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.

I should add here again, that our evidence points increasingly to a 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.

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.

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.”

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.