ARABIA

Far away to the east, across the breadth of the intervening deserts leading to the shores of the Arabian Gulf, the expanse of relatively shallow water which divides Arabia from Iran, there is also evidence of a significant volatility of climate at this time and during the centuries leading to it.11 The levels of the Gulf have oscillated fairly violently over the past seventeen thousand years;12 for example, the island of Bahrain, now lying in a bay some twenty miles from the Saudi Arabian mainland, was only separated from Arabia about nine thousand years ago; until that time it was a dome in the eastern

Arabian desert. Between six and five thousand years ago, one of the sites in Bahrain which has yielded pottery of the Ubaid people (the predecessors and presumed ancestors of the Samerians) was a small, offshore atoll, Al-Markh,13 then lying about a mile away from the principal Bahrain island of which it is now a part. Whilst obviously quite different factors and influences would be at work to affect radical changes in the sea levels in the Gulf and in the annual flood of the River Nile, the coincidence in time of the marked variations which have been described indicate the extent of climatic change in relatively recent times in two parts of the world which otherwise would seem to share many climatic characteristics.

The Arabian deserts are part of the band which stretches from the Atlantic to the western shore of the Arabian Gulf, whose inhabitants shared a regime similar to that experienced by the pastoralists of the Sahara. In the Arabian peninsula, large herds of wild cattle also flourished, the quarry of bands of indigenous hunters who left considerable evidence of their presence on the rocks of what is now the northern and western regions of the Arabian desert. On most of the available rock surfaces in the north and west of the peninsula they left carvings and engravings of the herds and the hunters who followed them. It has been demonstrated that the process of the desiccation of Arabia can be traced from the north, around the area in which the towns of Jubba and Al-Jawf now stand, in which, in comparable conditions to those which prevailed in the Sahara, there were large bodies of standing water, the result of increased precipitation and a rise in the water table,14 a situation very similar to that which pertained in southern Egypt. Gradually, as the climate became more arid the movement of the hunters and the herds can be traced moving southwards down the peninsula until around 2000 BC they disappear into the northern limits of Ar Rub al-Khali, the vast sand sea of the Empty Quarter. Until about six thousand years ago there were brackish lakes running in from the Gulf along the edge of Ar Rub al-Khali, where there were large game animals, such as hippopotamus, preyed on by Neolithic hunters who produced some remarkably fine stone tools.15 The fact that the Nile generally followed a higher course than it does today or than it did during dynastic times probably means that many late predynastic settlements, including perhaps some comparable with major centres like Hier-akonpolis and Naqada (two cities which will be seen to be of great importance in the late predynastic period) now lie buried beneath the silt laid down by the inundation.

THE ANIMALS AND THE HUNT

Even in times long after their first entry to it, when they had hunted to extinction or driven away the beasts which were once its undisturbed lords, the Egyptians living in the Valley never lost that sense of wonder at the magnificence surrounding them which they must have sensed when first they looked down on the river and the rich and fertile lands which enclosed it. This sense of wonder accounted for at least two of the most distinctive characteristics of the Egyptian psyche in later, historic times: the belief that the gods had specially favoured Egypt by providing the Valley with an abundance of nature’s resources, and a sense of oneness with the animals with which they shared it. This identity with animals is manifested in the personification of even the greatest gods in the form of animals and the reverence which was paid to them, as well as in the ability, amounting frequently to genius, to delineate and to portray animals and their lives generally with an absolute accuracy of observation. This is done, moreover, with no hint of patronage, but rather with abundant delight.

Hunting, combined with the probably imperceptible but nonetheless telling desiccation which occurred at the beginning of the historic period in Egypt, led to the reduction, ultimately to the elimination, of whole species from the upper reaches of the Valley. Between the end of the First Dynasty and the beginning of the Fourth (a period of little more than five hundred years) elephant, rhinoceros, giraffe, and the gerenuk gazelle disappeared from the lands north of Aswan. During this time, too, they disappear from the pictorial records in tombs of the chase, which reveal with commendable accuracy the environment and ecology of Egypt at the beginning of her history. Some animals survived, however, despite the odds laid against them by man and climate. Various antelope maintained their herd levels surprisingly well, amongst these was the oryx which, although its numbers declined from its relative density in predynastic times, clung on in the coastal desert lands. This pattern was repeated in Arabia; but then, the oryx is a survival from the Pliopleistocene and as such it has presumably learned much about adaptation.