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.[i] We come to the great beginning of the civilizational sequence, in reality, more like ‘step 2 or 3’. Sumer is in the ‘mainline’ like later  Israel and, perhaps, Greece , while Egypt springs up in parallel like ‘ET5, China’.

 ‘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. 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.

Leonard Woolley, attempting to find a Sumerian source behind Egyptian civilization, says of the Egyptian period of this transition that it is “not so complete as to amount to a breach of continuity but enough to mark an epoch; the changes are coming in towards the end of the Predynastic period and by the time of ‘Menes’ we have what is virtually a new culture.”[ii]

Dynasty 0 This period of transition produces the perfect symbolism of the emergent state in the Palette of Narmer. “The Naqada III phase c. 3200-3000 is the last phase of the Predynastic period…It was during this period that Egypt was first unified into a large territorial state…”[iii]

The sudden intensification of the late Uruk and the climax of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in the first Dynasty of the Pharaohs are tokens of the crucial period, followed by the emergence of the characteristic and classic forms and achievements of the Sumerian dynastic period and the Old Kingdom of the Pyramid builders.

Our model has recast the issue of ‘civilizations’ in terms of divides, phases, sequential dependency , and diffusion throughout oikoumenes. Instead of evolving civilization, we see an eonic sequence overlaid on these civilizations, as the transition creates a cone of diffusion. And it is here in the wake of Egypt and Sumer that we see the first great (double) oikoumene of antiquity take shape. These two, especially Sumer, will create the first great ‘modernism’ of world history, the point at which so much that we consider basic to our own forms of complex social existence came into being. The whole Toynbean confusion of searching for civilizations disappears, as the secondary constructs, e.g. Indus , arise in the mode of sequential dependency. By definition, only the phase is ‘on time’, the ‘initial conditions’ of mideonic civilization are contingent. If we cannot claim this effect of diffusion, our model is false. Our analysis sends out a challenge, to find exceptions to this sequential dependency effect in everything that arises after -3000 until the next phase after -1200. The only possible candidate, to the author, would be the New World civilizations. As to the New World we must either find, therefore, mideonic diffusion before ‘ET5’, or postulate the birth of a new V-cone.