IN our search so far for the positive factor in the geneses of civilizations we have been employing the tactics of the classical school of modern physical science. We have been thinking in abstract terms and experimenting with the play of inanimate forces—race and environment. Now that these manoeuvres have ended in our drawing blank, we may pause to consider whether our failures may not have been due to some mistake of method. Perhaps, under the insidious influence of the spirit of an outgoing age, we have fallen victims to what we will call the ‘apathetic fallacy’. Ruskin warned his readers against the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of imaginatively endowing inanimate objects with life; but it is equally necessary for us to be on our guard against the converse error of applying to historical thought, which is a study of living creatures, a scientific method devised for the study of inanimate nature. In our final attempt to solve the riddle let us follow Plato’s lead and try the alternative course. Let us shut our eyes, for the moment, to the formulae of science in order to open our ears to the language of mythology.
It is clear that if the geneses of civilizations are not the result of biological factors or of geographical environment acting separately, they must be the result of some kind of interaction between them. In other words, the factor which we are seeking to identify is something not simple but multiple, not an entity but a relation. We have the choice of conceiving this relation either as an interaction between two inhuman forces or as an encounter between two superhuman personalities. Let us yield our minds to the second of these two conceptions. Perhaps it will lead us towards the light.
An encounter between two superhuman personalities is the plot of some of the greatest dramas that the human imagination has conceived. An encounter between Yahweh and the Serpent is the plot of the story of the Fall of Man in the Book of Genesis; a second encounter between the same antagonists, transfigured by a progressive enlightenment of Syriac souls, is the plot of the New Testament which tells the story of the Redemption; an encounter between the Lord and Satan is the plot of the Book of Job; an encounter between the Lord and Mephistopheles is the plot of Goethe’s Faust; an encounter between Gods and Demons is the plot of the Scandinavian Voluspa; an encounter between Artemis and Aphrodite is the plot of Euripides’ Hippolytus.
We find another version of the same plot in that ubiquitous and ever-recurring myth—a ‘primordial image’ if ever there was one— of the encounter between the Virgin and the Father of her Child. The characters in this myth have played their allotted parts on a thousand different stages under an infinite variety of names: Danae and the Shower of Gold; Europa and the Bull; Semele the Stricken Earth and Zeus the Sky that launches the thunderbolt; Creusa and Apollo in Euripides’ Ion; Psyche and Cupid; Gretchen and Faust. The theme recurs, transfigured, in the Annunciation. In our own day in the West this protean myth has re-expressed itself as the last word of our astronomers on the genesis of the planetary system, as witness the following credo:
‘We believe ... that some two thousand million years ago ... 2 second star, wandering blindly through space, happened to come within hailing distance of the Sun. Just as the Sun and Moon raise tides on the Earth, so this second star must have raised tides on the surface of the Sun. But they would be very different from the puny tides which the small mass of the Moon raises in our oceans; a huge tidal wave must have travelled over the surface of the Sun, ultimately forming a mountain of prodigious height, which would rise ever higher and higher as the cause of the disturbance came nearer and nearer. And, before the second star began to recede, its tidal pull had become so powerful that this mountain was torn to pieces and threw off small fragments of itself, much as the crest of a wave throws off spray. These small fragments have been circulating round their parent sun ever since. They are the planets, great and small, of which our Earth is one.’ 1
Thus out of the mouth of the mathematical astronomer, when all his complex calculations are done, there comes forth, once again, the myth of the encounter between the Sun Goddess and her ravisher that is so familiar a tale in the mouths of the untutored children of nature.
The presence and potency of this duality in the causation of the civilizations whose geneses we are studying is admitted by a Modern Western archaeologist whose studies begin with a concentration on environment and end with an intuition of the mystery of life:
‘Environment. . . is not the total causation in culture-shaping. . . . It is, beyond doubt, the most conspicuous single factor. . . . But there is still an indefinable factor which may best be designated quite frankly as x , the unknown quantity, apparently psychological in kind. . . . If x be not the most conspicuous factor in the matter, it certainly is the most important, the most fate-laden.’ 2
In our present study of history this insistent theme of the super-human encounter has asserted itself already. At an early stage we observed that ‘a society ... is confronted in the course of its life by a succession of problems’ and that ‘the presentation of each problem is a challenge to undergo an ordeal’.
Let us try to analyse the plot of this story or drama which repeats itself in such different contexts and in such various forms.
We may begin with two general features: the encounter is conceived of as a rare and sometimes as a unique event; and it has consequences which are vast in proportion to the vastness of the breach which it makes in the customary course of nature.
Even in the easy-going world of Hellenic mythology, where the gods saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and had their way with so many of them that their victims could be marshalled and paraded in poetic catalogues, such incidents never ceased to be sensational affairs and invariably resulted in the births of heroes. In the versions of the plot in which both parties to the encounter are superhuman, the rarity and momentousness of the event are thrown into stronger relief. In the Book of Job, ‘the day when the Sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them’, is evidently conceived of as an unusual occasion; and so is the encounter between the Lord and Mephistopheles in the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ (suggested, of course, by the opening of the Book of Job) which starts the action of Goethe’s Faust. In both these dramas the consequences on Earth of the encounter in Heaven are tremendous. The personal ordeals of Job and Faust represent, in the intuitive language of fiction, the infinitely multiple ordeal of mankind; and, in the language of theology, the same vast consequence is represented as following from the superhuman encounters that are portrayed in the Book of Genesis and in the New Testament. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, which follows the encounter between Yahweh and the Serpent, is nothing less than the Fall of Man; the passion of Christ in the New Testament is nothing less than Man’s Redemption. Even the birth of our planetary system from the encounter of two suns, as pictured by our modern astronomer, is declared by the same authority to be ‘an event of almost unimaginable rarity’.
In every case the story opens with a perfect state of Yin. Faust is perfect in knowledge; Job is perfect in goodness and prosperity; Adam and Eve are perfect in innocence and ease; the Virgins— Gretchen, Danae and the rest—are perfect in purity and beauty. In the astronomer’s universe the Sun, a perfect orb, travels on its course intact and whole. When Yin is thus complete, it is ready to pass over into Yang. But what is to make it pass? A change in a state which, by definition, is perfect after its kind can only be started by an impulse or motive which comes from outside. If we think of the state as one of physical equilibrium, we must bring in another star. If we think of it as one of psychic beatitude or nirvana, we must bring another actor on to the stage: a critic to set the mind thinking again by suggesting doubts; an adversary to set the heart feeling again by instilling distress or discontent or fear or antipathy. This is the role of the Serpent in Genesis, of Satan in the Book of Job, of Mephistopheles in Faust, of Loki in the Scandinavian mythology, of the Divine Lovers in the Virgin myths.
In the language of science we may say that the function of the intruding factor is to supply that on which it intrudes with a stimulus of the kind best calculated to evoke the most potently creative variations. In the language of mythology and theology, the impulse or motive which makes a perfect Yin-state pass over into new Yang-activity comes from an intrusion of the Devil into the universe of God. The event can best be described in these mythological images because they are not embarrassed by the contradiction that arises when the statement is translated into logical terms. In logic, if God’s universe is perfect, there cannot be a Devil outside it, while, if the Devil exists, the perfection which he comes to spoil must have been incomplete already through the very fact of his existence. This logical contradiction, which cannot be logically resolved, is intuitively transcended in the imagery of the poet and prophet, who give glory to an omnipotent God yet take it for granted that He is subject to two crucial limitations.
The first limitation is that, in the perfection of what He has created already, He cannot find an opportunity for further creative activity. If God is conceived of as transcendent, the works of creation are as glorious as ever they were but they cannot ‘be changed from glory into glory’. The second limitation on God’s power is that when the opportunity for fresh creation is offered to Him from outside He cannot but take it. When the Devil challenges Him He cannot refuse to take the challenge up. God is bound to accept the predicament because He can refuse only at the price of denying His own nature and ceasing to be God.
If God is thus not omnipotent in logical terms, is He still mytho-logically invincible? If He is bound to take up the Devil’s challenge, is He also bound to win the ensuing battle? In Euripides’ Hippolytus, where God’s part is played by Artemis and the Devil’s by Aphrodite, Artemis is not only unable to decline the combat but is foredoomed to defeat. The relations between the Olympians are anarchic and Artemis in the epilogue can console herself only by making up her mind that one day she will play the Devil’s role herself at Aphrodite’s expense. The result is not creation but destruction. In the Scandinavian version destruction is likewise the outcome in Ragnarok—when ‘Gods and Demons slay and are slain’—though the unique genius of the author of Voluspa makes his Sibyl’s vision pierce the gloom to behold the light of a new dawn beyond it. On the other hand, in another version of the plot, the combat which follows the compulsory acceptance of the challenge takes the form, not of an exchange of fire in which the Devil has the first shot and cannot fail to kill his man, but of a wager which the Devil is apparently bound to lose. The classic works in which this wager motif is worked out are the Book of Job and Goethe’s Faust.
It is in Goethe’s drama that the point is most clearly made. After the Lord has accepted the wager with Mephistopheles in Heaven, the terms are agreed on Earth, between Mephistopheles and Faust, as follows:
Faust.
Comfort and quiet!—no, no! none of these
For me—I ask them not—I seek them not.
If ever I upon the bed of sloth
Lie down and rest, then be the hour in which
I so lie down and rest my last of life.
Canst thou by falsehood or by flattery
Delude me into self-complacent smiles,
Cheat me into tranquillity? Come then,
And welcome, life’s last day—be this our wager.
Meph. Done.
Faust.
Done, say I: clench we at once the bargain.
If ever time should flow so calmly on,
Soothing my spirits in such oblivion
That in the pleasant trance I would arrest
And hail the happy moment in its course,
Bidding it linger with me ....
Then willingly do I consent to perish.
1
The bearing of this mythical compact upon our problem of the geneses of civilizations can be brought out by identifying Faust, at the moment when he makes his bet, with one of those ‘awakened sleepers’ who have risen from the ledge on which they had been lying torpid and have started to climb on up the face of the cliff. In the language of our simile, Faust is saying: I have made up my mind to leave this ledge and climb this precipice in search of the next ledge above. In attempting this I am aware that I am leaving safety behind me. Yet, for the sake of the possibility of achievement, I will take the risk of a fall and destruction.’
In the story as told by Goethe the intrepid climber, after an ordeal of mortal dangers and desperate reverses, succeeds in the end in scaling the cliff triumphantly. In the New Testament the same ending is given, through the revelation of a second encounter between the same pair of antagonists, to the combat between Yahweh and the Serpent which, in the original version in Genesis, had ended rather in the manner of the combat between Artemis and Aphrodite in the Hippolytus.
In Job, Faust and the New Testament alike it is suggested, or even declared outright, that the wager cannot be won by the Devil; that the Devil, in meddling with God’s work, cannot frustrate but can only serve the purpose of God, who remains master of the situation all the time and gives the Devil rope for the Devil to hang himself. Then has the Devil been cheated? Did God accept a wager which He knew He could not lose? That would be a hard saying; for if it were true the whole transaction would have been a sham. An encounter which was no encounter could not produce the consequences of an encounter—the vast cosmic consequence of causing Yin to pass over into Yang. Perhaps the explanation is that the wager which the Devil offers and which God accepts covers, and thereby puts in real jeopardy, a part of God’s creation but not the whole of it. The part really is at stake; and, though the whole is not, the chances and changes to which the part is exposed cannot conceivably leave the whole unaffected. In the language of mythology, when one of God’s creatures is tempted by the Devil, God Himself is thereby given the opportunity to re-create the World. The Devil’s intervention, whether it succeeds or fails on the particular issue—and either result is possible—has accomplished that transition from Yin to Yang for which God has been yearning.
As for the human protagonist’s part, suffering is the keynote of it in every presentation of the drama, whether the player of the part is Jesus or Job or Faust or Adam and Eve. The picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is a reminiscence of the Yin-state to which primitive man attained in the food-gathering phase of economy, after he had established his ascendancy over the rest of the flora and fauna of the Earth. The Fall, in response to the temptation to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, symbolizes the acceptance of a challenge to abandon this achieved integration and to venture upon a fresh differentiation out of which a fresh integration may—or may not—arise. The expulsion from the Garden into an unfriendly world in which the Woman must bring forth children in sorrow and the Man must eat bread in the sweat of his face, is the ordeal which the acceptance of the Serpent’s challenge has entailed. The sexual intercourse between Adam and Eve, which follows, is an act of social creation. It bears fruit in the birth of two sons who impersonate two nascent civilizations: Abel the keeper of sheep and Cain the tiller of the ground.
In our own generation, one of our most distinguished and original-minded students of the physical environment of human life tells the same story in his own way:
‘Ages ago a band of naked, houseless, fireless savages started from their warm home in the torrid zone and pushed steadily northward from the beginning of spring to the end of summer. They never guessed that they had left the land of constant warmth until in September they began to feel an uncomfortable chill at night. Day by day it grew worse. Not knowing its cause, they travelled this way or that to escape. Some went southward, but only a handful returned to their former home. There they resumed the old life, and their descendants are untutored savages to this day. Of those who wandered in other directions, all perished except one small band. Finding that they could not escape the nipping air, the members of this band used the loftiest of human faculties, the power of conscious invention. Some tried to find shelter by digging in the ground, some gathered branches and leaves to make huts and warm beds, and some wrapped themselves in the skins of the beasts that they had slain. Soon these savages had taken some of the greatest steps towards civilization. The naked were clothed; the houseless sheltered; the improvident learnt to dry meat and store it, with nuts, for the winter; and at last the art of preparing fire was discovered as a means of keeping warm. Thus they subsisted where at first they thought that they were doomed. And in the process of adjusting themselves to a hard environment they advanced by enormous strides, leaving the tropical part of mankind far in the rear.’ 1
A classical scholar likewise translates the story into the scientific terminology of our age:
‘It is ... a paradox of advancement that, if Necessity be the mother of Invention, the other parent is Obstinacy, the determination that you will go on living under adverse conditions rather than cut your losses and go where life is easier. It was no accident, that is, that civilization, as we know it, began in that ebb and flow of climate, flora and fauna which characterizes the four-fold Ice Age. Those primates who just “got out” as arboreal conditions wilted retained their primacy among the servants of natural law, but they forewent the conquest of nature. Those others won through, and became men, who stood their ground when there were no more trees to sit in, who “made do” with meat when fruit did not ripen, who made fires and clothes rather than follow the sunshine; who fortified their lairs and trained their young, and vindicated the reasonableness of a world that seemed so reasonless.’ 1
The first stage, then, of the human protagonist’s ordeal is a transition from Yin to Yang through a dynamic act—performed by God’s creature under temptation from the Adversary—which enables God Himself to resume His creative activity. But this progress has to be paid for; and it is not God but God’s servant, the human sower, who pays the price. Finally, after many vicissitudes, the sufferer triumphant serves as the pioneer. The human protagonist in the divine drama not only serves God by enabling Him to renew His creation but also serves his fellow men by pointing the way for others to follow.
The Unpredictable Factor
By the light of mythology we have gained some insight into the nature of challenges and responses. We have come to see that creation is the outcome of an encounter, that genesis is a product of interaction. Let us now return to our immediate quest: our search for the positive factor that has shaken part of mankind out of ‘the integration of custom’ into ‘the differentiation of civilization’ within the last six thousand years. Let us review the origins of our twenty-one civilizations in order to ascertain, by an empirical test, whether the conception of ‘Challenge-and-Response’ answers to the factor of which we are in search any better than the hypotheses of race and environment, which we have already weighed in the balance and found wanting.
In this fresh survey we shall still be concerned with race and environment, but we shall regard them in a new light. We shall no longer be on the look-out for some simple cause of the geneses of civilizations which can be demonstrated always and everywhere to produce an identical effect. We shall no longer be surprised if, in the production of civilizations, the same race or the same environment appears to be fruitful in one instance and sterile in another. In fact, we shall no longer make the scientific postulate of the Uniformity of Nature, which we rightly made so long as we were thinking of our problem in scientific terms as the function of a play of inanimate forces. We shall be prepared now to recognize that, even if we were exactly acquainted with all the racial, environmental, and other data that are capable of being formulated scientifically, we should not be able to predict the outcome of the interaction between the forces which these data represent, any more than a military expert can predict the outcome of a battle or campaign from an ‘inside knowledge’ of the dispositions and resources of both the opposing general staffs, or a bridge expert the outcome of a game from a similar knowledge of all the cards in every hand.
In both these analogies ‘inside knowledge’ is not sufficient to enable its possessor to predict results with any exactness or assurance because it is not the same thing as complete knowledge. There is one thing which must remain an unknown quantity to the best-informed onlooker because it is beyond the knowledge of the combatants, or players, themselves; and it is the most important term in the equation which the would-be calculator has to solve. This unknown quantity is the reaction of the actors to the ordeal when it actually comes. These psychological momenta, which are inherently impossible to weigh and measure and therefore to estimate scientifically in advance, are the very forces which actually decide the issue when the encounter takes place. And that is why the very greatest military geniuses have admitted an incalculable element in their successes. If religious, they have attributed their victories to God, like Cromwell; if merely superstitious, to the ascendancy of their ‘star’, like Napoleon.
The Genesis of the Egyptiac Civilization
When dealing with environment in the previous chapter we assumed, as the Hellenic authors of the environment theory naturally assumed, that environment is a static factor; more particularly, that within the limits of ‘historic’ time the physical conditions presented by the Afrasian Steppe and the Nile Valley have been always the same as they are to-day and as they were twenty-four centuries ago when the Greeks spun their theories round them. But in fact we know that this has not been so.
‘While Northern Europe was covered in ice as far as the Harz, and the Alps and the Pyrenees were capped with glaciers, the Arctic high pressure deflected southwards the Atlantic rainstorms. The cyclones that to-day traverse Central Europe then passed over the Mediterranean Basin and the Northern Sahara and continued, undrained by Lebanon, across Mesopotamia and Arabia to Persia and India. The parched Sahara enjoyed a regular rainfall, and farther east the showers were not only more bountiful than to-day but were distributed over the whole year, instead of being restricted to the winter. . . .
‘We should expect in North Africa, Arabia, Persia and the Indus Valley parklands and savannahs, such as flourish to-day north of the Mediterranean. . . . While the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and the reindeer were browsing in France and Southern England, North Africa was supporting a fauna that is found to-day on the Zambesi in Rhodesia. . . .
‘The pleasant grasslands of North Africa and Southern Asia were naturally as thickly populated by man as the frozen steppes of Europe, and it is reasonable to suspect that in this favourable and indeed stimulating environment man would make greater progress than in- the icebound north.’ 1
But after the close of the Ice Age our Afrasian area began to experience a profound physical change in the direction of desiccation; and simultaneously two or more civilizations arose in an area which had previously, like all the rest of the inhabited world, been occupied solely by primitive societies of the palaeolithic order. Our archaeologists encourage us to look upon the desiccation of Afrasia as a challenge to which the geneses of these civilizations were the responses.
‘Now we are on the brink of the great revolution, and soon we shall encounter men who are masters of their own food supply through possession of domesticated animals and the cultivation of cereals. It seems inevitable to connect that revolution with the crisis produced by the melting of the northern glaciers and consequent contraction of the Arctic high pressure over Europe and diversion of the Atlantic rainstorms from the South Mediterranean Zone to their present course across Central Europe.
‘That event would certainly tax the ingenuity of the inhabitants of the former grassland zone to the utmost. . . .
‘Faced with the gradual desiccation consequent upon the re-shift northward of the Atlantic cyclone belt as the European glaciers contracted, three alternatives were open to the hunting populations affected. They might move northward or southward with their prey, following the climatic belt to which they were accustomed; they might remain at home eking out a miserable existence on such game as could withstand the drought; or they might—still without leaving their homeland—emancipate themselves from dependence on the whims of their environment by domesticating animals and taking to agriculture.’ 2
In the event, those that changed neither their habitat nor their way of life paid the penalty of extinction for their failure to respond to the challenge of desiccation. Those that avoided changing their habitat by changing their way of life and transforming themselves from hunters into shepherds became the nomads of the Afrasian Steppe. Their achievement and fate will demand our attention in another part of this book. Of those that elected to change their habitat rather than change their way of life, the communities which avoided the drought by following the cyclone belt as it shifted northward exposed themselves, unintentionally, to a new challenge—the challenge of the northern seasonal cold— which evoked a new creative response in such as did not succumb to it; while the communities which avoided the drought by retreating southward into the monsoon belt came under the soporific influence emanating from the climatic monotony of the Tropics. Fifthly and finally there were communities that responded to the challenge of desiccation by changing their habitat and their way of life alike, and this rare double reaction was the dynamic act which created the Egyptian and Sumeric civilizations out of some of the primitive societies of the vanishing Afrasian grasslands.
The change in these creative communities’ way of life was the thoroughgoing transformation of food-gatherers and hunters into cultivators. The change in their habitat was small in point of distance but vast if measured by the difference in character between the grasslands which they abandoned and the new physical environment in which they now made their home. When the grasslands overlooking the lower valley of the Nile turned into the Libyan Desert and the grasslands overlooking the lower valley of the Euphrates and Tigris into the Rub’ al-Khali and the Dasht-i-Lut, these heroic pioneers—inspired by audacity or by desperation—plunged into the jungle-swamps of the valley bottoms, never before penetrated by man, which their dynamic act was to turn into the Land of Egypt and the Land of Shinar. To their neighbours, who took the alternative courses described above, their venture must have seemed a forlorn hope; for in the outlived age when the area which was now beginning to turn into the Afrasian Steppe had been an earthly paradise the Nilotic and Mesopo-tamian jungle-swamp had been a forbidding and apparently impenetrable wilderness. As it turned out, the venture succeeded beyond the most sanguine hopes in which the pioneers can ever have indulged. The wantonness of nature was subdued by the works of man; the formless jungle-swamp made way for a pattern of ditches and embankments and fields; the lands of Egypt and Shinar were reclaimed from the wilderness and the Egyptiac and Sumeric societies started on their great adventures.
The Lower Nile Valley into which our pioneers descended was not only very different from the valley as we see it to-day, after sixty centuries of skilled labour have left their mark on it; it was almost equally different from what it would be to-day if man had left its re-fashioning to nature. Even as comparatively late as the times of the Old and the Middle Kingdom—that is to say, several millennia after the days of the pioneers—the hippopotamus, the crocodile and a variety of wild fowl, none of which are now found below the First Cataract, were common objects in the lower valley, as is proved by the evidence of sculptures and paintings which survive from that period. What is true of the birds and animals is true also of the vegetation. Though desiccation had set in, Egypt still had rainfall and the Delta was a waterlogged marsh. It is probable that the Lower Nile above the Delta resembled in those days the Upper Nile country of the Bahr-al-Jabal in the Equatorial Province of the Sudan and that the Delta itself resembled the region round Lake No where the Bahr-al-Jabal and the Bahr-al-Ghazal mingle their waters. What follows is a present-day description of this dismal country:
‘The scenery of the Bahr-al-Jabal throughout its course through the Sudd [reed-pack] region is monotonous to a degree. There are no banks at all, except at a few isolated spots, no semblance of any ridge on the water’s edge. Reedy swamps stretch for many kilometres upon either side. Their expanse is only broken at intervals by lagoons of open water. Their surface is only a few centimetres above that of the water-level in the river when at its lowest, and a rise of half a metre floods them to an immense distance. These marshes are covered with a dense growth of water-weeds, extending in every direction to the horizon. . . .
‘Throughout this whole region, more especially between Bor and Lake No, it is extremely rare to see any sign of human life. . . . The whole region has an aspect of desolation beyond the power of words to describe. It must be seen to be understood.’ 1
It is uninhabited because the people who live on its outskirts are not confronted, here and now, as the fathers of the Egyptiac Civilization were confronted when they were squatting on the borders of the Lower Nile Valley six thousand years ago, with the hard choice of plunging into the forbidding Sudd or clinging to an ancestral habitat in process of transformation from an earthly paradise into an inhospitable desert. If our scholars are right in their surmise, the forefathers of these people who now live on the margin of the Sudanese Sudd were living, in what is now the Libyan Desert, cheek by jowl with the founders of the Egyptiac Civilization at the time when these responded to the challenge of desiccation by making their momentous choice. At that time, it would seem, the ancestors of the modern Dinka and Shilluk parted with their heroic neighbours and followed the line of least resistance by retreating southwards to a country where they could continue to live, without changing their way of life, in physical surroundings partly identical with those to which they were accustomed. They settled in the Tropical Sudan, within the range of the equatorial rains, and here their descendants remain to this day living the self-same life as their remote ancestors. In their new home the sluggish and unambitious emigrants found what their souls desired.
‘On the Upper Nile there dwell to-day people allied to the oldest Egyptians in appearance, stature, cranial proportions, language and dress. These are ruled by rain-maker magicians or by divine kings who were until recently ritually slain, and the tribes are organised in totemic clans. ... It really looks as if among these tribes on the Upper Nile social development had been arrested at a stage that the Egyptians had traversed before their history began. There we have a living museum whose exhibits supplement and vivify the prehistoric cases in our collections.’ 1
The parallel between earlier conditions in one part of the Nile Basin and present-day conditions in another part invites certain speculations. Supposing that the challenge of desiccation had never been presented to the inhabitants of the Nile Basin in those parts of it which, under present conditions, are beyond the range of the equatorial rains: in that event would the delta and lower valley of the Nile have been left in the original state of nature? Would the Egyptiac Civilization never have arisen? Would these people be squatting still on the edge of an untamed Lower Nile Valley as the Shilluk and Dinka are now squatting on the edge of the Bahr-al-Jabal? And there is another line of speculation which concerns not the past but the future. We may remind ourselves that on the time-scale of the universe, or of our planet, or of life, or even of the genus homo, a span of six thousand years is a negligible lapse of time. Supposing that another challenge, as formidable as that which presented itself to the inhabitants of the Lower Nile Valley yesterday, at the end of the Ice Age, were to present itself to the inhabitants of the Upper Nile Basin tomorrow : is there any reason to believe that they are incapable of responding by some equally dynamic act which might have equally creative effects?
We need not require that this hypothetical challenge to the Shilluk and Dinka shall be of the same kind as that presented to the fathers of the Egyptiac Civilization. Let us imagine that the challenge comes not from the physical but from the human environment, not from a change of climate but from the intrusion of an alien civilization. Is not this very challenge being actually presented under our eyes to the primitive inhabitants of Tropical Africa by the impact of our Western Civilization—a human agency which, in our generation, is playing the mythical role of Mephistopheles towards every other extant civilization and towards every extant primitive society on the face of the Earth? The challenge is still so recent that we cannot yet forecast the ultimate response that any of the challenged societies will make to it. We can only say that the failure of the fathers to respond to one challenge would not condemn the children to fail in face of another challenge when their hour came.
The Genesis of the Sumeric Civilization
We can deal with this problem briefly, for here we have a challenge identical with that which confronted the fathers of the Egyptiac Civilization and a response which was of the same kind. The desiccation of Afrasia likewise impelled the fathers of the Sumeric Civilization to come to grips with the jungle-swamp of the lower valley of the Tigris and Euphrates and to transform it into the Land of Shinar. The material aspects of these two geneses almost coincide. The spiritual characteristics of the two resultant civilizations, their religion, their art, and even their social life, display much less similarity—another indication that, in the field of our studies, identic causes cannot be presumed, a priori, to produce identic effects.
The ordeal through which the fathers of the Sumeric Civilization passed is commemorated in Sumeric legend. The slaying of the dragon Tiamat by the god Marduk and the creation of the World out of her mortal remains signifies the subjugation of the primeval wilderness and the creation of the Land of Shinar by the canalization of the waters and the draining of the soil. The story of the Flood records nature’s revolt against the shackles which man’s audacity had placed on her. In the Biblical version, a literary heritage of the Jews from their exile by the waters of Babylon, ‘the Flood’ has become a household word of our Western Society. It has remained for modern archaeologists to discover the original version of the legend and also to find direct evidence of a particular flood of abnormal severity in a thick layer of flood-laid clay which intervenes between the earliest and the later strata deposited by human habitation on the sites of certain historic seats of the Sumeric culture.
The basin of the Tigris and Euphrates, like the basin of the Nile, displays for our observation a ‘museum’ in which we can study the normal aspect of inanimate nature in the wilderness which man has transformed, together with the life that was lived in this wilderness by the first Sumeric pioneers. In Mesopotamia, however, this museum is not to be found, as in the Nile Basin, by travelling up-stream. It lies in the new delta at the head of the Persian Gulf which has been laid down by the confluence of the sister streams in times posterior not only to the genesis of the Sumeric Civilization but to its extinction and also to the extinction of its Babylonic successor. These marshes, which have gradually come into existence during the last two or three thousand years, have remained in their virgin state down to this day only because no human society with the will to master them has appeared on the scene. The marshmen by whom they are haunted have learnt to adapt themselves to this environment in a passive way, as is indicated by their nickname, ‘the web-feet’, which they received from British soldiers who encountered them in the war of 1914-18, but they have never yet girded themselves for the task, which the fathers of the Sumeric Civilization accomplished in similar country near by some five or six thousand years ago, of transforming the marshes into a network of canals and fields.
The Genesis of the Sinic Civilization
If we consider next the genesis of the Sinic Civilization in tht lower valley of the Yellow River we shall find a human response to a challenge from physical nature which was perhaps even more severe than the challenge of the Two Rivers and of the Nile. In the wilderness which man once transformed into the cradle of the Sinic Civilization, the ordeal of marsh and bush and flood was capped by the ordeal of a temperature which varied seasonally between extremes of summer heat and winter cold. The fathers of the Sinic Civilization do not seem to have differed in race from the peoples occupying the vast region to the south and south-west which extends from the Yellow River to the Brahmaputra and from the Tibetan Plateau to the China Sea. If certain members of that wide-spread race created a civilization while the rest remained culturally sterile, the explanation may be that a creative faculty, latent in all alike, was evoked in those particular members, and in those only, by the presentation of a challenge to which the rest did not happen to be exposed. The precise nature of that challenge is impossible to determine in the present state of our knowledge. What we can say with certainty is that the fathers of the Sinic Civilization in their home by the Yellow River did not enjoy the fancied but delusive advantage of an easier environment than their neighbours. Indeed, none of the related peoples farther south, in the valley of the Yangtse, for example, where this civilization did not originate, can have had so hard a fight for life.
The Geneses of the Mayan and Andean Civilizations
The challenge to which the Mayan Civilization was a response was the luxuriance of the tropical forest.
‘The Mayan culture was made possible by the agricultural conquest of the rich lowlands where the exuberance of nature can only be held in check by organized effort. On the highlands the preparation of the land is comparatively easy, owing to scanty natural vegetation and a control vested in irrigation. On the lowlands, however, great trees have to be felled and fast-growing bushes kept down by untiring energy. But when nature is truly tamed she returns recompense many-fold to the daring farmer. Moreover, there is reason to believe that the removal of the forest cover over large areas affects favourably the conditions of life which under a canopy of leaves are hard indeed.’ 1
This challenge, which called the Mayan Civilization into existence to the north of the Isthmus of Panama, found no response on the other side of the Isthmus. The civilizations which arose in South America responded to two quite different challenges, from the Andean Plateau and from the adjoining Pacific Coast. On the plateau the fathers of the Andean Civilization were challenged by a bleak climate and a grudging soil; on the coast they were challenged by the heat and drought of an almost rainless equatorial desert at sea-level, which could only be made to blossom as the rose by the works of man. The pioneers of the civilization on the coast conjured their oases out of the desert by husbanding the scanty waters that descended from the western scarp of the plateau and giving life to the plains by irrigation. The pioneers on the plateau transformed their mountain-sides into fields by husbanding the scanty soil on terraces preserved by a ubiquitous system of laboriously constructed retaining walls.
The Genesis of the Minoan Civilization
We have now explained in terms of responses to challenges from the physical environment the geneses of five out of our six unrelated civilizations. The sixth was a response to a physical challenge that we have not yet encountered in this survey, the challenge of the sea.
Whence came these pioneers of ‘the thalassocracy of Minos’? From Europe, Asia or Africa? A glance at the map would suggest that they would have come from Europe or Asia, for the islands are very much nearer to these mainlands than to North Africa— being, in fact, the peaks of submerged mountain ranges which, but for a collapse in prehistoric times and the inflow of the waters, would run continuously from Anatolia to Greece. But we are faced with the disconcerting, yet indubitable, testimony of archaeologists that the oldest remains of human habitation are found in Crete, an island comparatively distant from both Greece and Anatolia, though it is nevertheless nearer to both of them than it is to Africa. Ethnology supports the suggestion that archaeology throws out; for it appears to be established that among the earliest known inhabitants of the continents facing the Aegean there were certain clearly marked distinctions of physical type. The earliest known inhabitants of Anatolia and Greece were ‘broad-heads’; the earliest known inhabitants of the Afrasian grasslands were ‘longheads’ ; and an analysis of the oldest relics of human physique in Crete seems to indicate that the island was first occupied wholly or mainly by ‘long-heads’, while the ‘broad-heads’, though they eventually became predominant, were originally either not represented in the population of Crete at all or only in a small minority. This ethnological evidence points to the conclusion that the first human beings to secure a footing in any part of the Aegean Archipelago were immigrants from the desiccation of the Afrasian grasslands.
We have, then, to add a sixth to the five responses to this desiccation that we have already noted. To those who stayed where they were and perished; to those who stayed where they were and became nomads; to those who went south and retained their old way of life, like the Dinka and Shilluk; to those who went north and became neolithic agriculturists on the European Continent; to those who plunged into the jungle-swamps and made the Egyptiac and Sumeric civilizations, we must add those who, going north and striking, not the comparatively easy passages offered by then surviving isthmuses or still existing straits, but the intimidating void of the open Mediterranean, accepted this further challenge, crossed the broad sea, and made the Minoan Civilization.
If this analysis is correct, it offers a fresh illustration of the truth that, in the geneses of civilizations, the interplay between challenges and responses is the factor which counts above all others—in this case above proximity. If proximity had been the determining factor in the occupation of the Archipelago, then the inhabitants of the nearest continents, Europe and Asia, would have been the first occupants of the Aegean islands. Many of the islands are ‘within a stone’s throw’ of these mainlands, whereas Crete is two hundred miles from the nearest point in Africa. Yet the islands nearest to Europe and Asia, which apparently were not occupied until a much later date than Crete, appear to have been occupied concurrently by ‘long-heads’ and ‘broad-heads’; which suggests that, after the Afrasians had laid the foundations of the Minoan Civilization, others entered into their labours, either from mere imitation of the pioneers or because some pressure or challenge which we cannot precisely identify forced them too, in their time, to make the same response as the original Afrasian occupants of Crete had already made under still more formidable conditions.
The Geneses of the Affiliated Civilizations
When we pass from the ‘unrelated’ civilizations, which arose out of the Yin-state of primitive society, to those later civilizations that were in varying ways and degrees related to ‘civilized’ predecessors, it is obvious that in their case, though there may have been some degree of physical challenge to stimulate them too, the principal and essential challenge was a human challenge arising out of their relationship to the society to which they were affiliated. This challenge is implicit in the relation itself, which begins with a differentiation and culminates in a secession. The differentiation takes place within the body of the antecedent civilization, when that civilization begins to lose the creative power through which, in its period of growth, it had at one time inspired a voluntary allegiance in the hearts of the people below its surface or beyond its borders. When this happens, the ailing civilization pays the penalty for its failing vitality by being disintegrated into a dominant minority, which rules with increasing oppressiveness but no longer leads, and a proletariat (internal and external) which responds to this challenge by becoming conscious that it has a soul of its own and by making up its mind to save its soul alive. The dominant minority’s will to repress evokes in the proletariat a will to secede; and a conflict between these two wills continues while the declining civilization verges towards its fall, until, when it is in articulo mortis, the proletariat at length breaks free from what was once its spiritual home but has now become a prison-house and finally a City of Destruction. In this conflict between a proletariat and a dominant minority, as it works itself out from beginning to end, we can discern one of those dramatic spiritual encounters which renew the work of creation by carrying the life of the Universe out of the stagnation of autumn through the pains of winter into the ferment of spring. The secession of the proletariat is the dynamic act, in response to the challenge, through which the change from Yin to Yang is brought about; and in this dynamic separation the ‘affiliated’ civilization is born.
Can we discern a physical challenge also at the geneses of our affiliated civilizations? We saw, in our second chapter, that thf affiliated civilizations were related in differing degrees to their predecessors in the matter of their geographical location. At one end of the scale, the Babylonic Civilization developed wholly within the homeland of its antecedent Sumeric Society. Here a physical challenge can hardly have entered into the genesis of the new civilization at all, except in so far as, during the interregnum between the two civilizations, their common cradle may have relapsed to some extent into its primitive state of nature and to that extent have challenged the fathers of the later civilization to repeat the initial achievement of their predecessors.
When, however, the affiliated civilization has broken new ground and established its home partly or wholly outside the area of the antecedent civilization, there will have been a challenge from the new and unmastered physical environment. Thus, our Western Civilization was exposed at its genesis to a challenge from the forests and the rains and the frosts of Transalpine Europe which had not confronted the antecedent Hellenic Civilization. The Indie Civilization was exposed at its genesis to a challenge from the moist tropical forests of the Ganges Valley which had not confronted its predecessor, the Sumeric Civilization’s outlying province or counterpart in the Indus Valley. 1 The Hittite Civilization was exposed at its genesis to a challenge from the Anatolian Plateau which had not confronted the antecedent Sumeric Civilization. The challenge to which the Hellenic Civilization was exposed at its genesis—the challenge of the sea—was precisely the same as that which had confronted the antecedent Minoan Civilization. This challenge, however, was entirely new to the external proletariat beyond the European land-frontier of ‘the thalassocracy of Minos’; and these continental barbarians, Achaeans and the like, when they took to the sea in the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung, were facing and surmounting as great an ordeal as the pioneers of the Minoan Civilization had themselves faced and surmounted in their day.
In America the Yucatec Civilization was exposed at its genesis to the challenge of the waterless, treeless and almost soil-less limestone shelf of the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Mexic Civilization to the challenge of the Mexican Plateau, neither of which challenges had been encountered by the antecedent Mayan Civilization.
There remain the Hindu, the Far Eastern, the Orthodox Christian, the Arabic and the Iranic civilizations. These do not seem to have been exposed to any obvious physical challenge; for their homelands, though not, like that of the Babylonic Civilization, identical with the homelands of their antecedent civilizations, had already been subdued by these or by other civilizations. We saw reason, however, to subdivide the Orthodox Christian and the Far Eastern civilizations. The offshoot of the Orthodox Christian Civilization in Russia was exposed to a challenge from forests and rains and frosts still more severe than that with which our Western Civilization had to contend; and the offshoot of the Far Eastern Civilization in Korea and Japan was exposed to a challenge from the sea entirely different from any challenge which had confronted the pioneers of the Sinic Civilization.
We have now shown that our affiliated civilizations, while in all cases necessarily exposed to a human challenge inherent in the disintegration of the antecedent civilizations from which they sprang, were also in some cases, though not in others, exposed to a challenge from the physical environment, resembling the challenges encountered by the unrelated civilizations. To complete this stage of our inquiry, we ought to ask whether the unrelated societies, in addition to their physical challenges, were exposed to human challenges arising out of their differentiation from primitive societies. On this point we can only say that historical evidence is entirely lacking—as one might expect. It may well be that our six unrelated civilizations did encounter, in that ‘prehistoric’ past in which their geneses are shrouded, human challenges comparable in kind to the challenges offered to the affiliated societies by the tyranny of the dominant minorities of their predecessors. But to enlarge on this subject would be to speculate in a void.