WHY DIDN’T CIVILIZATION COME TO ALL FOOD-PRODUCERS?
Once you have food-production, even at the well-advanced level of the village-farming community, what else has to happen before you get civilization? Many men have asked this question and have failed to give a full and satisfactory answer. There is probably no one answer. I shall give you my own idea about how civilization may have come about in the Near East alone. Remember, it is only a guess—a putting together of hunches from incomplete evidence. It is not meant to explain how civilization began in any of the other areas—China, southeast Asia, the Americas—where other early experiments in civilization went on. The details in those areas are quite different. Whether certain general principles hold, for the appearance of any early civilization, is still an open and very interesting question.
WHERE CIVILIZATION FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEAR EAST
You remember that our earliest village-farming communities lay along the hilly flanks of a great “crescent.” (See map on [p. 125].) Professor Breasted’s “fertile crescent” emphasized the rich river valleys of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers. Our hilly-flanks area of the crescent zone arches up from Egypt through Palestine and Syria, along southern Turkey into northern Iraq, and down along the southwestern fringe of Iran. The earliest food-producing villages we know already existed in this area by about 6750 B.C. (± 200 years).
Now notice that this hilly-flanks zone does not include southern Mesopotamia, the alluvial land of the lower Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, or the Nile Valley proper. The earliest known villages of classic Mesopotamia and Egypt seem to appear fifteen hundred or more years after those of the hilly-flanks zone. For example, the early Fayum village which lies near a lake west of the Nile Valley proper (see [p. 135]) has a radiocarbon date of 4275 B.C. ± 320 years. It was in the river lands, however, that the immediate beginnings of civilization were made.
We know that by about 3200 B.C. the Early Dynastic period had begun in southern Mesopotamia. The beginnings of writing go back several hundred years earlier, but we can safely say that civilization had begun in Mesopotamia by 3200 B.C. In Egypt, the beginning of the First Dynasty is slightly later, at about 3100 B.C., and writing probably did not appear much earlier. There is no question but that history and civilization were well under way in both Mesopotamia and Egypt by 3000 B.C.—about five thousand years ago.
THE HILLY-FLANKS ZONE VERSUS THE RIVER LANDS
Why did these two civilizations spring up in these two river lands which apparently were not even part of the area where the village-farming community began? Why didn’t we have the first civilizations in Palestine, Syria, north Iraq, or Iran, where we’re sure food-production had had a long time to develop? I think the probable answer gives a clue to the ways in which civilization began in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The land in the hilly flanks is of a sort which people can farm without too much trouble. There is a fairly fertile coastal strip in Palestine and Syria. There are pleasant mountain slopes, streams running out to the sea, and rain, at least in the winter months. The rain belt and the foothills of the Turkish mountains also extend to northern Iraq and on to the Iranian plateau. The Iranian plateau has its mountain valleys, streams, and some rain. These hilly flanks of the “crescent,” through most of its arc, are almost made-to-order for beginning farmers. The grassy slopes of the higher hills would be pasture for their herds and flocks. As soon as the earliest experiments with agriculture and domestic animals had been successful, a pleasant living could be made—and without too much trouble.
I should add here again, that our evidence points increasingly to a climate for those times which is very little different from that for the area today. Now look at Egypt and southern Mesopotamia. Both are lands without rain, for all intents and purposes. Both are lands with rivers that have laid down very fertile soil—soil perhaps superior to that in the hilly flanks. But in both lands, the rivers are of no great aid without some control.