3.4 The Birth Of Civilization

We suspect, as we head backwards again, the answer will be as before. We can almost guess what we might find. Is there anything resembling an explosive, fast advance period, of consistent novelties, albeit of relative beginnings in a time frame comparable, ca. 2400 years, to our previous case, yet earlier still? There may or may not be a parallel effect of two or more such hotspots in the same time band. We know what to look for, and head for the library, although our data is beginning to thin rapidly. Do the figuring, –600, back 2400 hundred years, –3000 and head for the library.

Somewhere near here someone should be reporting rapid change, or having a discontinuity problem. Let’s zoom in on an innocent Egyptologist. Describing the swift transition from the era of earliest Egypt, Michael Hoffman, in Predynastic Egypt, is driven in some puzzlement to adopt the economic take-off idea of the economist W. W. Rostow as a metaphor to account for the sudden change that produces the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the Pharaoh Menes:

The immediate archaeological problem in explaining the cultural identity of Menes and his state is to account for the sudden embarrassment of riches that characterizes the material culture of Egypt between the Late Gerzean (ca. 3300 B.C.) and Archaic period (ca. 3100-2700 B.C.) in terms of a sophisticated, multifaceted explanation. Professor Renfrew borrows the term ‘take-off point’ from the economist Walter Rostow to characterize the rise of civilization and the proliferation of certain types of artifacts. Over the years a number of propensities develop within a social system, which predisposes it to a really major transformation. When that transformation does occur, it is so thorough as to convey the impression of crossing a critical threshold.[i]

Bull’s eye. Remarkable, to say the least, although our data here is not comprehensive However, the degree of match is too close to be chance. The overall structure of parallel interactive emergence and transitional chronology is in principle identical to what we see in the Axial period.

What about Mesopotamia? In Prehistoric Europe , Philip Van Doren Stern  wrestles explicitly with the evolution/revolution paradox and observes the sudden jump to the first level of civilization in the first hydraulic world of Mesopotamia as it emerged from its mysterious roots of it in the era of the so-called Ubaid and before:

Something happened in Sumer during the fifth millennium B.C., when all the rest of the world was still so primitive that the Sumerians had to make their own way. The initial stages proceeded slowly for a thousand years or more, and then, during the five centuries between 3300 and 2800 B.C., culture accelerated so rapidly that in this brief time villages became cities and cities grew into city-states...Roux[Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, London. 1964,] merely says of this extraordinarily rapid cultural development in Sumer that ‘a close examination reveals no drastic changes in social organization, no real break in architectural or in religious traditions. We are confronted here, not with sudden revolution, but with the final term of an evolution which had started in Mesopotamia itself several centuries before.’ Perhaps. But perhaps he is applying our modern time scale to an age when centuries were equivalent to our decades. For a village to become a city in a few hundred years when there had never been a city anywhere before, is, to put it mildly, something more than ordinary evolution. [ii]

Bull’s eye again. The statement also shows clearly that we are dealing with the puzzle, right on schedule, of relative beginnings. Not the ‘rise of civilization’, as such. The author clearly notes the puzzle of the stream prior to the take-off in the eonic sequence. We will soon see that the observation should be amended to say that (perhaps) ‘something happened in the sixth millennium in the North of Mesopotamia, when, by a replication of one and the same process, the foundations of a prior parent to Sumer were laid.’ It is not too hard to zero in on that earlier case, but before the invention of writing  we will draw no conclusions, armed with a method of relative beginnings that can preempt any need to speculate about still earlier ‘beginnings’.

Note that once again we see parallel interactive emergence, in one and the same fashion as in the Axial age, although here scholars are often attempting to derive the Egyptian from the Sumerian. But even if there were cross-diffusion of some sort the scale of synchronous emergence is too great for any such explanation by derivation. Once again we see the stream and sequence effect in the parallel advance on schedule of two separate, possibly interacting, differential periods. This factor can seem less intuitive than the Axial Age, but that is only because we don’t see what comes before. Parallelism in the Axial era presupposes diffusion from earlier periods, as preparation. Obviously something is missing in our data ca. –5500.

A caveat is required here. What about India and China in this period? We must hold out for a closer study of the period comprising about two or more millennia before the Egyptian and Sumerian breakthroughs. We suspect, however, that an earlier period of Neolithic culture sourcing in the Fertile Crescent is the focal source of the eonic sequence, whatever else is going on elsewhere, and has long since diffused to, at least, India, where it is possible that an earlier Indus should join our parallel account. That, however, seems doubtful. Our account suggests the obvious: diffusion into the Eurasian field, and out pops an Indus civilization, notwithstanding highly developed prior elements of culture and religion. Note the difference. The answer is clear: our eonic sequence is the main thing, if parallel areas are ready they may also be triggered as synchronous companions. At the time of Egypt the field is barely ready, but Egypt takes off in tandem with Sumer.

The question is confused by the issue of Indian religion, which probably goes back to Neolithic times, and is highly sophisticated, from the onset of ‘civilization’—there’s the catch, civilization? This is not quite defined. We mean ‘eonic sequence’. There can be a high degree of culture outside the eonic sequence, but this tends to go nowhere. Our eonic sequence specializes in large-scale integration, generation of infrastructure, the state, ecumenical religions, and their ideologies, and the gestation of civil society, on the way to globalization. Buddhas may go back to the Paleolithic, and are simply bypassed until the eonic sequence goes into its Axial intersection in the next phase. The world never hears of them until the eonic sequence produces its Buddhist package designed to travel outwards. The same questions remain for China. We see the sudden appearance of the Shang in the same diffusion field as the Indus, in the appropriate centuries after our first transition. We can leave the question open.

It is thus clear that archaeology has found the so-far earliest phase of our eonic effect in the necessary, though minimum detail, and the result is so remarkable that we are almost stunned by the simplicity of the pattern. We must grant, to be sure, that our Sumerian and Egyptian transitions still remain thin, and that the evidence at the level of decades, to a half-century, is still lacking. But the overall pattern is directly confirmed. And its elegance is muddied by the obvious messiness of the patterns of advance and diffusion in specific geographical contexts, a factor that makes the core dynamic difficult to observe. Note the way Egyptian civilization produces a sort of infrastructure gigantism near its first third, and that this passes away, and the level of culture is left looking backwards. Note how the city-states of Sumer rapidly pass into the realm of mideonic empire. The last of these is the Assyrian, before the first of the new, the Persian (with its own frontier effect), which aborts and ends by passing its elements into the Judaic stream. The Greek and the Judaic attempt the impossible endrun around empire.

Thus, cities, state formation, and the civilizations with writing suddenly come together in the last centuries before –3000. Many archaeologists have remarked on the rapid emergence of higher civilization , and in fact the phenomenon of threshold crossing is obvious from the contrast of scales, before and after, especially in the case of Egypt. The use of the term ‘birth of civilization’ is conventional here, but requires caution. The beauty of our relative beginnings approach is that it emphasizes what we know by changing the label, yet forces us to consider the continuity behind the discontinuity. We must think the Neolithic should be included in this scheme, if we will once again move backwards. And, we note, we find Toynbee struggling with the inveterate causality problem that haunts our eonic effect. What caused the birth of civilization?

Going backward further, our data starts to become insufficient. The period of Egypt and Sumer, at their ‘beginnings’ near –3000, seem a bit primitive to us now, but constitutes what is probably the greatest transition in human history, the point at which the most basic fundamentals of man’s ‘civil condition’ came into existence over a substrate of previously achieved agricultural life. Substitute bullock carts, a great advance, for freight trains, and ingots of gold for high finance, and we have a massive ‘modernization’ period in the wake of Sumer. And it did so with remarkable speed, and yet in a fashion not contradicting slow evolution. And there is more than a family resemblance to the phase of ‘modernism’ we claim exclusively for the achievements of our own time, if we look at the same five hundred years of the Sumerian emergence, three hundred of rapid advance, and two of stabilizing crystallization after –3000, from its ‘Medieval’ sources in the religiously preoccupied world that came before of the Ubaid, and the Uruk.

We are suspicious of the Neolithic, we are missing something. We can keep on going backwards…