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Human Progress; a review

by O.G.S. Crawford

No book quite like this has ever been written. That is partly because the scientific discoveries upon which it is based are themselves so new that some of them are still unpublished (the earliest pictograms, for instance). But even when the knowledge is less new it is, for the most part, the special preserve of a few students, of great powers but limited range and outlook. Professor Childe can meet them on their own ground, for he has studied the archaeology of the Near East and India (as well as of Europe) at first hand. Four of the nine chapters in this book 'are based on first-hand study of the original objects, and reports' (p. vii); and, indeed, so are the relevant parts of the first three - the last two being of a general nature. There is probably no man living with better qualifications for such a theme as the Making of Man; and that holds true, whether one agrees (as the reviewer does) with Professor Childe's thesis, or not. Most of it, of course, is not opinion but fact.

That thesis is as follows. (The author's ideas are stated in his own words, whenever practicable).

Both men and animals have to satisfy their primary needs by adapting themselves to their environment; otherwise they perish. Man differs from the animals because he solves his problems by the use of intelligence instead of by some long-drawn-out process of organic change. For example he meets the primary need of shelter by clothing himself in animals' fur, instead of growing it on his body (I employ a Lamarckian mode of expression for convenience only). Such intelligent devices are 'external to his body; he can lay them aside and don them at will. Their use is not inherited, but learned, rather slowly, from the social group to which each individual belongs' (p.19). Slow though the process is, it is infinitely quicker than the animal method and it has the paramount advantage of allowing the organism, man, to retain complete power of adaptability to altered circumstances. Thus human history is seen as the interaction between man and his environment, which includes of course other groups of men. More precisely the 'realist conception of history' insists on 'the prime importance of economic conditions, of the social forces of production, and of applications of science as factors in historical change' (p.7).

The actual process of historical change, as operated by those causes, can be seen with beautiful clarity at certain crucial moments of the past. These moments, of many generations in duration, Professor Childe calls, quite correctly, 'revolutions'. 'Each new "age" is ushered in by an economic revolution of the same kind and having the same effect as the "Industrial Revolution" of the eighteenth century' (p. 39). 'The First Revolution that transformed human economy gave man control over his own food supply' (p.75) That revolution Professor Childe calls the Neolithic Revolution; it was the climax of a long process and consisted of the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals. This economy of food-production (as contrasted with the preceding one of hunting and food-gathering) 'provides an opportunity and a motive for the accumulation of a surplus' (p.93). It is also 'entirely self-sufficing', though without necessarily involving isolation (p. 94). Indeed complete economic self-sufficiency may never have been attained. 'The point is that such trade [as existed) was not an integral part of the community's economic life; the articles it brought were in some sense luxuries, non-essentials'. Even the trade in flint and other stones partook of this nature; for local sources of supply were invariably drawn upon as well. This sporadic intercourse was of vital importance to human progress; it provided channels whereby foreign materials might be compared, whereby, in fact, culture itself might be diffused' (p.98).

The First Revolution is associated with the invention of certain crafts, such as pot-making, weaving and spinning, which in their turn 'reacted on human thought. Building up a pot was a supreme instance of creation by man' (p.105). A loom, too, is 'quite an elaborate piece of machinery', and its invention 'was one of the great triumphs of human ingenuity . . . an application of science that only to the unthinking seems too trivial to deserve the name' (p.107). Yet all these industries 'were household crafts. In our hypothetical neolithic stage there would be no specialization of labour - at most a division of work between the sexes' (p. 107). Moreover all these industries, 'from garden culture to weaving, have been rendered possible only by the accumulation of experience and the application of deductions therefrom. Each and all repose on practical science. But 'if we may judge from the procedure of modern barbarians, the legitimate deductions from experience are inextricably mixed up with what we should call useless magic. Each operation of every craft must be accompanied by the proper spells and the prescribed ritual acts' (pp. 107-8). Also, an associated event may wrongly be regarded as a cause. 'Because the star Sirius is seen on the horizon at dawn when the Nile flood arrives it is inferred that Sirius causes the Nile flood. Astrology is based on this sort of confusion' (p.117). At a later date this primitive credulity was fully exploited by the priests in the name of their god; to what extent such exploitation already existed before the Second Revolution we do not know, but we are inclined to think there may have been more of it than Professor Childe suspects. On the other hand it is not likely to have developed very far, for 'had such magics and rituals been firmly established, they would surely have retarded the spread of the Second Revolution. After it, firmly rooted beliefs - for instance, in the efficacy of astrology and the potency of divine kings and ancestral spirits - did impede the growth of true science and the establishment of an inter-urban international economy' (p. 113) - just as, we might add, they still do today.

This early science is essentially a social thing. 'The craft traditions are not individual but collective traditions. The experience and wisdom of all the community's members are constantly being pooled' (p. 108), just as are the results of men of science today; indeed that is the essential feature which distinguishes the scientific worker from the capitalist business man, the doctor from the inventor of patent medicines. 'The neolithic economy as a whole cannot exist without co-operative effort' (p.109).

The Second Revolution 'transformed some tiny villages of self-sufficing farmers into populous cities, nourished by secondary industries and foreign trade, and regularly organized as States . . . The scene of the drama lies in the belt of semi-arid countries between the Nile and the Ganges. Here epoch-making inventions seem to have followed one another with breathless speed, when we recall the slow pace of progress in the millennia before the First Revolution or even in the four millennia between the second and the Industrial Revolution of modern times [which is of course the Third Revolution].

Between 6000 and 3000 B.C. man has learnt to harness the force of oxen and of winds, he invents the plough, the wheeled cart and the sailing-boat, he discovers the chemical processes involved in smelting copper-ores and the physical properties of metals, and he begins to work out an accurate solar calendar. He has thereby equipped himself for urban life, and prepares the way for a civilization which shall require writing, processes of reckoning and standards of measurement - instruments of a new way of transmitting knowledge and of exact sciences. In no period of history till the days of Galileo was progress in knowledge so rapid or far-reaching discoveries so frequent' (pp. 118-9).

The First Revolution had bound men to the soil. From its inception 'capital in the form of human labour was being sunk in the land . . . They would not lightly forego the interest brought in by their reproductive works which required capital in the form of a stock of surplus food-stuffs, accumulated by and at the disposal of the community' (p. 122). The Second Revolution arose quite naturally out of the first, for it 'required that a substantial proportion of the community should be permanently withdrawn from the primary business of getting food to be employed on reproductive works, in secondary industries, in transportation, commerce and administration. That is possible only if there is a surplus of food-stuffs already available to support those members of the community who are no longer themselves producing their own food. Moreover in practice a surplus is needed to barter for raw materials not available locally' (p. 148).

Thus there is observed a growing tendency for the increasing population to remain at home, where labour is needed and is profitable, rather than to migrate and found new self-sufficing settlements; for that would mean abandoning the results of invested labour. Those who thus remain at home become specialists; they devote the whole of their time to the new crafts. As these multiply, urban culture gradually comes into existence, replacing the old self-sufficing neolithic village community.

Professor Childe then discusses the problem of whether 'conquest is an essential pre-requisite to the accumulation of communal capital needed for the accomplishment of the Second Revolution' (p. 148). He concludes that, while 'in Egypt the first accumulation and concentration was apparently the result of conquest . . . it is not demonstrable that such conquest was in all cases the effective cause' of it. 'In Mesopotamia . . . it was nominally a native god (in practice, of course, the corporation of his self-appointed priests) that administered the accumulated wealth of a Sumerian city; there are only the vaguest and most ambiguous hints of an aristocracy owing its wealth to conquest rather than to religious prestige and homegrown social tradition' (p 149). 'The magician may have been the first independent craftsman, the first member of any community to have a claim on the surplus product of the collective food-quest without contributing thereto by physical activity. But the magician's wand is an embryo sceptre, and historical kings still retain many trappings from their magic office. . . Anyone who could successfully claim to control the elements by his magic would, of course, earn immense prestige and authority. It is needless to demonstrate in detail how many opportunities of aggrandisement through alleged magical prowess must have presented themselves in ancient societies' (p. 153). He points out, further, that 'in the oldest Indian cities we simply do not know how the communal surplus was accumulated or controlled. Military conquest is one means of assuring the accumulation of a surplus of wealth. But theories that regard it as an essential precondition of the Second Revolution must be regarded with reserve' (pp.149, 150). There speaks the archaeologist-historian, who alone can discover what did or did not happen, as contrasted with the old-fashioned sociological theorist, who at the best can never go beyond what might have happened.

Here we must digress for a moment to consider Professor Childe's ideas of 'history' and 'progress'. At the beginning of the book he points out what a poor, maimed thing the old-fashioned 'history' was, confined as it was to isolated, disconnected chunks of national history, each apparently unrelated to the other; that the true current of human history is like a mighty river whose onward flow can only be observed when long stretches are examined (we are describing this process in our own words). Further, he shows that human history 'is seen growing out of the "natural sciences" of biology, palaeontology and geology', so that the same objective tests of 'progress' should be applicable as those which are in fact applied there to other species of animals. 'Now to a biologist progress, if he used the term, would mean success in the struggle for existence'. Survival of the fittest is a good evolutionary principle. A provisional test of the 'fitness' of a species 'would be to count its members over several generations. If the total numbers turn out to be increasing, the species may be regarded as successful; if the total is dwindling, it is condemned as a failure' (p. 11). Figures of this kind 'provide an objective criterion by which such an event as the Industrial Revolution may be judged. The chief aim of this book is to examine prehistory and ancient history from this angle. It is hoped that a consideration of revolutions so remote that it is impossible to get angry or enthusiastic about them, may help to vindicate the idea of progress against sentimentalists and mystics' (p. 16).

Tested thus, each of the economic revolutions described in this book is seen to be a success, for each was accompanied by a marked increase in the population of the communities concerned. The old nomadic hunting-communities were small in numbers; contrast with them the new growth of neolithic villages which grew up over the area between the Nile and the Indus. Then compare the size of those neolithic villages with that of the urban cities which succeeded them, often on the same spot. These are objective facts. They are historically associated with certain inventions. Who but an obscurantist would deny those changes the name of 'progress'?

Chapter 7 gives an admirable picture of the new conditions of life in an urban community. Now for the first time in history we meet with real towns. In most essentials those conditions continued with little change right down to the Industrial Revolution, a period of some five thousand years. Economic self-sufficiency had been sacrificed and a completely new economic structure was created. 'The surplus of home-grown products must not only suffice to exchange for exotic materials; it must also support a body of merchants and transport-workers engaged in obtaining these, and a body of specialized craftsmen to work the precious imports to the best advantage. And soon soldiers would be needed to protect the convoys and back up the merchants by force, scribes to keep records of transactions growing ever more complex, and State officials to reconcile conflicting interests' (p.159). Archaeology builds up the picture. 'The most striking objects now unearthed are no longer the tools of agriculture and the chase and other products of domestic industry, but temple furniture, weapons, wheel-made pots, jewelry, and other manufactures turned out on a large scale by skilled artizans. As monuments we have, instead of huts and farmhouses, monumental tombs, temples, palaces and workshops. And in them we find all manner of exotic substances, not as rarities, but regularly imported and used in everyday life' (pp.159, 160). This reflects a transformation in the economy that produced the material, and is accompanied, as it should be, by a rise in the population, as indicated by the size of the cities. 'Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, for example, spread over a square mile of land' (p. 160); the contemporary cemeteries tell the same tale in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

At Erech (Uruk) there was a succession of stratified neolithic villages, formed of the ruins of reed huts or mud-brick houses and occupying a vertical space of fifty feet. Then appears 'a truly monumental building - a temple or group of temples', and a ziggurat or artificial hill [1] whose erection implies 'a large and disciplined force of labourers and craftsmen'. These people, being withdrawn from food-production, must have been supported from some common store of surplus food. 'Whose ? Presumably it was already controlled by the power, we may perhaps say already "deity", to whose honour and glory the buildings were dedicated. . .

'But the erection of such a monument required more than labourers and their food. The whole was carefully planned. The artificial mountain was laid out with its corners to the cardinal points. A centralized directing force was requisite. The god being but a fictitious projection of the communal will, that force must have been supplied by his servants. Naturally enough the imaginary god has found earthly representatives and interpreters glad to administer and to enlarge his terrestrial possessions in exchange for a modest share of his income. The wizards and magicians, guessed at in neolithic villages, have emerged as a corporation of priests sanctified with divine authority and emancipated from any mundane labours in field or pasture. These interpret the divine will to the toiling masses or, in other words, twist the magic ceremonies, by which society would compel natural forces, into ever more complicated rites for conciliating the power that now personifies these'. (p.163).

Out of these complex conditions emerged the invention of writing. It began as a system of mnemonic symbols invented by the priests to record their transactions; it developed through pictograms and ideograms to a regular system of writing. It seems to have been the temple corporations that were responsible for this development, which their own interests demanded, indeed necessitated. 'The Sumerian priests invented writing not in their capacity of ministers of superstition, but in that of administrators of a worldly estate' (p.209). For the temple was more than a mere centre of superstitious rites; it functioned also, perhaps in fact primarily, as a great capitalist institution, the equivalent of a bank (p. 172). The currency was mainly grain; the earliest archives 'record the god's loans of seed or plough-animals to cultivators, the fields he has let to tenants, wages paid to brewers, boat-builders, spinners and other employees, advances of grain or bullion to travelling merchants. The god is the richest member of the community. His wealth is available to the community from whose piety he, in fact, derived it. But the same piety required that the borrower should not only pay back the loan, but also add a little thank-offenng. The god's ministers were doubtless careful to remind you of your duty, and even stipulated in advance what decency demanded you to offer' (p.173).

From this it was a short step to kingship. 'By 3000 B.C. there is already emerging beside the deity in every city a temporal potentate. He styles himself humbly the god's "vicegerent", but also boldly "king". Perhaps he had once impersonated the god in those sacred dramas imagined above as a factor in the genesis of godhead . . . He has certainly usurped a substantial share of the god's temporal power over men. He even oppresses his subjects, according to quite early documents' (p. 173). But he performed useful functions as a civil ruler, perhaps reconciling conflicting class-interests, and he was also a military commander (p.174).

Thus there grew up in Sumeria the world's first cities. At first they were independent, and at constant war with each other, the inevitable result of a contradiction between economic realities and political separatism. It was not until about 2000 B.C. that Babylonia became 'a political reality, a unified nation with a common capital, a common code of written law, a common calendar, and a permanent system of government'. That was the work of Hammurabi. 'Then at last the city-state was absorbed into the territorial state that corresponded on the whole to the realities of economic needs' (p.175).

The Second Revolution in Egypt was approximately contemporary, occurring a little before 3000 B.C. (Menes, the founder of the 1st Dynasty and the unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt is put at 3400 B.C. by Breasted and 3200 B.C. by Meyer). But in Egypt the archaeological evidence is derived mainly from tombs, and we cannot trace the use of an urban economy with anything like so much certainty as in Mesopotamia. The earliest cities are buried under the Nile mud or have been looted and destroyed by later generations of builders. 'The reserve supplies required for the transformation of the economic system were not accumulated in the temples of a communal deity, but in the hands of a monarch who had already placed himself above the society from which he had arisen' (p.176). Again the magicians appear in full command, and indeed 'in the archaeological record economic achievements and scientific discoveries appear only as applied to magical ends, as distorted in a ideological medium' (p. 181).

Of the origins of the Second Revolution in India we know nothing, for 'the simpler villages and townships from which the cities have arisen remain unidentified. By 2500 B.C. the same uniform civilization extends from the mouth of the Indus throughout the lowlands of the Punjab right up to the foothills, but there is no evidence whether any political unity corresponded to this cultural uniformity. It is even uncertain what was the nucleus of capital accumulation. We have indications of a division into classes of rich and poor, but whether a king or a god stood at the head of the hierarchy is uncertain. Both temples and palaces are so inconspicuous among the ruins that their very existence is dubious' (p.189).

The revolution was probably contemporary in all three lands. There is archaeological proof of intercourse between them at the time. But 'urban civilization was not simply transplanted from one centre to another, but was in each an organic growth rooted in the local soil (p. 190). The process is compared by the author with the rise of mechanized industry and factory production which took place on both sides of the Atlantic at the time of the Third (Industrial) Revolution (p.190).

When once the new urban economy had been established in the three primary centres, it spread thence to secondary centres in much the same way as Western Capitalism spread to colonies and economic dependencies (p 191). The process is described in detail on pp. '191-5. Its propagation was in three ways. Economic demand for raw materials promoted the growth of 'industrial specialists ' to supply those needs and thereby share in the surplus. Or 'the Second Revolution was propagated by violence and imposed by the force of imperialism (p. 195), just as was the Third, for instance, by the British in India. Or it was propagated by provoking resistance to such attacks; that resistance could only be successful 'by assimilating part of the civilization of the aggressors' (p. 198).

In Chapter 8 (the Revolution in Human Knowledge) Professor Childe analyses the causes of the Second Revolution and its results. It 'had produced or accentuated a division of society into classes. In practice kings, priests, nobles, and generals stand opposed to peasants, fishermen, artizans and labourers. In this class-division the scribes belong to the former class; writing is a "respectable" profession' (p. 212). But this at once cut off the scribe from the living world of craftsmen and husbandmen to whose improvements in technique material progress in prehistoric times had been mainly due. It created a privileged class whose members alone had access to the 'learned sciences', which were thus divorced from practical life. To this must have been added the magical virtue attributed to the written word - a magic which would most surely be exploited to the full by those who held the key, just as it was - and indeed still is - exploited by the priests and mullahs of other religions. 'Thus learned men in the East, like schoolmen in our own Middle Ages, were apt to turn to books in preference to Nature . . Instead of demanding that a book should be up-to-date and embody the latest discoveries, the Egyptian or Babylonian student valued it for its antiquity. A publisher would then advertise his wares not as a "new and revised edition", but as a faithful copy of a fabulously old text' (pp.213-4). Thus began that 'great intellectual division of mankind' which, as Dr George Sarton truly says, is not along geographical or racial lines, but between those who understand and practise the experimental method and those who do not understand and do not practise it. In other words, there was imposed upon society a Sacred Book of Knowledge containing 'all ye know and all ye need to know'. The artizan and the husbandman, hitherto the harbingers of progress, were superseded by a caste, allied to the ruling class if not actually part of it. Knowledge was fossilized in a bed of verbiage. Observation and experiment no longer directed the advance of humanity.

In passing we may observe that precisely the same phenomenon has occurred at other periods in history. St. Augustine said: 'Whatever knowledge man has acquired outside Holy Writ, if it be harmful it is there condemned; if it be wholesome, it is there contained'. All knowledge is subordinated to the study of 'Holy Writ'. Nature must be studied but only in so far as it is useful for understanding the Scriptures. A knowledge of serpents is useful because it helps us to understand Matthew X, 16, and of hyssop for understanding Psalm L, 9! The mechanical arts require no special study.

In general it is not unfair to say that [St. Augustine] looks upon Nature simply as a possible aid to the understanding of the Bible [2] Today we have the magic books of Fascism (Mein Kampf) and Communism (Marx and Lenin), though it is fair to add that these works do at any rate deal with the practical problems of this world rather than with the imaginary ones of another. Yet salvation lies not in sacred books but in the understanding and practice of the experimental method: though certain obstacles have to be removed before this can be achieved.

The remainder of Chapter 8 is devoted to a very interesting account of early mathematics, impossible to summarize, concluding with notes on early astronomy and medicine ('the tradition that medicines must be disgusting is a survival of the demoniacal theory of disease, traceable in the oldest extant medical texts'! p.250). In a Note on Magic, Religion and Science [3] Professor Childe, quite rightly in my opinion, regards the distinction between magic and religion as one of convenience only. Whether the forces in question are impersonal mystic forces or personified as a god is surely immaterial. 'It is quite obvious that science did not, and could not, spring directly from either magic or religion. We have shown in detail that it originated in, and was at first identical with, the practical crafts. In so far as a craft like that of healing or astronomy was annexed to religion it was sterilized of scientific value' (p.256). These are weighty words.

The Acceleration and Retardation of Progress

'Before the urban revolution comparatively poor and illiterate communities had made an impressive series of contributions to man's progress', such as 'artificial irrigation using canals and ditches; the plough; the harnessing of animal motive-power; the sailing-boat; wheeled vehicles; orchard-husbandry; fermentation; the production and use of copper; bricks; the arch; glazing; the seal; and in the earliest stages of the revolution - a solar calendar, writing, numeral notation, and bronze'.

'The two thousand years after the revolution - say from 2600 to 600 B.C. - produced few contributions of anything like comparable importance to human progress. Perhaps only four achievements deserve to be put in the same category as the fifteen just enumerated. They are: the "decimal notation" of Babylonia (about 2000 B.C.); an economical method for smelting iron on an industrial scale (1400 B.C.); a truly alphabetic script (1300 B.C.); aqueducts for supplying water to cities (700 B.C.)'. But only two of these four discoveries can 'be credited to the societies that had initiated and first reaped the fruits of the urban revolution' (pp.257, 8). 'We are left then with only two first-rate discoveries made by societies equipped with all the advantages of the fifteen mutations that were unified in the urban revolution. Viewed in this light the achievements of Egypt, Babylonia, and their immediate cultural dependencies appear disappointing from the standpoint of human progress. Contrasting progress before and after it, the Second Revolution seems to mark, not the dawn of a new era of accelerated advance, but the culmination and arrest of an earlier period of growth. Yet the Oriental societies had been equipped by the revolution with unprecedented resources and a new faculty of transmitting and accumulating knowledge'. (p.259).

The explanation of this arrested growth is to be sought in the structure of society as it emerged during the Second Revolution. It had become a class society, dominated by those who controlled the surplus. That involved the degradation of the mass of the population, those productive craftsmen whose fertile brains and clever hands had actually brought about the Second Revolution. Now 'their share in the new wealth was minimal, and socially they were sinking toward the status of tenants or even serfs'. (p.259). A new army of specialized, non-foodproducing craftsmen and labourers had come into existence, dependent for its livelihood upon the surplus controlled by the ruling class. Though the revolution which their comrades had created was the ultimate cause of the surplus, 'the fraction which came to them was again trifling' (p. 260). The substantial balance 'was retained by the few - the kings, the priests, their relatives, and favourites . . . [The class division] is typified for the archaeologist by the contrast between the overpowering magnificence of royal tombs and the simplicity of private graves in Egypt, or by that between the luxurious houses of merchants and the hovels of artizans in an Indus city' (p.260). No such contrasts can be observed in earlier times.

Professor Childe is careful to point out that this concentration of power may have been 'essential to ensure the production of the requisite surplus resources and to make these available for effective social use' (p.259). Further, that 'by the biological standard here adopted the urban revolution is amply justified in its effects, even if those effects include the class division just outlined' (p.260). Nevertheless the result was a retardation of progress, caused precisely by that class-division; for the ruling classes who now emerged owed their power largely to the exploitation of just those superstitions, in the teeth of which improvements in production-processes had been made. Their affiliations were with priest-craft and superstition, and they could not be expected to be patrons of rational science. Moreover, the motive was lacking; labour was cheap and abundant, and could be kept obedient by means of religion, 'the opium of the people'. A potentially dangerous surplus population could be set to work on useless monuments of superstition like the Pyramids.

Subsequent developments followed the normal course towards imperialism. Both Egypt and Babylonia had to obtain their raw materials from outside their own territory. 'Eventually attempts were made to annex the sources of supplies and to conquer the exporting countries'. The empires thus constituted 'undoubtedly contributed to human progress' (p.264), but they contained a contradiction. 'The persistence with which the subject peoples revolted is a measure of their gratitude for the benefits' previously enumerated. Actually it is probable that empires like that of Sargon destroyed more wealth than they created. They were little more than tribute-collecting machines, interfering just so much in the affairs of subject peoples as was necessary to maintain 'law and order' and to secure the regular payment of taxes.

On almost the last page of the book (p.268) Professor Childe summarizes in a few admirable words the chief outcome of all this. 'The urban revolution, made possible by science, was exploited by superstition. The principal beneficiaries from the achievements of farmers and artizans were priests and kings. Magic rather than science was thereby enthroned and invested with the authority of temporal power.

It is as futile to deplore the superstitions of the past as it is to complain of the unsightly scaffolding essential to the erection of a beautiful building. It is childish to ask why man did not progress straight from the squalor of a "pre-class" society to the glories of a classless paradise, nowhere fully realized as yet. Perhaps the conflicts and contradictions, above revealed, themselves constitute the dialectics of progress. In any case, they are the facts of history. If we dislike them, that does not mean that progress is a delusion, but merely that we have understood neither the facts nor progress nor man. Man made the superstitions and the institutions of oppression as much as he made the sciences and the instruments of production. In both alike he was expressing himself, finding himself, making himself'.

So we reach the end of an admirably sane, lucid and unbiassed account of human history. We see the instruments of production shaping the society to which their inventors belong and determining the social relationships within it. We witness the birth of class divisions 5000 years ago, and the retardation which followed. And certain questions inevitably obtrude themselves. If the instruments of production effected so much then, what social changes should we expect to result from the Third (Industrial) Revolution? The answer is being written today on the map of the world in letters of blood. But it becomes intelligible only to those who have a sure grasp of the main, essential facts of human history as a whole. Then the forces arrayed against each other can be seen in their true historical relationships, and against their economic background, unobscured by nationalist, political or religious faĉades.

Professor Childe's book can be described as 'Marxist' in the only proper sense of the word; that is to say, it is the sort of book that Marx himself would have written if he were alive today, and therefore had access to all those rich stores of new knowledge that have been created by the archaeologist and historian during the last fifty years. When he wrote this knowledge was not available. It simply was not possible to say through what stages of development human society had passed, actually and as a matter of historical fact. It was merely possible to make certain guesses based upon the analogy of existing 'primitive tribes'. Now the 'argument by analogy' is based upon an assumption - that phases of society observed today represent phases historically enacted by the communities from whom our present culture is derived. That assumption cannot be proved, and is frequently found to be erroneous. In any case it is unscientific and inconclusive. We prefer the story of what did happen to speculations about what might have happened; we prefer the findings of modern science to the pioneer gropings, however valuable at the time, of writers like Lewis Morgan. Consequently we regard Professor Childe's book as the most stimulating, original and convincing contribution to the history of civilization which we have ever read. That is why we have devoted so much space to it here. We hope that all readers of this summary will buy the book itself.

Footnotes
1 See ANTIQUITY, June 1936, pp.139-41. Back to Text
2 Benjamin Farrington, Science in Antiquity, 1936, p.242. Back to Text
3 The reference to p.67 should surely be to p.62. Back to Text

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