erences will have had
the equivalent of a university extension course dealing with one of the
most critical issues confronting the present generation of humanity.

_Part I_

The Pageant of Experiment With Civilization

CHAPTER ONE

EXPERIMENTS IN EGYPT AND EURASIA

Thousands of years before the city of Rome was ringed with its six miles
of stone wall, other peoples in Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa were
building civilizations. New techniques of excavation, identification and
preservation, subsidized by an increasingly affluent human society, and
developed during the past two centuries of archeological research have
provided the needed means and manpower. The result is an imposing number
of long buried building sites with their accompanying artifacts. Still
more important are the records written in long forgotten languages on
stone, clay tablets, metal, wood and paper. These remnants and records,
left by extinguished civilizations, do not tell us all we wish to know,
but they do provide the materials which enable us to reconstruct, at
least in part, the lives of our civilized predecessors.

Extensive in time and massive in the volume of their architecture are
the remains of Egyptian civilization. The earliest of these fragments
date back for more than six thousand years.

The seat of Egyptian civilization was the Nile Valley and its estuary
built out into the Mediterranean Sea from the debris of disintegrating
African mountains. Annual floods left their silt deposits to deepen the
soil along the lower reaches of the river. River water, impounded for
the purpose, provided the means of irrigating an all but rainless desert
countryside. Skillful engineering drained the swamps, adding to the
cultivable area of a narrow valley cut by the river through jagged
barren hills. Deserts on both sides of the Nile protected the valley
against aggressors and migrants. Within this sanctuary the Egyptians
built a civilization that lasted, with a minor break, for some 3,000
years.

Egyptian temples and tombs carry records chiseled and painted on hard
stone, which throw light on the life and times of upper-class Egyptians,
including emperors, provincial governors, courtiers, generals,
merchants, provincial organizers. In a humid, temperate climate these
stone-cut and painted records would have been eroded, overgrown and
obliterated long ago. In the dry desert air of North Africa they have
preserved their identity t