Compare And Contrast Ancient Civilizations

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The emergence of civilizations brought a much greater emphasis on have and have not 's and powerful centralized governments. In some civilizations, however, the common people had more power than in others. Based on a comparison between their systems of government and the how the people viewed their rulers and how their rulers viewed them in return it is evident that ordinary people had more power in the civilization of Athens in Ancient Greece than they did in the first civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Mesopotamia and Egypt both had strong centralized governments ruled by Kings who claimed that their rule was divine. …show more content…
This law illuminates how great the disparity was between the ruling class and the peasents in these civilizations. In contrast, the civilization of Athens in Ancient Greece was run by a democratic form of government. This political system brought unprecedented control to ordinary citizens. In fact, according to Plato in The Republic, ordinary people were the ones who created democracy, "When the poor win, the result is a democracy. They kill some of the opposite party, banish others, and grant the rest an equal share in civil rights and government, officials being usually appointed by lot." In Athens every free, male, adult, citizen had the right to vote on how to deal with issues that faced their society and for the people who ruled them. This gave ordinary people an immense amount of power that they previously didn 't have in earlier …show more content…
In Mesopotamia and Egypt kings were seen as more than human. This view is illustrated in The Epic of Gilgamesh, where the king Gilgamesh of Uruk was said to be part god. He flaunted this authority by killing the bull of heaven, who symbolizes an earthquake, and saving the people of Uruk. This perspective that the people had of their kings gave them a great deal of psychological control over their people. After all, it would be hard to disobey a king who can control the weather and is only answerable to the gods. While the common people viewed their rulers as powerful and heroic, the rulers and their nobles viewed ordinary people as sub-human in many ways. This contempt is illustrated in The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, where throughout the story Sechet-hemat had to jump through hoops to get the nobles to listen and care about his plight. In fact, the main reason he even had the opportunity to speak with the pharaoh was because he was unusually eloquent and the nobles found this entertaining. In democratic Athens, people were quite aware of the very human flaws and talents of their rulers. The power was in the hands of the

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