Mesopotamia Vs Egyptian Civilization Essay

Approximately 3500 years before present, two sister civilizations grew tremendously due to the increase in complexity that the first cities gave. Out of the prosperous Mesopotamian and early Egyptian region, they slowly began to differ in their social, political, and religious practices as they grew larger. These two civilizations laid down the foundation of democracy we use to this day, such as the use of class systems. Their main differences include how they utilized their proximity to rivers, how they viewed political systems, and their ideas on how social structure should be established. The only true similarity shared by these two early civilizations was their founding, and how they incorporated irrigation and trade as the basis to grow their civilizations from. To start off, the first difference between these two civilizations pertains to the rivers.
Ancient Mesopotamia was much closer to a democracy in comparison to Ancient Egypt, which could almost be viewed as a dictatorship. Ancient Egypt consisted of the pharaoh, the wealthy class below him, citizens, and at the bottom were the slaves. The Slaves played a large role in ancient Egypt, and consisted of a majority of the labor force. This labor force is what allowed the Egyptians to construct such monumental building projects such as the pyramids. To construct these massive structures took an astounding labor force of up to 84,000, around 20 years in order to construct a single pyramid. This obviously could not have been achieved without the use of class systems and a higher power. On the other hand, Mesopotamians had a ceremonial center that used leadership to direct skilled labor workers to build it. I took 1,500 laborers 5 years to build this building, known as the Eanna Complex. This is an early form of class systems being used and early Egypt and Mesopotamians used them very differently to build special