Once the rules and the know-how did get going, there must have been a constant interplay of the two. Thus, the more the crops yielded, the richer and better-fed the people would have been, and the more the population would have grown. As the population grew, more land would have needed to be flooded or irrigated, and more complex systems of dikes, reservoirs, canals, and ditches would have been built. The more complex the system, the more necessity for work on new projects and for the control of their use.... And so on....
What I have just put down for you is a guess at the manner of growth of some of the formalized systems that go to make up a civilized society. My explanation has been pointed particularly at Egypt and Mesopotamia. I have already told you that the irrigation and water-control part of it does not apply to the development of the Aztecs or the Mayas, or perhaps anybody else. But I think that a fair part of the story of Egypt and Mesopotamia must be as I’ve just told you.
I am particularly anxious that you do not understand me to mean that irrigation caused civilization. I am sure it was not that simple at all. For, in fact, a complex and highly engineered irrigation system proper did not come until later times. Let’s say rather that the simple beginnings of irrigation allowed and in fact encouraged a great number of things in the technological, political, social, and moral realms of culture. We do not yet understand what all these things were or how they worked. But without these other aspects of culture, I do not think that urbanization and civilization itself could have come into being.
THE ARCHEOLOGICAL SEQUENCE TO CIVILIZATION IN IRAQ
We last spoke of the archeological materials of Iraq on [page 130], where I described the village-farming community of Hassunan type. The Hassunan type villages appear in the hilly-flanks zone and in the rolling land adjacent to the Tigris in northern Iraq. It is probable that even before the Hassuna pattern of culture lived its course, a new assemblage had been established in northern Iraq and Syria. This assemblage is called Halaf, after a site high on a tributary of the Euphrates, on the Syro-Turkish border.
SKETCH OF SELECTED ITEMS OF HALAFIAN ASSEMBLAGE
BEADS AND PENDANTS
POTTERY MOTIFS
POTTERY
The Halafian assemblage is incompletely known. The culture it represents included a remarkably handsome painted pottery. Archeologists have tended to be so fascinated with this pottery that they have bothered little with the rest of the Halafian assemblage. We do know that strange stone-founded houses, with plans like those of the popular notion of an Eskimo igloo, were built. Like the pottery of the Samarran style, which appears as part of the Hassunan assemblage (see [p. 131]), the Halafian painted pottery implies great concentration and excellence of draftsmanship on the part of the people who painted it.
We must mention two very interesting sites adjacent to the mud-flats of the rivers, half way down from northern Iraq to the classic alluvial Mesopotamian area. One is Baghouz on the Euphrates; the other is Samarra on the Tigris (see map, [p. 125]). Both these sites yield the handsome painted pottery of the style called Samarran: in fact it is Samarra which gives its name to the pottery. Neither Baghouz nor Samarra have completely Hassunan types of assemblages, and at Samarra there are a few pots of proper Halafian style. I suppose that Samarra and Baghouz give us glimpses of those early farmers who had begun to finger their way down the mud-flats of the river banks toward the fertile but yet untilled southland.