A full description of the birth of civilization in the Near East would
require a work many times the size of the present book. We have
concentrated on the social and political innovations in which the great
change became manifest. These bear most directly on the questions to
which the appearance of the first civilized societies gives rise; yet
they have received less attention than the concomitant changes in the
fields of technology and the arts, the manifestations of religion, or
the invention of writing. In so far as technological and artistic
developments reveal social and political conditions, we have taken them
into account; but we have not attempted to describe them in detail, and
have kept our subject within manageable limits by a somewhat strict
interpretation of the word civilization. While it is true that the terms
“civilization” and “culture” count as synonyms in general usage, and
that every distinction therefore remains arbitrary, there are
etymological reasons for preferences in their use. The word “culture,”
with its overtones of something irrational, something grown rather than
made, is preferred by those who study primitive peoples. The word
“civilization,” on the other hand, appeals to those who consider man in
the first place as _homo politicus_, and it is in this sense that we
would have our title understood.
A question which we have left unanswered is that of origins. The reader
will find that in trimming the ramifications of historical beginnings we
have exposed the trunks rather than the roots of Egyptian and
Mesopotamian civilization. To what extent can their roots be known; what
were the forces that brought them into being? I think that the historian
must deem this question unanswerable. It can but lead him astray in the
direction of quasi-philosophical speculations, or tempt him to give
pseudo-scientific answers. It is the latter alternative which has done
most harm, for time and again such changes as an increase in
food-production or technological advances (both, truly enough,
coincidental with the rise of civilization) have been supposed to
explain how civilization became possible. This misconception bars the
road to a deeper understanding. For Whitehead’s words are valid for past
and present alike:
In each age of the world distinguished by high activity there will be
found at its culmination, and among the agencies leading to that
culmination, some profound cosmological outlook, implicitly accepted,
impressing its own type upon the current springs of action. This
ultimate cosmology is only partly expressed, and the details of such
expression issue into derivative specialized questions ... which
conceal a general agreement upon first principles almost too obvious
to need expression, and almost too general to be capable of
expression. In each period there is a general form of the forms of
thought; and, like the air we breathe, such a form is so translucent,
and so pervading, and so seemingly necessary, that only by extreme
effort can we become aware of it.[1]
It is this effort which the historian cannot shirk, nor is there a short
cut to the understanding of an alien past; but I believe that the
comparative study of parallel phenomena leads most surely to an
elucidation of manifest and implicit form.
I have confined myself to Egypt and Mesopotamia, the cultural centres of
the Ancient Near East; for in the peripheral regions civilization arose
late and was always, to some extent, derivative. Egypt, too, was
influenced by Mesopotamia during its formative period, but without
losing its distinct and highly individual character. This matter of
early cultural contact is of such importance for our problem that I have
discussed the relevant evidence in an Appendix.
The following chapters are expanded versions of lectures delivered at
Indiana University, Bloomington, in the winter of 1948-9, on the Patten
Foundation. I am grateful to Dr. Helene J. Kantor, of the Oriental
Institute, the University of Chicago, for generously providing me with
the drawings for Figures 1 and 4.
H. Frankfort
WARBURG INSTITUTE,
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
17 DECEMBER 1950