THE BIRTH
OF CIVILIZATION
IN THE
NEAR EAST
HENRI FRANKFORT
Doubleday Anchor Books
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York
Henri Frankfort was born in 1897 in Holland. Hefirst studied history at Amsterdam University, obtainedhis M.A. in London, but returned to the University ofLeiden for his Ph.D. He has done extensive field workin the Near East, his main project being the OrientalInstitute of Chicago’s excavations in Iraq from 1929 to1937. Dr. Frankfort both organized and headed theseexcavations, which yielded much new information onthe early history of Babylonia, from 4000 to 2000 B.C.In 1938 Dr. Frankfort went to Chicago to write and toteach at the University of Chicago, which had appointedhim Research Professor of Oriental Archaeologyin 1932. In 1949 he was appointed Director ofthe Warburg Institute and Professor of the History ofPre-classical Antiquity in the University of London.Among his other writings are numerous contributionsto professional journals and a book, Ancient EgyptianReligion (1948). Dr. Frankfort died in 1954.
Cover design by Antonio Frasconi
Typography by Edward Gorey
The Birth of Civilization in the Near East was publishedby Indiana University Press in 1951. The AnchorBooks edition is published by arrangement withIndiana University Press.
Anchor Books edition: 1956
First published in the United States of America
by Indiana University Press
PREFACE
A full description of the birth of civilization in theNear East would require a work many times the size ofthe present book. We have concentrated on the socialand political innovations in which the great change becamemanifest. These bear most directly on the questionsto which the appearance of the first civilizedsocieties gives rise; yet they have received less attentionthan the concomitant changes in the fields oftechnology and the arts, the manifestations of religion,or the invention of writing. In so far as technologicaland artistic developments reveal social and politicalconditions, we have taken them into account; but wehave not attempted to describe them in detail, andhave kept our subject within manageable limits by asomewhat strict interpretation of the word civilization.While it is true that the terms “civilization” and“culture” count as synonyms in general usage, andthat every distinction therefore remains arbitrary,there are etymological reasons for preferences in theiruse. The word “culture,” with its overtones of somethingirrational, something grown rather than made, ispreferred by those who study primitive peoples. Theword “civilization,” on the other hand, appeals tothose who consider man in the first place as homopoliticus, and it is in this sense that we would have ourtitle understood.
A question which we have left unanswered is thatof origins. The reader will find that in trimming theramifications of historical beginnings we have exposedthe trunks rather than the roots of Egyptian and Mesopotamiancivilization. To what extent can their rootsbe known; what were the forces that brought theminto being? I think that the historian must deem thisquestion unanswerable. It can but lead him astray inthe direction of quasi-philosophical speculations, ortempt him