Sedentary Agriculture
- Concentration on cultivation of crops & building cities
- Rigid social hierarchy of two classes
- Strict subordination of women
- Relatively immobile in territory; slow to expand, but capable of long-lasting imperial conquest.
- Relatively immobile socially. A settled agrarian society could not easily adopt pastoral nomadism.
- Concentration on raising of livestock
- Division into tribes & clans rather than social classes
- Less subordination of women than in settled societies
- Mounted nomads had great mobility & more time to study warfare than settled societies. They could expand very rapidly. Nomadic empires, however, tended to be short-lived.
- Greater social flexibility. A pastoral nomadic people could settle down and become cultivators.
- They often traded with one another to obtain what they did not produce or have access to.
- Mounted nomads were often paid by settled societies to protect long-distance overland trade routes. They also raided trade routes.
 |