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 Semites from poorer lands to the west settled in the south in such numbers that their language superseded that of the Sumerians, although they adopted Sumerian civilization.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.

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.