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.
The Nile floods its banks once a year, in late September or early
October. It not only soaks the narrow fertile strip of land on either
side; it lays down a fresh layer of new soil each year. Beyond the
fertile strip on either side rise great cliffs, and behind them is the
desert. In its natural, uncontrolled state, the yearly flood of the
Nile must have caused short-lived swamps that were full of crocodiles.
After a short time, the flood level would have dropped, the water and
the crocodiles would have run back into the river, and the swamp plants
would have become parched and dry.
The Tigris and the Euphrates of Mesopotamia are less likely to flood
regularly than the Nile. The Tigris has a shorter and straighter course
than the Euphrates; it is also the more violent river. Its banks are
high, and when the snows melt and flow into all of its tributary rivers
it is swift and dangerous. The Euphrates has a much longer and more
curving course and few important tributaries. Its banks are lower and
it is less likely to flood dangerously. The land on either side and
between the two rivers is very fertile, south of the modern city of
Baghdad. Unlike the Nile Valley, neither the Tigris nor the Euphrates
is flanked by cliffs. The land on either side of the rivers stretches
out for miles and is not much rougher than a poor tennis court.
THE RIVERS MUST BE CONTROLLED
The real trick in both Egypt and Mesopotamia is to make the rivers work
for you. In Egypt, this is a matter of building dikes and reservoirs
that will catch and hold the Nile flood. In this way, the water is held
and allowed to run off over the fields as it is needed. In Mesopotamia,
it is a matter of taking advantage of natural river channels and branch
channels, and of leading ditches from these onto the fields.
Obviously, we can no longer find the first dikes or reservoirs of
the Nile Valley, or the first canals or ditches of Mesopotamia. The
same land has been lived on far too long for any traces of the first
attempts to be left; or, especially in Egypt, it has been covered by
the yearly deposits of silt, dropped by the river floods. But we’re
pretty sure the first food-producers of Egypt and southern Mesopotamia
must have made such dikes, canals, and ditches. In the first place,
there can’t have been enough rain for them to grow things otherwise.
In the second place, the patterns for such projects seem to have been
pretty well set by historic times.
CONTROL OF THE RIVERS THE BUSINESS OF EVERYONE
Here, then, is a _part_ of the reason why civilization grew in Egypt
and Mesopotamia first--not in Palestine, Syria, or Iran. In the latter
areas, people could manage to produce their food as individuals. It
wasn’t too hard; there were rain and some streams, and good pasturage
for the animals even if a crop or two went wrong. In Egypt and
Mesopotamia, people had to put in a much greater amount of work, and
this work couldn’t be individual work. Whole villages or groups of
people had to turn out to fix dikes or dig ditches. The dikes had to be
repaired and the ditches carefully cleared of silt each year, or they
would become useless.
There also had to be hard and fast rules. The person who lived nearest
the ditch or the reservoir must not be allowed to take all the water
and leave none for his neighbors. It was not only a business of
learning to control the rivers and of making their waters do the
farmer’s work. It also meant controlling men. But once these men had
managed both kinds of controls, what a wonderful yield they had! The
soil was already fertile, and the silt which came in the floods and
ditches kept adding fertile soil.
THE GERM OF CIVILIZATION IN EGYPT AND MESOPOTAMIA
This learning to work together for the common good was the real germ of
the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations. The bare elements of
civilization were already there: the need for a governing hand and for
laws to see that the communities’ work was done and that the water was
justly shared. You may object that there is a sort of chicken and egg
paradox in this idea. How could the people set up the rules until they
had managed to get a way to live, and how could they manage to get a
way to live until they had set up the rules? I think that small groups
must have moved down along the mud-flats of the river banks quite
early, making use of naturally favorable spots, and that the rules grew
out of such cases. It would have been like the hand-in-hand growth of
automobiles and paved highways in the United States.
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.
[Illustration: 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.
CLASSIC SOUTHERN MESOPOTAMIA FIRST OCCUPIED
Our next step is into the southland proper. Here, deep in the core of
the mound which later became the holy Sumerian city of Eridu, Iraqi
archeologists uncovered a handsome painted pottery. Pottery of the same
type had been noticed earlier by German archeologists on the surface
of a small mound, awash in the spring floods, near the remains of the
Biblical city of Erich (Sumerian = Uruk; Arabic = Warka). This “Eridu”
pottery, which is about all we have of the assemblage of the people who
once produced it, may be seen as a blend of the Samarran and Halafian
painted pottery styles. This may over-simplify the case, but as yet we
do not have much evidence to go on. The idea does at least fit with my
interpretation of the meaning of Baghouz and Samarra as way-points on
the mud-flats of the rivers half way down from the north.
My colleague, Robert Adams, believes that there were certainly
riverine-adapted food-collectors living in lower Mesopotamia. The
presence of such would explain why the Eridu assemblage is not simply
the sum of the Halafian and Samarran assemblages. But the domesticated
plants and animals and the basic ways of food-production must have
come from the hilly-flanks country in the north.
Above the basal Eridu levels, and at a number of other sites in the
south, comes a full-fledged assemblage called Ubaid. Incidentally,
there is an aspect of the Ubaidian assemblage in the north as well. It
seems to move into place before the Halaf manifestation is finished,
and to blend with it. The Ubaidian assemblage in the south is by far
the more spectacular. The development of the temple has been traced
at Eridu from a simple little structure to a monumental building some
62 feet long, with a pilaster-decorated façade and an altar in its
central chamber. There is painted Ubaidian pottery, but the style is
hurried and somewhat careless and gives the _impression_ of having been
a cheap mass-production means of decoration when compared with the
carefully drafted styles of Samarra and Halaf. The Ubaidian people made
other items of baked clay: sickles and axes of very hard-baked clay
are found. The northern Ubaidian sites have yielded tools of copper,
but metal tools of unquestionable Ubaidian find-spots are not yet
available from the south. Clay figurines of human beings with monstrous
turtle-like faces are another item in the southern Ubaidian assemblage.
[Illustration: SKETCH OF SELECTED ITEMS OF UBAIDIAN ASSEMBLAGE]
There is a large Ubaid cemetery at Eridu, much of it still awaiting
excavation. The few skeletons so far tentatively studied reveal a
completely modern type of “Mediterraneanoid”; the individuals whom the
skeletons represent would undoubtedly blend perfectly into the modern
population of southern Iraq. What the Ubaidian assemblage says to us is
that these people had already adapted themselves and their culture to
the peculiar riverine environment of classic southern Mesopotamia. For
example, hard-baked clay axes will chop bundles of reeds very well, or
help a mason dress his unbaked mud bricks, and there were only a few
soft and pithy species of trees available. The Ubaidian levels of Eridu
yield quantities of date pits; that excellent and characteristically
Iraqi fruit was already in use. The excavators also found the clay
model of a ship, with the stepping-point for a mast, so that Sinbad the
Sailor must have had his antecedents as early as the time of Ubaid.
The bones of fish, which must have flourished in the larger canals as
well as in the rivers, are common in the Ubaidian levels and thereafter.
THE UBAIDIAN ACHIEVEMENT
On present evidence, my tendency is to see the Ubaidian assemblage
in southern Iraq as the trace of a new era. I wish there were more
evidence, but what we have suggests this to me. The culture of southern
Ubaid soon became a culture of towns--of centrally located towns with
some rural villages about them. The town had a temple and there must
have been priests. These priests probably had political and economic
functions as well as religious ones, if the somewhat later history of
Mesopotamia may suggest a pattern for us. Presently the temple and its
priesthood were possibly the focus of the market; the temple received
its due, and may already have had its own lands and herds and flocks.
The people of the town, undoubtedly at least in consultation with the
temple administration, planned and maintained the simple irrigation
ditches. As the system flourished, the community of rural farmers would
have produced more than sufficient food. The tendency for specialized
crafts to develop--tentative at best at the cultural level of the
earlier village-farming community era--would now have been achieved,
and probably many other specialists in temple administration, water
control, architecture, and trade would also have appeared, as the
surplus food-supply was assured.
Southern Mesopotamia is not a land rich in natural resources other
than its fertile soil. Stone, good wood for construction, metal, and
innumerable other things would have had to be imported. Grain and
dates--although both are bulky and difficult to transport--and wool and
woven stuffs must have been the mediums of exchange. Over what area did
the trading net-work of Ubaid extend? We start with the idea that the
Ubaidian assemblage is most richly developed in the south. We assume, I
think, correctly, that it represents a cultural flowering of the south.
On the basis of the pottery of the still elusive “Eridu” immigrants
who had first followed the rivers into alluvial Mesopotamia, we get
the notion that the characteristic painted pottery style of Ubaid
was developed in the southland. If this reconstruction is correct
then we may watch with interest where the Ubaid pottery-painting
tradition spread. We have already mentioned that there is a substantial
assemblage of (and from the southern point of view, _fairly_ pure)
Ubaidian material in northern Iraq. The pottery appears all along the
Iranian flanks, even well east of the head of the Persian Gulf, and
ends in a later and spectacular flourish in an extremely handsome
painted style called the “Susa” style. Ubaidian pottery has been noted
up the valleys of both of the great rivers, well north of the Iraqi
and Syrian borders on the southern flanks of the Anatolian plateau.
It reaches the Mediterranean Sea and the valley of the Orontes in
Syria, and it may be faintly reflected in the painted style of a
site called Ghassul, on the east bank of the Jordan in the Dead Sea
Valley. Over this vast area--certainly in all of the great basin of
the Tigris-Euphrates drainage system and its natural extensions--I
believe we may lay our fingers on the traces of a peculiar way of
decorating pottery, which we call Ubaidian. This cursive and even
slap-dash decoration, it appears to me, was part of a new cultural
tradition which arose from the adjustments which immigrant northern
farmers first made to the new and challenging environment of southern
Mesopotamia. But exciting as the idea of the spread of influences of
the Ubaid tradition in space may be, I believe you will agree that the
consequences of the growth of that tradition in southern Mesopotamia
itself, as time passed, are even more important.
THE WARKA PHASE IN THE SOUTH
So far, there are only two radiocarbon determinations for the Ubaidian
assemblage, one from Tepe Gawra in the north and one from Warka in the
south. My hunch would be to use the dates 4500 to 3750 B.C., with a
plus or more probably a minus factor of about two hundred years for
each, as the time duration of the Ubaidian assemblage in southern
Mesopotamia.
Next, much to our annoyance, we have what is almost a temporary
black-out. According to the system of terminology I favor, our next
“assemblage” after that of Ubaid is called the _Warka_ phase, from
the Arabic name for the site of Uruk or Erich. We know it only from
six or seven levels in a narrow test-pit at Warka, and from an even
smaller hole at another site. This “assemblage,” so far, is known only
by its pottery, some of which still bears Ubaidian style painting. The
characteristic Warkan pottery is unpainted, with smoothed red or gray
surfaces and peculiar shapes. Unquestionably, there must be a great
deal more to say about the Warkan assemblage, but someone will first
have to excavate it!
THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION
After our exasperation with the almost unknown Warka interlude,
following the brilliant “false dawn” of Ubaid, we move next to an
assemblage which yields traces of a preponderance of those elements
which we noted (p. 144) as meaning civilization. This assemblage
is that called _Proto-Literate_; it already contains writing. On
the somewhat shaky principle that writing, however early, means
history--and no longer prehistory--the assemblage is named for the
historical implications of its content, and no longer after the name of
the site where it was first found. Since some of the older books used
site-names for this assemblage, I will tell you that the Proto-Literate
includes the latter half of what used to be called the “Uruk period”
_plus_ all of what used to be called the “Jemdet Nasr period.” It shows
a consistent development from beginning to end.
I shall, in fact, leave much of the description and the historic
implications of the Proto-Literate assemblage to the conventional
historians. Professor T. J. Jacobsen, reaching backward from the
legends he finds in the cuneiform writings of slightly later times, can
in fact tell you a more complete story of Proto-Literate culture than
I can. It should be enough here if I sum up briefly what the excavated
archeological evidence shows.
We have yet to dig a Proto-Literate site in its entirety, but the
indications are that the sites cover areas the size of small cities.
In architecture, we know of large and monumental temple structures,
which were built on elaborate high terraces. The plans and decoration
of these temples follow the pattern set in the Ubaid phase: the chief
difference is one of size. The German excavators at the site of Warka
reckoned that the construction of only one of the Proto-Literate temple
complexes there must have taken 1,500 men, each working a ten-hour day,
five years to build.
ART AND WRITING
If the architecture, even in its monumental forms, can be seen to
stem from Ubaidian developments, this is not so with our other
evidence of Proto-Literate artistic expression. In relief and applied
sculpture, in sculpture in the round, and on the engraved cylinder
seals--all of which now make their appearance--several completely
new artistic principles are apparent. These include the composition
of subject-matter in groups, commemorative scenes, and especially
the ability and apparent desire to render the human form and face.
Excellent as the animals of the Franco-Cantabrian art may have been
(see p. 85), and however handsome were the carefully drafted
geometric designs and conventionalized figures on the pottery of the
early farmers, there seems to have been, up to this time, a mental
block about the drawing of the human figure and especially the human
face. We do not yet know what caused this self-consciousness about
picturing themselves which seems characteristic of men before the
appearance of civilization. We do know that with civilization, the
mental block seems to have been removed.
Clay tablets bearing pictographic signs are the Proto-Literate
forerunners of cuneiform writing. The earliest examples are not well
understood but they seem to be “devices for making accounts and
for remembering accounts.” Different from the later case in Egypt,
where writing appears fully formed in the earliest examples, the
development from simple pictographic signs to proper cuneiform writing
may be traced, step by step, in Mesopotamia. It is most probable
that the development of writing was connected with the temple and
the need for keeping account of the temple’s possessions. Professor
Jacobsen sees writing as a means for overcoming space, time, and the
increasing complications of human affairs: “Literacy, which began
with ... civilization, enhanced mightily those very tendencies in its
development which characterize it as a civilization and mark it off as
such from other types of culture.”
[Illustration: RELIEF ON A PROTO-LITERATE STONE VASE, WARKA
Unrolled drawing, with restoration suggested by figures from
contemporary cylinder seals]
While the new principles in art and the idea of writing are not
foreshadowed in the Ubaid phase, or in what little we know of the
Warkan, I do not think we need to look outside southern Mesopotamia
for their beginnings. We do know something of the adjacent areas,
too, and these beginnings are not there. I think we must accept them
as completely new discoveries, made by the people who were developing
the whole new culture pattern of classic southern Mesopotamia. Full
description of the art, architecture, and writing of the Proto-Literate
phase would call for many details. Men like Professor Jacobsen and Dr.
Adams can give you these details much better than I can. Nor shall I do
more than tell you that the common pottery of the Proto-Literate phase
was so well standardized that it looks factory made. There was also
some handsome painted pottery, and there were stone bowls with inlaid
decoration. Well-made tools in metal had by now become fairly common,
and the metallurgist was experimenting with the casting process. Signs
for plows have been identified in the early pictographs, and a wheeled
chariot is shown on a cylinder seal engraving. But if I were forced to
a guess in the matter, I would say that the development of plows and
draft-animals probably began in the Ubaid period and was another of the
great innovations of that time.
The Proto-Literate assemblage clearly suggests a highly developed and
sophisticated culture. While perhaps not yet fully urban, it is on
the threshold of urbanization. There seems to have been a very dense
settlement of Proto-Literate sites in classic southern Mesopotamia,
many of them newly founded on virgin soil where no earlier settlements
had been. When we think for a moment of what all this implies, of the
growth of an irrigation system which must have existed to allow the
flourish of this culture, and of the social and political organization
necessary to maintain the irrigation system, I think we will agree that
at last we are dealing with civilization proper.
FROM PREHISTORY TO HISTORY
Now it is time for the conventional ancient historians to take over
the story from me. Remember this when you read what they write. Their
real base-line is with cultures ruled over by later kings and emperors,
whose writings describe military campaigns and the administration of
laws and fully organized trading ventures. To these historians, the
Proto-Literate phase is still a simple beginning for what is to follow.
If they mention the Ubaid assemblage at all--the one I was so lyrical
about--it will be as some dim and fumbling step on the path to the
civilized way of life.
I suppose you could say that the difference in the approach is that as
a prehistorian I have been looking forward or upward in time, while the
historians look backward to glimpse what I’ve been describing here. My
base-line was half a million years ago with a being who had little more
than the capacity to make tools and fire to distinguish him from the
animals about him. Thus my point of view and that of the conventional
historian are bound to be different. You will need both if you want to
understand all of the story of men, as they lived through time to the
present.
End of PREHISTORY
[Illustration]