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236 The Origin of Civilisation

directions, inventing a prodigious number of indispensable Łools, skills and techniques.³² They deuised brick moulds and the potter¹s wheel for shaping the ubiguitous clay; in the field of architecture, they discovered the arch, the vault and the dome. Describing the Temples C and D in the Eanna Precinct at Unik (Warka), dating to level lVa, (c.3100 BC), Seton Lloyd suggests their T-shaped sanctuaries were an innovation, elsewhere found only in northern Mesopotamia, and he sees this building complex as emphasising "the precocious ingenuity of Proto-literate architects."³⁴ They learnt to sculpt in stone, a materiał entirely absent from the region, so that they were totally dependent upon imports to satisfy their needs. They invented engraving, and inlay work and introduced the art of the cylinder seal to the Near East.³⁵ Their skills in metal-working and jewellery technigues were equally prodigious, although Kramer suggests it is not improbable that originally many craftsmen came from foreign parts to practise their skills in the construction of the temples¹ around which life centred, especially in the earliest period before the rise to pre-eminence of the kings. They understood casting in copper and bronze, rivetting, brazing and soldering, filigree work and granulation. They also devised the sailboat, the wagon wheel and the plough.³⁷

Through their inwention of writing ¹ the Sumerians hołd a unique place in the history of civilisation. This is particularly so because during the next few millennia almost every society in western Asia borrowed their cuneiform script for their own usage.³⁸ The most direct ewidence to datę for this borrowing concerns the Akkadians, Assyrians, Baby1onians, Hittites, Hurrians, Canaanites and Elamites. The tough requirements of this syllabie logographic writing system ensured that Sumerian literaturę and progressive attitudes to education would make a profound and enduring impression upon the entire area. The contihuation of so much that was essentially Sumer ian, especially in the realms of mythology, literaturę, reiigion and education, both through their conquerors and successors, the Babyłonians, enabled their influence and abiding legacy to survive, right down to modern times. Their grasp of ethics, morals, and the symbolic arts and Sciences were equally impressive. Written law played a major role in the life of the city, beginning at an early stage with formally contracted documents on sales and deeds and culminating in the compilation of specially prepared law codea. While they deweloped no generał laws on science or astronomy, they were extremely well versed in medicine, musie and in mathematics.⁴¹ Their knowledge in this discipline is astonishing; they devised posltional numeration and the sexagesimal system which is still used for diyiding the clock and the circle into smaller unita. Perhaps their greateat lasting achiewement is, quite fittingly, in the sphere of religion, sińce it is elear from the archaeologica 1 evidence that the gods played a hugely prominent role in the life of the entire population.⁴³

Kramer lists the prolific number of biblical parallels to be found in the Sumerian literaturo, indicating the enormous debt later cultures owe to theae enterprising pioneers in the ciwilisation process.⁴⁴ The list of borrowed themee is formidable; the creation of the Uniuerse and man, the concepta of paradise and the nether world, the story of the flood, the Cain - Abel and the plague motifs, the Tower of Babel and the diaperaion of mankind, belief in a persona1 Cod, biblical lawa, ethica and morala, divine retribution and national cataatrophe, suffering and submission.⁴⁵ The Baby lon ian a adopted a conaiderable quantity of this inspirational Sumerian culture, and ultimately, by exercising a deep influence on less cultured neighbours - most notably the Assyrians, Hittites, Hurrians and Canaanites - they were instrumental in planting this Sumerian legacy everywhere in the ancient Near Eastt⁶ Later, imaginatii/e borrowings by the Hebrews, Greeks and Romans, and through them down to the recent Western European cultures, have ensured the long-term surviv/al for a great deal of this inwaluable heritage.

The Origin of Greek Civilisation

Clearly, a durable cultural aura surrounds the Sumerian effluorescence, and the archaeological ewidence overwhelmingly confirms the notion of new ideas and innovations ramifying widely across all fiwe subsystems, with the strong impression that civilisation blossomed within just a few centuries. However, Classical Greece is an even better example for study, being close enough to us chronologically to have been minutely and extensively examined. In his excellent account, "The Origins of Greek Civilization," C.G.Starr resorts to atomie imagery to describe the birth of Classical Greece as a quantum leap:

The age of revolution 750-650 BC, was the most dramatic development in all Greek history. Change was many-sided and intricately eon-nected in all fields.⁴⁷

Although they inherited a mass of earlier elements, the generations who lived in the Aegean from 1100-750 BC gradually forged them into a cogent outlook and social structure, which, by the time of the Iliad, can be termed 'Greek'.

Swiftly, with simple but sharp strokes, the Greeks erected a coherent interlocked system politically, economically and culturally, which endured throughout the rest of their independent life. *8

This transformation was not achieved effortlessly, however. The Hycenaean culture, itself a close adaptation of the earlier Minoan efflorescence, was modelled on the despotic oriental civilisations of the Near East. The storn defiant fortresses of the petty kingdoms of the Hycenaean age are light years away from the world of Pythagoras and Aristotle. Two protracted centuries of consolidating reconstruction were required, for the Aegean world to recower from the shock of the Hycenaean collapse, and for the crucial metamorphosis to occur, before the fuli bodied ciwilisation of Classical Greece emerged.

Writing was independently invented in other locations, but Sumer is widely held to have been chronologically the first.