Each cycle of civilization has had its peculiarities, determined by the geographical and historical factors surrounding its origin and development.  Yet all have had features in common.  Among the common features we would list: 

1.  A revolutionary movement within the societies under consideration.  In each experiment with civilization the culture pattern was transformed from pastoral and/or agricultural to a culture based on trade, commerce and finance; from rural to urban; from simple to complex; from local toward universal.

2.  In each case an independent, self-directing, expanding state was built around an urban center.

3.  In each experiment a simple, local, social structure was extended, expanded, specialized, sub-divided, integrated, consolidated.

4.  In each experiment a relatively static society passed into the control of an emerging class of peddlers, merchants, traders, speculators, business enterprisers and professionals who were not directly involved in the conversion of nature’s gifts into goods and services ready for human use, but in political and cultural practices which enabled the emerging bourgeois class to stabilize and extend its wealth and power and build an economic structure that augmented unearned income and laid the foundation for predation, exploitation and parasitism.

5.  In each experiment an amateur apparatus for defense and/or aggression matured into a professional military means for enlarging the geographical area and strengthening the economic and political authority of the new trading-ruling classes.  In each empire and each civilization there was an evolution of “defense” forces from voluntary to professional status, from subordinate to dominant status, from participation in public life to political supremacy over all aspects of public life.

6.  In each experiment massed labor power (slave, serf, or wage-earner) was assembled, organized and trained to build roads, bridges, aqueducts, housing facilities and eventually to operate agriculture, construction, industry, trade and commerce, public utilities and other services in the interests of an oligarchy.

7.  In each experiment a capital city (and associated cities) became the nucleus for accumulating wealth, constructing public buildings, providing means of transportation and sources from which raw materials could be secured for city maintenance and for the provision of sanitary facilities, means of recreation and diversion.

8.  In each experiment there was a competitive struggle between rival communities, each passing through the rural-urban transformation.  The result was an increasing conflict for survival, for expansion and for local supremacy.

9.  Each experiment expanded along lines that led the more successful to build traditional empires consisting of wealth-power centers and peripheries of associates and dependents.

10.  Each experiment produced a competitive survival struggle between rival empires that would determine eventual supremacy.