Historic times are marked apart from prehistoric times when 'records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations' -in written or oral form. The first cities to house several tens of thousands were Memphis and Uruk, by the 31st century BC (see Historical urban community sizes). The earliest proto-urban settlements with several thousand inhabitants emerged in the Neolithic. The importance of water to safeguard an abundant and stable food supply, due to favourable conditions for hunting, fishing and gathering resources including cereals, provided an initial wide spectrum economy that triggered the creation of permanent villages. The earliest signs of a process leading to sedentary culture can be seen in the Levant to as early as 12,000 BC, when the Natufian culture became sedentary it evolved into an agricultural society by 10,000 BC. The terms also appear in esoteric pseudohistory, such as the Urantia Book, claiming the title for 'the second Eden', or the pseudoarchaeology related to Megalithic Britain ( Civilization One 2004,ДЄncient Britain: The Cradle of Civilization 1921).ДЇurther information: Neolithic Revolution, Urban revolution, and Chalcolithic It has been used in Eastern as well as Western cultures, for instance, in Indian nationalism ( In Search of the Cradle of Civilization 1995) and Taiwanese nationalism ( Taiwan - The Cradle of Civilization 2002). The phrase 'cradle of civilization' plays a certain role in national mysticism. Charles Rollin's Ancient History (1734) has 'Egypt that served at first as the cradle of the holy nation'. The figurative use of cradle to mean 'the place or region in which anything is nurtured or sheltered in its earlier stage' is traced by the Oxford English Dictionary to Spenser (1590). The concept 'cradle of civilization' is the subject of much debate. The term has also been applied to ancient Anatolia, the Levant, and the Iranian plateau, and is used to refer to cultural predecessors such as Ancient Greece, which is widely considered the predecessor to Western civilization. The term cradle of civilization has frequently been applied to a variety of regions and cultures, in particular to the Ancient Near East during the Chalcolithic (see Ubaid period), which contained the Fertile Crescent, and to Ancient India, and Ancient China. Scholars have defined civilization by using various criteria such as the use of writing, cities, a class-based society, agriculture, animal husbandry, public buildings, metallurgy, and monumental architecture. Scholars accept that the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica, which existed in modern-day Mexico, and the civilization in Caral-Supe, a region in modern-day Peru, rival in age the civilizations of the Old World and emerged independently of the Old World and of each other. The extent to which there was significant influence between the early civilizations of the Near East and the Indus Valley with the Chinese civilization of East Asia ( Far East) is disputed. Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, and Ancient China are believed to be the earliest in the Old World. According to current thinking, there was no single 'cradle' of civilization instead, several cradles of civilization developed independently. Pictured are the Giza Pyramids.ДЄ cradle of civilization is any location where civilization is understood to have independently emerged. Among the various cradles of civilization is Ancient Egypt.

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