Chapter V: Part 5

It is interesting that portable pottery does not appear until the last third of the life of the Jarmo village. Throughout the duration of the village, however, its people had experimented with the plastic qualities of clay. They modeled little figurines of animals and of human beings in clay; one type of human figurine they favored was that of a markedly pregnant woman, probably the expression of some sort of fertility spirit. They provided their house floors with baked-in-place depressions, either as basins or hearths, and later with domed ovens of clay. As we’ve noted, the houses themselves were of clay or mud; one could almost say they were built up like a house-sized pot. Then, finally, the idea of making portable pottery itself appeared, although I very much doubt that the people of the Jarmo village discovered the art.

On the other hand, the old tradition of making flint blades and microlithic tools was still very strong at Jarmo. The sickle-blade was made in quantities, but so also were many of the much older tool types. Strangely enough, it is within this age-old category of chipped stone tools that we see one of the clearest pointers to a newer age. Many of the Jarmo chipped stone tools--microliths--were made of obsidian, a black volcanic natural glass. The obsidian beds nearest to Jarmo are over three hundred miles to the north. Already a bulk carrying trade had been established--the forerunner of commerce--and the routes were set by which, in later times, the metal trade was to move.

There are now twelve radioactive carbon “dates” from Jarmo. The most reasonable cluster of determinations averages to about 6750 ± 200 B.C., although there is a completely unreasonable range of “dates” running from 3250 to 9250 B.C.! _If_ I am right in what I take to be “reasonable,” the first flush of the food-producing revolution had been achieved almost nine thousand years ago.

HASSUNA, IN UPPER MESOPOTAMIAN IRAQ

We are not sure just how soon after Jarmo the next assemblage of Iraqi material is to be placed. I do not think the time was long, and there are a few hints that detailed habits in the making of pottery and ground stone tools were actually continued from Jarmo times into the time of the next full assemblage. This is called after a site named Hassuna, a few miles to the south and west of modern Mosul. We also have Hassunan type materials from several other sites in the same general region. It is probably too soon to make generalizations about it, but the Hassunan sites seem to cluster at slightly lower elevations than those we have been talking about so far.

The catalogue of the Hassuna assemblage is of course more full and elaborate than that of Jarmo. The Iraqi government’s archeologists who dug Hassuna itself, exposed evidence of increasing architectural know-how. The walls of houses were still formed of puddled mud; sun-dried bricks appear only in later periods. There were now several different ways of making and decorating pottery vessels. One style of pottery painting, called the Samarran style, is an extremely handsome one and must have required a great deal of concentration and excellence of draftsmanship. On the other hand, the old habits for the preparation of good chipped stone tools--still apparent at Jarmo--seem to have largely disappeared by Hassunan times. The flint work of the Hassunan catalogue is, by and large, a wretched affair. We might guess that the kinaesthetic concentration of the Hassuna craftsmen now went into other categories; that is, they suddenly discovered they might have more fun working with the newer materials. It’s a shame, for example, that none of their weaving is preserved for us.

The two available radiocarbon determinations from Hassunan contexts stand at about 5100 and 5600 B.C. ± 250 years.

OTHER EARLY VILLAGE SITES IN THE NUCLEAR AREA

I’ll now name and very briefly describe a few of the other early village assemblages either in or adjacent to the hilly flanks of the crescent. Unfortunately, we do not have radioactive carbon dates for many of these materials. We may guess that some particular assemblage, roughly comparable to that of Hassuna, for example, must reflect a culture which lived at just about the same time as that of Hassuna. We do this guessing on the basis of the general similarity and degree of complexity of the Sears Roebuck catalogues of the particular assemblage and that of Hassuna. We suppose that for sites near at hand and of a comparable cultural level, as indicated by their generally similar assemblages, the dating must be about the same. We may also know that in a general stratigraphic sense, the sites in question may both appear at the bottom of the ascending village sequence in their respective areas. Without a number of consistent radioactive carbon dates, we cannot be precise about priorities.

POTTERY
POTTERY OBJECTS
CHIPPED STONE
BONE
GROUND STONE
ARCHITECTURE
REED MATTING
BURIAL]

The ancient mound at Jericho, in the Dead Sea valley in Palestine, yields some very interesting material. Its catalogue somewhat resembles that of Jarmo, especially in the sense that there is a fair depth of deposit without portable pottery vessels. On the other hand, the architecture of Jericho is surprisingly complex, with traces of massive stone fortification walls and the general use of formed sun-dried mud brick. Jericho lies in a somewhat strange and tropically lush ecological niche, some seven hundred feet below sea level; it is geographically within the hilly-flanks zone but environmentally not part of it.

Several radiocarbon “dates” for Jericho fall within the range of those I find reasonable for Jarmo, and their internal statistical consistency is far better than that for the Jarmo determinations. It is not yet clear exactly what this means.

The mound at Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) contains a remarkably fine sequence, which perhaps does not have the gap we noted in Iraqi-Kurdistan between the Karim Shahir group and Jarmo. While I am not sure that the Jericho sequence will prove valid for those parts of Palestine outside the special Dead Sea environmental niche, the sequence does appear to proceed from the local variety of Natufian into that of a very well settled community. So far, we have little direct evidence for the food-production basis upon which the Jericho people subsisted.

There is an early village assemblage with strong characteristics of its own in the land bordering the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea, where Syria and the Cilician province of Turkey join. This early Syro-Cilician assemblage must represent a general cultural pattern which was at least in part contemporary with that of the Hassuna assemblage. These materials from the bases of the mounds at Mersin, and from Judaidah in the Amouq plain, as well as from a few other sites, represent the remains of true villages. The walls of their houses were built of puddled mud, but some of the house foundations were of stone. Several different kinds of pottery were made by the people of these villages. None of it resembles the pottery from Hassuna or from the upper levels of Jarmo or Jericho. The Syro-Cilician people had not lost their touch at working flint. An important southern variation of the Syro-Cilician assemblage has been cleared recently at Byblos, a port town famous in later Phoenician times. There are three radiocarbon determinations which suggest that the time range for these developments was in the sixth or early fifth millennium B.C.

It would be fascinating to search for traces of even earlier village-farming communities and for the remains of the incipient cultivation era, in the Syro-Cilician region.

THE IRANIAN PLATEAU AND THE NILE VALLEY

The map on page 125 shows some sites which lie either outside or in an extension of the hilly-flanks zone proper. From the base of the great mound at Sialk on the Iranian plateau came an assemblage of early village material, generally similar, in the kinds of things it contained, to the catalogues of Hassuna and Judaidah. The details of how things were made are different; the Sialk assemblage represents still another cultural pattern. I suspect it appeared a bit later in time than did that of Hassuna. There is an important new item in the Sialk catalogue. The Sialk people made small drills or pins of hammered copper. Thus the metallurgist’s specialized craft had made its appearance.

There is at least one very early Iranian site on the inward slopes of the hilly-flanks zone. It is the earlier of two mounds at a place called Bakun, in southwestern Iran; the results of the excavations there are not yet published and we only know of its coarse and primitive pottery. I only mention Bakun because it helps us to plot the extent of the hilly-flanks zone villages on the map.

The Nile Valley lies beyond the peculiar environmental zone of the hilly flanks of the crescent, and it is probable that the earliest village-farming communities in Egypt were established by a few people who wandered into the Nile delta area from the nuclear area. The assemblage which is most closely comparable to the catalogue of Hassuna or Judaidah, for example, is that from little settlements along the shore of the Fayum lake. The Fayum materials come mainly from grain bins or silos. Another site, Merimde, in the western part of the Nile delta, shows the remains of a true village, but it may be slightly later than the settlement of the Fayum. There are radioactive carbon “dates” for the Fayum materials at about 4275 B.C. ± 320 years, which is almost fifteen hundred years later than the determinations suggested for the Hassunan or Syro-Cilician assemblages. I suspect that this is a somewhat over-extended indication of the time it took for the generalized cultural pattern of village-farming community life to spread from the nuclear area down into Egypt, but as yet we have no way of testing these matters.

In this same vein, we have two radioactive carbon dates for an assemblage from sites near Khartoum in the Sudan, best represented by the mound called Shaheinab. The Shaheinab catalogue roughly corresponds to that of the Fayum; the distance between the two places, as the Nile flows, is roughly 1,500 miles. Thus it took almost a thousand years for the new way of life to be carried as far south into Africa as Khartoum; the two Shaheinab “dates” average about 3300 B.C. ± 400 years.

If the movement was up the Nile (southward), as these dates suggest, then I suspect that the earliest available village material of middle Egypt, the so-called Tasian, is also later than that of the Fayum. The Tasian materials come from a few graves near a village called Deir Tasa, and I have an uncomfortable feeling that the Tasian “assemblage” may be mainly an artificial selection of poor examples of objects which belong in the following range of time.

SPREAD IN TIME AND SPACE

There are now two things we can do; in fact, we have already begun to do them. We can watch the spread of the new way of life upward through time in the nuclear area. We can also see how the new way of life spread outward in space from the nuclear area, as time went on. There is good archeological evidence that both these processes took place. For the hill country of northeastern Iraq, in the nuclear area, we have already noticed how the succession (still with gaps) from Karim Shahir, through M’lefaat and Jarmo, to Hassuna can be charted (see chart, p. 111). In the next chapter, we shall continue this charting and description of what happened in Iraq upward through time. We also watched traces of the new way of life move through space up the Nile into Africa, to reach Khartoum in the Sudan some thirty-five hundred years later than we had seen it at Jarmo or Jericho. We caught glimpses of it in the Fayum and perhaps at Tasa along the way.

For the remainder of this chapter, I shall try to suggest briefly for you the directions taken by the spread of the new way of life from the nuclear area in the Near East. First, let me make clear again that I _do not_ believe that the village-farming community way of life was invented only once and in the Near East. It seems to me that the evidence is very clear that a separate experiment arose in the New World. For China, the question of independence or borrowing--in the appearance of the village-farming community there--is still an open one. In the last chapter, we noted the probability of an independent nuclear area in southeastern Asia. Professor Carl Sauer strongly champions the great importance of this area as _the_ original center of agricultural pursuits, as a kind of “cradle” of all incipient eras of the Old World at least. While there is certainly not the slightest archeological evidence to allow us to go that far, we may easily expect that an early southeast Asian development would have been felt in China. However, the appearance of the village-farming community in the northwest of India, at least, seems to have depended on the earlier development in the Near East. It is also probable that ideas of the new way of life moved well beyond Khartoum in Africa.

THE SPREAD OF THE VILLAGE-FARMING COMMUNITY WAY OF LIFE INTO EUROPE

How about Europe? I won’t give you many details. You can easily imagine that the late prehistoric prelude to European history is a complicated affair. We all know very well how complicated an area Europe is now, with its welter of different languages and cultures. Remember, however, that a great deal of archeology has been done on the late prehistory of Europe, and very little on that of further Asia and Africa. If we knew as much about these areas as we do of Europe, I expect we’d find them just as complicated.

This much is clear for Europe, as far as the spread of the village-community way of life is concerned. The general idea and much of the know-how and the basic tools of food-production moved from the Near East to Europe. So did the plants and animals which had been domesticated; they were not naturally at home in Europe, as they were in western Asia. I do not, of course, mean that there were traveling salesmen who carried these ideas and things to Europe with a commercial gleam in their eyes. The process took time, and the ideas and things must have been passed on from one group of people to the next. There was also some actual movement of peoples, but we don’t know the size of the groups that moved.

The story of the “colonization” of Europe by the first farmers is thus one of (1) the movement from the eastern Mediterranean lands of some people who were farmers; (2) the spread of ideas and things beyond the Near East itself and beyond the paths along which the “colonists” moved; and (3) the adaptations of the ideas and things by the indigenous “Forest folk”, about whose “receptiveness” Professor Mathiassen speaks (p. 97). It is important to note that the resulting cultures in the new European environment were European, not Near Eastern. The late Professor Childe remarked that “the peoples of the West were not slavish imitators; they adapted the gifts from the East ... into a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own original lines.”

THE WAYS TO EUROPE

Suppose we want to follow the traces of those earliest village-farmers who did travel from western Asia into Europe. Let us start from Syro-Cilicia, that part of the hilly-flanks zone proper which lies in the very northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. Three ways would be open to us (of course we could not be worried about permission from the Soviet authorities!). We would go north, or north and slightly east, across Anatolian Turkey, and skirt along either shore of the Black Sea or even to the east of the Caucasus Mountains along the Caspian Sea, to reach the plains of Ukrainian Russia. From here, we could march across eastern Europe to the Baltic and Scandinavia, or even hook back southwestward to Atlantic Europe.

Our second way from Syro-Cilicia would also lie over Anatolia, to the northwest, where we would have to swim or raft ourselves over the Dardanelles or the Bosphorus to the European shore. Then we would bear left toward Greece, but some of us might turn right again in Macedonia, going up the valley of the Vardar River to its divide and on down the valley of the Morava beyond, to reach the Danube near Belgrade in Jugoslavia. Here we would turn left, following the great river valley of the Danube up into central Europe. We would have a number of tributary valleys to explore, or we could cross the divide and go down the valley of the Rhine to the North Sea.

Our third way from Syro-Cilicia would be by sea. We would coast along southern Anatolia and visit Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean islands on our way to Greece, where, in the north, we might meet some of those who had taken the second route. From Greece, we would sail on to Italy and the western isles, to reach southern France and the coasts of Spain. Eventually a few of us would sail up the Atlantic coast of Europe, to reach western Britain and even Ireland.

Of course none of us could ever take these journeys as the first farmers took them, since the whole course of each journey must have lasted many lifetimes. The date given to the assemblage called Windmill Hill, the earliest known trace of village-farming communities in England, is about 2500 B.C. I would expect about 5500 B.C. to be a safe date to give for the well-developed early village communities of Syro-Cilicia. We suspect that the spread throughout Europe did not proceed at an even rate. Professor Piggott writes that “at a date probably about 2600 B.C., simple agricultural communities were being established in Spain and southern France, and from the latter region a spread northwards can be traced ... from points on the French seaboard of the [English] Channel ... there were emigrations of a certain number of these tribes by boat, across to the chalk lands of Wessex and Sussex [in England], probably not more than three or four generations later than the formation of the south French colonies.”

New radiocarbon determinations are becoming available all the time--already several suggest that the food-producing way of life had reached the lower Rhine and Holland by 4000 B.C. But not all prehistorians accept these “dates,” so I do not show them on my map (p. 139).

THE EARLIEST FARMERS OF ENGLAND

To describe the later prehistory of all Europe for you would take another book and a much larger one than this is. Therefore, I have decided to give you only a few impressions of the later prehistory of Britain. Of course the British Isles lie at the other end of Europe from our base-line in western Asia. Also, they received influences along at least two of the three ways in which the new way of life moved into Europe. We will look at more of their late prehistory in a following chapter: here, I shall speak only of the first farmers.

The assemblage called Windmill Hill, which appears in the south of England, exhibits three different kinds of structures, evidence of grain-growing and of stock-breeding, and some distinctive types of pottery and stone implements. The most remarkable type of structure is the earthwork enclosures which seem to have served as seasonal cattle corrals. These enclosures were roughly circular, reached over a thousand feet in diameter, and sometimes included two or three concentric sets of banks and ditches. Traces of oblong timber houses have been found, but not within the enclosures. The second type of structure is mine-shafts, dug down into the chalk beds where good flint for the making of axes or hoes could be found. The third type of structure is long simple mounds or “unchambered barrows,” in one end of which burials were made. It has been commonly believed that the Windmill Hill assemblage belonged entirely to the cultural tradition which moved up through France to the Channel. Professor Piggott is now convinced, however, that important elements of Windmill Hill stem from northern Germany and Denmark--products of the first way into Europe from the east.

The archeological traces of a second early culture are to be found in the west of England, western and northern Scotland, and most of Ireland. The bearers of this culture had come up the Atlantic coast by sea from southern France and Spain. The evidence they have left us consists mainly of tombs and the contents of tombs, with only very rare settlement sites. The tombs were of some size and received the bodies of many people. The tombs themselves were built of stone, heaped over with earth; the stones enclosed a passage to a central chamber (“passage graves”), or to a simple long gallery, along the sides of which the bodies were laid (“gallery graves”). The general type of construction is called “megalithic” (= great stone), and the whole earth-mounded structure is often called a _barrow_. Since many have proper chambers, in one sense or another, we used the term “unchambered barrow” above to distinguish those of the Windmill Hill type from these megalithic structures. There is some evidence for sacrifice, libations, and ceremonial fires, and it is clear that some form of community ritual was focused on the megalithic tombs.

The cultures of the people who produced the Windmill Hill assemblage and of those who made the megalithic tombs flourished, at least in part, at the same time. Although the distributions of the two different types of archeological traces are in quite different parts of the country, there is Windmill Hill pottery in some of the megalithic tombs. But the tombs also contain pottery which seems to have arrived with the tomb builders themselves.

The third early British group of antiquities of this general time (following 2500 B.C.) comes from sites in southern and eastern England. It is not so certain that the people who made this assemblage, called Peterborough, were actually farmers. While they may on occasion have practiced a simple agriculture, many items of their assemblage link them closely with that of the “Forest folk” of earlier times in England and in the Baltic countries. Their pottery is decorated with impressions of cords and is quite different from that of Windmill Hill and the megalithic builders. In addition, the distribution of their finds extends into eastern Britain, where the other cultures have left no trace. The Peterborough people had villages with semi-subterranean huts, and the bones of oxen, pigs, and sheep have been found in a few of these. On the whole, however, hunting and fishing seem to have been their vital occupations. They also established trade routes especially to acquire the raw material for stone axes.

A probably slightly later culture, whose traces are best known from Skara Brae on Orkney, also had its roots in those cultures of the Baltic area which fused out of the meeting of the “Forest folk” and the peoples who took the eastern way into Europe. Skara Brae is very well preserved, having been built of thin stone slabs about which dune-sand drifted after the village died. The individual houses, the bedsteads, the shelves, the chests for clothes and oddments--all built of thin stone-slabs--may still be seen in place. But the Skara Brae people lived entirely by sheep- and cattle-breeding, and by catching shellfish. Neither grain nor the instruments of agriculture appeared at Skara Brae.

THE EUROPEAN ACHIEVEMENT

The above is only a very brief description of what went on in Britain with the arrival of the first farmers. There are many interesting details which I have omitted in order to shorten the story.

I believe some of the difficulty we have in understanding the establishment of the first farming communities in Europe is with the word “colonization.” We have a natural tendency to think of “colonization” as it has happened within the last few centuries. In the case of the colonization of the Americas, for example, the colonists came relatively quickly, and in increasingly vast numbers. They had vastly superior technical, political, and war-making skills, compared with those of the Indians. There was not much mixing with the Indians. The case in Europe five or six thousand years ago must have been very different. I wonder if it is even proper to call people “colonists” who move some miles to a new region, settle down and farm it for some years, then move on again, generation after generation? The ideas and the things which these new people carried were only _potentially_ superior. The ideas and things and the people had to prove themselves in their adaptation to each new environment. Once this was done another link to the chain would be added, and then the forest-dwellers and other indigenous folk of Europe along the way might accept the new ideas and things. It is quite reasonable to expect that there must have been much mixture of the migrants and the indigenes along the way; the Peterborough and Skara Brae assemblages we mentioned above would seem to be clear traces of such fused cultures. Sometimes, especially if the migrants were moving by boat, long distances may have been covered in a short time. Remember, however, we seem to have about three thousand years between the early Syro-Cilician villages and Windmill Hill.

Let me repeat Professor Childe again. “The peoples of the West were not slavish imitators: they adapted the gifts from the East ... into a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own original lines.” Childe is of course completely conscious of the fact that his “peoples of the West” were in part the descendants of migrants who came originally from the “East,” bringing their “gifts” with them. This was the late prehistoric achievement of Europe--to take new ideas and things and some migrant peoples and, by mixing them with the old in its own environments, to forge a new and unique series of cultures.

What we know of the ways of men suggests to us that when the details of the later prehistory of further Asia and Africa are learned, their stories will be just as exciting.

THE Conquest of Civilization

Now we must return to the Near East again. We are coming to the point where history is about to begin. I am going to stick pretty close to Iraq and Egypt in this chapter. These countries will perhaps be the most interesting to most of us, for the foundations of western civilization were laid in the river lands of the Tigris and Euphrates and of the Nile. I shall probably stick closest of all to Iraq, because things first happened there and also because I know it best.

There is another interesting thing, too. We have seen that the first experiment in village-farming took place in the Near East. So did the first experiment in civilization. Both experiments “took.” The traditions we live by today are based, ultimately, on those ancient beginnings in food-production and civilization in the Near East.

WHAT “CIVILIZATION” MEANS

I shall not try to define “civilization” for you; rather, I shall tell you what the word brings to my mind. To me civilization means urbanization: the fact that there are cities. It means a formal political set-up--that there are kings or governing bodies that the people have set up. It means formal laws--rules of conduct--which the government (if not the people) believes are necessary. It probably means that there are formalized projects--roads, harbors, irrigation canals, and the like--and also some sort of army or police force to protect them. It means quite new and different art forms. It also usually means there is writing. (The people of the Andes--the Incas--had everything which goes to make up a civilization but formal writing. I can see no reason to say they were not civilized.) Finally, as the late Professor Redfield reminded us, civilization seems to bring with it the dawn of a new kind of moral order.

In different civilizations, there may be important differences in the way such things as the above are managed. In early civilizations, it is usual to find religion very closely tied in with government, law, and so forth. The king may also be a high priest, or he may even be thought of as a god. The laws are usually thought to have been given to the people by the gods. The temples are protected just as carefully as the other projects.

CIVILIZATION IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT FOOD-PRODUCTION

Civilizations have to be made up of many people. Some of the people live in the country; some live in very large towns or cities. Classes of society have begun. There are officials and government people; there are priests or religious officials; there are merchants and traders; there are craftsmen, metal-workers, potters, builders, and so on; there are also farmers, and these are the people who produce the food for the whole population. It must be obvious that civilization cannot exist without food-production and that food-production must also be at a pretty efficient level of village-farming before civilization can even begin.

But people can be food-producing without being civilized. In many parts of the world this is still the case. When the white men first came to America, the Indians in most parts of this hemisphere were food-producers. They grew corn, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, and many other things the white men had never eaten before. But only the Aztecs of Mexico, the Mayas of Yucatan and Guatemala, and the Incas of the Andes were civilized.

WHY DIDN’T CIVILIZATION COME TO ALL FOOD-PRODUCERS?

Once you have food-production, even at the well-advanced level of the village-farming community, what else has to happen before you get civilization? Many men have asked this question and have failed to give a full and satisfactory answer. There is probably no _one_ answer. I shall give you my own idea about how civilization _may_ have come about in the Near East alone. Remember, it is only a guess--a putting together of hunches from incomplete evidence. It is _not_ meant to explain how civilization began in any of the other areas--China, southeast Asia, the Americas--where other early experiments in civilization went on. The details in those areas are quite different. Whether certain general principles hold, for the appearance of any early civilization, is still an open and very interesting question.

WHERE CIVILIZATION FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEAR EAST

You remember that our earliest village-farming communities lay along the hilly flanks of a great “crescent.” (See map on p. 125.) Professor Breasted’s “fertile crescent” emphasized the rich river valleys of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers. Our hilly-flanks area of the crescent zone arches up from Egypt through Palestine and Syria, along southern Turkey into northern Iraq, and down along the southwestern fringe of Iran. The earliest food-producing villages we know already existed in this area by about 6750 B.C. (± 200 years).

Now notice that this hilly-flanks zone does not include southern Mesopotamia, the alluvial land of the lower Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, or the Nile Valley proper. The earliest known villages of classic Mesopotamia and Egypt seem to appear fifteen hundred or more years after those of the hilly-flanks zone. For example, the early Fayum village which lies near a lake west of the Nile Valley proper (see p. 135) has a radiocarbon date of 4275 B.C. ± 320 years. It was in the river lands, however, that the immediate beginnings of civilization were made.

We know that by about 3200 B.C. the Early Dynastic period had begun in southern Mesopotamia. The beginnings of writing go back several hundred years earlier, but we can safely say that civilization had begun in Mesopotamia by 3200 B.C. In Egypt, the beginning of the First Dynasty is slightly later, at about 3100 B.C., and writing probably did not appear much earlier. There is no question but that history and civilization were well under way in both Mesopotamia and Egypt by 3000 B.C.--about five thousand years ago.

THE HILLY-FLANKS ZONE VERSUS THE RIVER LANDS

Why did these two civilizations spring up in these two river lands which apparently were not even part of the area where the village-farming community began? Why didn’t we have the first civilizations in Palestine, Syria, north Iraq, or Iran, where we’re sure food-production had had a long time to develop? I think the probable answer gives a clue to the ways in which civilization began in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The land in the hilly flanks is of a sort which people can farm without too much trouble. There is a fairly fertile coastal strip in Palestine and Syria. There are pleasant mountain slopes, streams running out to the sea, and rain, at least in the winter months. The rain belt and the foothills of the Turkish mountains also extend to northern Iraq and on to the Iranian plateau. The Iranian plateau has its mountain valleys, streams, and some rain. These hilly flanks of the “crescent,” through most of its arc, are almost made-to-order for beginning farmers. The grassy slopes of the higher hills would be pasture for their herds and flocks. As soon as the earliest experiments with agriculture and domestic animals had been successful, a pleasant living could be made--and without too much trouble.

I should add here again, that our evidence points increasingly to a climate for those times which is very little different from that for the area today. Now look at Egypt and southern Mesopotamia. Both are lands without rain, for all intents and purposes. Both are lands with rivers that have laid down very fertile soil--soil perhaps superior to that in the hilly flanks. But in both lands, the rivers are of no great aid without some control.

The Nile floods its banks once a year, in late September or early October. It not only soaks the narrow fertile strip of land on either side; it lays down a fresh layer of new soil each year. Beyond the fertile strip on either side rise great cliffs, and behind them is the desert. In its natural, uncontrolled state, the yearly flood of the Nile must have caused short-lived swamps that were full of crocodiles. After a short time, the flood level would have dropped, the water and the crocodiles would have run back into the river, and the swamp plants would have become parched and dry.

The Tigris and the Euphrates of Mesopotamia are less likely to flood regularly than the Nile. The Tigris has a shorter and straighter course than the Euphrates; it is also the more violent river. Its banks are high, and when the snows melt and flow into all of its tributary rivers it is swift and dangerous. The Euphrates has a much longer and more curving course and few important tributaries. Its banks are lower and it is less likely to flood dangerously. The land on either side and between the two rivers is very fertile, south of the modern city of Baghdad. Unlike the Nile Valley, neither the Tigris nor the Euphrates is flanked by cliffs. The land on either side of the rivers stretches out for miles and is not much rougher than a poor tennis court.

THE RIVERS MUST BE CONTROLLED

The real trick in both Egypt and Mesopotamia is to make the rivers work for you. In Egypt, this is a matter of building dikes and reservoirs that will catch and hold the Nile flood. In this way, the water is held and allowed to run off over the fields as it is needed. In Mesopotamia, it is a matter of taking advantage of natural river channels and branch channels, and of leading ditches from these onto the fields.

Obviously, we can no longer find the first dikes or reservoirs of the Nile Valley, or the first canals or ditches of Mesopotamia. The same land has been lived on far too long for any traces of the first attempts to be left; or, especially in Egypt, it has been covered by the yearly deposits of silt, dropped by the river floods. But we’re pretty sure the first food-producers of Egypt and southern Mesopotamia must have made such dikes, canals, and ditches. In the first place, there can’t have been enough rain for them to grow things otherwise. In the second place, the patterns for such projects seem to have been pretty well set by historic times.

CONTROL OF THE RIVERS THE BUSINESS OF EVERYONE

Here, then, is a _part_ of the reason why civilization grew in Egypt and Mesopotamia first--not in Palestine, Syria, or Iran. In the latter areas, people could manage to produce their food as individuals. It wasn’t too hard; there were rain and some streams, and good pasturage for the animals even if a crop or two went wrong. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, people had to put in a much greater amount of work, and this work couldn’t be individual work. Whole villages or groups of people had to turn out to fix dikes or dig ditches. The dikes had to be repaired and the ditches carefully cleared of silt each year, or they would become useless.

There also had to be hard and fast rules. The person who lived nearest the ditch or the reservoir must not be allowed to take all the water and leave none for his neighbors. It was not only a business of learning to control the rivers and of making their waters do the farmer’s work. It also meant controlling men. But once these men had managed both kinds of controls, what a wonderful yield they had! The soil was already fertile, and the silt which came in the floods and ditches kept adding fertile soil.

THE GERM OF CIVILIZATION IN EGYPT AND MESOPOTAMIA

This learning to work together for the common good was the real germ of the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations. The bare elements of civilization were already there: the need for a governing hand and for laws to see that the communities’ work was done and that the water was justly shared. You may object that there is a sort of chicken and egg paradox in this idea. How could the people set up the rules until they had managed to get a way to live, and how could they manage to get a way to live until they had set up the rules? I think that small groups must have moved down along the mud-flats of the river banks quite early, making use of naturally favorable spots, and that the rules grew out of such cases. It would have been like the hand-in-hand growth of automobiles and paved highways in the United States.

Once the rules and the know-how did get going, there must have been a constant interplay of the two. Thus, the more the crops yielded, the richer and better-fed the people would have been, and the more the population would have grown. As the population grew, more land would have needed to be flooded or irrigated, and more complex systems of dikes, reservoirs, canals, and ditches would have been built. The more complex the system, the more necessity for work on new projects and for the control of their use.... And so on....

What I have just put down for you is a guess at the manner of growth of some of the formalized systems that go to make up a civilized society. My explanation has been pointed particularly at Egypt and Mesopotamia. I have already told you that the irrigation and water-control part of it does not apply to the development of the Aztecs or the Mayas, or perhaps anybody else. But I think that a fair part of the story of Egypt and Mesopotamia must be as I’ve just told you.

I am particularly anxious that you do _not_ understand me to mean that irrigation _caused_ civilization. I am sure it was not that simple at all. For, in fact, a complex and highly engineered irrigation system proper did not come until later times. Let’s say rather that the simple beginnings of irrigation allowed and in fact encouraged a great number of things in the technological, political, social, and moral realms of culture. We do not yet understand what all these things were or how they worked. But without these other aspects of culture, I do not think that urbanization and civilization itself could have come into being.

THE ARCHEOLOGICAL SEQUENCE TO CIVILIZATION IN IRAQ

We last spoke of the archeological materials of Iraq on page 130, where I described the village-farming community of Hassunan type. The Hassunan type villages appear in the hilly-flanks zone and in the rolling land adjacent to the Tigris in northern Iraq. It is probable that even before the Hassuna pattern of culture lived its course, a new assemblage had been established in northern Iraq and Syria. This assemblage is called Halaf, after a site high on a tributary of the Euphrates, on the Syro-Turkish border.

BEADS AND PENDANTS
POTTERY MOTIFS
POTTERY]

The Halafian assemblage is incompletely known. The culture it represents included a remarkably handsome painted pottery. Archeologists have tended to be so fascinated with this pottery that they have bothered little with the rest of the Halafian assemblage. We do know that strange stone-founded houses, with plans like those of the popular notion of an Eskimo igloo, were built. Like the pottery of the Samarran style, which appears as part of the Hassunan assemblage (see p. 131), the Halafian painted pottery implies great concentration and excellence of draftsmanship on the part of the people who painted it.

We must mention two very interesting sites adjacent to the mud-flats of the rivers, half way down from northern Iraq to the classic alluvial Mesopotamian area. One is Baghouz on the Euphrates; the other is Samarra on the Tigris (see map, p. 125). Both these sites yield the handsome painted pottery of the style called Samarran: in fact it is Samarra which gives its name to the pottery. Neither Baghouz nor Samarra have completely Hassunan types of assemblages, and at Samarra there are a few pots of proper Halafian style. I suppose that Samarra and Baghouz give us glimpses of those early farmers who had begun to finger their way down the mud-flats of the river banks toward the fertile but yet untilled southland.

CLASSIC SOUTHERN MESOPOTAMIA FIRST OCCUPIED

Our next step is into the southland proper. Here, deep in the core of the mound which later became the holy Sumerian city of Eridu, Iraqi archeologists uncovered a handsome painted pottery. Pottery of the same type had been noticed earlier by German archeologists on the surface of a small mound, awash in the spring floods, near the remains of the Biblical city of Erich (Sumerian = Uruk; Arabic = Warka). This “Eridu” pottery, which is about all we have of the assemblage of the people who once produced it, may be seen as a blend of the Samarran and Halafian painted pottery styles. This may over-simplify the case, but as yet we do not have much evidence to go on. The idea does at least fit with my interpretation of the meaning of Baghouz and Samarra as way-points on the mud-flats of the rivers half way down from the north.

My colleague, Robert Adams, believes that there were certainly riverine-adapted food-collectors living in lower Mesopotamia. The presence of such would explain why the Eridu assemblage is not simply the sum of the Halafian and Samarran assemblages. But the domesticated plants and animals and the basic ways of food-production must have come from the hilly-flanks country in the north.

Above the basal Eridu levels, and at a number of other sites in the south, comes a full-fledged assemblage called Ubaid. Incidentally, there is an aspect of the Ubaidian assemblage in the north as well. It seems to move into place before the Halaf manifestation is finished, and to blend with it. The Ubaidian assemblage in the south is by far the more spectacular. The development of the temple has been traced at Eridu from a simple little structure to a monumental building some 62 feet long, with a pilaster-decorated façade and an altar in its central chamber. There is painted Ubaidian pottery, but the style is hurried and somewhat careless and gives the _impression_ of having been a cheap mass-production means of decoration when compared with the carefully drafted styles of Samarra and Halaf. The Ubaidian people made other items of baked clay: sickles and axes of very hard-baked clay are found. The northern Ubaidian sites have yielded tools of copper, but metal tools of unquestionable Ubaidian find-spots are not yet available from the south. Clay figurines of human beings with monstrous turtle-like faces are another item in the southern Ubaidian assemblage.

There is a large Ubaid cemetery at Eridu, much of it still awaiting excavation. The few skeletons so far tentatively studied reveal a completely modern type of “Mediterraneanoid”; the individuals whom the skeletons represent would undoubtedly blend perfectly into the modern population of southern Iraq. What the Ubaidian assemblage says to us is that these people had already adapted themselves and their culture to the peculiar riverine environment of classic southern Mesopotamia. For example, hard-baked clay axes will chop bundles of reeds very well, or help a mason dress his unbaked mud bricks, and there were only a few soft and pithy species of trees available. The Ubaidian levels of Eridu yield quantities of date pits; that excellent and characteristically Iraqi fruit was already in use. The excavators also found the clay model of a ship, with the stepping-point for a mast, so that Sinbad the Sailor must have had his antecedents as early as the time of Ubaid. The bones of fish, which must have flourished in the larger canals as well as in the rivers, are common in the Ubaidian levels and thereafter.

THE UBAIDIAN ACHIEVEMENT

On present evidence, my tendency is to see the Ubaidian assemblage in southern Iraq as the trace of a new era. I wish there were more evidence, but what we have suggests this to me. The culture of southern Ubaid soon became a culture of towns--of centrally located towns with some rural villages about them. The town had a temple and there must have been priests. These priests probably had political and economic functions as well as religious ones, if the somewhat later history of Mesopotamia may suggest a pattern for us. Presently the temple and its priesthood were possibly the focus of the market; the temple received its due, and may already have had its own lands and herds and flocks. The people of the town, undoubtedly at least in consultation with the temple administration, planned and maintained the simple irrigation ditches. As the system flourished, the community of rural farmers would have produced more than sufficient food. The tendency for specialized crafts to develop--tentative at best at the cultural level of the earlier village-farming community era--would now have been achieved, and probably many other specialists in temple administration, water control, architecture, and trade would also have appeared, as the surplus food-supply was assured.

Southern Mesopotamia is not a land rich in natural resources other than its fertile soil. Stone, good wood for construction, metal, and innumerable other things would have had to be imported. Grain and dates--although both are bulky and difficult to transport--and wool and woven stuffs must have been the mediums of exchange. Over what area did the trading net-work of Ubaid extend? We start with the idea that the Ubaidian assemblage is most richly developed in the south. We assume, I think, correctly, that it represents a cultural flowering of the south. On the basis of the pottery of the still elusive “Eridu” immigrants who had first followed the rivers into alluvial Mesopotamia, we get the notion that the characteristic painted pottery style of Ubaid was developed in the southland. If this reconstruction is correct then we may watch with interest where the Ubaid pottery-painting tradition spread. We have already mentioned that there is a substantial assemblage of (and from the southern point of view, _fairly_ pure) Ubaidian material in northern Iraq. The pottery appears all along the Iranian flanks, even well east of the head of the Persian Gulf, and ends in a later and spectacular flourish in an extremely handsome painted style called the “Susa” style. Ubaidian pottery has been noted up the valleys of both of the great rivers, well north of the Iraqi and Syrian borders on the southern flanks of the Anatolian plateau. It reaches the Mediterranean Sea and the valley of the Orontes in Syria, and it may be faintly reflected in the painted style of a site called Ghassul, on the east bank of the Jordan in the Dead Sea Valley. Over this vast area--certainly in all of the great basin of the Tigris-Euphrates drainage system and its natural extensions--I believe we may lay our fingers on the traces of a peculiar way of decorating pottery, which we call Ubaidian. This cursive and even slap-dash decoration, it appears to me, was part of a new cultural tradition which arose from the adjustments which immigrant northern farmers first made to the new and challenging environment of southern Mesopotamia. But exciting as the idea of the spread of influences of the Ubaid tradition in space may be, I believe you will agree that the consequences of the growth of that tradition in southern Mesopotamia itself, as time passed, are even more important.

THE WARKA PHASE IN THE SOUTH

So far, there are only two radiocarbon determinations for the Ubaidian assemblage, one from Tepe Gawra in the north and one from Warka in the south. My hunch would be to use the dates 4500 to 3750 B.C., with a plus or more probably a minus factor of about two hundred years for each, as the time duration of the Ubaidian assemblage in southern Mesopotamia.

Next, much to our annoyance, we have what is almost a temporary black-out. According to the system of terminology I favor, our next “assemblage” after that of Ubaid is called the _Warka_ phase, from the Arabic name for the site of Uruk or Erich. We know it only from six or seven levels in a narrow test-pit at Warka, and from an even smaller hole at another site. This “assemblage,” so far, is known only by its pottery, some of which still bears Ubaidian style painting. The characteristic Warkan pottery is unpainted, with smoothed red or gray surfaces and peculiar shapes. Unquestionably, there must be a great deal more to say about the Warkan assemblage, but someone will first have to excavate it!

THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION

After our exasperation with the almost unknown Warka interlude, following the brilliant “false dawn” of Ubaid, we move next to an assemblage which yields traces of a preponderance of those elements which we noted (p. 144) as meaning civilization. This assemblage is that called _Proto-Literate_; it already contains writing. On the somewhat shaky principle that writing, however early, means history--and no longer prehistory--the assemblage is named for the historical implications of its content, and no longer after the name of the site where it was first found. Since some of the older books used site-names for this assemblage, I will tell you that the Proto-Literate includes the latter half of what used to be called the “Uruk period” _plus_ all of what used to be called the “Jemdet Nasr period.” It shows a consistent development from beginning to end.

I shall, in fact, leave much of the description and the historic implications of the Proto-Literate assemblage to the conventional historians. Professor T. J. Jacobsen, reaching backward from the legends he finds in the cuneiform writings of slightly later times, can in fact tell you a more complete story of Proto-Literate culture than I can. It should be enough here if I sum up briefly what the excavated archeological evidence shows.

We have yet to dig a Proto-Literate site in its entirety, but the indications are that the sites cover areas the size of small cities. In architecture, we know of large and monumental temple structures, which were built on elaborate high terraces. The plans and decoration of these temples follow the pattern set in the Ubaid phase: the chief difference is one of size. The German excavators at the site of Warka reckoned that the construction of only one of the Proto-Literate temple complexes there must have taken 1,500 men, each working a ten-hour day, five years to build.

ART AND WRITING