ABSTRACT
The organization of society around the making and use of tools marked the beginning of culture — that accumulation of instruments, ideas and institutions by which social life proceeds. At Mt Carmel on the coast of present-day Israel what are presumed to be the earliest of Neolithic tools have been discovered, including a wood-and-flint sickle used for harvesting grain, from the Lower Natufian culture of Palestine. The Sumerians dominated the lower, south-eastern part of the Mesopotamian valley during the first half of the third millennium and their culture gave the pattern to early civilization in the Ancient Orient. The earliest tablets that can be deciphered, both in Akkadian and Sumerian, reveal a content almost entirely commercial: they consist of accounts, contracts, fragments of legal codes, lists of temple produce and treaties. By 2500 b.c. the Akkadians were the dominant people, and Sumerian had become relegated to the status of an ancient and scholarly language, employed almost exclusively in the temples.
