At present the arable lands of Egypt and Western Asia are embedded in large tracts of desert. But it seems that in the Ice Age the pressure of cold air over Europe compelled the Atlantic rain storms to travel east by a more southerly track so that the whole area from the west coast of Africa to the Persian mountains was a continuous belt of park and grassland. In Algeria and southern Tripolitania hunters of the Old Stone Age engraved images of elephants, buffaloes, and giraffes on rocks now surrounded for hundreds of miles by an arid waste where life is utterly impossible. Paleolithic implements have been found on the high desert which flanks the Nile valley, and in Syria, Palestine, and Kurdistan. Carved tools found in Palestine ([Fig. 1], A, B) and the engravings from North Africa find close parallels in the splendid engravings and paintings from the caves of southern France and northern Spain.
We want to dwell for a moment on the paleolithic remains in order to insist that even these distant hunters cannot be understood as “part of nature.”[38] From paleolithic times onwards, man has been aware of being involved, not only with his kindred, but with superhuman powers. This dual involvement becomes apparent as soon as we find more than the mere bones and implements of man. In France and Spain hunters of the Old Stone Age left us astonishing paintings and engravings depicting the game upon which they were dependent. These works of art are found in the remote depths of caves and could only be reached at mortal risk. Analogies found among modern people still living in the Stone Age allow us to see in the marvellous images of the beasts, the traces of dancing feet on the soil of the caves, the stones marked with linear signs, the figures of masked or dancing men, expressions of a coherent religious conception, proclaiming man’s intimate and reciprocal relationship with the animals, and beyond these, with the divine. Such a brief formula is, of course, ludicrously inadequate;[39] for one thing it substitutes articulate concepts for unreflected experience. But we formulate it in order to emphasize that, from the first, man possessed creative imagination, and we have to reckon with this in considering social cohesion. If the earliest men of whom we have knowledge co-operated in order to trap and kill animals far more powerful than themselves, their hunting differed toto cælo from the hunting of a pack of wolves. Their art proves that their relation with their game was not a mere matter of killing and devouring, and that their parties were kept together, not merely by common need, but also by imaginative, religious conceptions, made explicit, not in doctrine, but in acts.
The transition from paleolithic to neolithic culture is not yet known; but we do know that a change of climate, which started in the Old Stone Age, continued in the New, and very gradually changed living conditions throughout the Near East. Libya remained rich in vineyards, olive trees, and cattle up to the end of the second millennium B.C.—a fact which may be surmised from records of booty brought back from there: by a Pharaoh of the First Dynasty;[40] by Sahure of the Fifth Dynasty (about 2475 B.C.), who listed 100,000 head of cattle and more than 200,000 each of asses, goats, and sheep;[41] and finally by Ramses III (about 1175 B.C.), who was still able to take away 3600 head of cattle, in addition to horses, asses, sheep, and goats.[42] At the opposite end of the Near East, in south-eastern Iran, Sir Aurel Stein was unable to round up a “minimum of local labour” to investigate the thickly dotted ruins of ancient settlements.[43] Nevertheless, progressive desiccation marked the period from perhaps 7000 B.C. onwards, turning the plateaux from grassland into steppe and, ultimately, into desert, and making the valleys of the great rivers inhabitable. When meadows and shrub lands began to emerge from the swamps and mudflats along the river courses, man descended from the highlands.
Now the earliest inhabitants of the valleys were in possession of a considerable body of knowledge which the hunters of the Ice Age had lacked. And we do not know how the change from old to new, from the Old Stone Age to the New Stone Age, came about; for nowhere has a series of continuous remains covering the transition been recognized. I use this word advisedly, for we shall see in a moment that the change was of such a nature that its earliest consequences may well defy recognition. We know, however, that this change, like the later one with which we are more especially concerned, took place in the Near East.[44]
The outstanding new feature of the neolithic age is agriculture, with emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum) and six-rowed barley (Hordeum hexastichum) as the main crops. Now the wild ancestors of these grains survive even to-day in Syria and Palestine. In the same region, in caves on Mount Carmel, were discovered remains of the earliest men who used sickles.[45] This does not prove, of course, that they cultivated grain; they may merely have harvested grasses which grew wild. The point is of importance since these people—known in archaeological literature as Natufians—belong to the very end of the Old Stone Age. Yet the Natufians were the initiators, or at least the early practitioners, of a technique of harvesting which survived in the earliest agricultural settlements of neolithic times. Their peculiar sickles consisted of a grooved haft of bone in which short pieces of flint—“teeth”—were mounted ([Fig. 1] A, B).[46] Such sickles are also found in the oldest settlements in the Fayum (in Egypt) ([Fig. 1] D),[47] at Hassuna in northern Iraq,[48] and at Sialk near Kashan in Persia ([Fig. 1] C).[49] They date perhaps about 5000 B.C., possibly a thousand years or more after the Natufians. In Egypt, during the First Dynasty (about 3100 B.C.), the sickle-haft was improved by being curved; it was now made of wood but retained its cutting edge of small flints ([Fig. 1] E),[50] and sickles of this type were used as late as the Twelfth Dynasty (about 2000 B.C.).[51] In Iraq, too, sickles with curved wooden handles in which flint teeth were set were used as late as the Second Early Dynasty period, about 2700 B.C.[52] In Asia Minor and Europe no trace of the hafts has survived, but the distinctive flint teeth have been found in Anatolia, South Russia, on the Danube, and at the western end of the Mediterranean at Almeria. They occur also throughout North Africa. It is clear, then, that the diffusion of agriculture consisted not merely in spreading the knowledge of emmer and barley but in a simultaneous diffusion of the odd and complex harvesting tool, first used, as far as we know, by the Natufians. Radiating from the Near East, the new knowledge spread in widening circles, reaching the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea about 2500 B.C.[53] However, many questions remain at present unanswered. When did men undertake to improve the wild grasses and to produce, by cross-breeding and selection, the vastly more nutritious grains which were known to the earliest farmers of the neolithic period? When, in fact, was the extraordinary first step taken and the satisfaction of immediate needs limited in order to save seeds, store them, safeguard them against insects and rodents, and sow them when the time was propitious? This may have been done by the Natufians, but of this we know nothing. Furthermore, we do not know how far agricultural methods had advanced when they began to be diffused throughout the Old World. In particular we know nothing about the origin of irrigation, which played so large a part in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and which has been repeatedly recognized as a factor greatly furthering social and political cohesion, since it makes each settlement dependent on its neighbours. We must, therefore, consider this invention.
It deserves notice that irrigation can be resorted to by people who do not cultivate but collect wild-growing plants. This is done, for instance, by certain Indians of the Great Basin of Western North America,[54] and their methods could very well have been followed by the Natufians utilizing the wadi running at the foot of their cliffs. We may admit, then, that irrigation could have been one of the features of the original agricultural complex which spread from the Near East; but there are serious arguments to the contrary.
In the first place, the spread of agriculture seems to have been achieved by means of a slow migration of the cultivators. Primitive hoe or garden cultivation (which is still practised) exhausts the soil it uses. It ignores rotation of crops or fallowing; after some years a fresh piece of ground must be cleared and sown. When the neighbourhood has been farmed, the village moves farther into the bush. The smallness of the neolithic settlements and of their cemeteries,[55] and the manner in which they spread into the European continent, suggests this type of slow but continual migration outwards from the centre where agriculture was first practised. There is no dependence on irrigation to be observed here.
In the second place, there are African parallels which suggest that the earliest agriculture in the Nile valley and Mesopotamia could also have proceeded without irrigation. The conditions in these river valleys in antiquity resembled closely those found nowadays on the Blue Nile, where semi-Hamitic nomads, the Hadendoa, sow and harvest in the simple manner which we shall now describe. It is possible, therefore, to postulate similar simple methods for the prehistoric Egyptians. Burckhardt renders his observations in the Taka country of Nubia as follows:
About the latter end of June ... large torrents coming from the South and South-east pour over the country and in the space of a few weeks cover the whole surface with a sheet of water, varying in depth from two to three feet.... The waters, on subsiding, leave a thick slime, or mud, upon the surface, similar to that left by the Nile.... Immediately after the inundation is imbibed, the Beduins sow the seed upon the alluvial mud, without any previous preparation whatever. The inundation is usually accompanied by heavy downpours. The rains last several weeks longer than the inundation but they are not incessant, falling in heavy showers at short intervals.
The people appear to be ignorant of tillage. They have no regular fields; and the Dhourra, their only grain, is sown among the thorny trees and tents, by dibbling large holes in the ground, into each of which a handful of the seed is thrown. After the harvest is gathered, the peasants return to their pastoral occupations; they seem never to have thought of irrigating the ground for a second crop with the water which might everywhere be found by digging wells. Not less than four-fifths of the ground remains unsown; but as the quantity of Dhourra produced is generally sufficient ... they never think of making any provisions for increasing it, notwithstanding that, when the inundation is not copious, or only partial (no one remembers it ever failing entirely) they suffer all the misery of want.[56]
This kind of procedure could not, of course, have been invented in Palestine and Syria where rivers with regularly recurring inundations are unknown. However, the same results can be achieved where there are copious spring rains. Newberry says of the Alabdeh (Hamites living between the Nile valley and the Red Sea): “Some of these nomads sow a little barley or millet after a rainstorm, and then pitch their tents for a while till the grain grows, ripens and can be gathered. Then they move on again with their little flocks.”[57]