>EvMick@aol.com wrote:
>
>> My understanding....based upon what I picked up while there....was that
>Crete
>> was the EARLIEST civilization....Assyria..Babylon...Egypt...Greece....all
>> came later....
>
>I thought the earliest was Sumer.
>
Sumer was a comparative nipper. The oldest city cultures now known with
any certainty are, I believe, the surprisingly precocious neolithic
cultures of what used to be called Anatolia (the plains in the southern
part of Turkey) - true cities like Catal Huyuk (6500BC) and Hacilar
(5700BC). Jericho also has strata going back to 7000BC. Crete was kind
of contemporaneous with this sort of thing as well. There were also many
surprisingly large settlements along the Adriatic and in the Balkan
regions.
Basically, there seems to be pretty good evidence for a fairly uniform
and sophisticated pre Indo-European culture across the whole Mediterranean
and Balkan region from about 7000 BC to about 3500 BC, which seems to
have been gradually destroyed by successive waves of invasions by
bastards with bronze swords, who subsequently got to build all the
monuments. Kind of depressing really.
Guru George