The early civilization of man points to his creation, not his evolution. Evolution requires many centers of civilization; creation, only one. Of course, if man is descended from an ancient ape-like form, and from the Primates and their brute progeny, he must have been as uncivilized and brutish as any baboon or gorilla today, or the apes, which, last year, horribly mangled the children at Sierra Leone. He must have worked his way up into civilization. The records, as far back as they go, prove that the original condition of man was a state of civilization, not savagery. Man fell down, not up.
The recent explorations in the tomb of Tutankhamen, in Egypt, and the more recent explorations of the tomb of a still more ancient Egyptian monarch, show that a high degree of civilization prevailed from 2000 to 1300 B.C. The art displayed in the carvings and paintings, and the skill of the artisans are beyond praise. They had knowledge even of what are now lost arts. They had a written language 300 years before Homer wrote his immortal Iliad. Yet many higher critics claim that writing was unknown in the days of Moses and Homer. They declare that the Iliad, a poem in 24 books, was committed to memory, and handed down from generation to generation, 400 years with all its fine poetic touches. Monstrous alternative! Indeed we are even told that “Many men must have served as authors and improvers.” The mob of reciters improved the great epic of Homer! Scarcely less brilliant is the suggestion of another higher critic that, “Homer’s Iliad was not composed by Homer, but by another man of the same name”!
The laws of Hammurabi, who is identified as the Amraphel of Scripture, Gen. 14:1, and who was contemporary with Abraham, were in existence many hundred years before Moses, and showed a high state of civilization, which began many hundred years before Abraham. The literature of China goes back to 2000 B. C. The earliest civilization of China, Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia, reaching to 2500 B.C., or earlier, points to a still earlier civilization, which likely reaches back to the origin of the human race.
It is admitted that the earliest (Sumerian) civilization began on the Euphrates, near the garden of Eden. They had temples and priests, and, therefore, religion prevailed as well as civilization. The first great empires clustered around the places where Adam and Noah lived. No other civilization recorded in any quarter reaches farther back.
We quote from the New International Encyclopedia: “The Sumerian language is probably the oldest known language in the world. From the Sumerian vocabulary, it is evident that the people who spoke this language had reached a comparatively high civilization.”
The monuments show that in early historical times, man was in a state of civilization. There are no monuments of man’s civilization prior to historical time.
Higher critics have said that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch because writing was unknown in his day. Yet Prof. A. H. Sayce, D.D., LL.D., of Oxford University, one of the greatest archaeologists the world ever knew, writes: “Egypt was the first to deliver up its dead. Under an almost rainless sky, where frost is unknown, and the sand seals up all that is entrusted to its keeping, nothing perishes except by the hand of man. The fragile papyrus, inscribed it may be 5,000 years ago, is as fresh and legible as when its first possessor died.
“In Egypt, as far back as the monuments carry us, we find a highly-developed art, a highly organized government, and a highly-educated people. Books were multiplied, and if we can trust the translation of the Proverbs of Ptah-hotep, the oldest existing book in the world, there were competitive examinations, [civil service!] already in the age of the sixth Egyptian Dynasty.... We have long known that the use of writing for literary purposes is immensely old in both Egypt and Babylonia. Egypt was emphatically a land of scribes and readers. Already in the days of the Old Empire, the Egyptian hieroglyphs had developed into a cursive hand.”
From the Tel el-Amarna tablets, discovered in Upper Egypt, we know that for 100 years people were corresponding with each other, in the language of Babylonia in cuneiform characters. Libraries existed then, and “Canaan in the Mosaic age, was fully as literary as was Europe in the time of the Renaissance.” Ancient Babylonian monuments testify to the existence of an ancient literary culture. The results of the excavations by the American Expedition, published by Prof. Hilprecht, of the U. of Pa., show that in the time of King Sargon of Accad, art and literature flourished in Chaldea. The region of the garden of Eden was the pivot of the civilization of the world. From this region radiated the early civilization of Babylonia, Assyria and Egypt. And the advanced degree implies centuries of prior civilization. The origin of man and the earliest civilization occurred in the same region. Ur explorations (1927) show high art, 3000 B.C.
The earliest records show man was civilized. He lived in houses, cities and towns, read and wrote, and engaged in commerce and industry. To be sure, he did not have the inventions of modern times. If all these were necessary, then there was no civilization prior to the 20th century. Prof. J. Arthur Thompson, of Aberdeen, an evolutionist, says: “Modern research is leading us away from the picture of primitive man as brutish, dull, lascivious and bellicose. There is more justification for regarding primitive man as clever, kindly, adventurous and inventive.”
It is admitted that cannibalism was not primeval. The two great revolting crimes of barbarism, cannibalism and human sacrifices, only prevailed when man had fallen to the lowest depths, not when he had risen out of savagery to the heights. The assertion that man was originally a brute, savage and uncivilized is pure fiction, unsupported by the facts. The original civilization of mankind supports the Bible, and upsets evolution.
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