THE Conquest of Civilization
Now we must return to the Near East again. We are coming to the point where history is about to begin. I am going to stick pretty close to Iraq and Egypt in this chapter. These countries will perhaps be the most interesting to most of us, for the foundations of western civilization were laid in the river lands of the Tigris and Euphrates and of the Nile. I shall probably stick closest of all to Iraq, because things first happened there and also because I know it best.
There is another interesting thing, too. We have seen that the first experiment in village-farming took place in the Near East. So did the first experiment in civilization. Both experiments “took.” The traditions we live by today are based, ultimately, on those ancient beginnings in food-production and civilization in the Near East.