Food Surplus In Ancient Civilizations

A civilization is a vast yet intricate system of people. It cannot simply consist of people alone; it must have developed an infrastructure that supports it. Civilizations, similar to machines, need some sort of power source or fuel to achieve such infrastructure and intricacy, and their fuel is food surplus. The driving force of early advanced civilizations was their ability to acquire and maintain a food surplus. Prior to these civilizations, small mobile groups of people would rely completely on their surroundings for their food, which was unreliable, yet sufficient. At a time of food scarcity however, these small groups learned to manipulate their environment and began planting the crops they eat, creating the concept of agriculture. This required them to stay in one place where they would have a source of water to grow their crops. Still, just having a steady source of food was not enough because if they harvest more than they can eat at a time, the rest will just spoil. Hence, they learned to store their food in order to preserve it, creating a food surplus. Not only did this allow them to feed more people (and more food per person), but also to …show more content…
By having excess food, they could now accommodate more people, which led to lesser workload per person, that gave them more spare time. This supposed idle part of their day, bore new skills and technologies. Applying these newly learned skills and technologies, as a collective effort, is what produced the advancements that cultivated these groups into complex civilizations. Going back however, we see that none of this is possible without having the appropriate supply of food that agriculture, food storage, and animal domestication provided them. Infrastructure may be the backbone of a civilization, but it’s the control of food surplus that fuels it, and is what gave way to the large and intricate system we know