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Thanks for the ping. There are so many intelligent and plausible theories put forth here that I am sort of hesitant to say anything, but here goes.

In antiquity, the fundamentals of wealth would be first, lots of arable land with a water source, thus the riverine civilizations of antiquity. But the Greeks showed a counter-example to this. Name a river in Greece. Or the Minoan civilization. It seems both borrowed a lot of knowledge from Egypt, which had run its course as a great power.

Thus, land and food = leisure time for education and study, leading to knowledge, a permanent asset in exploiting nature. After knowledge reaches a critical point, the civs of the Nile, Tigris/Euphrates and Indus rivers lost their special advantage.

These older civs ran on slave labor. But when a civ uses knowledge as its primary tool, a lot of individual freedom is needed. Technology, of course, is the offspring of knowledge. Thus, the free Greeks defeated the hordes of Persia again and again, both because they were free, and wished to stay that way, and because their military technology was far advanced.

In order to keep freedom alive, it must be codified. The Romans and the Chinese were good at this, and it avoided a lot of conflict. Rome grew too big to defend it own borders, and the public spirit which enlivened it became degenerate hedonism. Mercenary Germanic troops rebeled and helped divide the empire, while huge migrations from central Asia finally took down both the Western and the Eastern Empire. That is what is starting to happen to us today.

So I have first, surplus food, leading to leisure, leading to knowledge, leading to technology. What brings otherwise successful civilizations down? Internal dissoluteness and external invasion. What could prevent this fate, for the US or any advanced tech civilization? A unifying, unyielding ethos and rational laws justly applied. The Founders provided us the basics for this, but warned that such a government was meant only for a moral people.

OK, there's my history in a nutshell.

Thanks for the ping. There are so many intelligent and plausible theories put forth here that I am sort of hesitant to say anything, but here goes.

I'm glad you did!

In antiquity, the fundamentals of wealth would be first, lots of arable land with a water source, thus the riverine civilizations of antiquity. But the Greeks showed a counter-example to this. Name a river in Greece. Or the Minoan civilization. It seems both borrowed a lot of knowledge from Egypt, which had run its course as a great power.

Greece is only about 30 percent arable land; the Eurotas river in the Peloponnese appears to have been the one naturally well-endowed ag area, and not surprisingly was powerful in classical times (Sparta enslaved nearly every Greek living in the Eurotas valley, and totally dominated (basically ruled) all other towns and villages there. Walling a settlement was not acceptable to the Spartans. Only after Thebes beat the Spartans' vaselined asses at Leuctra and freed the enslaved Greeks did city walls spring up all over the Peloponnese. Those walls kept those freed Greeks free.

In Homeric times Menelaus was the aggrieved king of Sparta, and if the legend is more or less on track, he and his kinsman Agamemnon king of Mycenae compelled the rest of the Greek city-states to join in the quest to reclaim Helen (or maybe it was just a plan for a cool weekend of plundering a town which wound up turning into ten years of bitter fighting; the Helen story doesn't sound so implausible by comparison). In any case, whatever connections may have existed between Mycenaean Greece and Egypt, the approach and technologies of each were homegrown.

Thus, land and food = leisure time for education and study, leading to knowledge, a permanent asset in exploiting nature. After knowledge reaches a critical point, the civs of the Nile, Tigris/Euphrates and Indus rivers lost their special advantage.

I agree. What little is known in their own words of Mycenaean Greece has been translated from a fairly small body of Linear B tablets. These contain details of local economic activity, which was apparently at least minutely inventoried by, and probably controlled by, the state. Besides olive oil and wheat, slaves and flax products were apparently typical. The careful management of production led to surplus and political organization -- and trade, and wealth for the lords of the manors. Local sovereignty was so important that it took an outside invader -- Alexander the Great (and then the Romans, etc) -- to unify them.

In Boeotia a river was rerouted behind a huge dyke, to carry it in a long loop around the base of some hills; the lake formerly fed by the river was drained out, freeing flat, fertile lakebed for agriculture. At some point the dyke was breached, possibly during an undocumented war at the end of the Homeric age. Alexander the Great had the lake drained again in the 4th c BC. In the 19th century similar work was done, and the resulting reclaimed land was in the area of 76 square miles, which shows the extent of this Bronze Age project. A former island with Mycenaean-era fortifications is now known as Gla (no ancient name is recorded), and was a substantial site. It may have been owned by one of the known city-states in the region, and the breaching of the dyke may have happened as a consequence of a war between two or all three of them. Or perhaps Gla was a power in its own right, an upstart of sorts, and the neighbors got jealous, angry, or wanted a piece of the action.

These older civs ran on slave labor. But when a civ uses knowledge as its primary tool, a lot of individual freedom is needed. Technology, of course, is the offspring of knowledge. Thus, the free Greeks defeated the hordes of Persia again and again, both because they were free, and wished to stay that way, and because their military technology was far advanced

The Persians moved an immense army made up of more than two dozen ethnic groups drawn from all over the empire across Anatolia, across a pontoon bridge at the straits, and down into a mountainous peninsula. At one point Xerxes had a canal dug through a long narrow landmass in order to bring his fleet along a more favorable course. There was no comparison -- the Persian Empire had a huge superiority in military logistics and strategy, and a very deep well of manpower and wealth. The "free Greeks" consisted of groups of occasional soldiers trained in a very simple but very effective (and small) set of battlefield tactics -- as well as the standing army of Sparta, which was supported by a massive slave population eventually held in bondage for about two centuries.

The one area where the Greeks had a technological advantage was in the ships, Themistocles' "wooden wall", which smashed the Persian fleet at Salamis. After that defeat, the Persian army could no longer be supported as an expeditionary force of that size, and yet it took another year for the Greeks to finally defeat the reduced Persian land army. IMO it's likely that Sparta was already in the pocket of the Persians prior to Marathon -- the Spartan army showed up after the battle was over, expecting to link up with its victorious Persian allies, and finding their various inferior fellow Greeks holding the field. Regardless, that embarrassment was atoned for at the militarily insignificant battle of Thermopylae, during the second Persian invasion. During the Pelopponesian War the Persians are known to have paid for the Spartans to build their fleet and hire away Athenian rowers, tipping the balance, and leading to the final defeat and humiliation of Athens.

Since the Greeks were in contact with relatives and others living under Persian rule, I might argue that they therefore had extensive knowledge of the terrible burdens imposed by despotic Persian rule. But after Themistocles was ostracized and forced to leave Athens (by the loonie bunch that later started a 30 year long war with Sparta, somewhere in the middle of which, during a years-long truce, they decided to try an expeditionary force of their own to Syracuse, in Sicily, and got their asses handed to them), the architect of the Persian defeat at Salamis relocated to the Persian Empire, was warmly received, and was appointed governor of a Greek city in Anatolia, where he grew old and died.

In order to keep freedom alive, it must be codified. The Romans and the Chinese were good at this, and it avoided a lot of conflict. Rome grew too big to defend it own borders, and the public spirit which enlivened it became degenerate hedonism. Mercenary Germanic troops rebeled and helped divide the empire, while huge migrations from central Asia finally took down both the Western and the Eastern Empire. That is what is starting to happen to us today.

Codified law is a necessary protection -- as "A Man For All Seasons" puts it, after you've knocked down all the laws to get at the Devil, and he turns round on you, where do you turn for help, all the laws being flat? The Romans had a massive set of books that were (like ours) made from both the legislation (including common law and local practice) and legal precedents from litigation results. There was an index, also from Roman times, that had made the massive body of law teachable, learnable, and usable. The index was the one part of the corpus of Roman law that survived into the Middle Ages, and was found (oddly enough) preserved in a library in Spain that had recently been liberated from the Moslems. That discovery revolutionized European law, and came along at a good time, because the bubonic plague destroyed the folklore-based settlement of disputes pretty much universal in feudal societies. The sage oldsters were simply not there due to sudden death, and the societies of Europe were having their props kicked out, because traditional ways (regardless of what they were locally) were shown to be unable to cope with or even anticipate such a disaster.

The Roman Empire tore itself apart because it didn't have any kind of unifying national identity, and those who did identify with the Roman civ wound up fighting each other for power. It never had any kind of system of orderly succession (or even any way out of office except death) until Diocletian came along, and his system didn't work perfectly either. He was so unsure of it himself that he built a self-reliant fortress which is still standing, and was occupied continuously from then to now. :') Rome never had anything like a public education system, didn't have a banking system, didn't have coherent taxation, didn't have much in the way of uniform currency until the 3rd century (and it wasn't "hard money"), didn't have a postal system, had a massive legacy of native and acquired theology (all of which was overlapping and/or in conflict), and like classical Greece, never banned slavery.

And it still stretched from the 5th c BC to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in the 14th c AD. :')

Where Rome shined was in its export of an idealized engineered Roman way of life, which was adopted and/or adapted throughout the provinces, and was the main draw for the steady stream of "third world" migrants. It's one obvious parallel with what we face today.

So I have first, surplus food, leading to leisure, leading to knowledge, leading to technology. What brings otherwise successful civilizations down? Internal dissoluteness and external invasion. What could prevent this fate, for the US or any advanced tech civilization? A unifying, unyielding ethos and rational laws justly applied. The Founders provided us the basics for this, but warned that such a government was meant only for a moral people.

Wholeheartedly agree -- all civilization is based on agricultural surplus (and so far that has always included animal husbandry, i.e., meat); the centralized states of whatever size have been made possible (and really, made necessary) by food surplus. Standing armies to defend against external threats -- as well as internal ones -- were made possible by food surplus. Writing was necessitated by the needs of title to property, water rights, what we would call probate, and of course the collection of taxes (no joke, that). Once writing existed for one purpose, the recording of previously oral-only traditions made perfect sense, and helped homogenize culture, leading to a sense of nationality and national origin where it had never existed in quite that form.

We're lucky to have had a fairly small group of geniuses who were surrounded by people smart enough to let the geniuses show what they could do (and often enough, fight among themselves). They were educated (public education was a fact of life in the Colonies by the early 17th c, and that included instruction in ancient languages) and aware of the lessons of classical antiquity as well as European history. And they learned from those lessons, in the process creating a magnificent heritage, almost as out of thin air. Did I say lucky? Make that, we're extraordinarily lucky!