The 12th Planet Read Free Page A

of utensils, ornaments, and statuettes. By 5000 B.C. , the Near East was producing clay and pottery objects of superb quality and fantastic design.
     
    But once again progress slowed, and by 4500 B.C. , archaeological evidence indicates, regression was all around. Pottery became simpler. Stone utensils—a relic of the Stone Age—again became predominant. Inhabited sites reveal fewer remains. Some sites that had been centers of pottery and clay industries began to be abandoned, and distinct clay manufacturing disappeared. "There was a general impoverishment of culture," according to James Melaart
(Earliest Civilizations of the Near East);
some sites clearly bear the marks of "the new poverty-stricken phase."
     
    Man and his culture were clearly on the decline.
     
    Then—suddenly, unexpectedly, inexplicably—the Near East witnessed the blossoming of the greatest civilization imaginable, a civilization in which our own is firmly rooted.
     
    A mysterious hand once more picked Man out of his decline and raised him to an even higher level of culture, knowledge, and civilization.
     

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    THE SUDDEN CIVILIZATION
     
    For a long time, Western man believed that his civilization was the gift of Rome and Greece. But the Greek philosophers themselves wrote repeatedly that they had drawn on even earlier sources. Later on, travelers returning to Europe reported the existence in Egypt of imposing pyramids and temple-cities half-buried in the sands, guarded by strange stone beasts called sphinxes.
     
    When Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1799, he took with him scholars to study and explain these ancient monuments. One of his officers found near Rosetta a stone slab on which was carved a proclamation from 196 B.C. written in the ancient Egyptian pictographic writing (hieroglyphic) as well as in two other scripts.
     
    The decipherment of the ancient Egyptian script and language, and the archaeological efforts that followed, revealed to Western man that a high civilization had existed in Egypt well before the advent of the Greek civilization. Egyptian records spoke of royal dynasties that began circa 3100 B.C. —two full millennia before the beginning of Hellenic civilization. Reaching its maturity in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. , Greece was a latecomer rather than an originator.
     
    Was the origin of our civilization, then, in Egypt?
     
    As logical as that conclusion would have seemed, the facts militated against it. Greek scholars did describe visits to Egypt, but the ancient sources of knowledge of which they spoke were found elsewhere. The pre-Hellenic cultures of the Aegean Sea—the Minoan on the island of Crete and the Mycenaean on the Greek mainland—revealed evidence that the Near Eastern, not the Egyptian, culture had been adopted. Syria and Anatolia, not Egypt, were the principal avenues through which an earlier civilization became available to the Greeks.
     
    Noting that the Dorian invasion of Greece and the Israelite invasion of Canaan following the Exodus from Egypt took place at about the same time (circa the thirteenth century B.C. ), scholars have been fascinated to discover a growing number of similarities between the Semitic and Hellenic civilizations. Professor Cyrus H. Gordon
(Forgotten Scripts; Evidence for the Minoan Language)
opened up a new field of study by showing that an early Minoan script, called Linear A, represented a Semitic language. He concluded that "the pattern (as distinct from the content) of the Hebrew and Minoan civilizations is the same to a remarkable extent," and pointed out that the island's name, Crete, spelled in Minoan
Ke-re-ta,
was the same as the Hebrew word
Ke-re-et
("walled city") and had a counterpart in a Semitic tale of a king of Keret.
     
    Even the Hellenic alphabet, from which the Latin and our own alphabets derive, came from the Near East. The ancient Greek historians themselves wrote that a Phoenician named Kadmus ("ancient") brought them the alphabet,