239. Egypt and Sumer and Their Background
It is scarcely conceivable that these two parallel growths of civilization, easily the most advanced that had until then appeared on earth, should have sprung up independently within a thousand miles of each other. Had Sumerian culture blossomed far away, say on the shores of the Pacific instead of the lower Euphrates, its essential separateness, like that of Middle American civilization, might be probable. But not only is the stretch of land between Babylonia and Egypt relatively short: it is, except in the Suez district, productive and pleasant, and was settled fairly densely by relatively advanced nations soon after the historic period opens or even before. The same is true of the adjoining regions. Canaan, Syria, Mesopotamia, Troy, Crete, Elam, southwestern Turkistan, had all passed beyond barbarism and into the period of city life during the fourth and third millenia B.C. This cannot be a series of coincidences. Evidently western Asia, together with the nearest European islands and the adjacent fertile corner of Africa, formed a complex but connected unit, a larger hearth in which culture was glowing at a number of points. It merely happened that a little upstream from the mouths of the Nile and of the Euphrates the development flamed up faster during the fifth and fourth millenia. The causes can only be conjectured. Perhaps when agriculture came to be systematically instead of casually conducted, these annually overflowed bottom lands proved unusually favorable; their population grew, necessitating fixed government and social order, which in turn enabled a still more rapid growth of numbers, the fuller exploitation of resources, and division of labor. This looks plausible enough. But too much weight should not be attached to explanations of this sort: they remain chiefly hypothetical. That culture had however by 3000 B.C. attained a greater richness and organization in Egypt and in the Babylonian region than elsewhere, are facts, and can hardly be anything but causally connected facts. These two civilizations had evidently arisen out of a common Near Eastern high level of Neolithic culture, much as the peaks of Mexico and Peru arose above the plateau of Middle American culture in which they were grounded.
Of course this means that Egypt and Sumer did not stand in parental-filial relation. They were rather collateral kin—brothers, or better, perhaps, the two most eminent of a group of cousins. Attempts to derive Egyptian hieroglyphic from Babylonian Cuneiform writing, and vice versa, have been rejected as unproved by the majority of unbiased scholars. But it is likely that at least the idea of making legible records, of using pictorial signs for sounds of speech, was carried from one people to the other, which thereupon worked out its own symbols and meanings. Just so, while the Phœnician alphabet has never yet been led back to either Egyptian, Cuneiform, Cretan, or Hittite writing with enough evidence to satisfy more than a minority fraction of the world of scholarship, it seems incredible that this new form of writing should have originated uninfluenced by any of the several systems which had been in current use in the near neighborhood, in part in Phœnicia itself, for from one to two or three thousand years. Such a view denies neither the essentially new element in Phœnician script nor its cultural importance. It does not consider the origin of the alphabet explained away by a reference to another and earlier system of writing. It does bring the alphabet into some sort of causal relation with the other systems, without merging it in them. It is along lines like this that the relation of early Egypt and Babylonia to each other and to the other cultures of the ancient Near East must be conceived.