The Ancient Near East includes cultures stretching from Turkey to Pakistan (Figure 1.1). This large area contains a variety of topographic and climatic zones: alluvial lowlands, uplands, mountains, and desert. In the heart of the Near East lies Mesopotamia, the land between the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. This region corresponds with modern Iraq, north-east Syria, and south-east Turkey. The Euphrates, the longer of the two rivers, makes its leisurely way down from the mountains of eastern Turkey across Syria and southwards through Iraq. The Tigris also originates in Turkey, but follows a swifter path to the south. The two rivers meet in southern Iraq and flow together to the Persian Gulf in a marshy waterway known as the Shatt al-Arab.
Figure LI The Near East: Neolithic towns
The southern half of Iraq is flat, its climate hot and dry. Farmers depend on irrigation from the rivers, not on rainfall. This is the area in which Sumerian civilization flourished in the fourth and third millennia BC.
The Taurus Mountains run east-west, crossing southern and eastern Turkey, northern Syria, and northern Iraq, and link with the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. Beyond the mountains lie great plateaus: the Anatolian to the north of the Taurus, and the Iranian to the east of the Zagros. The remote mountain regions provide the snow that feeds the great rivers of the Near East. The difficult terrain has discouraged social and economic unification, although trade and movement of peoples can be active. The mountain people have always been autonomous and independent, and throughout antiquity, just as today, have often annoyed or terrorized the established cultures of the lowlands. The hostile environment of the desert has nurtured similarly free-spirited peoples.
Between mountains and lowlands lie the uplands, or foothills. This zone, which forms a great arc from eastern and northern Iraq westwards across northern Syria and then southwards toward the southern Levant (Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan) is often called the Fertile Crescent (Figure 1.2). Although not part of the traditional Fertile Crescent, the Anatolian plateau of central and eastern Turkey shares the same features and thus merits its place on our map. Despite dry summers, precipitation (rain and, in places, snow) during the cooler months of the year is sufficient to sustain agriculture. This region had rich natural resources; most important for early people were gazelle, acorns, and wild grasses. Also among the species present, but not necessarily so significant for food foragers, were the ancestors of plants and animals that would be domesticated during the Neolithic period. Wheat, barley, and other grains grew wild, and wild sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs roamed freely.
In this region, with food sources close at hand, early men and women could sustain themselves with relative ease. They subsisted by hunting wild animals and gathering edible plants. They lived in small groups, and moved with the seasons to track animals or collect ripened fruit and vegetables. Natural shelters, such as caves, often served them as seasonal dwelling places. These hunters and gatherers crafted tools made from flakes of flint or pieces of bones; their European contemporaries even painted fantastic scenes of such crucial events as the hunt or modeled figurines of plump nurturing mothers. This situation lasted through the fourth glaciation. This long period is variously known as the late Pleistocene (the geological term) or the Upper Paleolithic and the succeeding Mesolithic (the cultural terms).
But these Paleolithic and Mesolithic men and women did not know the art of pottery or metalworking, they could not read or write, and they had little control over their food sources. These skills - agriculture (including cultivation and animal husbandry), pottery making, and metallurgy — plus recording systems utilizing clay tokens (but not yet actual writing) were developed during the Neolithic period in the Near East. So important was the transformation that Childe termed this the “Neolithic Revolution.” The word “revolution” may be misleading, however. Although indeed drastic, these changes did not take place overnight. They developed over long periods, at varying rhythms in different regions, often blending or coexisting with earlier modes of subsistence and seasonal movements.
Anyone can spot the existence of pottery or metal objects. In contrast, the search for specimens of domestic vs. wild plants and animals from this period of transition demands special skills and training. Archaeologists working at such early sites collect animal bones and plant remains, with the smaller specimens obtained by passing excavated dirt through a fine-meshed screen. Plant remains can also be collected by means offlotation:, a sample of excavated earth is poured into water; seeds and other plant remains will then float to the surface, from which they
Figure 1.2 The Fertile Crescent in the earlier Pre-Pottery Neolithic, ca. 7500-6500 BC
Can easily be removed. Since the forms of the domesticated versions of seeds and bones have changed distinctly if slightly from their wild ancestors, the specialist can assess how far the process of controlling certain plant and animal species had advanced at a particular place and time.
At present, it appears that plant cultivation began in the southern Levant, probably in that part of the Levantine corridor between Damascus and Jericho. Here, in well-watered areas with a range of edible wild plants and animals, people had already established settlements (even as simple as seasonal encampments) during the late ninth to early eighth millennia BC. The onset of a drier climate, reducing the fertility of wild plants, may have spurred people to cultivate their own plants as a supplement to dwindling wild supplies. A subsequent return to a wetter climate ensured the survival and growth of these experiments in farming.
Animal domestication developed later than plant cultivation, and in a broader area of the Near East, the Levantine corridor plus the highlands of Anatolia and the Zagros (Iran). Settled farmers kept herds of, first, goats and sheep, beginning in the late eighth millennium BC. Cattle and pigs would be widely domesticated later, from the later seventh millennium BC.
With the control of food sources developed in the Neolithic Revolution, people no longer needed to move around in order to take advantage of seasonal and fluctuating resources, but could remain in one place. Farmers could sow crops as they wished (subject to local climate and soil conditions, of course), and maintain herds of animals. Hunting and gathering of wild animals and plants would continue, but now for the purpose of supplementing the diet. This sort of agricultural economy was the basis for permanent, year-round settlements. Out of small village clusters would emerge towns and eventually cities. Just as the existence of sedentary settlements, however simple, was a prerequisite for plant cultivation, so in turn would the practice of agriculture (plant cultivation and animal husbandry) give rise to concepts of land use and ownership that would influence the nature of the settlements, and subsequent urbanism.
World History
