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World History 
And The Eonic Effect
Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution
By  John Landon

The Book

 A Frequency Hypothesis

 

An Eonic Model of World History 

 

 

We have created the foundations of our model, and can now proceed through world history along the mainline of the 'eonic sequence'. Note the way the selectivity of the model is an asset, rather than a liability, for we see that our 'eonic evolution' is an unfolding from a narrow source, or set of parallel sources, expanding outward in a series of oikoumenes, a simple and yet elusively structured result that corresponds in the simplest way to the data of world history. We suspect the source of our sequence in the Neolithic, and begin by a consideration of two possible earlier phases. This projection is not required to make our point, and is left with a question mark, as we begin with the first phase period, the parallel phase of the Mesopotamian and Sumerian streams. Note that this is a relative beginning. To see that, consider the second phase, where we see the sudden phasing in the middle of world history. This divides, for example, Classical Greece from the Mycenaean, one stream two manifestations, very different. We can infer the same for this earlier phase of Egypt and Sumer. 

Note that we have pointedly started our terminology in mid-sequence, and  our account begins with the birth of civilization, nothing of the kind, a period like the modern, a surge on top of a previously well developed Neolithic. Thus, "ET4", is really not the birth of civilization, but a jump to a new stage of this. This thinking can help later with the question of the rise of the modern. We tend to collate two things, medieval Europe and the rise of the modern, in a causal sense. But our model, as we zoom out, and then in, suggests something different. These phases are a function of the whole. 

The New World civilizations are ambiguous, but only because we lack sufficient data to resolve the question. The model sends a strong suggestion that a great deal of unseen diffusion is at work, and that the 'independent evolution' of New World civilizations is misleading. Whether that is true or not, and we should predict that it is true, our model stands as is, and wouldn't be much different if we did find some component of independent evolution in many different places.  The reason is that there is a difference between spontaneous emergent action and general directionality. The sequence starting in the zone of Sumer and before ignites the grand historical convergence of globalization. This is too 'energy intensive' and wouldn't occur twice. 

 The mini-'Axial' age of the Sumerians and Egyptians shows us that there is no unique association with religion in the phasing sequence process. The early form of civilization establishes a beachhead with the basic forms of the state.  

 
 The Birth of Civilization
 

Just as we pass the world of the ziggurats and pyramids, at the ‘start’ of our pattern, we can flashback to the greater dawn of cultural history after the Ice Ages to consider the elements brought to the beginnings of civilization.[i]  To start in this period without the experience of the later transitions is likely to be confusing, for what we must find is very specific and beyond the resolving power of current archaeological data, and it must show correct periodization, without stretching dates. Further, we are liable to make the assumption that the pattern observed in the later eras logically requires an extension of identical structure to the previous periods. There is no a priori reason why it should. A long step-up from ca. -8000 or before to a higher take-off plateau of self-organization would seem more logical, but the evidence seems to be emerging for an extension to the cyclical version we see in historical times, starting after the end of the Ice Age. We see our Neolithic breaking into two pieces, as suspected. We see ‘religion’ crystallizing in our second period, in the faint evidence of Jericho and Catal Huyuk. The next era will see the temple complexes of Eridu. Religion, whatever we mean by this, will already be ancient by the time of the Sumerian breakthrough, very much as in the Christian Middle Ages  leading to a ‘relative reformation’ after 1500. It is very hard to put such a long sequence of religious history in correct perspective.

As we look at the nature of our problem overall, and the emerging picture of the Near East from the earliest times, the broad rolls of at least two antecedent e-cycles begin to become evident, but without the solid data for the transitional intervals themselves. Behind the first visible transition, then, so aptly symbolized by the unification of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms of Egypt under the aegis of Pharaonic theocracy and the emergence of the Sumerian city-states, increasing historical research is beginning to fix for us the emergence of two, perhaps three earlier periods before the point that we egregiously call the emergence of civilization, not the transitions, but broad humps of cultural advance, the ‘emergence from ground’ in each period, finally leading up to the great breakthrough around -3000, which is then, in fact, no more than the midpoint of organized human community. More conclusively, we catch the Ubaid culture rising from -5500 in the period after –5000. This is about the period of the Roman Empire in the later stage six hundred years from a transitional period. The first great religion, as a construct of civilization, is emerging in fashion that will make its condition at the rise of the State one of great antiquity. That ‘religion’ should be well on its way before the emergence of the state would seem a strong indication of the longer unity of the latter with the earlier Neolithic.

This says nothing about the possibility of independent ‘neolithics’ emerging elsewhere, or partial breakthroughs before. We should know a fad for independent cultural evolution when we see one. All we can say is that, as far as we can tell, this source takes off and finally climaxes in civilization. A number of recent speculative books have been attempting to stretch backward the sources of India  as a candidate for the source of civilization.[ii]  Remembering that our suggestion is of two plateaus of Neolithic diffusion, ‘ET2, …3’, we can guess that the early Neolithic has spread to India from the Fertile Crescent after ca. –7000, but before the Sumerian takeoff. And this example reminds us that the first source, Jericho-Levant, is always likely to swamp the rest. The rising scale of effects in the emerging V-cone soon becomes very complex, and can create confusion, the more so if the ‘t-stream’ is confused with the eonic sequence. Much later we find the mixture of goddess worship and patriarchal myth fused in a fashion that is difficult indeed to sort out, although we suspect this layering relates to what is inferred from this era. It is, in general, not the evolution of this t-stream, but the effects of phase and sequential dependency as diffusion that are important.

Thus, our examination of the eonic effect begins with Egypt and Sumer, for this is simply when our fulsome data becomes available, and this because of the invention of writing, in the same fashion as an older view of history finds this period to be the ‘beginning’ of civilization. This should make us suspicious, for our pattern suggests, not the beginning of civilization, but simply the ‘next’ eonic interval initiated in a broad transition driving two zones that are ready ‘over the top’; and this forces us to ask, transitions from what? Our sequence is transcultural from the first, showing jump diffusion: one culture has the focus, then the process moves to a next culture somehow with all the achievements of the previous, a point manifest in the Old Testament of the Hebrews. Let us keep in mind that from -5500 to -3000, from North to Southern Mesopotamia, is a period as long and probably as complex as that between Ancient Israel, the Medieval Cathedrals and the Protestant Reformation, disregarding the tremendous expansion of scale. The eonic structure and religious change, abstracted of content, is so close that it is ‘proof’ in the author’s mind at least, that there is an additional earlier transition lurking in the Hassuna-Halaaf zone ca. -5500. But consider the modern case, many parallel worlds suddenly slump, while one goes over the top. There are many possible parallel developments, but only two breakthrough areas to the level of higher civilization.   

?  ‘ET1,…ET2,…:

The rough correlation of the onset of the Neolithic in the Levant is unmistakable, as is the appearance of a first ‘city’ very early in the site of Jericho. The broad correlation is so vague however that we can only wonder at the nature of any transitional phase in such primitive circumstances. This period is too speculative to be included in our full data set. First, during the period -10000 to -8000, the so-called Mesolithic, there is the slow passage from earlier nomadic, hunter-gatherer, existence to a mixed mode of proto-agricultural discovery and experimentation. Even this earlier stage is a discovery and a long learning process. And there is a strong suggestion that our ‘cultural integration’, that is the assembly into community, precedes and induces the Neolithic, rather than the other way around. Groups begin to settle down in communities, the harvesting of the wild grains and the domestication of animals precede the emergence of the Neolithic proper. This is the Natufian period with its traces in the Levant, when the exploration of seminal possibilities of agriculture is emerging.[iii]

During the period from -8000 to -5500, we enter the period of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, visible in the broad focal band of the Levant, Western Asia, then later in the very advanced culture arising in Catal Huyuk, followed by the full emergence of pottery technologies, and the first beginnings of copper use, and remarkably, strong suggestions of a religious mode associated with it. It is remarkable that the centuries near -8000 and -5500, occur over and over again in the delineation of many studies. The carbon dating of the first Neolithic levels of Jericho, at which we find evidence of a shrine, are in precisely the right time frame.[iv]  We must suspect a transition near -8000 starting in the Levant and the higher regions of Mesopotamia, slowly networking outward over a period of two millennia into Northern Iraq, Egypt, South Europe, Crete, the Indus, creating a new type of Neolithic culture, village life, a characteristic religious mode, that will show lingering signs persisting during the following millennia in the transition of Goddess images that begins with civilization. We cannot fudge these earlier transitions. We must find, be on the lookout for, specific short term ‘transitional areas’ in  the correct time-frame.

 

?  ‘ET3,…:

We see the first instance of eonic jump diffusion in the notable decline in the first area near the Levant, and the surge of a second stage of Neolithic further east in the Hassuna and Halaaf vicinity, and the rapid spread into southern Mesopotamia from this more northern source in the first third of the new period after ca. -5500. We can’t quite pinpoint a transitional area, but the broad pattern is there. The temple of Eridu is underway by -5000, comparable in terms of centuries to the appearance of the major religions in the classical period from the early transitional sources. The foundation of the coming Sumerian civilization is being laid in an eonic architecture very similar to the European Middle Ages. Greek, Judaic, and other sources generate a new oikoumene, that spreads into Europe and a fertile medievalism that is readied for a modern transition, by eonic jump diffusion. In the same fashion the northern Zagros area generates an early ‘proto-oikoumene’, the Ubaid, spreading south into the sources of the coming Sumerian rapid advance in the next cycle. The picture must be more complex than this, as the spread of the Neolithic reaches Elam, India, China, Egypt, Europe and Africa. But Sumer will be the spearhead of civilization, next to Egypt.

 

In general, over the whole period from ca. -8000, we see one and the same process of social and technological integration, village, town, city, to be occurring in sequential rhythm.[v]  There is a further, barely visible, phase before this, what used to be called the Mesolithic. Thus the so-called Natufians emerge after -10000 in the Levant, and then merge with the full Neolithic after -8000. We then find a period of significant beginnings after a full era over two millennia later from ca. -5500 in a Predynastic Egypt and a proto-Mesopotamian continuity that prepare for the sudden onset of Sumer and the Old Kingdom. Three steps, each with a lesson to be learned, as it were.

We cannot arrive at any exact conclusions about the onset of the Neolithic in relation to our model unless we can answer questions of the independent discovery of agriculture. We must be (heretically, with respect to current paradigms) suspicious in favor of universal Neolithic diffusion from this Middle Eastern region, but its independent discovery in Northern China and the New World, and possible other sources, has been claimed by many, and is entirely compatible with our model, whose exploitation of the clear synchronies of a world-system, experiences few difficulties if the independent discovery of agriculture can be established. But as in all cases, the invention is one thing, and its expansion or idling is another. This would strike many as an egregious restatement of the obvious. But our discussion shows strongly the structure of diffusion with respect to the elements of higher civilization. Along with the phenomenon of jump diffusion. We should be vigilant to the possibility that universal diffusion even of the Neolithic is true. And we should be suspicious of the rough two thousand year gap between the onset of agriculture in the mid-east and its appearance elsewhere. After tens of thousands of years, suddenly within one and a half eonic periods, agricultural breakthroughs are global. Why is this? The whole phenomenon is world-wide within a narrow time-frame after -8000 and in a cone of clear sequencing originating in the Middle East. Our approach however is compatible with the discovery and loss of agriculture twenty times since –100000. Thus it does not follow that this would be the absolute source, but only a relative amplification at the source of a V-cone. Our model simply cannot answer the question in the abstract, for its data encompasses synchronous emergence, compatible with independent emergence of agriculture in several zones, and the eonic independence of technological creativity, which is again a possible argument in favor of the independent discovery of agriculture, if we can assume that the first stages of agricultural discovery are ‘technological’, which evidently they are.

The issue is related to our technological principle, that distinguishes between human ingenuity and the greater scale of cultural integration, free action and eonic determination. Thus there are two processes at work. Our approach suggests that there is the intuitive and slow discovery of agricultural knowledge and its rapid integration of independent agricultural discovery into a cultural matrix, a slight but important difference, and that this occurs in a focused zone during a transition, but with possible interacting parallel sources, the very description of the Neolithic in Southwest Asia. This means that any number of areas might be entering into the first phase of semi-agricultural discovery, short of the full Neolithic, which is eonically determined. So far a speculation only. Thus, as our discussion of technical invention has suggested, the invention of agriculture may occur spontaneously as a factor of human creative discovery. It is the integration of this into a social structure that might show signs of eonic influence, at least in the area of Southwest Asia, connected as so often by a religious advance of some kind. This fact should make us very suspicious indeed, not that the discovery of agriculture is unique, but that the higher forms of Neolithic culture associated with this advance only occurred once, in the Middle East. The more so as all the elements of the later civilization appear to expand from this area in a later second wave. Be this as it may, the forms of higher civilization do spring from this first Neolithic zone and soon spread through the entire Old World.

We would never claim anything but random  slow evolution induced by demographic, climactic or material conditions for the developments of this period, if we had not the evidence otherwise from the later periods of cultural evolution. Even at the later stages when maturing historical awareness, and a more explicit creativity, effect the rate of change, we find the great periods of cultural foundation during the transitions. How much more likely this should be for the dispersed elements of hunter-gatherers groping during the early period moving toward the first techniques of agricultural existence. Thus the older distinction of the Neolithic and Urban Revolution , more or less accurate as far as it goes, yields to a unified interpretation as integration whose fulcrum is the organization and socialization around new technologies. The terms ‘civilization’, ‘history versus prehistory’, ‘neolithic’, ‘urbanizing’, could be set aside to show one ‘continuous’ process of V-cone jump stages operating on a expanding scale from the Paleolithic to the great breakthroughs after -3000.

This is suggestive, but, of course, not proven. Although this earlier period remains unclear, we have enough to see that the relative beginning in Egypt and Sumer in tandem is not mysterious and springs from direct sources in an expansion within a V-cone. All we need is the long run of healthy ‘medievalism’, religious and agricultural, that flowers in the breakthrough, ‘ET4, Sumer’. It is interesting to consider the evidence of earlier eonic structure from the indications of a mideonic plateau effect. As James Mellaart notes, in a description that almost implicitly maps out the period ET3++:

At the end of the Early Chalcolithic period, then, let us say ca. 5000 BC., we find that throughout the greater part of the Near East all the requirements for the birth of civilization were present...Nevertheless, the expected birth of civilization did not take place. It was delayed for nearly another millennium and a half and when it did come it was not in the areas which had hitherto been most prominent, but in the dismally flat lands of S. Iraq and a little later in Egypt, areas which until then had been of little or no importance. Why was this so?[vi]

Does this sound familiar? Once again we see an arrest after the sudden burst of change, the eonic falloff and downturn, given an interesting interpretation by Childe, with a clear suggestion of a two-step rise to civilization. The real beginning of civilization then would seem to be as well the emerging Ubaid culture springing from a likely transition to the North of the next zone of advance in the South, Sumer.[vii]  Note that Egypt is likely to have been already in a diffusion field from as early as ca. –5500 or before, and could have, indeed, been fed from a number of distinct sources well before its spectacular emergence as a first civilization. A similar statement should probably be made about, for example, the world of megalithic Britain. Wasn’t this an emergence of civilization? Probably not, but we don’t need to answer, because it has no relation to our V-cone, unless fed from a transition near –5500. Our system doesn’t control all its consequences or generate the full potential of free action. Transitions are expensive and need long connection, and fast action. We see the way the V-cone keeps a direction, even as its generation of relatively contingent progeny becomes more and more complex.[viii]

 

  ‘ET4,…’: 

Transition to the State

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.[ix]  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’. Careful reflection on this eonic architecture resolves a number of paradoxes, including the obvious ‘wild goose chase’ of earlier hyperdiffusionism. The sources of Egypt can easily be double, or triple, if we see the difference of timbre (t-stream) and eonic sequence: sources of the Neolithic can, in this system, reach from ‘ET3’, while the ‘African flavor’, pointed to, however accurately, by some, is easily explainable as side flow into a transitional zone. A number of recent authors have attempted an Afrocentric interpretation of Egyptian, indeed Greek, origins. But we can see that the prime source is the band of the Fertile Crescent, with the Egyptian phase rising parallel to the Sumerian in fashion resembling the classical parallelism. Our terms are those of phase as ‘parallel interactive emergence’, there is no absolute focus on Egypt or Sumer. Indeed, the world of Elam is nearly a third in the zones of first civilization, with a question mark about India ca -3000.[x]  In fact both should probably be considered sequential. This synchronous parallelism is the strangest part of our thesis, and the most questionable: our phases are functions of time with parallel independent, but possibly, interacting evolutions. It is as hard to avoid this here as in the classical phase. Those emerging just behind, have a different character, very quickly. These cones of diffusion are a great clue, and strong evidence in and of themselves. It is the classical period, where we see exactly this, that emboldens us to take this approach. The factor of sequential dependency is one to reckon with if we are skeptical of the homogeneity of civilizational advance. A good example is to compare the Indus civilization, mideonic, with Buddhism, (virtually) in phase yet not even an infrastructure. The first, a vast nexus of cities, disappears. The latter, a group of monks with begging bowls, diffuses all over Asia. Thus, Elam, the Indus, the Shang, the Minoans, should be taken as the downfield in the field of dependent sequentiality, as the cone of diffusing civilization spreads outward in space in proportion to time.[xi]  We have one statement to make here, after which one is better returned to the treatments of specialists: this phase sets up the first tidal wave of the diffusion boundary, civilization. Until after –900, all the descendants are well inside this sub-V-cone, a point made evident by the example of the last, the Assyrians, no group of Gilgameshes.[xii]

 ‘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 was 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.

After the period of rapid acceleration and the crossing of the divide, we see the emergence of the early dynastic period in Sumer and the first and second dynasty in Egypt, each roughly correlated with the first thrust of the new from ca. -3000 to -2700. From this period the seeds appearing in the transition (e.g. the earliest glyphic use of ‘writing’ begins to resemble true cuneiform, etc,..) begin to crystallize in the Traditions that will set the tone and timbre of all the centuries to come. There is a slow falloff after the first few centuries, very noticeable in Egypt. By the New Kingdom, the Pyramid age is a distant memory. Needless to say this is the onset of a long period: by the end of second millennium, the use of Sumerian is as distant as Latin or abstruse as Greek to medieval Europeans. The comparison is apt, for it is clearer, as we look back, that there is a unity across the 2400 period until after -600, than it is in the classical period where our division of ancient, medieval, and modern still holds sway, and the parallel emergents blend together, The division near the fall of the Roman Empire is only secondary, while that near 1500 to 1800 is the more fundamental.

As Cyril Aldred notes, 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.”[xiii]

 ‘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 Mycenaean 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 the simply 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 V-cone. This does not subtract from their achievement in any way.

 

We have already noted the observations on the speed of transition. 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.”[xiv]  “Overnight, as it were, Mesopotamian civilization crystallizes. The fundamental pattern, the controlling framework within which Mesopotamia is to live its life, formulate its deepest questions, evaluate itself and evaluate the universe for ages to come, flashes into being, complete in all its main features”.[xv]  C.G. Starr in A History of the Ancient World, traces the steady development from the Ubaid and Uruk and describes the sudden change in the period just before -3000 by noting that in history there are “revolution s as well as slow eons of evolution; one of the greatest explosions now took place and affected virtually all phases of life in an amazing, interconnected forward surge.” Walter Emery  notes:

 

At a period approximately 3400 years before Christ, a great change took place in Egypt, and the country passed rapidly from a state of Neolithic culture with a complex tribal character to one of well-organized monarchy…

At the same time the art of writing appears, monumental architecture and the arts and crafts develop to an astonishing degree, and all the evidence points to the existence of luxurious civilization. All this was achieved within a comparatively short period of time for there appears to be little or no background to these fundamental developments in writing and architecture.[xvi]

 

We could not feel the same degree of confidence in ascribing any character of ‘divide’ to the year ca. –3000 (it is directly in front of us as the transition itself), and yet we do see the emergence of the dynastic periods, with their character of realization rather than generation, cluster just after this more fuzzy division point. Our approach is ‘up in the air’ in one way, but very exact in another. Consider the sources of the ‘involutionary myth’ of Pharaonic theocracy, a first great instance of ‘cgfxing’ (involutionary mythology) relative to a transition, that is so notable in the downfield of ‘ET5, Israel ’. The relations of phase and sequential dependency are very strong evidence, the latter in the pattern of diffusion sufficient to organize the data of empire all the way to the era of Israel. Soon, from the Sumerian city states, the scale tips toward world civilization at this period, the real birth of globalism, in the first successor, the Akkadians. The Sumerian transition in many ways resembles the modern in its expansive character, compared with the more concentrative classical phase that will invest so much in regeneration of religion. In the spiral emergence of so many eonic productions, it should be the early Sumerian city-states that produce the first intimations of ‘democracy’, soon to be swamped by the integrating force of the first type of the Universal Empire.

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.[xvii]  Although we find nothing in this early transition that we can match to the exact generation of the divide ca -3000, nor even feel absolute confidence in the chronologies established for the early dynasties, we are on solid grounds in calling the period from within -3100 to -2900 the average interval for the emergence of a truly fundamental passage across a boundary into a new stage of human culture, in both Sumer and Egypt. It is proven by the backtrack of the cone of diffusion from the world of Mesopotamia, and the emergence of the characteristic tradition and sequential dependency effects. The footprints lead back to just after this period and stop.[xviii]  The coming into existence of this cone of diffusion is what establishes the period in a satisfactory way.

The period is misleadingly called the beginning of the Bronze age. This, as we have been at pains to point out, confuses the techno-sequence and the transition, that does indeed accelerate Bronze technology, in Sumer, although Egypt moves much more slowly into full Bronze technology. The development of metallurgy proceeds at its own pace, preceding the passage to civilization, rapidly expanding after -3000, turning into an Iron Age quite before the next great period, before -1200, diffusing in a pattern independent of the eonic cycle . The eonic pumping of bronze technology is one of the clearest cases of the separate mechanisms of development in action. It is the first transition to urbanization that intensifies the technology. The transitions are no more than accelerants of these processes to an almost industrial scale. The sequence of Metal Ages needs to be laid to rest as a strong correlate with the intensive acceleration of culture. Not only Bronze, but most of the other metallic substances in common use by man experience a rapid expansion of use. James Muhly in a study of metallurgy, especially Bronze, in the Third Millennium calls the rate of change in metal technique astounding as evidenced by the example of gold work that is virtually nonexistent before -3000, and yet reaches a tremendous degree of sophistication by -2600 as evidenced by the royal tombs at Ur.

The period of phase creates a boundary of potential types that is in principle not binding, but in practice a closed world until –600. The overwhelming nature of the sequential dependency is a function of consciousness, not only of knowledge, and it binds the system into a whole that is independent of its boundaries. Even with all of our historical research it is hard for a modern mind to keep clear the generative sequence from ‘ET6’. In theory we could act without sequential dependency, in practice we drone on with defunct editorialese written as pieces of 48. In these earlier instances, records were hardly being kept. Instead of cycles of civilization we see dynastic cycles inside an eonic cycle generating a cone of diffusion, soon to become a recognizable early form of a ‘world civilization’.[xix]  Lonely sages, the early Abrahams and Zarathustras, already see ahead, but the cast of the first form of civilization is set.

To repeat, the purpose of our ‘cyclical’ theory has been to recast the issue of ‘civilizations’ in terms of divides, phases, sequential dependency , and diffusion throughout oikoumenes. Instead of cycles of civilization, we can consider the expansive phase of focal advance to create and enforce a cone of diffusion that will spread across Eurasia. 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.[xx]

The rise of civilization in the first phase often seems a contradiction to us, if we persist in linear continuity, for we are stuck with the ‘first step, wrong step forever’ paradox that must haunt any system that is deprived of feedback. Slavery, warfare, class division, social ideology, the very nature of civilization is at risk from eonic amplification and mideonic deviation. Without a feedback system, it is a hopeless venture. A good example is this amplification of warfare brought about by the rise of the state, whatever its earlier Paleolithic status.  The other is the issue of slavery. At this early period, the issue of slavery is still inchoate, with an ambiguous overlap with the prisoner of war. Thus it is in part misleading to consider the ‘dialectic of master and slaves’ as the motor of history. There is no evolution of civilization from slavery to freedom, for slavery amplifies as mideonic pathology restored by eonic feedback. This is a caution against the plausible, suggestive, but flawed idea of a ‘dialectic of stages’. And yet we can see the obvious way one might consider such thinking in the triple progression of phase periods.

[i] Ascent of Civilization: The Archaeology of Early Humans (London: Collins, 1984), by John Gowlett. Patterns in Prehistory: Humankinds First Three Million Years (NY: Oxford, 1984), by R.J. Wenke, Farming in Prehistory (NY: St. Martin’s, 1975), by Barbara Bender, From Foraging to Agriculture (Phil.: Univ. of Penn., 1989), by Donald Henry, James Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East, and Catal Huyuk (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1965), James Mellaart, David Harris, The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia (1996), The Early History of the Ancient Near East 9000-2000 B.C.(Chicago: Chicago, 1988), Hans Nissen, The Old World: Early Man to the Development of Agriculture, ed. Robert Stigler, The Emergence of Civilization (NY: Routledge, 1990), by Charles Maisels, The Ancient Near East (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1971), by W. Hallo and W. Simpson, Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization, by J. Hawkes and L. Woolley, Charles Redman, The Rise of Civilization (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman,1978).

 

[ii] Cf. George Feuerstein et al., In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (Wheaton, Ill:, Quest, 1995), Chapter 8, “The Dawn of Indic Civilization: The Neolithic town of Mehrgarh”

 

[iii] A transition to the Natufian itself is the suggestion of new studies, such as Donald Henry’s From Foraging to Agriculture: The Levant at the End of the Ice Age (Phil.: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1989). Remarkably, the author details two of his own ‘transitions’ for us with the identical indicated time periods, the first near -10,500, for the development from simple to complex foraging, and the second near -8000, to the Food Producing phase of the Neolithic proper that we have been discussing. This is almost too good to be true, data that must give one pause indeed. Could this rhythm be continuous from -40000 or beyond? We won’t speculate a bit further. The distinction in Henry’s outline is based on the factor of mobility. A first form of ‘organized’ sedentary culture would seem to be the lead-in foundation for the sudden emergence of the truly Neolithic that becomes evident by the beginning of the eighth millennium. The problem the author has is the confusion of phases and areas that surge and lag, overlap and crisscross. The discussion assumes that a unified advance must be discernible over an indicated broad area. But everything we have seen suggests that small fragmentary areas break off and advance past their surroundings that lag behind them. A sudden spearheading from pure Paleolithic to something like an early phase of Natufian is not something that we should reject out of hand. And the concordance with our dates is suggestive indeed.

[iv] James Mellaart, “The Beginning of Village and Urban Life” in The Dawn of Civilization (NY: Dawn of Civilization, 1961), p.55, Jacquetta Hawkes, in History of Mankind, p. 222. Cf. Also, K. Kenyon, Digging up Jericho, J. Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East, H. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East.

 

[v] For a discussion of the term ‘civilization’ in relation to the sequence ‘village, town, city’, cf. Sir Leonard Woolley, “The Beginnings of Civilization”, p. 359, in History of Mankind, Volume I, Part II., 1963.

 

[vi] Dawn of Civilization (NY: F. Ungar Pub Co, 1968), Stuart Piggott, p.62.

 

[vii] It is interesting that Childe, in Man Makes Himself (NY: New American Library, 1951), attempts to pinpoint “The Acceleration and Retardation of Progress”, in a chapter by that name, that occurs after the creative period around -3000. His claim is that there is a sudden retardation in progress due to the arising of an inherent dilemma in the very coming into being of the urban civilization, this because of the arising of a class structure in which the practical inventions of working men are stymied by the sudden subordination to systems of hierarchical control. Thus he finds that the two millennia before the Urban Revolution had made impressive gains, whereas the period after the Urban Revolution, from -2600 to -600 was comparatively stultified. He attempts to conclude, “One partial explanation for such arrested growth may be detected in internal contradictions evoked within the societies by the revolution itself.”

 

[viii]  The Genesis of Early Religion The relation of religion and civilization is complex, although our eonic phasing clarifies its confusion by distinguishing ‘t-stream’ entry and the amplification during phase frequently seen. The point is that relative phasing allows the content of culture to enter sideways, so to speak, and not be the dynamical descendant of the first era, although this has more influence than we think, a point to remember if puzzled by the tenacity of Mariology. An example of this is the entry of Buddhism and Jainism onto the world stage, relative to ‘ET5’, although their sources are simply unclear, probably predating the Aryan invasions, after which their blend with Vedism appears to make them seem Indo-European. This generates the sense of ‘revelation’ from this period, another example being the ‘Zoroaster’ thought to have lived ca. –600 and the real Zarathustra who lived earlier. In the same way we see that Canaanite t-streams remorph in phase, from which emerges eventually the world of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But what is religion? We cannot quite claim high ground from modern secularism to ‘analyze’ religion. Nor can we disentangle the issue from the disposition toward the ‘state’.

These ‘re-formations’ make us curious to move backwards. The interaction of the early goddess-worship, Indo-European and Semitic polytheism, and the transition of these to patriarchal monotheism is one of the most confusing aspects of historical study. It is mostly an effect of the intersection of Indo-European, and Semitic, nomadisms with our second phase. We will allow ourselves one speculative venture not connected with our basic analysis, but in an area where our thinking can perhaps clarify the confusion over an early ‘matriarchy’, that has continued ever since the works of Bachofen. The idea that Greek religion, for example, shows an overlay of earlier goddess-oriented religion, perhaps with a Neolithic source, overlaid with Indo-European polytheism is a view that is frequently rebutted, and yet in broad outlines makes a great deal of sense. We need not take a position in such a short treatment. The issue is a scholarly swamp. But in our minimalist treatment of early religion, we have one idea to contribute to this issue: the period ‘-8000 to -5500’ is the natural gestation point for an entity that we tend to call ‘religion’ in relation to a social context (i.e. ‘organized’ religion), as a relative beginning of elements that show artifacts going back much earlier. But this ‘relative beginning’ effect happens again after –5500, yielding the first organized proto-catholic goddess-oriented religion associated with agriculture that is still viable at the period of the birth of civilization. Our basic point is that the beginning of ‘religion’ and of ‘civilization, ET4’, in the sense of the civilizationalists, are ‘out of sync’.

This leaves ‘ET2++’ as the vague ‘beginning’ of socializing ‘religion’, by a process of elimination, one can’t be sure. This chronology means the earlier era is too soon, and the next era, is already comparatively advanced, as the organized temple complexes in Mesopotamia suggest. In fact variants of it are probably apparent in the Neolithic cultures outstanding in later times. This early spirituality promoted as ‘matriarchy’ is probably a phantom, and one made to look edenic in relation to what occurred later, entering into the theories of Engels and issues of family and private property, which are beyond the means of our method to solve. It should more naturally be seen as the first embryonic phase of all that came later, granting its primordial inspiration in some Paleolithic world of the Venus figurines. In any case the era of the rising Neolithic is the natural ‘relative beginning’ gestation period of ‘religion’, still bearing the signs of a Paleolithic ‘mother goddess’ as it begins to be transformed into a structure of Neolithic life. The point is that this should be the real Axial Age. In fact, the basic idea is that religion is simply fretted around the sequence of phases, as the periods of many, but not all, of its fundamental advances. There is no intrinsic connection, as such, but the transitions morph all in their path.

Whatever we are to conclude, we are stuck quite naturally in this model with ‘flowarounds’, later traces as late as the early Minoan culture, still evident perhaps in the undercurrents of Greek religion, to say nothing of their clear presence from the first in the historically recoverable Sumerian and Egyptian corpus, finally Mariology resurfaces in the ‘ET5, Israel’ descendants. Because of the conservatizing effect of religious feeling, the eonic emergents are often remixed with these flowarounds. The religion of Isis reappears in classical antiquity, then in Christian mariology, to the consternation of Judaic purists. In the first era, ‘ET2++’, the sudden evidence of shrines, goddesses in sites such as Jericho or Catal Huyuk,, although ambiguous, hints at a form of spiritual culture that is both local and regional, in a fashion that we have forgotten, perhaps not totally unlike the decentralized and disparate Hinduism that we see to this day in India. The great cone of diffusion spreading from Sumer and Egypt does not quite overtake this earlier stratum and it constitutes the one partial exception to the construct of sequential dependency that we claim, as of -3000. As we track it backwards, we come to this period, and stop.

As so often in the ages to come, we might suspect a ‘religious driver’, or a glue-factor such as that provided by the rise of the monotheisms in the later eras. It is a very natural suggestion, if only we do not let ourselves become entranced by wild claims of some primordial Golden Age of Matriarchal utopia. Here, we might reflect that future men, told of a religion of love called ‘Christianity’ might scoff on the grounds that Christian history shows few signs of such an emotion. But such a religion did exist as symbolism! Perhaps the symbolism of matriarchal divinity is the net result of the spiritual sourcing of this first era of religious emergence in a Neolithic goddess orientation. Asking ourselves the question, what is the later eonic evidence for the sources of religion, and having seen them, ask again, could a similar eonic structure account for the traces of later religion in early Sumer, early and later India, etc,…? Thus our model has suggested, and has some reasonable evidence, that agricultural discovery and its cultural integration are two different processes, the former capable of multiple independent discovery, the latter a phenomenon more typical of a localized eonic transition, perhaps associated with the rise of the first villages or towns. And by an extension of this idea, we can suspect that the factor of cultural integration might be associated with a goddess-based spirituality of some sort. This would be a simple solution to a complex issue, if we can find any grounds for it, and a prime source, geographically speaking, for its emergence. We can indeed! Recent feminist historians exploring theories of an early matriarchal Goddess culture connected with the Neolithic transition have attempted just this. These authors may be serendipitously describing the fruits of this earlier transition, or the resulting religious mode that arose from it.

Thus, in The Myth of the Goddess, by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, stemming from the works of Gimbutas, and others, we have a suggestive description of a broad cultural formation of the type so reminiscent, in a sort of reverse video, of later religious culture of the patriarchal type. The point is confusing because in historical terms, after -600, we see the replacement or abstraction of Indo-European and Semitic myth-structures, whose sources are different, with the new type of patriarchal monotheism. We tend to think of the Indo-European and Semitic constructs as some primitive substrate transcended by monotheistic advance. Perhaps. But these latter are elements brought from the outside during their entry from nomadic tribalism into the Mesopotamian integrator zone. But there is this earlier strain before these, that emerges before the rise of city-state ‘civilization’ itself. One can imagine the difficulty of some future historian attempting to claim that new religious monotheisms suddenly emerged after -600 from a flagship group of Israelites, and then spread rapidly throughout an entire eon. And that’s the point, historical evidence suggests the probability of this form of religious emergence, in a tempo of 2400 years, recycling and reblending and recreating what went before. As the authors suggest, in The Myth of the Goddess, “The picture that is emerging is of a single cultural matrix that underlies and relates all these different areas to each other” in a broad zone from the Balkans to world of the Indus. A ‘unified cultural matrix’, matriarchal or not, is exactly what we suspect, and is a precise description of an ‘unorganized’ religion, for example, and is certainly a candidate for eonic start-up, as a spearhead zone generates the expansion of a cultural type. It is not unlikely, highly explanatory, but unfortunately not yet proven. Our study as a whole shows that it is not impossible or unreasonable to claim the rapid and sudden arising of a seed religious mode in a very brief transitional time-frame. ‘ET5, Persian /Israel -> Judaism, Christianity’ shows an exact model of how this can happen, albeit in a patriarchal mode. The list of transitions shows that every period of transition reveals the elements of a religious ‘re-formation’ or ‘neo-formation’. This doesn’t mean that it happened during an ‘ET2, Levant, Anatolia,…’, but it is remarkable that anyone should make such claims at all, such as those made for this Goddess religion, in exactly the right time-frame. We may not care to accept these theories of a blissful ‘golden age’ of maternal religion a backward projection, but it is incorrect to disregard the blend and transition-from in, for instance, the Greek religion and the passage out of polytheism of the monotheisms. And we should be mindful that some such religious factor might have been decidedly less rosy than we imagine. Bloody sacrifice is still the preoccupation of primitive men in this period. And it would be interesting if we could track the true source of the religious passage beyond human and animal sacrifice that gathers steam in ‘E4’, and becomes the achievement of all the religious cultures of ‘E5’. That its real source is much earlier, cannot be rejected out of hand. Proponents of a ‘once and future’ goddess theme should be wary of what they are about. It is a dangerous symbolism.

We might adopt a minimalist version, and make it a question: how do we project backwards from the Greek Artemis, the Cretan matriarchy, the Indian Goddesses? Where did all these elements come from? It is interesting, finally, that these speculations attempt to sort out two forms of claimed matriarchal spirituality, an utterly ancient one stretching all the way back to -25000 and beyond, and a recent version  suddenly growing out of this during the Neolithic period. Let us conclude by saying that this gives us, not anything final or certain, but a possible indication of what to be on the look-out for, as the scale of research gives us its difficult-to-interpret evidence. And we should keep in mind the dangers of jumping to conclusions about the relation of emergence of ground phenomena in relation to those of transition, which is an exact and difficult requirement. As we will see from ‘ET5, India’, the Hindu emergence did not come from a Hindu transition. The earlier phase was something different.

The myth of civilization is born, and so is the myth of the Golden Age. This latter, so much the pre-occupation of ideological, and conservative, longings, can be understood very simply if we can but strip away the exorbitant, nearly mystical, claims made for it, and see it, not unlike the way Hesiod saw it, as a suspicion, no more, that civilization replaced one set of hardships with another, and that the early agricultural communities in the great phase of the Neolithic may well have known periods and places of stable and contented life in a fashion undisturbed by the obsessions of centralizers, agents of theocratic domination and the onset of ‘politics, bureaucracy, conquest and plunder’. Whether blissful or not, the early Neolithic world was surely a period of great cultural flowering on its own terms.

[ix] For descriptions of the transitional periods and the relevant eras generally, see H. J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East (Chicago: Chicago, 1988), Chapter 4, “The Period of Early High Civilization (ca. 3200—2800 B.C.), Harriet Crawford, Sumer and Sumerians (NY: Cambridge, 1991), Chapter 2, “ History Chronology, and Social Organization”, J.N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia (NY: Routledge, 1992), Chapter 2-3, “Cities and Dynasties”, “The Written Record”, George Roux, Ancient Iraq (NY: penguin, 1992), Chapter 4, “From Village to City”; for Egypt, see especially Michael Hoffman, Egypt Before the Pharaohs (NY: Knopf, 1979), Chapters 19-20, “In Search of Menes”, “The Emergence of Egypt”, Michael Rice, Egypt’s Making (NY: Routledge, 1990), Egypt’s Legacy (NY; Routledge, 1997), Chapter 3, “The Lords of the Two Lands”, Walter Emery, Archaic Egypt (NY: Penguin, 1961), Chapter 1, “The Unification”, Nicolas Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1988), Chapter 3, “The Thinite Period”, Karl Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt (Chicago: Chicago, 1976), Ronald Cohen & Elman Service, The Origins of the State (NY: Norton, 1978), “The Ancient Near East”, H. Frankfort, in Orientalism and History (1954), Sir Leonard Woolley History of Mankind (1965), Vol. I, Part 2, “The Beginnings of Civilization”, Wilbur Jones, Venus and Sothis (1982), Stephen Sanderson, Civilizations and World Systems (Walnut Creek: Ca: Altamira Press, 1995). William Hallo, Origins (NY; Brill, 1996). In The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization (Chicago: Chicago, 1993), G. Algaze applies Wallerstein’s ‘world system’ idea to the sudden expansion of Uruk. Thus, he attempts to show that the first momentum toward empire is in the Uruk period, as if the later Sargonite expansion was a recursion of this earlier phase. For the history of the mideonic period with a good perspective on diffusion, cf. The Rise of the West (Chicago: Chicago, 1990), William MacNeill, Chapter III, “The Diffusion of Civilization: First Phase”. C.G. Starr’s A History of the Ancient World (NY: Oxford, 1965) is a useful complement to his important books on the rise of Greece. Charles Freeman, Egypt, Greece and Rome (NY: Oxford, 1991), Donald Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times(Princeton: Princeton, 1992),are two useful ‘lego-block straddler’ accounts of the sources of ‘ET5,…’. The emergence of History is implicit in the nature of rising ‘information civilization’.

[x] Note the strange implication of our terms and the change that occurs as the transition falls off after -3000, the point at which Dynastic Egypt and Sumer begin to crystallize: from eonic determination during phase, and parallel interactive emergence, the process shifts gears and becomes ‘free action during a period of sequential dependency’. To make this jargon clear, we see this in modern times in, for example, the contradictions of ‘modernization theory’, where the ease of eonic emergence must be replaced by a replicating procedure of ‘free action’, e.g. industrialization of a third world economy. Free action cannot recapitulate the earlier steps cast in the foundry of eonic determination. It can finally produce an ‘algorithm’ for subprocesses, e.g. economic development. This reversal needs a closer look, such as we see in the later relation of Greece and Rome, compared with Sumer and Akkad, giving us an example. This mechanism is clearly inevitable if those who come later can’t match the previous phase of creativity. This enforces the cone of diffusion. This means that people begin to look backward toward the sources of their new traditions. That faraway places such as the Indus, or the Shang seem relatively independent evolutions doesn’t change this, this is free action in the sequential cone. This takes in a large territory on the back of diffusion. Let it be stated as a challenge of disproof, find any rising global/Eurasian civilization in this mideonic era before -900 that has no influence from Sumer and Egypt. The only candidate is the Olmec, raising instant suspicions of diffusion. Once civilization is born, its replication is a matter of the passage of information. Only the next period will show the jump to a higher level of complexity that will generate a new set of genuinely structures. Modern industrialization is a direct analog subprocess. It is born in a jump diffusion zone, in a period of phase, and then radiates in a cone of diffusion.

[xi] In the parallel interactive emergence of Egypt and Sumer, we might be puzzled by this double emergence of two parallels. This approach also voids the confusion of older hyperdiffusionism. It is useful to compare this to a pair of the later transitions, e.g. Greece, and Israel. Their t-streams pass across phase from different sources to a common status in the V-cone. In such a brief glimpse at a vast archaeological subject where specialists might not welcome macrohistory, let us reduce our statement here to, “There must have been an earlier Bump”. Looking at ‘ET5,…’, the suggestion is of a frequency pattern, with an earlier manifest, and here it is, approximately 2400 years earlier. Our idea of relative beginnings solves for us the ‘paradox’ that ‘ET4, Sumer,…’ is the ‘birth of civilization’ in the middle of a long sequence of growth from the Ubaid, if we find the characteristic signatures of eonic determination and sequential dependency in a clustered period. We find both in massive doses, first in the emergent character of a new form of the state, and more than this, in the great cone of diffusion that spreads from this source, and from Egypt.

[xii] Research into the origins of civilization is causally misguided in almost every case. The reason can be seen by looking at Sumer, then Israel and Greece. The ‘system’ is not local except as a ‘subsystem’. The next phase, carefully considered, echoes this one. Therefore, incident local causality fails. Endless local theories are proposed, climate, economics this and that, a cause to explain the first ‘effect’ to be called civilization. But civilization has ‘already’ started, this would be a relative beginning as acceleration. This is all very puzzling until it the explanation is seen as trivial, albeit tricky. It is trivial, because, macrohistorical theory or not, the boundary of sequential dependency is exact and clocks back to ca. –3000, period. The next rapid structural advance comes in its future. Our at first strange approach, then, without any intention to ignore these complexities of local particulars, is macrohistorical, pure and simple, and in danger of lunacy, if misunderstood, until we see how well it photographs the structure of what is happening, and frees thinking from puzzles of sterile sociological analysis in the small. What we take as the ‘beginning of civilization’ is the effect of phase intensity in a period of long eonic sequence, however we might conceive of taking this. We can renounce speculation and take it practically as the architecture created by intensity of cultural acceleration followed by its ‘well of dependent sequence’. The beginning of ‘civilization’ is a more primitive version of what we see in the next classical era, with less obstruction from outstanding forms. But civilization is not an entity for which there is a ‘cause’, in our terms. To show ‘cause’, we must explain the whole. But secondary ‘cause’ (in the context of free action) rapidly arises as ‘sequentiality’ in the raising of a wall of higher creativity as the realization of potential. This approach is so much simpler, for we can discard useless analytics and describe the broad rolls of unfolding civil oikoumene, the first in world history. It is interesting to compare the collapses and breakdowns that begin to occur in this stage, and again, in the classical era. The end of the Old Kingdom, the fall of the Roman Empire would seem contingent phenomena that must find explanations other than the eonic, and yet the broad conditioning of long frequency-return itself creates the ‘medieval’ effect, of mideonic drift or misdirection. Within a millennium, the early period of phase is ‘wearing off’.

[xiii] Cyril Aldred, Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom (NY: Mcgraw-Hill, 1965), p. 52. In an unusual theory of Pyramid Construction (claiming their blocks are limestone concrete set in place, a point about which the author could not express an opinion), Joseph Davidovitz & Margie Morris, in The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved (1988), notes (in relation, however, to his own theory) the decline in building technology, noting, p. 47, “Egyptian sculpture was so degenerated by the New Kingdom that it fell into irredeemable decadence.” There is a discrepancy in Egyptian history between the technological advance from Copper to Bronze technology and the failure of this to correlate with any creative advance in the cultural sequence, a point for the distinction of eonic sequence, and technosequence.

[xiv] Leonard Woolley, The Sumerians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928). There are dissenters to the sudden transitional view, influenced usually by the confusion over relative beginnings and divide action. Egypt enters the ‘e-sequence’ at this point, where Mesopotamia has been closer to the core sequence. Cf. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton, 1992), who sees the suddenness of the Egyptian, but not the Sumerian, transition. The Sumerian is quite as abrupt, but it is already like the world that will see the classical ‘relative jumps’ in the context of a greater antiquity.

[xv] Thorkild Jacobsen, “Mesopotamia: The Cosmos as State”, Before Philosophy (NY: Penguin, 1964), p. 140.

[xvi] W. Emery, Archaic Egypt (NY: Penguin, 1962), p.192.

[xvii] The chronology of ancient Egypt is based on the writings of the Egyptian writer Manetho of the Alexandrian period, the correlation with the solar calendar and the helical rising of Sothis, and the fragmentary indications of the various King Lists such as the Palermo Stone. Any claim for the frequency hypothesis must depend on this complex analysis of chronology, whose suggestion given the rough estimate of an average divide period is of a twenty-four hundred year interval or period. Cf. Hoffman, Egypt Before the Pharoahs (NY: Knopf, 1979), Chapter 2, “Time Beyond Reckoning: From Manetho to De Perthes”.

In all discussions of the Sumerians it is unclear who the Sumerians really were. Part of the reason is that the ‘catholic’ effect starts from the beginning of the Neolithic, as social structures start to blend t-stream entries. For a discussion of the history of the theories of the origins of the Sumerians, see T.B. Jones (ed.), The Sumerian Problem (NY: Wiley, 1969), New York, 1969; George Roux, Ancient Iraq (Penguin, 1992), pp. 80-84 H. Frankfort notes, ‘The much discussed problem of the origin of the Sumerians may well turn out to be a chimera.’ The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (Bloomington, Ind: Indiana, 1951), London, 1954, p.50, n.1.

The so-called Late Gerzean period of the unification in Egypt and the Jamset Nasr period in Sumer are the time-periods on which to focus for a rough ‘divide’. This interval is perhaps more a pottery style than a full-blown period. But it is interesting that this sliver of a period should appear to suggest itself to archaeologists near the invention of writing, in the period of the cylinder seals, at the exact right point, in the phase of late Uruk. It is the Uruk phase, emerging more or less continuously from the Ubaid, that will be the staging ground for the sudden complexification and the birth of a system of city-states. Into this puzzle many have attempted, without an success, to insert an invasion or infiltration of extra-local Sumerians, as an aide to explaining the cause of the transformation. Finkbeiner, U. & Rollig, W (eds.), Gamdet Nasr: Period or Regional Style (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1986). Our discussion is about a phase, ‘ET4’, from which the Sumerian and the Egyptian civilizations emerge seemingly in parallel. Isn’t this a little strange? Shouldn’t there be a unique source of civilization? The question sounds reminiscent of the old hyperdiffusionism. We have already quite answered this, by putting our discussion in terms of relative beginnings, and simply not dealing with any absolute beginnings. What we are seeing is the first case of parallel interactive emergence. If we look behind ‘ET4, Egypt, Sumer’ we will see the same situation we find in the classical parallel rise, with Sumer somewhat stronger and influencing the rise of Egypt. But Egypt, like the Shang becoming Classic China, receives influences from the earlier ‘ET2,…ET3’ in the spread of the Neolithic, and then goes over the top in concert with Sumer. The paradox disappears, as does the old obsession to derive Egypt from Sumerian jumpstarting.

We should not see the effect of parallel interactive emergence in the earliest Egyptian period.

Sumer                                             Egypt  
Hassuna ca. –5800 to –5500           ? -5500
Samarra ca. -5600 to –5000           Badarian -5000
Halaf ca. -5500 to –4500               Amratian -4000
Ubaid ca. -5000 to –3750
Uruk ca. -3750 to –3150               Early Gerzean -3500  
Jemdat Nasr ca. -3150 to –2900     Late Gerzean -3300

[ Cf. Hoffman, 1979; Roux, 1992]

[xviii] Uruk reminds one of ‘ET6, …England’ with its early surge, as a trigger zone of rapid and early advance. Adams and Nissen document in great detail, in The Uruk Countryside (Chicago: Chicago, 1979) the great transformation that begins in the Uruk period. This study contains the evidence for the slow-rise/sudden-acceleration factor at the onset of the great change. The frequency of rural settlements increase around the ceremonial precincts of Uruk. The moment of takeoff is at hand. But it is only in the late Uruk and Jamset Nasr period that the rate of increase in the number of settlements reaches the scale of the Urban Revolution. Then the process begins to reverse itself, as the central city begins to increase still further at the expense of the surrounding countryside, which begins to depopulate. But the flagship effect of Uruk seems to pass and it apparently declines relative to the new constellation of city states that has come into existence. This is altogether reminiscent of our modern case, where the early drivers trigger the first expansions and quickly yield to the rising parallel field of competitors. In The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization (Chicago: Chicago, 1993), G. Algaze applies Wallerstein’s ‘world system’ idea to the sudden expansion of Uruk. Thus, he attempts to show that the first momentum toward empire is in the Uruk period, as if the later Sargonite expansion was a recursion of this earlier phase.

[xix] Cf. David Wilinson, “Central Civilization”, in S. Sanderson, Civilizations and World Systems (Cambridge: Blackwel1, 1995).

[xx]  The Cuneiform Tradition Civilizations need a palace. But these come and go, as a tradition remains, and this is an information structure. We can bridge the two periods, ‘ET4’, and ‘ET5’, by considering the treatment of the Assyriologist Oppenheim, in Letters From Mesopotamia, in his periodization of the Mesopotamian history. Our treatment does not answer, because it doesn’t need to, the long temporal stream history as a structure, e.g. the ‘course of civilization’ from –4000 to the Roman Empire in the Mesopotamian zone. What we see is a pre-Sumerian t-stream, a period of phase, an entire cycle of an oikoumene surrounding Sumer, the rise of the Assyrians, and the onset of the next phase at its fringes, with the ambiguous Assyrians and Persians in the old area being surpassed by the spread of the rising tide of civilization, as it band of creativity passes outward.

Although disposed as an ‘Assyriologist’ to see only the continuity of his subject, he gives exact expression to the idea of sequential dependency of the entire Mesopotamian sphere in the earlier period, independently of its component t-streams, confusingly labeled ‘civilizations’, in terms of the ‘essential unity of Mesopotamian civilization’. His emphasis is on the continuum of tradition rather than the disparate details of military or political history. As he puts it, a phenomenon occurs over and over again: rulers from cultural sources that are not Mesopotamian, only recently acculturated, take political control and end by maintaining the basic continuity. He sketches the sequential stream in terms of five phases (obviously not the same as our own):

The Basic Aggregate (The Substratum)

The Catalyst (The Sumerians)

The Transformation (The Rise of Mesopotamian Civilization)

Tradition and Experiment (Scribes and Scholars)

The Great Change (The Formation of the Legacy)

This formulation perfectly expresses, in terms, of non-eonic conceptions of strict sequence, the temporal stream emerging from the world of the Ubaid, the revealing insertion of the two periods suggestive of transition, the first the Sumerians (the catalyst!), and the second, expressed as a ‘great change’, the expression of the precise difficulty that the old oikoumene experienced during ‘ET5’: all it can manage is to reorganize, rather than to create, to reexpress the elements of the ancient tradition.

The Assyrians show the dilemma of creative renewal. As Joseph Campbell describes it, “The world historic role of the Kings of Assyria can be described, there, as the erasure of the past and creation of a thoroughly mixed, internationalized, interracialized Near Eastern population that has remained thus ever since.”, followed by their sudden and precipitous disappearance from history altogether. This statement shows the danger of all forms of historicist thinking. It suggests a ‘force-historical’ justification of social integration. Our distinction of eonic determination and free action prevents us from this mistake, although our terms remain ambiguous. What does the term ‘world historical’ mean? The Assyrians were merely entangled in the full logistical dilemma of all the Universal Empires since the Akkadians. Surely it is precisely the point that the new era moves to regenerate a new ethical form of ecumenization in the clear resync of Israel, whose prophets eagle eye the Assyrian phenomenon and manage to sow the seeds of a new form of social integration in the age to come. Our phase shows all the intermediate blends, and we must include the intermediate Persians, whose Empire also shows the rise to a new level of intelligent empire, but still they are caught in the old dilemma.

Leo Oppenheim, Letters From Mesopotamia (Chicago: Chicago, 1967)

 Warfare. Another good example of the equivocation over the ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’ lies in the issue of warfare, which becomes amplified at the beginning of civil existence taking off in a technological mode. This can be seen in the question, does warfare have analytical functionality as a social institution of civilization? Beware. Note the false use of the term ‘civilization’ apart from our fundamental unit. We don’t have to answer. Reflection will suggest that civilization doesn’t exist yet if it does, whereas emergent civil structure, indeed technological acceleration, feed on it, a contradiction. It does show ‘functionality’ in relation to phases. And ends in its transmogrification as Holy War! We have said nothing about war in our treatment, having dismantled our ‘theory’ in advance with considerations of what we called ‘Exec 1,…’, the potential ethic of ‘doing nothing, exit history’. This has the advantage that we are not required to say whether warfare is a positive valuation of good, or a negative one, of evil, the distinction itself in great doubt. This is dangerous, but less dangerous than such reasoning as that which sees functionality in war as a character or property of civilization. Civilization must be either at the ‘end of history’ or impossible, in which case you will later or sooner meet up with a Buddhist, yourself.

Thus our reasoning is well adapted to this case, for we step past the contradiction in the ‘axioms’ of civilization. Thus, is warfare part of the essence of civilization? We see the trap. In our approach we do see the eonic determination of warfare, but never its ‘endstate’ functionality, its persistence notwithstanding. The reason is that civilization is not our unit of analysis, and has no fixed properties. The result is the spastic nature of pacifism, and the birth of the Holy War, along with the Marathon factor of the Greeks, and the extreme ‘non-violence’ of the first Buddhists, and Jains. We must shake our heads in wonder at this complex pattern in parallel, with its balance of opposites. One reason for our confusion is that we are merely two cycles in the future, still defining the ‘functionality of civilization’. Thus, at least, we can express cautious optimism toward the abolition of war, because warfare has no status as functionality in civilization, for the simple reason that the term ‘civilization’ is not our fundamental unit, and can only be saved, perhaps, to describe a future or endstate. We need no further explanation, apart from issues of human nature, for its persistence, and the real trouble this creates. Once again our pattern serves as a guide, our most recent eonic data on this matter is Kant’s Perpetual Peace.

  One can only think of Kant’s ponderings on Universal Peace to see the determinations already in motion of future counters of passing beyond war confronted by the terrible reaction of the rising onset of a new era moving into worse and worse technologies of war. History can only show you a Kant. It cannot expend computation on the ‘freedom’ of idiots who started the First World War, or destroyed at a stroke two millennia of Judaism in the Holocaust. Our method is not able to produce instant answers on such complex questions, for the first implication is to study of the eonic pattern in relation to warfare, a very long research task. We cannot find the ‘causes of war’ unless we know we are dealing with a causal system, which seems unlikely: we see the predominance of free action, people fight wars for arbitrary motives in particular contexts, and indeed we see the passage of war into adventurism, militarism, etc,… We cannot abolish war without controlling future action, something requiring action over millennia, that is, do what our system does. But war precedes the rise of civilization, and is really an attribute of evolutionary free action, and therefore not an evolutionary novelty of this civilization. By and large its ‘eonic determination’ is a defensive action in the creation of the state, and therefore an as aspect of ‘freedom’. Therefore, we can feel safe in not resigning ourselves to the ‘inevitability of war’ as an attribute of political history. Cf. Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War (NY: Doubleday, 1995), Doyne Dawson, The Origins of Western Warfare (1996).

 

 

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      Last modified 09/05/2005