4. Cradles of Civilization

Central Asia—Anau—Lines of Dispersion

It is fitting that this chapter of unanswerable questions should end with the query, “Where did civilization begin?”—which is also unanswerable. If we may trust the geologists, who deal with prehistoric mists as airy as any metaphysics, the arid regions of central Asia were once moist and temperate, nourished with great lakes and abundant streams.⁷⁰ The recession of the last ice wave slowly dried up this area, until the rainfall was insufficient to support towns and states. City after city was abandoned as men fled west and east, north and south, in search of water; half buried in the desert lie ruined cities like Bactra, which must have held a teeming population within its twenty-two miles of circumference. As late as 1868 some 80,000 inhabitants of western Turkestan were forced to migrate because their district was being inundated by the moving sand.⁷¹ There are many who believe that these now dying regions saw the first substantial development of that vague complex of order and provision, manners and morals, comfort and culture, which constitutes civilization.⁷²

In 1907 Pumpelly unearthed at Anau, in southern Turkestan, pottery and other remains of a culture which he has ascribed to 9000 B.C., with a possible exaggeration of four thousand years.⁷³ Here we find the cultivation of wheat, barley and millet, the use of copper, the domestication of animals, and the ornamentation of pottery in styles so conventionalized as to suggest an artistic background and tradition of many centuries.⁷⁴ Apparently the culture of Turkestan was already very old in 5000 B.C. Perhaps it had historians who delved into its past in a vain search for the origins of civilization, and philosophers who eloquently mourned the degeneration of a dying race.

From this center, if we may imagine where we cannot know, a people driven by a rainless sky and betrayed by a desiccated earth migrated in three directions, bringing their arts and civilization with them. The arts, if not the race, reached eastward to China, Manchuria and North America; southward to northern India; westward to Elam, Sumeria, Egypt, even to Italy and Spain.⁷⁵ At Susa, in ancient Elam (modern Persia), remains have been found so similar in type to those at Anau that the re-creative imagination is almost justified in presuming cultural communication between Susa and Anau at the dawn of civilization (ca. 4000 B.C.).⁷⁶ A like kinship of early arts and products suggests a like relationship and continuity between prehistoric Mesopotamia and Egypt.

We cannot be sure which of these cultures came first, and it does not much matter; they were in essence of one family and one type. If we violate honored precedents here and place Elam and Sumeria before Egypt, it is from no vainglory of unconventional innovation, but rather because the age of these Asiatic civilizations, compared with those of Africa and Europe, grows as our knowledge of them deepens. As the spades of archeology, after a century of victorious inquiry along the Nile, pass across Suez into Arabia, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Persia, it becomes more probable with every year of accumulating research that it was the rich delta of Mesopotamia’s rivers that saw the earliest known scenes in the historic drama of civilization.