Complex civilizations and their peripheries

Under the Shang, the process of sinification of northern China began, a process that would be continued in the following centuries over Central and South China. But the influence of a great civilization does not remain limited to its direct political sphere. In the case of China, we may speak of a wide and growing periphery that came into China’s cultural sphere, and that would ultimately encompass a large part of East Asia. The same phenomenon—a core region, where a complex civilization had arisen, and a large periphery—occurred elsewhere as well. The Indus civilization in the 2nd millennium BC clearly influenced the sedentary communities of the Ganges valley until, after the arrival of Indo-Aryan groups, the center of gravity of Indian civilization would shift to the Ganges valley in the 1st millennium BC, later to move further southward. Likewise, Egyptian civilization from its beginning exerted a strong influence on the Sudan to the south and on the eastern Mediterranean coastlands to the north. In the latter, the periphery of Egyptian civilization met with that of Mesopotamia.

To some extent, Mesopotamia, the region of the first complex civilization, drew the whole of the Near East into its cultural periphery and it exerted influences that went even beyond the Near East, especially in a western direction. Those influences manifested themselves in a number of areas. We may think here of the technique of bronze working, of the use of a script, of various religious customs and ideas, including complex mythological stories. But that influence can also be discerned in the techniques of agriculture and horticulture, even if these by themselves were not always of strictly Mesopotamian origin. Here, irrigation may be mentioned, as well as various crops, plants, and trees with, for instance, the accompanying art of grafting, that would spread westward from the Near East, among them also the vine. Until well into the 1st millennium BC, Mesopotamia would thus be a cultural leader that was followed directly or indirectly by large parts of western Eurasia.