Early Civilizations

The earliest civilizations that arose in the world developed in the late fourth and the third millennia BC in parts of Asia and north Africa. The three large alluvial systems of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile and the Indus supported three great ancient civilizations. Other urban communities also arose during this time. For example, settlement mounds known as tells or tepes, occur in almost all major valleys between Iraq and Pakistan in one direction and between the Caspian Sea and the Indian Ocean in the other and many that have been explored are known to have been occupied in the same period. However, unlike the great civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Indus, these communities did not form part of a unified economic system, and these small units, though clearly able for a time to support large, wealthy and organized societies, were much weaker than the vast civilizations of the alluvial lowlands.
Of the three great civilizations, that of Mesopotamia (first the Sumerian and later the Babylonian and Assyrian) is both the earliest in origin and in many ways the best understood, accessible through archaeology and through written documents. The Mesopotamian culture though separated from us by more than 4,000 years, the inheritance of ancient Sumer can still be recognized in today's traditions. Since many of the practices and beliefs of Sumer were passed on to the Babylonians and Assyrians and hence through contact and deliberate borrowing to the Hittites, the Phoenicians and finally the Greeks, some have reached today's culture. Specific traits that we can trace back to Sumer include, in the field of mathematics, positional numeration where the value of a number is determined by its position in a sequence of numbers (as in the decimal system), and the sexagesimal system by which we divide the clock and the circle, and in the world of religion, the concept of the creative power of the divine word and the story of the Universal Flood.

Archaeology has now established that civilization appeared earlier in southern Mesopotamia than anywhere else. Urban conglomerations of populations, monumental architecture and writing were all in existence by 3500 BC, whereas they did not appear in Egypt for several centuries after this. In the Valley even the Pre-Harappan or Early Harappan phase, with its small fortified towns, these did not begin till shortly before 3000 BC and writing is not known before the mature Harappan phase which cannot be dated before 2500 BC. Sumer undoubtedly has the chronological priority and therefore it is possible that both the Egyptian and the Indus civilization, as well as all the later civilizations of western Asia, were derivatives of Sumer. Here one must consider the evidence in favor of the view that civilization was diffused from this early center and weigh it against the evidence for the independent development of civilization in different areas. The two great civilizations of Egypt and the Indus Valley will be dealt with first, and later with the smaller centers of urban life in western Asia.