The Birth of Civilization in the Near East

HENRI FRANKFORT
Doubleday Anchor Books Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York
Henri Frankfort was born in 1897 in Holland. He first studied history at Amsterdam University, obtained his M.A. in London, but returned to the University of Leiden for his Ph.D. He has done extensive field work in the Near East, his main project being the Oriental Institute of Chicago’s excavations in Iraq from 1929 to 1937. Dr. Frankfort both organized and headed these excavations, which yielded much new information on the early history of Babylonia, from 4000 to 2000 B.C. In 1938 Dr. Frankfort went to Chicago to write and to teach at the University of Chicago, which had appointed him Research Professor of Oriental Archaeology in 1932. In 1949 he was appointed Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of Pre-classical Antiquity in the University of London. Among his other writings are numerous contributions to professional journals and a book, Ancient Egyptian Religion (1948). Dr. Frankfort died in 1954.
Cover design by Antonio Frasconi Typography by Edward Gorey
The Birth of Civilization in the Near East was published by Indiana University Press in 1951. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Indiana University Press.
Anchor Books edition: 1956
First published in the United States of America by Indiana University Press
A full description of the birth of civilization in the Near East would require a work many times the size of the present book. We have concentrated on the social and political innovations in which the great change became manifest. These bear most directly on the questions to which the appearance of the first civilized societies gives rise; yet they have received less attention than the concomitant changes in the fields of technology and the arts, the manifestations of religion, or the invention of writing. In so far as technological and artistic developments reveal social and political conditions, we have taken them into account; but we have not attempted to describe them in detail, and have kept our subject within manageable limits by a somewhat strict interpretation of the word civilization. While it is true that the terms “civilization” and “culture” count as synonyms in general usage, and that every distinction therefore remains arbitrary, there are etymological reasons for preferences in their use. The word “culture,” with its overtones of something irrational, something grown rather than made, is preferred by those who study primitive peoples. The word “civilization,” on the other hand, appeals to those who consider man in the first place as homo politicus , and it is in this sense that we would have our title understood.