It is often believed that the ecological state of cities has deteriorated markedly in recent decades as a result of the rapid development of industrial production. But this is a delusion. Environmental problems of cities arose along with their birth. The cities of the ancient world were characterized by high population density. For example, in Alexandria, the population density in the I-II centuries. reached 760 people, in Rome - 1500 people per 1 hectare (for comparison, let's say that in the center of modern New York there are no more than 1 thousand people per 1 hectare). The width of the streets in Rome did not exceed 1.5-4, in Babylon - 1.5-3 m. The sanitary improvement of cities was at an extremely low level. All this led to frequent outbreaks of epidemics, pandemics, in which diseases covered the entire country, and even several neighboring countries. The first recorded plague pandemic (it entered the literature under the name "Justinian Plague") occurred in the VI century. in the Eastern Roman Empire and covered many countries of the world. For 50 years, the plague claimed about 100 million human lives.
Now it is difficult even to imagine how the ancient cities with their population of many thousands could do without public transport, without street lighting, without sewerage and other elements of urban improvement. And, probably, it was not by chance that it was at that time that many philosophers began to have doubts about the expediency of the existence of large cities. Aristotle, Plato, Hippodamus of Miletus, and later Vitruvius repeatedly spoke with treatises that dealt with the issues of the optimal size of settlements and their arrangement, the problems of planning, building art, architecture, and even interconnection with the natural environment.
With the development of industry, the rapidly growing capitalist cities quickly outnumbered their predecessors in population. In 1850, London crossed the milestone, then Paris. By the beginning of the XX century. there were already 12 cities in the world - "millionaires" (including two in Russia). Height major cities proceeded at an ever faster pace. And again, as the most formidable manifestation of the disharmony of man and nature, outbreaks of epidemics of dysentery, cholera, and typhoid fever began one after another. The rivers in the cities were horribly polluted. The Thames in London became known as the "black river". Fetid streams and reservoirs in other major cities became the source of gastrointestinal epidemics. So, in 1837 in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh, a tenth of the population fell ill with typhoid fever and about a third of the patients died. From 1817 to 1926 there were six cholera pandemics in Europe. In Russia, in 1848 alone, about 700 thousand people died from cholera. However, over time, thanks to the achievements of science and technology, the success of biology and medicine, the development of water supply and sewage facilities, the epidemiological danger began to weaken significantly. We can say that at that stage the ecological crisis of large cities was overcome. Of course, each time such overcoming was worth colossal efforts and sacrifices, but the collective mind, perseverance and ingenuity of people have always turned out to be stronger than the crisis situations they themselves created.
Scientific and technological achievements based on outstanding natural scientific discoveries of the 20th century. contributed to the rapid development of productive forces. These are not only huge advances in nuclear physics, molecular biology, chemistry, space exploration, but also the rapid, unceasing growth in the number of large cities and the urban population. The volume of industrial production has increased hundreds and thousands of times, the energy supply of mankind has increased by more than 1000 times, the speed of movement - by 400 times, the speed of information transfer - by millions of times, etc. Such active human activity, of course, does not go unnoticed for nature, since resources are drawn directly from the biosphere.
And that's just one side of the environmental issues. big city. The other is that in addition to consumption natural resources and energy drawn from vast spaces, a modern city with a million inhabitants produces a huge amount of waste. Such a city annually emits at least 10-11 million tons of water vapor, 1.5-2 million tons of dust, 1.5 million tons of carbon monoxide, 0.25 million tons of sulfur dioxide, 0.3 million tons of nitrogen oxides and a large the amount of other contaminants that are not indifferent to human health and the environment. In terms of the impact on the atmosphere, a modern city can be compared to a volcano.
What are the features of the current environmental problems of large cities? First of all, the numerous sources of environmental impact and their scale. Industry and transport - and these are hundreds of large enterprises, hundreds of thousands or even millions Vehicle- the main culprits of pollution of the urban environment. The nature of waste has also changed in our time. Previously, almost all waste was of natural origin (bones, wool, natural fabrics, wood, paper, manure, etc.), and they were easily included in the cycle of nature. Now a significant part of the waste is synthetic substances. Their transformation in natural conditions is extremely slow.
One of the environmental problems is associated with the intensive growth of non-traditional "pollution" of a wave nature. The electromagnetic fields of high-voltage power lines, radio broadcasting and television stations are increasing, as well as a large number electric motors. are rising general level acoustic noise (due to high transport speeds, due to the operation of various mechanisms and machines). Ultraviolet radiation, on the contrary, decreases (due to air pollution). Energy costs per unit area are growing, and, consequently, heat transfer and thermal pollution are increasing. Under the influence of the huge masses of high-rise buildings, the properties of the geological rocks on which the city stands are changing.
The consequences of such phenomena for people and environment not yet studied enough. But they are no less dangerous than pollution of water and air basins and soil and vegetation cover. For residents of large cities, all this in the complex turns into a big surge nervous system. Citizens quickly get tired, are prone to various diseases and neuroses, and suffer from increased irritability. Chronic ill health of a large proportion of urban residents in some Western countries is considered a specific disease. It was called "urbanite".
Introduction 3
§ 1. The essence of environmental problems in the ancient world 6
§ 2. Environmental problems in ancient Egypt 14
§ 3. The relationship between man and nature in Ancient Rome. Major environmental issues 21
Conclusion 33
References 35
Introduction
The problem of the relationship between man and nature for centuries has caused conflicts of opposing points of view, one of which is associated with the idea of the dominance of the natural environment over man, the other with the idea of the superiority of man over nature. For us here it is of interest to find out whether the ancients already thought about their relationship to nature and whether they experienced it in a conflicting way (and to what extent). Since ancient times, the problem of the relationship between man and the natural environment has been approached in a completely different way compared to our fundamental today's formulation of the question: attention was paid only to the impact natural conditions per person, and also established a direct relationship between the natural environment, climate, resources - on the one hand, and the characteristics appearance and behavior different peoples- with another. On the contrary, they did not pay attention at all to the inevitable interaction and interdependence of the population and its own ecosystem, and the direct anthropogenic impact of the man of the ancient world on nature was not the subject of research.
In accordance with the above, the problem of the relationship between man and nature in ancient world seems to us quite interesting. Interest in the problem of research is largely due to the fact that in modern domestic historical science An insignificant amount of research is devoted to environmental problems that arose in the ancient world.
So, recently this issue has been actively developed by such domestic researchers as D.B. Prusakov, Yu.Ya. Perepelkin, V.V. Klimenko, E.N. Chernykh and some others. In the works of these historians, some aspects of the problem of interest to us are investigated. In the works of E.N. Chernykh poses the problem of the connection between anthropogenic environmental disasters and ancient mining and smelting production. The researcher points to the undoubted global significance of such catastrophes, reveals the dynamics and degree of human influence on the nature of the ancient world. In the works of V.V. Klimenko and D.B. Prusakov examines the dynamics of climatic conditions in ancient Egypt, reveals the relationship between social and climatic shocks.
The problem of interest to us has received much greater development in foreign historical science. Abroad, environmental problems in the ancient world were covered in the works of B. Bell, R. Sallares, P. Fideli, A. Gardiner, V. Zeit, D. O'Connor, K. Batzer, R. Faybridge, S. Nicholson, J. .White, J.Flenley and many others.
Sources on the research problem are numerous and varied. Among them, literary monuments of that time should be noted. However, here we are limited by the irreparable losses of many ancient texts. Nevertheless, a significant part of the written sources that have come down to us is of interest for the study of such a promising problem as the ideas of an ancient person about nature and his attitude towards it.
A huge number of archaeological finds is an invaluable material for historical analysis.
In connection with the above, the urgent task of historians is to combine all types of historical sources (literary, documentary, archaeological, natural science) to write a comprehensive history of the ecology of the ancient world.
Thus, we defined the topic of our research as follows: "Environmental problems in the ancient world."
The purpose of this work is to characterize the essence of the relationship between man and nature in the Ancient World and environmental problems arising from the interaction of man and nature.
The object of our study is the natural and climatic conditions of the Ancient World.
The subject of the study is the environmental problems of this period.
To achieve this goal, we set and solved the following tasks:
To characterize the essence of environmental problems that arose in the Ancient World;
Describe the main environmental problems that arose in ancient Egypt;
To reveal the nature of the relationship between man and nature in ancient Rome.
Describe the most important environmental problems of Ancient Rome.
To solve the tasks we used the following methods historical research: study and analysis of all available historical literature on this issue, analysis of archaeological data, study of historical sources, etc.
Research structure. this work consists of introduction, three chapters, conclusion, bibliography.
§ 1. The essence of environmental problems in the ancient world.
The concept of "ecology" is relatively recent. It was introduced into circulation by E. Haeckel, a student of C. Darwin, in 1866. However, if we take into account the Greek etymology of the term, which comes from oikos - "household", then we can conclude that in the ancient era there were concepts related to this term . Many stories that come into view modern ecology, served as the subject of reflection for the ancient man. Ancient people, like us, sensitively reacted to the complexity and diversity of natural phenomena (20, p. 19).
Climate change is one of global problems modern ecology. In the system of ancient views on nature, climate played an equally important role; it was often thought of as the dominant way of life of entire peoples and the cause of differences. ethnic behavior. Empedocles formulated the theory of the four primary elements. It formed the basis of the teachings of Anaxagoras and Alcmaeon on opposites, which in turn influenced the emergence of ideas about the four primary fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile). We will find the beginnings of these ideas in Hippocrates. They received their final expression in the writings of Galen (20, p. 39).
Deepening our knowledge of the climate of the past will sooner or later resolve some contentious issues. ancient history. In this regard, it is necessary to say a few words about the hypothesis of "three catastrophic droughts". There is an opinion that around 1200. BC. the Eastern Mediterranean was hit by a severe drought that lasted several years. This assumption serves as an argument with which they try to explain the reasons for the almost simultaneous decline and disappearance at the end of the Late Bronze Age of the old political centers of the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia (Mycenaean Greece, the Hittites, the Egyptian New Kingdom, etc.). Proponents of this hypothesis usually associate the beginning of the Great Greek colonization with the drought. Finally, some researchers believe that in the second half of the 4th c. BC. Attica experienced another severe drought that lasted for several decades.
The slightest climate change led to the fact that the worst agricultural areas became completely unsuitable for agriculture, and the exploitation of the best lands increased significantly.
Changing climatic conditions are not the only ecological problem of the Ancient World. So, from the second half of the III millennium BC. in a number of places in the Mediterranean there was a reduction in forest tracts. At the same time, the composition of forests changed: evergreen vegetation replaced deciduous trees. It is now clear that forest retreat was mainly the result of global climate change, although human activity should not be discounted. This process continued in subsequent millennia, and its further stages require a more detailed explanation (8, p. 4).
Some areas of southern Greece lost their forest cover in the era early bronze when a climate unfavorable for year-round vegetation, arid in the summer seasons, was established here. As for the northern part of Greece, in those areas that are outside the zone of a typical Mediterranean climate, forests remained until the second half of the 1st millennium BC. and even later. In other words, the process of the disappearance of forests here continued in the classical era, as ancient authors mention. So, in one passage of Plato, it is said about the disappearance of forests in Attica. The ancient Greeks constantly needed a lot of wood, which was used to build buildings and smelt metals, such as silver in Attica or copper in Cyprus. In the V-IV centuries. BC. the Athenians were forced to export ship timber from remote regions to build their fleet. It is no coincidence that their northern colony of Amphipolis was of strategic importance to them. The need for forests and the classical era was so great that, according to some modern historians, it was during this era that the predatory destruction of forests led to the current bare landscapes in many places in the Mediterranean, no doubt ancient man responsible for the disappearance of the forest in certain areas of the Mediterranean, for example, in the mountains of Lebanon, which supplied Egypt and other states with cedar for several millennia, or in Crete, once famous for its cypress trees (10, p. 72).
Recently, however, studies have appeared, the authors of which are revising the thesis about the detrimental impact of man on the Mediterranean forests. O. Rackham, the most famous representative of this direction, believes that in a number of places in the Mediterranean, such as Attica, where thick limestone layers do not retain moisture, forests were initially doomed to extinction. According to the researcher, the descriptions of landscapes by ancient Greek authors corresponded to contemporary reality. True, by the "forest" of ancient Greek texts, we must understand shrubs and other small vegetation, since the authors of these texts have never seen a real forest with giant trees like the northern forests. The complexity of the "forest problem" increases if we take into account the fact that many Mediterranean forests are secondary, since they appeared on the site of former wastelands. A typical example is the Aleppo pine. This tree is found everywhere in Greece today, while in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages it was rare in the Balkans. Pine spread here at a later time, mainly because its seeds germinate well in places of wastelands and conflagrations (8, p. 5).
The history of ecological problems of the Ancient World cannot be limited only by the framework of long-term processes. Often, episodic events have long-term environmental consequences. These events include volcanic eruptions. The question of how the volcanic eruption on the island of Fera in the 17th century influenced the world climate is still controversial. BC. Probably, the consequences of this catastrophe were significant and no less in scale than the consequences of the recent eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. The Sicilian volcano Etna is known today as a source of colossal amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, the emissions of which into the atmosphere affect the modern climate.
It is possible that the eruption of this volcano in 44 - 42 years. BC. significantly influenced the climate of the Mediterranean in the Roman era. Various cataclysms of the biosphere can have no less ecological consequences. Here it is appropriate to recall the outbreaks of epidemics of infectious diseases observed in antiquity: the "pestilence" in Athens in 430 BC, the "plague" (rather, it was smallpox) that struck the Roman Empire under the Antonines, or a real plague that struck Constantinople in the 6th century The origins of these contagious epidemics can be traced back to the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, when population density in some places reached a level sufficient for the rapid spread of diseases such as smallpox, typhoid, influenza and measles. A special place in this series was occupied by malaria - the source of high mortality in the Mediterranean population in antiquity and later eras. Some researchers go too far, attributing to malaria the reasons for the disappearance of the Etruscan civilization or the decline of Hellenistic Greece. At the same time, no one can still say with certainty when this disease appeared in the Mediterranean: in the prehistoric period, in the 5th-15th centuries. BC. or in the era of Hellenism (8, p. 8).
Another ecological problem of the Ancient World is the overpopulation of the centers of a particular civilization. Among the consequences of the pressure of the "excessive human mass" on nature, in addition to the reduction of forests, the first cases of environmental pollution in history should be noted. Studies of Greenland glaciers and lacustrine deposits in Sweden showed a sharp increase in their lead content starting around the 6th century BC. BC. The increase in lead content in the atmosphere was a consequence of mining and metallurgy in the Greco-Roman era. The dispute about the nature of the ancient economy continues, despite the harsh verdict of M. Finlay, who argued that the ancient Greeks and Romans had no idea about the economy as such and that their organization economic activity was primitive, not beyond the scope of handicraft production. However, the scale of this production was capable of causing air pollution over Sweden and Greenland. We know from historians that the Athenian fleet was kept at the expense of the Lavrion silver mines - the key to the naval power of the Athenian Empire. However, historians do not mention one unpleasant fact - the Avrion mines, whose by-product was lead, were a powerful source of environmental pollution. The Mediterranean Sea today is one of the dirtiest seas on our planet, it urgently needs to be cleaned. But it would be wrong to believe that it has become so in our century - even in the pre-industrial era, the dirty imprint of human activity was imposed on the Mediterranean.
Since the time of Ancient Egypt, there has been a further increase in human impact on the biosphere. In some cases, this led to the expansion of population ranges. various kinds animals, in others - to their reduction. First of all, the range of domestic animals expanded. During Greek colonization, a highly productive woolly breed of sheep spread throughout the Mediterranean. It is possible that the Greeks were the first to learn how to breed fine-fleeced sheep. Starting from late antiquity, the draft Longhorn breed of cows, which existed in Europe since the Neolithic era, is gradually being replaced by the dairy Shorthorn breed. However, this did not lead to an increase in the consumption of dairy products (with the exception of cheese) in the Mediterranean countries, where the goat continued to be the main dairy animal. In the course of a long selection selection, the Greeks and Romans managed to develop larger breeds of livestock and poultry. In the Roman era, they spread in a number of provinces, for example, in Gaul and the Danube region. Along with the increase in productivity in agriculture during the period of antiquity, the productivity of animal husbandry increased.
In ancient times, porcupines, ferrets, mongooses and guinea fowls came to Southern Europe from North Africa. The domestic cat also entered Europe from Egypt in the 1st millennium BC. Thanks to the Romans, the population of the provinces learned about the rabbit, whose homeland was Spain.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were well acquainted with some large animals, which have now practically disappeared in the Mediterranean basin due to the hostile attitude towards them on the part of ancient man. In ancient times, lions were found in North Africa and Western Asia. Findings of lion skeletons in the Neolithic sites of Ukraine allow us to say that these animals managed to survive in post-glacial Europe as well. The skeleton of a lion, probably performing in a circus, was found in Olbia. Recently, the remains of a lion dating from the middle of the 6th century BC were discovered at Delphi. BC. On the existence in Greece in the IV century. BC. tame lions is reported by Isocrates. Earlier records of lions in Greece include data from the excavations of the Mycenaean palace at Tiryns, where archaeologists found the bones of a lion, probably a not-so-rare animal in the Aegean during the Bronze Age. It is no coincidence that his appearance is captured in such monuments of art as a dagger and steles with scenes of lion hunting from the shaft tomb IV at Mycenae. G. Mylonas suggested that a pair of lions, decorating the column that crowns the Mycenaean Lion Gate, was the emblem of the dynasty of Mycenaean rulers of the 13th century. BC, i.e., perhaps Agamemnon himself. Sensational discovery in Vergina, the tomb of Philip II of Macedon with images of a lion-hunting scene confirms the words of Herodotus and Aristotle that in their time lions were found in northern Greece (12, p. 100).
The king of beasts became the most visible victim of the ancient man's attack on nature. A kind of lion, which was known in antiquity to the inhabitants of Hellas, today is extremely rare in the wild in India. They had much less opportunity to get acquainted with the East African breed of lion, a frequent inhabitant of modern zoos. The Carthaginians and Romans probably knew the North African lion, which has disappeared without a trace today. As for another species of this animal exterminated by man - the South African lion, the ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean hardly suspected its existence.
Today in Greece, bears are found in one or two remote places in the north of the country. In ancient times, they met much more often. Pausanias reports on bears living on Mount Parnassus in Attica, on the slopes of the Taygetus Range in Laconia, as well as in Arcadia and Thrace. Bears have been hunted since ancient times, as a result of which their numbers in the Mediterranean have declined sharply.
The largest land animal also suffered from humans in ancient times. Indian elephants came to Asia Minor in the 4th-3rd centuries. BC. At that time, in North Africa, there was a local, not so large compared to the Asian, breed of elephants, which has now completely disappeared. North African elephants were caught and tried to tame to be used in the war, however, without much success. The peak of demand for these "tanks" of antiquity coincided with the III century. BC, in connection with which it is impossible not to recall the battle of Raphia in 217 BC. between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. Like lions, North African elephants were exterminated by the inhabitants of Carthage and the Romans who subjugated it. At the beginning of our era, no one remembered these animals. Strabo wrote that the shepherds and farmers of Numidia should be grateful to the Romans, who, having exterminated wild animals, secured labor in the fields. This remark well illustrates the attitude of ancient people towards wild animals. If the activity of ancient man contributed to the growth of populations of domestic animals and small pests, then large wild animals inevitably lost from contacts with him.
Another equally famous example is the Egyptian papyrus. The plant was so widely used in the ancient world that it brought it to the brink of extinction in the Nile Valley in the distant past. By the beginning of the spread in Egypt of modern irrigation systems, which have a detrimental effect on papyrus, it already belonged to a number of rare plants. Today, the only place in the Nile Valley of Egypt is known, where several dozen copies of this plant have been preserved. Fortunately, papyrus is still common in Central Africa. Thus, the extent of the intervention of ancient man in natural environment were significant enough to cause changes in her biological universe. There is no need to recall the relevance of this problem for modern ecology.
Destroying the habitat, the ancient peoples doomed themselves to extinction. One of the most compelling examples is Easter Island. Pollen analysis showed that the Polynesian colonists destroyed all the trees on this island, which was once teeming with vegetation. As a result, soil erosion intensified, which led to the degradation of agriculture and the decline of culture, which left mysterious megalithic statues. Lost in the vastness Pacific Ocean the island turned out to be a trap for its inhabitants, doomed to extinction in environmental conditions that have become unsuitable for life. On the continent, the way out of the ecological crisis was migration - whether we are talking about repeated bursts of Greek colonization or about the migrations of the peoples of Eurasia.
§ 2. Ecological problems in ancient Egypt.
An analysis of the history of Ancient Egypt allowed some domestic researchers to put forward a working hypothesis, according to which its historical evolution was characterized by three socio-ecological crises - the largest turning points in the life of society. The most severe was the second crisis. It covered the 1st Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom (XXIII - XVIII centuries BC). Now there is no doubt that its most important natural conditions were a significant decrease in the level of the Nile floods and a severe drought, which apparently affected at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. not only Egypt, but also a number of other countries of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. In other words, climate change played a huge role in the history of ancient Egypt at this stage. However, there is still a fair amount of uncertainty regarding the nature, chronology, and causes of the climatic fluctuations of interest to us.
About the drought and low floods of the Nile as the immediate natural causes of the collapse of the VI dynasty and the Old Kingdom as a whole, B. Bell wrote in detail, based on the paleoclimatic data at her disposal, with the involvement (in translation) of a large corpus of written sources of the 1st Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom . At the same time, the researcher did not at all deny the importance of the socio-political factors of the collapse of the old Egyptian centralized state, insisting only on the fact that in history there may be environmentally conditioned economic crises that no social system can overcome. B. Bell's conclusions formed the basis for the later rather widely accepted idea that the death of the Old Kingdom was directly related to a sharp deterioration in natural conditions in Northeast Africa (8, p. 6).
Socionatural analysis suggests that deterioration environmental situation on the banks of the Nile at the end of the Old Kingdom not only led to a complication of the living conditions of people, which contributed to the weakening of the state under the VI dynasty and its subsequent collapse, but to a certain extent predetermined all further qualitative technological, administrative, economic and socio-political reorganization in ancient egypt on the epochal historical transition to the New Kingdom.
Among the significant social prerequisites for the Second socio-ecological crisis, one should probably single out the demographic growth and the strengthening of novy administrations to the detriment of the capital's nobility, which should have become the cause of the confrontation between the parties. gradual deterioration environmental conditions, undoubtedly aggravated the political situation in Egypt, contributing to the irreversibility of the centrifugal process of the decline of the Old Kingdom. In turn, the collapse of the centralized state and the onset of a period of social unrest and internecine wars caused the destruction or division of a single irrigation system! - the basis of agricultural production in the country. The texts of the 1st Intermediate Period, almost throughout its entire length, inform about grain shortages, which sometimes led to a famine so severe that it even pushed the population of certain regions of Egypt to cannibalism.
It should be noted that the cause of the drought at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. previously considered an increase solar activity in accordance with its 1800-1900-year cycle, however latest research disproved its existence. Nevertheless, thanks to the same studies, it was possible to give a different natural scientific explanation for the increased aridity of the climate of the Nile Valley during the 1st Intermediate Period and at the initial stage of the Middle Kingdom. The fact is that the end of the III millennium BC. was characterized by a strong global cooling, which apparently began no later than the 24th century. BC.
Research results confirm that in the 19th century BC. not only significant, but unprecedented for all historical time increase in the flow of the Nile to a value of 160 million cubic meters. m / year, which is almost twice the level of the XXII century. BC. Such an increase in runoff could only be ensured by an even more significant increase in precipitation (8, p. 9).
Following a brief climatic optimum, the second half of XIX V. BC. came a new wave of cooling, and extremely fast. To imagine the scale of this cooling, we note that it exactly corresponds to the magnitude and speed of modern warming, which, of course, is one of the most significant in world history and causes serious concern of the world community in connection with the observed and potential environmental consequences.
The reason for the cooling in the era of the Middle Kingdom, in our opinion, is the unfavorable coincidence of decreasing solar activity with a low content carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and one of the most powerful explosive volcanic eruptions in the last 5000 years at the beginning of the 17th century. BC. As a result of this colossal volcanic explosion, the researchers estimate that the global average temperature should have dropped by more than 0.5 ° C within two to three years after the eruption.
This was to lead to one or more catastrophic droughts and crop failures, such as had not been seen in Egypt for at least the preceding 400 years. This can be confirmed by the results of studying the composition of the bottom sediments of Lake Meridova in the Fayum depression, where in layers dating from about 1920 - 1560. BC, the sand content increases sharply, which indicates the activation of sand dunes and eolian transport accompanying dry periods. Thus, the rapid cooling, which reached its minimum already at the beginning of the 17th century. BC, of course, should have seriously reduced the amount of river flow and contributed significant difficulties commissioning of new irrigation facilities created in the era of excessive moisture. It can hardly be considered accidental that this cooling corresponded to the appearance of evidence of the degradation of the Egyptian irrigation system and the return of famine after the decline of the XII dynasty, the final collapse of the Middle Kingdom and the conquest of Lower Egypt by the Asian tribes of the Hyksos.
Egyptian sources of the 1st Intermediate Period (XXII-XXI centuries BC) report the extreme shallowness of the Nile: in some places the river, the average width of which in valley Egypt before the construction of the high-altitude Aswan dam was approx. 1.22 km, allegedly waded. This kind of ancient evidence is supported by the information about the sharp lowering of the mirror of Lake Meridova in the Fayum oasis, which was fed by the Nile water, which took place at the same time, amounting to several tens of meters as a result. It seems that the fall in the level of the Nile during the interregnum reached a catastrophic degree, which was reflected in the documents of that era.
The decrease in the height of the Nile floods was one of the most dangerous environmental disasters in ancient Egypt, because. entailed a reduction in the area of the most fertile flood lands, which already in the second half of the Old Kingdom, before the disunity and decline of the irrigation network, should have resulted in a drop in grain yields. In addition, the shallowing of the Nile, most likely, was accompanied by a decrease in the level of groundwater in the alluvial valley of the river, fraught with disaster for those gardening households of the common people who used water from wells. The situation was aggravated by the fact that approximately in the XXIV century. BC. Sands began to attack the Nile floodplain from the west, due to the formation of deserts and increased eolian activity. The most dangerous was the intrusion of sand dunes into Middle Egypt, where it engulfed a significant part of the floodplain and possibly led to a deterioration in the quality of alluvial soils.
An analysis of the content of the sources of the second half of the Old Kingdom, taking into account environmental data, suggests that the economic crisis deepened in Egypt during this period. For example, the massive impoverishment of the country's population, the development of debt slavery, and the widespread use of corporal punishment, including by high-ranking officials who managed production on the estates of nobles, were noted by Egyptologists. On the whole, it can be concluded that under the 6th dynasty, the prerequisites for the Second socio-ecological crisis of the ancient Egyptian civilization had already taken shape.
The second socio-ecological crisis was marked by a radical administrative and technological reorganization of the agricultural economy in ancient Egypt. The non-specialized "working detachments" that prevailed in the fields in the ancient Egyptian era were replaced by professional farmers by the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, who were obliged to fulfill the individual labor norm, mastering standard allotments. The prototype of these plots can already be seen in the sources of the VI dynasty, and there is reason to believe that such plots did not appear everywhere, but in the floodplain of the Nile as the border of floods retreated in the second half of the III millennium BC. Thus, the reduction of floods, apparently, was one of the immediate prerequisites for reforming the old Egyptian system of land use and taxation, the reduction in the area of \u200b\u200bthe most productive, naturally irrigated lands, must have put society in the person of the dignitaries before the need to improve the quality of their cultivation and more stringent fiscal accounting, which led to the state standard rationing, primarily of grain production, which was also characteristic of the New Kingdom. The "individualization" of the labor of farmers, obviously, was closely connected with the emergence of the tradition of holding regular reviews of the labor force in order to distribute it according to social and professional categories and the liquidation of large noble households, which ended in the Middle Egyptian era (12, p. 101).
As a direct consequence of the fall of the Nile floods, we consider the appearance in the 1st Intermediate Period of large channels, which were intended for watering the so-called "high fields" that lay outside the floodplain. Apparently, with the help of such artificial channels, the regional rulers sought to compensate for the loss of naturally irrigated lands - a practice that then established itself in Egypt for millennia. Just as in the era of the First socio-ecological crisis, a single irrigation network was created on the basis of local basin systems, which in fact marked a revolution in the development of irrigation facilities in the Nile Valley, in the conditions of the Second Crisis, another qualitative revolution occurred in irrigation construction.
Canals for supplying water to the "high fields" have become a reliable means of overcoming the food and social crisis by individual regions and the growth of their economic and military power, and it is natural to assume that the nomes, located upstream of the river, had advantages in taking water from the shallow Nile, in while the economy of the lower regions, on the contrary, suffered additional damage as a result of the irrigation activities of the southerners. It is possible that all this served as an extra reason for civil strife and to some extent predetermined the victory of Thebes in the wars against Heracleopolis in the 1st Intermediate Period and the hegemony in the era of the Middle Kingdom of rulers who came from Upper Egypt.
After the formation of the Middle Egyptian state, irrigation innovations reached a grand scale. During the XII dynasty, a large hydroelectric complex was built in the Fayum oasis, which made it possible to artificially regulate the water balance of the vast agricultural region created here: Nile water accumulated in Lake Merida, which entered it from the Bahr-Yusuf branch and then, if necessary, was supplied to the cultivated areas through a special canal system. fields, This outstanding hydrotechnical achievement is quite consistent with the realities of the Second socio-ecological crisis, probably being directly due to them: the drought and low floods of the Nile, apparently, pushed the population of Egypt to realize the need for radical action that would dramatically reduce its dependence on the state, and primarily from catastrophic changes in the external environment. In this case, being a product of the socio-ecological crisis, the new organization of the irrigation economy, which significantly increased the efficiency of agriculture as a whole, at the same time became an important condition for the ancient Egyptian civilization to overcome it. The construction of the Fayum complex interrupted the series of economic crises that shook Egypt since the end of the Old Kingdom and created the basis for the relative socio-political stabilization of the Middle Egyptian state (8, p. 14).
The acquisition by the Egyptians of the skills of creating diversion canals throughout the country, which made it possible to artificially expand the area irrigated by the Nile, as needed, and the construction of the Fayum hydroelectric complex, we regard as an epochal revolution in the development of agricultural technologies in the Nile valley. The basin irrigation system, inherited by the Old Kingdom from the early dynastic era, was elementarily adapted to the previous regime of the river. A less arid climate and high floods made the enclosing landscape relatively comfortable for people in the pre-crisis era, which saved them from the need to significantly modify it. With the onset of the Second Social and Ecological Crisis, the population of Egypt, in order to preserve itself, was forced to start actively transforming its living space. At the same time, it seems quite plausible to assume that the need to adapt to qualitatively new conditions of existence, up to meaningful intervention in the natural - "God-given" appearance of the surrounding world, should have contributed to a revolution in the worldview and, as a result, in the ideology of the ancient Egyptians.
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People often tend to idealize the "bright past", and vice versa, to experience apocalyptic moods in relation to the "foggy future". Ecological disasters on a regional scale took place even before the birth of Christ. Since ancient times, man has done nothing but change, transform the nature around him, and from ancient times the fruits of his activity have returned to him. Usually, anthropogenic changes in nature were superimposed on the actual natural rhythms, intensifying unfavorable tendencies and preventing the development of favorable ones. Because of this, it is often difficult to distinguish where the negative influences of civilization are, and where natural phenomena. Even today, disputes do not stop, for example, about whether ozone holes And global warming a consequence of natural processes or not, but the negativity of human activity is not questioned, the dispute can only be about the degree of influence.
Perhaps man has made a great contribution to the emergence of the largest Sahara desert on the planet. Frescoes and rock paintings found there and dating back to 6-4 millennium BC show us a rich animal world Africa. The frescoes depict buffaloes, antelopes, hippos. As studies show, the desertification of the savannah on the territory of the modern Sahara began about 500,000 years ago, but the process took on a landslide character from 3 tons BC. e. The nature of the life of the nomadic tribes of the South of the Sahara, a way of life that has not changed too much since then. As well as data on the economy of the ancient inhabitants of the North of the continent, suggest that slash-and-burn agriculture, cutting down trees, contributed to the drainage of rivers in the territory of the future Sahara. And immoderate grazing led to the hoofing of fertile soils, the result of which was a sharp increase in soil erosion and desertification of lands.
The same processes destroyed several large oases in the Sahara and a strip of fertile land north of the desert after the arrival of the Arab nomads there. The advance of the Sahara to the south today is also associated with economic activity indigenous peoples. "The goats ate Greece" - this saying has been known since ancient times. Goat farming destroyed the woody vegetation in Greece, the hooves of goats trampled the soil. The process of soil erosion in the Mediterranean in ancient times was 10 times higher in cultivated areas. Near the ancient cities there were huge dumps. In particular, near Rome, one of the dump hills was 35 meters high and 850 meters in diameter. Rodents and beggars who fed there spread disease. Waste discharges onto the streets of cities, discharges of city wastewater into reservoirs, from where the same residents then took water. About 1 million people lived in the same Rome, you can imagine how much garbage they produced.
Most of the world's population lives in cities, due to which urban areas are overloaded. At the moment, it is worth noting the following trends for urban residents:
- worsening living conditions;
- an increase in diseases;
- falling productivity of human activity;
- decrease in life expectancy;
- climate change.
If you add together all the problems of modern cities, then their list will be endless. Let's designate the most critical cities.
Terrain change
As a result of urbanization, there is a significant pressure on the lithosphere. This leads to a change in the relief, the formation of karst voids, and the disturbance of river basins. In addition, there is desertification of territories that become unsuitable for the life of plants, animals and people.
Degradation of the natural landscape
There is an intensive destruction of flora and fauna, their diversity decreases, and a kind of "urban" nature arises. The number of natural and recreational areas, green spaces is decreasing. Negative influence comes from cars that crowd urban and suburban highways.
Water supply problems
Rivers and lakes are polluted by industrial and domestic wastewater. All this leads to a reduction in water areas, the extinction of river plants and animals. All the water resources of the planet are polluted: groundwater, inland hydrosystems, the World Ocean as a whole. One of the consequences is the lack drinking water, including this leads to the death of thousands of people on the planet.
This is one of the first environmental problems that were discovered by mankind. The atmosphere is polluted by the exhaust gases of cars, emissions from industrial enterprises. All this leads to dusty atmosphere, . Further polluted air causes disease in humans and animals. As forests are being cut down intensively, the number of plants that process carbon dioxide is decreasing on the planet.
The problem of household waste
Garbage is another source of soil, water and air pollution. Various materials are recycled for a long time. The decay of individual elements takes 200-500 years. In the meantime, the process of processing is underway, harmful substances are released that cause diseases.
There are other environmental problems of cities. No less relevant are the problems of functioning of urban networks. These problems should be addressed by highest level, however, small steps can be performed by people themselves. For example, throwing garbage in the bin, saving water, using reusable dishes, planting plants.
Goals, objectives, epigraph…………….………………………. ……………....2
Relevance……………………………………………… .…………..…2
Introduction…………………………………………………….……………..3
Nature and man in ancient Rome……………………….…………….4
Nature and man in ancient Greece …………………….…………….5
Nature and Man in Ancient China…………….………………………6
Nature and Man in Ancient Egypt ……………….…………….……7
Conclusion…………………………………………….…… …………….8
List of used literature……………………………….…….10
Application……………………………………………………………..….11
Epigraph: "...More than children about their mother,
citizens should take care of
native land, because she is a goddess -
purveyor of mortal creatures..."
Project goals: 1. To expand knowledge about the ecology of the Ancient World;
2. Draw conclusions about how the ecology has changed from ancient times to our time
Tasks: 1. to study the scientific literature on this issue;
2.protect the project.
Relevance: Many students have no idea about the ecology of the Ancient World, as well as how ancient people found solutions to certain environmental problems.
Introduction
Man is closely connected with the environment by origin, material and spiritual needs. The scale and forms of these connections have steadily grown from the local use of individual natural resources to the almost complete involvement of the planet's resource potential in the life support of a modern industrialized society.
With the advent of human civilization, a new factor has appeared that affects the state of the biosphere. It has achieved tremendous power in the current century, especially in recent decades. In terms of the scale of their impact on nature, 6 billion of our contemporaries are equal to about 60 billion people of the Stone Age, and the amount of energy released by man may soon become comparable to the energy received by the Earth from the Sun. Man, developing production, remakes nature, adapts it to his needs, and the higher the level of development of production, the more perfect the technique and technology, the greater the degree of use of the forces of nature and environmental pollution.
Even in ancient Rome and Athens, the Romans noted the pollution of the waters of the Tiber, and the Athenians - the pollution of the waters of the Athenian port of Piraeus, which received ships from all over the then ecumene, i.e. areas of the world inhabited by humans.
Roman settlers in the provinces of Africa complained about the impoverishment of land due to soil erosion. For many centuries, artificial, i.e. anthropogenic sources of environmental pollution did not have a noticeable impact on ecological processes. The most developed in those days were the production of metals, glass, soap, pottery, paints, bread, wine, etc. Such compounds as oxides of carbon, sulfur and nitrogen, metal vapors, especially mercury, were released into the atmosphere; waste from dyeing and food industries went into water bodies.
Nature and Man in Ancient Rome
It all started with a small settlement in Latium, and this settlement of Roma, Rome - extended its power not only to the lands of its neighbors, to the territory of Italy, but also to the adjacent vast countries. Already then, in antiquity, contemporaries were looking for explanations for these impressive achievements: historians and poets saw their reasons mainly in the strength of Roman weapons, in the heroism of the Romans, but they also paid attention and took into account the important role of geographical conditions that this region, especially the lowlands of Northern Italy , owed its plentiful harvests and riches.
The climate and temperature of the country are distinguished by great diversity, which causes the greatest changes ... of the animal and plant world, and in general everything that is useful for sustaining life ... Another advantage fell to Italy: since the Apennine mountains stretch along their entire length and leave on both sides of the plain and fertile hills.
There is not a single part of the country that would not enjoy the wealth of mountainous and flat areas. To this must be added many large rivers and lakes, and moreover, in many places there are also springs of hot and cold water, created by nature itself for health, and especially the abundance of all kinds of mines.
Without human effort, all the benefits of the geographical position of Italy would have remained unrealized and Rome could not have achieved that power and glory. It was believed that the Greeks, when founding cities, especially successfully achieved their goal, striving for beauty, impregnability, the presence of fertile soil and harbors, then the Romans just took care of what the Greeks did not pay attention to: the construction of roads, water pipes, sewers, through which urban sewage can be lowered into the Tiber. They built roads throughout the country, tearing down the hills, and arranging mounds in the dells, so that their wagons could receive the loads of merchant ships.
Aqueducts supply such a huge amount of water that real rivers flow through the city and through the sewers. It was the Romans, according to geographers, who managed, owning Italy, to turn it into a stronghold of their dominion over the whole world. Mastering nature and adapting its elements to their own needs, ancient man tirelessly engaged in land reclamation.
In some places, for centuries, he struggled with an excess of groundwater, in others, feeling a lack of moisture, he had to "correct" the environment with his own mind and hands - to supply dry areas with water.
Water for quenching thirst, for housekeeping, for treatment - was not always an easily accessible gift of nature or the gods, a source of free benefit.
Initially, these were long-term water collectors or wells. The choice of one or another device for supplying people with water depended on local geographical conditions.
Large floodplains, areas flooded by spills, coexist with areas where only rainwater is used for irrigation. Therefore, sustainable water supply was a very difficult problem. However, one of the most ancient forms of accumulation and collection of water is the construction of grottoes, the equipment of springs protected from pollution. The underground springs arranged in this way resembled wells.
Identifying the source of water and equipping access to it meant solving only half the problem. No less important was the problem of transportation, delivery of water to consumers. Sometimes they immediately brought a large supply of water in voluminous jugs.
They also created fenced pools with recesses, it was easy to draw water from there.
Nature and Man in Ancient Greece
The devastation that man produces in nature attracted the attention of the Greek rulers already at the beginning of the 6th century. BC. The legislator Solon proposed to forbid the cultivation of steep slopes - in order to avoid soil erosion; Peisistratus encouraged those peasants who planted olive trees, resisting the deforestation of the area and the depletion of pastures.
Two hundred years later, Plato wrote about the destruction inflicted on the Attic land: “And now, as happens with small islands, in comparison with the previous state, only the skeleton of a body exhausted by an ailment remained, when all the soft and fat earth was washed away - and only one skeleton is still in front of us. ... Among our mountains there are those that now only breed bees ...
There were also many tall trees from among those that were grown by the hand of man ... and immense pastures were prepared for the cattle, for the waters poured out every year from Zeus did not die, as now, flowing from the bare land into the sea, but were absorbed in abundance into the soil, seeped from above into the voids of the earth and were stored in clay beds, and therefore everywhere there was no shortage of sources of streams and rivers. The sacred remains of former springs that still exist testify that our present story about this country is true ”(Plato. Critias).
In terms of ecology, "the transition to agriculture was the most important milestone in the history of mankind." The result was the first form of agricultural environment, the cultivated countryside. In this process, Europe followed the path outlined in Southwest Asia and developed in parallel with China and Central America (Mesoamerica). Our subcontinent has not been spared all the consequences of such development - a constant surplus of food - and therefore the potential for demographic growth; organized, hierarchical society; increased coercion in the economy and in matters of war; the emergence of cities, organized trade and written culture - and environmental disasters.
The main thing is that special ideas have developed about the relationship of mankind to Nature.
Nature and man in ancient China
The problem of man in ancient Chinese philosophy arises together with philosophy and at each stage of the development of ancient Chinese society is solved as the problem of developing the relationship of man to man and man to nature. She attaches particular importance to the definition of the place and functions of man in the world and the criteria for knowing oneself and nature in a historical relationship.
In the ancient Chinese philosophical worldview in solving the problem of man, 3 tendencies were manifested mainly:
1. Search for ways to build the right relationship between nature and man as an active subject, when spiritual and behavioral patterns of life are embodied in the chosen ideal of man. Society and nature are presented as one huge house-family and space-state, living according to the law of natural-human “reciprocity” Ren, “justice-duty” Yi, “respect” and “love” Xiao and Ci, older and younger, bonded in the unity of Lee's "ritual-etiquette".
2. Solving the problem of a person with an orientation towards steadily moving patterns of nature, when a person of natural "nature" Zi zhan (shen zhen "wise man" in Taoism) is chosen as the ideal of a social subject. Human life is built in harmony with the living rhythms of nature. Man is understood as an eternal spiritual and bodily entity, living according to the laws of Tao-Te.
3. The third way to solve the problem combines the possibilities of the first and second. Human behavior is the harmonization of natural and social rhythms, the material and spiritual balancing of the cosmos and nature. The law of life is the natural-human harmony of feelings and thoughts.
Early Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism during the period of "chaos of the Celestial Empire" set the same task: to find ways to establish harmony between nature and man. In Confucianism, interest falls on a self-conscious person who observes the ritual social and natural tradition and follows the precepts of the "preborn" in behavior and history. Consciousness here moves from nature to man, from the “permanence” of the past fixed in natural rhythms to the present. In Taoism, the search interest is turned to nature, consciousness moves from man to nature. The human subject here, body and soul, trusts nature and identifies himself with it. In legalism, the center of gravity falls on the subject, who organizes the life of society and nature according to the Fa law, consciousness is concentrated in the center of the collision of natural and human norms of life. In these indicated directions, ancient Chinese philosophy, the anthropological problem is closely connected with nature, on the body of which all human meanings of life are objectified. Moreover, with the universal spiritualization and humanization of nature, the latter is perceived as a subject and a direct participant in history. There are deep economic rationales associated with this - the almost complete dependence of the Chinese agricultural community on nature. As a result, in the minds of the ancient Chinese, nature is higher than man.
In addition, the original theoretical principles of Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism date back to the time of direct identification of a person with a natural thing (tribal society), which also left its mark on the philosophical style of thinking. As a result, the teachings about man in the ancient Chinese worldview take the form of teachings about nature. Consequently, when considering the problem of man in ancient Chinese philosophy, it is necessary to refer to the teachings about the origin of nature and the types of its structural order.
Nature and man in ancient Egypt
In ancient Egypt, information about ecological knowledge goes back to sources related to the lifetime of the remarkable thinker and healer Imhotep (about 2800-2700 BC). In the surviving ancient Egyptian papyri, dating back to 2500-1500. BC, it also sets forth thoughts of an ecological nature about life, nature and health, about the problems of death, which, according to scientists of our time, amaze with their exceptionally scientific accuracy and clarity of presentation in the absence of religious and mystical layers. Egyptian civilization for several millennia lived and created cheerfully, with the rise of vital energy. The source of vitality and such a long prosperity of Egypt lies in the attitude of the Egyptians to the world and its nature, in their concepts of conscience and soul, life on Earth and the fate of people in inextricable connection and harmony with the environment.
Conclusion
During the project, I learned a lot about the ecology of the Ancient civilizations, and also replenished my knowledge of how certain environmental problems of those times were solved.
For different times their problems. Now there are many more of them and they are several times larger.
Even ancient philosophers wrote about how important it is to protect nature, we should not forget this even now.
Bibliography
1. Vinnichuk L. "People, manners and customs of Ancient Greece and Rome" Per. from Polish. VC.
2. Ronin. - M .: Higher. school 1988 - 496 p.
3.Internet
Application
Maps of ancient civilizations
Ancient Rome
Ancient Greece
Ancient China
