For that reason, the Egyptians developed the concept of Ma’at, which embraced the concepts of law, order, justice, and harmony. She prevented the universe from returning to chaos, and she judged the souls of the dead.Īncient Egypt was a great civilization that developed along the banks of the Nile River. Egypt’s prosperity depended on the predictability of the Nile and the orderly and harmonious behavior of its citizenry. Ma’at was the ancient Egyptian goddess who represented truth, justice, order, and harmony. In other words, the society’s rulers needed to popularize the abstract concepts of truth and justice, and the related concepts of sin and virtue. Since the police power of the state was limited, the civilization’s rulers needed ordinary people to accept abstract concepts of good and evil, so that ordinary people would behave like civilized people. Civilizations also needed laws that would help to regulate how strangers treated each other. In particular, civilizations needed engineers who could control the flow of water through and around cities. One is to dominate the natural environment. The cultural elite serves two practical purposes. A civilization is a large, complex society with a cultural elite. The concept of sin is a product of civilization. They also developed informal rules, such as customs, that helped to regulate social relationships among virtual strangers. For this purpose, societies developed laws that were enforced by the powerful people within society.
Yet as human societies grew in scale, they needed to find ways to persuade people to get along with strangers. If you saw a stranger in your territory, you might try to kill him before he killed you.
As a result, social relationships were negotiated face-to-face. The people in these bands spent virtually all of their lives among people they had known all of their lives. Throughout most of human existence, most people lived in small, scattered family-based groups called bands.
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