Some Notes on the Pre-Dynastic Epoch

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We understand some of their languages, but none of them completely. That is one of the great difficulties. What has come down from their epoch to ours is spotted and stained and eroded by time, full of lacunae and static; and so we can only approximately comprehend the nature of their civilization and the reasons for its collapse. Too often, I fear, we project our own values and assumptions back upon them and deceive ourselves into thinking we are making valid historic judgments.

On the other hand there are certain aesthetic rewards in the very incompleteness of the record. Their poetry, for example, is heightened and made more mysterious, more strangely appealing, by the tantalizing gaps that result from our faulty linguistic knowledge and from the uncertainties we experience in transliterating their fragmentary written texts, as well as in transcribing their surviving spoken archives. It is as though time itself has turned poet, collaborating belatedly with the ancients to produce something new and fascinating by punching its own inexorable imprint into their work. Consider the resonances and implications of this deformed and defective song, perhaps a chant of a ritual nature, dating from the late pre-dynastic:

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