Just as we pass the world of the ziggurats and pyramids, at the ‘start’ of our pattern, we can flashback to the greater dawn of cultural history after the Ice Ages to consider the elements brought to the beginnings of civilization. The real beginning of what we call civilization lies in the Neolithic, and we can infer with some degree of confidence that  this occurs in the Fertile Crescent in the time-frame –10000 to –8000. We suspect a series of transitions now lost to us, and we must also carefully distinguish the invention of agriculture, which probably occurs several times in different places, from the larger cultural integration of this and other factors in the characteristic working of the eonic series. Nothing in this schema says anything about the absolute origin of civilization, nor does it preempt the independent evolution of cultures or civilizations. Thus the place the New World civilizations is ambiguous.

? ‘ET1,…ET2,…:

The rough correlation of the onset of the Neolithic in the Levant is unmistakable, as is the appearance of a first ‘city’ very early in the site of Jericho. The broad correlation is so vague however that we can only wonder at the nature of any transitional phase in such primitive circumstances. This period is too speculative to be included in our full data set. First, during the period -10000 to -8000, the so-called Mesolithic, there is the slow passage from earlier nomadic, hunter-gatherer, existence to a mixed mode of proto-agricultural discovery and experimentation. Even this earlier stage is a discovery and a long learning process. And there is a strong suggestion that our ‘cultural integration’, that is the assembly into community, precedes and induces the Neolithic, rather than the other way around. Groups begin to settle down in communities, the harvesting of the wild grains and the domestication of animals precede the emergence of the Neolithic proper. This is the Natufian period with its traces in the Levant, when the exploration of seminal possibilities of agriculture is emerging.

During the period from -8000 to -5500, we enter the period of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, visible in the broad focal band of the Levant, Western Asia, then later in the very advanced culture arising in Catal Huyuk, followed by the full emergence of pottery technologies, and the first beginnings of copper use, and remarkably, strong suggestions of a religious mode associated with it. It is remarkable that the centuries near -8000 and -5500, occur over and over again in the delineation of many studies. The carbon dating of the first Neolithic levels of Jericho , at which we find evidence of a shrine, are in precisely the right time frame. We must suspect a transition near -8000 starting in the Levant and the higher regions of Mesopotamia, slowly networking outward over the a period of two millennia into Northern Iraq, Egypt, South Europe, Crete, the Indus, creating a new type of Neolithic culture, village life, a characteristic religious mode, that will show lingering signs persisting during the following millennia in the transition of Goddess images that begins with civilization.

? ‘ET3,…: We see the first instance of the frontier effect in the notable decline in the first area near the Levant, and the surge of a second stage of Neolithic further east in the Hassuna and Halaaf vicinity, and the rapid spread into southern Mesopotamia from this more northern source in the first third of the new period after ca. -5500. We can’t quite pinpoint a transitional area, but the broad pattern is there. The temple of Eridu is underway by -5000, comparable in terms of centuries to the appearance of the major religions in the classical period from the early transitional sources. The foundation of the coming Sumerian civilization is being laid in an eonic architecture very similar to the European Middle Ages. Greek, Judaic, and other sources generate a new oikoumene, that spreads into Europe and a fertile medievalism that is readied for a modern transition, by eonic jump diffusion. In the same fashion the northern Zagros area generates an early ‘proto-oikoumene’, the Ubaid, spreading south into the sources of the coming Sumerian rapid advance in the next cycle. The picture must be more complex than this, as the spread of the Neolithic reaches Elam, India, China, Egypt, Europe and Africa. But Sumer will be the spearhead of civilization, next to Egypt.

In general, over the whole period from ca. -8000, we see one and the same process of social and technological integration, village, town, city, to be occurring in sequential rhythm. There is a further, barely visible, phase before this, what used to be called the Mesolithic. Thus the so-called Natufians emerge after -10000 in the Levant, and then merge with the full Neolithic after -8000. We then find a period of significant beginnings after a full era over two millennia later from ca. -5500 in a Predynastic Egypt and a proto-Mesopotamian continuity that prepare for the sudden onset of Sumer and the Old Kingdom. Three steps, each with a lesson to be learned, as it were. 

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