All three of the world’s earliest civilizations sprang up in river valleys at about the same time:
[ul]
[li]Egypt along the Nile[/li][li]Sumer between the Tigris & Euphrates[/li][li]Harappa along the Indus[/li][/ul]
Just a little to the north of Egypt and Sumer, the Danube empties into the Black Sea. It’s about the same size as the rivers in Mesopotamia, and it has a nice fertile valley along its banks. Nevertheless, no major cities were built along its banks in classical times. In fact, the area around the Danube was a backwater, populated by warring tribes of barbarians.
So what’s wrong with the Danube? Why didn’t the Danube valley develop a major civilization like those other rivers did?
Too many big thick trees? (In the days before iron axes)
It may be thanks to human effort, but my impression of the rivers mentioned is that they have wide, braid flood-plain valleys and so they would drown any trees; or so dry trees would burn up. Europe north of the Alps seems to have huge thick trees, difficult to clear big fields to support large cities until the iron age.
Also have to wonder about a climate where the inhabitants would freeze several months of the year. You can’t afford to clear-cut your major source of fuel. This would limit the size of settlements.
The advantage of the Nile and Mesopotamia as river-based civilizations is that they had the hot dry climate, but a river nearby to irrigate crops. In wet rainy Europe, there was no need to congregate near a river. Crops would grow in any clearing you could make.
You have to consider the climate at the time in all those locations. The first domesticated crops originated in the fertile crescent. That area had the happy circumstance of the right plants, the right soil, the right climate, and the right people to exploit it all at the right time (post ice-age). Those first crops lent themselves to the river valleys of the Nile and Indus because they are along a similar latitude and have/had similar climate. Residents there had a head start, civilization-wise, compared to most other areas.
The Danube is further north than any of the three rivers in the OP, so it would have to wait for further developments of agriculture, technology, and human organization to be able to take advantage of it’s resources.
Diamond covers most of this in Guns Germs and Steel.
I do not disagree with the first two replies, but I think you also have to leave room for a role for sheer contingency here. Maybe no-one living near the Danube (or no-one in a position to do anything about it) happened to hit on the right idea (probably the idea of organizing major earthworks for communal irrigation) at the right time.
Indeed, I think it is still an open possibility (though perhaps not the historical orthodoxy it once was) that the key idea was only really ever hit on once, probably in Sumeria, and spread from there to other suitable and reasonably nearby areas. It is not to hard to see how it might have spread quite soon to Egypt, and even to the Indus, but although the Danube valley may not be much further away as the crow flies, the Black Sea and the mountains of central Turkey are right in the way. (And again, contingency: there might be an element of sheer luck in the fact that the idea did not find its way in that direction).
To the contrary, the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture situated near the lower Danube may have been the most advanced civilization on the planet, ca 4000 BC. Wikipedia shows Tripolye villages as the largest cities of 3800 BC and 3500 BC.
I’ll let better Googlers find links and artist depictions of those villages. (I spent several minutes hunting now, got lots of 404’s; what looked like one of the better pages was in archive.org … but without its images.) That webpages are hard to find reinforces OP in that this early civilization is little known. It was situated just north of the most advanced metallurgy center of its day, and near other important inventions. The economy was quite varied: pigs, caprines, cattle, orchards, hunting, gathering, fishing, as well as farming. The nearby Black Sea may have had an earlier advanced civilization that got flooded.
Archaeologists had long assumed that the Fertile Crescent area “led the way” in Neolithic Europe, and were surprised many decades ago when radio-carbon dating gave them a new chronology for Europe. (Some suspect that the Aratta of Sumerican myth may have been near the Danube!)
ETA: Although Cucuteni may have been the most advanced Neolithic ca 4000 BC, it was late to the discovery of farming. I think that is mainly a simple matter of changing climate.
But I’m not sure I agree with the thesis - the foundational Mesoamerican and Andean cultures weren’t as dependant on notable river valleys, were they?I’d like to add the non-river-valley Anatolian foundational civilization (Çatalhöyük) into the mix as well. I think what you might find a big river valley helpful (but not essential) for is a larger unified state (Empire or …whatever the hell the Indus had), not just a civilization.
And septimus covered my second point - there was a civilization there, just not a state-type polity. “barbarians” is a mischaracterization.
Also, that area’s always been the first stopping point on the route of any Asian Steppe nomads, which can’t help longevity much.
BTW, if you look at a properly drawn map of the (slightly misnamed) Fertile Crescent, it is not focused primarily on Mesopotamia, but around southern Anatolia, the Levant, and the foothills of Iran’s Zagros Mountains. When the land between the Rivers became the center of early Empires, I think they were dependent on hinterlands for food.
ETA: … as MrDibble wrote: “I think what you might find a big river valley helpful (but not essential) for is a larger unified state”
That was the first thing I thought of! My God, that was The Mother River! Don’t you know Ayla and Jondalar invented virtually everything that would become part of modern culture while traveling along The Mother River with their newly domesticated horses and wolf!
From what I know about the temperate belt, many of the large settlements sprang from the waterfront areas, or the mouths of large rivers. But mainly it seems, small towns sprang around the fishing and farming areas.
I have read an article which posits then hypothesis, that the reason civilization began in Iraq and not Europe was the fact that most areas in Europe were conducive to agriculture of some sort and a simple farmer could essentially farm anywhere. That OTH, in these areas, farmable land was concentrated in some areas and was rather less, so you got an incentive to have greater settlements in that areas and the release of many more people from food production and encouraged other trades.
The pre-Incan Peruvian civilizations were initially very reliant on fishing, but quickly turned to agriculture as they expanded and increasingly relied on the river valleys. You can actually see it archaeologically as the temples, over time, turned to face the mountains rather than the coast.
You can see this during the Chavin horizon, and really see the river dependence in the Moche period.
I’m still going to blame the forests. You have to be pretty far along with agriculture, very productive crops and an intense need for extra farmland, before you go to the effort of chopping down big thick trees. I think of the Nile valley as a giant (but narrow) floodplain, so the trees there tended to get drowned out. I assume the same for the other “cradles of agriculture”, there was a lot of nice flat open plain, and the river was just a handy irrigation source that scaled nicely from occasional bucketfulls to major irrigation works.
My impresson of the Danube valley is that it would be very woody and with rolling hills, a lot would not be condusive to casual agriculture or irrigation efforts.
My own mention of the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture was confused. Those cities (perhaps housing 10,000 people ca 1380 BC !) were located by the lower Bug – near the Danube but on the opposite side of the Carpathian mountains, and in grassland rather than forest.
I think the constant waves of migrant cultures through the region would have something to do with it as well, and not having other major civilizations nearby with which to trade and compete. The Nile and Tigris-Euphrates were hosts to multiple competing cultures which were eventually merged. You had Upper and Lower Egypt, you had the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, etc. That makes a major difference in long term development. Cultures which don’t need to compete with anyone don’t have a huge need to advance.
