THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION
After our exasperation with the almost unknown Warka interlude, following the brilliant “false dawn” of Ubaid, we move next to an assemblage which yields traces of a preponderance of those elements which we noted ([p. 144]) as meaning civilization. This assemblage is that called Proto-Literate; it already contains writing. On the somewhat shaky principle that writing, however early, means history—and no longer prehistory—the assemblage is named for the historical implications of its content, and no longer after the name of the site where it was first found. Since some of the older books used site-names for this assemblage, I will tell you that the Proto-Literate includes the latter half of what used to be called the “Uruk period” plus all of what used to be called the “Jemdet Nasr period.” It shows a consistent development from beginning to end.
I shall, in fact, leave much of the description and the historic implications of the Proto-Literate assemblage to the conventional historians. Professor T. J. Jacobsen, reaching backward from the legends he finds in the cuneiform writings of slightly later times, can in fact tell you a more complete story of Proto-Literate culture than I can. It should be enough here if I sum up briefly what the excavated archeological evidence shows.
We have yet to dig a Proto-Literate site in its entirety, but the indications are that the sites cover areas the size of small cities. In architecture, we know of large and monumental temple structures, which were built on elaborate high terraces. The plans and decoration of these temples follow the pattern set in the Ubaid phase: the chief difference is one of size. The German excavators at the site of Warka reckoned that the construction of only one of the Proto-Literate temple complexes there must have taken 1,500 men, each working a ten-hour day, five years to build.