Far from inevitable, civilization resulted from human creativity.  This chapter discusses the origins of Western civilization in the Stone Age and its first flowering in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Humanity moved toward civilization during the Stone Age.  Paleothilic humans used simple tools to do the tasks necessary for survival, harnessed fire for cooking and heat, developed spoken language, and fashioned mythic-religious beliefs to explain life, death, and nature. These beliefs informed their burial practices and art.  Cave paintings depicting animals were probably crafted during rituals to protect hunters and ensure good hunts.  In addition to animals, Paleolithic people also painted and sculpted human images, such as fertility figures.  Neolithic humans employed more polished tools and developed technologies such as wheeled vehicles and tools for creating pottery.  As they domesticated animals and began practicing agriculture, they settled into villages, where labor and social roles grew more specialized.  Extrapolating from modern tribal cultures, scholars suggest that music and dance were probably central to Stone Age culture.

Stone Age achievements laid the foundations for true civilization.  In Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley, people gathered into cities in which life became more complex and hierarchical.  Using even more specialized labor, city-dwellers engaged in trade and manufacturing, administered large-scale agriculture, and built monuments.  The development of writing enabled these people to keep the records necessary for organized government.

In Mesopotamia and Egypt, religion was the principal unifying and creative force.  People saw divine forces at work in every aspect of nature, and every form of human endeavor was meant to serve the gods.  For example, the Sumerians believed that laws descended from the gods.  Kings administered these laws with the assistance of priests who divined for them the will of the gods.  In Egypt, the pharaohs themselves were considered gods, and by serving them, their subjects respected the divine order.

In addition to law and government, religion drove activity in mathematics and  science.  Mesopotamian mathematicians, for example, devised multiplication and division tables, while their Egyptian counterparts developed simple geometry.  Physicians of both cultures gained some accurate knowledge of pharmacology, and Egyptian healers learned to identify diseases and understood the connection between cleanliness and disease.  Mesopotamian and Egyptian astronomers observed the movements of the planets and stars and devised, respectively, lunar and solar calendars.  In all these areas of activity, the ultimate goal was to understand and accommodate the will of the gods as revealed through the processes of nature and workings of the human body.

Similarly, the purpose of art was to represent the relationship between humanity and the gods.  The Mesopotamian ziggurat, for example, gave architectural form to the experience of approaching the gods to gain wisdom. Stylized Egyptian royal statues typically emphasize the pharaohs' divine grandeur. Although stylization was the norm in Near Eastern art, Egyptian Amarna art took a naturalistic turn during the Amarna period, during which Amenhotep IV imposed monotheism on his subjects.  He also encouraged artists to represent the human form more realistically and even to depict the pharaoh engaged in everyday activities.  This style and the new religion died with Amenhotep, whose successors reestablished polytheism and the rigid artistic style of the Old Kingdom.

Early Mesopotamians and Egyptians shared a religious outlook, but their world view differed in ways that affected their religious thought, art, and literature.  The Mesopotamian world view was fundamentally pessimistic.  The gods were viewed as capricious and human life as an effort to cope with their whims.  Consequently, Mesopotamian literature is comparatively austere.  For example, wisdom literature poses imponderable questions about human suffering; a central theme of the Epic of Gilgamesh is the hopelessness of the search for immortality.

Perhaps because the Nile Valley afforded relative security, the Egyptians cultivated a happier view of life and death.  They conceived of an afterlife that was an idealized version of earthly life, and much of their art and literature explores the passage through death to the afterlife.  The Book of the Dead, for example, contains a variety of texts composed to guide the deceased safely into the next world.  Tombs included tools, food, and personal items for use in the afterlife, as well as relief sculptures that depict daily activities in which the deceased participated in life and would again in the next world.  Despite this concern with death and the afterlife, Egyptians also examined earthly life.  For example, although both Egyptian and Mesopotamian women were subordinate to men, the former enjoyed legal protections and a greater scope in life than the latter.  This greater scope helped nourish a body of love poetry in which both men and women voice their desires and a tradition of misogynist literature in which men bemoan the inconstancy of women.

Music was important in Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture.  Paintings and sculptures depict a variety of instruments used for religious rituals, royal processions, funerals, and private gatherings.

The last great ancient Near Eastern civilization was Persia.  This vast empire unified nations from the Mediterranean to the Indus Valley, governed them through a single administrative system, and brought them under a world view composed of diverse traditions.  One central unifying forces was Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic religion whose prophet, Zarathustra, developed an eschatology and taught that humans can choose between good and evil.  Persian art represented the empire's cultural synthesis by fusing elements from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek art.

Near Eastern civilizations shared a myth-making world view.  Although Mesopotamians and Egyptians observed themselves and their world, they did not analyze and draw general conclusions about what they saw.  Like their prehistoric ancestors, they told stories that personified and explained phenomena in terms of divine influence.  Later civilizations moved from a myth-making mind to scientific thought, through which people formulated universal rules about inanimate natural processes.  Still, Near Eastern cultural achievements laid the crucial foundation for Western civilization and influenced the Hebrew and Greek traditions for centuries.