Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [12]
So when and where did all this begin? Did the idea spread outward from the original center to other societies, or did it occur independently in various parts of the world? If it did occur only once, where was the cradle of civilization?
The problem of Diffusion versus In de pen dent Invention is still being debated by scholars, and also by people whose scholarship is, to put it nicely, goofy. The latter believe in a single source, but they don’t agree on what it was. Some give the credit to the hypothetical geniuses of the lost continent of Atlantis. However, the most popular current theory favors visitors from outer space. I don’t want to get started on this, because it makes me lose my temper.
A slightly more believable version of the Diffusion scenario holds that all advanced civilizations derived from a single terrestrial source, with Egypt being the leading contender. It is only slightly more believable, really. Despite superficial similarities such as pyramids and sun worship, the advanced civilizations of the Americas have no provable, direct connection with the much older civilizations of the Middle East.
It’s not as simplistic as that, of course. There is always communication among cultures; the closer they are geo graphically, the more frequent the contacts. Enterprising merchants have been around since prehistoric times; some such trader might have seen a pot whose shape took his fancy and brought it home to be imitated and improved upon. He might have watched, openmouthed, as a priest scribbled weird symbols on a piece of stone or stamped equally weird symbols into a clay tablet; once the purpose of the exercise had been explained, its usefulness would have been apparent to a keen-minded man. This process is sometimes referred to as stimulus diffusion—the copying of a concept instead of an object.
Ancient Sumer and Ancient Egypt aren’t that far distant physically. Egyptologists and Sumerologists have been arguing for years about which of their pet civilizations was the first to invent writing. For a long time the Sumerologists were ahead. Their arguments went like this: Despite the fact that elements of the two cultures appear dissimilar—the mud-brick ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the stone pyramids, the pretty picture writing of Egypt and the bird-track cuneiform—there are signs of Mesopotamian influence in Egypt at the very end of the predynastic period. Cylinder seals are typical of Mesopotamia and atypical of Egypt, but there are cylinder seals in late predynastic graves. Building stone is scarce in the flat plains of the Land of the Two Rivers, so the natives of that region built in brick; the earliest large-scale architecture of Egypt is in the same brick, and it imitates a well-known Mesopotamian style, recessed brick niching. Even when the Egyptians began to quarry their numerous fine sources of stone, they cut it up into brick-size pieces.
These traits died out early in Egypt and were replaced by “Egyptian” ways of doing things. Stone architecture began to employ the monolithic blocks we can see in the Giza pyramids; seal impressions were made with stamp seals—scarabs—instead of with the cylinder type. And the writing, of course, is completely dissimilar. The pictures of objects, which became the hieroglyphic symbols of Egyptian writing, were all Egyptian objects. But who got the idea first, the citizens of Sumer or those of Egypt?
Not that it really matters. However, since some people think it does matter, the reader should be informed that in recent years discoveries at the holy city of Abydos in Egypt have turned up examples of writing—typically Egyptian