Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.116

c7.116

If, apart from this reservation, we now review the comparison between the two civilizations as a whole, it is fair to recognize a general affinity with recurring and important differences in detail which are at least sufficient to set aside any likelihood of immediate or wholesale colonization of the Indus region from Sumer. (For the physical structure of the Indus Civilization we must look to more local sources and causes. But that is not to rob Mesopotamia of a close responsibility in the matter.) Mesopotamia, and none other, retains her world-priority, not to the ‘invention’ of town-life (in which at present Jericho in Jordan is far in the lead), but to the production of a mature and literate civilization, with organized accounts and archives: in other words, to the essential *idea* of civilization. Thanks to Mesopotamia, by the end of the 4th millennium the *idea* of civilization was in the air of the Middle East; and, as I have remarked before, ideas have wings. Archaeology, in its proper pursuit of material evidence, is liable to understress the intangibles which may have been, and in some circumstances certainly were, the true agents of diffusion, penetrating more surely and significantly than pence and potsherds. So from Mesopotamia, by easy land-routes, the idea of civilization penetrated shortly to Egypt, where the ideas of writing and of certain architectural modes were adopted and adapted in a local idiom. (From Mesopotamia, we may be sure, the mature idea of civilization, always including that of writing, later reached the Indian coast and the Indus valley by an easy sea-route and perhaps by land, to be adapted there to local taste and circumstance. The alternative postulate, that in each of three lands so accessible to one another the immensely complex idea of an evolved civilization should, within the narrow space of some five or six centuries, have emerged spontaneously and without cross-reference, is too absurd to merit argument.