The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  Figure 1 (Above) Three pictures of hunters from the caves of the Spanish Levante (left to right: Cueva del Garroso, reproduction by M. Almagro; Els Secans, reproduction by Vallespi; Cueva Remigia della GasuUa, reproduction by Porcar).

  Figure 2 (Below) Deerhunt, Cueva de los Caballos (Arana, Spain, reproduction by Hernandez Pacheco).

  The mesolithic: an early example of the decline of the west?

  Is it conceivable that the rather advanced culture of the Solutre and Magdalene people in the west resulted from the advantages they derived over a long period from the herds of reindeer and other herbivores (saiga, horses, bison) which roamed the vast open spaces swept by howling winds south of the great glaciers? Humans were parasites on the abundant wildlife. They had only to attach themselves to one of these herds, following it in its seasonal migrations, to be supplied not only with food but with hides, for clothing and tents, and with horn, sinews and bones for making tools and weapons. Animals were already the servants of men. Thus liberated, these early people found themselves with more free time, which created new needs: they painted, carved and moulded objects, and dressed with greater care once the needle had been devised for sewing clothes. Alongside the caves, which were now adapted as dwelling places, they would eventually build huts with stone floors coloured with ochre, like those discovered at Arcy-sur-Cure in France.

  The end of the last ice age and the retreat of the glaciers may have put an end to this time of comparative plenty and the ancient balance between man and nature which it represented. The melting of the glaciers led to much flooding, as new lakes, rivers and seas came into being: the English Channel and the northern Adriatic for instance. The rapid growth of the great forest mantle limited the area of grassland: reindeer and other herbivores moved north and the hunters had to resort to trapping, a much more hazardous matter, going after forest game such as roe deer, boar and other creatures. In short the triumph of birch, oak, willow and pine, which led to the shrinking of grazing land in northern Europe, also spelled the end of the magnificent art of the cave- and rock-paintings. An artistic pinnacle had passed, and possibly the climate is one explanation of this art ‘wrapped in a double mystery: where it came from and why it vanished’.

  The term ‘reindeer civilization’ has often been used to draw attention to the benefits that the natural world first offered, then withdrew. But several prehistorians have strongly objected to the expression and the suggestion it carries of some kind of ‘decline’ of the west in mesolithic times.7 They have rightly pointed out that during the upper paleolithic, the reindeer was by no means present everywhere. Near Nemours (Seine-et-Marne) the Magdalenians of the limestone plateau of Beau-regard were eaters of horsemeat; an immense graveyard of horses has also been found at Solutre near Macon. In some of the caves in the Ariege, the favoured game seems to have been the Pyrenean goat. In Styria, humans ate the flesh of bears, and the remains of some fifty thousand animals have been discovered on a single site. And the forests brought some benefits too: the Helix nemoraisy the species of snail found in woodlands, was prolific and an important source of food if we are to judge by the impressive middens of snailshells. Water, both fresh and salt, was once more a resource at this time: fishing accompanied hunting.

  What is more, mesolithic technology certainly does not indicate any backward move. The bow and arrow was developed and manyingenious improvements were made to the microliths used for fish-hooks and arrowheads, providing evidence of manual skill. And in the plains of northern Europe, from East Anglia to Russia, the many decorated objects, including attractive amber statuettes, artefacts made from wood, bone and horn, traces of dwellings, fishing nets, woven osiers and wooden canoes are all evidence of a lively culture known as Maglemosian, from the name of a Danish site.

  This kind of argument rightly rehabilitates the hunters and fishermen of the mesolithic age in Europe. But that is not perhaps the most important point. The mesolithic may not have meant an absolute change for the worse (debatable anyway for certain regions) but it may have brought change in the most important aspect of evolution: animal rearing and agriculture. The early domestication of animals, achieved in the Middle East in neolithic times, and by the pastoral peoples of the deserts and the Asiatic steppes, was always a slow process: it developed out of the sustained relation between hunters and particular herds of animals to which they attached themselves. Such a symbiosis between a group of animals and a group of humans does not seem tohave been possible in western Europe once the great herds of reindeer and other ice-age herbivores had disappeared. Although flocks of sheep and goats were to be found on the Mediterranean littoral in such places as Provence by the seventh millennium BC, there had been a break in continuity, probably leading to a slowdown. In the Middle East on the other hand, there had been no disruption of the climate and here the flora and fauna lent themselves more readily to domestication. Here we find the beginnings of the great adventure of the eastern Mediterranean.

  Ill The Mediterranean strikes back: the first agrarian civilization

  In about 8000 BC, just as the Franco-Cantabrian Magdalenian age was drawing to a close, genuine villages were already in existence at the other end of the Mediterranean. Their inhabitants were about to be ‘initiated into the secrets of making wheat germinate and animals bow to the yoke’, as farming of crops and animals gradually replaced hunting and gathering. With this change came fixed human settlements, as villages were no longer camp-sites but were built on top of their own middens, forming those artificial hillocks with which archaeologists are so familiar: the tells of Asia, the magoulas of Thessaly, the tumbas of Macedonia, the hoyiiks of Turkey. Should we call this a revolution (the only one deserving of the name before the industrial revolution of our own times, originating in eighteenth-century England)? Gordon Childe was the first historian to speak of the ‘neolithic revolution’ without which Homo sapiens, for all his intelligence, would have remained a scattered and therefore defenceless species, like his predecessors.

  The expression has inspired much controversy. Perhaps this arises from a simple misunderstanding over vocabulary. A revolution implies a break, a new spirit which relegates an archaic life to the past. It is true that a new kind of humanity, a new landscape, new social system and new economy did appear in a few limited parts of the globe during the neolithic era. In this respect, yes, it was indeed a revolution. But I need hardly add that the word ‘revolution’ also smacks of a truly historical vocabulary, denoting something rapid, sudden and dramatic. The ‘neolithic revolution’, like all truly prehistorical processes, took place very slowly at every stage, from its beginnings through to its settled phase and its expansion. The stages must be counted in thousands not hundreds of years. It would also be mistaken to think of it as a miraculous formula, discovered once and for all in the Middle East and then transmitted by degrees all over the world. It is possible that the formula, whether fully worked out or not, was arrived at in various parts of the globe independently. There may have been, as Emile Werth deduced from the diversity of wild grasses and animal species, several autonomous centres of invention from which the culture spread.

  A further ambiguity is introduced if this particular revolution is seen as the birth of Civilization with a capital C. Civilization, another phenomenon which took immeasurable time to develop, can truly be said to begin with the first group of human beings, however limited their resources, from the mere fact that there was a group and that it had something to pass on. Civilization becomes established or confirmed with the appearance of beliefs, the first elementary attitudes towards death and the natural world. If it is to expand and influence others, civilization requires the existence of two things: first some kind of agriculture which attaches societies, villages, and above all towns and cities, to a particular site; and secondly writing, the cement holding together any coherent society. In short, civilization was not ‘born’ at any particular time and place.

  That said, it seems that in a European and Mediterranean
context, the first steps towards an agricultural civilization were taken in the Middle East, in a few privileged and isolated spots within a vast area of inertia and indifference. Those privileged spots will be our present concern.

  Revolutionary excavations in the Fertile Crescent of Asia Minor

  The question of origins remains to be decided by archaeological studies which will certainly deserve the label revolutionary. What is known already, and what will be known in future, depends on a series ofexcavations aiming to go as deep as possible, sometimes as much as twenty metres down, to the virgin subsoil. It will not be possible to locate any crucial turning points until we are able to reconstitute the entire sequence of layers, and read off all the stages in the slow process of change, eventually charting the sequence with as precise a chronology as possible. The first evidence of pestle and mortar, of flint knives with long bone handles, of sickles, silos, grain pits, the remains of animals, wild or domestic – all these are vital elements in the story requiring careful examination. The remains of a sickle, for instance, cannot necessarily tell us whether wild cereals were being systematically harvested or whether they were already being cultivated. Traces of the cereals themselves, when their species can be identified, are more instructive on this point. Mistakes and confusions are always possible: remains rather hastily identified as those of a dog on a site in Jericho turned out after further analysis to be those of a wolf – and this might be an important detail when one is looking for the beginnings of domestication of animals.

  Nevertheless, a co-operative research network based on systematic carbon dating has made it possible to establish sequences of dates which seem either to concur or to differ in a logical fashion. Broadly speaking, the mesolithic era is seen as dating from about 10,000 BC, the proto-neolithic (without pottery) from about 9000, and the neolithic proper (with pottery) from the seventh millennium – with local variations needless to say. The most significant discovery by far remains that of an early neolithic era with no pottery – although pottery had long been considered, along with polished stone, as being the key structural sign of a neolithic site. But is that so surprising? There is no necessary connection between pottery and elementary agriculture among certain primitive peoples still to be found in the twentieth century. In central Brazil, there are tribes which do not have ceramics at all, whereas they all ‘practise a kind of agriculture based on slash-and-burn methods, at which some groups have become very accomplished’ (Claude Lévi-Strauss).

  The other discovery, even more important, is that the earliest civilizations – those which combined cultivated plants, domestic animals, houses grouped in villages and towns, some form of art, and organized cults with recognized holy places – did indeed begin in the Middle East, but not (as was thought until very recently) exclusively in the great river valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia. At the time of writing [1970] there are about twenty points on the map marking the key excavations of the last two or three decades. These are where the new evidence is to be found. They are certainly not yet complete, but already seem to point in a certain direction.

  Three zones stand out as advanced: the valleys and west-facing slopes of the Zagros range near Mesopotamia; the wide southern border of Anatolia; and the zone broadly corresponding to Syria, Palestine and Lebanon. These regions are all at fairly high altitudes, well watered (over 200 mm of rainfall a year even today) and situated within that broad arc running along the northern edge of the Syrian desert known as the ‘Fertile Crescent’. The fertility is the result of the relief, which halts and captures the rains of the winter depressions, as the mountains turn into a series of water-towers for the regions down below. The springs, streams and torrents pouring down from the hills explain the presence, so near the Syrian desert, of the woodland and vegetation which would have provided neolithic cultures with plants for cultivation. But further excavation will be needed to cover the entire zone of early farming cultures.

  Let us imagine that the Fertile Crescent is represented by a semicircle, roughly between the Dead Sea (or the Red Sea for that matter) and the Persian Gulf. Then imagine a tangent going off westwards from the highest point of the semicircle. Our brush stroke would have to be broad enough to take in all of southern Anatolia, between Catal Hdyuk and Hacilar to the north and the sites of Kizilkaya and Beldibi to the south, almost on the Mediterranean. Neolithic development was particularly precocious and striking in this Anatolian offshoot – long considered, mistakenly, to be the barbaric and backward frontier of the Fertile Crescent. In about 5000 BC, no doubt as a result of some foreign invasion, this early Anatolian civilization vanished, leaving no trace on the cultural development of the Middle East. On the other hand, during the sixth millennium BC, a neolithic culture established in Greece showed marked affinities with that of Hacilar (similar implements, similar pottery). The Anatolian influence seems undeniable, although we cannot work out how it was transmitted.

  All these local identifications add up to a pattern. The zones wherevillages first appeared correspond to the original habitat of flocks of wild sheep, goats, cattle and pigs. They also correspond to the habitat of several wild grasses, found at between 600 m and 900 m altitude: emmer from the Balkans to Iran; barley from Anatolia to Persia, and from Transcaucasia to Palestine and Arabia; and spelt, which was to be found in all these localities. Peas, lentils and vetch were also available. Having since time immemorial gathered grain from the hills, women now began to plant it; and the hunters gradually moved towards the domestication and farming of livestock.

  A few examples

  To get the authentic feel of these early stages of human culture, so crucial for future development but still at a rudimentary stage and not leading to any major civilization in this area, there is no substitute for concrete details from archaeological digs. Each of them corresponds to a culture, or rather a sequence of experiences, never identical. Three examples, briefly presented here, take us to Jarmo in the Zagros mountains; to Jericho on the lower slopes of Mount Carmel; and to fatal Hoyiik in Anatolia. The problem is finding any connection between these different yet parallel histories, fitting them into a common chronology.

  Jarmo lies on the edge of a deep wadi, the Adhaim, one of several tributaries of the Tigris flowing down from the mountains to join its middle reaches. Here archaeologists have dug down to the non-ceramic neolithic level (the seventh millennium BC). There are no fewer than eleven different levels below the first traces of pottery. All of them relate to a quite small village (twenty to twenty-five hearths, possibly 150 inhabitants). The earliest huts were built of sun-dried clay with a reed thatch; then the first fireplaces appeared, with ovens and chimneys. Hides, woven osiers lined with pitch, and stone jars were all used as receptacles. The remains of emmer, a grass still very close to the wild variety, and of spelt, two kinds of barley, peas and lentils unambiguously point to an already well-developed agriculture. Handmills, sickles, crushing tools and plenty of implements fashioned from flint and obsidian imported from Anatolia were found alongside crude earth-mother goddesses modelled from unbaked clay. The dead were buried outside the village. By the time pottery started to appear in about 6000 BC, the houses already had stone foundations. But the only animals to be domesticated were the goat and possibly the dog. Most of the meat eaten by this community was still provided by hunting wild boar, or wild sheep and cattle.

  The second example takes us to Jericho and the important excavations of 1954. We still do not know the whole story about this exceptional site which upset a number of older theories. No one expected to find a town8 with over two thousand inhabitants at the dawn of prehistory. Yet this settlement existed at a very early date. The oldest level, thought to be identified as a site of sanctuary, has been carbon dated to about 9500 BC. At this time, the village of ‘Jericho’ and all those which succeeded it on this site in the course of the ninth millennium, were indistinguishable from all the other Palestinian sites belonging to the so-called Natufian culture, Eynan for instance, on the shore
s of Lake Huleh. This strange culture of unknown origin, established in caves and on levelled terraces, then in authentic villages with circular huts, has provided rich stone-age remains and interesting sculptures, the oldest in the Middle East. It seems to have been moving towards the neolithic, with its heavy consumption of cereals (although there were no domestic animals), its pestles and mortars and its grain pits, etc. But it apparently stagnated or eventually quite disappeared from most of these early sites. The Jordan valley and Jericho in particular are exceptional in having retained its legacy.

  By the eighth millennium, the cultivation of cereal crops was probably established. Was this the reason for Jericho’s sudden remarkable expansion? After all, at this point on the shores of the Dead Sea, 200 metres below normal sea level, the conditions for successfully growing crops with the aid of irrigation were no better than anywhere else in Palestine. And yet the settlement became a town, with well-built circular houses made of dried brick on stone foundations, some of them having several rooms. Impressive trenches and ramparts (including a very large tower) were constructed round the perimeter, and the town possessed water cisterns and grain silos, all clear signs of a coherent urban identity. The explanation may lie in Jericho’s exploitation of the salt, sulphur and precious bitumen (pitch) to be found in the Dead Sea – in other words very early trading activity, since we already findobsidian from Anatolia making an appearance in the ancient village by the ninth millennium. It would later be joined by nephrite and other volcanic rocks also from Anatolia, turquoise from Sinai and cowrie shells from the Red Sea.