Successful Civilizations

Intro Paragraph / Thesis

Before beginning to examine successful civilizations, historians must be familiarized with the meaning of success. Success is the completion of a course of action or goal that ultimately benefits the person or group who has achieved it. The “group” can range anywhere from a mere group of friends working on a project for school to a powerful empire of millions of people and warriors. This idea of success is illustrated throughout history, in civilizations across the world. Empires of all sorts have had their own successes and losses, but it is essentially up to historians to sort out the progress from the failure and decide if civilizations have been successful or not. There are numerous ways historians can tackle this

First, they have to identify some basic points about the successes—who, what, when, where, why, and how. After identifying the core information associated with a certain success, historians must go more in depth and see what the short-term or long-term effects of the success were. For example, the American Revolution affected America in a huge way. Historians can make the conclusion that because of this success, America grew at a rapid rate, and eventually became a place of opportunity for citizens and immigrants alike. Historians must always take into account three key aspects of the civilizations when deciding and classifying the success of civilizations. In order to accurately classify the overall success of civilizations, historians must identify how much land the civilizations have acquired and/or conquered as a result of their successes, how long the civilizations have lasted (or how long they were successful), and lastly, how much the civilizations’ languages have stayed intact to this day. With this crucial information and analysis covered, historians can accurately measure civilizations’ successes by focusing on the key advancements and

Land can be acclaimed in many ways, including the obvious way of raiding, battling, and conquering communities. Additional ways land can be claimed is by treaty and negotiation with other empires to take their land (without brutal fighting), or discovering land and settling in it. Throughout history, important civilizations have grown by gaining new territory. These civilizations include the Mongol Empire, the Russian Empire, the British Empire, and many others. The Mongol Empire included 9.15 million square miles of land, which was equivalent to more than 16% of Earth's landmass. It was the world’s largest contiguous empire in history. By the beginning of the 1300s, the empire had 110 million people—at the time, more than a quarter of the world's population. The Mongol Empire was not so renowned at that time, but that does not imply it was not successful. The empire fought brutal battles, as Genghis Khan portrayed when mentioning to his personal historian, “Man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, [and] ride his [horse].” However, because the Mongols also “were quite tolerant in peace,” once the land was won, the lives of its people remained unaltered and generally the same as before. Though not contiguous, the British Empire was the largest