the New Stone Age (ca. 10,000 BC) to the end of the Roman Imperial Period (AD. 476), in order to understand the dynamic, complex, and multifaceted relationships among social organization, technology, economy, politics, and environment. The underlying theme of this course is that all of our modern-day problems that seem insurmountable have their origins in these early complex societies; the scale and intensity of these problems depend on the scale of organizational complexity of societies.