2500 bce

The great megalithic tradition in Europe and the Mediterranean was still nominally within the worldview of First Societies. Attitudes toward death and the potency of the spirit world and ancestral territories blended into the communal perspectives of farming and herding. Egypt, by 3000 bce, had, by way of contrast, moved into a difierent direction. Ancient worldviews would have persisted within the domain of folk religion, but the singular focus on the death of the pharaoh and the emergence of huge mortuary complexes, such as the one made by Zoser around 2700 bce, where the continuity of the pharaoh is preserved after death for the sake of all, was not something that a First Society person would have understood. The value of architecture changed from a communal efiort to an operation requiring masters and slaves. The results were magnificent for sure, but what is remarkable is that though in Europe cattle were an important part of the culture, herding ideologies never quite managed to suppress First Society worldviews regarding death. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, the transition was more profound and irreversible.

Eridu is a case in point. Its grain-based economy is clearly evident in its religion. The first temple—the so-called temple 17 (since they are numbered backward from the last one)—dates to about 5400 bce. It is a small square building no more than 4 meters on the side with a simple pedestal inside for a statue of a divinity. Next to it was an outdoor oven where the sacred ofierings were prepared. It was one of probably hundreds of small cult centers in the region. Over the centuries, it was rebuilt, covered, and expanded so many times in fact that in the end it would become a ziggurat, a massive mountain of mud bricks surfaced with expensive, kiln-fired cone-shaped tiles. Remarkably, the altar of the final temple was positioned directly over the first small and humble temple buried some 8 meters below. Eridu inaugurated a new era. Apart from grain and perhaps dates and dried fruit from its gardens, the city had little to ofier, no metal, no obsidian, and no lumber. All of that had to be imported from great distances. And not only was the city vulnerable to the vicissitudes of trade, it was also vulnerable to the elements. The irrigation channels had to be meticulously maintained and supervised, not easy since spring floods occurred during planting season. The wheel had to be invented as well as writing to document the trade transactions. It was all an experiment, held together by the force of massive centralization and an imposing religion of ritual and superstition. It might not be an accident that around this time settlements and towns in the mountain foothills, like Mehrgarh, disappear from the archaeological record. Like in the modern age, the young were leaving the village for the city. The urban experiment was quickly copied and soon the entire lower Mesopotamian region was to become one of multiple city/states vying for control over the vast network of relations on which their existence depended.

The emergence of cities and of states as the new political institution of Mesopotamia and Egypt should, therefore, not be seen as the natural progression of civilization, but rather as a response to geopolitical inequity. The same is true for the Indus civilization, which saw the rise of the two greatest cities and ritual centers of the time, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa (circa 2600 bce). In Egypt, Djoser, who ruled around 2600 bce, united the land into a single increasingly powerful realm. During this time, around 2500 bce, the architectural ambitions in Europe waned. Silbury Hill and Knowth were impressive constructions, but are, in truth, the last great building efforts north of the Mediterranean for a long time. Longhouses and villages continued to be built and propsper, but by 1500 bce the era of building with the earth and marking stones was over. It is quite likely that a climactic change forced a civiliza-tional downturn from which the northern areas were never really to recover until the expansion of the Celts around 400 bce. The difficulties must have been severe enough to drive the Hittites south into Turkey around 1900 bce and the Dorians into Greece around 1100 bce. They arrived with a limited, or in the case of the Dorians, a nonexistent stone architectural culture. They did have a longhouse tradition, which developed into an architectural form known as the Greek temple, but working with stone was something they learned from their contact with the Egyptians.