Prehistoric Men

by Robert J. Braidwood

THE Conquest of Civilization

Now we must return to the Near East again. We are coming to the point where history is about to begin. I am going to stick pretty close to Iraq and Egypt in this chapter. These countries will perhaps be the most interesting to most of us, for the foundations of western civilization were laid in the river lands of the Tigris and Euphrates and of the Nile. I shall probably stick closest of all to Iraq, because things first happened there and also because I know it best.

There is another interesting thing, too. We have seen that the first experiment in village-farming took place in the Near East. So did the first experiment in civilization. Both experiments “took.” The traditions we live by today are based, ultimately, on those ancient beginnings in food-production and civilization in the Near East.

WHAT “CIVILIZATION” MEANS

I shall not try to define “civilization” for you; rather, I shall tell you what the word brings to my mind. To me civilization means urbanization: the fact that there are cities. It means a formal political set-up—that there are kings or governing bodies that the people have set up. It means formal laws—rules of conduct—which the government (if not the people) believes are necessary. It probably means that there are formalized projects—roads, harbors, irrigation canals, and the like—and also some sort of army or police force to protect them. It means quite new and different art forms. It also usually means there is writing. (The people of the Andes—the Incas—had everything which goes to make up a civilization but formal writing. I can see no reason to say they were not civilized.) Finally, as the late Professor Redfield reminded us, civilization seems to bring with it the dawn of a new kind of moral order.

In different civilizations, there may be important differences in the way such things as the above are managed. In early civilizations, it is usual to find religion very closely tied in with government, law, and so forth. The king may also be a high priest, or he may even be thought of as a god. The laws are usually thought to have been given to the people by the gods. The temples are protected just as carefully as the other projects.

CIVILIZATION IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT FOOD-PRODUCTION

Civilizations have to be made up of many people. Some of the people live in the country; some live in very large towns or cities. Classes of society have begun. There are officials and government people; there are priests or religious officials; there are merchants and traders; there are craftsmen, metal-workers, potters, builders, and so on; there are also farmers, and these are the people who produce the food for the whole population. It must be obvious that civilization cannot exist without food-production and that food-production must also be at a pretty efficient level of village-farming before civilization can even begin.

But people can be food-producing without being civilized. In many parts of the world this is still the case. When the white men first came to America, the Indians in most parts of this hemisphere were food-producers. They grew corn, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, and many other things the white men had never eaten before. But only the Aztecs of Mexico, the Mayas of Yucatan and Guatemala, and the Incas of the Andes were civilized.