We begin in medias res with the Sumerian city-states and the founding of the great dynasties of the Pharaohs, the millennia since the Ice Ages behind us, and no detailed evidence for what we must at once suspect is only the midpoint of this history, starting at the point where we see the first eonic transition majestically evident in Egypt and Sumer, after ca. –3300, with probably the same false equivocation as elsewhere over –3600 to -3300.  

 ‘ET4, Sumer,…, Egypt’ :

This is the first preeminent case of parallel interacting emergence, with considerable evidence of Sumerian influences at the point of take-off. Egypt and Sumer are taken however as independent emergents during phase, with possibly a strong interaction between them, almost as though Egypt were also sequentially dependent on Sumer. But the early roots are too deep for anything but independent emergence. Comparison with the Greek Orientalizing period, and the sudden interactive period of the Judaic Exile  suggest any number or ways to reconcile independence and diffusion. During this first transition, the first urban scale of human settlement, theocratic kingship, the technological organization of agriculture, the embryonic gestation of industrialism, writing, bookkeeping and the maintenance of records, a religious ‘re-formation’ or theocratic neo-formation (and hints of a brief primitive democracy), a managerial revolution with a scribal technocracy, and an information economy, all make their first glorious appearance, as does the first emergence of the dilemmas of hierarchical society, the disposition of the agricultural surplus becoming the determinant of social structure.

    ‘ET4,++…’: From Akkad to the Assyrians… :

As we pass to the world that emerges from this first great period of transition, we enter the first phase of our study of diffusion, and the first and most useful application of our ideas and terminology if, and only if, we have grounds for establishing the relations of diffusion from Egypt and Sumer into the Minoan, Elamite, Indus, Shang, and general Eurasian sphere. The probable inclusion of the Olmec must await resolution of facts of New World diffusion. The corporations entering economy here include the direct descendants of the Sumerians, the nearby Hittites, the world of Ugarit, the Phoenicians, etc,… We can note the rise of sequential civilizations in very close proportions of time and distance after –3000, Indus then Shang, Minoan to Mycenean. The Myceanean and the Ugaritic worlds are two source areas of sequential dependency that are useful counter points to their successors of phase, the Classical Greeks and the Israelites. History records the cultural types, mideonic and ‘switched on’, during phase. It is hard, impossible, to believe that e.g. the Olmec, in the New World is not simplest the furthest and latest manifestation of the cone of diffusion originating in Sumer. The civilizations of the New World are surely, for this reason alone of relative spacing of diffusion and emergence,  children of the this diffusion field.  

 

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