ABSTRACT
Since we are committed to begin at the beginning it is important to look at some of the milestones in the development of humanity, which are of course well enough known today. On the evidence of skeletal remains and primitive tools the anthropologist and the archaeologist have been pressing back the beginnings of man and his subsequent development along a number of experimental lines, with such labels at Neanderthal, Sinanthropus, Pithecanthropus, Rhodesian and Homo Sapiens, to as early as seven hundred thousand to a million years b.c., although it was not until about 35,000 b.c. that the infancy of mankind seems to have given way to the hunter stage, which lasted till the emergence of agriculture and settled communities about 6000 b.c. Only then does substantial evidence begin to accumulate of organized government and the existence of public officials. The first representative civilizations are already upon the scene somewhere between 4000 and 3000 b.c. (although recent discoveries at Jericho and elsewhere suggest that there was already a settled town on this site at least two thousand years earlier!). Written records are vital both to the recording of history and the expansion of administration. But writing was not invented before the fourth millennium b.c. and obviously evidence of administration before this is hard to come by.
