The Birth of Civilization in the Near East

by Henri Frankfort

For the moment, the distinction of form and dynamics enables us to bring some clarity into the problems connected with our present subject, the birth of Near Eastern civilization. Under the aspect of “form” we may ask: what actually does appear when this civilization comes into being? Is its form established piecemeal? If so, whence comes the coherence which characterizes it throughout its historical existence? Under the aspect of “dynamics” we may ask: is the emergence of this civilization a gradual process? Are earlier elements transmuted or combined by degrees, or is the peculiar coherence of a mature civilization the outcome of a sudden and intense change, a crisis in which its form—undeveloped but potentially a whole—crystallizes out, or rather, is born? The title of this book indicates the answer which I think the evidence compels us to accept as correct. But, before we consider the evidence, it will be profitable to discuss certain current opinions. For if it is true—as we have said before—that those best acquainted with the ancient Near East have rarely found occasion to consider our problem, it is equally true, of course, that we are not the first to discuss it.

Curiously enough, the two men who have devoted their life’s work to the problem of the genesis of civilization have done so under a compelling awareness of its decline. Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee both wrote under the shadow of an impending world war; and their work is, to some extent, warped by their preoccupation with decay. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West was first published in 1917 and bears the subtitle, Outline of a Morphology of World History.[2] This indicates that the aspect of form (as we have called it) is fully considered in his work. In this resides, as a matter of fact, the element of lasting worth of his sensational, arrogant, and pompous volumes. They were written as a reaction against the prevalent view of history which was prejudiced in two respects: it considered world history exclusively from the western standpoint; and it presumed, with evolutionary optimism, that history exemplified the progress of humanity. For Spengler the word “humanity” is merely an empty phrase. The great civilizations are unconnected. They are self-contained organisms of so individual a nature that people who belong to one cannot understand the achievements and modes of thought of another. He maintains that not even in science does knowledge show accumulations transcending the limits of one civilization.

It would seem that under such conditions world history is not feasible at all, and this has, in fact, been maintained by no less a historian than Ernst Troeltsch.[3] But Spengler thinks otherwise because he applies biological methods to the study of civilizations. The very word “morphology,” which figures in his sub-title, usually denotes the study of form and structure in plants and animals; it warns us to expect biological categories and these, indeed, abound. For instance, Spengler maintains that in different civilizations we can find not analogues—features similar as regards function—but only homologues—features similar as regards form. He also maintains that the life-cycle of each civilization runs through the same phases: youth, maturity, and senescence. This implies that a comparison of corresponding phases in different civilizations may be instructive, but that it is merely confusing to compare phases which do not correspond; for then one is led to expect, for instance, that an ageing civilization (like our own) might yet be able to produce great poetry or a live religion, which are features peculiar to civilizations in their youthful stage.

The birth of civilization is succinctly described by Spengler in the following passage:

It comes into flower on the soil of a precisely definable region, to which it remains linked with a plant-like attachment. A civilization dies when it has realized the sum total of its potentialities in the guise of peoples, languages, theologies, arts, states, sciences.[4]

I have omitted certain untranslatable references to an urseelenhafter Zustand from which civilizations are supposed to emerge and to which their “souls” return. For the quotation shows clearly that Spengler, notwithstanding these irrational additions, writes, like Toynbee, under the spell of the nineteenth century and attempts to interpret history in the terms of science. Even if we admit that the country in which a civilization arises influences its form, we must balk at Spengler’s formulation (repeated elsewhere in his work, e.g. I, 29) which approaches materialistic determinism. By interpreting the harmony between each civilization and its natural setting in this manner, he denies a freedom of the human spirit which—to name but one instance—the achievements of the Greeks in Sicily and southern Italy splendidly vindicate.

In describing the death of a civilization Spengler is likewise under the spell of scientific notions. This is not obvious; in fact, Spengler’s success is largely due to the plausibility of some of his most imaginative statements. We feel that it makes sense, even that it is illuminating, to speak of a youthful, or ageing, or dying civilization. But for Spengler such phrases are not metaphors; and when he speaks (as in the previous quotation) of a civilization’s dying “when it has realized the sum total of its potentialities,” he believes that he refers to a state of affairs as inevitable and as accurately predictable as the withering of a plant. He actually calls civilizations “living beings of the highest order,”[5] and he undertakes to state with precision which phenomena characterize each stage in their life-cycle. For him, an imperialistic and socialistic order follow a traditional and hierarchical society; expanding technique and trade follow greatness in art, music, and literature as certainly as the dispersal of the seeds follows the maturing of a plant which will never flower again. But to take the biological metaphor literally, to grant in this manner reality to an image, is not morphology but mythology; and it is belief, not knowledge, which induces Spengler to deny the freedom of the spirit and the unpredictability of human behaviour.

Spengler substitutes the mystery of natural life for the dynamics of history which he, therefore, fails entirely to explain.[6] But to the aspect of “form” he has done justice as few before him. Here too, however, he goes much too far. It is one thing to stress the singularity of each great epoch of the past as a prerequisite of deeper understanding, and quite another to declare the discontinuity of cultural achievements to be absolute. Had the first been Spengler’s intention, no one who had once comprehended the uniqueness of a historical situation, a work of art, or an institution, would have quarrelled with his dictum: “Each civilization has its own possibilities of expression, which appear, mature and wither, and never recur.”[7] When he states, furthermore, “I see in world-history the image of a perennial configuration and transfiguration, a wonderful formation and dissolution of organic forms. The professional historian, however, sees in it the image of a tape-worm which tirelessly puts forth period after period,” there is enough truth in this scathing remark for it to strike home. It is a negative truth, but it is born of a true perception of the poverty of our usual view of history as an evolutionary process. This view encourages us to project the axioms, habits of thought, and norms of the present day into the past, which, as a result, seems to contain little that is unfamiliar to us. It is remarkable how rarely historians of ancient or alien civilizations have guarded themselves against that danger. In this respect Herodotus was more perspicacious; he realized that the values of different cultures may be incommensurate when he frankly epitomized his description of Ancient Egypt in the statement that its laws and customs were, on the whole, the opposite of those of the rest of mankind.[8] This peculiar integration of the facts satisfied a Greek facing Barbarians. We, however, seek understanding. We can be resigned neither to registering astonishment nor to accepting the solution which a misconceived regard for objectivity sometimes proposes: a mere chronicling of the facts. We cannot rest content when we know that the Egyptians considered their king a god, entombed him in a pyramid, buried cats and dogs, and mummified their dead. We want to recover the cultural “form” in which these odd phenomena find their proper place and meaning. But it is a laborious, and never completed, task to rediscover the original coherence of a past mode of life from the surviving remains. Spengler attempts short cuts; overrating the extent of his truly remarkable erudition, and, for the rest, trusting recklessly his intuition, he forces the evidence to fit the schemata which he has conceived. He describes, for instance, the bearer of Egyptian civilization as follows:

The Egyptian soul—pre-eminently gifted for and inclined towards history, striving with primeval passion towards the infinite—experienced past and future as its entire universe, and the present ... but as a narrow borderland between two measureless distances. The Egyptian civilization is an embodiment of concern—the soul’s correlate of distance—concern with the future, manifest in the choice of granite and basalt as the material for sculpture, in the engraved documents, in the elaboration of a masterly system of administration and a net of irrigation works; of necessity a concern with the past is linked with this concern for the future.[9]

I hold this image of ancient Egypt evoked by Spengler to be totally at variance with the evidence. I have recently interpreted this evidence and described how (to take up the points raised by Spengler) the Egyptians had very little sense of history or of past and future. For they conceived their world as essentially static and unchanging. It had gone forth complete from the hands of the Creator. Historical incidents were, consequently, no more than superficial disturbances of the established order, or recurring events of never-changing significance. The past and the future—far from being a matter of concern—were wholly implicit in the present; and the odd facts enumerated above—the divinity of animals and kings, the pyramids, mummification—as well as several other and seemingly unrelated features of Egyptian civilization—its moral maxims, the forms peculiar to its poetry and prose—can all be understood as a result of a basic conviction that only the changeless is truly significant.[10] I do not offer this summary as a formula by means of which Egyptian civilization becomes comprehensible, for it explains nothing by itself and does not pretend to replace the detailed and concrete description of Egyptian life and thought which it summarizes. Nor can even such a detailed description ever be final or entirely comprehensive. I do hold that a viewpoint whence many seemingly unrelated facts are seen to acquire meaning and coherence is likely to represent a historical reality; at least, I know of no better definition of historical truth. But each new insight discloses new complexities which now demand elucidation, while at all times a number of facts are likely to remain outside any network to be established. However, if our view is true as far as it goes, then Spengler’s view is baseless.