What were the political and intellectual outlooks of the civilizations Essay

What were the political and intellectual outlooks of the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia How did geography influence the religious outlooks of these two civilizations - Essay Example Like Mesopotamia, Egypt was also dominated by a major river: the Nile, which was central to its life (Pollock, 1999). According to Trigger (2003), city-states in Mesopotamia, after successfully resisting incoporation into larger political systems for more than fifteen hundred years, were not transformed into territorial states, but absorbed into regional kingdoms. Unlike a hegemonic city-state system, the â€Å"Inka† empire was organized as a series of provinces ruled by the Inka upper class. Governorships were not allowed to become hereditary. Provinces were governed from administrative centres which were new foundations. Local rulers who in the central highlands were mostly descended from the hereditary chiefs, administered largely rural populations. Their executive powers were subject to the approval of the provincial governor. To reduce the power of conquered groups, they were sent as colonists to far-off regions of the Inka state, and replaced by reliable settlers from older parts of the kingdom (Patterson, 1987). In contrast to the situation in Mesopotamia, where urban development played a prominent role in shaping the civilization, most people in ancient Egypt continued to live in small, largely self-sufficient villages. Although the reasons for this are complex and include fundamental differences in political organization (Trigger, 2003), the greater uniformity and stability of natural resources and correspondingly lower risks associated with agriculture in Egypt were significant (Wenke, 1989). In Mesopotamia, political entities were most often small-scale competitive polities rather than centralized regional states (Pollock, 1999). Politically centralized territorial entities were the exception rather than the rule, and most were of short duration. Contrastingly, in Egypt, after the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around the end of the fourth millennium, it remained a politically centralized state comprising of a great geographical