Selections: Egypt, Sumer, and the Rise Of Civilization

The value of our model is that it gives us a rationale for the demarcation of the so-called ‘rise of civilization’ as instead a phase of transition in a greater history that precedes it. This helps to resolve the continuity/discontinuity snafu that besets the obvious perception of this interval, without the means to properly consider its status. We come thus to the spectacular rise of ‘civilization’ visible in the rise of

Sumer

and Dynastic Egypt. We begin at the halfway mark, as close to the modern world, as to the onset of the Neolithic. The point is worth considering since this ‘axial’ period generates the basic tone of future civilization. If Hegel, at the modern divide, is musing oddly about the divine sanctity of the state, to the frowns of Marx, and the horror of libertarians, it is because the State shows eonic generation, whatever its beginnings in Paleolithic chieftaincy, and is cast in eonic granite, starting here, and subsequent stages of the eonic sequence respond to the first, Sumerian/Egyptian, experiments.

An incomplete picture We need to exercise caution with our first visible transition era, since the data is just on the borderline of our centuries level standard of observational data. A more complex picture of the rise of the new era of cities and states is always possible, and likely. What about the rest of Eurasia in this period? Synchronous factors prior to the existence of writing would pass undetected. However, we suspect that a flagship mainline more than justifies our emphasis on Sumer and

Egypt

, and we can see that our frequency hypothesis is basically confirmed here, even given the probable incompleteness of our portrait.

Cities, state formation, and the first intimations of organized technology suddenly come together in the last centuries before –3000. The key invention of writing changes the entire course of history and is justly considered the beginning of history, save that we have defined that to include the earliest homo sapiens. It is hard to assess to what degree this emergence of the State is an absolute historical first here, but the crystallization and advance are for all intents and purposes the real beginning, as are the first intimations of civil society. This is no sentimental issue of royal panoplies, as we see from the consequences in the degenerations of states into empires and the dominations of elites. The moment the state comes into existence, a problem arises, a permanent crisis of the individual. Existence in a State is the first prerequisite to advance, but its effects prove also counterproductive, and its effects on the individual will generate the great dialectic of freedom in the state and freedom from the state that will surge forward in the next Axial interval.

Israel

, let us note, is, not a religion factory, but a response, as a state, at first, in the next step of the eonic sequence, to the perceived histories of states and empires. Challenges to the State arise in the next Axial phase of our eonic sequence. The ‘revolutionary idea’ is born in the Axial interval.

The rise of the Dynastic Pharaohs is spectacular, and a new form is set for millennia. The lopsided history of the Pyramid Age in the early third, followed by discontinuation, is an obvious clue. Many archaeologists 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

. From its modest Predynastic period, the phenomenon of the Egyptian civilization that we know rises from the desert into its monumental grandeur. And then stops.

In the case of

Sumer

, we see a nexus of city-states. The key technology is 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.

We should emphasize the relative transform effect here. Looking at overall world history we suspected 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. Not hard to find. Jump back 2400 years in a possible source area nearby. 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 our account really begins in the prior era as this leads to the rise of Sumer, and its sidewinder,

Egypt

In Ancient Iraq, George Roux unwittingly gives us the right chronology behind this, starting in Northern Mesopotamia in the wake of the first Neolithic period, and ending in its Sumerian frontier adjacency zone.[ii]

We can see the dates fit so well we can hazard a guess. Clearly we are seeing two transitions separated by a mideonic interval. But what of

Egypt

? The rules of our eonic model allow us to consider sudden synchronous effects inside the eonic sequence, during the transitions. Presto, Dynastic

Egypt

The Egyptian sidewinder The case of the sidewinder

Egypt

can be understood by analogy with the Axial Age, and remembering that the eonic effect shows intermittent sequence, and (often) synchronous emergence in the phase of transition. Consider China or

India

in the Axial Age. Isolated, they suddenly ping in echo to the Axial concert. All other interactions are by diffusion, before and after the Axial global convulsion. The eonic sequence finds a mainline in the Greek/Israelite frontier transitions, but India and

China

suddenly show relative emergence in an Axial echo as sidewinders to the mainline.

China

, far away and isolated, is still in the diffusion field of the earlier era and is ready for the relative beginning overlaid on its stream evolution. Something similar is obviously evident in Egypt, which has a parallel gestation in the diffusion field of the Neolithic, then suddenly shows synchronous take-off in concert with

Sumer

Roman/American sidewinders Two other later notable sidewinders, that might show the effect are the Roman republic’s emergentism, that arises in tandem with the farflung field of Greek city states stretching even into Italy and with their many republican experiments, and the American which becomes an instant adjunct to the English transition, then near its divide suddenly becomes a full-blown core transition area at the end of the eighteenth century. The North American field is really a flow zone for the English transition, and the relationship of small to large region is no accident.

Despite the confusing appearance, this tandem effect in Sumer/Egypt is thus suddenly recognizable, and completely isomorphic to the case of the Axial Age. There is also every possibility of direct diffusion of many Egyptian elements, e.g. hieroglyphic writing. But these technological loans, if any, can’t explain the autonomous integrated cultural advance perfectly correlated with high-level eonic periodization, the ‘ET4’ interval. Such complex integrations don’t diffuse. Note that in this kind of mechanism, sidewinders can seem to skip a stage. There is nothing exact prior to ‘ET4’ in the Egyptian stream leading up to civilization. It is not needed. This splitting of streams shows us there is no unique mainline, and also shows a more efficient way to accelerate development toward globalization as the eonic sequence splits and jumpstarts sidewinders that have had good prior diffusion.

A relative beginning To summarize, the ‘rise of civilization’ becomes a relative beginning in a larger sequence, and this shows the parallel interactive emergence of two sources, an, at first, confusing situation. But we have the key. Study the Axial Age examples and note the way the cultural stream crosses the eonic sequence, as in Greece, or

Israel

, to understand the lead ups to these remarkable take-offs in tandem here.

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, but with just barely enough data here. Thus the data resembles 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. Same here.

Once we grasp the factors of synchronous emergence and relative transforms the emergence of Egypt/Sumer falls into place with an abstract structure exactly like the later Axial Age.

This relative effect can also be seen by zooming out and looking at the long periods after the transitions: The fall-off is suddenly 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,

Mideonic slowdown 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.[iii]

The period of Egypt and Sumer, at their ‘beginnings’ near –3000, constitutes 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. 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.

Mideonic trend toward empire Another clue to our eonic structure is the drift into mideonic dramas of empire, the curse of civilization. The initial Sumerian innovative network of city-states so reminiscent of later

Greece

breaks down as the inexorable forces of integration precipitate the drift of the system into imperial histories. Our model highlights at once the gross trend, the curse of civilization, the mideonic drift into empire. The whole period resembles the next, a century of democracy, then nothing. And yet our system is unstable as the empire phases moves rapidly to generate greater integration in a globalizing system.

The great Sumerian tradition is born, and the forgotten Sumerian buried in Akkadian is directly analogous to Latin buried in later languages in the next cycle. The Cuneiform tradition dominates throughout, with the same effect in the case of

Egypt

and its hieroglyphic literature.

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.

Note: Gilgamesh and writing The first great written literature emerges from the cuneiform tradition, and the epic of Gilgamesh is the first masterpiece in this great stream. Although appearing relatively late in the mideonic period, we can follow its earlier traces to the ‘revolution in writing’ sourcing in the Uruk world of the transition, the ‘first city in human history’. All of the classic signs of a relative transform are visible in the typical ‘continuity’ debate over its origins.

Writing developed through a long process, beginning with simple notations of images and numbers, needed by traders to account for goods exchanged and received. According to one theory, full-scale writing gradually emerged over the course of several centuries, as symbols accumulated and people began to use them for their phonetic value. Yet widely scattered experimentation would have produced a proliferation of mutually incomprehensible systems, each useless to anyone beyond a given scribe and his circle. An increasing number of historians of writing have come to regard this process as marked by punctuated equilibrium, to use a term from evolutionary biology. In this theory, the transition from established methods of accounting via symbols to true writing entailed an intellectual revolution, carried out by a group of scribes working together between 3300 and 3200 BCE to formulate the basic norms of a workable system.[iv]

This passage speaks for itself in terms of our eonic analysis. The influence of this and other works on the later Old Testament is both a striking case of diffusion and an indication of the way our eonic system acts recursively as it selects strains from its previous steps and remorphs them again in its next transition, albeit cast in the new mode of monotheism.

[i] Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (New York: New American Library, 1983):, p. 107. Bernard Knapp, The History and Culture of Ancient Western Asia (Chicago: Dorsey, 1988), Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of The Ancient Near East (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).

[ii] George Roux, Ancient Iraq (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 48.

[iii] Cyril Aldred, Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 52.

[iv] David Damrosch, The Buried Book (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), p. 241.