Egyptian – First among earliest civilizations

First to mention among earliest civilizations, over 5000 years ago the fertile valley of the river Nile, in Egypt, was the home of a thriving civilization which lasted for about 3000 years. The people were ruled by kings who were called the ‘Pharaohs’.

Most of the people were farmers who worked for rich land owners or the king. Besides farming, the Egyptians used boats made from papyrus reeds to fish in the Nile River with the help of nets and hooks. Egypt was divided into two kingdoms called the upper and lower kingdoms.

The Egyptians worshipped a large number of gods and they believed in life after death. This was reason why their Pharaohs were embalmed after death of placed in the burial chambers inside pyramids with the entire thing that they might need in the next world.

Some of the discoveries and contributions of this civilization include the discovery of paper, the art of picture writing called Hieroglyphics, the science of embalming etc. The civilization fell when the Romans conquered it in 30 BC.

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The Sumerian Civilization

Before 200 BCE the lower part of Mesopotamia, in modern Iraq, was inhabited by the Sumerians. The Sumerians came to this area probably from modern day Turkey or Iran. Sumerians considered their rulers to be representatives of god.

The cities of Uruk, Ur and Eridu were built by them using clay bricks dried in the sun, a large number of clay tablets with writings, found in the ruins of their cities; prove that the Sumerians know how to write using sounds. This was a significant development over the picture writing developed by the Egyptians.

Though the plains in this area were fertile, they were devoid of water; farmers dug ditches and canals to bring water to their lands from rivers. Sumerians were fine crafts men and many of their works of art have been discovered by archaeologists.

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The Indus Valley Civilization

One of the earliest civilizations of the world developed on the bank of the river Indus between 2500 BCE and 1500 BCE in modern day Pakistan. There were more than hundred small towns and villages in the area along river Indus. Amongst these Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa are famous ones.

The People who inhabited this area used baked clay bricks to build their homes and surroundings streets. The remains of the city of Mohenjo-Daro show that there was a granary for storing grain, temples and a large public bath with a proper drainage system and a large number of well build houses.

Copper and bronze was used by the people to make various things they had a system of measure and weight though most of the population was involved in farming, some of inhabitants of this area were traders and traded with the Babylonians.

The reason for the downfall of this one among earliest civilizations is not known though it is assumed it might have happened due to floods in the river Indus.

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The Phoenicians

Along the coast of the Mediterranean was located large number of cities inhabited by the Phoenicians. These people were skilled ship builders and traders. Their ships had sails and rudder and were rowed by a large group of men. All the cities of this area were linked by sea. The Phoenicians traded in many things amongst with the most famous ones were ivory, cloth, jewellery, glass, dyes, etc.

Most of their trading was done through the port of Carthage while they also spread into Rhodes, Cyprus, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, etc. The Phoenicians sailed to the trading ports in ships and displayed and sold their wares on the beaches. Phoenicia was over the years, conquered by the Persians, Assyrians and Babylonians but trading continued till the Greeks came to this area which led to the downfall of the Phoenicians.

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The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) formally ceased to exist on 26 December 1991 by the declaration of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. On the previous day, 25 December 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned, declaring his office extinct, and handed over the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. That evening the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin and replaced with the Russian tricolour.

Representatives from 11 Soviet republics (Ukraine, the Russian Federation, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) met in the Kazakh city of Alma-Ata and announced that they would no longer be part of the Soviet Union. Instead, they declared they would establish a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

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The Soviet state was born in 1917. That year, the revolutionary Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian czar and established a socialist state in the territory that had once belonged to the Russian empire. In 1922, Russia proper joined its far-flung republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The first leader of this Soviet state was the Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.

The dissolution of the state also marked an end to the Cold War. The Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to the end of decades-long hostility between North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact, which had been the defining feature of the Cold War.

Gorbachev introduced a wide-ranging program of reform. His major reforms were glasnost, perestroika, and democratization. These reforms allowed the problems of the USSR to be uncovered and become public knowledge.

With the new found freedom of Gorbachev’s reforms, some outlying Soviet states began to rebel. The first states to demand their freedom were the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia.

On 24 August, President Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the CPSU and ordered all party units in the government dissolved. Five days later, Communist rule in the Soviet Union effectively ended when the Supreme Soviet indefinitely suspended all CPSU activities on Soviet territory.

In early December, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine broke away from the USSR and created the Commonwealth of Independent States. Weeks later, they were followed by eight of the nine remaining republics. At last, the mighty Soviet Union had fallen.

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During the First World War, the prices of various commodities rose, the conditions of the people worsened and the government extracted many dues from the people in the name of war efforts. This gave rise to resentment among the Indian people and there were several agitations against the government. To contain this, the government passed the Rowlatt Act in 1919 which authorized the government to arrest any person without warrant and to detain him/her without trial for two years.

There were massive protests and demonstrations by the Indian people against this measure of the government. Gandhi also took very active part in this. He started a Satyagraha Sabha which campaigned against this act asking people to disobey it and court arrest. He also gave a call for country-wide hartal which was observed in various places on different dates. But it was generally a success. The government responded with depression.

In Punjab, this repression took its worst form and in the Jallianwala Bagh the military under General Dyer shot at unarmed people without warning. Hundreds of persons – men, women, and children – died. This Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the subsequent imposition of martial law in Punjab horrified the whole country and generated anger against the British rule.

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Around the same time, the Indian Muslims were aroused because the Sultan of Turkey was deposed by the British. The Indian Muslim regarded the Turkish Sultan as their Khalifa and they started Khilafat movement for the restoration of Khalifa in Turkey. Mohammed Ali and Shaukat Ali were the leaders of the movement. They called upon Gandhi to guide them. Although Khilafat movement was not directly concerned with Indian politics, Gandhi thought that in this there was an opportunity to unite the Hindu and Muslims again the British. He, therefore, openly supported the movement.

Gandhi had decided to simultaneously, launch the non-cooperation movement at an all-India level. In September 1920, in a special session of the All India Congress Committee held in Calcutta, it was decided to launch the movement. The Nagpur Congress held in December 1920 further approved it. The Indian people were asked to boycott foreign goods and adopt Swadeshi to boycott government schools, colleges and courts, and councils, to adopt national schools, arbitration courts, and Khadi. The programme also included resignation from government services, non-payment of taxes, removal of untouchability and promotion of Hindu-Muslim unity.

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The movement started at an unprecedented level. Thousands of students left schools and colleges, hundreds of lawyers and many government servants left their jobs, most of the people refused to vote in the election to the legislatures, the boycott of foreign cloth assumed massive proportion, thousands were involved in the picketing of the shops selling foreign cloth and liquor and in many places, peasants and workers were also involved along with students, middle classes, and women. Its influence was even more far-reaching. Millions of peasants and urban poor became familiar with the ideology of nationalism. Most section of the Indian population became politicized and women were drawn to movement. An anti-imperialist feeling spread to wide areas of the country and the movement imbued the Indian people with self-confidence and self-esteem.

Such a big movement, however, did sometimes reached beyond Gandhian tenet of non-violence. On 5th February 1922, in Chauri-Chaura, a crowd of peasants burnt the police station killing 22 policemen in retaliation to the police firing. Gandhi condemned this incident and withdrew the movement. This decision shocked many Congress people but Gandhi remained adamant and started a five-day fast in penance. This way non-cooperation movement came to an end.

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In the early part of the 12^th century, there were many small nomadic tribes scattered all over Central Asia. In the later part of this century, one of the most powerful chiefs of the tribes called Genghis Khan brought all other tribes under his control and lead the foundation of Mongol empire.

The Mongolians were tough fighters and in a battle, they mostly rode on horseback and control their horses with their feet thus allowing them to use their hands for shooting an arrow or fighting with swords their bows were powerful and made of horn and wood while the arrows had tips with were capable of piercing armor.

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In the hands of expert Mongolian archers, there was a deadly combination. The Mongolians were trained of fighting on plane land but they were incapable of attacking fortified towns. They soon learned the skill doing so from the Chinese soldier they captured in the battles.

The Mongols used a lot of new things in the battle for the first time they made a bomb with the help of gunpowder and used smoke screens during battles. The Military operations of the Mongol empire were minutely planned and executed with speed. They relied on sheer surprise and terror and wherever they went they looted and burnt anything that came in their path.

In 1213, they broke through the great wall of China and captured Peking. When Genghis Khan 1227, Mongol empire extended from the black sea to modern day Korea and in the South up to the Middle-East and the Himalayas.

After his death, Mongol empire was divided into four parts or ‘Khanates’ called the Khanate of Jagatai, the Khanate of Hulagu, the Khanate of Kublai Khan, the Khanate of Golden Horde which was ruled by different rulers.

The Mongolians were basically nomads who wandered on their land with their cattle, ship, goats. They lived in round tents called ‘Yurts’ which are still used the Mongols.

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Historically, fine cotton produced in India were exported to Europe. With industrialization, British cotton manufacturer began to expand, and industrialists pressurized the government to restrict cotton imports and protect local industries. Tariffs were imposed on cloth imports into Britain. Consequently, the inflow of fine Indian cotton began to decline.

From the early nineteenth century, British manufacturers also began to seek an overseas market for their cloth. Excluded from the British market by tariff barriers, Indian textiles now faced stiff competition in other international markets. If we look at the figures of exports from India, we see a steady decline of the share of cotton textiles: from some 30 percent around 1800 to 15 per by 1815. By the 1870s, this proportion had dropped to below 3 per cent.

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What, then, did India export? The figures again tell a dramatic story. While exports of manufactures declined rapidly, export of raw materials increased equally fast. Between 1812 and 1871, the share of raw cotton export rose from 5 per cent to 35 percent. Indigo used for dyeing cloth was another important export for many decades. Optimum shipments to China grew rapidly from 1820 to become for a while India’s single largest export. Britain grew opium in India and exported it to China and, with the money earned through this sale, it financed its tea and other imports from China.

Over the nineteenth century, British manufactures flooded the Indian market. Food grain and raw material exports from India to Britain and the rest of world increased. But the value of British exports from India. Thus, Britain had a ‘trade surplus’ with India. Britain used this surplus to balance its trade deficits with other countries – that is, with countries from which Britain was importing more than it was selling to. This is how a multilateral settlement system works – it allows one country’s deficit with another country to be settled by its surplus with a third country. By helping Britain balance its deficits, India played a crucial role in the late-nineteenth-century world economy.

Britain’s trade surplus in India also helped pay the so-called ‘home charges’ hat included private remittances home by British officials and traders, interest payments on India’s external debt and pensions of British officials in India.

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