The Birthplace of Civilization

Abstract

AST winter the oldest remains of a civilized people were found in Iraq by the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and the University Museum of Philadelphia. The mound that Mr. Leonard Woolley, Director of the Expedition, is now excavating is called Tell-el-Obeid, the ancient Ur of the Chaldees; it lies on the south bank of the Euphrates, a little more than Ioo miles from Basra. His discoveries were quite sensational, for they included a contemporary inscription of a mythical king and a masterpiece of an art whose very existence had hardly been suspected.' The inscription of A-anni-padda, son of Mes-anni-padda, is the earliest dated historical document in the world-the discoverer puts it somewhere in the fourth millennium before the Christian era, probably about the middle. The art is Sumerian, and the site of Tell-el-Obeid has provided the oldest known remains of Sumerian civilization. It will be profitable, therefore, to summarize the facts known about the earliest cultures in this region and in that other early home of civilization, Egypt, and to propound a hypothesis which may account for the origin of both civilizations.