There are, then, many ways in which a temporary abundance of water can be utilized by simple people to produce crops, and it may well be that the systematic distribution of water which marks the agriculture of historical times in Egypt and Mesopotamia did not exist in prehistoric times at all. We shall see that the problem of drainage was at first as important as that of irrigation, or rather more so; in this respect the modern analogies do not hold good.
The uncertainty attached to the earliest phases of agriculture makes it impossible to speculate on the immediate social consequences of the invention of food production. One would expect these to consist in a greater emphasis on local rather than tribal groupings, a limitation of outlook and horizon, a progressive differentiation of separate settlements as a result of their attachment to the soil. But the introduction of agriculture probably did not mean the more or less speedy transition to a fully settled life or to a socio-political organization on a large scale.[58] Nor did it mean that all the other ways of finding sustenance were neglected. A “partial exploitation of the environment”[59] is characteristic of modern savages who have become stuck in a backwater, but not of the true primitives of antiquity. The Natufians may have sown a catch crop or gathered wild grasses, but they also hunted deer and speared fish. All the early settlements of the Near East show signs of a many-sided economy, although in all of them agriculture played an important part. In all of them, too, we find stock-breeding; and this is an innovation which we must simply take for granted since its origin and motivation is at present quite obscure.[60] The Natufians did not possess domestic animals.
Other inventions, too, were known throughout the Near East in the earliest settlements of the New Stone Age. Pottery-making is one of them, weaving another. It is hardly to be wondered that we cannot follow the first phases of their existence. If the earliest pots, for instance, were only dried in the sun or lightly baked or were merely clay-lined baskets, they cannot be expected to have survived. And it may be considered exceptionally fortunate that of early textiles a few scraps have survived for six or seven thousand years.[61] It is likewise only due to the refinements of modern excavation technique that the oldest of the successive settlements of Hassuna, near Mosul ([Fig. 2]), was recognized as a camp site, consisting of no more than a number of hearths, still containing wood ashes. They were made of “potsherds and pebbles set in a kind of primitive cement” with pottery lying around them.[62] Only in higher levels did adobe walls appear. This single instance in which a very early settlement was recognized explains why others remain unknown.[63] But we know that after (or during) the time of the Natufians these important discoveries were made and diffused among villages stretching from the Nile valley through the Delta and thence in a great arch ([Fig. 51]) from Jericho in the south, via Byblos and Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast to Mersin in Cilicia; then, through the Amuq plain, east of Antioch, via Carchemish on the Euphrates to Tell Halaf and Chagar Bazar in North Syria to Nineveh and Hassuna near Mosul, and on eastwards, to Sialk near Kashan in central Persia.
Throughout this region we find small self-contained and self-supporting settlements. Some beads, shells, or other luxuries may have been imported from more or less distant regions by means of hand-to-hand barter. Occasionally a rare raw material, such as obsidian—volcanic glass, flaked and used, like flint, for tools—was obtained regularly from outside. For the rest, one gets an impression of a somewhat stagnant prosperity in which the great new inventions were thoroughly exploited but little changed from generation to generation for a very long time. There are differences in the crafts: flint tools, pot designs (even ceramic techniques), and personal ornaments differ from region to region and even, as in prehistoric Thessaly, from village to village. There are also changes in style in the course of time. But these local and temporal differences must not detain us as we survey the prehistory of the ancient Near East with a view to the subsequent development. For that purpose we can divide the region into three parts: the two great river valleys and the area between, in which the rich plains of North Syria were the most important part. This central area was prosperous, but it remained unprogressive until the second millennium, dependent on the great cultural centres in Egypt and Mesopotamia. For that reason, we shall confine our attention to the river valleys.
Modern Egypt, even if we disregard the aridity of its climate, differs entirely from the land with which we are here concerned. Nowadays the whole of the country is so intensively cultivated that it does not possess sufficient grazing for its cattle, and one sees cows, buffaloes and asses tethered at the desert edge and fed on cultivated crops such as clover. The river is thoroughly controlled. The desert valleys—wadis—are devoid of vegetation except for bushes of camel-thorn. But in prehistoric, as well as in Pharaonic times, Egypt was a land of marshes in which papyrus, sedge, and rushes grew to more than man’s height ([Fig. 3]). The wadis, too, teemed with life; they are best described as park land where as late as the New Kingdom (1400 B.C.) man could hunt Barbary sheep, wild oxen, and asses, and a wide variety of antelopes with their attendant carnivores. It has been pointed out[64] that the methods of hunting prove that different types of landscape could be found here. Sometimes rows of beaters are shown driving the game towards the hunter or into nets, a method possible only in areas which are somewhat thickly wooded. At other times lassos are used, which presuppose pampa-like open spaces with low shrub.
In the valley, the annual flood of the Nile continuously changed the lay of the land. When the water overflowed the river banks the silt, previously kept in suspension by the speed of the swollen current, precipitated. Some of this precipitation raised the river bed, the remainder covered the banks and the area closest to them; towards the edges of the valley there was comparatively little deposit. Thus banks of considerable height were formed, and after some years the weight of water broke through these natural dikes to seek a new course in low-lying parts, some distance away. The old bed turned into swamp, but its banks remained as ridges and hillocks whose height and area were increased by wind-blown dust and silt caught at their edges. Trees took root, and man settled there, sowing his crops and grazing his beasts in the adjoining lowlands, to retire with them to the high ground of the old banks when the river overflowed. During the inundation, fish, wild boar, hippopotamus, and huge flocks of water birds invaded the surrounding fields and supplied an abundance of food throughout the summer.
All traces of these settlements in the valley proper have long since disappeared; they have been not merely silted over but washed away by the changes in the river’s course.[65] This explains why we find traces of early settlements only at the edge of the valley, on the spurs of detritus at the foot of the high cliffs. We must imagine the valley, not flat and featureless as it is to-day, but dotted with hamlets perched on the high banks of former watercourses and surrounded by an ever-changing maze of channels, marsh, and meadow. Even as late as the First Intermediate period, just before 2000 B.C., the populace of a province in Middle Egypt left their homes and hid in swamps in the valley to escape the dangers of civil war and marauding soldiers.[66] And the early predynastic settlements at the valley’s edge were built in groves; among the remains of huts and shelters, tree roots of considerable size have been found.[67]
The prehistoric, “predynastic,” period of Egypt clearly falls into two parts or stages ([Fig. 4]). The earliest of these is known in three successive phases called Tasian, Badarian, and Amratian,[68] each a modified development of its predecessor. Together they represent the African substratum of Pharaonic civilization, the material counterpart of the affinities between ancient Egyptian and modern Hamitic languages; of the physical resemblances between the ancient Egyptians and the modern Hamites; and of the remarkable similarities in mentality between these two groups which make it possible to understand ancient Egyptian customs and beliefs by reference to modern Hamitic analogies.[69] The second stage of predynastic culture—called Gerzean[70]—is in many ways a continuation of Amratian; in other words, the preponderantly African character remained. But new elements were added, and these point to fairly close relations with the East, with Sinai, and with Palestine. Foreign pottery was imported from that quarter. A new type of Egyptian pottery, implying a change in ceramic technique, was derived from a class of wavy-handled vases which were at home in Palestine. Several new kinds of stone used for vases may have come from Sinai,[71] and the increase in the use of copper points certainly to closer relations with that peninsula. Although flint remained in use and flint-work achieved an unrivalled beauty and refinement, copper was no longer an odd substance used for luxuries but appeared in the form of highly practical objects: harpoons, daggers, axes (one of which weighs 3½ pounds).[72] The language of the country may also have been affected.[73]
The innovations of Gerzean can best be explained as the effect of a permeation of Upper Egypt by people who had affinities with their Asiatic neighbours and derived from them certain features of their culture.[74] We know that in historical times a similar gradual but continuous drift of people from Lower Egypt into Upper Egypt can be observed.[75] During the Gerzean period the country seems to have become more densely populated; and it has been suggested that the reclamation of the marshland was begun.[76] Such work presupposes co-operation between neighbouring groups and organization of men in some numbers. We may assume that this took place, but on a strictly limited scale. For there are no signs of large political units. There are no ruins of great size, no monuments of an exceptional nature; and if it is objected that these may have existed but may not have been discovered yet, we must insist on the significant fact that among the many thousands of predynastic graves which have been found, there is not a single one which by its size or equipment suggests the burial of a great chief.[77] The Gerzean innovation did not change the general character of the country’s culture; the remains suggest a prosperous homogeneous population, fully exploiting its rich environment and loosely organized in villages and rural districts. It was in this setting that the efflorescence of Pharaonic civilization occurred.
In Mesopotamia the corresponding change took place in the extreme south, in the marshy plain between the head of the Persian Gulf and the higher ground which stretches north from Samarra and Hit.[78] This older diluvial part of the country had been farmed already for many centuries before the south was inhabited. The northern farmers had passed through three phases which can be distinguished by their material equipment (see [chronological table] at end of book).[79] When the third was predominant in the north, men from the Persian plateau entered the southern marshes. Under present conditions it would be inconceivable that highlanders would elect to do so, or even that they would be able to survive there. But in the fifth and fourth millennia B.C. the Iranian plateau had not yet become a salt desert. Many rivers, descending from the surrounding mountains, ended in upland seas without an outlet and ringed by swamps. Even to-day, in eastern Iran, marsh dwellers are found on the shores of the great lake of the river Hamun.[80] Like the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, they build boats and huts of reeds, fish and keep water buffaloes and cattle. Similar conditions must have prevailed over much of Persia in the period we are discussing, and immigrants from such regions would be well prepared to face life in the delta of the Euphrates and Tigris.