The Five Hearths of Urbanization

I never really knew much about this, but a friend of mine was taking a course in Human Geography (WTH?) and this was one of the things that they dealt with in the class.
What this really means is that these five areas were the first parts of the world to experience urbanization. Urbanization is very important. You cannot even make cities until you develop surplus agriculture. Moving agriculture from subsistence to surplus usually involves a move to some sort of large farms, orchards or plantations. These large agricultural outposts can then produce enough to not only feed the rural population, but to provide food for the urban population.
The urban population must be fed by the rural because as a good rule, people in cities just do not grow food, or, if they do, they do not grow enough to sustain the city. As long as the urban folks don’t need to worry about starving and don’t have to grow food, they can do other stuff besides growing food. This is the beginnings of civilization.
The five Hearths are the Nile River Valley in Egypt, Mesopotamia in Iraq, the Indus River Valley in Pakistan, the Mayan in Central America and the Yellow River Valley in China. No one has any idea of what the IQ’s of the dwellers of these regions were at the time, but right now they are Guatemala 79, Egypt 82, Pakistan 82.5, Iraq 87 and China 105 (I don’t accept Richard Lynn’s phony 100 figure for China).
All but China are in what is the lower half of the human IQ range. Since White nationalists are adamant that IQ has remained unchanged in all of these places, and everywhere else for that matter, in the past few thousand years, it behooves to ask how is it that these dummies showed up Homo Superiorus in Europe anyway?
Of the five, Egypt was far and away the most advanced. The latest thinking is that the pyramids were not built by slaves, but instead were built by relatively well-paid, middle-class workers. Whole cities that housed these workers have been uncovered near the pyramids. Egyptian cities are the oldest of all. I am not sure of dates, but it looks like Egyptian cities go back 6,000 years or more (YBP = years before present).
It’s odd that the earliest cities were the best of them all. The majestic pyramids were unsurpassed in the other Hearths. Although Mesopotamia had stone obelisks as tall as a man, Egypt had incredible obelisks of solid stone up to an unbelievable 100 feet tall. People to this day still wonder how the Egyptians did it, and no one quite knows.
King Tut appointed what seems to be the first, or one of the first, queens of a large society, so this was a feminist breakthrough too, not that you would know it if you went to Islamic and misogynistic Egypt today.
The next one along was Mesopotamia at 5,500 years ago. This is very, very early. They had art, aqueducts and organized religion, but no pyramids or major architectural accomplishments. There was a Great Wall of Babylon, a beautiful structure fashioned of blue bricks.
They had obelisks and statues such as the Style of Hammurabi, but that was only as tall as a man. Compare to the 100 foot obelisks of the Egyptians – no contest. The Mesopotamians were already smelting metal – this was the Bronze Age. Smelting metal is a serious advance in civilization, and it’s amazing that anyone was smelting anything 4,900 years ago, when Mesopotamian smelting began. It appears that Mesopotamia was influenced by the earlier civilization of the Egyptians.
The next is the great civilization of the Indus. This was in Pakistan, not in India as idiot Indian nationalists claim. Not quite as impressive as the first two, it did have very large cities with aqueducts for irrigation. However, they had no pyramids or other great architecture, no art and no writing. They had big cities and little else. The Indus Civilization vanished without a trace for unknown reasons. The Indus was very old, 4,200 YBP.
The fourth Hearth was the Maya Civilization in Central America. This actually goes back a long ways, all the way to 3,100 YBP at least and possibly earlier. It was characterized by a writing system, mathematics, pyramids, art and advanced astronomy. The Mayan pyramids were excellent structures. I am not sure how they compare to the Egyptian pyramids, but it is fascinating that early peoples in two completely different parts of the world both decided to build pyramids (Why?).
The Mayans also smelted metal and had a very early irrigation system.
What is odd is that neither the Mayans nor the Aztecs who came much later never managed to invent the wheel or to put it to good use. The wheel is absolutely essential for advanced civilization, and discovering it is considered a profound breakthrough for any culture.
What is even more strange is that the early Central Americans did invent the wheel, but they did not put it to good use. We have found children’s toys with wheels on them from these cultures. On the other hand, there were no pack animals to be domesticated in Central America, so it’s dubious what use you could put the wheel to, although I guess you could make a rickshaw, a bicycle or a wheelbarrow.
The early Central Americans are derided, especially by White Nationalists, for being horribly, even evilly cruel, especially in their mad, seemingly insane addiction to human sacrifice. It’s true that the Central Americans did take human sacrifice to frightfully vicious extremes, at times making it nearly an assembly line operation.
However, many early cultures engaged in human sacrifice, including Homo Superiorus over in Europe. Why, we ask? Well, these were pre-scientific folks. They did have their Gods, but as cruel and meaningless as fate often is, the Gods must have been crazy, to paraphrase a movie title.
For instance, these nutty and semi-wicked Gods would kill the hottest babe in the village along with the handsomest, smartest guy to boot, for no darn reason at all, while leaving alive the village dirtbag, who barely even deserved to be kept alive one more minute. None of it made sense. Human life is a caprice, so cruel a caprice that it can almost seem like folly or the blackest of jokes.
These Gods were clearly nuts, but they ruled our lives nevertheless. What to do? Appease the crazy bastards.
This was the meaning of human sacrifice and the more humane later animal sacrifice, taken to insane lengths of folly by the Jews of the Temple Period, where an assembly line of animals stretched for up to a mile or so, and animals were killed all day in a 9-5 operation, such that blood flowed from the Temple like a river. This is the mad period that the most fanatical Zionists wish to recreate.
Anyway, the way to appease a powerful, crazy person is to humor him, be nice to him or even bring him gifts. This was the idea behind the human sacrifices, to try to semi-rationalize the ferocious whimsy of the Gods.
The fifth Hearth is the Yellow River Valley of China. Actually, yo can’t say that anymore, as the PC-idiots take offense. Guess why? Yellow River sounds like yellow skin. Chinese are said to have yellow skins, but that’s racist and you can’t say that. So forget the Yellow River.
Instead, it’s the Huang He River, which I think means yellow in Chinese, but since mostly only Chinese know Chinese, there’s nothing to get offended about, since Chinese equating Chinese = yellow is not offensive, but if Caucasians do it, it’s mean and evil and racist. Whatever.
Anyway, the Yellow River civilization was about 2,200 YBP. I don’t know much about it except that they did have large cities and irrigation. They also had writing.
One might reasonably ask what these five Hearths had in common. We can say that they were near the Equator, but not too near. That seems crucial. They were all in the Northern Hemisphere, but I doubt if that is meaningful, except that there  seem to be more humans and more land mass in the north. And, with the exception of the Mayas, they were all in lush river valleys. The Mayas are odd man out in the jungle.
The question of YBP comes up. I don’t mind the term. Originally we had B.C. (Before Christ), and as a Christian, that’s just fine for me. Well, some folks got rid of that a while back and replaced it with BCE, (Before Christian Era), which always struck me as a cheap anti-Christian shot.
I figure Jews probably had a hand in this, since Jesus isn’t exactly their favorite guy, nor is Christianity exactly their favorite religion. The atheists and scientist types must have had a hand in it too. It surely so infuriated these poor atheist souls to have to say and write that horrible word “Christ” over and over. Non-Christians all over the world probably nodded in approval or chimed in.
YBP seems a good compromise. Neither Christocentric nor a slap in the face of Christianity, it just avoids the whole issue of Jesus and religion altogether and goes by a nice secular calendar.
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