ON CIVILIZATION

When do you call a society a civilization. This term meant living up to human standards. Rules of behavior that distinguished “civilized man”, from the cave-men, nomads and hunter-gatherers.

Civilizations can be found all over the world. Sumeria in Iraq, which had a school system, public services like toilets and hot water. India knew civilizations that fought immense wars, using rockets and even atomic weapons. The Chinese civilization is a story of continuous warfare, before unity was established. We call Sparta a civilization, but its identity was based on warfare. All over the world, a civilization was recognized by its intellectual achievements, like geometry, writing and astronomy. The Sumerians kept records of the celestial movements and were the first civilization to observe an asteroid-impact. Egypt is famous for its art, like many other civilizations, and monuments. We still wonder, how these monuments were built. We tend to make things small. We talk about the Great Pyramid, while referring to an hughe complex of pyramids and temples. Lately underground tunnels were explored, connecting the monuments. These underground systems are definitively older, than the Gizeh-pyramids themselves. Civilization also has a link to human rights. Some kind of judgment must be performed. Especially concerning life and death. Then suddenly the picture changes.

All civilizations used calendars. The Persians did, the Hebrews, the Chinese and the Greek. So did the Maya. A Meso-American “civilization”, that flourished for a thousand years, to disappear around 800 AD. and abandoned their cities and temples.

The Maya knew several calendars. A normal 360 days calendar, a personal calendar of 260 days and a “long-count”-calendar, which had a prophetic character. On 21 December 2012, at 11.11 pm., this calendar ends. Will the world come to an end? But that is not my point. I am talking about the concept of civilization. World-wide, what we call civilizations, were societies based on human and animal sacrifice. Especially the Maya. Human sacrifice was necessary to keep the Gods satisfied and the world going. If these stories are only partly true, thousands of fellow-Indians, were slaughtered and their bodies were thrown down the temple-stairs. The Maya disappeared because they ran out of victims and started to slaughter their own. Warfare is a second form of human sacrifice. It dominated the civilized world for some 4000 years.