Evolution of Civilizations According To the Challenge They Respond To
Andrew Targowski:
Societal Civilizations
"Autonomous civilizations rose in a response to physical challenges of nature (ecosystem). Humans began to organize themselves into a society, which provided exchangeable and specialized services, such as food hunting, food production, house building, road construction, transportation, health care, entertainment, and so forth. These services and growing human communication led towards the formation of cities. These types of autonomous civilizations we will call societal civilizations.
Cultural Civilizations
In addition to the environmental challenges, societal civilization as a whole was threatened by its own internal structure involving power, wealth creation, beliefs enforcement, family formation, leadership, and so forth. As societal civilizations evolved into more complex entities, they were managed by cultural manipulation. By culture, we mean a value-driven patterned behavior of a human entity. This type of autonomous civilization we will name the cultural civilization. Ever since religion was transformed from beliefs in magic to beliefs in poly-gods and to then to a mono-god, the cultural civilization has applied religion as the main tool of cultural control. Religious and military force were the foundations of the power apparatus that maintained the society as a governed entity. These forces civilized the society and moved it into higher levels of organization.
Among cultural civilizations, one can recognize about 17 cases, such as the Egyptian Civilization, 3100 B.C.; Minoan, 2700 B.C.; Mycean. 1500 B.C.; Sinic, 1500 B.C.; Hebrew, 800 B.C.; Hellenic , 750 B.C.; Persian, 600 B.C to 600 A.D.; Canaanite Civilization 1100 B.C.; Hindu Civilization 600 B.C.; Roman Civilization, 31 B.C.; Eastern Orthodox, 350 A.D.; Hellenistic Civilization, 323 B.C.; Buddhist Civilization, 600 A.D.; Ethiopian Civilization 400 A.D., the SubSaharan Civilization 800 A.D., the Western Civilization 800 A.D., the Islamic Civilization, 632 A.D.; and the Maghrebian (Islamic Spain and North Africa), 1000 A.D.
Infrastructural Civilizations
The cultural civilization evolves into a civilization with challenges generated by intra and inter-civilizational issues of war and peace. These types of issues have been managed by technological means of domination. Such a civilization we will call the infrastructural civilization. The infrastructural civilization's purpose is to expand spheres of influence with the means of technology. Technology drives the development of infrastructural civilizations. The prime target of technology applications has been a war machine which supports the main values of a given civilization. By-products of military applications of technology affect the civilian part of its infrastructure.
Among eight infrastructural civilizations one can recognize Sinic 1500 B.C., Hindu 600 B.C., the Japanese 650 A.D., Western Civilization 800 A.D., the Byzantine 350 A.D., Buddhist 600 A.D., and the Islamic Civilization (limited to Ottoman Empire) 1300 A.D. By the end of the second millennium, infrastructural civilizations had become civilizations responsible for world and regional influence and domination. Hence, Western Civilization dominates the Western Hemisphere and Japan, Australia, and New Zealand; Hindu civilization dominates South Asia, Islamic Civilization dominates North Africa, the Middle East, and some parts of the Far East Hemisphere; the Chinese and Japanese dominate the Far East, with Buddhist civilizations influencing a small part of the Far East. In the majority of autonomous civilizations, one can differentiate more than one culture, with the exception of the Egyptian, Hittite, and Japanese Civilizations, which are monocultural. Figure 4 provides 75 examples of empirical civilizational cultures. By "empirical" cultures we would like to emphasize that their names have been created by historians along the discovery process. Of course, some names have been modified to read as they are perceived nowadays."
(https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1618&context=ccr)