AGE OF MAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 134, 8 June 1929, Page 16 (Supplement)

AGE OF MAN.

TRACED A MILLION YEARS.

RIVAL THEORIES ON THE

EARLIEST CIVILISATION.

AFRICA OR ASIA?

The American Philosophical Societydevoted the closing hours of its annual meeting, held at Philadelphia, to a symposium of scholars and archaeologists on the age of civilised man and his earliest geographic setting.

George A. Barton, professor of semitic languages at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the origins went back "to the time when there was no geography and no Equator" and Dr. James H. Breasted, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, declared that the human career could be traced in Egypt from the beginning of the royal dynasties, about 3400 8.C., for at least several hundred thousand and perhaps a million years.

Exact Age of Man Uncertain,

In the symposium on the age of man all of the speakers agreed that an exact determination was virtually impossible under any circumstances, and particularly so at the present, when the surface of geological and archaeological investigations in Western Asia had been barely scratched. Dr. Breasted, whose Oriental institute maintains six field expeditions on a 2000-mile front stretching from the Black Sea on the north, through Assyria and Palestine to the Upper Nile on the south, said that a combination of the discoveries and deductions of geologists with the findings of the archaeologists had established Egypt as the seat of an early civilisation whose degree of culture widely surpassed that represented in any other in Asia or Europe. Developing his theory of a civilisation there hundreds of thousands of years old, he said: "The mature and highly refined civilisation which emerged in,the Nile Valley after 3000 B.C. must have required a long social experience exceeding in ago the parallel development of the cruder culture of Babylonia, which was chiefly and essentially a commercial civilisation." Claims for Mesopotamia. The claims of Mesopotamia as the home of the earliest civilisation were upheld by Dr. Barton, who said in his concluding argument: "If by civilisation we mean the mastery of the arts of life, it must be said that, while the share of Egypt is by no; means to bo minimised, she was anticipated in many details and in time by the Sumerians and their predecessors, the makers of the red pottery in Babylonia and Susa, both of which peoples developed their civilisations outside Babylonia, and from both of which Egypt borrowed." Alan Rowe, leader of the University of Pennsylvania Museum's expedition to Bcisan, in comparing the Egyptian and Babylonian civilisations and their influence on Palestine, said that the excavators' chief surprise was "to observe the predominance of Egyptian and Mediterranean influence to Mesopotamian culture."

"Tho antiquity and character of the Babylonian civilisation" was discussed by Leon Legrain, curator of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and although he spoke enthusiastically of the Western Asiatic culture as evidenced by archaeological findings at Ur of tho Chaldees, he refused to be drawn into an argument over dates. Influence of Climate on Peoples. Dr. Breasted based his conclusions in assuming first antiquity of the human race in Egypt on his observations of the extent of the last glacial invasion, together with the continent - invading floods which followed that period. "Egypt escaped tho glacial rigors of tho ice ago and the devastating floods of immediately post-glacial times," he; said. "On tho other hand, it is quite 1 clear that in Western Asia, the valley of the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, lay so far toward the north as to be immediately under the southern fringes of the Armenian ice sheet in the glacial age. "Prehistoric Assyria was thus exposed to the northern cold as well as to the ravages of the glacial floods. "This was an age when Egypt, thus protected by the Mediterranean from the rigors of the European ice age, was already rapidly out-distancing all her rivals in the advance toward civilisation. In harmony with this situation the ripple-flaked flint knives of Egypt surpass in beauty and masterful control of the material the stone implements of any age or any country." Traces of Man Along the Nile. Geologists sent into the Nile Valley by the Oriental institute to determine the strata and secure from them, if possible, indications and artifacts of human habitation, he said, have determined the boundaries of the prehistoric gulf, now the deeply eroded Nile Valley, and some miles south of Cairo have found the river to have formed a succession of five terraces.

"This survey has found no evidence of man in the oldest, the 150-foot terrace," declared Dr. Breasted, "but all of the others contain human artifacts, the oldest being at the top in the 100-foot terrace.

"Since the age of man who lived on this terrace the river has cut down through a solid rock from a point 100 vertical feet above the present Nile level. While this erosion was going on the Sahara was a vast, well-watered and vegetation-covered plateau. - "The age of these prehistoric men of the terraces is measured here by two natural processes —the desiccation of North-eastern Africa and the erosion of the Nile Valley. "The geologists are reluctant to estimate the length of these processes In terms of yeare, but it Iβ evident that their Tength was not less than several hundred thousand years." Evidences of Egypt's Priority. Dr. Breasted, in referring to recent efforts to establish the priority of Asia in the field of mining, said that "the fact that the earliest known dated copper mines, those in the peninsula of Sinai, are shown by the adjacent Egyptian inscriptions to have been worked by the Pharaohs of the First Dynasty as- early as 3400 B.C. remains impregnable evidence of the priority of Egypt in metallurgy."

In architecture and engineering, in medicine, art, science, sculpture and general social maturity, Western Asia cannot approach _ the Egyptians, the archaeologist continued. "To their technical attainments in engineering and surgery, so early in the human career, and to the pyramids, also as a measure of social and administrative control, there is no parallel in Western Asia for 2000 years or more," he said. . .

Civilisation of the Sumerians. Dr. Barton contended that the answer to the question, "Which , 'lβ thei older civilisation?" depended upon what we call civilisation. Referring to the probable migrations of parts of the HamitoSemitic race from North Africa and the Sahara region to Arabia after this race's formation, about 10,000 to 8000 8.C., and the subsequent formation of the various Semitic nations of history he said:

"If we could call these tribes civilised at that period of the world's history, we should be forced to confess that their civilisation originated in North Africa. Into the civilisations of Babylonia and Egypt, as known to history, other elements, however, entered.

"In the making of Babylonian civilisation three distinct races had a part. Two of these, the Semitic and the Sumerian, have long been known. The third lias been brought to light only since the great war. It is known to us through a peculiar type of red pottery found at Al-Obeid, Ur, Abu-Sherein (Eridu).

"Certainly as early as 3500 B.C. and perhaps as early as 4000 8.C., the Sumerians, pushing up the Persian Gulf from the south, made their way into Southern Babylonia, driving themselves in like a wedge betAveen the other two races." ' Invented Arch, Dome and Wheel. Dr. Barton declared that the Suineriaiie were highly civilised when they entered Babylonia, that they knew the arts of agriculture, could make beautiful objects of gold and silver by 3500 8.C., "surpassing in craftsmanship and beauty anything found in Egypt until centuries later."

"They 'could write," he went on; "they had invented the- principle of the real arch and dome and they had invented the use of the wheel and had chariots. Tho man who invented the wheel contributed more to civilisation than the one who built the Great Pyramid."

Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, of the National Museum at Washington, said that when we have finally material from all of the dynasties wo shall have in Egypt one of the standards for measuring all civilisations, and Professor George Grant Mac Curdy added that "a current of culture moved back and forth between Mesopotamia and Egypt, but we don't know yet in which direction it moved."