NCERT Solutions Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation

F R E E S T U D Y M AT E R I A L F O R E V E R Y S T U D E N T

CLASS 9 · SOCIAL SCIENCE

NCERT Solutions

Chapter 4: Early Humans and
Beginning of Civilisation

NCERT Textbook — Understanding Society: India And Beyond

BOOK PAGES SECTIONS QUESTIONS MEDIUM

61 – 94 22 47 English

Solutions, notes, sample papers & more at 89 pages

Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

CLASS 9 · SOCIAL SCIENCE · UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY: INDIA AND BEYOND

NCERT Solutions — Chapter 4: Early Humans and
Beginning of Civilisation
Complete NCERT Solutions for Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation
from Understanding Society: India and Beyond, Grade 9 Part 1. Every question the chapter prints is answered —
The Big Questions, all eight THINK ABOUT IT boxes (the most in the book), all seven LET'S EXPLORE boxes,
LET US RECALL, LET'S MAP, LET'S RECALL, the in-text question on page 89, the Before we move on… recap
and all thirteen Questions and activities — with every date and figure read off the chapter's own timelines,
maps and charts, and with the evidence behind each claim set out beside it.

TEXTBOOK BOOK PAGES

Understanding Society: India and Beyond (Class 61 – 94
9)

SECTIONS QUESTIONS

22 47

MEDIUM

English

The Big Questions — Page 61
Chapter opening

THE BIG QUESTIONS

Q1 How did humans live on Earth before the beginning of civilisation?

For more than 99 per cent of human history — from about 3 million years ago to 5000 years
ago, the span Fig. 4.3 marks as 'Before' — people lived without farming, without villages and
without writing. They lived by hunting and gathering, moving with the seasons, and the whole
of that life has to be reconstructed from the objects they left behind, because they left no
documents.
The chapter divides this long stretch into three stages, and each stage is defined by what the
tools can do:

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

STAGE HOW PEOPLE TOOLS THE WHERE THEY DATES THE
GOT FOOD CHAPTER NAMES LIVED CHAPTER PRINTS

Palaeolithic Hunting large Handaxes, cleavers, Open camps, Subcontinent's oldest
(Old Stone game, gathering scrapers, choppers of caves and rock settlement about 2
Age) plants, digging quartzite and shelters million years ago;
tubers, cracking limestone; later Attirampakkam 1.5–
bones for marrow scrapers, borers and 1.7 million; Isampur
points; later still 1.2 million
blades and
microblades, and the
bow and arrow

Mesolithic Small game, fish Microliths (tiny stone Caves and rock From about 12000
and shellfish — tools), bone points shelters years ago, when the
'fishing was the occupied climate warmed
mainstay of their frequently;
subsistence camps near
economy' — and rivers and lakes
wild grains

Neolithic Farming and Polished stone tools The first Mehrgarh 7000 BCE;
herding — food for processing food; permanent most of the
production pottery in many village subcontinent by 2500
instead of food shapes and sizes settlements BCE
collection

What else the evidence shows. These were not people with tools and nothing more. From the
later Palaeolithic the chapter records symbolic behaviour: cave and rock-shelter walls
decorated with paintings, pigments used to decorate the body, the first beads of stone, bone
and shell, and a special tool — the burin or engraver — used to cut symbolic marks on bone
and on shells such as ostrich eggs. Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh, a World Heritage Site, has
hundreds of painted rock shelters.

Why this life lasted so long: hunting and gathering works. It supported people
through enormous swings of climate across the Quaternary Period — the last 26
lakh years. What changed it was not that it failed but that, as the chapter puts it,
hunter–gatherers 'gained adequate familiarity with seasons and different types of
food resources' — they learned enough about plants and animals to start controlling
them.

Careful with the word 'primitive': the chapter never uses it. A microblade struck
from glassy rock is razor-sharp when fresh, and hafting several of them into one
handle is a sophisticated idea. Simple tools are not the same thing as simple minds.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Q2 How did humans communicate before writing was invented?

Through symbols they made by hand and left on durable materials — which is exactly why
we can still see them. The chapter names three kinds of evidence for pre-writing
communication, and each one is a physical object an archaeologist can dig up:

Painting. Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic people 'decorated the walls of caves and rock
shelters with paintings'. Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh preserves hundreds of painted
shelters (Fig. 4.12). A painting of a hunt is a message about what was hunted and how.
Body decoration. They 'used pigments to decorate their bodies', and were 'the first to
produce beads of stone, bone, and shell'. Ornament is a way of saying who you are and
which group you belong to.
Engraving. The burin, a stone engraver, was 'used to engrave symbolic features on bones
and shells (such as ostrich eggs)'. This is deliberate marking — the closest step before script.

Then came the half-way stages. Before full writing, the chapter records marks that carry
meaning but are not yet a language on a page:

STAGE WHAT IT IS WHERE THE CHAPTER FINDS IT

Graffiti on pottery Repeated scratched marks Early Harappan sites; 'extensive use'
on pots — probably
ownership or contents

Seals with geometric Stamps that identify a Harappa, Rehman Dheri and Kunal — 'forerunners to
and simple animal person, family or workshop the script and inscribed seals' of the mature civilisation
motifs

Full script Signs standing for language Harappan pictographic script (Sindhu lipi,
undeciphered); Sumerian cuneiform from 3200 BCE;
Egyptian hieroglyphs; Chinese oracle-bone symbols

The honest limit of this evidence: we can see that these marks meant something;
we usually cannot say what. Fig. 4.3 states the problem exactly — before writing, 'it
is generally difficult to understand the thoughts and ideas of people'. A painted
bison at Bhimbetka proves people communicated. It does not tell us the sentence
they were saying.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

co m
m.
How is archaeology helpful in understanding our past?
e
Q3

m l as
.co a g
a s em
a gl for the period before writing, archaeology supplies the only evidence there is. Fig. 4.3
Because
is blunt about it: for the 'Before' period, 'tools, implements, and other material objects made by

co m
ag
humans (artefacts) are the major sources for reconstructing people's ways of living'. Take those

m .
e
away and more than 99 per cent of human history goes silent.

g l as
a
How the evidence gets there in the first place. The chapter describes the mechanism, and it
is worth following closely, because it is the reason archaeology works at all:

co m
em.
c o m g l as
m .Ground surface today — the excavation of Fig. 4.5 starts here a
l a se
a g Youngest layer

deeper = older
s
pottery, polished tools

m a
.co agl
Older layer
microblades, bone points
se m
g l a
Older still
scrapers, borers, points
a
Oldest layer
co m
m .
e
handaxes, cleavers, choppers; animal fossils

m l as
.co g
Tools were discarded and buried under later earth; remains slowly turned into fossils.

em a
l a s The chapter's own account of how the record forms: objects are discarded, buried under later earth,

a g and recovered in order — which is why the sequence of tool types can be read at all.

se m
com g l a
. a
What archaeologists actually do with it, according to the page 65 box:
m
ase
agl
Excavate early human sites to uncover clues — 'tools, bones, and other objects left behind
by our early ancestors' (Fig. 4.5 shows a dig in progress).
Experiment. They 'also experiment by making and using similar tools'. This is the part

. c om
students usually miss: to know what a cleaver was for, you make one and use it. That is how

s e m dig out tubers, scrape
the chapter can state that these tools 'were used to chop animal meat,

. om skin, and cleave animal bones to extract protein-rich
canimal a la — the wear on a replica
gmarrow'
a s em matches the wear on the original.
agl Date and compare. Radio-carbon dates are what allow the chapter to say the Pre-Harappan
c
m .
e
phase at Bhirrana and Kunal 'began between 7000 and 5500 BCE'.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Three things archaeology alone could not tell us, and one it can: it cannot give
us a king's name, the date of a war, or what people believed word for word — Fig. 4.3
says dating before writing is 'only approximate'. What it can do is give an unbroken
account of how people lived: what they ate, what they made, where they moved,
and what they traded. Meluhha, Magan and Dilmun are known from Akkadian
tablets — but the Harappan beads that travelled that route are known from the
ground.

Q4 How did early civilisations interact with each other?

Mainly through long-distance trade, and the chapter's strongest case is the link between
Mesopotamia and the Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation. Here the evidence is unusually good,
because it comes from two independent directions at once.

KIND OF WHAT IT SAYS WHY IT COUNTS
EVIDENCE

Written — The tablets of King Sargon name trade with the A named ruler's own records, in a
Akkadian eastern territories of Dilmun, Magan and script that has been deciphered
cuneiform Meluhha

Geographical Dilmun = today's Bahrain; Magan = the Oman The three named places lie in a
— Fig. 4.26 peninsula; Meluhha is generally identified with the line, in the right order, on the sea
Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation. The map plots route from Sumer to the Indus
Mesopotamian, Dilmun, Magan and Meluhhan
sites in one chain along the Persian Gulf and
Arabian Sea

Material — the Traded to Mesopotamia: semiprecious stone These are exactly the crafts the
goods beads, ivory, timber, gold dust, and probably chapter says the Harappans had
copper been developing since the Early
Harappan stage — bead
production at Harappa, Kunal
and Datrana

Why these two and not the other two. The chapter gives a geographical reason:
'Geographically, Mesopotamia and the Indus and Ghaggar-Sarasvatī valleys are closer to each
other. This proximity facilitated strong contacts and trade.' By contrast, the Egyptian and
Chinese civilisations 'have little tangible evidence of their direct contact with the Sindhu–
Sarasvatī civilisation'.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

What is established and what is inferred. Established: Sargon's tablets name
Meluhha, and Harappan-type goods moved west. Inferred, and worth saying so: that
Meluhha = the Harappan civilisation is an identification — the chapter says
'generally identified', not 'proved'. It rests on the goods matching and the direction
being right, not on a Harappan document saying so — and no Harappan document
can say so while the script stays undeciphered.

A second kind of interaction: ideas that appear in more than one place. The chapter is
careful here. It notes that 'while the Sumerians were developing canal irrigation, the Early
Harappans… were also building check dams known as gabarbands' — parallel solutions, later
refined into the interconnected stone and mud-brick water tanks at Dholavira in Kachchh and
the burnt-brick dockyard at Lothal. Its closing paragraph settles the point: the Bronze Age
civilisations 'emerged independently in the fertile river plains' and 'developed social and
administrative systems independently'. Contact was real, but it was contact between societies
that had already invented their own answers.

LET'S EXPLORE — Page 62
Fig. 4.1, Harappan script on a seal

LET'S EXPLORE

Q1 You have studied about the Harappan script in your previous grades. Observe this
seal carefully and discuss why the script has not yet been deciphered. Also, find out
what efforts have been made to decipher it. You can use your textbook, consult
your teacher, or refer to online sources.

What to look at on the seal first. Fig. 4.1 shows a small square stone seal with a line of signs
along the top and an animal figure below. Note three things, because they are the whole
difficulty:

The signs are pictographic — they look like little pictures — but a picture-sign can stand for
an object, a sound or an idea, and you cannot tell which by looking.
The inscription is extremely short. Most Harappan inscriptions run to only a handful of
signs, usually one line across a seal or a pot.
There is no second script beside it saying the same thing.

Why it has not been deciphered. The chapter states the fact — 'it has not yet been deciphered.
As a result, we still do not understand the Harappan script, also referred to as Sindhu lipi' — and
the reasons follow from what a decipherment actually needs:

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

WHAT EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHS HAD IT THE HARAPPAN
DECIPHERMENT SCRIPT
NEEDS

A bilingual text — the Yes — the Rosetta Stone, found by Pierre Bouchard in No such bilingual
same passage in a known 1799, carried three scripts including Greek, which has ever been found
script people could still read. The chapter calls it 'like having
a bilingual dictionary for a lost language'

Long texts, so that signs Yes — tomb walls, papyrus rolls, long royal inscriptions Seals and pottery
repeat in different contexts only; the inscriptions
are very short

A known language behind Yes — Coptic, descended from ancient Egyptian, was We do not know
the script still known what language the
Harappans spoke

What has been attempted. Report the method honestly rather than announcing a solution,
because no proposed reading is accepted by all scholars:

Sign lists. Scholars have catalogued the signs and counted how many distinct ones there are
— the count matters, because a small set suggests an alphabet, a very large set suggests
picture-writing, and a middle-sized set suggests syllables.
Positional analysis. Studying which signs come first, which come last and which pair up, to
work out the grammar even without the sounds.
Computer and statistical study. Testing whether the sign sequences behave like a
language at all.
Proposed language families. Different scholars have tried to read the signs through
different languages. These proposals disagree with each other, and none has been
generally accepted — which is exactly why the chapter still calls the script undeciphered.

What is at stake — and the chapter's own comparison. Brahmi, used from about
400 BCE in southern India and the Ganga Valley and formalised by Aśhoka in the 3rd
century BCE (Fig. 4.2, the railing inscription at Sanchi), can be read — so we know
names, donors and dates from it. Cuneiform can be read, so we know Sargon's
trading partners. The Harappan seals cannot be read, so we can measure a
Harappan weight to the gram and still not know a single Harappan's name.

How to run the discussion in class: hand out a short line of invented picture-signs
with no translation and ask groups to decode it. Then give one group a translation of
a single line and let them try again. The difference between the two attempts is the
answer to this question.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

THINK ABOUT IT — Page 65
Migration out of Africa

THINK ABOUT IT

Q1 Why do you think early humans left Africa to migrate to other regions?

The chapter does not give one reason, so the honest answer sets out the reasons that follow
from the evidence it does give, and says which are firmer than others. Start from the shape of
the movement:

WAVE WHO WHEN EVIDENCE FOR IT

First Homo erectus — Began moving out around 2 Its handaxes and cleavers have been
'the first hominin million years ago; dispersal found across Asia and Europe —
to exit Africa' between 2 and 0.5 million 'indicating their origin in Africa and their
years ago dispersion beyond the continent'

Second Early Homo Around 125,000 years ago Our species is 'now spread all over the
sapiens — (having evolved in Africa earth'; reached Australia and the
ourselves about 300,000 years ago) Americas between 50000 and 12000 years
ago

Reason 1 — hunter–gatherers move because their food moves. This is the strongest reason
and it needs no extra assumption. A hunting and gathering economy has no stores and no
fields. When a herd shifts its grazing or a fruiting season ends, people follow. Over hundreds of
thousands of years, a band that shifts camp a few kilometres each generation covers continents
without ever intending to 'migrate'. The chapter's own dates make this the natural reading: 1.5
million years is a very long time to cross from East Africa to East Asia — this is drift, not a
journey.
Reason 2 — climate opened and closed the doors. Fig. 4.4 labels the deserts of the Sahara
and Arabia as 'both wetter during interglacials'. That is the chapter telling you the route was not
always desert. When the climate turned wet, grassland and water crossed the barrier, and
animals and people could cross with them. The chapter also links the whole story of cultural
evolution to 'changes in climate and the environment' through the Quaternary Period.
Reason 3 — population pressure. A growing band in a fixed territory eventually splits, and the
daughter group settles the next valley. The chapter shows this force clearly at work later, when
warming after 12000 years ago produced 'the first-ever population explosion in human history'.
Reason 4 — they had the technology to survive elsewhere. This one is important because it
explains who could leave. Homo erectus did not leave empty-handed: it left as the maker of
handaxes and cleavers. Tools that could butcher a carcass and process plants anywhere are

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

what made new environments survivable. The chapter names this species as the tool-maker and
co m
as the first to leave, in the same sentence — the two facts belong together.
e m.
m l as
.co a g
s em
What is established and what is inference. Established, from the tools: they left,
a
gl roughly when. Inferred, and no more than that: why. Nobody left a record of the
aand
decision, and the chapter never claims one. The best answer says so — and notes

co m
ag
that the four reasons are not rivals. Following game, a wetter Sahara, more mouths

m .
to feed and better tools all push the same way at once.
as e
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co m
m.
LET'S EXPLORE — Page 66

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Fig. 4.6, Skulls of early humans and modern humans

LET'S EXPLORE

Q1 Do you notice any changes in the shape or features of the skulls across different
ancestors?

What Fig. 4.6 shows. Four photographs of skulls, arranged two above
two, each photographed from the front on a wooden stand, and each
carrying a printed note beside it.
a. A small, dark, weathered skull. The braincase is low and
rounded, the eye sockets are large and set under a shelf of bone,
the nose opening is wide and the jaws jut forward, with worn
teeth showing at the bottom. Printed beside it: “Homo habilis
lived in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania and Kenya, 2–6 million years
ago; made chopper stone tools”.
b. A slightly larger skull, greenish-brown, with a long low
braincase and a thick continuous ridge of bone straight across
above both eye sockets. Printed beside it: “Homo erectus lived in
the Eastern African Rift Valley 2 million years ago; made
handaxes and cleavers.”
c. A big cream-coloured skull with a long, backward-sloping
braincase, heavy arched brow ridges and a wide projecting mid-
face with a very large nose opening. Printed beside it: “Homo
neanderthalensis lived in Europe and Southwest Asia till about
40000 years ago; made Middle Palaeolithic flake tools.”
d. A pale, smooth skull with a high domed forehead rising
straight up above the eyes, no brow ridge, small eye sockets and
a short flat face. Printed beside it: “Living humans, or the Homo
sapiens, are the only human species living today on earth.”
The book’s caption reads: “Skulls of early humans and modern
humans showing the evolutionary sequence from Homo habilis to
Homo sapiens”.

Fig. 4.6, page 66 — described here; see the textbook for the photographs of the skulls.

Yes — and the changes run in a consistent direction across the four photographs (a) to (d).

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Working from the labels the figure prints and from what is visible in the pictures:

FIG. WHO, AND WHAT THE CAPTION SAYS WHAT YOU CAN SEE IN THE SKULL
4.6

a Homo habilis — Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania and The smallest braincase of the four; a low, sloping
Kenya, 2–6 million years ago; made chopper forehead; the face and jaws push forward below
stone tools the eyes; large teeth

b Homo erectus — Eastern African Rift Valley, 2 A bigger but still long and low braincase; a
million years ago; made handaxes and heavy, continuous brow ridge like a bar above
cleavers the eyes; a broad flat face; no chin

c Homo neanderthalensis — Europe and A large, long skull; strong arched brow ridges
Southwest Asia, till about 40000 years ago; over each eye; a big nasal opening and a mid-
made Middle Palaeolithic flake tools face that projects forward; forehead still sloping
back

d Homo sapiens — living humans, 'the only A high, rounded, dome-like braincase; a vertical
human species living today on earth' forehead; brow ridges almost gone; a small, flat,
tucked-in face; smaller teeth and jaws

The three trends to state as your answer:

1. The braincase grows and changes shape — not just bigger, but taller and rounder, rising
above the eyes instead of stretching behind them.
2. The brow ridges shrink — a heavy bone bar in (b) and (c) becomes barely a swelling in (d).
3. The face pulls back under the braincase — the projecting muzzle of (a) becomes the flat
vertical face of (d), and the teeth and jaws get smaller with it.

Why the tool column matters as much as the skull column. Read the two
together and the figure makes an argument, not just a display: chopper tools go
with the smallest braincase, handaxes and cleavers with a larger one, flake tools
with a larger one still, and 'complex technologies' — the chapter's phrase — with
Homo sapiens. The chapter's claim is that all human ancestors were tool makers,
but it was the Homo sapiens that developed complex technologies. The skulls
and the toolkits change together.

Read the dates carefully. Fig. 4.6 prints '2-6 million years ago' for Homo habilis and
'2 million years ago' for Homo erectus, so the two overlap. That is not a misprint in
the argument — the running text says plainly that 'different kinds of human
ancestors co-existed at this time'. Evolution here is a branching bush, not a single
line of one species replacing another. Fig. 4.6's own caption calls it a 'sequence', but
the text is the better guide.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Q2 Can you observe a gradual straightening of the face?

Yes. Compare the four skulls in profile-sense — how far forward the face sits under the eyes —
and the change is steady:

a Homo habilis — face and jaws project strongly forward, like a muzzle

b Homo erectus — still projecting, but the face is broader and flatter, under a heavy brow bar

c Homo neanderthalensis — the middle of the face (nose and cheeks) still pushes forward,

the forehead still slopes

d Homo sapiens — the face is tucked in and nearly vertical, sitting below a forehead that

rises straight up

Direction of change: from a projecting muzzle to a flat, upright face.

What is straightening, exactly. Two separate movements produce the impression:

The forehead becomes vertical. In (a) and (b) the skull slopes back sharply from the brow;
in (d) it rises almost straight. This is the braincase expanding upwards and forwards.
The jaws retreat. The teeth and jaws get smaller and move back under the eyes, so there is
less muzzle to project. A chin appears in modern humans, where none of the earlier skulls
has one.

The connection to what the chapter has already told you. The chapter links these
species to increasingly capable tools, and tools do part of the work that jaws used to
do — chopping meat, cracking bone, digging tubers, scraping skin. It notes that
tools acted as 'extra-corporal limbs', doing what hands alone could not. A face that
no longer has to be a heavy-duty processing machine can afford to become smaller
and flatter, while the space above it is taken by a bigger brain. That is the reasoning
behind the picture. Note that it is inference from a pattern, not something the
fossils state — the fossils show the change; the explanation is the argument built on
it.

THINK ABOUT IT — Page 67

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Fig. 4.7, Periods in Early Human History

THINK ABOUT IT

Q1 Why do you think the shift to farming during the Neolithic period is called a
revolution rather than a simple change? Discuss with your classmates.

Because it did not change one thing — it changed the whole basis on which people lived, and
everything the chapter describes afterwards, right up to the Bronze Age cities, follows from it. A
simple change swaps one method for another. A revolution changes what is possible.
The single sentence that carries the argument. The chapter says of the Neolithic that 'the
ability to produce surplus food and material goods laid the foundation for the emergence of
civilisation'. Follow the chain:

Domestication Food produced, SURPLUS
plants and animals not only collected more than is eaten

Settled villages Specialist crafts Trade and storage
houses, granaries pottery, beads, shell, weights, seals,
Mehrgarh, 7000 BCE then copper records

Urban revolution
Bronze Age civilisations

Every later section of the chapter sits somewhere on this chain.

Why the Neolithic is called a revolution: it is the one change from which the rest of the chapter
follows.

Five things that changed at once — the test of a revolution:

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co m
m.
WHAT BEFORE (HUNTING– AFTER (NEOLITHIC)

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com
CHANGED GATHERING)

. a g l
s em
Relationship with
a
Take what nature offers Bring plants and animals under human control and

agl
nature breed new varieties 'through cultivation and
husbandry'

m
.co and processing' — and pottery in many shapes and ag
What tools are for 'Hunter–gatherers produced 'Neolithic farmers made tools for food production

sem
tools for procuring food'

a
agl
sizes

Where people Moving camps, caves, rock 'The first village settlements' — permanent, with
lived shelters
co m
granaries; Mehrgarh had sun-dried brick houses

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m l as
.co
Eat what you find, when you
g
Food security A stored surplus — food that outlives the season

a
sem
find it

a society
aglcould contain Everyone works at getting
What Some people can do something else — potters, bead-
food makers, metalworkers, priests, officials, scribes

om a s
. c
emthe chapter makes it itself. 'Revolution' agl
a
The one honest qualification, and
s
a
suggests speed, and this wasglnot fast. The chapter says there was 'a gradual
transition to a food-producing way of life'; Fig. 4.14 shows the process taking

c o m
thousands of years and starting at different dates in West Asia, India, China and
m .
s e
West Africa; and Fig. 4.7 places a whole transitional stage, the Mesolithic, in

. c om So the word describes the size of the consequence,
between.
a gla not the speed of the
m Historians keep the word because nothing in the previous three million years
eevent.
g l as changed so much — but a good answer says both halves.
a
se m
o m g l a
m .c
Points for the class discussion: Was it entirely a gain? Farming ties people to one
a
place, makes them depend on
l a seone or two crops, and gives a failed harvest the power
ag— none of which was true of a mobile band. Question 1 of
to starve a whole village
Questions and activities comes back to exactly this.

co m
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m ABOUT IT — Page 71
se
THINK
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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Fig. 4.14, Transition to the agricultural way of life in different parts of the world

THINK ABOUT IT

Q1 Observe the chart (Fig. 4.14) and identify the animals that were domesticated. Also
try and identify the types of human habitats and objects that were used. Are any of
these still used in present times?

15000 years ago 10,000 5,000 0 Geographical
area

sedentism
West
Africa
pottery livestock
(Pearl millet)
cultivation
agricultural landscape

cultivation agricultural landscape
West Asia
(Wheat and
sedentism livestock pottery
barley)

pottery livestock agricultural landscape
India
(Millets)
cultivation sedentism

cultivation sedentism livestock
India
Ganga Plains
pottery agricultural landscape
(Rice)

cultivation sedentism
North
China
pottery livestock
(Millets)
agricultural landscape

cultivation livestock
South China
Yangtze (Rice)
pottery sedentism
agricultural landscape

Domesticated Crops
Cultivation
Early traces of cultivation

Fig. 4.14, page 72 — redrawn. Same six regions, same time axis and the same items at
the positions the book marks them; the book draws each item as a painted picture
rather than the plain pictograms used here.

Fig. 4.14 runs from 15000 years ago on the left to 0 (the present) on the right, with six regions
stacked down the page. Each region has icons for pottery, cultivation, livestock, sedentism
(settled living) and agricultural landscape, placed at the time each appeared there. Reading

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

the icons region by region:

REGION ANIMAL SHOWN HABITAT SHOWN FOR OBJECTS SHOWN
(CROP FOR 'LIVESTOCK' 'SEDENTISM'
NAMED)

West Africa A white long-horned A round hut with mud walls and A globular red pottery jar;
(Pearl millet) cow a conical thatched roof a farmer bending with a
hoe; a field of pearl millet

West Asia A humpless cow / ox Flat-roofed mud-brick houses A round-bodied pot; a
(Wheat and (taurine cattle) with a ladder against the wall farmer with a hoe; a field
barley) of wheat/barley

India (Millets) A sheep (woolly, with A round hut with a mud plinth A tall storage jar; a farmer
curved horns) and a thatched dome roof with a hoe; a millet field

India — A grey humped zebu A thatched hut A globular pot; a woman
Ganga Plains bull bending with a hoe; a rice
(Rice) field

North China A pig (dark brown A round house with wattle walls A cylindrical corded-ware
(Millets) boar-type) and a thatched roof jar; a farmer with a spade;
a millet field

South China A pig A thatched house raised on A conical pot with a
— Yangtze wooden posts (pile dwelling), pointed base; a farmer
(Rice) and a large round thatched with a hoe
structure

So the animals domesticated, as shown in the chart, are: cattle — both humped (zebu) and
humpless — sheep, and pigs. The chapter's text adds goats for Mehrgarh, where the people
'raised sheep, goats, and Indian cattle—the zebu humped bull in particular'.
The habitats shown are: round thatched huts (West Africa, India, North China), flat-roofed
mud-brick houses (West Asia), and houses raised on wooden posts above the ground (South
China). The objects shown are: pottery of many shapes — globular jars, tall storage jars,
cylindrical corded jars, pointed-base pots — and the hoe or digging stick in every single region.
Are any still used today? Yes — most of them. And this is the real point of the exercise:

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

FROM THE CHART IN INDIA TODAY

Zebu humped cattle The ordinary cattle of Indian villages — for milk, for ploughing and for carting

Sheep and goats Herded across Rajasthan, the Deccan and the Himalaya; wool, milk and meat

Millets Bajra, jowar and ragi are still staple grains — and are now promoted again as climate-
resilient crops

Rice, wheat, barley Still the main food grains of the Ganga plains and the north-west

The hoe The khurpi and kudal are in every kitchen garden and small field

Earthen pots The matka and surahi for cooling water; earthen kulhads for tea; storage jars in village
homes

Thatched, mud-walled Still built in villages across India; houses raised on stilts are standard in Assam and
houses other flood-prone and high-rainfall areas

The second thing the chart is teaching. Look along the time axis, not just down
the regions. The order of events is different in different places. In West Asia,
sedentism comes first, near 13000 years ago, and pottery arrives last. In West
Africa, pottery arrives around 10,000 years ago — thousands of years before
livestock, cultivation or settled villages. In India and China the cluster sits later still.
So the chapter's claim holds exactly as it states it: 'this transition did not occur at the
same time everywhere, but took place at different periods in different areas.' There
was no single Neolithic revolution that spread from one place — there were several,
invented independently.

Check it yourself: take the chart's own bar key — early traces of cultivation (blue
dots), cultivation (light green), domesticated crops (dark green) — and trace one
region's bar left to right. You will see cultivation begin as scattered traces long
before it becomes full domestication. That gap is the 'gradual transition' the text
describes.

THINK ABOUT IT — Page 76

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Fig. 4.20, Harappan stone weights

THINK ABOUT IT

Q1 Harappans had their own standard systems of weight and measurement. This is
evident from the meticulously planned settlements and efficient interregional
trade practices of the Harappans. They followed a binary multiple (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.)
system for weighing smaller units and used multiples of ten for larger
denominations. Such cubical stone weights have been reported from several sites.
Can you imagine how long-distance trade would have been affected had the
Harappans not followed a standard system of weights?

Long-distance trade would have become slow, disputed and small — and probably could not
have reached from the Indus to Mesopotamia at all. A standard weight is not a convenience; it is
the thing that makes trade between strangers possible.
What the weights themselves show. Fig. 4.20 photographs eight weights: four large ones in
the back row — two cut as cubes, two as smooth cylinders — and four small cubes in front.
They are made of hard, pale, fine stone, cut with flat faces, and they come in a graded range
from big to very small. Two conclusions follow directly from the photograph:

They were made to a plan, not shaped by eye. Cubes of hard stone with true flat faces take
skill and time. Nobody invests that in something meant to be approximate.
They form a series. The very large and the very small in the same photograph is the visible
form of the system the text describes — 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 for small units, multiples of ten for
large ones. A trader could weigh a handful of beads and a sack of grain with the same
system.

Now imagine the system removed. Take each function away in turn:

Page 18 of 89

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

co m
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WHAT A STANDARD WHAT HAPPENS WITHOUT IT
WEIGHT DOES
m as e
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s m
equantity
Lets buyer and seller
agreeaon
Every deal starts with an argument about whose stone is the true one. Trade slows to

agl
the speed of negotiation

Makes trade possible You could only trade with people you already trust — that is, close to home. Long-

co m
. ag
between strangers distance trade is precisely trade between strangers

se m
Lets goods be traded
through middlemen
l a
g measure, quantity cannot survive the journey; every transfer needs
A cargo from Harappa to Meluhha's ports and on to Ur passes through many hands.
Without a a
fixed
re-weighing and re-arguing

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Prevents cheating, and Fraud becomes easy and undetectable. Once cheating cannot be proved, reputations

m l as
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lets it be proved collapse and the trade network with them

em a
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Allows records and You cannot record a quantity that has no fixed unit. Storage, redistribution and any

a
levy become impossible to administer

m a s
agl
Sets value for precious Gold dust, ivory and semiprecious beads are sold by weight. Small errors on valuable
goods
m.co
goods mean large losses — which is exactly why the tiny weights in Fig. 4.20 exist

l a se
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Why the answer is more than a guess. The chapter has already told you what the

m
Harappans traded with Mesopotamia — 'semiprecious stone beads, ivory, timber,
. co
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gold dust, and probably copper' — and Fig. 4.26 shows that cargo travelling through

o m l a se
Magan and Dilmun to Ur and Lagash. Goods of that value, moving that far, through
g thing at both ends.
.c many hands, are only possible if quantity means the asame
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that

agl made it work.

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Did you know? Because the Harappan script is undeciphered, these weights are one

a gl
of the few Harappan systems we can still read directly. We cannot read what a
Harappan wrote, but we can put their weights on a modern balance and recover the
ratios they used. Objects can speak when writing cannot.
co m
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a s em ABOUT IT — Page 77
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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Bronze Age Civilisations Outside India

THINK ABOUT IT

Q1 Why were rivers important in the growth of early civilisations?

Because a river supplies, in one place, every physical requirement of a large settled
population — and the chapter's own evidence for this is that all four of the world's early
civilisations grew in river plains, independently of one another:

CIVILISATION RIVER(S) WHAT THE CHAPTER SAYS THE RIVER DID

Sindhu–Sarasvatī Sindhu (Indus) and 'Fertile alluvial plains of the Indus and the Ghaggar-Sarasvatī
Sarasvatī basins' — copper tools there 'enhanced productivity, leading
to increased prosperity'

Mesopotamian Euphrates and Farming from 12000 years before present; the Sumerians built
Tigris 'a system of dams and canals for irrigation' and spread
farming 'across the vast plains'

Egyptian Nile 'The river Nile watered the land along its banks, and every
summer the river flooded, leading to annual inundations, with
rich mud, kemet, excellent for growing crops'

Chinese Huang He (Yellow 'These two river valleys were also centres of early Chinese
River) and Yangtze Neolithic cultures dating to around 7000 BCE'

Six things a river gives, in the chapter's own examples:

1. Fertile soil, renewed every year. The Nile flood deposited rich black mud so reliably that
the Egyptians named their country after it — Kemet, 'the black'. A field beside a flooding
river does not need to be abandoned when it tires; the river re-fertilises it.
2. Water for irrigation. The Sumerians were 'the first to build a system of dams and canals';
about 5000 years ago Egyptian farmers 'discovered that by digging ditches they could divert
water from the Nile into their fields and store water in reservoirs'; the Early Harappans built
gabarbands — check dams across small streams — and later the great interconnected tanks
at Dholavira.
3. Surplus, and therefore cities. Irrigated alluvium produces more food than the farmers eat.
That surplus is what feeds potters, bead-makers, metalworkers, priests and officials — the
specialists who make a city a city.
4. Transport. Bulk goods move on water long before they move by land. The Sumerians
invented the sailboat; the Harappans built the burnt-brick dockyard at Lothal.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

5. Building material. River mud is brick. The Sumerians were 'the first to use mud bricks and
burnt bricks'; Mehrgarh's houses were sun-dried brick; Dholavira's tanks were stone and
mud-brick.
6. A reason to organise — this is the subtlest one. The chapter says that digging ditches and
building dams 'required collective effort. These early cooperative efforts must have led to the
growth of local government, accompanied by the rise of the administrative class.' A river
does not only feed people; managing it forces them to organise, and the organisation
becomes the state.

And rivers also gave a calendar. The Egyptians developed their year 'by counting
the days between Nile floods' — 365 days, twelve months of thirty plus five extra —
and named their three seasons after what the river was doing: Inundation, Peret
(growing), shemu (harvest). The river set the working year, so it also set the way time
itself was measured.

Keep the other half in view. Question 8 of Questions and activities asks about the
disadvantages, and they are real: a flood that comes too high destroys the same
fields it usually feeds, and settlements crowded along one channel are all exposed to
the same disaster at the same time. The chapter itself lists 'environmental
degradation, pressure on agricultural lands' among the causes of Babylonia's
decline.

LET'S EXPLORE — Page 79
Mesopotamian Civilisation

LET'S EXPLORE

Q1 Can you find out which countries constitute West Asia in present times?

Start from what the chapter itself gives you, because that is the part you can answer from
the book. It says Mesopotamia 'in modern times… includes mainly Iraq and Kuwait, with some
parts of Turkey and southwestern Iran' — so those four are certain. Fig. 4.21 adds the
geography around them: the Mediterranean Sea to the west, the Black Sea and Caspian Sea
to the north, the Red Sea and Arabian Desert to the south, and the Persian Gulf to the east.
The countries usually counted as West Asia today. Working outward from that frame, the
region is generally taken to include:

Page 21 of 89

Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

SUB-REGION COUNTRIES LINK TO THE CHAPTER

The Mesopotamian Iraq, Kuwait Named in the chapter as the land of the Euphrates
core and Tigris

The eastern and Iran, Turkey The chapter includes 'some parts' of both; the
northern edge Zagros mountains lie in Iran and the Taurus in
Turkey, and it is their foothills that form the fertile
crescent

The Levant (eastern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Fig. 4.4 marks the LEVANT as one of the routes of
Mediterranean coast) Palestine, Jordan early Homo dispersal out of Africa

The Arabian Saudi Arabia, Yemen, The chapter identifies Dilmun as today's Bahrain
peninsula Oman, United Arab and Magan as the Oman peninsula
Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain

The Caucasus edge Armenia, Azerbaijan, Fig. 4.21 labels the Caucasus Mts. along the
(sometimes included) Georgia northern margin of the map

Island in the eastern Cyprus Lies within the Mediterranean shown on Fig. 4.21
Mediterranean

Why the list has fuzzy edges, and why that is not a mistake. 'West Asia' is a
regional name, not a legal one, so different atlases and organisations draw the
boundary in slightly different places — the Caucasus states, Egypt's Sinai and
Afghanistan are the usual borderline cases. The core is never in doubt: the lands
around the Tigris, the Euphrates, the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.
When you present your list, say which map you used. Naming your source is part of
a good geographical answer.

Tip: trace Fig. 4.21 into your notebook, mark the Tigris and Euphrates, shade the
Fertile Crescent from the Mediterranean round to the Persian Gulf, and then write
today's country names on top of the ancient ones — Ur, Uruk, Eridu, Lagash, Nippur,
Babylon and Akkad all in modern Iraq. Seeing the two maps at once is the point of
the exercise.

LET'S EXPLORE — Page 80

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

The Sumerians and the ziggurat

LET'S EXPLORE

Q1 Do you find any similarities between the temples in India and those of the
Sumerian civilisation as centres of socio-cultural and economic activity?

Yes, in function there are real similarities — but they are similarities of role, not of religion or
of origin, and the answer is only worth having if it keeps that distinction clear.
First, what the chapter actually says about the ziggurat. Four claims, and each one is about
the temple's place in the working life of the city:

'Each city built a grand temple called a ziggurat for its chief god, and the city grew around
this main temple' — the temple is the centre of the settlement plan.
'All economic activities, such as agriculture, trade, and the transport of goods, were tied to
the temple authority' — it is an economic institution.
The area around the ziggurat 'contained palaces and royal storehouses', and 'the
surrounding walls had only one entrance as the ziggurat also served as the city's treasury'
— it stores and guards wealth.
'Entry to the sacred temple was restricted to high priests and priestesses, who were
probably a part of the ruling class, reflecting a clear division of social hierarchy' — access
to it marks rank.

Now the comparison, point by point.

Page 23 of 89

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

co m
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FUNCTION SUMERIAN ZIGGURAT LARGE INDIAN TEMPLES SIMILAR?

as e
settlement .c
omThe
Centre of the city 'grew around Many old towns are laid out
a g l
Yes

s e m this main temple' around the temple; streets,
a
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tanks and markets take their
bearings from it

. com servants and ag
Economic All agriculture, trade and Great temples held land, Yes

emcraftspeople, and ran their
transport tied to temple
s
institution employed

a
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authority
— you studied
temple economies in earlier
grades
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Store of wealth Also the city treasury, Temple treasuries held donated Yes

a g
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behind a single guarded gold, land grants and grain

gla
entrance

a Centre of Festivals and ritual Festivals, processions, music, Yes

om around temples a s
agl
cultural life centred on the temple dance, sculpture and teaching

m .ccluster
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Marks social
hierarchy
The inner shrine
restricted to high
g
a priests
The garbhagṛiha is likewise
entered only by priests, while
Yes, in form

m
and priestesses of the the outer spaces are open
ruling class
. co
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m l a
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Building form A stepped, tower-like A shrine at ground level under a

m
ase
pyramid of several floors tiers, but the shrine

agl
with the shrine on top; vimāna); most often stone sits at the top in one
mud and burnt brick and at the base in the
other
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esuch
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as floods andgwinds;
belief over natural forces

a
separate temple for each
history

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

How to state the conclusion without over-claiming. The similarity is functional
and independent, not borrowed. Whenever a society produces a surplus, someone
must store it, guard it, keep account of it and redistribute it — and in many early
societies the institution that already commanded trust and labour was the temple.
So temples in unconnected places ended up doing similar jobs, for the same
structural reason, without either copying the other. The chapter's closing paragraph
supports exactly this reading: the Bronze Age civilisations 'developed social and
administrative systems independently'. Saying 'similar because both needed the
same thing' is a stronger historical claim than 'similar because one influenced the
other' — and it is the one the evidence supports.

LET US RECALL — Page 81
The Beginning of Writing

LET US RECALL

Q1 The cuneiform writing system was contemporary to the Harappan script, but while
cuneiform has been deciphered, the Harappan script has not yet been deciphered.
Do you think our understanding of a civilisation changes when its script is
deciphered compared to when it is not?

Yes — it changes completely, and the chapter itself is the demonstration. Compare how
much this one chapter can tell you about Mesopotamia with how much it can tell you about the
Harappans, and the whole difference comes from one fact: cuneiform can be read and Sindhu
lipi cannot.

Page 25 of 89

Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

KIND OF MESOPOTAMIA (CUNEIFORM SINDHU–SARASVATĪ (SCRIPT
KNOWLEDGE DECIPHERED) UNDECIPHERED)

Names of rulers Sargon of Akkad; Hammurabi, who Not one Harappan name is known
ascended in 1792 BCE

Dates of events Akkad rises 2334 BCE; Assur takes over Only period boundaries — Early,
2154 BCE; Babylonia from 1900 BCE Mature, Late Harappan — dated by
excavation and radio-carbon, never by a
text

Law and The Code of Hammurabi — the actual Nothing. We can see planned streets
government rules for civil and social conduct, and the and a standard weight system but
fact that they were enforced empire-wide cannot read a single rule

Trade partners Sargon's tablets name Dilmun, Magan Harappan goods are found abroad, but
and Meluhha by name the Harappans never tell us where they
sent them

Beliefs and 'Great myths and epics, hymns, the law Seal motifs and figurines survive; what
literature codes, and educational treatises' — they meant is guesswork
including the Epic of Gilgamesh

Ordinary working Tablets recording the work of 'potters, We know the crafts existed from the
life seal cutters, shipbuilders, carpenters, objects; we do not know the workers
farm workers'

Thoughts and Directly attested in their own words Fig. 4.3's verdict applies: 'It is generally
ideas difficult to understand the thoughts and
ideas of people'

The change is not only more information — it is a different kind of information. Fig. 4.3
makes exactly this distinction. Material remains tell you how people lived; written documents
add names, events, and social, political and cultural life, and make dating 'relatively
accurate' because documents mention specific dates of coronations and wars. Archaeology
gives you the pattern of a society. Writing gives you its people.
Egypt shows the change happening. Before 1822, Egyptian monuments were impressive but
mute. Then Champollion read the Rosetta Stone's hieroglyphs against its Greek, and the same
stones started giving up names, reigns, prayers and medical recipes — the Papyrus Ebers alone
lists more than 700 cures and spells. Nothing new was excavated; the same evidence simply
began to speak.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

The other half of the answer — what does not change. A decipherment does not
make the archaeology wrong or redundant. We know the Harappans traded over
long distances, planned their cities, managed water at Dholavira, ploughed cross-
furrowed fields at Kalibangan and weighed goods in a fixed system — all without a
readable line of text. And written sources bring their own problem: they are usually
written by and for the powerful. Sargon's tablets record what a king wanted
recorded; the potter's life still has to be reconstructed from the pots. The best
history uses both, which is exactly what Fig. 4.3's 'After' column says: 'both material
remains and written documents are sources'.

LET'S EXPLORE — Page 82
The Akkadians

LET'S EXPLORE

Q1 The Epic of Gilgamesh, written during the Mesopotamian civilisation, is one of the
earliest stories written. Try and find out more such stories and share them in class.

Method. The point of this exercise is to find stories that come to us from the earliest written
traditions, so search by where the text comes from, not by whether you like the plot. For each
story, note four things before you present it: (i) the civilisation and rough date, (ii) the
material it survives on — clay tablet, papyrus, bone, palm leaf, (iii) a one-line summary, and
(iv) the human question it turns on. Use your library, your teacher, and the chapter itself, which
names several without discussing them.
What a good presentation must contain. Not the plot alone. It must say how we know the
story — which is where the chapter's own theme returns. The Epic of Gilgamesh reaches us
because it was pressed into clay in cuneiform, clay survives burial, and cuneiform has been
deciphered. A story told aloud in a Harappan street is gone forever. Make that point explicitly; it
is what connects this box to the rest of the chapter.
Sample answer:

Page 27 of 89

Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

STORY WHERE IT COMES FROM WHAT IT IS ABOUT HOW IT
SURVIVED

The Epic of Mesopotamia; the chapter A powerful king who loses his Cuneiform on clay
Gilgamesh places creative literature in the closest friend and goes tablets
Akkadian period, from 2334 searching for a way to escape
BCE onwards death — and fails

The oldest Egypt; the chapter says A sailor shipwrecked on a Papyrus scroll in a
'Sindbad the libraries dating back to 2000 strange island, and how he labelled jar on a
Sailor' BCE stored papyrus scrolls in gets home library shelf
labelled jars, and 'one such jar
contained the oldest version'

Egyptian animal Egypt, same period Short tales in which animals Papyrus
fables behave like people and the
story ends in a lesson — the
chapter notes they suggest 'a
link to Aesop's Fables'

The oldest Egypt; the chapter lists it A poor girl whose fortune Papyrus
'Cinderella' among short stories of this turns — the earliest known
period form of a story now told
worldwide

Egyptian ghost Egypt The chapter groups these Papyrus
and miracle together as the range of
tales, and Egyptian short fiction
romances

Chinese oracle- China; the earliest source of Not stories but questions put Symbols carved
bone records information about China to the future — which, as the on animal bones
chapter says, 'tell us a lot and tortoise shells
about the hopes, desires, and (Fig. 4.36)
fears of the early Chinese'

The pattern worth pointing out when you present. These stories were written
down thousands of years ago in four unconnected places, and they are still about
the same things — death, friendship, luck, a journey home, the fear of what
tomorrow holds. The chapter ends on precisely this note: 'many of our cultural ethos
have their roots in the Bronze Age civilisations'. The technologies changed beyond
recognition; the questions people tell stories about did not.

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co m
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Tip: when you present, bring one object — a lump of clay with a stylus mark, a strip

mmakes the survival of the story the memorable part.glas
of paper folded like a papyrus sheet, a bone with a scratch. Showing what the story e
. c o a
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was written on
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THINK ABOUT IT — Page 85
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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Fig. 4.29, An illustration from the Papyrus of Ani

THINK ABOUT IT

Q1 Why do you think there is a scale with a heart on one side and a feather on the
other (fig. 4.29)? What can this papyrus tell us about early Egyptian beliefs?

What Fig. 4.29 shows. A painted papyrus, golden-brown with age,
crowded with figures and columns of hieroglyphs.
Along the top sits a row of about a dozen gods on low thrones,
all facing left, with blocks of hieroglyphs written above and
between them.
At the left of the main scene a man and a woman in long white
linen stand side by side, hands raised, bowing slightly forward.
In the middle stands a tall balance: an upright post carrying a
cross-beam with a pan hanging from each end. In the left-hand
pan is a small rounded jar-shaped object; in the right-hand pan
stands a single upright feather. A small baboon sits on top of
the post.
Kneeling at the foot of the balance is a man with the black head
of a jackal, one hand on the plumb-line of the scale, checking it.
To the right a figure with the long-beaked head of an ibis stands
holding a scribe’s palette and writing.
At the far right crouches a creature made of parts of several
animals — a crocodile’s head, a spotted front, heavy
hindquarters — facing the balance.
The book’s caption reads: “An illustration from the Papyrus of Ani”.

Fig. 4.29, page 85 — described here; see the textbook for the painting itself.

First, describe exactly what is painted, because the answer is an inference and it must be
built on what is visible. Fig. 4.29 shows, from left to right: a man and a woman in white linen
bowing forward; a large balance in the centre with a heart in one pan and a single feather in
the other; a jackal-headed figure crouching at the balance and adjusting it; a standing figure
recording the result; an animal-headed creature waiting at the right-hand end; and, along the
top, a row of seated deities watching. Columns of hieroglyphs fill every gap.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

So why a heart against a feather? Because the scene is a weighing — a judgement after
death, and each object is chosen for what it stands for:

ELEMENT IN WHAT IT STANDS FOR THE CHAPTER'S SUPPORTING EVIDENCE
THE
PICTURE

The heart The person's own life and Decisive: in mummification, all internal organs
conduct — the organ the were removed except the heart. Of everything in
Egyptians treated as the seat of the body, only the heart stayed. The picture explains
the self why — it was needed at the judgement

The feather The standard the heart is A feather is the lightest thing that can be drawn.
measured against — something The test is a balance, and a balance needs a fixed
perfectly light, so that any standard on the other side
weight of wrongdoing shows

The balance That the judgement is exact and The Egyptians were a measuring people: a 365-day
itself impartial, not a matter of calendar, ditches and reservoirs, surveyed fields
opinion

The deities That the judgement is public The chapter records that 'each god had a festival'
watching from and witnessed and that the people had 'deep reverence for their
above gods and ruler'

The waiting That the outcome matters — It sits at the end of the sequence, after the weighing
creature at the there is something to lose and the recording
right

The figure That the verdict is written down Egypt reconstructed its own history from papyrus
recording the records; even the afterlife is imagined as keeping
result documents

What the papyrus tells us about early Egyptian beliefs — four things:

1. Death was not the end. The chapter states the belief directly: 'the Egyptians believed that
each person had a ka (a spiritual double) that lived on after death if the body was
preserved through mummification'. This scene is what the ka was preserved for.
2. The afterlife had to be earned, by conduct. A weighing is a test, and a test can be failed.
Egyptian belief was therefore moral: how you lived decided what followed.
3. The body and the spirit were bound together. Mummification, the mastaba, the pyramid
and this papyrus all belong to a single system — preserve the body, protect the burial, and
equip the dead for the judgement. This is why the chapter can say the pyramids 'were built
primarily because' of the ka belief.
4. Belief was written and illustrated, not merely remembered. A papyrus like this was made
to accompany a burial. Egyptians recorded what they believed, which is exactly why we can
still recover it — and exactly what we cannot do for the Harappans.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Distinguish what is certain from what is read into the picture. Certain, because
the chapter prints it: the heart alone was left in the mummified body; the ka lived on
if the body was preserved. Reasonable and widely accepted, but an interpretation of
an image: that the scene is a judgement, that the feather is the standard of right
conduct, and that the creature at the right threatens the one who fails. Say which is
which when you answer — this is how a historian handles a picture without a
caption.

LET'S MAP — Page 86

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Fig. 4.30, The region in which the Egyptian civilisation flourished

LET'S MAP

Q1 Can you locate the River Nile on the given map? Why do you think the northern part
is called Lower Egypt and the southern part Upper Egypt?

N
Mediterranean Sea

31°N
Lower Egypt

Heliopolis
Heliopolis

Giza
Giza
30°N
Turah
Turah
Sakkara
Sakkara
Memphis
Memphis

GU
LF
29°N

OF
SU
EZ

28°N
Hermopolis
Hermopolis 0 100 km

29°E 30°E 31°E 32°E 33°E 34°E

Fig. 4.30, page 86 — the region in which the Egyptian civilisation flourished, redrawn at
true latitude and longitude. The book prints it over a satellite photograph and shows
each place as a picture-bubble.

Locating the Nile on Fig. 4.30. The map covers roughly 29°E to 34°E and 28°N to 31°N. The
Nile is the dark, narrow ribbon of water and vegetation entering the map at the bottom
(south), near 31°E, and running northwards through pale desert on both sides. Near the top it
spreads into a wide green triangle — the delta — which meets the Mediterranean Sea along
the northern edge. To the right lies the Gulf of Suez.

Page 33 of 89

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

How to be sure you have the right feature: the Nile is the only continuous green strip on the
co m
map. Everything away from it is desert-coloured. That contrast is itself the lesson — Egypt is the
em.
m l as
.co g
watered strip.

m a
l a se
Use the labelled sites to fix the course (all of them cluster on or beside the river, which is the

ag
point):

GOING DOWN THE MAP, NORTH TO
co m
ROUGHLY WHERE ON FIG. 4.30
SOUTH
e m . ag
g l as
Mediterranean Sea and the delta
a Top of the map, above 30°N — the river's mouth

om
Giza, Heliopolis About 30°N, at the head of the delta

. c
m a s embank
agl— the step pyramid of Fig.
Memphis, Turah Just below, close to the river on either

. c o
s e m (Saqqara)
a
Sakkara West of the river, near 29.7°N

agl
4.31

a s
Hermopolis Furthest south on the map, near 28°N

. c om agl
s e m on a map and is not. We are used to reading a map
a
Now the naming, which looks backwards

a thel top 'upper'. The Egyptians named their country not by the
with north at the top and calling g
page but by the river, and the rule is:

co m
.
s em
The Nile flows from south to north, and empties into the Mediterranean.
m a
So .the a gl Egypt
co upstream end — the source end — is in the south → Upper
m
ase
agl And the downstream end — the mouth — is in the north → Lower Egypt

'Upper' and 'Lower' refer to height along the river's course, not to position on a page.
se m
com g l a
m . a
ase
agl
The physical reason behind it. Water flows downhill. If the river runs north, the land in the
south must stand higher and the land in the north lower. So the names are literally true about
elevation — the south really is the upper country. Fig. 4.30 shows the consequence: in the low

c o m
.
north the river slows, splits into many channels and spreads its load of silt into the wide green

s em
delta; in the higher south it stays a single narrow channel between deserts.
m a
. co a gl
as em Why this mattered to Egyptians every year. The flood arrived from the south and
agl moved north. Upper Egypt got the inundation first, Lower Egypt later. The chapter
c
m .
e
says 'every summer the river flooded, leading to annual inundations, with rich mud,

om la s
. c g
kemet' — and that the Egyptians built their calendar 'by counting the days between

e mset the farming year, and therefore set the calendar. a
s
Nile floods'. Direction of flow
a
agl

co m
m .
m as e
.co


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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Check it yourself: the same rule works on Indian rivers. Uttarakhand is upstream on
the Ganga and West Bengal is downstream, even though Uttarakhand sits at the top
of the map. Try naming an 'Upper' and 'Lower' stretch of the Ganga, the Godavari or
the Brahmaputra using flow direction, and then check the contour heights in your
atlas.

LET'S EXPLORE — Page 87
Fig. 4.32, Social hierarchy Pyramid

LET'S EXPLORE

Q1 Look at the social hierarchy pyramid in the image. What were the social classes of
early Egypt? What were the different kinds of occupations? What could have been a
typical daily routine of the people from each class?

Pharaoh

Government Officials,
Nobles and Priests

Free Landholders,
Artisans and Merchants

Serfs and Slaves

Fig. 4.32, page 87 — the social hierarchy pyramid as printed in the chapter.

(a) The social classes. Fig. 4.32 prints exactly four tiers, from the narrow top to the wide base:

Page 35 of 89

Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Pharaoh
few at the top, many at the base

Government Officials,
Nobles and Priests

Free Landholders,
Artisans and Merchants

Serfs and Slaves

Fig. 4.32 as printed. The shape carries the argument: each tier down is wider, so most Egyptians were
at the bottom.

(b) The occupations — read from the figures drawn inside each tier.

CLASS WHO IS DRAWN IN THE TIER OCCUPATIONS

Pharaoh A single figure holding a staff Ruler of Egypt; the chapter adds that the
Sed festival marked a king's 30th year on
the throne, and that festivals celebrated
the pharaoh's rule

Government Four figures — some carrying staffs Administration, collecting and recording
Officials, Nobles and fans and wearing gold, one in revenue, running the temples and the
and Priests plain white linen rituals; the priests are the ones with access
to the sacred spaces

Free Landholders, A woman carrying a basket on her Farming one's own land; craft work —
Artisans and head; a kneeling craftsman; two men potters, weavers, sandal-makers, basket-
Merchants carrying a loaded litter; a person makers, jewellers; trading and carrying
working at an object goods

Serfs and Slaves Figures with sheaves of grain; a man Ploughing, harvesting, carrying water,
ploughing behind a red ox; a man hauling stone for building — the physical
carrying a yoke with two vessels; men labour on which everything above rests
hauling a sledge with a heavy block

(c) A typical day — clearly labelled as reconstruction. No timetable survives, so this is built
from what the chapter does tell us: the Nile flood and the farming year, ditch-digging and dam-
building as collective work, temple ritual and festivals, craft production, pyramid building, and

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

the leisure activities it lists — swimming, canoeing, board games, music and dancing.
Sample answer:

CLASS MORNING MIDDAY EVENING

Pharaoh Ritual duties; receives officials Decisions on building Attends a festival in
with reports on the level of the works, on the army, on which a god's statue is
Nile, the harvest and the grain stores; audiences paraded to the sound
storehouses of the sistrum; music
and feasting

Official or The priest performs the morning Supervises the Checks the day's
priest rites at the temple; the official measuring of fields and accounts; oversees the
reads and writes records on the collection and temple's evening ritual
papyrus storage of grain; settles and its stores
disputes

Landholder, The farmer opens the ditches to Craft work continues; Repairs to tools and to
artisan or let Nile water into the fields; the goods are exchanged; the house; board
merchant potter and the sandal-maker the family's meal of games, music, a swim
begin work; the merchant loads bread, beer, fish and in the river
goods for the river journey vegetables

Serf or slave Out at first light — ploughing Heavy labour through Returns late; a simple
behind an ox, sowing, or the hottest hours: meal; rest — with the
carrying water on a shoulder harvesting, threshing, or same work waiting at
yoke hauling stone on sledges dawn
for a royal building

The point the pyramid shape is making. Widen the tiers going down and you are
saying something about numbers: a very few at the top, a great many at the bottom.
But surplus flows the other way — the grain the base grows and the stone the base
hauls support the two tiers above it. The chapter shows the same structure in
Mesopotamia, where entry to the ziggurat was 'restricted to high priests and
priestesses, who were probably a part of the ruling class, reflecting a clear division of
social hierarchy', and in China, where by 1500 BCE society was 'highly stratified with
the ruling class, nobles, and aristocrats at the top, followed by farmers and
labourers'. Once there is a surplus, someone controls it — and every Bronze Age
civilisation in this chapter developed a hierarchy independently.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

One qualification the chapter itself supplies. Rank was not the only thing that
decided a life. Egyptian women 'in general enjoyed more rights than their Greek or
Roman counterparts, as they could own property and run businesses' — Cleopatra
(69–30 BCE) was trained from childhood to rule and became queen at eighteen. A
single pyramid diagram flattens differences of this kind; mention them so your
answer does not.

THINK ABOUT IT — Page 88
Fig. 4.33, Daily items used by the Egyptians

THINK ABOUT IT

Q1 Observe the images given above. What do they tell you about Egyptian fashion?

What Fig. 4.33 shows. Three museum photographs of objects, each on
a plain grey background.
Top left. A squat, round, orange-red pottery flask with a short
narrow neck and a ribbed handle. Around its shoulder and body
are painted, in black, several long-legged wading birds with
speckled wings.
Bottom left. An oval, lidded basket of honey-coloured reed or
grass, coiled in tight rings from base to rim. It is plain, with no
decoration.
Right (the largest picture). A pair of sandals plaited from pale
palm-leaf or reed fibre. Each has a flat oval sole made of coiled
fibre with a braided rim, a thick thong rising between the toes,
and two straps that meet the thong and run back over the
instep.
The book’s caption reads: “Daily items used by the Egyptians”.

Fig. 4.33, page 88 — described here; see the textbook for the photographs of the objects.

First, what Fig. 4.33 actually shows — three objects:

Page 38 of 89

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

1. A red pottery jar, round-bodied with a small spout and handles at the top, painted with dark
co m
bird figures around its shoulder.
em.
m l as
.co g
2. A coiled reed basket with a fitted lid, oval, woven in fine close rows.
m a
se
3. A pair of sandals plaited from reed or palm fibre, with a plaited sole, a woven border and a

g l a
a
toe-post thong — very like the chappal shape still worn in India.

What they tell you about Egyptian fashion — five things, each tied to something visible:

. c om ag
WHAT YOU CAN SEE
s e m YOU
WHAT IT TELLS
a
Sandals, not closed shoes aglsuited a hot, dry climate — open footwear, feet exposed, nothing heavy
Dress
or insulating

co m
e m.
as
Reed and palm fibre, not leather or Fashion used local plant materials — the same river-valley plants that gave

m l
.co g
metal them papyrus for writing. What grew beside the Nile is what they wore

em a
a s
glbordered
The plaiting is fine, even, and These are skilled craft products, made by specialists. Everyday things were

a made carefully and meant to look good, not merely to function

m a s
.co agl
The pot is painted with birds; the A taste for decoration on ordinary objects. Egyptians did not keep beauty for

em
basket is patterned in its weave temples and tombs; they put it on the pot in the kitchen

a s
l made for storing and keeping things clean — a settled household
The basket has a lid and the jar a
narrow mouth
gObjects
a with possessions worth putting away

. c om
Read this against the rest of the chapter. Fig. 4.29 shows Ani and
m a s em his wife in fine
.
whiteco linen with collars and wigs; Fig. 4.34 shows Cleopatra
a l
gpainted on a temple wall
einma patterned gown with a headdress and beaded jewellery. Fig. 4.33 shows the
as other end of the same wardrobe — the sandals and household goods of ordinary
a g l
life. Put together, they say that Egyptian dress ran from plain plaited reed to gold
se m
com g l a
. a
and fine linen, and that the difference between the two was rank.
m
ase
agl

co m
m .
m as e
.co a g l
se m
g l a
a c
m .
m a s e
e m . co agl
g l as
a

co m
m .
m as e
.co


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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Q2 Which social classes do you think used these items?

What Fig. 4.33 shows. Three museum photographs of objects, each on
a plain grey background.
Top left. A squat, round, orange-red pottery flask with a short
narrow neck and a ribbed handle. Around its shoulder and body
are painted, in black, several long-legged wading birds with
speckled wings.
Bottom left. An oval, lidded basket of honey-coloured reed or
grass, coiled in tight rings from base to rim. It is plain, with no
decoration.
Right (the largest picture). A pair of sandals plaited from pale
palm-leaf or reed fibre. Each has a flat oval sole made of coiled
fibre with a braided rim, a thick thong rising between the toes,
and two straps that meet the thong and run back over the
instep.
The book’s caption reads: “Daily items used by the Egyptians”.

Fig. 4.33, page 88 — described here; see the textbook for the photographs of the objects.

Most likely the middle and lower tiers of Fig. 4.32 — the free landholders, artisans and
merchants, and the serfs and slaves — with the plainer versions of these same objects
reaching every household in Egypt.

ITEM MOST LIKELY USERS REASON

Reed All classes, but as the ordinary footwear of Made of a cheap, locally abundant material.
sandals working people Sandals of gilded leather existed for royalty;
plaited reed is the everyday form

Coiled Free landholders, artisans, merchants; also Baskets carry and store grain, bread, tools
reed servants storing household goods and cloth — the objects of daily work
basket

Painted A household that could afford a decorated The painting is extra work, so it costs more
pottery jar pot rather than a plain one — an artisan, than plain ware, but clay is cheap and the
merchant or landholding family vessel is a working container, not a treasure

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Who probably did not use them — and this is the sharper half of the answer. The pharaoh
and the highest nobles are unlikely to have used these particular objects. Their possessions were
of gold, precious stone, fine linen and imported wood, and they were buried with them. A reed
sandal and a clay pot belong to a working household. But note the caution: the classes overlap,
and a fine painted jar may well have stood in a wealthy house too.

Q3 What clues in the images help you to make this guess? Try to explain your
reasoning based on the materials, designs, or accessories shown in the pictures.

What Fig. 4.33 shows. Three museum photographs of objects, each on
a plain grey background.
Top left. A squat, round, orange-red pottery flask with a short
narrow neck and a ribbed handle. Around its shoulder and body
are painted, in black, several long-legged wading birds with
speckled wings.
Bottom left. An oval, lidded basket of honey-coloured reed or
grass, coiled in tight rings from base to rim. It is plain, with no
decoration.
Right (the largest picture). A pair of sandals plaited from pale
palm-leaf or reed fibre. Each has a flat oval sole made of coiled
fibre with a braided rim, a thick thong rising between the toes,
and two straps that meet the thong and run back over the
instep.
The book’s caption reads: “Daily items used by the Egyptians”.

Fig. 4.33, page 88 — described here; see the textbook for the photographs of the objects.

Three clues, and here is the reasoning that runs from each one to the conclusion:

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

CLUE IN THE IMAGE THE REASONING CONCLUSION

Material. Reed, palm fibre and Value in an object comes largely from how Everyday goods, affordable
clay — no gold, no silver, no scarce and far-travelled its material is. These to ordinary households
ivory, no fine imported wood three materials all grew or were dug within
sight of the river

Design. Plain shapes doing plain Nothing here is ceremonial. Every feature Objects made to be used
jobs — a lidded box, a jar with a serves use: the lid keeps out dust, the narrow daily, not displayed
narrow mouth, a flat sole with a mouth slows evaporation, the toe-post keeps
toe-post the sandal on while walking

Workmanship. Even coiling, a This is skilled work, so the owner was not The middle tier of the
neat woven border, careful destitute — but the skill has been spent on pyramid: artisans,
painted birds cheap material, which is the signature of a merchants and
craftsman working for ordinary customers landholding families

The general rule to state. Archaeologists judge status from material first, workmanship
second, and rarity third. Gold from far away in a fine setting means high rank; local clay well
made means a comfortable working household; local clay crudely made means little means at
all. Fig. 4.33 sits squarely in the middle band.

Say where the reasoning could go wrong. Three honest limits. (i) Survival bias —
reed and cloth rot; what survives is not a fair sample of what was used. (ii) Findspot
unknown — the figure does not say whether these came from a workman's village
or a royal tomb, and rich burials often contained ordinary objects for use in the next
life. (iii) The same object can cross classes — a wealthy Egyptian also owned
baskets. So the right form of the answer is 'these are most likely everyday objects of
the middle and lower classes', not 'these prove they were poor'. Marking the limits of
an inference is part of making it well.

In-text Questions — Page 89
The Chinese Civilisation

Q1 You have already seen in the case of Mesopotamia and Egypt how rivers helped
civilisations grow. Can you recall how they supported people's lives?

Yes — in Mesopotamia and Egypt the chapter shows rivers doing five jobs, and the same
five explain why the Chinese civilisation grew on the Huang He and the Yangtze.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

HOW THE MESOPOTAMIA (EUPHRATES AND EGYPT (NILE)
RIVER TIGRIS)
SUPPORTED
LIFE

Fertile land The 'fertile crescent' of the Zagros and The summer flood left rich black
Taurus foothills, 'due to their high mud, kemet — 'excellent for growing
agricultural potential'; farming here from crops' — and gave the country its
12000 years before present own name

Water on demand The Sumerians were 'the first to build a About 5000 years ago farmers dug
system of dams and canals for irrigation' ditches to divert Nile water into
fields and stored it in reservoirs

Surplus, and so Copper tools from 4500 BCE improved City-states emerged around 3000
cities farming and craft, which 'contributed to the BCE 'as population increased and
broader dissemination of farming across the resources became available'
vast plains'; city-states followed from 3500
BCE

Building material First use of mud bricks and burnt bricks; Boats on the Nile; stone brought
and transport the sailboat and the wheeled cart downriver for the pyramids

A reason to All economic activity tied to the temple Ditches and dams 'required
organise authority, which ran the canals and the collective effort. These early
stores cooperative efforts must have led to
the growth of local government', and
to an administrative class

And the river set the calendar. The Egyptians worked out a 365-day year 'by counting the days
between Nile floods', and named their three seasons after the river's own cycle — Inundation,
Peret (growing) and shemu (harvest).

Why the question is asked here. China is about to follow the same pattern from a
completely separate starting point: Neolithic cultures in the Huang He and Yangtze
valleys from around 7000 BCE, bronze metallurgy around 2000 BCE, and urban
centres from about 1600 BCE once 'agricultural productivity' expanded. Four
civilisations, four river systems, no copying between them — which is the chapter's
central claim about the Bronze Age.

LET'S EXPLORE — Page 90

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

The Chinese logographic script
co m
e m.
m as
LET'S EXPLORE

.co a g l
a s emChinese script is logographic, with characters representing entire words or
gl
The
a
Q1
morphemes (smallest meaningful units of language), rather than sounds. Person →
人 Tree → 木. Explore more examples of Chinese characters that resemble the
. com
objects or ideas they represent. Note down at least two such characters and explain
ag
a s
how their shapes are connected toemtheir meanings.
agl

. c om
Start from the two the book gives. 人 (person) keeps the two legs of a standing figure. 木

m a
(tree) keeps a trunk with branches spreading above and roots below. In both,
s emthe character is a
simplifiedco
. a glidentify it.
drawing of the thing, reduced to the fewest strokes that still

a s emanswer — four more characters and the reasoning for each:
agl
Sample

s
CHARACTER MEANING HOW THE SHAPE CARRIES THE MEANING

om a
山 Three peaks.c
em
rising from one base line — a mountain range drawn in agl
three s
mountain

a
agl
strokes

日 sun / day A closed shape with a mark in the middle: the disc of the sun. Older

co m
forms were a circle with a dot; the square is what happens when you

m .
e
write a circle quickly with a brush

雨 .com g l as
m a
A line for the sky, a shape below it for the cloud, and four short strokes

se
rain

l a
for falling drops

a g 門
m
gate / door Two door-leaves facing each other, each with its panel — a double gate

a se
com l
seen from the front

. a g
m
ase
agl
Then take one step further, and show a compound. This is what makes the system powerful
rather than merely picturesque: pictures can be combined to write ideas that cannot themselves
be drawn.

co m
m .
林 — a wood as e
com l
木 (tree) + 木 (tree) =
.木 + 木 + 木 = 森 — a dense forest a g
e m
as
agl 日 (sun) + 月 (moon) = 明 — bright
c
m .
s e
. com
What to explain in your note. A logographic character stands for a word or morpheme, not
a gla
m
for a sound. So two people whoepronounce
s
a
agl is one reason the script held together across a very large country
the same word completely differently can still read
the same character — which
with many spoken varieties.

co m
m .
m ase
.co


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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

The comparison the chapter is setting up. Put three scripts of this chapter side by
side and you can see three different solutions to the same problem:

Cuneiform — wedge marks pressed into damp clay, adapted to write several
different languages: 'cuneiform was widely used all over Mesopotamia by
different city-states, even though they spoke different languages'.
Chinese — a sign per word, still in use today, and the direct descendant of the
oracle-bone symbols of Fig. 4.36.
The Harappan script — pictographic, and still undeciphered.

Notice the difference in outcome: a script that has been used continuously, like
Chinese, could never be lost. A script that fell out of use with no bilingual key, like
the Harappan, could be — and was.

Tip: for your presentation, draw each character large, then beside it draw the object
it came from, and let the class match them without labels. The ones they get right
are the ones where the picture survived; the ones they get wrong show how much a
character changes once people start writing it fast.

THINK ABOUT IT — Page 92
Fig. 4.38, The Great Wall of China

THINK ABOUT IT

Q1 What could have been the other reasons for building the Great Wall of China?
Explore and share your findings on the Great Wall through a model or presentation.

The reason the chapter gives is defence: 'several walls were built from 680 BCE onwards by the
Zhou and other dynasties as protection against the violent raids of nomadic tribes. These
were later joined together to make an effective defence mechanism.' The question asks for the
other reasons — so what follows is inference from what the chapter tells us about Chinese
society, and it is labelled as such.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

POSSIBLE THE ARGUMENT FOR IT SUPPORT IN THE CHAPTER
REASON

Controlling trade A wall with gates does not only keep Silk became a major export around the
people out — it decides where they 2nd century BCE under the Han, so much
may cross. Goods can then be so that the route took its name; a money
inspected, counted and taxed at the economy existed by the 5th century BCE
gate

Marking the A visible line on the ground states The Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) is 'credited
boundary of the where the empire's authority begins for unifying the country'
empire — useful to a state that has just
unified the country

Communication A continuous wall is also a road along Public officials were examined in archery
and troop the frontier, and a line along which a and horsemanship — a state that trained
movement warning can travel faster than a officials for mounted warfare needed to
raiding party move them

Displaying the A work of this size announces what Zhou rulers were 'both kings and priests,
power of the ruler the state can command in labour and believed to be appointees of heaven';
organisation, to its own people as Egypt's pyramids make the same kind of
much as to outsiders statement

Protecting The wall separates settled farming Urban centres emerged 'with the
farmland and country from grazing country; it expansion of agricultural productivity';
settled life defends fields and stores, not just society by 1500 BCE rested on 'farmers and
people labourers'

Employing and A continuous project across centuries Building continued over 'a period
organising labour gives the state a standing use for stretching to two thousand years', with
conscripted labour and a reason to repairs 'till the 17th century CE'
maintain supply lines

The point that makes the Wall interesting historically. It is not one wall and it
was not one decision. The chapter is precise: separate walls from 680 BCE by
different dynasties, later joined together, then expanded and repaired until the
17th century CE — roughly 2,300 years of work. So the reasons need not be the
same at every stage. A Zhou wall against raiders and a later imperial wall guarding a
trade route can both be true, of different centuries. Beware of the common mistake
of treating the Wall as a single object with a single purpose.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

For the model or presentation. Build a short section in cardboard or clay and
include the three features that make it work as a system, not just a barrier: (i) a
walkway on top wide enough to move soldiers; (ii) watchtowers at intervals, for
seeing far and passing signals; (iii) a gate, and a label explaining that the gate is
where trade is controlled and taxed. Add a timeline strip beneath: 680 BCE — first
walls; Qin 221–206 BCE — unification; Han 206 BCE–220 CE — Silk Route trade; 17th
century CE — last repairs. The timeline is what turns a model into an argument.

LET'S RECALL — Page 92
Silk and the Silk Route

LET'S RECALL

Q1 Do you remember studying about the Silk Route in Grade 7? How was India
connected with it? Can you recollect China's contact with India with reference to
Buddhism that you studied in Grade 7?

(a) What this chapter tells you about the Silk Route. Three facts, and they are the frame for
everything else:

Silk was known to the Chinese from the Neolithic period (4000–3000 BCE) and 'became an
important craft during the Bronze Age' — so it was a Chinese product for thousands of years
before it became an export.
Around the 2nd century BCE, during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), silk became a
major item of external trade.
It became so important that 'the entire route on which it was traded came to be known as
the Silk Route' — the road is named after the cargo.

(b) How India was connected with it. India was not at one end of the route; it was in the
middle of it, and connected in three ways:

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

CONNECTION WHAT IT MEANT

Overland, through Branches of the route ran through the passes of the north-west into the plains of the
the north-west subcontinent, linking Indian towns to the Central Asian trunk road

By sea Indian ports on both coasts joined the route to the maritime trade of the Arabian Sea
and the Bay of Bengal. This chapter shows how old that habit was — the Harappan
dockyard at Lothal and the sea trade with Magan and Dilmun (Fig. 4.26) belong to the
same tradition, thousands of years earlier

As a supplier, not Indian goods travelled the route in both directions — spices, cotton textiles, precious and
only a passage semiprecious stones. Notice that the Harappans were already exporting 'semiprecious
stone beads, ivory, timber, gold dust' westward by the third millennium BCE

(c) China's contact with India, and Buddhism. This is the part of the Silk Route story that
matters most, because it shows that a trade road carries more than trade:

Buddhism travelled from India to China along these routes. It began in India and spread
outward with travellers, traders and monks who used the same roads and passes that the
caravans used.
Monks and pilgrims travelled in both directions. Chinese pilgrims came to India to study
at its monasteries and to collect Buddhist texts, and carried them home. Indian teachers
went the other way.
Texts were translated. Buddhist works were rendered from Indian languages into Chinese
— an enormous scholarly effort spread over centuries.
Art and architecture moved with the ideas. Cave monasteries, sculpture and painting
along the route carry Indian forms adapted to local traditions.

The idea worth carrying away. A trade route is also an idea route. The same road
that moved silk east to west moved a religion west to east, and moved writing,
techniques and stories in both directions. This chapter shows the earlier version of
exactly the same thing: Sargon's tablets record cargo, but they also record that
Mesopotamians knew there were people called Meluhha living far to the east.
Contact begins with goods and does not stop there.

Check it yourself: take an outline map of Asia and draw the Silk Route from China
westward. Then mark, on the same map, the Harappan sea route of Fig. 4.26 —
Lothal and Dholavira to Magan (Oman), Dilmun (Bahrain) and Ur. Two networks,
roughly two thousand years apart, linking the same broad regions. Long-distance
exchange between India and the west is not a late development; it is one of the
oldest things in this chapter.

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co m
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Before we move on … — Page 93
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BEFORE WE MOVE ON …

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Why the 99 per cent matters. A history that only started with writing would miss
almost everything. The chapter puts the writing boundary at about 5000 years ago
— the Sumerians began cuneiform around 3200 BCE — but writing arrived 'at
different times in different parts of the world', so prehistory ends on different dates
in different places.

Q2 Early humans evolved in Africa and gradually migrated to different parts of the
world.

The claim, with the evidence for each half.
Evolved in Africa. The chapter states it as agreed knowledge: 'It is generally agreed that our
earliest ancestors evolved and lived in Africa.' The fossil evidence sits in specific African places —
Homo habilis in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and Kenya, Homo erectus in the Eastern African
Rift Valley, and Homo sapiens evolving in Africa about 300,000 years ago.
Migrated gradually. Two waves, both dated by what they left behind:

WAVE SPECIES DATE HOW WE KNOW

First Homo erectus, 'the Began about 2 million Its handaxes and cleavers are found in
first hominin to years ago; dispersal other parts of Asia and Europe, 'indicating
exit Africa' between 2 and 0.5 their origin in Africa and their dispersion
million years ago beyond the continent'

Second Early Homo Around 125,000 years Our species is now spread over the whole
sapiens ago earth; it reached Australia and the
Americas between 50000 and 12000
years ago

Where they went, and where they stopped. Africa, Asia and Europe together form what the
chapter calls the Old World — 'the geographical area of the oldest human settlements of the
earliest palaeolithic period'. Australia and the Americas were reached only much later, and only
by Homo sapiens. Fig. 4.4 maps the potential routes of early Homo dispersal, running from the
Olduvai Gorge north through the Nile Valley and the Levant, then east across Asia — with
Hathnora in India and Denisova Cave in Siberia marked along the way.

Note the word 'gradually'. Two million years to cross from East Africa to East Asia is
not a journey; it is a slow spread of hunting and gathering bands, generation by
generation, following animals and plants. Fig. 4.4 also labels the Sahara and Arabia
as 'both wetter during interglacials' — the door opened and closed with the climate.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Q3 During the Palaeolithic period, humans were hunter-gatherers who used stone
tools like handaxes, cleavers, and scrapers, and lived in caves or open camps.

The Palaeolithic in India, with its dates and its evidence. The oldest human settlement in the
subcontinent goes back about 2 million years. Two sites anchor that claim:

Attirampakkam, Tamil Nadu — about 1.5–1.7 million years ago

Isampur, Karnataka — about 1.2 million years ago

Found there: animal fossils; large cutting tools including handaxes and cleavers; and other

tools such as scrapers and choppers, made of quartzite and limestone.

What each tool was for — and the chapter is specific, because archaeologists have tested it by
making and using replicas: to chop animal meat, dig out tubers, scrape animal skin, and
cleave animal bones to extract protein-rich marrow. That last one matters: it says these people
were getting at food inside bones that other animals could not open.
The toolkit did not stand still. The chapter traces three stages within the Palaeolithic:

1. Large cutting tools — handaxes and cleavers (Fig. 4.9, captioned 'dating to about 1–5
million years in India').
2. Smaller tools — scrapers, borers and points (Fig. 4.10, Middle Palaeolithic), which 'indicate
improved efficiency in hunting by developing projectiles which were tipped with sharp
points'. A pointed tip on a thrown weapon is a real advance: you can now kill at a distance.
3. Blades and microblades struck from glassy rock, 'very sharp when freshly made', plus the
bow and arrow, hunting of small game, and the first beads of stone, bone and shell.

And where they lived: caves, rock shelters and open camps — no permanent buildings,
because a hunting and gathering economy has to move with its food.

The part the recap line leaves out. By the late Palaeolithic these were people with
a symbolic life: they 'developed symbolic communication, decorated the walls of
caves and rock shelters with paintings, and used pigments to decorate their bodies',
and used the burin or engraver to mark bones and ostrich-egg shells. Hunter–
gatherer describes how they ate, not the whole of who they were.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Q4 In the Mesolithic period, humans developed microlithic tools and began occupying
temporary settlements near rivers and lakes.

Start with the cause, because the Mesolithic begins with the climate. 'Around 12000 years
ago, Earth's climate became warmer, leading to significant changes in the environment.' Follow
the chain the chapter sets out:

Climate warms (about 12000 years ago)
→ ice sheets retreat; forests and grasslands expand into areas previously covered by ice

→ 'the new landscapes offered a wider variety of resources, including small game animals,

fish, and edible wild grains'

→ more food, more reliably → the world witnessed the first-ever population explosion in

human history

Why the tools got smaller, not bigger. A handaxe is made for a large carcass. When the food is
small game, fish and wild grain, what you need is many small sharp edges — so people made
microliths. The chapter records the decisive technique: 'the microblades were fixed in a handle
for ease of use'. That is composite tool-making — several tiny stone pieces set into wood or
bone to make one sickle, knife or arrow. It uses far less stone, is easily repaired one piece at a
time, and can be shaped for any job.
What the microlithic kit let them do. 'A variety of microlithic tools enabled the people to
gather aquatic food—both marine and freshwater—and fishing was the mainstay of their
subsistence economy.' This is the real shift: from chasing large animals across country to
working a rich patch of water and shore.
Where they lived. Near water — which is exactly where the fish and the wild grain were. The
chapter also records that 'new habitats such as caves and rock shelters were frequently
occupied', so the settlements were still not permanent villages: they were places returned to
again and again.

The art belongs here too. 'Art activity also flourished during this time.' Bhimbetka
in Madhya Pradesh — a World Heritage Site — 'contains hundreds of painted rock
shelters with Mesolithic and earlier human occupation' (Fig. 4.12). Read that
alongside the fishing and the population growth: a settled, well-fed community with
time to paint is a different thing from a band always on the move.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Why the Mesolithic gets its own name. Fig. 4.7 calls it 'a transitional phase
between hunting–gathering and agriculture'. People are not yet farming, but they
are staying longer in one place, eating wild grains, and living at higher density —
every precondition of the Neolithic is already assembling.

Q5 The Neolithic period marked a major shift to agriculture and domestication of
animals, leading to permanent villages, pottery making, and weaving.

The definition first. 'The hallmark of this revolution was the domestication of select animals
and plants, bringing them under human control, and the development of new breeds through
cultivation and husbandry.' Two verbs matter — control and breed. Domestication is not just
keeping animals; it is changing them over generations.
The evidence, at one site, in detail. Mehrgarh on the Bolan river (in present-day Pakistan) is
the subcontinent's oldest Neolithic site and its earliest agricultural village, dating back to about
7000 BCE (Fig. 4.16). Everything the recap line claims is present there at once:

RECAP CLAIM WHAT MEHRGARH SHOWS

Agriculture Cultivated wheat and barley

Domestication of Raised sheep, goats, and Indian cattle — the zebu humped bull in particular
animals

Permanent villages Handmade sun-dried brick houses and granaries. A granary is the proof of the whole
argument: you only build one if you have a surplus to keep and intend to stay

Burial and belief Buried their dead in graves — permanent living means permanent burial grounds

Craft and exchange Ornaments of lapis lazuli, carnelian and shells — semi-precious stones and marine shell, so
goods were already moving over distances

The next step The first copper objects, making them Chalcolithic by about 4000 BCE — the foundation
of the Bronze Age Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation

Pottery. Neolithic farmers 'developed a variety of earthenware pottery in various shapes and
sizes'. Pottery is a farming technology: grain has to be stored dry against damp and pests, and
cooked grain needs a vessel that will sit on a fire. Fig. 4.14 shows pottery in every one of its six
regions.
Weaving. The recap line names it, though the running text of this chapter does not describe it
separately — the closest it comes is the domestication of sheep at Mehrgarh (wool) and, much
later, silk in China from 4000–3000 BCE. Say so if you are asked for evidence: this is a recap claim
you cannot support from this chapter's own text.

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co m
m.
The Indian picture as a whole. There is regional variation — the chapter says so

m l a se
plainly. Mehrgarh is at 7000 BCE in the north-west; Sanganakallu in the south, on
o g most of the
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Indian
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Farming did not sweep across India in one wave; it started in different places at
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REGION COPPER ARRIVES SOURCE IN THE
CHAPTER

Indian about 4000 BCE (running text); Fig. 4.18 marks Chalcolithic at Pages 73–75 and Fig.
subcontinent 4500 BCE 4.18

Mesopotamia copper tools 'arrived here around 4500 BCE'; Fig. 4.22 marks Page 77 and Fig. 4.22
Chalcolithic at 5500 BCE

Egypt Fig. 4.28 marks Chalcolithic at 4000 BCE Fig. 4.28

China 'Around 2000 BCE, the introduction of copper/bronze Page 89 and Fig. 4.35
metallurgy'

Read the running text and the timelines together, and note where they differ.
For India the text says Chalcolithic by about 4000 BCE and the Bronze Age civilisation
'around 3500 BCE', while Fig. 4.18 prints Chalcolithic at 4500 BCE and Bronze Age at
3300 BCE. Both are in the same chapter. This is not carelessness on your part if you
notice it — early dates are ranges, not points, and different authorities round them
differently. When you are asked for a date, say which figure or which page you are
taking it from.

Q7 These developments led to the emergence of Bronze Age civilisations, characterised
by urban centres, trade, writing, administration, and social organisation.

Bronze is an alloy, and that is the technical heart of the age. Fig. 4.7 defines the Bronze Age
as 'development of bronze metallurgy (mixing copper and tin to make bronze); expansion of
trade, towns, and early civilisations'. Making bronze needs two metals that rarely occur together
— so from the start, bronze metallurgy requires long-distance trade. The technology and the
trade network grow together.
The five characteristics, each with its evidence from this chapter:

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

CHARACTERISTIC EVIDENCE IN THE CHAPTER

Urban centres 'Technological advancements and economic integration during the Early Harappan
period… led to the emergence of the urban centres of the Harappan civilisation';
Mesopotamian city-states from 3500 BCE; Egyptian city-states around 3000 BCE;
Chinese urban centres around 1600 BCE

Trade Sargon's tablets name Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha; the goods are listed —
semiprecious stone beads, ivory, timber, gold dust, probably copper; Harappan standard
weights (binary multiples for small units, tens for large) make it workable; the dockyard
at Lothal handles it

Writing Sumerian cuneiform from about 3200 BCE, in use everywhere by 3000 BCE; Egyptian
hieroglyphs on papyrus; the Harappan script on seals and pottery, still undeciphered;
Chinese oracle bones

Administration Egyptian ditch- and dam-digging 'required collective effort' and led to 'the growth of
local government, accompanied by the rise of the administrative class'; in Sumer 'all
economic activities… were tied to the temple authority'; Chinese public officials chosen
'after being examined in archery, horsemanship, calculations, writing, and music'

Social organisation Egypt's four-tier pyramid (Fig. 4.32); Sumerian temple entry 'restricted to high priests
and priestesses, who were probably a part of the ruling class'; China 'highly stratified'
by 1500 BCE with rulers, nobles and aristocrats above farmers and labourers

Why these five appear together and not one at a time. They are one system. A
surplus lets a town grow; a town needs goods it cannot produce, so it trades; trade
across distances needs records and standards; records need writing and weights;
and someone must keep the records, guard the stores and settle the disputes —
which is administration, and administration creates rank. The chapter's own
summing-up follows this order exactly: 'harnessing agricultural productivity and the
incorporation of new resources helped economic growth, leading to the emergence
of urban cities… The development of writing systems enabled early societies to
record economic transactions and social activities, and over time, it also led to the
composition of literary and creative texts.' Writing begins as accountancy and ends
as literature.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Q8 Major early world civilisations such as Sindhu–Sarasvatī, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and
China developed independently in fertile river valleys and made significant
contributions in agriculture, writing, architecture, administration, and culture.

Four civilisations, four river systems, and — the chapter insists — four independent
inventions.

CIVILISATION RIVER(S) WRITING SIGNATURE CONTRIBUTION THE
CHAPTER NAMES

Sindhu–Sarasvatī Sindhu Harappan script / Planned settlements; standard weights and
(Indus) and Sindhu lipi — measures; water management —
Sarasvatī undeciphered gabarbands, the Dholavira tanks, the Lothal
dockyard; stone beads and inscribed seals;
double-crop ploughing at Kalibangan

Mesopotamian Euphrates Cuneiform, from First dams and canals for irrigation; first mud
and Tigris about 3200 BCE and burnt bricks; the ziggurat; the wheeled
cart and the sailboat; a number system based
on 60, giving the 60-minute hour, the 60-
second minute and the 360-degree circle; the
Code of Hammurabi; the Epic of Gilgamesh

Egyptian Nile Hieroglyphs on Basin irrigation by ditch and reservoir; a 365-
papyrus, day calendar (12 × 30 + 5) built from the
deciphered 1822 interval between floods; mastabas and
pyramids, including the step pyramid at
Saqqara; mummification; papyrus itself;
libraries from 2000 BCE; the Papyrus Ebers
with over 700 remedies

Chinese Huang He Oracle-bone Bronze ritual vessels, weapons and tools;
(Yellow symbols; a jade and marble carving; silk and the Silk
River) and logographic Route; the Great Wall; a money economy by
Yangtze script the 5th century BCE; the first paper
currency; the first civil service by public
examination

What 'independently' means, and how the chapter shows it. Not that they never met —
Mesopotamia and the Harappans traded, and the chapter says the proximity of the two
'facilitated strong contacts'. It means they invented their institutions separately. Three pieces
of evidence support that:

1. Different dates. The Bronze Age begins at 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia (Fig. 4.22), 3300 BCE in
India (Fig. 4.18), 3100 BCE in Egypt (Fig. 4.28) and 2000 BCE in China (Fig. 4.35). If one had
copied another, the dates would cluster.

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Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4 Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

2. Different solutions to the same problems. Four unrelated scripts — wedges in clay,
pictures on stone seals, hieroglyphs on papyrus, symbols on bone. Four water systems —
Sumerian canals, Egyptian ditches and reservoirs, Harappan gabarbands and rock-cut tanks,
and Chinese river-valley farming.
3. No contact where there was distance. Egypt and China 'have little tangible evidence of
their direct contact with the Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation'. Yet all four ended up with cities,
writing, administration and hierarchy anyway.

Why the same answers turned up four times. Because the same problem was
posed four times. Wherever a fertile river plain allows a big surplus, someone has to
store it, protect it, count it and share it out — and cities, records, officials and ranks
are what solving that problem looks like. The chapter says it in one line: 'they
developed social and administrative systems independently to ensure and enhance
economic growth. Thus, many of our cultural ethos have their roots in the Bronze
Age civilisations.'

Questions and activities — Pages 93–94
End-of-chapter exercise

Q1 Do you think life became easier or more challenging after humans started farming?
Give two reasons for your answer.

It became both — easier in security and harder in labour and risk — and the strongest
answer says which way it went on each measure rather than choosing a side. But since the
question asks for a position, here it is: farming made life more secure but more demanding,
and it is the security that made everything afterwards possible.
Two reasons why it became easier:

1. Food became predictable, and could be stored. A hunter–gatherer eats what the season
gives. A farmer sows, harvests and keeps. The chapter's proof is architectural: Mehrgarh,
about 7000 BCE, had sun-dried brick granaries as well as houses. Nobody builds a granary
unless there is a surplus and an intention to stay. The chapter names this directly — 'the
ability to produce surplus food and material goods laid the foundation for the emergence of
civilisation'.
2. People stopped having to move, and could accumulate. Once you stay in one place you
can own things too heavy to carry — 'a variety of earthenware pottery in various shapes and
sizes', ornaments of lapis lazuli, carnelian and shell, and eventually copper objects. Settled
life also lets some people stop producing food altogether and become potters, bead-makers
and metalworkers instead.

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Two reasons why it became more challenging:

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1. The work is harder and never stops. A farming year is clearing, ploughing,esowing,
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agcollective effort'; the Early Harappans at Kalibangan ploughed cross-furrowed fields for two
crops a year.

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2. You become dependent on a few crops in one place — and you cannot walk away. A

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hunting band that finds a valley empty moves to the next. A village whose harvest fails has

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nowhere to go, because its whole investment — houses, granaries, fields, wells — is in that
spot. The chapter shows this vulnerability at the level of an empire: Babylonia weakened

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partly through 'increasing environmental degradation, pressure on agricultural lands'. If that

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could bring down an empire, it could certainly ruin a village.

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.c a g lives easier so
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se as it made societies larger and more capable. It supported far more people
The historian's way of putting it. Farming did not make individual

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much
a on the same land, and it created everything the rest of this chapter describes —

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villages, crafts, trade, cities, writing. Whether the individual farmer worked harder
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than the individual hunter is genuinely debated; that the farming society could do
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vastly more is not.
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One striking piece of evidence to quote. The chapter dates the 'first-ever
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se
population explosion in human history' to the Mesolithic, around 12000 years ago

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.c reminder that the chapter does not present farmingagas a simple rescue from
— before farming, when a warming climate made wild food abundant. That is a
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ase
useful

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hunger. It was a change of strategy, with gains and costs on both sides.

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Q2 The environment offers human societies both opportunities as well as challenges.
Explain with reference to early farming communities and river-valley civilisations.

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The environment sets the terms; societies answer them. Take theem
m a s two cases the question

. co and in each, put opportunity beside challenge. a gl
em
names,

l a s 1. Early farming communities.
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