Etruscans people

Herodotus said that the Etruscans originated from Lydia. These people quickly established themselves in Italy and became a great and sophisticated culture in the Italian mainland.

The oldest-known inscriptions in Etruscan, a non-Indo-European language isolate, date back to the end of the 8th century, right after the shift from the rural Villanovian culture, documented in the same area in the 9th century B.C., to an urban society.

The Etruscan cities were independent states that shared a language and a religion but never formed a political unit. From around 900 to 400 BC, the Etruscans were the most innovative, powerful, wealthy, and creative people in Italy. The Etruscans had come to control Etruria, a land just north of the Palatine, by about 8oo BC.

By the sixth century BC Etruscan civilization was flourishing across northern and central Italy, and their influence stretched from Latium to the Po Plain. It is during this period that the Etruscan city located at Forcello (Bagnolo San Vito, Mantova) emerged.

Although situated at the northernmost periphery of the Etruscan world, active trade routes linking Etruria, the Adriatic, and central Europe ran through the site and, together with neighboring Mantova, Forcello formed part of an influential network of northern Etruscan cities that mediated inter-regional exchange.

It was Etruscans who built the triple temple on the Capitol, the most sacred spot in Rome; and that Etruscans had stamped their ideas upon the dress and the pomp of the supreme magistrates, and especially on their behavior in the crowning moment of their career, their return in victory from war.

Military defeats, the Roman expansion, and progressive assimilation caused a decline of the Etruscan cities, which lost their autonomy when Roman citizenship was granted to the Roman allies.
Etruscans people

Ancient Mayan civilization

The Maya built splendid temples and pyramids were accomplished artists and developed a sophisticated calendar, as accurate as any in existence in the world at that time.

Mayan people are excellent timekeepers. By following the movement of the planets, Mayan astronomers have calculated the yearly path of Venus around the Sun with an error of only fourteen seconds per year. 

The Maya built tremendous cities – Tikal, the most important Mayan political center, may have been populated by more than 100,000 people.

The Maya people were an agrarian people who cleared the dense rainforests, developed farming and built a patchwork of city-states.

Mayan warfare was a unique with a tremendous amount of religious significance. Days of religious would preceded a battle, and the King and nobility would actively participate in combat. The purpose of warfare was not to gain territory, but to acquire slaves, who were used in large scale building projects and farming. 

During the Classic period, dance performance functioned as a metaphor for civilization in three principal modes. It was image of divinity. It also structured society and played a key role on socialization and finally it was essential to the definition of the state, both representing and enacting royal authority.

The Maya speak as many as twenty-three different languages or dialects – regional variations that have different pronunciations from other regional varieties of the same languages.

The Mayan written language consists of glyphs. Unlike other language systems in ancient America, the Mayan glyphs are not just pictures of object. Many of them also represent specific sounds.

The Maya inscribed their glyphs on far more imperishable materials like stone stelae, staircase, door lintels, facades, and pottery.

The origin of Maya writing is intertwined with that of the neighboring Mixe-Zoqueans, who developed a script related to Maya writing during the Late Pre-Classic.

Like other pre-Columbian recoding systems, Maya writing was not static, but developed and changed over some 2,000 years of use.
Ancient Mayan civilization

Modern Metropolitan Civilization

The dominant community form today is the vast urban metropolitan region. This form has been well described by urban sociologists, urban geographers, and planners.

In such communities, millions of people participate in the corporate institutions of trade, finance, industry and communications.

New key institutions have emerged in modern life.

The first is the market, with its potential of regulating value through the play of supply and demand in a “free” or “price-regulated” market system.

The market system was instrumental in the rise of industrialism – the harnessing of exterior sources of power to machines and people working together in synchronized effort.

In turn, the market and industrialism made the enormous urban region, upward of 20 million or more persons living on one area, possible.

In economics, then capitalisms, working through the market, compete with state regulation, harking back to an earlier mode familiar to anthropologists from feasting complexes: distribution.

The second key institution is the legal rational corporate bureaucracy derived from the old dynastic bureaucracy of a monarchy’s household.

The impersonal corporation, with careers open to talent, has spread world wide and has been coupled with industrial organization.

In sociology, old forms are conserved while new ones overlay them. In many countries the impersonal corporation vies, still, with the dynastic principle of inherited ownership of the corporation is a single linage.

Schooling is now the corporate form of age grading in mass society. It provides for socializing large numbers of youth and giving them the skills to interact impersonally with other by role and skill in a corporate setting.

In politics everywhere, mass participation is a norm. In societies, where power is monopolized by the state itself, this participation is a ritual exercise in which elections reflect ritual consent of the state’s choice of rulers.

In other societies the participation is more nearly a reality. But in any mass society true participation is always hard to achieve.

Moreover, in most of the world old and new empires are giving way to the nation state, a political form that tries to wed ethnic culture and identity (nationalism) with formality self governing constitutional form.

In addition, ethnic groups, labor, youth and in some advanced modern centuries – women and gays are everywhere forming protest movements to achieve more participation in the state and economy.
Modern Metropolitan Civilization

Mycenaean

The inhabitants of Greece during the 2nd millennium BC are called Mycenaeans after famous and impressive citadel of Mycenae, which was excavated at the end of the 19th century.

In Mycenae, the palace was first built around 1600 BC. The Mycenaeans centered their lives around great palace complexes.

In around 1400 BC the center of Minoan power in Crete, Knossos, was destroyed, by an earthquake.

The Mycenaeans of mainland took advantage of this disaster take over Crete; they rebuilt Knossos as a Mycenaean palace and Crete became a Mycenaean kingdom in 1450 BC.

Between 1400 and 1200 BC, they erected great citadels at Mycenae, Tiryns and elsewhere with Cyclopean walls of huge, irregularly shaped stone blocks.

The Mycenaeans used their regional dominance to expand their trading networks and developed close contacts with surrounding civilizations, notably those of the Near East such as the Hittites, Syrians and Egyptians.

The Mycenaeans themselves seem to have engaged in extensive internal warfare among the competing towns. These wars wreaked them sufficiently that they fell to a new wave of nomads from the north, the Dorians.

The disaster of 1200 BC violently ended the Mycenaeans’ political and economic domination of the Mediterranean, but their culture lingered on for another one hundred years.

A few of the palaces were inhabited again and some Mycenaeans fled eastward, where they settled on the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus.
Mycenaean