Ancient Western and Egyptian Civilizations

Introduction

During the course of human history, several civilizations, huge and small, have prospered, leaving a significant impact on even today's societies, and collapsed leaving their legacy in the form of statues, ruins and magnificent but crumbling temples and castles. Going through the pages of history and looking at the remains of these civilizations, a keen student of history always wonders about the reasons behind the fall of some civilizations, and what are the factors that led to the success of others. The basic questions intrigues one's mind is why some civilizations failed and while others prospered? Are there any lesson to be learnt for the present civilization from rise and fall of those ancient societies?

In an attempt to answer these questions, the present paper aims at identifying the decisive factors behind the success and failures of major western civilizations in the ancient times such as the Easter Island, Norse and the North American |Anasazi civilization. The paper also attempts to give a brief glimpse of Egyptian civilization in order to ascertain the factors that helped sustain the civilization for around 3000 years.

Discussion

The rise and fall of ancient civilizations poses a very challenging and complicated problem for the researchers. Some civilizations such as Easter Island failed mainly due to the extraordinary increase in population which resulted in sever scarcity of resources. In Easter Iceland, a major portion of the natural resources also exhausted by building the large number of national and personal monuments of the leaders.

Although the example of Easter Island civilization's demise if most often referred to when an natural disasters occurs or if there is a damage noticed to the environment, the failure of civilization was not isolated to the Easter Island itself, rather it was, as observed by world historians, a global phenomenon during that time. The fact can verified by thoroughly studying the remains of other major civilizations such as Anasazi of North American region, the Norse civilization in Greenland as well as from what is left of other major civilization that once existed in the different parts of the world during the time the aforementioned civilization were approaching their demise.

Natural disasters can result in destroying the civilizations at once or causing the large scale disbursement which ultimately made the members of civilization lost their identity thereby causing the death of that particular society. The natural disasters include volcano eruption, earthquakes, ...