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75 By the time the Hittites and their writings were reclaimed from oblivion, scholars had already determined that before the Hittite and Egyptian civilizations, before Assyria and Babylon, even be- fore Akkad, there arose in southern Mesopotamia the high civiliza- tion of Sumer. All the others were offshoots of that first-known civilization. And it is by now established beyond doubt that it was in Sumer that the tales of gods and men were first recorded. It was there that numerous texts—more numerous than can be imagined, more de- tailed than could be expected—were first inscribed. It was there that the written records of history and prehistory on our planet Earth had originated. We call them THE EARTH CHRONICLES. The discovery and understanding of the ancient civilizations has been a process of continuous astonishment, of incredible realiza- tions. The monuments of antiquity—pyramids, ziggurats, vast platforms, columned ruins, carved stones—would have remained enigmas, mute evidence to bygone events, were it not for the Writ- ten Word. Were it not for that, the ancient monuments would have remained puzzles: their age uncertain; their creators obscure; their purpose unclear. We owe what we know to the ancient scribes—a prolific and me- ticulous lot, who used monuments, artifacts, foundation stones, bricks, utensils, weapons of any conceivable material, as inviting slates on which to write down names and record events. Above all there were the clay tablets: flattened pieces of wet clay, some small enough to be held in the palm of the hand, on which the scribe leftly embossed with a stylus the symbols that formed syllables, words, and sentences. Then the tablet would be left to dry (or be kiln-dried), and a permanent record had been created—a_ record that has survived millennia of natural erosion and human destruc- tiveness. In place after place—in centers of commerce or of administra- tion, in temples and palaces, in all parts of the ancient Near East— there were both state and private archives full of such tablets; and there were also actual libraries where the tablets, tens of thousands of them, were neatly arranged by subject, their contents entitled, their scribe named, their sequel numbered. Invariably, whenever they dealt with history or science or the gods, they were identified as copies of earlier tablets, tablets in the "olden language." Astounded as the archaeologists were to uncover the grandeur of Assyria and Babylonia, they were even more puzzled to read in The Earth Chronicles