Brought joy to the Engur (Deep).
To the sea it seemed that awe was upon him,
To the Great River it seemed that terror hovered around him
While at the same time the south wind stirred the depths of the Euphrates.[85]
The importance which one attaches to these signs of a possible continuity remains a matter of personal judgment. But, in any case, the Al Ubaid culture which we have described was the first to have occupied Mesopotamia as a whole. It seems to have spread along the rivers from the south.[86] And it was in the south that, after an interval, the profound change was brought about which made first Sumer, and then Babylon, the cultural centre of Western Asia for three thousand years.
III. THE CITIES OF MESOPOTAMIA
The scene we have so far surveyed has been somewhat monotonous. The differences between the various groups of prehistoric farmers are insignificant beside the overriding similarity of their mode of life, relatively isolated as they were and almost entirely self-sufficient in their small villages. But by the middle of the fourth millennium B.C. this picture changed, first in Mesopotamia and a little later in Egypt; and the change may be described in terms of archaeological evidence. In Mesopotamia we find a considerable increase in the size of settlements and buildings such as temples. For the first time we can properly speak of monumental architecture as a dominant feature of sizable cities. In Egypt, too, monumental architecture appeared; and in both countries writing was introduced, new techniques were mastered, and representational art—as distinct from the mainly decorative art of the preceding period—made its first appearance.
It is important to realize that the change was not a quantitative one. If one stresses the increased food supply or the expansion of human skill and enterprise; or if one combines both elements by proclaiming irrigation a triumph of skill which produced abundance; even if one emphasizes the contrast between the circumscribed existence of the prehistoric villagers and the richer, more varied, and more complex life in the cities—one misses the point. All these quantitative evaluations lead to generalizations which obscure the very problem with which we are concerned. For a comparison between Egypt and Mesopotamia discloses, not only that writing, representational art, monumental architecture, and a new kind of political coherence were introduced in the two countries; it also reveals the striking fact that the purpose of their writing, the contents of their representations, the functions of their monumental buildings, and the structure of their new societies differed completely. What we observe is not merely the establishment of civilized life, but the emergence, concretely, of the distinctive “forms” of Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization.
It is necessary to anticipate here and to substantiate the contrast. The earliest written documents of Mesopotamia served a severely practical purpose; they facilitated the administration of large economic units, the temple communities. The earliest Egyptian inscriptions were legends on royal monuments or seal engravings identifying the king’s officials. The earliest representations in Mesopotamian art are preponderantly religious; in Egyptian art they celebrate royal achievements and consist of historical subjects. Monumental architecture consists, in Mesopotamia, of temples, in Egypt of royal tombs. The earliest civilized society of Mesopotamia crystallized in separate nuclei, a number of distinct, autonomous cities—clear-cut, self-assertive polities—with the surrounding lands to sustain each one. Egyptian society assumed the form of the single, united, but rural, domain of an absolute monarch.
The evidence from Egypt, which is the more extensive, indicates the transition was neither slow nor gradual. It is true that towards the end of the prehistoric period certain innovations heralded the coming age. But when the change occurred it had the character of a crisis, affecting every aspect of life at once but passing within the space of a few generations. Then followed—from the middle of the First until the end of the Third Dynasty—a period of consolidation and experiment, and with this the formative phase of Egyptian civilization was concluded. Few things that mattered in Pharaonic Egypt were without roots in that first great age of creativity.