§ 1. _Early Cities and Early Nomads._ § 2A. _The Riddle of the Sumerians._ § 2B. _The Empire of Sargon the First._ § 2C. _The Empire of Hammurabi._ § 2D. _The Assyrians and their Empire._ § 2E. _The Chaldean Empire._ § 3. _The Early History of Egypt._ § 4. _The Early Civilization of India._ § 5. _The Early History of China._ § 6. _While the Civilizations were Growing._ § 1 When the Aryan way of speech and life was beginning to spread to the east and west of the region in which it began, and breaking up as it spread into a number of languages and nations, considerable communities of much more civilized men were already in existence in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, and probably also in China and in (still purely Dravidian) India. Our story has overshot itself in its account of the Aryans and of their slow progress from early Neolithic conditions to the heroic barbarism of the Bronze Age. We must now go back. Such a pre-Keltic gathering as we sketched at Avebury would have happened about 2000 B.C., and the building of the barrow for Hector as the _Iliad_ describes it, 1300 B.C. or even later. It is perhaps natural for a European writer writing primarily for English-reading students to overrun his subject in this way. No great harm is done if the student does clearly grasp that there has been an overlap. Here then we take up the main thread of human history again. We must hark back to 6000 B.C. or even earlier. But although we shall go back so far, the people we shall describe are people already in some respects beyond the Neolithic Aryans of three thousand years later, more particularly in their social organization and their material welfare. While in Central Europe and Central Asia the primitive Neolithic way of life was becoming more migratory and developing into nomadism, in the great river valleys it is becoming more settled and localized. It is still doubtful whether we are to consider Mesopotamia or Egypt the earlier scene of the two parallel beginnings of settled communities living in towns. By 4000 B.C., in both these regions of the earth, such communities existed, and had been going on for a very considerable time. The excavations of the American expedition[99] at Nippur have unearthed evidence of a city community existing there at least as early as 5000 B.C., and probably as early as 6000 B.C., an earlier date than anything we know of in Egypt. De Candolle asserts that it is only in the Euphrates-Tigris district that wheat has ever been found growing wild.[100] It may be that from Mesopotamia as a centre the cultivation of wheat spread over the entire eastern hemisphere. Or it may be that wheat grew wild in some regions now submerged. There may have been a wild wheat region in what is now the sea bottom of the eastern Mediterranean. But cultivation is not civilization; the growing of wheat had spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific with the distribution of the