Page 383 - The Tigris Expedition

Five Months for Us, Five Millennia for Mankind

related priest-kings at that time came from elsewhere with their
respective entourages, and imposed their dynasties on areas for­
merly occupied by more primitive or at least culturally far less
advanced tribes.
Why this impressive, seemingly overnight blossoming in three
places simultaneously unless there was some link between them? If
this question was pertinent before, it certainly becomes more so
now, with the discovery that 3000 bc does not mark some sort of
half-way point in human spread and evolution; the Mesopota­
mians, Egyptians and all other representatives of mankind had all
had at least 2,000,000 years in which to move independently from
palaeolithic barbarian to bronze age civilisation. Knowing this,
how can we assume that three reed-boat building people began to
travel in search of tin and copper at the same time, the two metals
they needed to mix for shaping bronze in their wax-filled moulds?
Nor is there any natural tie between bronze moulding and, say, the
invention of script or the use of wheeled carts; yet these three
civilisations suddenly shared all of man’s major inventions and
beliefs, as if they had inspired each other or suddenly had drawn
from a common pool.
We are on firm historic ground when we admit that it was from
the vast grain fields of Egypt and Sumer that all the arts of
civilisation spread in Antiquity, first throughout the Middle East,
then to Crete, Greece, Rome and finally the rest of Europe. The
Indus civilisation, with elaborate ports on the coast, is known to
have left its influence on distant parts of India. Since Pliny shows
that Ceylon traded with China in prehistoric times, there would
have been nothing to prevent the civilised Harappans from doing
the same thing and spreading impulses important for the coming
growth of the great Chinese civilisation which blossomed soon
afterwards. In Ormara village we had seen the tiny, primitive
dhows that regularly came to fetch shark cargo for Ceylon. The sea
was their natural road, not the jungle of India. With Ceylon as a
geographical intermediary in the east and Bahrain in the west, the
Indus civilisation was not necessarily ignorant of any major nation
along coastal Asia in the epoch when their ships began to plough the
seas.
Chronologically, all the great civilisations of Antiquity known to
us today appeared one by one in the centuries immediately after
3000 bc. They all followed the break-through in the three circum-
Arabian river valleys. But however important, that break-through
still does not mark the zero hour for civilised man, the real

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