This learning to work together for the common good was the real germ of the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations. The bare elements of civilization were already there: the need for a governing hand and for laws to see that the communities’ work was done and that the water was justly shared. You may object that there is a sort of chicken and egg paradox in this idea. How could the people set up the rules until they had managed to get a way to live, and how could they manage to get a way to live until they had set up the rules? I think that small groups must have moved down along the mud-flats of the river banks quite early, making use of naturally favorable spots, and that the rules grew out of such cases. It would have been like the hand-in-hand growth of automobiles and paved highways in the United States. Once the rules and the know-how did get going, there must have been a constant interplay of the two. Thus, the more the crops yielded, the richer and better-fed the people would have been, and the more the population would have grown. As the population grew, more land would have needed to be flooded or irrigated, and more complex systems of dikes, reservoirs, canals, and ditches would have been built. The more complex the system, the more necessity for work on new projects and for the control of their use.... And so on.... What I have just put down for you is a guess at the manner of growth of some of the formalized systems that go to make up a civilized society. My explanation has been pointed particularly at Egypt and Mesopotamia. I have already told you that the irrigation and water-control part of it does not apply to the development of the Aztecs or the Mayas, or perhaps anybody else. But I think that a fair part of the story of Egypt and Mesopotamia must be as I’ve just told you. I am particularly anxious that you do _not_ understand me to mean that irrigation _caused_ civilization. I am sure it was not that simple at all. For, in fact, a complex and highly engineered irrigation system proper did not come until later times. Let’s say rather that the simple beginnings of irrigation allowed and in fact encouraged a great number of things in the technological, political, social, and moral realms of culture. We do not yet understand what all these things were or how they worked. But without these other aspects of culture, I do not think that urbanization and civilization itself could have come into being. THE ARCHEOLOGICAL SEQUENCE TO CIVILIZATION IN IRAQ