The Ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian World-Systems

"Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the development of complex and hierarchical societies in ancient Southwestern Asia from a comparative world-systems perspective, and presents an analysis of the timing of urban and empire growth/decline cycles in Mesopotamia and Egypt to test the hypotheses that these two regions may have experienced waves of development synchronously. We also discuss how climate change may have influenced the patterns of development. In a nutshell our argument is that there have been systemic relations among different peoples since at least the first human settlements by the Natufians some twelve thousand years ago (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997)."