.png){kind=icon}
The Reincarnation Experiment (best with large lecture classes)
For this exercise, have your students assume that reincarnation actually happens. Each student should, in secret, consider who, among all the people in Ancient Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs, they might be reincarnated from, and have them write that on a slip of paper. Best if you or your TAs pass out ballots, as it makes students take this exercise seriously. A few hieroglyphs on the ballot does wonders to focus their attention. Collect all the “ballots” and have your TAs tally up all the results. In most classes, the vast majority of people will be the elite classes (Pharaoh, Pharaoh’s queen, Isis or another of the gods, or one of the generals). Almost nobody will choose farmer, potter, house servant, or slave. Ask students how many pharaohs are likely to be reincarnated in your very classroom of 100 or 200? If the Pyramids at Giza were each built for one pharaoh and his family, what was the likely relationship between the number of pharaohs and the number of workers and slaves who built the pyramids? Use this exercise to get students to recognize the bias in history that winners write the history of cities and states in their architecture, even when they don’t have writing or when we can’t decipher it.
Identifying the Factors that Led to the Rise of Cities (Best with smaller classes)
Break up your class into six or seven teams. Prepare cards or type up sheets of paper about the several different areas of the globe where agriculture developed (Fertile Crescent, Yellow River, Indus River, Highland New Guinea, Peru, Maya lowlands, Sub-Saharan Africa such as Mali, or you may break up the Fertile Crescent into Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley). Have teams search the internet for information on the rise of cities (or in the case of New Guinea, areas that did not) to identify the factors that lead to urban settlements. In class discussion, have student teams discuss their findings. See if the class can identify patterns that are common across the teams.
Understanding Political Authority
Have students form groups of five or six and ask them to decide who is to be the leader of the group. Have them discuss why they chose that particular student as their leader. What might the leader do to keep his members from leaving to join another group? Now choose one of the other students (not the leader) and give him or her (hypothetically) free passes to some local amusement park, restaurant, ice cream parlor or the like that he or she may share with anyone in her group. How does this simple advantage give him or her a stake in leadership? Have students consider what happens if one of the other students is given the (hypothetical) power of force such as a non-lethal weapon, superior size, etc. How do the students think this feature would change the leadership within the group? Which of these actions would keep everyone in the original group satisfied and compliant? Explain that we have been looking at power in distinctly American cultural ways, but natural advantages, power, and wealth could clearly have shaped the nature of early cities and states.
Considering the Limitations of Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” Model
Have students break into groups to debate Diamond’s model of Collapse to explain the end of the ancient societies of the early Mesopotamian kingdoms, the states around the Indus river, the Inca, the Maya, or the Egyptian Pharaohs (explain to students that by Cleopatra’s time the ancient Egyptian kingdoms had ceased with Alexander the Great’s conquest and Cleopatra was one of the Greek Pharaohs). Diamond’s model is about environmental degradation and is likely more a parable about climate change in our own time than a discussion of events in these early states. Have students debate whether the end of these societies was actually a collapse or a transformation into some other sort of social formation.