ABSTRACT
Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home. Each is an aspect of the other. Anthropologists who use, or misuse, words such as 'acculturation' beg this basic question. For the major mode of acculturation, the direct shaping of one culture by another through which civilization develops, has been conquest. Civilization, then, has evolved in two major phases, ancient and modern. The ancient states of China, Egypt, Babylonia, India were, in their restricted primary range, and along with their satellites and descendants, peasant-based and slow to develop. But the older civilizations are primary, in the sense that they were the original locus for the primitive transformation. The classical civilizations of Greece and Rome that are ancestral to the Western experience are the heirs of the ancient Near Eastern cultures mediated through Crete and the Aegean. Primitive peoples have been fascinated, repelled, conquered, administered and decimated by civilization, but they have hardly ever chosen to civilize themselves.
