did we miss something?

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How is it possible that the ancient civilizations arose so suddenly? ~ Allan
A) It is a modern misconception that any of those ancient civilizations arose "suddenly." The archeological record is all we have to go by, and anything that did not survive intact is lost information. Just as we throw away the older things we use when we get new things, those people built over the older parts of their lives with their new architecture, erasing the records of previous generations. If you study the Neolithic cultures of the generations before the rise of Sumeria, you will find much of the roots of their world in those cultures. And in Egypt, since Sumeria was, after all, influenced by the earlier rise of Egypt's civilization, which is now acknowledged as being older than the Sumerian. Egypt has been recognized now as the first civilization of humankind, and at the time that writers like Sitchin were first writing, it was believed that Sumeria was the older one. The issue of population growth also plays a role. When a population reaches a certain density in a given area, more things are possible, since you have enough labor to do the work of civilized life. ~ RLW
Q) Isn't the civilization of Mesopotamia older than Egypt? Didn't they invent the writing and mathematics?
A) In the earlier days of archeological exploration, the Mesopotamian sites were glamorized by their biblical associations. The sites are better preserved because of the desert dryness of the main locations, and thus the older sites were unearthed first. Discoveries made in the last decade, however, have proven that the Egyptian civilization predates that of the Mesopotamian by almost a thousand years ~ and new discoveries continue to push that date back further. It is the bleakness of the Sumerian/Assyrian cultural world that furnishes the clue that they are not the older society. They show such a damaged sense of joy in life. All this "play acting" is swept away by the brutal realities of warfare, realities that are the center and obsession of their culture. They cared more about how to kill their enemies than how to live their lives. Their mythology suggests that they were a splinter group that left the Nile Delta and went into the desert of the Anatolian Plain to set up their own version of civilization. The details of their mythology further suggest that they did not leave voluntarily but were exiled because of their behavior. Their stories reek of guilt. They built from scratch on the banks of a new river system, but they never forgot the "land of milk and honey" that they had lost. The clue is in their images  of the world of the afterlife, a gray, dusty place with only the dimmest of light, without hope or identity. That does not sound like a carry-over from the rich spiritual world of the Neolithic cultures, but, rather, of an intellectual, neurotic denial of the world from which they had been expelled.

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Included Page: Frequently Asked Questions about Ancient Egypt