Chapter 6!

The topic of this chapter is commonalities and variations. The chapter opens up with very shocking ones unfortunately. The world's population was very unevenly distributed. More than three quarters of the world populations lived in Eurasia, which made me wonder why the scale was so tipped during those times. The answer might likely be development, and what resources each land mass and/or civilization had to work with.

The second thing that jumped to my attention was the methods of ruling, since the Nubia civilization had women rule, which provided diversity among the society. In the other side of the spectrum, the Axum civilization administrated loosely, well sort of. Instead of collecting taxes this society wanted people to make tribute payments. In the middle of the spectrum, the Niger river civilization had no central power.

The maya Civilization is something that comes to no surprise, they collapsed because of warfare, and I have read this many times, watched documentaries, but I wonder what we would know about the civilization had we as a society have Mayan books and scriptures in abundance today.

One thing I did not comprehend on this reading was the collapse of Teotihuacan, because the book states that the city collapsed around 650. As someone who studied history in Mexico during grade school, we were not taught this. We were actually thought that the civilization evolved, due to the diversity of the Nahua, the Otomi, and the Totonac peoples. Unfortunately, world history undermines indigenous groups of present day Mexico that were smaller than Aztecs and Mayans, and of course the 1st ones which were the toltecs. For example, When people say Mexicans have Aztec blood I do not relate to it, because my Indigenous roots lie in the Purepecha civilization, which was not conquered by the Aztecs.