Henri Frankfort

“ We shall now desist from comparisons and consider the formative age of Mesopotamia, which is called the Protoliterate period since it witnessed the invention of writing. To this period the earliest ruins of cities belong. Now one may say that the birth of Mesopotamian civilization, like its subsequent growth, occurred under the sign of the city. To understand the importance of the city as a factor in the shaping of society, one must not think of it as a mere conglomeration of people. ”

“ Under the aspect of “form” we may ask: what actually does appear when this civilization comes into being? Is its form established piecemeal? If so, whence comes the coherence which characterizes it throughout its historical existence? Under the aspect of “dynamics” we may ask: is the emergence of this civilization a gradual process? Are earlier elements transmuted or combined by degrees, or is the peculiar coherence of a mature civilization the outcome of a sudden and intense change, a crisis in which its form—undeveloped but potentially a whole—crystallizes out, or rather, is born? ”

“ Recognizing it amounts to discovering a point of view from where seemingly unrelated facts acquire coherence and meaning. Even so the “form” of a civilization remains intangible; it is implicit in the preoccupations and valuations of the people. It imparts to their achievements—to their arts and institutions, their literature, their theology—something distinct and final, something which has its own peculiar perfection. Therefore a discussion of the emergence of form entails a knowledge of a civilization in its maturity, a familiarity with its classical expression in every field. ”

“ But Toynbee, who is a believing Christian, surely knows that self-determination may not be a matter of gradual advance at all, but rather a flash-like illumination in which one’s true nature stands revealed. As a rule, the sequel to this experience is a life-long struggle for a realization of the vision. Why could not this type of self-determination also, like the slow and gradual realization, have an analogy in the life of civilizations? Flinders Petrie and others have maintained that every significant trait of Egyptian culture had been evolved before the end of the Third Dynasty. ”

“ Most modern cities have lost the peculiar characteristic of individuality which we can observe in cities of Renaissance Italy, of Medieval Europe, of Greece, and of Mesopotamia. In these counties the physical existence of the city is but an outward sign of close communal affinities which dominate the life of every dweller within the walls. The city sets its citizens apart from the other inhabitants of the land. It determines their relations with the outside world. It produces an intensified self-consciousness in its burghers, to whom the collective achievements are a source of pride. ”

“ It seems easy to deal in a general way with civilizations as entities; at least this is commonly done. Arnold Toynbee, in his Study of History, distinguishes without hesitation twenty-one civilizations—“specimens of the species,” belonging to the “genus societies”—by what he believes to be an empirical method. But consider the problem which arises when we want to study the genesis of any one civilization in particular! We cannot merely assume that it is an entity and has a recognizable character of its own ”

“ I shall simply use the term “prehistory” to denote the period preceding the emergence of Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization, and shall discuss first the climatic conditions in the Near East at that time and then the form of society which prevailed before the events with which we are primarily concerned took place.
At present the arable lands of Egypt and Western Asia are embedded in large tracts of desert. ”

“ We must imagine a great arc on which are ranged the possible interests provided either by the human age-cycle or by the environment or by man’s various activities. A culture that capitalized even a considerable proportion of these would be as unintelligible as a language that used all the clicks, all the glottal stops, all the labials, dentals, sibilants and gutturals from voiceless to voiced, and from oral to nasal. Its identity as a culture depends upon the selection of some segments of this arc. Every human society everywhere has made such a selection in its cultural institutions. ”

“ While it is true that the terms “civilization” and “culture” count as synonyms in general usage, and that every distinction therefore remains arbitrary, there are etymological reasons for preferences in their use. The word “culture,” with its overtones of something irrational, something grown rather than made, is preferred by those who study primitive peoples. The word “civilization,” on the other hand, appeals to those who consider man in the first place as homo politicus, and it is in this sense that we would have our title understood. ”

“ For Spengler the word “humanity” is merely an empty phrase. The great civilizations are unconnected. They are self-contained organisms of so individual a nature that people who belong to one cannot understand the achievements and modes of thought of another. He maintains that not even in science does knowledge show accumulations transcending the limits of one civilization. ”

“ For a comparison between Egypt and Mesopotamia discloses, not only that writing, representational art, monumental architecture, and a new kind of political coherence were introduced in the two countries; it also reveals the striking fact that the purpose of their writing, the contents of their representations, the functions of their monumental buildings, and the structure of their new societies differed completely. What we observe is not merely the establishment of civilized life, but the emergence, concretely, of the distinctive “forms” of Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization. ”

“ There is, in this last passage, a suggestion of the dynamics of the formation of a civilization but it is not this aspect but that of “form” which prevails in the work of Benedict or Malinowski. For modern savages are relatively stagnant if we discount the disturbances caused by the white man. Hence the title Patterns of Culture.
It is, however, precisely the problem of the dynamics of cultural change—a problem misconstrued by Spengler and rightly ignored by Ruth Benedict—which lies at the centre of Arnold Toynbee’s work. ”

“ It is important to realize that the change was not a quantitative one. If one stresses the increased food supply or the expansion of human skill and enterprise; or if one combines both elements by proclaiming irrigation a triumph of skill which produced abundance; even if one emphasizes the contrast between the circumscribed existence of the prehistoric villagers and the richer, more varied, and more complex life in the 50 cities—one misses the point. All these quantitative evaluations lead to generalizations which obscure the very problem with which we are concerned. ”

“ Generalizations based on a limited historical experience, and theorizing, however ingeniously conducted, must fail to disclose the individual character of any one civilization or of any one series of events. We must concentrate on what Ruth Benedict called the “selected segment of the arc of possible human behaviour,” “the characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society.” In our own terms: In studying the birth of a civilization we are concerned with the emergence of its “form.” ”

“ Toynbee expects to find in every civilization an analogy of the early Christian Church in the Roman Empire, and thus postulates for Egypt an “Osireian Church” as a “universal church created by an internal proletariat.” [27] Now, a “church” as an organized body of believers was not known in Egypt at any time (nor in Mesopotamia, for that matter) . The worship of Osiris, always a main concern of the king, spread through all classes of the population, but merely as one among many devotions which filled the life of every Egyptian; the god was never honoured by one group more than by another. ”

“ While it is true that the city in Mesopotamia was an outstanding innovation of the Protoliterate period, the great divergence between city and countryside, between rural and urban life, is, in the form in which we are familiar with it, a product of the “industrial revolution,” and emphasis on this contrast mars our perspective when we view earlier situations. ”

“ The tension between courage and the awareness of man’s dependence on superhuman power found a precarious equilibrium in a peculiarly Mesopotamian conception. It was a conception which was elaborated in theology but which likewise informed the practical organization of society: the city was conceived to be ruled by a god.
Theocracy, of course, was not peculiar to Mesopotamia: Egypt, too, was ruled by a god. But this god was incarnate in Pharaoh ”

“ One culture hardly recognizes monetary values; another has made them fundamental in every field of behaviour. In one society technology is unbelievably slighted even in those aspects of life which seem necessary to ensure survival; in another, equally simple, technological achievements are complex and fitted with admirable nicety to the situation. One builds an enormous cultural superstructure upon adolescence, one upon death, one upon afterlife. ”

“ Curiously enough, the two men who have devoted their life’s work to the problem of the genesis of civilization have done so under a compelling awareness of its decline. Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee both wrote under the shadow of an impending world war; and their work is, to some extent, warped by their preoccupation with decay. ”

“ By interpreting the harmony between each civilization and its natural setting in this manner, he denies a freedom of the human spirit which—to name but one instance—the achievements of the Greeks in Sicily and southern Italy splendidly vindicate.
In describing the death of a civilization Spengler is likewise under the spell of scientific notions. This is not obvious; in fact, Spengler’s success is largely due to the plausibility of some of his most imaginative statements. We feel that it makes sense, even that it is illuminating, to speak of a youthful, or ageing, or dying civilization. ”

“ In Mesopotamia no god was identified with the mortal head of the state. The world of the gods and the world of men were incommensurate. Nevertheless, a god was supposed to own the city and its people. The temple was called the god’s house; and it functioned actually as the manor-house on an estate, with the community labouring in its service. We shall describe the organization of the temple community at the end of this chapter. It is necessary first to survey the actual remains of the Protoliterate cities—the earliest cities in Mesopotamia. ”

“ The scheme which we have criticized in its application to Egypt is intended to render account of the dynamics of civilizations in their last phases. For the early phases, the classical world cannot supply ready-made notions. Here Toynbee introduces a set of formulas which may be summarized in his own words:
Growth is achieved, when an individual, or a minority, or a whole society, replies to a challenge by a response, which not only answers the particular challenge that has evoked it, but also exposes the respondent to a fresh challenge which demands a fresh response on his part. ”

“ It is true that towards the end of the prehistoric period certain innovations heralded the coming 51 age. But when the change occurred it had the character of a crisis, affecting every aspect of life at once but passing within the space of a few generations. Then followed—from the middle of the First until the end of the Third Dynasty—a period of consolidation and experiment, and with this the formative phase of Egyptian civilization was concluded. Few things that mattered in Pharaonic Egypt were without roots in that first great age of creativity. ”

“ For if it is true—as we have said before—that those best acquainted with the ancient Near East have rarely found occasion to consider our problem, it is equally true, of course, that we are not the first to discuss it. ”