98 evolution: the ages and tomorrow 



are dated by archaeologists as having had their beginnings 

 more than 6,000 years ago. In the Nile valley dikes must 

 have been built to control the river's floods, and in the delta 

 of the Tigris and Euphrates man must have had to dig long 

 drainage ditches in order to cultivate the soil. The towns 

 which later appeared in the Tigris valley were built on plat- 

 forms of reeds, showing how marshy was the locale of the 

 earliest of all civilizations. All this adds to the certainty that 

 there was considerable division of labor long before the first 

 urban civilizations appeared. 



The earliest known villages from Mesopotamia and 

 Egypt show definite cooperation and even control. Village 

 sites have been found that covered several acres and in- 

 cluded upwards of 35 families. The houses were in rows, 

 along streets. The arrangement and the spacing of the build- 

 ings indicate considerable agreement among the individuals 

 involved and perhaps a planning control. As these villages 

 grew into cities, the cooperation, division of labor, and con- 

 trol kept pace. Man was learning the use of metals and the 

 fashioning of many objects; his ideas and wants were in- 

 creasing. Community specialization and stratification were 

 well under way. The "peck order" was becoming more and 

 more complex. Rulers and priests were turning to ceremony 

 and ritual for the "divine right" of their dominant positions. 

 Power was breeding the love of power, and the struggle to 

 hold or get it was on; pretense and deception and war were 

 used by the top-level individuals in the society, and are still 

 being used. Trade and the need for raw materials brought 

 conflict, the armies marched, and empires began to appear. 

 In Mesopotamia the priests formed a corporation and ex- 

 erted an uneasy and quarrelsome control through payments 

 to the gods. Later, kings usurped this power, but kept the 

 priests handy. Out of the endless conflicts of the small states 

 in the Tigris-Euphrates valley there finally appeared, about 

 2500 B.C., the first empire. In Egypt temporal power arose 

 directly out of the struggles of the clans, when, about 3000 



