The Pageant of Experiment With Civilization




CHAPTER ONE

EXPERIMENTS IN EGYPT AND EURASIA


Thousands of years before the city of Rome was ringed with its six miles
of stone wall, other peoples in Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa were
building civilizations. New techniques of excavation, identification and
preservation, subsidized by an increasingly affluent human society, and
developed during the past two centuries of archeological research have
provided the needed means and manpower. The result is an imposing number
of long buried building sites with their accompanying artifacts. Still
more important are the records written in long forgotten languages on
stone, clay tablets, metal, wood and paper. These remnants and records,
left by extinguished civilizations, do not tell us all we wish to know,
but they do provide the materials which enable us to reconstruct, at
least in part, the lives of our civilized predecessors.

Extensive in time and massive in the volume of their architecture are
the remains of Egyptian civilization. The earliest of these fragments
date back for more than six thousand years.

The seat of Egyptian civilization was the Nile Valley and its estuary
built out into the Mediterranean Sea from the debris of disintegrating
African mountains. Annual floods left their silt deposits to deepen the