238. The Early Focal Area
The prehistoric archæology of Europe and the Near East, outlined in the last chapter, besides arriving at a tolerable chronology, reveals a set of processes of which the outstanding one is the principle of the origin of culture at focal centers and its diffusion to marginal tracts. Obviously this principle should apply in the field of history as well as prehistory, and should be even more easily traceable there.
In the Western Hemisphere it is plain that the great hearth of cultural nourishment and production has been Middle America—the tracts at the two ends of the intercontinental bridge, the Isthmus of Panama. That a similarly preëminent focal area existed in the Eastern Hemisphere has been implied over and over again in the pages that immediately precede this one, in the references to the priority of Egypt and Babylonia—the countries of the Nile and of the Two Rivers. These two lands lie at no great distance from each other: they are closer than Mexico and Peru. Like these two, they are also connected by a strip of mostly favorable territory—the “Fertile Crescent” of Palestine, Syria, and northern Mesopotamia. Curiously, the two countries also lie in two continents connected by a land bridge: the Isthmus of Suez is a parallel to that of Panama.
Both in Egypt and in Babylonia we find a little before 3000 B.C. a system of partly phonetic writing, which, though cumbersome by modern standards, was adequate to record whatever was spoken. Copper was abundant and bronze in use for weapons and tools. Pottery was being turned on wheels. Economic life was at bottom agricultural. The same food plants were grown: barley and wheat; similar beer brewed from them. The same animals were raised: cattle, swine, sheep, goats; with the ass for transport. Architecture was in sun-dried brick. Considerable walled cities had arisen. Their rulers struggled or attained supremacy over one another as avowed kings with millions of subjects. A regulated calendar existed by which events were dated. There were taxes, governors, courts of law, police protection, and social order. A series of great gods, with particular names and attributes, were worshiped in temples.