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.
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.
240. Predynastic Egypt
Egyptian civilization was already in full blown flower at the time of the consolidation of Lower and Upper Egypt under the first dynasty in the thirty-fourth century. Its developmental stages must have reached much farther back. Hieroglyphic writing, for instance, had taken on substantially the forms and degree of efficiency which it maintained for the next three thousand years. An elaborate, conventional system of this sort must have required centuries for its formative stages. A non-lunar 365-day calendar was in use. This was easily the most accurate and effective calendar developed in the ancient world, and furnished the basis of our own. It erred by the few hours’ difference between the solar and the assumed year. This difference the Egyptians did not correct but recorded, with the result that when the initial day had slowly swung around the cycle of the seasons, they reckoned a “Sothic year” of 1,461 years. One of these was completed in 2781; which gives 4241 B.C. as the date of the fixing of the calendar. This is considered the earliest exactly known date in human history. Of course, a calendar of such fineness cannot be established without long continued observations, whose duration will be the greater for lack of astronomical instruments. Centuries must have elapsed while this calendar was being worked out. Nor would oral tradition be a sufficient vehicle for carrying the observations. Permanent records must have been transmitted from generation to generation; and these presuppose stability of society, enduring buildings, towns, and a class with leisure to devote to astronomical computations. It is safe therefore to set 4500 B.C. as the time when Egypt had emerged from a tribal or rural peasant condition into one that can be called “civilized” in the original meaning of that word: a period of city states, or at least districts organized under recognized rulers. From 4500 on, then, is the time of the Predynastic Local Kingdoms.
Beyond this time there must lie another: the Predynastic Tribal period, before towns or calendars or writing or metal, when pottery was being made, stone ground, boats built, plants and animals being domesticated—the typical pure Neolithic Age, in short. Yet with all its prehistoric wealth, Egypt has not yet produced any true Neolithic remains. It is hardly likely that the country was uninhabited for thousands of years; much more probably have Neolithic remains been obliterated. This inference is strengthened by the paucity and dubiousness of Upper Palæolithic artifacts in Egypt. Lower Palæolithic flint implements are abundant, just as are remains from the whole of the period of metals. What has happened to the missing deposits and burials of the Upper Palæolithic and Neolithic that fell between?