Mesopotamia vs. Egypt

Here's the first discussion post for my SNHU-117 class.

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One similarity shared by ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia was government in the form of monarchy. It is likely that they shared monarchy because they both were agricultural societies. The textbook authors argue that monarchy gave rise to surplus wealth, which in turn gave rise to class distinctions, including "ruling elites."[1] It is likely that competition among members of ruling elites for increased power resulted in the evolution from rule by elite groups to rule by elite individuals. As also noted in the textbook, patriarchy accompanied urbanization -- which arose with agriculture because of the ability to sustain larger populations due to surplus food -- because of the emergence of motherhood as the principal social role in increasingly militarized and physical work-intensive societies.[2] These trends assured that almost all monarchs were male.

A key difference between the two societies was related to the aforementioned issues, but also to geography. This difference was that political power was centralized in ancient Egypt but not in Mesopotamia; i.e., whereas the latter has several kings of individual city states, the former had only a single pharaoh at a time, beginning with the Old Kingdom. The sociologist Michael Mann has argued for an ecological explanation: the concentration of resources in the river valley meant that  communication networks could only run north with the river, thus limiting opposition to consolidation.[3] In addition, raw materials for weapons lay only to the east in the Sinai, so whoever controlled the river controlled those resources as well. In contrast, the existence of two rivers in Mesopotamia allowed for a broader settlement area and more even distribution of resources and wealth. Therefore, it was much more difficult for individual monarchs to consolidate broad bases of economic, military, and political power.

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     1. Jerry Bentley and Herbert Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters, Volume 1: To 1500, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), 2-3.
     2. Ibid, 14-15.
     3. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, new ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 110-112.