This title conforms with the conventional nomenclature of the archaeological periods, but it has become obvious how far such terms are inadequate—at least in relation to the Near East. In Palestine there was an initial phase of the Neolithic period in which pottery was not known, a fact which it is hard for European prehistorians to credit; in the ‘ Chalcolithic’ period metal was scarcely used and in the ‘Early Bronze’ age which followed only copper was yet known. It seems preferable to demarcate the different periods according to the successive stages of human development: (i) the first settlements (Neolithic without pottery) in which there was a transition from an economy of food-gathering (hunting and collecting) to an economy of production (breeding of livestock and agriculture), villages of hunters who were beginning to be shepherds and farmers; (2) villages of farmers and potters, who drew their main source of livelihood from the breeding of domestic animals and/or the cultivation of grain crops and who had a knowledge of pottery (Neolithic with pottery); (3) villages of farmers, potters and metalworkers, who were beginning to work in, and make use of, copper (Chalcolithic). A new era was to open with urban life and the first fortified cities (Early Bronze). These divisions are in themselves somewhat arbitrary: the adherence of groups of people to the soil had begun with the Mesolithic period; the advent of pottery is a convenient point for marking the transition to the second phase, but it does not of itself signify a change in the village economy, nor did the beginnings of metalworking have a very profound effect upon living conditions. On the other hand, development did not proceed at the same tempo in different areas: plains and valleys were more advanced than hill country; primitive ways of life continued for a long time in the semi-desert regions of the periphery.

V. THE FIRST SETTLEMENTS: HUNTERS AND FARMERS

The first relatively permanent dwellings apart from caves go back to the Mesolithic period in Palestine, the Natufian.

I. EGYPT—TO END OF TWENTIETH DYNASTY

The most significant advance made in the study of ancient Egyptian chronology in recent years is the repudiation by Neugebauer and others of an astronomical origin for the Egyptian civil calendar and, as a corollary, the elimination of the socalled Sothic Cycle as a factor in dating the earliest periods of Egyptian history. It is thus unnecessary to associate the inauguration of the calendar, and all that is implied therein, with the beginning of such a cycle in 4241 B.C.; the beginning of Egyptian history may now be lowered to about the end of the fourth millennium B.C, a date which agrees far better with the body of historical and chronological evidence available than do the much higher figures once favoured by some leading scholars. It does not, however, entitle us to disregard this evidence and arbitrarily telescope the earlier periods of Egyptian history to allow for synchronisms with the admittedly fluid chronologies of neighbouring lands or merely to gratify an intuitive feeling that such eras as the Early Dynastic Period and the Old Kingdom ‘ could not’ have been as long as our ancient sources indicate that they were.

For the fixing in time of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and the periods preceding it the key date is the seventh year of the reign of King Sesostris III of the Twelfth Dynasty. In this year a heliacal rising of the star Sothis (our Sirius) was recorded on 16. VIII of the 365-day civil calendar, a fact which, thanks to the regular displacement of this calendar in relation to the true astronomical year, allows the year in question to be placed between 1876 and 1864 B.C., with every probability favouring 1872 B.C. Since the reigns of Sesostris III’s predecessors of the Twelfth Dynasty amount to a total of 120 years, and since the Turin Canon of Kings (confirmed in part by surviving monuments of the time) gives 143 years as the duration of the Eleventh Dynasty, it is possible, with only a negligible margin of error, to date the founding of this dynasty to 2133 B.C.

I. BABYLONIA AND MESOPOTAMIA

TERMINOLOGY

Al-‘Ubaid is a small site which lies about 4 miles west of Ur along the bank of an ancient canal. There, H. R. Hall and Leonard Woolley were the first to discover and record a prehistoric pottery, hand-turned and decorated with simple designs painted in a dark pigment on a comparatively light ground; the predominating colours were black, green, brown or chocolate on pink or buff and the pots were sometimes slipped, sometimes unslipped. Characteristic of these so called ‘Ubaid wares was a carbonized, dark green, highly vitrified paint which had bitten hard into the clay, the result of over-firing; in the later stages of development this criterion makes ‘Ubaid singularly easy to distinguish. When the excavations revealed that this was a prehistoric pottery, the term ‘Ubaid was applied to it and was also used to define the period and the culture with which it appeared to be distinctively associated.

After the excavations at the site of ‘Ubaid had been concluded, the same type of pottery was discovered in abundance at the neighbouring, and much greater, site of Ur. It soon began to be evident that this ware must have lasted for a long span of time, which Woolley consequently sub-divided into three periods. Later, however, when the Iraq Antiquities Department began to conduct excavations on a wide scale at the great site of Eridu, an even longer sequence, covering four successive periods, was established, and it became possible to classify this pottery into a number of dominant styles which had developed over a span of many centuries.

Deep down at the bottom of Eridu, the decorated pottery was given the name of Eridu ware (or ‘Ubaid 1), and this was succeeded by another variety, Qal’at Hajji Muhammad (or ‘Ubaid 2), named after a type site which is situated near to Warka, and this again was followed by two varieties of ‘Ubaid ware (‘Ubaid 3, 4), which in style came very close to that which had been found in abundance at Ur. Whether we should call the entire series by the generic name of ‘Ubaid is a matter for debate, but on the whole this distinctive and striking pottery does show a homogeneous development, and we may therefore accept the apparent continuity as indicative of a single consistent period of culture.

I. THE NATURAL, EARLY POSTGLACIAL ENVIRONMENT

The elements of the physical geography of the Near East and the Middle East are characterized by considerable regional diversity and colour no less rich and varied than the present cultures and peoples of this area. Whether we contrast the warm, parched plains of the Libyan Desert with the cool, foggy slopes of the high Caucasus, or the humid, fertile tract of riverain Mesopotamia with the bleak shores of the northern Caspian, the manifold variations in the natural environment are ever obvious. In the course of millennia races of diverse religions and cultures have modified the physical landscape of plain and mountain, steppe and forest, impressing upon it the features of a cultural landscape. This new pattern has in places obscured the basic physical features; elsewhere it has emphasized more vividly the preexisting distinctions and distributions.

The Near and Middle East presented a somewhat different aspect in pre-Neolithic times from that of today. Topography and landforms, it is true to say, have not changed perceptibly, but vegetation and soils have suffered severely at the hand of man. Forests have given way to fields, or have been reduced to barren scrub by fuel-gatherers and browsing goats. Extensive grasslands have been ploughed up or impoverished by overgrazing. Desolate steppe or the few isolated pines or oaks preserved in a Muslim cemetery may be the only evidence of a once luxuriant forest. These are changes due to the intervention of man. Climatic changes have also taken place which, by reason of their effect on the composition and character of natural vegetation, have significantly modified conditions of human habitation.

The following sketch of the major physical aspects of the natural environment before the advent of villages and farming communities, of towns and cities, must necessarily be incomplete; it need not, however, be either speculative or hypothetical. Prehistoric geography is essentially a physical science founded on factual evidence which is provided by such studies as geology, geography, botany, zoology, meteorology and archaeology, no attempt will be made to discuss or evaluate here the various methods of research and classes of evidence employed.

Topography and terrain are fundamental factors in biological distribution. The Eurasian and the Afrasian steppes, the broad intervening expanse of mountain systems and the intermontane valleys or plateaux constitute three zones of climatic and biological phenomena.

The existence of a Neolithic culture in the Aegean area was first recognized during the opening years of this century—at Dhimini and Sesklo in Thessaly by Stais and Tsountas, in the regions of Elatea and Chaeronea (in Phocis and Boeotia respectively) by Soteriades, at Boeotian Orchomenus by a Bavarian expedition, at Cnossus in Crete by Evans. Within the first decade the picture of that culture was already filled in in considerable detail and subsequent excavations supplied it with both breadth and depth. But while stone artefacts of pre-Neolithic types were thought to have been found at times on the Greek mainland, no stratified remains surely of Palaeolithic or Mesolithic types were found until 1941, when Stampfuss cut a trench into the fill of the Seidi Cave, located at the south-east corner of the Copaic Basin, about two miles east of Haliartus. Only then was it fairly certain that men in the food-gathering, rather than the food-producing, stage had lived in Greece, but the exact date of these finds remained in question. It was the work of Milojcic and the German expedition to Thessaly which first lengthened enormously the record of human occupation in Greece, with the discovery in 1956 of an Aceramic Neolithic culture at Argissa and then, in 1958, with the location of numerous sites of Middle and Late Palaeolithic occupation along the Peneus River west of Larissa.’ These have been followed by similar discoveries in other parts of the Aegean as well as in Thessaly, and by a re-appraisal of earlier reports, so that a somewhat continuous sequence covering perhaps as much as 100,000 years now begins to take shape.

I. PALAEOLITHIC AND MESOLITHIC

As part of the German expedition to Thessaly, a study of the steep sides and gravel banks of the Peneus River was undertaken in September 1958 by the geologist Dr Dieter Jung. On the first day of his survey Palaeolithic stone artefacts and fossilized bones were found and in rapid succession at least fifteen sites were located along the river in a ten-mile stretch to the west of Larissa; this number grew to well over twenty the following year.

I. EGYPT

The earliest record of man’s presence in Egypt is written in the ancient gravels and silts of the Nile. The pioneer work of Sandford and Arkell in this field, together with that of Caton-Thompson and Gardner in the Faiyum, set a standard which remains substantially unchallenged, though supplemented by later work—in particular that of Ball and Little.

The Nile valley was already excavated nearly in its present form by the end of the Miocene, but the high sea-level of the Pliocene brought the Mediterranean flooding into the depression, transforming it into a long narrow gulf, reaching as far south as Kom Ombo in Upper Egypt. Into the southern end of this flooded inlet the Nile and its tributaries continued to pour detritus, until by the end of the Pliocene it was filled almost to water-level. In the Lower Pleistocene the sea withdrew to the north, and the river began to erode its bed in conformity with the falling base-level, with pauses marked by gravel terraces at heights ranging from 90 m. to 45 m. above the present stream. These high-level gravels, which can be traced at intervals from Wadi Haifa to Cairo, contain no traces of man. The first stone implements are found in the 30 m. terrace, the gravels of which have yielded bifaces of Abbevillian and Acheulean types, made from pebbles, or from small boulders of brown chert. Further down-cutting brought the river to 15 m. above its present level, and in the gravels of this stage were found ovate bifaces and discs of Middle Acheulean type, and some later Acheulean forms. Sandford considered that the deposits of the 30 m. and 15 m. terraces suggested the evenly distributed rainfall of temperate latitudes, and took the absence of windborne sand and faceted pebbles to mean that there were at that time no deserts in the region.

When the decision to publish this new edition of the first two volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History was taken, it was apparent that it would not be possible to revise the former edition and that the volumes must be entirely re-written. The new volumes, which are about twice as long as their predecessors, are divided into two parts in order to key in with the numbering of the later volumes. This substantial increase in size is to be ascribed mainly to fresh knowledge which has been acquired during the past forty-five years as a result of more and more intensive efforts to discover the past. Perhaps the most notable advances have been made in our knowledge of the very early phases of man’s existence in settled communities: excavations at Catal Hiiyiik in Anatolia have disclosed a city, dated to the seventh millennium B.C., which extends at least over an area of thirty-two acres, while smaller towns or villages of approximately the same date have been found in the Jordan valley at Jericho, in Iraq at Jarmo, in the foothills of Kurdistan, on the north Syrian coast at Ras Shamra, in Cyprus at Khirokitia and at Argissa in Thessaly. Settled communities presuppose the domestication of animals and the cultivation of crops, landmarks in social evolution which are now believed to have been reached between the tenth and the eighth millennia B.C. Behind these achievements lay perhaps more than 40,000 years of human development, if the dates obtained by carbon-14 determination for the Palaeolithic Age are reliable. This invaluable aid to the archaeologist, which we owe to the American scientist Professor W. F. Libby, is still lacking in precision, but improvements in technique and in the interpretation of results can hardly fail to come in time. However remote from the present day such dates as have been obtained by this method for the Palaeolithic Age may seem they are recent in comparison with the earliest evidence of primitive life in Cambrian rocks, which are believed to be 600 million years old and thus to date from nearly 4,000 million years after the earth came into existence.

Chronology, the subject of chapter vi in this volume, has always presented difficult problems to the ancient historian, and it must be admitted that complete agreement has not yet been achieved, in particular for the third millennium B.C.

I. GEOGRAPHY, TERMINOLOGY AND CHRONOLOGY

The scene of man’s first emergence as a food-producer as opposed to the countless millennia of his existence as a foodgatherer during the Palaeolithic period, an event frequently alluded to as the ‘neolithic revolution’, was that part of southwest Asia which is usually described as the Near East, or in the terminology of some the Near and Middle East.

Even before the last glaciers had retreated from northern Europe, man in south-west Asia had embarked on a momentous course which was to lead slowly but inexorably to the development of civilization, a higher and more efficient form of living than had been practised during the long aeons of the Palaeolithic period. These changes towards the domestication of animals and plants, the conservation and eventually the production of food no doubt came slowly. They were not accomplished overnight, or due to a sudden discovery or the arrival of new ethnic elements bringing a higher culture from ‘elsewhere’. On the contrary, they were the culmination of a process that had started long ago, we assume, with the appearance of modern man, Homo sapiens, at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic. Improved technical skills in the production of tools and weapons with which to catch and kill his quarry, the manufacture of clothing, nets and matting, the construction of tents and huts, a greater cohesion of hunting groups and the first rise of semipermanent hunting-camps, all marked important steps forward, well in advance of his predecessor, Neanderthal man. In no single field were the changes more marked than in the field of religion; slowly art developed, first sculpture in the form of statuettes of a goddess of fecundity, next the arts of engraving and painting, to culminate in the unsurpassed cave paintings of such sites as Lascaux, Altamira, Font de Gaume, Niaux, Pech Merle and a host of others. Upper Palaeolithic man in the later stages of the Ice Age is emerging as an individual, deeply religious, a craftsman and artist of no mean order, and a most successful hunter, but bound by his environment and utterly dependent on the food supplies available.

I. INTRODUCTION

PERIODS AND CHRONOLOGY

The Predynastic Period is the name given to the time before the first historical dynasty of Egypt as far back as we can trace an unbroken line of civilizations. It is separated from the last stages of the Palaeolithic Period by a hiatus, a period during which no permanent occupation can be traced either in the Nile Valley or in the hills that bound it. It develops into the brilliant period of the archaic dynasties, which mark its end and which in their turn were the foundation of the Pyramid Age.

The length of time needed for this development must have been considerable, but we cannot yet measure it in terms of years before the beginning of the Christian Era. When the carbon-14 method of dating, based on the measurement of the remaining radioactivity of the radioactive isotope of carbon (carbon-14) has passed the experimental stage, some of our difficulties may disappear.

To overcome the dating difficulties Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie devised a system which was intended to establish the historical sequence of the predynastic periods, not in absolute dates but in relation to each other. WThen he first evolved it in 1901 he had excavated the large predynastic cemeteries of Naqāda and El-Ballās and those which he published under the title of Diospolis Parva. His system was an attempt to bring some order into the material from the thousands of tombs which he had excavated, by establishing ‘relative ages’ or ‘sequence dates’ (S.D.). This system was based on the comparison of groups of pottery found in a series of graves containing certain characteristic pots. Petrie assigned fifty stages to the whole Predynastic Period, as it was then known, and numbered them S.D. 30-80, leaving S.D. 1-29 for earlier cultures should they be discovered. These stages were further grouped into two main divisions; an earlier division from S.D. 30—37; and a later from S.D. 38—80, eventually altered to S.D. 76 when Petrie came to the conclusion that the Dynastic Period began at S.D. 76. Even this lower date has had to be revised, and it is now considered that the beginning of the First Dynasty corresponds with S.D. 63.

I. INTRODUCTION

The perspective of history begins with the origin of the earth, and develops through geological time until the stage is ultimately set for human evolution. The age of the earth, so long a matter of grave controversy, is now fairly reliably known as the result of the development of delicate methods of measurement that make use of the radioactive properties of certain naturally occurring elements, and is of the order of 4,500 million years. For much of this period there was apparently no life upon the earth, and certainly any life that existed left no traces that have yet been recognized as such. Yet year by year records of primitive life are announced from older and older rocks, until now there are claims going back more than 2,000 million years. Nevertheless, complex life forms that have lef£ abundant traces as fossils are not found in rocks older than those of the Cambrian system, which may be accepted as having been laid down about 600 million years ago. This dividing line between Cambrian and Pre-Cambrian rocks, between those with abundant fossil remains and those to all intents and purposes without any is clearly of paramount importance to the palaeontologist studying the forms of organic evolution, and to the stratigraphical geologist who depends so importantly upon his labours. The greater part of all geological writing is thus concerned with Cambrian and Post-Cambrian time, but the nongeologist must be careful to avoid the inference from this that little of importance occurred before the Cambrian. More than four-fifths of the history of our earth was over before the fossil record opens.

From that moment, however, it is clear that the evolution of life was both multifarious and rapid. The remains preserved in the Lower Palaeozoic systems (Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian) are all of marine organisms; land plants and land animals did not appear until the Upper Palaeozoic, in the Devonian and Carboniferous, respectively. The giant reptiles flourished in the era represented by the Mesozoic systems (Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous). Mammals made a slow start with Triassic or even Permian origins, and did not rise to dominance until Tertiary ( = Cainozoic) times. The genus Homo, one of the latest additions to the mammalian fauna, appeared less than two million years ago, and Homo sapiens, our own species, has been present on earth in only the last fiftieth of that period.

I. LANGUAGE AND HISTORY

While it is difficult to establish a close relationship between language form and the racial or cultural characteristics of its speakers, an intimate relationship does exist between culture and language content. The study of language content needs no special justification, since the written records of antiquity are our most valuable source of information concerning the peoples and civilizations which form the object of historical investigation. But language as a formal structure, like the tools and institutions of a society, represents a kind of transmitted organism and as such falls into the category of data which can be ordered in typologically related sequences. Thus, for the historian, who is interested primarily in tracing interacting continuities, the study of the history and development of a language, apart from its use as a vehicle for oral and written traditions, provides useful and sometimes unique evidence of otherwise undiscernible ethnic and cultural affiliations.

LANGUAGE CHANGE

The evolution of a language through time is most conveniently described in terms of two distinct but related features: function and form. Limiting ourselves for the moment to spoken language, we may define the primary function of language as communication. It is virtually axiomatic that a language, in order to serve the communication needs of a given community effectively, must keep pace with cultural changes within that community. That one is static implies that the other is also static, a generally unlikely situation. The ever-changing communication needs of a community will thus be reflected in its language, and mainly in lexical content rather than in form. It is more or less irrelevant whether such changes are internal (evolutionary) or caused by some impetus from outside the community in question.

The changes which take place within the form of a language are of a very different sort and are to a great extent self-generated. The structure of a language may be described as a complex interlocking set of systems, the analysis of which may be approached at several levels. Although traditional divisions into phonology, morphology, and syntax are no longer recognized as adequate, this tripartite breakdown is still at the basis of the more elaborate modern analyses.

IX. GEOGRAPHY

It is commonplace that Cyprus forms a stepping-stone between Europe and Asia, and that her history holds a mirror to the sequence of great powers, now Asiatic, now European, who have dominated the lands of the Near East and the waters of the east Mediterranean. Such dominance has not always been in the same hands at the same time; a maritime power and a land power have more than once contended with each other to win control of an island whose strategic and mercantile importance has been quite out of proportion to its size. During the fifth century B.C., Athens strove unsuccessfully to wrest Cyprus from the control of Persia; in the sixteenth century A.D., Venice fought a losing battle against the Osmanli Turks to maintain ownership of the island and the key to the rich trade-routes of the Levant and beyond which it provided. This succession of foreign masters is conspicuous in the cultural history of Cyprus. That history is of some seven and a half thousand years duration, only for a part of which has the island occupied her neighbours’ attention. Before the development of comparatively reliable ships, Cyprus was left in unmolested isolation for centuries at a time. For a period of more than three thousand years, from early in the sixth millennium B.C. onwards, her relations with surrounding regions amounted to no more than three or four ethnic changes, each of which must represent an incursion of people from overseas. During all this long period there are the most meagre indications of foreign trading contacts. It is, therefore, during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods in Cyprus, between c. 5800 and 2300 B.C., and to a lesser extent during the Early Bronze Age, between c. 2300 and 1800 B.C, that it is possible to observe a series of cultural developments that are essentially Cypriot. From the Middle Bronze Age onwards, Cyprus became more and more involved in the ambitions and quarrels of her powerful continental neighbours; by the middle of the second millennium B.C, in the Late Bronze Age, this involvement was complete and the island had become one of the main clearing houses for the seaborne trade of the Levant and Egypt with the mainland of Greece and the islands of the Aegean.

With its area of 3584 square miles Cyprus is the third Mediterranean island.