The Proto-Literate assemblage clearly suggests a highly developed and sophisticated culture. While perhaps not yet fully urban, it is on the threshold of urbanization. There seems to have been a very dense settlement of Proto-Literate sites in classic southern Mesopotamia, many of them newly founded on virgin soil where no earlier settlements had been. When we think for a moment of what all this implies, of the growth of an irrigation system which must have existed to allow the flourish of this culture, and of the social and political organization necessary to maintain the irrigation system, I think we will agree that at last we are dealing with civilization proper. FROM PREHISTORY TO HISTORY Now it is time for the conventional ancient historians to take over the story from me. Remember this when you read what they write. Their real base-line is with cultures ruled over by later kings and emperors, whose writings describe military campaigns and the administration of laws and fully organized trading ventures. To these historians, the Proto-Literate phase is still a simple beginning for what is to follow. If they mention the Ubaid assemblage at all--the one I was so lyrical about--it will be as some dim and fumbling step on the path to the civilized way of life. I suppose you could say that the difference in the approach is that as a prehistorian I have been looking forward or upward in time, while the historians look backward to glimpse what I’ve been describing here. My base-line was half a million years ago with a being who had little more than the capacity to make tools and fire to distinguish him from the animals about him. Thus my point of view and that of the conventional historian are bound to be different. You will need both if you want to understand all of the story of men, as they lived through time to the present. End of PREHISTORY [Illustration] You’ll doubtless easily recall your general course in ancient history: how the Sumerian dynasties of Mesopotamia were supplanted by those of Babylonia, how the Hittite kingdom appeared in Anatolian Turkey, and about the three great phases of Egyptian history. The literate kingdom of Crete arose, and by 1500 B.C. there were splendid fortified Mycenean towns on the mainland of Greece. This was the time--about the whole eastern end of the Mediterranean--of what Professor Breasted called the “first great internationalism,” with flourishing trade, international treaties, and royal marriages between Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hittites. By 1200 B.C., the whole thing had fragmented: “the peoples of the sea were restless in their isles,” and the great ancient centers in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia were eclipsed. Numerous smaller states arose--Assyria, Phoenicia, Israel--and the Trojan war was fought. Finally Assyria became the paramount power of all the Near East, presently to be replaced by Persia.