The importance of rivers to the earliest civilisations
During the lockdown period of this coronavirus crisis, I’m running online lessons in Victorian history for a couple of nine year olds. This week, we covered developments in transportation and industrialisation.
For the transportation section, I suggested that the history of transport could be seen as having five stages: rivers & seas, roads, canals, railways and aviation. The Victorian period in Britain exhibited dramatic developments in canals and railways and we spoke a lot about this.
But first I pointed out that all the earliest civilisations formed on the banks of rivers. The most notable examples are the Ancient Egyptians, who were based on the Nile, the Mesopotamians in the Fertile Crescent on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the Ancient India on the Indus River, and the Ancient Chinese on the Yellow River.
Rivers were attractive locations for the first civilisations because they provided a steady supply of drinking water and made the land fertile for growing crops. Furthermore, goods and people could be transported easily, and the people in these civilisations could fish and hunt the animals that came to drink water.