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Here, made vivid by today's foremost writer
on archaeology for the layman, is the story of one of the
great creative periods of all human history -- the rise
of the three extraordinary pre-classic civilizations: Mesopotamia,
Egypt and the people of the Indus Valley. In sharp detail
and with panoramic sweep, their beginnings 5000 years ago
are re-created: how in the vast and fertile flood plains
of three broad, subtropical river valleys (the Tigris-Euphrates,
the Nile, and the Indus), once-nomadic tribesmen developed
the social and economic patterns that brought them out of
the Stone Age.
Their contrasting lifeviews, their relationships
to the world and the gods around them, are made clear and
concrete: the Mesopotamians, committed to constant warfare
in the belief that their rulers were servants of competing
gods, originating walled cities and citadels, harbingers
of "progress"; the Egyptians, essentially rural,
spiritually reliant upon their vision of eternal changelessness,
preserving the bodies of their dead, supplying them with
the accoutrements and tools of the living; and last, the
Indus peoples, dead and forgotten long before Egypt had
attained the height of her imperial splendour.
It is Miss Hawkes's great and special gift
to infer with absolutely convincing authority the minds
and personalities of such distant peoples from what we have
unearthed of their artifacts and architecture, tools, weapons,
household necessities and luxuries. Her richly fascinating
interpretations of these early societies reveal their cultures
as the seedbeds of written language and the alphabet, of
mathematics, institutionalized religion, astrology, medical
science and a class structure based on the productivity
of the peasant and the development of merchant trade --
making possible the emergence of craftsmen, architects,
artists, priests, nobles, the building of palaces, and temples,
the equipment of armies and the formation of governments.
The First Great Civilizations is
an enthralling historical work which carries the full excitement
of archaeological discovery and provokes a large reappraisal
of the impact these cultures still exercise on our own.
Jacquetta Hawkes is the author of many
distinguished books on archaeological subjects, including
Man on Earth and (with Sir Leonard Woolley) History
of Mankind. She conceived and edited, with commentaries,
the famous archaeological history-anthology The World
of the Past, and has herself participated in numerous
diggings as well as in research. She was educated at Cambridge
University and lives in England with her husband, the well-known
writer J. B. Priestly.
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