Page 112 - Encyclopedia Of World History

462 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

This map shows the Plains culture
area of indigenous North America.
By the time this culture area was
designated by anthropologists in the
twentieth century, the Plains culture
no longer existed.

been made. One group of Turks, the Sakha (or
Yakuts), for example, left their pastoral Central
Asian homeland long ago for the forests of central
Siberia, where they came into contact with the
Evenki and other taiga dwellers.Although aspects
of a proto-Turkic culture are found among the
Sakha, their cultural attributes in general are quite
distinctive from those of other members of their
linguistic family. The Sakha are further differenti-
ated from most other Turkic peoples by the fact
that they did not adopt Islam and were never
influenced by the cultural norms of Persian civi-
lization.Among most Central Asian Turks, on the
other hand, Persian and Islamic influences were
strong enough to generate, according to Robert L.
Canfield (1991), a distinctive Turko-Persian cul-
tural sphere.
As the “Turko-Persian” example shows, among
state-level societies common political or religious
institutions can cement together previously dis-
tinct peoples, spanning linguistic and environ-
mental divides to generate novel agglomerations.
Due to the presence of such integrating mecha-
nisms, complex societies often span larger cultural
areas, and more stable ones, than small-scale
social orders.Yet even in the case of well-integrated, com- Sumerian languages. Eventually, Sumerian itself disap-
plex societies, cultural areas change their contours and peared, but many elements originally associated with
structures over time.The historical geography of human Sumerian culture, such as cuneiform writing, had diffused
civilization reveals a continual melding and reconfiguring over a broad zone, extending from the eastern Mediter-
of cultural assemblages over space. ranean to the Iranian Plateau.As a result, the Bronze Age
Near East can either be depicted as encompassing a sin-
Cultural Areas in gle cultural area or as being divided into numerous
the Ancient World smaller regions. Ancient Egypt, on the other hand, par-
Lower Mesopotamia, the world’s first locus of urbanism, tially isolated by intervening deserts and usually unified
provides a good example. In this well-demarcated area, politically, formed a more stable cultural zone. But even
independent Sumerian-speaking city-states initially in this case, not all cultural boundaries were clearly
formed a coherent cultural sphere. Over time, however, marked. Nubia, for example, situated up the Nile River
aspects of Sumerian civilization (including urbanism, lit- beyond several imposing cataracts, shared many aspects
eracy, and religious ideas) spread to neighboring peoples, of Egyptian culture while developing along its own polit-
such as the Elamites and the Akkadians, who spoke non- ical lines.