[13]Ibid., 250.
[14]Ibid., 46.
[15]Ibid., 254.
[16]Horizon, Vol. XV, No. 85 (London, January 1947), 25-6.
[17]A Study of History, I, 176.
[18]Op. cit., I, 193.
[19]Op. cit., IV, 130.
[20]R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 328-30, especially 328-9. The whole section should be read, since our quotations give but an inadequate impression of its cogency.
[21]R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 328-30, especially 328-9. “There is only one genuine meaning for this question. If thought in its first phase, after solving the initial problems of that phase, is then, through solving these, brought up against others which defeat it; and if the second solves these further problems without losing its hold on the solution of the first, so that there is gain without any corresponding loss, then there is progress. And there can be progress on no other terms. If there is any loss, the problem of setting loss against gain is insoluble.”
[22]A Study of History, III, 216.
[23]Op. cit., I, 159.
[24]Op. cit., III, 381.
[25]Ibid. et passim.
[26]Op. cit., I, 172-3. Edgar Wind, “Some Points of Contact Between History and Natural Science,” in Philosophy and History, Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer (Oxford, 1936), 255-64, shows that the latest developments of science, which make it so much less “exact,” lead to the raising of questions by scientists “that historians like to look upon as their own.” But if these latest developments have made science more “humanistic,” Wind is over-optimistic when he says that “the notion of a description of nature which indiscriminately subjects men and their fates like rocks and stones to its ‘unalterable law’ survives only as a nightmare of certain historians.” For many of them (not to mention sociologists) it seems still to be a cherished ideal.
[27]A Study of History, e.g., I, 143.
[28]Op. cit., V, 28.
[29]These texts have been discussed by Kurt Sethe, Amun und die acht Urgötter von Hermopolis. “Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Klasse,” No. 4. Berlin, 1929.
[30]A Study of History, I, 137. It is, perhaps, not unnecessary to add that Toynbee’s scheme would be no more relevant to Egyptian history if he shifted the date of his “time of troubles” to the second or even the first millennium B.C. The error is one of method, not of chronology.
[31]Op. cit., III, 377.
[32]Op. cit., III, 248-377. In the history of individuals Toynbee applies it not only to the Buddha or to saints who of their own free will withdrew from society in order to clarify their mission and the message which they were to preach, but also to men like Thucydides, Dante, and Macchiavelli, who were exiled, and bitterly lamented their banishment even though it did not destroy their powers to create. They worked in a solitude not of their choosing and never returned at all, however effective their work may have proved to be in the course of time. Toynbee also applies the formula of “Withdrawal-and-Return” to social groups in a manner which fails to explain anything, as, for instance, when he states that the Nonconformists, after the Restoration, reacted on persecutions by “withdrawing into the realm of private business in order to return omnipotent, a century and a half later, as the authors of the Industrial Revolution” (Ibid., 334). Thus, the interplay of dire necessity and circumstances of every description is reduced to a formula which confuses the issue by a theological implication (withdraw in order to) which in more than one place (e.g. in the image of the climbers and the mountainside) turns Toynbee’s account of the facts into mythology. I am purposely avoiding a discussion of Toynbee’s examples taken from the Near East or Crete, since I should then have to correct his facts and should become a “critic aiming instruments at bits and pieces” (Horizon, XV [London, January 1947], 50.) Readers interested in a detailed criticism by an authority on European history (who likewise considers principles rather than isolated errors) are referred to the essay of Professor P. Geyl in Journal of the History of Ideas, IX (New York, 1948), 93-124.
[33]Part of Volume I and the whole of Volume II are devoted to its discussion.
[34]Op. cit., III, 214.
[35]Op. cit., III, 215.
[36]We have actually adopted this method in Archeology and the Sumerian Problem, SAOC 4 (Chicago, 1932), an example followed by Anton Moortgat, Frühe Bildkunst in Sumer (Leipzig, 1935); but the latter book suffers from the confusion caused by an inadequate delimitation of the successive periods.
[37]It would be simple enough if we could equate the beginning of history with the introduction of writing, as is often done. The equation holds good for Egypt where the oldest inscriptions refer to the first identifiable events and personalities and thus, as records of battles and royal names, form the earliest raw material of Egyptian history. But in Mesopotamia this is not so; there civilization took shape, and writing appeared, well before historical documents in the narrow sense came into being. We shall see that this difference between Egypt and Mesopotamia was due to the different purposes which writing and art were made to serve; but it illustrates that generalizations about history and prehistory are hazardous even within a limited field.
[38]So, e.g. J. S. Slotkin, “Reflections on Collingwood’s Idea of History,” in Antiquity, No. 86 (June 1948), 99. Against this misconception see Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, Berlin, 1928.
[39]For a penetrating study of this matter see Gertrude Rachel Levy, The Gate of Horn, A Study of the Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age and Their Influence upon European Thought, Faber & Faber (London, 1948).
[40]On the so-called Libyan palette: Capart, Primitive Art in Egypt, 236-7, Figs. 175, 176.
[41]L. Borchardt, Das Grabdenkmal des Königs Sahure, II (Leipzig, 1913), 10 and Plate I.
[42]W. F. Edgerton and J. A. Wilson, Historical Records of Ramses III (Chicago, 1936), 67 f. Wreszinski, Atlas zur altaegyptischen Kulturgeschichte, III, Plate 66.
[43]Sir Aurel Stein, An Archaeological Tour in Gedrosia (Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, No. 43), 34; cf. 6-7.
[44]R. J. & L. Braidwood, in Antiquity XXV, No. 96 (December 1950), 189-95.
[45]D. A. E. Garrod and D. M. A. Bates, The Stone Age Of Mount Carmel, Oxford, 1937.
[46]These “teeth” show a peculiar gloss produced by the silica in the stalks of grasses so that we are certain that they were used for cutting cereals. (Cecil E. Curwen in Antiquity, IV [1930], 184-6; IX [1935], 62-6.)
[47]G. Caton-Thompson and E. W. Gardner, The Desert Fayum (London, 1934), 45 and Plates XXVI, XXVIII, XXX.
[48]Journal of Near Eastern Studies, IV (1945), 269, 274, and Fig. 37.
[49]R. Girshman, Fouilles de Sialk, I (Paris, 1938), 17 ff. and Plates VII, LIV.
[50]Walter B. Emery, The Tomb of Hemaka (Cairo, 1938), 33 and Plate 15.
[51]W. M. Flinders Petrie, Tools and Weapons (London, 1917), 46 and Plate LV, 7.
[52]P. Delougaz, The Temple Oval at Khafajah (Chicago, 1940), 30-1, Figs. 26, 27.
[53]C. F. C. Hawkes, The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe (London, 1940), 82-4.
[54]C. Daryll Forde, Habitat, Economy and Society (London, 1934), 35: “In Owen’s valley several groups took advantage of favourable conditions to irrigate patches of ground. The growth of bulbous plants and grasses is patently more luxuriant wherever abundant water reaches them, and this was achieved artificially by diverting from their narrow channels the snow-fed streams flowing down from the Sierra Nevada. In spring, before the streams rose with snow-melt, a dam of boulders, brushwood and mud was thrown across a creek where it reached the valley floor.... Above the dam one or two main ditches, sometimes more than a mile long, were laboriously cut with long poles to lead the river water out on the gently sloping ground over which it was distributed by minor channels.... After the harvest the main dam was pulled down.... There was, however, no attempt at planting or working the soil, and none of the cultivated plants grown to the south of the Colorado were known.”
[55]V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, 109, states that some of these villages, when completely excavated, covered no more than from 1½ to 6½ acres, lodging from eight to ten households. In The Town Planning Review, XXI (1950), 6, he states that sixteen to thirty houses was the normal figure of a local group which he estimates at 200 to 400 souls.
[56]John Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia, 2nd ed. (London, 1822), 348-50.
[57]Percy E. Newberry, Egypt as a Field of Anthropological Research, Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report for 1924 (Washington, 1925), 435-59.
[58]It seems as undesirable, therefore, to speak here of a neolithic “revolution” as it is to refer to our theme as an “urban revolution” (see below, p. 61, n. 10). Both terms, used by V. Gordon Childe, place the changes in parallelism with the “industrial revolution,” but the word “revolution” in this phrase is already used figuratively; it does not refer to an event such as the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, but to a change of conditions. And by extending its use in this sense, an impression of violent, and especially of purposeful change is made which the facts do not suggest.
[59]R. U. Sayce, Primitive Arts and Crafts (Cambridge, 1933), 27 ff.
[60]An attractive guess is made by V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (Oxford, 1939), 87-90. For a recent discussion of the problem which accentuates our uncertainties, see André Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et techniques (Paris, 1945), 96-119.
[61]E.g. G. Caton-Thompson and E. W. Gardner, The Desert Fayum (London, 1934), 46 and Plate XXVIII. Guy Brunton and Gertrude Caton-Thompson, The Badarian Civilization (London, 1928), 64 ff. Jacques de Morgan, Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse, XIII (Paris, 1912), 163 and Plate XLIII.
[62]Seton Lloyd and Fuad Safar, in Journal of Near Eastern Studies, IV (1945), 271.
[63]This point has been emphasized by Robert J. Braidwood in lectures and papers. See Human Origins, an Introductory General Course in Anthropology, Selected Readings, Series II, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1946), 170 ff., 181 ff. See also Linda Braidwood, ibid., 153 ff. The Braidwoods, excavating in 1948 for the Oriental Institute at Jarmo near Sulimanieh, found remains of a settlement perhaps even older than Hassuna. See p. 29, n. 9 above.
[64]S. Passarge, Die Urlandschaft Aegyptens (Nova Acta Leopoldina, N.F., Vol. IX, No. 58, Halle, 1940), 35.
[65]In 1923 an expedition going to Qau el Kabir in Middle Egypt found no trace of a Ptolemaic temple which Champollion, a hundred years earlier, had marked on his maps on the east bank of the Nile; the river had destroyed both the ruins and the village of Qau and subsequently cut a new bed (G. Brunton, Qau and Badari [London, 1927], 2-3, Plate I).
[66]Rudolf Anthes, Die Felseninschriften von Hat Nub (Leipzig, 1928), 52 ff., 95 ff.
[67]Brunton, Mostagedda (London, 1937), 67; Sir Robert Mond and O. H. Myers, Cemeteries of Armant, I, 7.
[68]Amratian is called “Early or First Predynastic” or “Naqada I” in the older literature.
[69]Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago, 1948), 348, n. 4, and Index, Africa, Hamites. Badarian objects have been found, not only in Middle and Upper Egypt (at Badari, Mahasna, Naqada, Armant, and Hierakonpolis—see Brunton in Antiquity, III [1929], 461), but in Nubia (Brunton, The Badarian Civilization [London, 1928], 40), in the northern provinces of the Sudan (report of the discoveries of Mr. Oliver Myers of Gordon College, Khartoum, in The Times [London] of March 31, 1948), in the desert fifty miles west of the Nile in the latitude of Abydos (Man, No. 91 [1931]), and again far to the south, four hundred miles west of the Nile in the latitude of Wadi Halfa (Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, XXII [1936], 47-8).
[70]Also called “Naqada II” or “Middle Predynastic.” Note that “Late Predynastic” or “Semainean” has been proved a chimera. The remains so labelled belong to the Gerzean period, which thus leads right up to the First Dynasty. See Helene J. Kantor, in Journal of Near Eastern Studies, III (1944), 110-46. When we use “late Predynastic” we mean the last part of the predynastic period, in other words, late Gerzean.
[71]A. Lucas, in Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, XVI (1930), 200 ff.
[72]Nature, XII (October 1932), 625; Lucas in Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, XIII (1927), 162-70; XIV (1928), 97-108.
[73]The Egyptian language has been explained as a common tongue imposed upon a country where several dialects existed, in the same manner as the French of Ile de France became the official French language, and “Hochdeutsch” the vehicle of communication for all Germans. Now this ancient Egyptian language included two recognizable Hamitic strains—one Southern or Ethiopian, the other Western or Berber—and also one Semitic strain (see the studies of Ernst Zyhlarz in Africa, IX [London, 1936], 433-52; Zeitschrift fur Eingeborenensprachen, XXIII [1932-3], 1 ff.; XXV [1934-5], 161 ff.).
[74]It would be possible to assume that the Semitic elements entered through the Wadi Hammamat from the Red Sea, but this leaves the Gerzean innovations unexplained and ignores the arguments put forward by K. Sethe, “Die Aegyptische Ausdrücke für rechts und links und die Hieroglyphenzeichen für Westen und Osten,” in Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Phil.-Hist. Kl., 1922, 197-242.
[75]It even affected the physical type of the population; see G. M. Morant, “Study of Egyptian Craniology from Prehistoric to Roman Times,” in Biometrika, XVII (1925), 1-52.
[76]Brunton, The Badarian Civilization, 48. The assumption finds strong support in the tradition that Menes, the first king of the First Dynasty, reclaimed all the land from Wasta to Cairo before he founded Memphis at the north end of the strip so reclaimed. Such an enterprise presupposes some established skill in work of that nature.
[77]For a criticism of the hypothetical construction of Egyptian prehistory in terms of united Upper and Lower Egyptian kingdoms in conflict with one another, see my Kingship and the Gods, Chapter I, 349, n. 6; 350, n. 15; 351, n. 19.
[78]The head of the Persian Gulf was perhaps 125 miles to the north of Basra; or this area may have been a lagoon, separated from the Gulf by the “Bar of Basra.”
[79]The oldest of these is marked by various kinds of simple pottery wares (Hassuna ware) decorated with incisions or merely burnished to a high gloss. In addition there were sickles with flint “teeth” and underground silos for grain storage. Sheep, goats, oxen, and asses were kept. In a second stage appears fine painted pottery, called Samarran—an offshoot of a ceramic tradition at home in Persia. It was, in its turn, displaced by another type of pottery called Tell Halaf, which is found from the Gulf of Alexandrette to the region east of Mosul. The archaeological material is fully discussed in Ann Louise Perkins, The Comparative Archaeology of Early Mesopotamia (Chicago, 1949).
[80]See the article and photographs of Melvin Hall in Asia (New York), February 1939.
[81]This stage of their ceramics had been known from a small site near Erech (A. Nöldeke and others, Neunter Vorläufiger Bericht.... Uruk-Warka, Berlin, 1938, Plates 36-40), when it was found well represented at Abu Shahrein (Eridu): See Illustrated London News, 11 September 1948, p. 305; Sumer, IV (Baghdad, 1948), 115 ff. There is nothing against calling this pottery “Eridu ware” as long as its historical connections are not obscured. It is quite gratuitous to claim that “Al Ubaid people” can no longer be called the earliest settlers in southern Mesopotamia, for the Eridu ware is simply an earlier stage of the Al Ubaid ware. If quibbles about names are disregarded, it remains true that the earliest settlers of the plain descended from Persia; the new ware shows an earlier stage of their ceramics than has hitherto been found in the plain but it was already known from the western edge of the Highland, e.g. Tepe Khazineh near Susa (J. de Morgan, Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse, Paris, 1908).
[82]C. Leonard Woolley in Antiquaries Journal, X (1930), 335.
[83]Fulanain, The Marsh Arab, Haji Rikkan (Philadelphia, 1928), 21.
[84]Ancient Eridu. Illustrated London News, 31 May, 1947, 11 September, 1948; Sumer, III (Baghdad, 1947), 84 ff.; Orientalia, XVII (Rome, 1948), 115-22. Sumer, IV (1948), 115 ff. shows the development from a very small and primitive village shrine in the earliest layer to a building recognizable in its main features as the prototype of later temples.
[85]After T. Jacobsen in Journal of Near Eastern Studies, V (1946), 140.
[86]We cannot say for certain whether its bearers were the Sumerians who created the earliest civilization of Mesopotamia in the subsequent—the Protoliterate—period. But no decisive proof for a later arrival of the Sumerians has been offered, and the continuity in cult and architecture support the view that they were the dominant element in the Al Ubaid period, as they remained throughout the third millennium in the south of the country. See also p. 51, n. 1 below.
[87]The earliest tablets, of the Protoliterate period, seem to be written in Sumerian. They use the Sumerian sexagesimal system (with units for 10, 60, 600, and 3600) and refer to Sumerian gods like Enlil. But Sumerian has no clearly recognized affinity to other tongues.
It is important to realize that the term “Sumerian,” strictly speaking, can be used only for this language. There is no physical type which can be called by that name. From Al Ubaid times until the present day, the population of Mesopotamia has consisted of men predominantly belonging to the Mediterranean or Brown race, with a noticeable admixture of broad-headed mountaineers from the north-east. This is, for instance, true of the Early Dynastic period, as the skulls from Al Ubaid and Kish show. Skeletons of the earliest known inhabitants of the plain, found at Eridu and Hassuna, have been briefly discussed by C. S. Coon in Sumer, V (1949), 103-6; VI (1950), 93-6. They represent “rather heavy-boned prognathous and large-toothed mediterraneans.” The much-discussed problem of the origin of the Sumerians may well turn out to be the chase of a chimera.