At the end of our last chapter we said that the study of the birth of a
civilization means watching the emergence of its “form.” We have also
seen that this “form” is elusive, that it is not a concrete mould, or a
standard which we can apply to our observations to see whether they
conform with it. We have described it as “a certain consistency in
orientation, a cultural style.” Recognizing it amounts to discovering a
point of view from where seemingly unrelated facts acquire coherence and
meaning. Even so the “form” of a civilization remains intangible; it is
implicit in the preoccupations and valuations of the people. It imparts
to their achievements—to their arts and institutions, their literature,
their theology—something distinct and final, something which has its own
peculiar perfection. Therefore a discussion of the emergence of form
entails a knowledge of a civilization in its maturity, a familiarity
with its classical expression in every field. Then it should be possible
to work backwards from better-known to early times until the point is
reached where the familiar phenomena are lost sight of and where,
conversely, their emergence must be postulated.[36]
This procedure, however, has a double disadvantage. It obscures
development because it moves against the current of time; and it fails
to describe, first of all, the conditions under which the civilization
took shape—in other words, its prehistoric antecedents. Now I am not
prepared to attempt a definition of the distinction between prehistory
and history in general terms, for even within the ancient Near East the
distinction is problematical.[37] I shall simply use the term
“prehistory” to denote the period preceding the emergence of Egyptian
and Mesopotamian civilization, and shall discuss first the climatic
conditions in the Near East at that time and then the form of society
which prevailed before the events with which we are primarily concerned
took place.
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]
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.
The pottery made by the earliest settlers of South Mesopotamia shows
that they came from Persia. At first they retained the tightly
interwoven geometric designs used in their homeland;[81] but left to
themselves they soon adopted an easier flowing, careless decoration
(called Al Ubaid) which remained in use for many centuries and
represents the Persian tradition in only a very debased form. In many
places it is found on virgin soil, which shows that the settlers spread
farther through the country of which they had at first occupied only
certain localities. At Ur, for instance, detailed observations were made
which reveal the conditions in which men lived when the site was first
inhabited. The relevant layers show:
a stratum of irregular thickness composed of refuse resulting from
human occupation—ashes, disintegrated mud brick, potsherds, etc. This
went down almost to sea-level; below it was a belt about one metre
thick of mud, grey in colour above, and darkening to black below, much
of which was clearly due to the decay of vegetation. In it were
potsherds, sporadic above but becoming more numerous lower down and
massed thickly at the bottom, all the fragments lying horizontally;
they had the appearance of having sunk by their own weight through
water into soft mud. At a metre below sea-level came stiff, green clay
pierced by sinuous brown stains resulting from the decay of roots;
with this all trace of human activity ceased. Evidently this was the
bottom of Mesopotamia.[82]
Southern Mesopotamia resembled the Egyptian Delta, rather than the Nile
valley where cliffs constrain the meanderings of the river, and old
banks and spurs provide high ground. In Mesopotamia the lowest course of
Euphrates and Tigris presents, even to-day, a wilderness of reed forests
where the Marsh Arabs lead an amphibious existence (Fig. 6). All traffic
is by narrow bituminous skiffs; the people fish and keep some cattle,
living in reed huts built on mattresses of bent and trodden-down reed
stems. Their dwellings are described as follows:
at one end is a low and narrow aperture which serves as a doorway,
window and chimney combined; on the rush-strewn and miry floor sleep
men and women, children and buffaloes, in warm proximity ... the
ground of the hut often oozing water at every step.[83]
The chiefs’ reed tents are more impressive; they are large tunnels of
matting covering a framework of reed bundles which form semicircular
arches. Doors and windows are arranged in the mats closing either end.
We know that such structures were also used in the fourth millennium
B.C., for they are represented, with all the necessary detail, in the
earliest renderings of sacred buildings, notably the byres and folds of
temple animals (Fig. 5).
But modern savages are but diminished shadows of the true primitives,
and the ancient people of the Al Ubaid period exercised a mastery over
the marsh to which the modern inhabitants never as much as aspire.
Moreover, the people of the Al Ubaid period belonged to the most
advanced group of the prehistoric farmers. Copper was used in their
homeland for axes and adzes and even for mirrors. Bricks were known
there, too; and brick buildings and the waterproofing of reeds with
bitumen are certified for the period. It is likely that some reclamation
and drainage of marshland was undertaken. In any case, the men of the Al
Ubaid period appear from the first as cultivators, and we are free to
imagine their fields as shallow islands in the marsh or as reclaimed and
diked-in land.
The vitality and power of these earliest settlers is astonishing. Their
influence can be traced upstream, where their pottery replaced the Tell
Halaf wares completely, even occurring in appreciable quantities in
North Syria. Since it has nothing to recommend it as an article of
export, we must assume that its makers came with it and settled widely
throughout the upper reaches of Tigris and Euphrates. Nevertheless, the
Al Ubaid people were simple cultivators like their contemporaries in
Egypt and their predecessors in northern Iraq and Syria. This is most
clearly shown by their inability to organize trade in order to obtain
the copper which they had been accustomed to use in their country of
origin. Once settled in Mesopotamia and removed from the sources of the
metal, they used a substitute material that was locally available,
making axes (Fig. 7_a_), choppers, and sickles (Fig. 7_b_) of clay which
they fired at so high a temperature that it almost vitrified and thus
obtained a useful cutting edge. These implements were, of course, very
brittle and were broken by the hundreds. But they could be easily
replaced; and the isolated settlements achieved that autarchy which is
characteristic of early peasant cultures.
And yet the Al Ubaid period has left us some remains which suggest that
certain centres began to be of outstanding importance and that a change
in the rural character of the settlements was taking place. At Abu
Shahrein in the south,[84] and at Tepe Gawra in the north, temples were
erected. And these not only testify to a co-ordinated effort on a larger
scale than we would expect within the scope of a village culture, but
show also a number of features which continue in historical times—for
instance: the simple oblong shape of the sanctuary, with its altar and
offering table; the platforms on which the temples were set; the
strengthening buttresses (which developed into a system of piers and
recesses, rhythmically articulating the walls). Moreover, it is likely
that at Eridu there was continuity, not only of architectural
development, but of worship. In the absence of inscriptions this
contention cannot be proved. But the god worshipped there in historical
times was called Enki—lord of the earth, but also god of the sweet
waters. He is depicted surrounded by waters (for he “had founded his
chamber in the deep”) and fishes sport in the streams which spring from
his shoulders. Now an observation made during the excavation of the Al
Ubaid temples suggests that the same god was adored in them. At one
stage the offering table and sanctuary were covered with a layer of fish
bones six inches deep, remains, no doubt, of an offering to the god of
whom it was said:
When Enki rose, the fishes rose and adored him.
He stood, a marvel unto the Apsu (Deep),
Brought joy to the Engur (Deep).
To the sea it seemed that awe was upon him,
To the Great River it seemed that terror hovered around him
While at the same time the south wind stirred the depths of the
Euphrates.[85]
The importance which one attaches to these signs of a possible
continuity remains a matter of personal judgment. But, in any case, the
Al Ubaid culture which we have described was the first to have occupied
Mesopotamia as a whole. It seems to have spread along the rivers from
the south.[86] And it was in the south that, after an interval, the
profound change was brought about which made first Sumer, and then
Babylon, the cultural centre of Western Asia for three thousand years.