The Mediterranean civilisation cluster

I often see people wondering why almost all of human achievement is concentrated in such a tiny region of the world.

It's an interesting question that I don't have a full answer to, but part of it is that there were five great civilisations spread out around the Mediterranean and across five millennia, all connected to each other: the first centered in Iraq, the second in Egypt, the third in Greece, the fourth in Israel, and the fifth in France, and each radiating outward. There were also two other great civilisations centered in India and China, but they were too isolated from the Mediterranean cluster to make more than anecdotal contributions.

That doesn't answer why those five civilisations appeared there though.

Centrality to global trade

That region is all the way to the West of Eurasia, it's hardly central.

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>I often see people wondering why almost all of human achievement is concentrated in such a tiny region of the world.

It's not. You had clusters of civilization, the arts, writing, and other hallmarks of society and culture in the far east and in the Americas as well. It's just most english speaking people come from cultures and socieites that trace their routes back to Mediterrian civilizations. If you lived in the far east in Asia, you, other people you know, and your society would place that sort of value on ancient china, india, etc.

The Americas have the unfortunate reality that the Spanish burned and destroyed nearly all their records and culturally speaking there's not that much connection to the original advanced civilizations there outside of cuisine.

China and India were largely irrelevant to the construction of the modern world, American wholly so, probably due to partial and total isolation respectively from the place where the modern world was constructed, which is the Mediterrano-Atlantic region.

>The Americas have the unfortunate reality that the Spanish burned and destroyed nearly all their records
only 3 tribes had records.

This to an extent. An obvious amount of cataloging and technological advancements were in the eastern part of the world as we know of because of the cataloging and other written forms of explanation of them. Places like the Americas for example to a much less amount didn't have much in the way as such a large catalog of history to explain the culture and technological advancements around them. Also the influence of the Mediterranean super powers on modern day Europe and america is much greater than the influences it got from Japan (a super power of it's own time) or more north Icelandic regions because of its convenient out reach to European culture, then to American culture.

TLDR: The outreach of other places weren't as influential or cataloged, so all advancements made by the less influential are more or less unknown are created down the line.

Asia is a part of the modern world you dumbass, that's my point. In those countries, much of the culture is still descended from their original civilizations, and much of the hallmarks of modern society they indepednetly invented or contributed as much to via cultural interchange as europe itself did.

You are woefully ignorant. Both Mesoamerica and the Andes were predominately filled with urban, state socities (not tribes) with actual complex organized governments for hundreds to thousands of years before europeans showed up. There were hundreds of actual political states and cities. Just because popular culture only mentions the Aztec, maya, and inca doesn't mean those are the only ones. Here's a map of Mesoamerica and Central America during the time of contact. Only the shit labeled with "territorio" were actual tribes. Everything else was either city-states, kingdoms, or empires. As you can see, only Northern mexico, and the Yucatan downwards had tribal socieites, and even then all of the Yucatan was filled with state based cities prior to the Classical maya collapse in 900ad.

Go read all the posts in and educate yourself. There's a series of around 15 posts that is detailing all Mesoamerican history and it's political landscape over time in a pretty good amount of detail

>. Places like the Americas for example to a much less amount didn't have much in the way as such a large catalog of history to explain the culture and technological advancements around them
That's really not accurate: The Mesoamericans left detailed records for stuff like taxes, land surveys, as well as ethno-cultural accounts for migrations, how cities were founded, the accomplishments of notable rulers, etc. They basically recorded their own history as much as ancient old world cultures did.

The problem is all almost of their books were burned. If you read the other thread I linked, you'll see how much we know about just from the few that's left

It is worth noting though that even the stuff in central america that's not marked with terrotorio wouldn't have been that complex, but everything inside this circle that's not "territorio" would have been basically bronze or iron age level complex in most regards