In a previous chapter we have witnessed the development of native Anatolian neolithic and chalcolithic cultures and their subsequent destruction at the hand of barbarians with inferior culture-traditions in the west, whereas some measure of continuity of painted pottery traditions was observed in the south. We must now continue our narrative of the development of the Late Chalcolithic cultures in their later phases during the first half of the fourth millennium.

END OF THE LATE CHALCOLITHIC PERIOD

With the burning of Mersin XVI, that intrusive culture from the Konya plain—rich in pottery, architecture and metalwork—was, if not completely eliminated, at least greatly weakened. The badly documented second half of the Late Chalcolithic period (Mersin XV–XII) is characterized by ever increasing eastern influences from North Iraq gaining at the expense of what survived of the Mersin XVI and local Halaf traditions. Mersin was refortified in level XV a and these defences lasted through the next two levels (XIV, XIII) furnishing eloquent evidence for unsettled conditions. The stratigraphical record is almost certainly incomplete and lacunae are expected after the successive destructions of Mersin XIV and XIII. Side by side with painted wares of local ‘Ubaid type, grey burnished bowls occur, having red and black counter-parts in Mersin XIV–XIII, at Tarsus and a number of other Cilician sites, as well as at Sakcagözü across the Amanus, at Tell esh-Shaikh in the ‘Amūq and at Tepe Gawra in northern Mesopotamia. These grey bowls are fashioned in imitation of stone vessels found in the same levels and the term ‘Uruk’ which is often applied to them, is not only erroneous, but would seem to be misleading, in so far as their context not only in Cilicia, but also at Tepe Gawra is unmistakably ‘Ubaid’.

THE HERACLEOPOLITAN KINGDOM

About 2160 b.c., after several decades of nominal occupancy by the weak rulers of the end of the Sixth Dynasty and the Memphite kinglets of the Seventh and Eighth Dynasties, the throne of Egypt was claimed by Achthoes, the governor of the Twentieth Nome of Upper Egypt, whose city, called by the Egyptians Heneneswe and by the Greeks Heracleopolis, occupied the site of present-day Ihnāsya el-Medīna, on the west side of the Nile, just south of the entrance to the Faiyūm. Assuming the throne-name Meryibre, Achthoes evidently set about imposing his rule upon his fellow nomarchs with such vigour that he has been described by Manetho as ‘behaving more cruelly than his predecessors’ and doing ‘evil to the people of all Egypt’. Though his control of the eastern Delta and its mixed Egyptian and Asiatic population is open to question, he was apparently recognized as king throughout the rest of Egypt as far south as Aswān, where his name has been noted in a rock inscription at the First Cataract. It is by no means certain, as was once thought, that his adherents failed to take over This and the sovereignty of his second successor, Neferkare, seems to have been acknowledged in the three southernmost nomes of Upper Egypt. Elsewhere the names of Achthoes I occur on an openwork bronze vessel from Asyūt, a stronghold of the new regime in the Thirteenth Nome of Upper Egypt, on an ebony staff from Meir in the Fourteenth Nome, and on a fragment of an ivory coffer from El-Lisht, eighteen miles south of Memphis.

IN the first part of this volume the peoples discussed were classified either according to the physical or cultural stage in evolution which they had reached or according to the locality in which their material remains had first been found by archaeologists. Such terms as Neanderthal man, the Palaeolithic age, Badarians and the Tell Halaf culture are definitions with a limited application which are useful for scientific purposes, but they are nevertheless a cloak for anonymity. It was the invention of writing which enabled man to record his existence as an individual and thus to provide later generations with a means of determining his identity.

At the time when the events which are described in the opening chapters of this second part were taking place, writing had come into use in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and in Elam too, but its early script has only recently been deciphered. Elsewhere, with the possible exception of the Indus Valley, man seems to have been illiterate. Very early records, however, offer the historian but limited assistance; they generally refer to isolated incidents without giving much indication of the background. Chronicles compiled in later times supplement this sketchy information to a significant degree, but they are not always reliable. Biographical texts in narrative form do not seem to have been written before the middle of the Third Millennium B.C., the earliest known being inscriptions in the tomb of an Egyptian official named Metjen, who died in the reign of Sneferu (c. 2600 B.C).

THE PRE-SARGONIC PERIOD

The north-east corner of Upper Mesopotamia, where the river Tigris runs from north-west to south-east, constitutes the region usually designated as Assyria. The narrow valley of the Tigris river and those of its tributaries are studded on both banks with ruin mounds covering major and minor Assyrian towns several of which served as royal residences. The knowledge about some of the cities buried under these mounds was never lost. That the mound of Nimrūd, on the east bank, close to the point where the Greater Zab flows into the Tigris, was the town of Kalakh mentioned in Genesis X. II was told by the natives to a British representative of the East India Company who explored the site in 1820. They even knew that the country to which this town had once belonged was named ‘al-Assur’. In much the same way, the natives of Mosul were well aware that the huge ruin mound across the river from their city covered Nineveh, the metropolis to which, according to the Book of Jonah, this prophet had been sent and where he died. Small wonder then that these sites attracted the curiosity not only of Bible scholars but of all those interested in the ancient world, and that excavations were undertaken which filled the museums of Europe’s capitals with Assyrian antiquities.

Only at a much later time archaeologists turned their attention from the Neo-Assyrian to the Old and pre-Assyrian levels of the two ruin mounds which, by their size and the importance of their buildings stood out among all the others, namely that of the royal city of Ashur, today Qal‘at Sherqāt, and Nineveh the most important mound of which is known today as Koyunçik, the smaller one as Nabi Yūnis. At Ashur archaeological evidence precedes by only a few centuries the period in which Mesopotamia and Assyria belonged to the Old Akkadian Empire. As was pointed out by the excavator of Ashur, the extensive earth

BABYLONIA: ARCHAEOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

An earlier chapter (XIII) has described the historical development of the cities in Babylonia and their cultural background. Here we must concentrate on the archaeological evidence, for this is by far the richest source for the study of man's development in the Early Dynastic period. Indeed, when we come to discuss developments in Assyria and Mesopotamia proper, historical records are so scarce that the archaeological evidence becomes our primary source of reference.

The Early Dynastic period of Babylonia has been divided into three parts and the archaeological development has been traced through an exhaustive analysis of stratified objects. At present the most satisfactory ground for this study is the Diyālā valley, where extensive excavations have provided a detailed and continuous relationship between buildings and the small finds associated with them. The principal objects were cylinder seals, pottery, sculpture and metal. Each category was subjected to stylistic examination and compared with similar material from sites outside the Diyālā valley. In the Diyālā district itself no mound proved more rewarding than Khafājī, where the long sequence of ‘Sin Temples’ could be related to many other less complete sequences of religious and domestic buildings discovered there and elsewhere.

The analysis of style is, however, complicated by the fact that development did not proceed pari passu everywhere. Thus solid-footed clay goblets which were used in the Uruk-Jamdat Nasr period at Warka, Ur and Nippur did not appear before Early Dynastic I on the Diyālā the same observation applies to reserved slip ware. Archaic seals frequently occur in contexts much later than those to which they originally belonged.

THE REIGN OF SARGON

With the appearance of this imposing figure, vast but dim to later generations of Babylonians hardly less than to us, the historical memory of the people was enriched with its most abiding treasure. Yet the written tradition, so far as it is at present available to us, does scant justice to a king who could not only achieve greatness but could record it for posterity more clearly than any before and most after him. The inscriptions of Sargon must have been numerous and their remains show that they were informative and detailed as to his warlike and religious, possibly even his civil, transactions. With a different language something of a new spirit came into the records, and seemed for a time to overcome the historical reticence which is so disappointingly manifest in other not inglorious periods of the nation's experience. The inscriptions are mostly lost or not yet recovered, though a few remain in copies made by scribes who perused the statues and trophies laid up in the great central shrine at Nippur. The Sumerian king-list spares but two or three remarks upon the founder himself and relapses into its customary tale of names and numbers for the rest of the Dynasty of Agade; and all else is anecdote preserved and perhaps adapted for special ends.

A miraculous or a mysterious origin is essential to superhuman characters, and Sargon was the first to show that the taste of the ancient eastern peoples was to be for the latter. Like several notable successors he had, and did not disguise, an obscure birth and a humble beginning.

THE THIRD DYNASTY

Early in the Third Dynasty, King Djoser employed the genius of his architect Imhotep to erect the first great building of stone, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. The name Djoser, written in a cartouche, has not been found in an inscription of the Old Kingdom. On his own monuments the king writes his Horus-name, Netjerykhet. There is no doubt that these two names refer to the same man. The wall scribblings of the Eighteenth Dynasty visitors to the Step Pyramid refer to the temple of Djoser and both names occur, together with the name of Imhotep, in the Ptolemaic inscription, on the Island of Siheil near the First Cataract. The legendary character of Imhotep, who was revered centuries after his death as a demi-god, the builder of the temple of Edfu, the wise chancellor, architect and physician of Djoser, has now acquired reality through the discovery of his name on a statue-base of Netjerykhet in the excavations of the Step Pyramid. It is curious that modern research should, within a short space of time, have established the identity of both the wise men of whom centuries later the harper of King Inyotef sings: ‘I have heard the sayings of Imhotep and Hordedef with whose words men speak so often. What are their habitations now? Their walls are destroyed, their habitations are no more, as if they had never been.’ The tomb of Hordedef, with the inscriptions in its chapel maliciously erased but still partly readable was found at Giza, east of the pyramid of his father Cheops, at a time when the excavation of the elaborate series of structures erected at Saqqara by Imhotep was still in progress.

SOURCES AND GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD

Towards the middle of the fourth millennium B.C., civilization in the plain of the Euphrates and the Tigris was not dissimilar to that of western Asia in general, as described in the foregoing chapters. Everywhere we find farmers and stock-breeders, in possession of all the requisite crafts, obtaining a few commodities from abroad, and little given to change. Similar peasant cultures—settled, stagnant and uncentralized—existed in Neolithic times throughout Europe and Asia, and continued to exist there for centuries after the ancient Near East had evolved a more complex mode of life, and had, through the diffusion of metallurgy, brought about an improvement in the equipment of the populations of Asia and Europe. If we judge by their remains, these people do not appear inferior to the early inhabitants of the ancient Near East and of Egypt described in chapters vii–ix above. We cannot explain why the latter set out on a course which led to achievements surpassing all that had gone before. In prehistoric times the future centres of high civilization showed no signs of being exceptional. On the contrary, each of them formed part of a larger cultural province: Egypt shared its early pre-dynastic civilization with Libya, Nubia and perhaps the Sudan; northern Mesopotamia was at first indistinguishable from north Syria; southern Mesopotamia was intimately linked with Persia. It was the unprecedented development described in this and the preceding chapter which differentiated Egypt and Mesopotamia from their surroundings, as it also established their unique historical significance.

THE PROBLEM OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS

For several thousand years before the third millennium b.c. the new way of life based on agriculture, which had developed in the Near East and perhaps also in certain adjacent areas, spread out of these regions into lands which lay around them. There is no doubt that it was disseminated mainly by peoples or smaller groups who migrated out of its original centres. Then the trend was largely reversed. In the third millennium ‘barbarians’ moved into Mesopotamia. Semites from poorer lands to the west settled in the south in such numbers that their language superseded that of the Sumerians, although they adopted Sumerian civilization. Gutian invaders from the highlands to the east ruled southern Iraq during the twenty-second century, but they proved less assimilable and were eventually expelled. After c. 2000 b.c. similar intrusions had more important results. The infiltration of Semitic tribes, ‘Amorites’, from Syria into Mesopotamia continued, but the migrations which caused the greatest changes appear to have come from further north.

In many cases the names of the incoming peoples have not been preserved in the records of older civilized states or in documents in their own languages. The earliest of them spoke languages of various types and affiliations. But most of those who came from the north and who are identified for the first time after c. 2000 b.c. spoke languages which belong to the ‘Indo-European’ family.