Wikijunior:Ancient Civilizations/What is a Civilization?
This is the A civilization is large group of people who live and work co-operatively, a society that share a single culture. The word civilization comes from the Latin civilis, meaning civil, related to the Latin civis, meaning citizen, and civitas, meaning city or city-state and that also somehow defines the size of the society, city-states are the precursors of nations.
A civilizational culture also implies the passing on knowledge to across generations. In fact a civilization is defined by its culture. All civilization usually shares not only a culture but other common characteristics. A specific region of the world, shares a stable food supply, a form of government and creates distinct social structures that implements a range of common techniques for stabilizing their way of life.
Civilized people generally practice agriculture and obey rules that allows them to settle and live in towns and cities in a organized way. Compared with barbarian cultures, members of a civilization are commonly structured according to specific skills such as farming, trading or defending their settlements, rules and believes.
Civilizations are usually also characterized by an intricate social hierarchy, older civilizations where usually headed by a powerful king, queen, emperor or empress at the top, supported by a noble or ruling class who control military forces. These disciplined soldiers and police in turn control the ordinary people: artisans who make things, peasants who work the land, merchants who trade things, and so on...
Civilizations are not only found in the past, today we can say that we are heading toward a global civilization, that means that we are starting to share the same culture (that includes the acceptance of differences) all over the world. If we look into the last century, we can clearly identify some distinctions.
