Page 384 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
beginning. Established views collapsed again when a revision and
adjustment of carbon datings disclosed that civilised man had been
active on some of the most unlikely islands before he got around to
founding the first dynasties in the three great river valleys. Impor­
tant stone structures were built on islands around Great Britain, on
Malta and Bahrain before they were built elsewhere. The long
accepted teachings as to the beginning of civilisation arc today
found untenable.
Science itself is bewildered. There has been no time to revise the
textbooks and they arc now all heretical. Nor can the old texts be
replaced until the majority of scholars agree on their replacement.
At present some assert that civilisation must simply have started
independently on various islands a millennium or more before it
started in the continental river valleys. The stimulus for progress
was perhaps peace and security through isolation rather than in­
spiration through contact, mass organisation and rich grain harvests.
Others insist that such a theory conflicts with fundamental know­
ledge of social anthropology. Small islands, poor in soil and
resources, offer none of the basic needs to produce civilisation.
Besides, civilisation is not born overnight; if present on islands
around Britain by 4000 bc, then civilised people must have reached
there at that time or barbarians must have arrived there much
earlier, with time to become civilised.
Whatever might be the answer, we are back with boats marking
the beginnings. Whole families, civilised or primitive, were travel­
ling together by sea. This confirms what we knew from the wall
paintings in the Sahara and the rock carvings near the Red Sea:
ship-building was old when pyramid-building started. Rivers and
oceans were open when jungles were closed.
There is a glaring lack of knowledge about our own past in the
two million years between the oldest hominid bones found under
the silt in Africa and the evidence of seafaring inside and outside the
Straits of Gibraltar some six or seven thousand years ago. Then
another short gap until the sudden appearance of powerful, dei ie
kings with whole entourages of skilled craftsmen, metal-workers,
architects, astronomers and scribes at the mouth of the
mian rivers and on the banks of the Nile and the Indus around JUUU
bc. These dates arc milestones, nothing else. Most of the luman
past is totally lost. Buried or effaced. In the course of two mi icm
years of human activity, ice has come and gone. Land has emerge
and submerged. Forest humus, desert sand, river silt an vo cz
eruptions have hidden from our view large portions of the or
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