Impact of Warfare, Religion, and Social Stratification on City-Building

Impact of Warfare, Religion, and Social Stratification on City-Building

In both ancient and contemporary human societies, one can witness the cultural creations of warfare, religion, and social stratification interacting to help form and perpetuate the existence of each other. In addition, these cultural factors have lent themselves to help produce, regulate, and justify specific technologies. These technologies may be either destructive or beneficial to human societies economically and/or environmentally, and can have a very wide range of function. Technologies can in turn influence warfare, religion, and social stratification so as to increase the importance of these aspects of culture in society. In this paper, I seek to explore the relationships between warfare, religion, and social stratification, and their important influences on city-building in ancient times and today.

As early societies began to group together and form conglomerations of people that eventually became towns and cities, they discovered a ‘need’ for warfare in order to protect and expand their territories, resources, and populations. In the words of Ehrlich, it is important to remember that “(c)onnecting ‘genes for aggression’…to the actions of warring governments is a bit of a stretch, just as would be connecting genes for conciliations to the deployment of United Nations peacemakers (Ehrlich 260).” Basically, Ehrlich wants us to realize that there are no “war” or “peace” genes, but that cultural micro- and macro-evolutionary conditions (that is, societal or environmental conditions) may drive a group of people to be either warring or peaceful.

With the development of warfare came the development of religion. A causative relationship is...

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...a, especially slaves, would have been the people who would have physically labored to build the cities. In this way, social stratification played a major role in the rise of ancient Greek cities.

In conclusion, the cultural components of warfare, religion, and social stratification have not only interacted to help create and perpetuate each other, but they have also heavily influenced technologies such as city-building in ancient Greece. Though the emphasis on the different factors changes with evolving cultural and environmental climates, they are still present to some degree in Western culture today.

Works Cited

Chant, Colin. Pre-Industrial Cities and Technology. London: Routledge, 1999.

Ehrlich, Paul. Human Natures. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000

Southwick, Charles. Human Impacts on Planet Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.