2. Answer the following questions to check how well you have read the text:

   1. What does the term “civilization” imply?

   2. What perspective has been adopted by most European historians since the Middle Ages? What was history for them?

   3. What historical thinking dominated in the 18th century?

   4. What historical movement prevailed early in the 19th century? How did the historians of this trend treat previous historical as­sumptions?

   5. What do modern historians of civilization maintain?

   6. Can you agree with the doctrine put out by Oswald Spengler? How may a civilization prolong its life according to A. Toynbee?

   7. Is it difficult for historians to define a particular society? What world civilizations are mentioned in this text?

3. You have a list of opinions and a list of philosophers. Match the opinion to the philosopher who held it.

They emphasized the profound differences in the minds and works of humans in different cultures.	Voltaire and Montesquieu
For him the proper object of historical study was the state.	Oswald Spengler
A civilization may prolong its life indefinitely by successful responses to the various internal and external challenges that constantly arise to confront it.	Niccola Machiavelli Arnold Toyhbee G. Hegel

Text two

Translate the text without a dictionary.

... Cultivation is not civilization. Civilization is something more than the occasional seasonal growing of wheat. It is the settlement of men upon an area continuously cultivated and possessed, who live in buildings continuously inhabited, with a common rule and a common city or citadel...

Mesopotamia and Egypt were the most favourable countries for the first permanent settling down of men. Here was a constant water supply under enduring sunlight, trustworthy harvests year by year; and as for building material, in Egypt was clay and easily worked stone, and in Mesopotamia a clay that becomes a brick in the sunshine. In such countries people would cease to wander, and settle down almost unawares; they would multiply and discover themselves numerous. Their houses became more substantial, the security of life increased so that ordinary men went about in the towns and fields without weapons, and among themselves at least, they became peaceful peoples. Men took root as man had never taken root before...

Now in the less fertile lands outside these favoured areas in the forests of Europe, the Arabian deserts and the seasonal pastures of Central Asia, there was developing a thinner, more active population of peoples of a quite divergent type, the primitive nomadic peoples. These nomads lived freely and dangerously. The discoveries in the elaboration of implements and the use of metals made by the settled people spread to them and improved their weapons. They became more warlike with better arms and more capable of rapid movements with the improvement of their transport. It was inevitable that nomad folk and the settled folk should clash.

For the most part it was the mere raiding of the borders. But ever and again we find some leader or some tribe, powerful enough to force a sort of unity upon its kindred tribes; and then woe betide the nearest civilization. But instead of carrying off the booty, the conquerors settle down on the conquered land, which becomes all booty for them. The villagers and townsmen are reduced to servitude and tribute-paying. The leaders of the nomads become kings and princes, masters and aristocrats. They, too, settle down, they learn many of the arts and refinements of the conquered, they cease to be lean and hungry, but for many generations they retain traces of their own nomadic habits, they hunt and indulge in open-air sports, they regard work, especially agricultural work, as the lot of an inferior race and class.