Glass making seems to have been discovered in Egypt in the early dynasties and to have spread from there to Syria and the Euphrates. The earliest glass was colored faïence, at most translucent, and devoted chiefly to jewelry, or to surfacing brick. Later it was blown into vessels, usually small bottles, and only gradually attained to clearness. From western Asia the art was carried to Europe, and, in Christian times, to China, which at first paid gem prices for glass beads, but later was perhaps stimulated by knowledge of the new art into devising porcelain—a pottery vitrified through.
The horse first reached Egypt with the Hyksos. With it came the war chariot. Wheeled vehicles seem to have been lacking previously. The alphabet, the arch, the zodiac, coinage, heavy metal armor, and many other important inventions gained no foot-hold in Egypt until after the country had definitely passed under foreign domination. The superior intensity of early Egyptian civilization had evidently fostered a spirit of cultural self-sufficiency, analogous to that of China or Byzantine Greece, which produced a resistance to innovation from without. At the same time, inward development continued, as attested by numerous advances in religion, literature, dress, the arts, and science when the Old Kingdom and New Empire are compared. In the eleventh and twelfth dynasties, for instance, the monarchy was feudal; in the eighteenth lived the famous monotheistic iconoclastic ruler Ikhnaton.
The civilization of ancient Egypt was wholly produced and carried by a Hamitic-speaking people. This people has sometimes been thought to have come from Asia, but its Hamitic relatives hold Africa from Somaliland to Morocco even to-day, and there is no cogent reason to look for its ancestors outside that continent.
242. The Sumerian Development
The story of Babylonia is less completely known than that of Egypt because as a rockless land it was forced to depend on sun-dried brick, because the climate is less arid, and also because of its position. Egypt was isolated by deserts, Babylonia open to many neighbors, and so was invaded, fought over, and never unified as long as Egypt. The civilization was therefore never so nationally specific, so concentrated; and its records, though abundant, are patchy. Babylonia, the region of the lower Euphrates and Tigris, was the leading culture center of Asia in the third and second millenia before Christ; and while mostly a Semitic land in this period, its civilization was the product of another people, the Sumerians, established near the mouth of the two rivers in the fourth millenium. It was the Sumerians who in this thousand years worked out the Cuneiform or wedge-shaped system of writing—mixedly phonetic and ideographic like the Egyptian, but of wholly different values, so far as can be told to-day, and executed in straight strokes instead of the pictorial forms of Hieroglyphic or the cursive ones of its derivative Hieratic. It was the Semites who, coming in from the Arabian region, took over this writing, together with the culture that accompanied it. Their dependence is shown by the fact that they used characters with Sumerian phonetic values as well as by their retention of Sumerian as a sacred language, for which, as time went on, they were compelled to compile dictionaries, to the easement of modern archæologists.
Of the local origins of this Sumerian city-state civilization with its irrigation and intensive agriculture, nothing is known. It kept substantially abreast of Egypt, or at most a few centuries in arrears. In certain features, as the use of metals, it seems to have been in advance. Egypt is a long-drawn oasis stretched through a great desert. Babylonia lies adjacent to desert and highland, steppe and mountains. Within a range of a few hundred miles, its environment is far more varied. Not only copper but tin is said to have been available among neighboring peoples. So, too, Babylonia is likely to have had the early domestic animals—except perhaps cattle—earlier than Egypt, because it lay nearer to what seem to have been their native habitats. The result is that whereas Egyptian culture makes the superficial impression of having been largely evolved on the spot by the Egyptians, Sumerian culture already promises to resolve, when we shall know it better, into a blend to which a series of peoples contributed measurably. The rôle of the Sumerians, like that of their Semitic successors, was perhaps primarily that of organizers.
243. The Sumerian Hinterland
There are some evidences of these cultures previous to the Sumerian one or coeval with it. In Elam, the foot-hill country east of Sumer, a mound at Susa contains over 100 feet of culture-bearing deposits; in southern Turkistan, at Anau, 300 miles east of the Caspian sea, one is more than fifty feet deep. The date of the first occupancy of these sites has been set, largely on the basis of the rate of accumulation of the deposits—an unsafe criterion—at 18,000 and 8000 B.C. respectively. These dates, particularly the former, are surely too high. But a remote antiquity is indicated. Both sites show adobe brick houses and hand-made, painted pottery at the very bottom. Susa contains copper implements in the lowest stratum; Anau, three-fourths way to the base—in the same level as remains of sheep and camels. Still lower levels at Anau yielded remains of tamed cattle, pigs, and goats, while wheat and barley appear at the very bottom, before domesticated animals were kept. Whatever the date of the introduction of copper in these regions, it was very likely anterior to the thirty-first century, when bronze was already used by the Sumerians. These excavations therefore shed light on the Full Neolithic and Eneolithic or Transition phases of west Asiatic culture which must have preceded the Sumerian civilization known to us.
The languages of these early west Asiatic peoples have not been classified. Sumerian was non-Indo-European, non-Semitic, non-Hamitic. Some have thought to detect Turkish, that is Ural-Altaic, resemblances in it. But others find similarities to modern African languages. This divergence of opinion probably means that Sumerian cannot yet be safely linked with any other linguistic group. The same applies to Elamite, which is known from inscriptions of a later date than the early strata at Susa. What the Neolithic and Bronze Age people of Anau spoke there is no means of knowing. The region at present is Turkish, but this is of course no evidence that it was so thousands of years ago. The speech of the region might conceivably have been Indo-European, for it lies at the foot of the Persian plateau, which by the Iron Age was occupied by the Iranian branch of the Indo-Europeans, who are generally thought to have entered it from the north or northwest. But again there is not a shred of positive evidence for an Indo-European population at this wholly prehistoric period. The one thing that is clear is that the early civilization of the general west Asiatic area was not developed by the Semites who were its chief carriers later. This is a situation parallel to that obtaining in Europe and Asia Minor, whose civilization in the full historic period has been almost wholly in the hands of Indo-Europeans, whereas at the dawn of history the nations who were culturally in the lead, the Hittites, Trojans, Cretans, Lydians, Etruscans, and Iberians, were all non-Indo-European.