6. Symphony
Of Emergence
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Egypt, Sumer,
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| 6.2 Egypt, Sumer, and The Rise of Civilization | ||||
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Looking at overall world history we suspect that our eonic sequence begins with the Neolithic. Our frontier effect suggests that some region round about the first visible transition zone, most probably Sumer rather than Egypt, will show an earlier transition. In fact we can almost see one further north from the Mesopotamian area, with clear indications of connections to the general Neolithic in the Fertile Crescent. Thus we begin at the halfway mark, to leapfrog quickly through our eonic series. Cities, state formation, and the first intimations of organized technology suddenly come together in the last centuries before -3000. It is hard to assess to what degree this emergence of the State is an historical first here, but the crystallization and advance here are dramatic, as are the first intimations of civil society. The rise of the Dynastic Pharaohs is spectacularly in phase, and a new form is set for millennia. Many archeologists have remarked on the speed of emergence of higher civilization , i.e. our transition, and in fact the phenomenon of thresholding is obvious from the contrast of scales, before and after, especially in the case of Egypt. This, to repeat, is a relative transform, and one can compare it to the rise of the modern versus the medieval European world. Both show high development, but the relative take-off is obvious. We claim something similar here. From its modest Predynastic period, the phenomenon of the Egyptian civilization that we know rises from the desert into its monumental grandeur. In the case of Sumer, we see a nexus of city-states. The key technology is, in many ways, the invention of writing, and the beginning, in the sense of many historians, of ‘history’. We are at the threshold of the Urban Revolution, so-called. We can cite Gordon Childe who notes, in Man Makes Himself: And so by 3000 B.C. the archaeologist’s picture of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus valley no longer focuses attention on communities of simple farmers, but on States embracing various professions and classes. The foreground is occupied by priests, princes, scribes, and officials, and an army of specialized craftsmen, professional soldiers, and miscellaneous laborers, all withdrawn from the primary task of food-production. The most striking objects now unearthed are no longer the tools of agriculture and the chase and other products of domestic industry, but temple furniture, weapons, wheel-made pots, jewelry, and other manufactures turned out on a large scale by skilled artisans. As monuments we have instead of huts and farmhouses, monumental tombs, temples, palaces, and workshops. And in them we find all manner of exotic substances, not as rarities, but regularly imported and used in everyday life. [i] Childe’s delineation of the Neolithic or Agricultural and the Urban Revolutions has drawn a number of criticisms, but it is useful enough. These can be matched to our eonic sequence. The possible independent emergence of agriculture is entirely possible. But the instance in the mainline takes off. There is a suspicious resemblance between the two, for the Urban Revolution is in reality also another agricultural revolution whereby the birth of the structures of the state, and higher civil society, emerge in relation to the regulation and control of the productive surplus in forms of society labeled ‘hydraulic’ in the world of the irrigated civilization we see in Egypt, and Sumer. Look at the rise of the modern, it is an Industrial Revolution, but also still another agricultural revolution. The period of Egypt and Sumer, at their ‘beginnings’ near -3000, constitutes in any case the period of what is probably the greatest turning point 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. And it did so very quickly 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. Note: A relative beginning Our relative beginning shows the parallel interactive emergence of two sources, an, at first, confusing fact. Study the Axial Age examples and note the way the ‘t-stream’ crosses the ‘e-sequence’, as in Greece, to understand the lead ups to these remarkable take-offs in tandem here. Although we strongly suspect the onset of our sequence begins in the Neolithic, the two earlier transitions, on the assumption of monotone sequence, are invisible, and we start in medias res. It is disconcerting to ordinary theoretical tactics to begin with a double start in parallel. It causes a sort of fidget, and efforts to derive the one from the other are unstoppable, but we take this in stride. The paradox goes away as we compare this to the next ‘Axial’ era, and as we study the sources of both in the earlier two millennia. Please note that our thesis is not about ‘quite a lot of innovations somewhere within a millennium about here’ but about highly compressed relative transformations in a frequency sequence, something we see with stunning impact in the later cases. Thus the data should resemble the contrast of medieval and modern times. The Middle Ages were quite sophisticated. But the relative transformation of the rise of the modern is so massive as to be unmistakable. This effect is obvious, especially in Egypt, where the lack of cultural innovation after ca. -2000 haunts its history to the end. Even if we can’t close on rich data at the level of decades to find a divide, we can see the obvious high level fact that the whole system descends a step and never recovers, whether we call that medievalism or not. Thus, as Cyril Aldred notes of Egypt, the institutions of kingship remained ‘frozen at the moment’ of their creation, while the first four dynasties essentially created the forms of the entire Egyptian civilization, “as soon as a solution had been sanctioned…there was no further development.” Much of the Egypt with which we are familiar is from a much later stage. It is thus easy to spot in broad outline the basic factor of relative transformation.[ii] Note: Mideonic trend toward empire Our model highlights at once the gross trend, the curse of civilization, the mideonic drift into empire. In the Sumerian field we see this drift from a remarkable constellation of city-states into empire and consolidation that will proliferate across the Middle East. The whole period resembles the next. Sumerian buried in Akkadian is directly analogous to Latin buried in later languages in the next cycle. The Cuneiform tradition dominates throughout, and the Egyptians never forgot their emergence into the world of the Pharaohs. In Mesopotamia, we see a more characteristic reflection of our unit of analysis concept in the way the ‘civilization’ arising from the transition very soon changes its center of gravity, as the Sumerians bestow ‘cuneiform’ culture on a long series of expanding empires, beginning with the Akkadians. The center of gravity begins to shift, but that is grist for the mill in the eonic model. A common tradition is shared by all the descendants of the first phase, from the Akkadians to the Hittites to the Assyrians. Only with Greece and ‘Israel’ do we see the true eonic transform in action and this simply lifts the next phase out of its sluggish Mesopotamian-Egyptian deep freeze. This culture diffuses widely and, of course, the early world of Canaan, which will spawn the ‘Israel effect’ (Israel/Judah) of the next phase is inside this field of diffusion, a point accurately reflected in the myths of an ‘Abraham’ from Ur.
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