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Savagery and Civilization
Mohamed Rabie
Days ago, I posted a rather complex question on ResearchGate asking more than 17
million university professors, intellectuals, researchers, and graduate students to answer.
The question says: When did our savage ancestors become civilized? How did they
become civilized? Can we claim that all humans who live in the 21st century have become
civilized? But no one tried to answer the question. And though I do not know why no one
tried to answer the question, it is not hard to guess.
I believe that few reasons discourage most people from trying to answer such
questions. One reason is the difficulty to define what civilized and uncivilized mean, and
what is the difference between savagery and civilization, and the circumstances that
make some behave savagely and others behave in a civilized way. People who believe
in faith and fate, for example, do not see history as a process that transforms people’s
cultures and outlooks, and individuals’ views, attitudes, ways of thinking, and characters.
Lack of understanding of such issues and their social implications is probably the main
reason for the spread of racial discrimination and hatred. And that leads us to see some
people as civilized and others as savages but without thinking about the circumstances
or the process that caused some people to be savages and others civilized.
In trying to define the word civilized, I looked at several examples and dictionaries,
but no definition was comprehensive or even satisfying. The West tends to associates
civilization with having a high state of culture and the development of the economic and
technological aspects of life. But what does ‘having a high state of culture’ mean? The
Cambridge English Dictionary says that “A civilized society or country has a well-
developed system of government, culture, and way of life and that treats the people who
live there fairly.” Ben Davis adds that a “fair justice system is a fundamental part of a
civilized society.”
1
During the colonization stage, the West found a way to categorize and
deny the inhabitants of the colonies their right to the land they lived on, calling them
savages.
2
When the European people who called themselves ‘civilized’ launched the colonial
enterprise in the 16th century they claimed that they were on a sacred mission “to civilize
and Christianize the savages.” But to carry out their mission and civilize and Christianize
the savages, they killed tens of millions of innocent people in Asia, Africa, North and South
America, and Australia. In the meantime, all sectors of the civilized society, including
leaders of the church and the working class participated in that inhumane enterprise. And
instead of helping their victims build new societies and developed their economies, they
destroyed the indigenous cultures and the traditional economies and kidnaped and sold
millions more of the ‘savages’ as slaves in North and South America, denying them their
human rights, even the right to live with their families and see their children grow. In light
of these actions, can the West claim to be civilized? And therefore, should we accept this
claim? Some might argue that the West has changed, but the wave of racial discrimination
that swept Europe and America during the last decade proves that discrimination against
the other never left the western culture.
Let us look at some social indicators in America to see if Americans qualify as a
civilized society. Today (July 15, 2021) it was announced that 93,000 people died in
America in 2020 due to drug overdose. And though the poverty rate has fallen 4.3
percentage points since 2014, it was 10.5% in 2019, but expected to rise again due to
COVID-19.
2
Police brutality kills over 1000 people each year, many of them belong to the
Black and Hispanic minorities. “Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United
States seems to only be increasing, with a total 440 civilians having been shot, 74 of
whom were Black, in the first six months of 2021. In 2020, there were 1,021 fatal police
shootings, and in 2019 there were 1004 fatal shootings. Additionally, the rate of fatal
police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other
ethnicity.”
3
“Meanwhile the percentage of people with health insurance coverage for all or
part of 2019 was 92.0% and 8.0% of people, or 26.1 million, did not have health insurance
at any point during 2019.”
4
Moreover, “seventeen out of every 10,000 people in the United
States were experiencing homelessness on a singly night in January 2019. These
567,715 people represent a cross-section of America. They are associated with every
region of the country, family status, gender category, and racial/ethnic group.”
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However,
about 30% of those homeless people are in families.
3
In this paper, I will try to answer the questions raised at the beginning: When did our
ancestors become civilized? How did they become civilized? Can we say that all of us
have become civilized? Do the Christians who kill Muslims in the Philippines, Buddhists
who kill Muslims in Myanmar, Zionist Jews who kill Muslims and Christians in Palestine,
and Muslim radicals who kill everyone who disagrees with dogma are civilized?
Historical Background
World history is the story of the development of human societies and their achievements
in all social, cultural, economic, political, and scientific fields, as well as the story of war
and peace and their social and economic consequences. Because no one can confidently
prove or disprove assertions about the past, any conversation about history is naturally
controversial. Therefore, all assertions made by historians should be considered
probabilities, not facts beyond doubt. And since no history of the distant past contains
proven facts, then no history should be viewed as sacred, and no historical record should
be considered beyond challenge. Indeed, unless we accept that the only fact about history
is that there are no credible facts in history, most people are likely to live as prisoners of
a largely fictitious past, unable to free themselves from the chains of history, and move
forward to envision a shared future for all humanity.
Since acts, ideas, inventions, and events that shape history are not isolated from
one another, historical records reflect chains of actions, reactions, and interactions that
form a process of sociocultural, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical fundamental change
and transformation. This process is an unconscious and unregulated movement of
groups, nations, states, cultures, empires, and civilizations toward higher, more complex,
often undefined goals. It is a self-propelled process that has no particular point of
departure, and no clear destination. As it moves, it causes conflict, induces change, and
transforms people’s ways of life, perceptions, and living conditions in ways that do not
necessarily reflect the desires or interests of all people.
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But for the historical process to continue moving, it requires motives to inspire it,
forces to lead it, energy to fuel it, and a mechanism to coordinate its many activities.
Traditionally, ambitious leaders, active groups and intellectuals, aggressive states,
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human needs, individual aspirations, and an uninterrupted stream of new ideas,
technologies, and inventions have played leading roles in energizing the historical
process, causing the many relationships among these forces to experience conflict,
competition, and cooperation. However, the mechanism that continues to cause and
manage conflict and change in a seemingly orderly manner was unconsciously created
before the dawn of civilization about 12,000 years ago. Four social processes gradually
and successively emerged as independent, yet complementary vehicles to form a larger
societal framework through which forces of change and conflict shape societies and their
cultures and transform living conditions at all times. They are the sociocultural process,
the political process, the economic process, and the infomedia process.
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Archeological records seem to indicate that the first human social unit was formed
about 100,000 years ago; it gave birth to the hunter-gatherer society. People at the time
lived on hunting animals and gathering wild fruits and vegetables. They formed small
groups of men whose duty was to hunt animals and gather wild fruits and vegetables.
And since the hunter-gatherers had no common languages, they could not form societies
and live in peace; some historians and anthropologists say that until 7500 years ago,
every encounter between two groups of people meant war. This is why the hunter-
gatherer age lasted longer but experienced less change than any other age that followed.
About 30,000 years ago, the tribal society emerged to dominate life in older times;
it was organized around a set of traditions, customs, norms, a common language, and
oftentimes a religion as well. The tribal society continued to live on the hunting of animals
and the gathering of fruits and wild vegetables for some 20,000 years; however, around
the end of this age humans managed to domesticate several animals, giving the tribal
society a stronger social organization and a new meaning; it enabled the nomads to
strengthen their economic base, grow in size, and further develop their culture and way
of life. Domesticated animals made tribal life easier and sustainable; the meat of some
was used for food, the skin and fur of others were used for clothing, and the bones of
some animals served other purposes, providing tools, weapons, musical instruments, and
ornaments. In addition, tribal people employed animals such as camels, horses, and
donkeys, as means of transportation, making it easier for them to move across difficult
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terrains, and interact peacefully and otherwise with other tribes. The intellectual horizon
of the tribal people, however, remained limited to their families and tribal loyalties. Culture
in this age was in essence a way of life based on norms and traditions, and a history of
feuding with other tribes. The social and cultural aspects of life or what I call the
sociocultural process governed the pace and influenced the course of social change for
thousands of years to come without challenge.
In fact, the sociocultural process could hardly be called a process; it consisted of a
simple set of traditions, norms, and customs that were passed from one generation to
another without discernible change. Economic stagnation, the abundance of land and
freedom, and the absence of technological innovations made change difficult to conceive
in this age. However, the basic goals of survival and security improved over time but
remained vastly constrained by nature, which set the limits and defined the space of
economic activity. Since economic conditions were similar everywhere, the environment
became the primary force influencing the course of sociocultural change. And since
environmental conditions were similar in most inhabited places, they produced similar
patterns of living. Consequently, tribal cultures displayed almost identical characteristics
in content, character, attitudes, and outlook; all had the same internal and external
dynamics. The way of life of an African tribe, for example, was found to be similar to that
of a Middle Eastern tribe, which resembled the way of life of Asian, European, and
Mexican tribes. “Many events in human history seem to correlate very remarkably with
environmental controls... The historical theory that ascribes many events in the human
record to environmental causes thus receives powerful support from geology.”
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All tribes
lived in the same stage of societal development, had the same economy, and developed
similar cultures and ways of life.
Members of each tribe were tied to each other by blood and kinship relationships
and believed and largely behaved as if they were members of one large family sharing
the same history and destiny. Yet strict tribal norms and traditions, while strengthening
tribal unity, they weakened individuality and initiative. On the other hand, internal tribal
solidarity reflected an almost equal enmity toward the outside, causing tribal relationships
to be shaped by suspicion, hostility, and a strong desire to avenge real and perceived
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past injuries to tribal honor. Tribes raided each other for a reason and often for no reason.
Hostility toward the other had been, as the Rwanda, Burundi, and Somalia tragedies of
the 1990s sadly demonstrated, an important aspect of the tribal way of life. Contact
between different tribes often meant war, whose consequences were recognized and
largely accepted as normal.
In other words, the tribal man fought to live and lived to fight, causing life, in general,
to start and end with fighting. Nevertheless, places in which tribes lived were different in
geography and topography, as well as in their endowment of plants and animals that lent
themselves to domestication. Because of this diversity, argues Jared Diamond, some
regions were able to develop first, enter the agricultural age, and make more progress
than others. “Hence the availability of domestic plants and animals ultimately explains
why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed earlier in Eurasia and later, or not at
all, on other continents.”
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What Diamond means to say is that the differences in literary
and steel weapons that different regions exhibited are not due to differences in human
ingenuity, but due to the availability of animals and plants that lent themselves to
domestication.
However, nature and the dictates of a largely nomadic life denied tribal people the
opportunity to establish roots in one place, leading them to have no attachment to a
country or develop a sense of belonging to a nation, even after the establishment of the
state in the agricultural age. The family house, usually a tent, was the place to which tribal
people exhibited most attachment, and the tribe was the nation to which they belonged
and to whose customs and traditions and legacy they gave allegiance.
About 11,000 years ago, humans discovered the life cycle of plants and developed
agriculture as a mode of economic production and way of life. Historians of ancient times
and archeologists seem to agree that the city of Jericho in Palestine is the oldest city in
the world and the only city of older times to continue to be inhabited until today. History
books of older times say that the history of Jericho as an agricultural settlement dates
back to 10,000 BCE. “The Ein es-Sultan spring at what would become Jericho was a
popular camping ground for Natufian hunter-gatherer groups…Around 9600 BCE, the
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droughts and cold ended, making it possible for Natufian groups to extend the duration of
their stay, eventually leading to year-round habitation and permanent settlement.”
10
The
inhabitants of those settlements in Jericho are the people who discovered the life cycle
of plants and developed agriculture, which gave birth to civilization.
Jericho “is believed to be one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world and the city
with the oldest known protective wall in the world.”
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Archeologists have unearthed the
remains of many successive settlements in Jericho, the first of which dates back 11,000
years. “Jericho is one of the earliest continuous settlements in the world, dating perhaps
from about 9000 BCE. Archaeological excavations have demonstrated Jericho’s lengthy
history: it provides evidence of the first development of permanent settlements and thus
of the first steps toward civilization.”
12
Jericho is described in the Hebrew Bible as “the
city of palm trees.”
13
Yes, palm trees, banana farms, watermelons, oranges, and other
exotic tropical fruits are Jericho’s most famous agricultural products.
According to UNESCO, “the first permanent settlement on the site of Jericho
developed near the Ein es-Sultan spring between 9,500 and 9000 BCE.”
14
At Jericho,
circular dwellings were built of clay and straw bricks left to dry in the sun and then
plastered together with a mud mortar. Each house measured about 5 meters across and
was roofed with a mud-smeared brush. Successive Palestinian generations inherited
these techniques from their ancestors and used them throughout history. After the Israelis
ethnically cleansed about half of the Palestinian people from their homes and villages and
cities in 1948, tens of thousands of the refugees settled around Jericho; they used the
same material and techniques and built little homes in which thousands still live today.
The Dawn of Civilization
Any educated person living in the 21st century can easily argue that the dawn of civilization
began with the domestication of animals. Though most humans have not treated their
animals kindly, some lived all their lives attached to their animals, be it a cat, dog, horse,
or donkey. In fact, until today, shepherds in the Middle East do not leave their homes with
their cattle in the morning without having a dog and a donkey. The dog has to watch the
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cattle, protect them from other tribesmen, and ensure that no sheep or cow strays away
from the herd. As for the donkey, its job is to carry the things that shepherds need during
their daily trips like food and water; shepherds also ride their donkeys when they get tired
walking and on their way home at the end of the day. This attachment of humans to
animals is what caused man’s feelings to change and become less savage and more kind
to animals and humans alike.
On the other hand, “Year-round warm weather, the abundance of water and fertile
land, and the availability of domesticated animals and plants made a semi-nomadic life
possible. And this, in turn, enabled man to observe nature closely, follow its seasonal
course, and ultimately discover the life cycle of plants. Since tribal man was forced by
nature and culture to spend most of his time foraging, it is believed that the woman was
responsible for the discovery of the life cycle of plants and thus the development of
agriculture.”
15
In fact, women in most traditionally agricultural societies have continued to
spend most of their time cultivating the land, tending plants, preparing produce for food,
and preserving meat and other agricultural products for cold seasons and hard times.
“Plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human
populations. The resulting food surpluses and the animal-based means of transporting
those surpluses were a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralized,
socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies.”
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Evolution of Civilization
During the agricultural age, villages, cities, and commercial centers gradually appeared,
allowing the agricultural man to work and think and organize life in ways that made him
more social, productive, and secure. And this caused society to enter a continuous, but a
slow process of change and transformation. And unlike the tribal man, the agricultural
man moved from concentrating on the material things, like the tribal man, to discover the
values of justice, truth, and honesty and develop the concepts of self-awareness and
social responsibility. This happened when humans began to differentiate between right
and wrong, moral, and immoral behavior, and develop a conscience that understood
these values and tried to abide by them. Having a family living in a home located on or
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near a farm made this human transformation not only possible but inevitable. Attachment
to one’s home and love of man to wife and parents to children and children to brothers
and sisters and parents was a natural development of family life spending its time working,
eating and sleeping together and entertaining each other.
Religion appeared around the middle of the agricultural age or about 6,000 years
after the dawn of civilization and conscience. By that time feudalism had become a major
institution controlling the best agricultural land, exploiting farm workers and servants, and
denigrating the weak and poor. Faced with this situation, religion moved to emphasize
the moral and ethical aspects of life. Injustice, exploitation, the enslavement of the weak
were major forces that pushed religion to call for justice, empathy, truthfulness, and
morality. For example, during the reign of King Ikhnaton in Egypt, he moved faith in god
from the local sphere to the universal one, he made god one entity that controls life on
earth and man’s destiny in the hereafter life. Consequently, Ikhnaton made God eternal,
universal, and one entity, and therefore, moved religion toward monotheism, telling
believers to depend on God who controls their destinies; a message that Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam embraced when they appeared centuries later.
However, the humanizing process of man, which started with the development of
agriculture about 10,000 years ago in Palestine, was never completed. And due to the
chaos that characterizes the current transition from the industrial to the knowledge age,
the pillars of both the agricultural and industrial societies are crumbling slowly and no new
ones are being developed or even conceived to replace them, causing much of the
progress in character and conscience that was achieved in the distant past to be lost.
Today, money has become the only god that most people worship, do whatever it takes
to stay close to it, and use its power to achieve their goals.
During the tribal age, the tribe was the nation to which every member belonged and
gave allegiance. And due to the tribal way of life, the family did not play a major role in
societal life and thus in shaping the tribal culture. And since character and conscience
were developed in farm homes during the agricultural age, the tribal man behaved in a
savage way that did not give much consideration to human life. In contrast, though the
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clan became the unit of the agricultural society, the family became the heart of society;
love for children, wife, land, and neighbors became the major source of pleasure, if not
the essence of life. Farming the land forced man to live on his farm or close to it, build a
house where he and his family lived together, and performed most tasks as one team.
Since there were no schools for kids to attend, all able members of each family worked
together and pursued one purpose in life that all shared .
The surviving documents of older times “demonstrate historically that the thing
which was long called the moral consciousness of mankind has grown up with each
generation out of the discipline and the emotions of family life, supplemented by
reflections and teachings of experienced elders. The supreme values which lie within the
human soul have, therefore, as a matter of historical fact, entered the world for the first
time through the operation of those gentle and ennobling influences which touch us
continually in our family life; they were not anywhere here upon our globe until the life of
father, mother, and children created them. It was the sunshine and the atmosphere of the
earliest human homes that created ideals of conduct and revealed the beauty of self-
forgetfulness.”
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Sean Ellerker says that “anyone who has not specialized in ancient
history could be forgiven for thinking that nothing meaningful happened before the Fifth
Century BC when the western classical age is generally considered to have begun.
However, the civilized world existed and flourished for an incredible 3,500 years before
the classical Greeks first came to prominence.”
18
The family of the agricultural age was the force that labored unconsciously day and
night to enable us to develop conscience and character. Meanwhile, religion, particularly
in the absence of the state, played a leading role in humanizing us; however, its overall
influence on people’s conduct was more negative than positive, as it was transformed
into a social institution that discriminated against the followers of other religions. For
example, Jews discriminated against the Canaanites and massacred them in Palestine
about 4,000 years ago; Christianity discriminated against Jews and persecuted them
during the reign of the Roman Empire; Islam discriminated against both Christians and
Jews and killed many of them during its conquests in the 7th and 8th centuries. Today,
Hindus and Buddhists discriminate against Muslims and kill them in India and Myanmar,
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Christians discriminate against Muslims and kill them in the Philippines, and Zionist Jews
discriminate against Muslims and Christians and kill them in Palestine. Meanwhile,
American Evangelical Christians provide Zionist Jews with the moral, political, and
financial support to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its Muslim and Christian inhabitants.
During the industrial age, the nucleus family replaced the clan of the agricultural age
as the basic unit of society. And in the evolving knowledge age, the individual is fast
becoming the unit of the new society replacing the nucleus family of the industrial age.
However, the individual is incapable of further developing the character or conscience of
man because he rarely interacts with the larger society or cares for a human cause.
Meanwhile, the nucleus family of the industrial age can no longer play the role it had
played earlier because it does not have shared tasks to perform or time to stay together
long enough to shape cultures; kids attend schools, most parents work to make ends
meet, and even rich parents, driven by the lust for money and power, have no time to
devote to noble causes, leaving the upbringing of children to nannies and kindergartens .
Since the farmhouse was the place where both civilization and conscience were
born, it is hard to say that most Americans, Canadians, or Australians had the opportunity
to be civilized and develop a conscience. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the
American families never lived in farmhouses. As most Americans were busy killing the
indigenous people and confiscating their land, some were busy kidnapping millions of
Black Africans and enslaving them to do the farming work for them. Though most White
American farmers spent a lot of time with their children and lived in the same homes, kids
had to go to school and the elders had to manage the land and slaves. So whatever the
young learned from watching the old was how to view the slaves they owned and how to
treat them. And because the Church approved the slavery institution, it could not play a
humanizing role in society the way religion played in the early agricultural times.
Conclusion
Due to passing through a difficult transition that is taking us from the industrial to the
knowledge age, chaos, loss of direction and the lust for money have combined to create
a new jungle that engulfs the lives of most people everywhere. No individual or group of
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people or a state seems stable enough to think deeply or behave rationally. Moreover,
the crumbling of the pillars of the industrial society has allowed big corporations to lose
business ethics and see each customer as an object to exploit; a commodity to sell to
maximize profits. Most humans in this age have become prisoners in a virtual world that
they can neither understand nor control. Consequently, humanity suffered a serious
setback that it cannot overcome without changing the systems that regulate business
organizations and manage societal life.
How to get out of this chaotic and unhealthy transition and reorient society to move
in the right direction is difficult to say, especially since no social, political, or business
leader seems to know the right direction. Based on my unique experience of living in
many countries and going through all stages of human development from the hunter-
gatherer to the knowledge age, I can say that we have become leaderless. Nonetheless,
nothing can be done as long as the current leaders and economic philosophies and social
systems stay as they are today; these are philosophies and systems that serve the
interests of the rich and powerful, enabling them to legally confiscate the rights and wealth
of the general public and falsify its conscience to pursue their evil intentions with impunity .
Since racism is an attitude based on certain beliefs, it cannot be a part of the human
genes; it is an ideology taught to people, often at an early age, that poisons their souls
and lead them to hate others and discriminate against them, often for no reason. Children
born in racist families and closed religious communities have become racists with falsified
consciences. Racism must therefore be considered a contagious disease that moves
from one group to another, and from one generation to another with ease. Racists who
succeed to cleanse themselves of this curse oftentimes become strangers in their native
communities, if not outcasts forced to find a new community to belong to. This is why
Jews who recognize the rights of the Palestinian people and support their just cause are
accused of being self-hating Jews. So to be a good Jew you must hate all Palestinians
and everyone who supports them, and celebrate the Israeli killing of Palestinian children
in their homes and villages; you also must deny the Palestinians their human rights,
including the right to return to their stolen land and homes in Palestine.
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Therefore, the farming home and conscience which managed to civilize the savages
in the early agricultural times, are losing the battle to civilize the rest of humanity.
Meanwhile, savagery, which western states declared dead with the writing of laws and
constitutions and developing their national economies and science, is back challenging
everything that civilization and the conscience had instituted in our hearts and minds and
way of life many centuries ago.
James H. Breasted acknowledges that man never hesitated to use military force to
destroy his kind, yet he urges us to resort to our conscience because it is the only force
that can save us from destruction. However, Breasted realizes, and urges us to realize,
that “man has been fashioning destructive weapons for possibly a million years, whereas
conscience emerged as a social force less than five thousand years ago.”
19
This suggests
that, for conscience to catch up with the material and technological progress we have
made, there is a need to slow down the development and application of military force and
speed up the sociopolitical and sociocultural processes to resurrect the conscience, which
cannot be resurrected without ending all forms of racial discrimination and recognizing
the rights of the natives of every old and new occupied land.
Since my motto is, “Knowledge not shared is Knowledge wasted, and the more we share, the
more we gain knowledgeable people” I ask all readers to recommend every article and book they
like because it will help inform others. We all share the responsibility to make our world more
hospitable to peace, social justice, and freedom; a lofty goal we cannot reach without spreading
knowledge and awareness in every corner of our mother earth.
Prof. Rabie is a distinguished professor of International Political Economy; he attended 5
universities and taught at 10 others on four continents. He has published 52 books in addition to
over 100 scholarly papers and 1,500 newspaper articles. Books are 15 in English, one in Albanian,
and 36 in Arabic. English Books include four published by Palgrave Macmillan between 2013 and
2017: Saving Capitalism and Democracy; Global Economic and Cultural Transformation; A
Theory of Sustainable Sociocultural and Economic Development; The Global Debt Crisis and its
Socioeconomic Implications. Arabic Books include 3 poetry collections, 2 novels, and a story; the
rest is mostly academic books and collections of ideas and reflections. Prof. Rabie is president of
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the Arab Thought Council in Washington, DC, a member of the Arab Thought Forum, and a fellow
of the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation since 1992. Grants and scholarships financed his
education from high school to receiving his Ph.D. in 1970; grants covered studies in Jordan,
Egypt, Germany, and America. He is the winner of the State of Palestine Lifetime Achievement
Award for scholarly publications and several other awards. His writings and positions reflect a
strong commitment to peace, social justice, freedom, human development, as well as social,
cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability.
1
Ben Davis, What does it mean to be highly civilized and provide specific examples? Mvorganizing.org,
May 13, 2020, https://www.mvorganizing.org/what-does-it-mean-to-be-highly-civilized-and-provide-
specific-examples/
2
Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2019, September 15, 2020,
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/income-poverty.html
3
Number of people shot to death by the police in the United States from 2017 to 2021, by race, Statista,
Crime and Law Enforcement, https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-
police-by-race/
4
United States Census Bureau, September 15, 2020 https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-
releases/2020/income-poverty.html
5
Homelessness in America; https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-
statistics/state-of-homelessness-2020/
6
Mohamed Rabie, Global Economic and Cultural Transformation, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 1
7
Ibid, 2
8
John A. Garraty and Peter Gray, The Columbia History of the World, (Harper & Row, 1972) 23
9
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, (W.W. Norton, 1999) 92
10
Mithen, Steven, After the ice: a global human history, 20,000–5000 BCE (Harvard University Press, 2006)
57.
11
Michal Strutin, Discovering Natural Israel, (Jonathan David Publishers, 2001) 4.
12
Jericho, history and facts, Britannica; https://www.britannica.com/place/Jericho-West-Bank
13
Deuteronomy 34:3
15
14
Ancient Jericho: Tell es-Sultan". (UNESCO World Heritage Centre. 2012)
15
Mohamed Rabie, Global Economic and Cultural Transformation, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 25
16
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies ,(W.W. Norton, 1999) 92
17
James Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience, Scribner Sons, New York, 1933 pp. 410--411
18
Sean Ellerker, The Dawn of Civilization, Troubador. https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/history-
politics-society/the-dawn-of-civilization/
19
Ibid, Breasted, xi
