The ancient mound at Jericho, in the Dead Sea valley in Palestine, yields some very interesting material. Its catalogue somewhat resembles that of Jarmo, especially in the sense that there is a fair depth of deposit without portable pottery vessels. On the other hand, the architecture of Jericho is surprisingly complex, with traces of massive stone fortification walls and the general use of formed sun-dried mud brick. Jericho lies in a somewhat strange and tropically lush ecological niche, some seven hundred feet below sea level; it is geographically within the hilly-flanks zone but environmentally not part of it.
Several radiocarbon “dates” for Jericho fall within the range of those I find reasonable for Jarmo, and their internal statistical consistency is far better than that for the Jarmo determinations. It is not yet clear exactly what this means.
The mound at Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) contains a remarkably fine sequence, which perhaps does not have the gap we noted in Iraqi-Kurdistan between the Karim Shahir group and Jarmo. While I am not sure that the Jericho sequence will prove valid for those parts of Palestine outside the special Dead Sea environmental niche, the sequence does appear to proceed from the local variety of Natufian into that of a very well settled community. So far, we have little direct evidence for the food-production basis upon which the Jericho people subsisted.
There is an early village assemblage with strong characteristics of its own in the land bordering the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea, where Syria and the Cilician province of Turkey join. This early Syro-Cilician assemblage must represent a general cultural pattern which was at least in part contemporary with that of the Hassuna assemblage. These materials from the bases of the mounds at Mersin, and from Judaidah in the Amouq plain, as well as from a few other sites, represent the remains of true villages. The walls of their houses were built of puddled mud, but some of the house foundations were of stone. Several different kinds of pottery were made by the people of these villages. None of it resembles the pottery from Hassuna or from the upper levels of Jarmo or Jericho. The Syro-Cilician people had not lost their touch at working flint. An important southern variation of the Syro-Cilician assemblage has been cleared recently at Byblos, a port town famous in later Phoenician times. There are three radiocarbon determinations which suggest that the time range for these developments was in the sixth or early fifth millennium B.C.
It would be fascinating to search for traces of even earlier village-farming communities and for the remains of the incipient cultivation era, in the Syro-Cilician region.
THE IRANIAN PLATEAU AND THE NILE VALLEY
The map on [page 125] shows some sites which lie either outside or in an extension of the hilly-flanks zone proper. From the base of the great mound at Sialk on the Iranian plateau came an assemblage of early village material, generally similar, in the kinds of things it contained, to the catalogues of Hassuna and Judaidah. The details of how things were made are different; the Sialk assemblage represents still another cultural pattern. I suspect it appeared a bit later in time than did that of Hassuna. There is an important new item in the Sialk catalogue. The Sialk people made small drills or pins of hammered copper. Thus the metallurgist’s specialized craft had made its appearance.
There is at least one very early Iranian site on the inward slopes of the hilly-flanks zone. It is the earlier of two mounds at a place called Bakun, in southwestern Iran; the results of the excavations there are not yet published and we only know of its coarse and primitive pottery. I only mention Bakun because it helps us to plot the extent of the hilly-flanks zone villages on the map.
The Nile Valley lies beyond the peculiar environmental zone of the hilly flanks of the crescent, and it is probable that the earliest village-farming communities in Egypt were established by a few people who wandered into the Nile delta area from the nuclear area. The assemblage which is most closely comparable to the catalogue of Hassuna or Judaidah, for example, is that from little settlements along the shore of the Fayum lake. The Fayum materials come mainly from grain bins or silos. Another site, Merimde, in the western part of the Nile delta, shows the remains of a true village, but it may be slightly later than the settlement of the Fayum. There are radioactive carbon “dates” for the Fayum materials at about 4275 B.C. ± 320 years, which is almost fifteen hundred years later than the determinations suggested for the Hassunan or Syro-Cilician assemblages. I suspect that this is a somewhat over-extended indication of the time it took for the generalized cultural pattern of village-farming community life to spread from the nuclear area down into Egypt, but as yet we have no way of testing these matters.
In this same vein, we have two radioactive carbon dates for an assemblage from sites near Khartoum in the Sudan, best represented by the mound called Shaheinab. The Shaheinab catalogue roughly corresponds to that of the Fayum; the distance between the two places, as the Nile flows, is roughly 1,500 miles. Thus it took almost a thousand years for the new way of life to be carried as far south into Africa as Khartoum; the two Shaheinab “dates” average about 3300 B.C. ± 400 years.