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.
If the movement was up the Nile (southward), as these dates suggest,
then I suspect that the earliest available village material of middle
Egypt, the so-called Tasian, is also later than that of the Fayum. The
Tasian materials come from a few graves near a village called Deir
Tasa, and I have an uncomfortable feeling that the Tasian “assemblage”
may be mainly an artificial selection of poor examples of objects which
belong in the following range of time.
SPREAD IN TIME AND SPACE
There are now two things we can do; in fact, we have already begun to
do them. We can watch the spread of the new way of life upward through
time in the nuclear area. We can also see how the new way of life
spread outward in space from the nuclear area, as time went on. There
is good archeological evidence that both these processes took place.
For the hill country of northeastern Iraq, in the nuclear area, we
have already noticed how the succession (still with gaps) from Karim
Shahir, through M’lefaat and Jarmo, to Hassuna can be charted (see
chart, p. 111). In the next chapter, we shall continue this charting
and description of what happened in Iraq upward through time. We also
watched traces of the new way of life move through space up the Nile
into Africa, to reach Khartoum in the Sudan some thirty-five hundred
years later than we had seen it at Jarmo or Jericho. We caught glimpses
of it in the Fayum and perhaps at Tasa along the way.
For the remainder of this chapter, I shall try to suggest briefly for
you the directions taken by the spread of the new way of life from the
nuclear area in the Near East. First, let me make clear again that
I _do not_ believe that the village-farming community way of life
was invented only once and in the Near East. It seems to me that the
evidence is very clear that a separate experiment arose in the New
World. For China, the question of independence or borrowing--in the
appearance of the village-farming community there--is still an open
one. In the last chapter, we noted the probability of an independent
nuclear area in southeastern Asia. Professor Carl Sauer strongly
champions the great importance of this area as _the_ original center
of agricultural pursuits, as a kind of “cradle” of all incipient eras
of the Old World at least. While there is certainly not the slightest
archeological evidence to allow us to go that far, we may easily expect
that an early southeast Asian development would have been felt in
China. However, the appearance of the village-farming community in the
northwest of India, at least, seems to have depended on the earlier
development in the Near East. It is also probable that ideas of the new
way of life moved well beyond Khartoum in Africa.
THE SPREAD OF THE VILLAGE-FARMING COMMUNITY WAY OF LIFE INTO EUROPE
How about Europe? I won’t give you many details. You can easily imagine
that the late prehistoric prelude to European history is a complicated
affair. We all know very well how complicated an area Europe is now,
with its welter of different languages and cultures. Remember, however,
that a great deal of archeology has been done on the late prehistory of
Europe, and very little on that of further Asia and Africa. If we knew
as much about these areas as we do of Europe, I expect we’d find them
just as complicated.
This much is clear for Europe, as far as the spread of the
village-community way of life is concerned. The general idea and much
of the know-how and the basic tools of food-production moved from the
Near East to Europe. So did the plants and animals which had been
domesticated; they were not naturally at home in Europe, as they were
in western Asia. I do not, of course, mean that there were traveling
salesmen who carried these ideas and things to Europe with a commercial
gleam in their eyes. The process took time, and the ideas and things
must have been passed on from one group of people to the next. There
was also some actual movement of peoples, but we don’t know the size of
the groups that moved.
The story of the “colonization” of Europe by the first farmers is
thus one of (1) the movement from the eastern Mediterranean lands
of some people who were farmers; (2) the spread of ideas and things
beyond the Near East itself and beyond the paths along which the
“colonists” moved; and (3) the adaptations of the ideas and things
by the indigenous “Forest folk”, about whose “receptiveness” Professor
Mathiassen speaks (p. 97). It is important to note that the resulting
cultures in the new European environment were European, not Near
Eastern. The late Professor Childe remarked that “the peoples of the
West were not slavish imitators; they adapted the gifts from the East
... into a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own
original lines.”
THE WAYS TO EUROPE
Suppose we want to follow the traces of those earliest village-farmers
who did travel from western Asia into Europe. Let us start from
Syro-Cilicia, that part of the hilly-flanks zone proper which lies in
the very northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. Three ways would be
open to us (of course we could not be worried about permission from the
Soviet authorities!). We would go north, or north and slightly east,
across Anatolian Turkey, and skirt along either shore of the Black Sea
or even to the east of the Caucasus Mountains along the Caspian Sea,
to reach the plains of Ukrainian Russia. From here, we could march
across eastern Europe to the Baltic and Scandinavia, or even hook back
southwestward to Atlantic Europe.
Our second way from Syro-Cilicia would also lie over Anatolia, to the
northwest, where we would have to swim or raft ourselves over the
Dardanelles or the Bosphorus to the European shore. Then we would bear
left toward Greece, but some of us might turn right again in Macedonia,
going up the valley of the Vardar River to its divide and on down
the valley of the Morava beyond, to reach the Danube near Belgrade
in Jugoslavia. Here we would turn left, following the great river
valley of the Danube up into central Europe. We would have a number of
tributary valleys to explore, or we could cross the divide and go down
the valley of the Rhine to the North Sea.
Our third way from Syro-Cilicia would be by sea. We would coast along
southern Anatolia and visit Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean islands on
our way to Greece, where, in the north, we might meet some of those who
had taken the second route. From Greece, we would sail on to Italy and
the western isles, to reach southern France and the coasts of Spain.
Eventually a few of us would sail up the Atlantic coast of Europe, to
reach western Britain and even Ireland.
[Illustration: PROBABLE ROUTES AND TIMING IN THE SPREAD OF THE
VILLAGE-FARMING COMMUNITY WAY OF LIFE FROM THE NEAR EAST TO EUROPE]
Of course none of us could ever take these journeys as the first
farmers took them, since the whole course of each journey must have
lasted many lifetimes. The date given to the assemblage called Windmill
Hill, the earliest known trace of village-farming communities in
England, is about 2500 B.C. I would expect about 5500 B.C. to be a
safe date to give for the well-developed early village communities of
Syro-Cilicia. We suspect that the spread throughout Europe did not
proceed at an even rate. Professor Piggott writes that “at a date
probably about 2600 B.C., simple agricultural communities were being
established in Spain and southern France, and from the latter region a
spread northwards can be traced ... from points on the French seaboard
of the [English] Channel ... there were emigrations of a certain number
of these tribes by boat, across to the chalk lands of Wessex and Sussex
[in England], probably not more than three or four generations later
than the formation of the south French colonies.”
New radiocarbon determinations are becoming available all the
time--already several suggest that the food-producing way of life
had reached the lower Rhine and Holland by 4000 B.C. But not all
prehistorians accept these “dates,” so I do not show them on my map
(p. 139).
THE EARLIEST FARMERS OF ENGLAND
To describe the later prehistory of all Europe for you would take
another book and a much larger one than this is. Therefore, I have
decided to give you only a few impressions of the later prehistory of
Britain. Of course the British Isles lie at the other end of Europe
from our base-line in western Asia. Also, they received influences
along at least two of the three ways in which the new way of life
moved into Europe. We will look at more of their late prehistory in a
following chapter: here, I shall speak only of the first farmers.
The assemblage called Windmill Hill, which appears in the south of
England, exhibits three different kinds of structures, evidence of
grain-growing and of stock-breeding, and some distinctive types of
pottery and stone implements. The most remarkable type of structure
is the earthwork enclosures which seem to have served as seasonal
cattle corrals. These enclosures were roughly circular, reached over
a thousand feet in diameter, and sometimes included two or three
concentric sets of banks and ditches. Traces of oblong timber houses
have been found, but not within the enclosures. The second type of
structure is mine-shafts, dug down into the chalk beds where good
flint for the making of axes or hoes could be found. The third type
of structure is long simple mounds or “unchambered barrows,” in one
end of which burials were made. It has been commonly believed that the
Windmill Hill assemblage belonged entirely to the cultural tradition
which moved up through France to the Channel. Professor Piggott is now
convinced, however, that important elements of Windmill Hill stem from
northern Germany and Denmark--products of the first way into Europe
from the east.
The archeological traces of a second early culture are to be found
in the west of England, western and northern Scotland, and most of
Ireland. The bearers of this culture had come up the Atlantic coast
by sea from southern France and Spain. The evidence they have left us
consists mainly of tombs and the contents of tombs, with only very
rare settlement sites. The tombs were of some size and received the
bodies of many people. The tombs themselves were built of stone, heaped
over with earth; the stones enclosed a passage to a central chamber
(“passage graves”), or to a simple long gallery, along the sides of
which the bodies were laid (“gallery graves”). The general type of
construction is called “megalithic” (= great stone), and the whole
earth-mounded structure is often called a _barrow_. Since many have
proper chambers, in one sense or another, we used the term “unchambered
barrow” above to distinguish those of the Windmill Hill type from these
megalithic structures. There is some evidence for sacrifice, libations,
and ceremonial fires, and it is clear that some form of community
ritual was focused on the megalithic tombs.
The cultures of the people who produced the Windmill Hill assemblage
and of those who made the megalithic tombs flourished, at least in
part, at the same time. Although the distributions of the two different
types of archeological traces are in quite different parts of the
country, there is Windmill Hill pottery in some of the megalithic
tombs. But the tombs also contain pottery which seems to have arrived
with the tomb builders themselves.
The third early British group of antiquities of this general time
(following 2500 B.C.) comes from sites in southern and eastern England.
It is not so certain that the people who made this assemblage, called
Peterborough, were actually farmers. While they may on occasion have
practiced a simple agriculture, many items of their assemblage link
them closely with that of the “Forest folk” of earlier times in
England and in the Baltic countries. Their pottery is decorated with
impressions of cords and is quite different from that of Windmill Hill
and the megalithic builders. In addition, the distribution of their
finds extends into eastern Britain, where the other cultures have left
no trace. The Peterborough people had villages with semi-subterranean
huts, and the bones of oxen, pigs, and sheep have been found in a few
of these. On the whole, however, hunting and fishing seem to have been
their vital occupations. They also established trade routes especially
to acquire the raw material for stone axes.
A probably slightly later culture, whose traces are best known from
Skara Brae on Orkney, also had its roots in those cultures of the
Baltic area which fused out of the meeting of the “Forest folk” and
the peoples who took the eastern way into Europe. Skara Brae is very
well preserved, having been built of thin stone slabs about which
dune-sand drifted after the village died. The individual houses, the
bedsteads, the shelves, the chests for clothes and oddments--all built
of thin stone-slabs--may still be seen in place. But the Skara Brae
people lived entirely by sheep- and cattle-breeding, and by catching
shellfish. Neither grain nor the instruments of agriculture appeared at
Skara Brae.
THE EUROPEAN ACHIEVEMENT
The above is only a very brief description of what went on in Britain
with the arrival of the first farmers. There are many interesting
details which I have omitted in order to shorten the story.
I believe some of the difficulty we have in understanding the
establishment of the first farming communities in Europe is with
the word “colonization.” We have a natural tendency to think of
“colonization” as it has happened within the last few centuries. In the
case of the colonization of the Americas, for example, the colonists
came relatively quickly, and in increasingly vast numbers. They had
vastly superior technical, political, and war-making skills, compared
with those of the Indians. There was not much mixing with the Indians.
The case in Europe five or six thousand years ago must have been very
different. I wonder if it is even proper to call people “colonists”
who move some miles to a new region, settle down and farm it for some
years, then move on again, generation after generation? The ideas and
the things which these new people carried were only _potentially_
superior. The ideas and things and the people had to prove themselves
in their adaptation to each new environment. Once this was done another
link to the chain would be added, and then the forest-dwellers and
other indigenous folk of Europe along the way might accept the new
ideas and things. It is quite reasonable to expect that there must have
been much mixture of the migrants and the indigenes along the way; the
Peterborough and Skara Brae assemblages we mentioned above would seem
to be clear traces of such fused cultures. Sometimes, especially if the
migrants were moving by boat, long distances may have been covered in
a short time. Remember, however, we seem to have about three thousand
years between the early Syro-Cilician villages and Windmill Hill.
Let me repeat Professor Childe again. “The peoples of the West were
not slavish imitators: they adapted the gifts from the East ... into
a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own original
lines.” Childe is of course completely conscious of the fact that his
“peoples of the West” were in part the descendants of migrants who came
originally from the “East,” bringing their “gifts” with them. This
was the late prehistoric achievement of Europe--to take new ideas and
things and some migrant peoples and, by mixing them with the old in its
own environments, to forge a new and unique series of cultures.
What we know of the ways of men suggests to us that when the details
of the later prehistory of further Asia and Africa are learned, their
stories will be just as exciting.
THE Conquest of Civilization
[Illustration]
Now we must return to the Near East again. We are coming to the point
where history is about to begin. I am going to stick pretty close
to Iraq and Egypt in this chapter. These countries will perhaps be
the most interesting to most of us, for the foundations of western
civilization were laid in the river lands of the Tigris and Euphrates
and of the Nile. I shall probably stick closest of all to Iraq, because
things first happened there and also because I know it best.
There is another interesting thing, too. We have seen that the first
experiment in village-farming took place in the Near East. So did
the first experiment in civilization. Both experiments “took.” The
traditions we live by today are based, ultimately, on those ancient
beginnings in food-production and civilization in the Near East.
WHAT “CIVILIZATION” MEANS
I shall not try to define “civilization” for you; rather, I shall
tell you what the word brings to my mind. To me civilization means
urbanization: the fact that there are cities. It means a formal
political set-up--that there are kings or governing bodies that the
people have set up. It means formal laws--rules of conduct--which the
government (if not the people) believes are necessary. It probably
means that there are formalized projects--roads, harbors, irrigation
canals, and the like--and also some sort of army or police force
to protect them. It means quite new and different art forms. It
also usually means there is writing. (The people of the Andes--the
Incas--had everything which goes to make up a civilization but formal
writing. I can see no reason to say they were not civilized.) Finally,
as the late Professor Redfield reminded us, civilization seems to bring
with it the dawn of a new kind of moral order.
In different civilizations, there may be important differences in the
way such things as the above are managed. In early civilizations, it is
usual to find religion very closely tied in with government, law, and
so forth. The king may also be a high priest, or he may even be thought
of as a god. The laws are usually thought to have been given to the
people by the gods. The temples are protected just as carefully as the
other projects.
CIVILIZATION IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT FOOD-PRODUCTION
Civilizations have to be made up of many people. Some of the people
live in the country; some live in very large towns or cities. Classes
of society have begun. There are officials and government people; there
are priests or religious officials; there are merchants and traders;
there are craftsmen, metal-workers, potters, builders, and so on; there
are also farmers, and these are the people who produce the food for the
whole population. It must be obvious that civilization cannot exist
without food-production and that food-production must also be at a
pretty efficient level of village-farming before civilization can even
begin.
But people can be food-producing without being civilized. In many
parts of the world this is still the case. When the white men first
came to America, the Indians in most parts of this hemisphere were
food-producers. They grew corn, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, and many
other things the white men had never eaten before. But only the Aztecs
of Mexico, the Mayas of Yucatan and Guatemala, and the Incas of the
Andes were civilized.
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.