This kind of evidence prompts the belief that alongside the agricultural revolution, there must have been a revolution in communications, in those early days of ‘civilization’. That too must go back much further than we used to think. These long-distance contacts may not all have been beneficial, however, since after twenty-two levels of building and a thousand years of an existence which was prosperous though not always secure, to judge by the extended ramparts, the town was abandoned at the beginning of the seventh millennium. It was almost immediately reoccupied, but now by a different population, who took over the whole Jordan valley at this time: the signs are that these people came from northern Syria or Anatolia. The Natufian culture entirely disappears at this point: the houses in the new town were rectangular and had plastered floors in the Syrian tradition. The economy remained proto-neolithic, as it was to be for the next ten to fifteen centuries, the only real innovation being the domestication of the goat and dog. The neolithic era with pottery was finally established in Jericho in the sixth millennium, and was probably brought there by a semi-nomadic people, following a second desertion of the town indicated by a gap in the layers. Oddly enough, the arrival of pottery corresponded to a long period of cultural impoverishment in Jericho, Palestine and the Lebanon, which lasted until the fourth millennium.
Our third example, fatal Hoyiik in Anatolia, provides even more food for thought, since excavation in 1962-4 revealed, lying adjacent to proto-neolithic traces, what may be the earliest example of a neolithic culture with pottery in the whole of Asia Minor. fatal Hoyiik is a real town9 of which unfortunately only one district has been prospected, the so-called ‘priests’ quarter’, half a hectare of a fifteen-hectare site. Twelve levels have been identified between 6500 and 5650 BC. The earliest dwellings were single-storey rectangular houses made of dried brick, with a hole in the roof to let out smoke and small high ‘windows’ to let in light. The way in was through an opening in the flat roof, reached by a ladder (houses of this type are still to be found today in Anatolia and even Armenia). There were no doors and no real streets. Sometimes there was an inner courtyard, shared by several houses, with tiny windows opening on to it. Alternatively, if dwellings were built all the way up the side of the tell, adjoining houses could have windows opening on to the neighbour’s roof. To get from one house to another, people used short ladders laid across the roofs. Figure 4 on p. 56 explains this odd way of moving about more clearly than a description in words. The town thus presented to the outside world a series of blank adjoining walls, making it easy to defend, with windows serving as loopholes for archers.
The presumption that the inhabitants of this large settlement came from the nearby mountains (where primitive plants were to be found) suggests that they had an interesting previous history, about which unfortunately nothing is known. This is the more regrettable since it would have provided us with knowledge about the transition from the previous mesolithic stage to the neolithic ‘revolution’.
In Catal Hoyiik, agriculture had indeed reached a high degree of organization: the fields around the town were farmed, perhaps collectively, to bear wheat (three varieties), unbearded barley, lentils, peas, vetch, as well as pistachio, almond and cherry trees. Oil was pressed and beer was probably brewed. Sheep and possibly cattle were domesticated,10 while other beasts were regularly hunted: wild cattle, deer, onager, roe deer, boar – and especially leopard. But what must be remembered is that the most importance source of income for the town was trade.
Lying near two active volcanoes, Catal Hoyiik operated a virtual monopoly on the trade in obsidian with western Anatolia, Cyprus and the Levant. In exchange, it received high-quality flint from Syria, many shells from the Mediterranean, and all kinds of stone: alabaster, marble, black limestone, and from the nearby mountains ochre, cinnabar, native copper and even copper ore. This material provided supplies for the town’s already advanced craftsmanship: represented, for example, by a ritual dagger with a flint blade and chased bone handle, decorated with the coils of a snake, dating from the beginning of the sixth millennium. But even before this date, all the little objects which were placed alongside the bodies of the dead, the countless javelins, lances and arrowheads, the mirrors of polished obsidian, the necklaces of finely pierced beads carved from brownstone, blue apatite or shell,
Figure 3 (Above) fatal Hoyiik – inside a sanctuary: showing the goddess giving birth to a bull, the seats arranged around, the bull’s horns and the ladder giving access to the upper terrace (drawing after J. Mellaart).
Figure 4 (Below) A district in Çatal Höyük: small groups of adjoining houses are clustered round several sanctuaries. On the outer side, the walls form a continuous barrier, protecting the village against marauders. The almost total absence of doors suggests that people moved between the houses via the terraces rather than at ground level (drawing by Laure Nollet).
the pendants made of obsidian or copper, the metal beads (copper and lead), the vessels made of wood, bone and horn, the textiles of finely woven fabric, probably wool – all of these strongly indicate the existence of specialized craftworking. Finally, the pottery on this site, still crude in the seventh millennium, progressively becomes finer, first red or dark-coloured earthenware, then smooth, yellowish and mottled in different colours. In the final stages, which excavation has not yet discovered on this site, but which we know about from Hacilar, painted pottery is found, red on a cream base or white on red (mid-sixth millennium).
But it is its sacred art which makes fatal Hciyuk especially interesting. At the various levels of the different sanctuaries, a particularly rich collection of artefacts has been found: many sculptures made of stone, alabaster, marble or terracotta; some reliefs and paintings executed with a brush on a smooth plaster surface, the first known paintings done on a man-made wall. The fertility goddess, the essential divinity of neolithic cults, appears here in many versions: as a young girl, as a pregnant woman, reminiscent of the paelolithic Venuses, or sometimes giving birth to a bull. The bull is the male god, generally represented by a bull’s head alone, or by rows of horns, only rarely in anthropomorphic shape.
Paleolithic religion still surfaces in places, with all its ancient imagery: mural frescoes and relief friezes representing animals: bulls, cattle, deer, boar, leopards (the goddess’s sacred beasts). There are patterns made with handprints, painted or indented, as in the cave art of France and Spain, covering an entire panel in one sanctuary, alongside images of women’s breasts and bulls’ heads; and there are hunting scenes with dancers clad in leopard skins, and funeral rites in which priests disguised as vultures are officiating. In this culture, the bodies of the dead were indeed exposed for birds of prey to pick the bones clean. Their skeletons were then wrapped in their clothing and buried, with their worldly goods, in the house in which they had lived, under one of the raised platforms found in every dwelling, large stone benches on which people sat, worked and even slept, as in ancient houses in China. Women were always buried under the principal platform in the house, in the place of honour, a sign that this was a society where mothers, priestesses and goddesses reigned.
IV Conclusion
The innovations of the neolithic era took place, as far as we know, at pinpoints on the map, distant from one another, but with zones of influence around them. Can we say that these points added up to a kind of powder trail which caught alight and sent the flame further afield? The image certainly does not fit the slow propagation of agriculture and livestock farming. ‘Neolithicization’ took only small steps from its eastern centres, and did not take hold everywhere: whole regions of the Mediterranean and Europe were left behind. Even in the Middle East, it would take another twenty or thirty centuries before the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt emerged.
But what I find fascinating about these early microcosms, particularly Catal Hoyiik, is that their evolution was already reaching the stage of an urban culture. Despite what has been said about them, these were not merely large villages, th
e product of agriculture, livestock herding and the sedentarization of nomadic people. We can see in them the beginnings of a division of labour. Long-distance trade, in my view the key factor, was already present, not to mention the social organization necessary for any highly ritualized religion: each sanctuary in Catal Hoyiik was at the centre of its own district. It is true that these towns did not last: at some point these ventures received some kind of mortal blow. But they had made a start, prefiguring the future. From that time on, the die was cast. Catal Hoyiik and Hacilar would simply disappear; Jericho would decline into obscurity; Jarmo lasted only a few centuries and was in any case never much more than a hamlet. But the head start gained by the seas, the countries and the peoples of the Middle East had already become a fixture for millennia to come. This represents a geographical and spatial feat, the most lasting of victories. Local setbacks notwithstanding, it was here that civilization would first spring to life and here that its first outstanding examples would be located. From now on the Mediterranean would look towards these enlightened areas, and that orientation would be very long-lasting.
So we find that our sea was from the very dawn of its protohistory a witness to those imbalances productive of change which would set the rhythm of its entire life. They consisted both of north-south contrasts, as already described, and of east-west contrasts which very soon took the form of differences in level, leading eventually to marked conflicts between civilizations.
3
A Twofold Birth
The neolithic revolution as here defined – the appearance of fields, cultivated plants, domestic animals, pottery, weaving, villages and eventually towns – extended over a large part of the Mediterranean area between the fifth and the third millennia BC. It was of capital importance for the destiny of the sea th it this early series of changes, leading to the great civilizations of the fourth and third millennia, should have taken place on or near its shores. The transformations were accompanied by a revolution in transport, both on land and on sea. Some time between the far-off tenth millennium (a very approximate date) and the second, coasts and rivers were gradually explored by shipping.
So it was that increasingly complex and well-organized societies developed, while the number of boats sailing on the sea also increased. From this double history, which is perhaps a single one after all, the historical Mediterranean derived its first identity.
I Mesopotamia and Egypt: the beginnings
The first miracles took place not on the shores of the sea itself but along certain freshwater courses. The domestication of the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates lay behind the c reation of Egypt and Mesopotamia: economic, cultural and already political giants dating from even earlier than the third millennium. Yet the areas in question were very small: Upper Egypt covered only about 12,000 square kilometres, Lower Egypt 11,000; Mesopotamia, if measured by its fertile gardens, represented about 20-25,000 square kilometres of irrigable land. On these modest territories there assembled an unprecedented concentration of peoples and resources. For centuries to come, the Middle East and the busy seas bordering on it would be centred on the Egypt-Mesopotamia axis, the whole forming a fragile entity but one gradually gaining in coherence.
A few comparisons
Civilization in its first really large-scale forms came into being at roughly the same time in Mesopotamia and Egypt, in the fourth millennium. By about a thousand years later (hardly any time at all in this context of very slow change) civilizations had appeared on the distant banks of the Indus, and probably in China as well. The phenomenon did not happen everywhere at exactly the same moment in world history: it was not as if civilization was somehow ‘in the air’ for all to experience. Rather, history started more or less from scratch, in one place after another.
These civilizations grew up on the banks of rivers which had to be tamed by the use of artificial irrigation, so that full use could be made of their alluvial mud which was easy to till and provided ever-renewable fertility. The results matched the effort: they produced both an unparalleled advantage in global terms and the visible subjection of individuals to the collective good. Such a disciplined society could not have been put in place without the networks of towns, made possible by the agricultural surpluses from the nearby countryside. Yet these towns had at first been inward-looking. Their self-centred preoccupations had operated only over a short radius. They were like aggressive wasps which had to be tamed and brought under control before they could be incorporated into a busy beehive. The operation succeeded by and large in Egypt, but had little or no success in Mesopotamia. This became a distinctive trait of their respective histories.
In order for the unequal dialogue between town and country to become established, certain things had to be in position: advanced economic links; some form of division of labour; social obedience based on strict religious beliefs, and a royal dynasty based on divine right. All of these – religion, a dynastic ruler, towns, irrigation channels, plus the skill of writing, without which no orders could be sentover distances and no accounts committed to memory – had to be created ex nihilo.
The rest followed in sequence. These urban societies had certain immediate needs: salt, wood for building, stone (even the most basic). Then, like any society which is developing towards a more sophisticated stage, new needs sprang up and quickly became necessities: gold, silver, copper, tin (essential for casting bronze), oil, wine, precious stones, ivory, rare woods. As it grew richer, a society would send abroad for these goods. In short, the range of commodities to be traded increased considerably, opening up to outside influence economic circuits which would otherwise have been self-contained. Road traffic became organized: caravans of pack-asses soon appeared, to be followed by wheeled vehicles (the heavy four-wheeled cart was not easy to manoeuvre, but was present in Mesopotamia by the fourth millennium), and cargo vessels, powered by sails or oars.
Mesopotamia, first off the mark. Does this matter?
Specialists are virtually unanimous that Mesopotamia was the first to develop. Before Egypt, the first place on earth to develop the plough, the wheel, writing and later money was the ‘river island’ between the Tigris and the Euphrates. At some later point, on the eve of the third millennium, Egypt borrowed from its distant rival a number of things: the cylindrical seal, the brick wall with redans and niches, a series of artistic themes, especially heraldic monsters, significant words such as mr (= house); possibly the key-word ma’at (= justice, truth); and perhaps the shape of its boats, in the view of scholars in the past: we are not quite so sure today. But these examples, inconclusive in themselves, do not in fact resolve the debate. There have been civilizations which borrowed more than others, but they were not on that account inferior or less precocious. A stone vase with indented carvings dating from the end of the fourth millennium, discovered by Keith Seele, and a vase of the same period in the British Museum, depict boats on the Nile of the same ancient type as those on the cylindrical seals of Mesopotamia: they have the same shape and possibly a more advanced design of sail. One specialist has rightly pointed out that if Egypt was in direct contact with Mesopotamia in the fourth and third millennia, it would have been odd if it did not borrow the wheel and cart we know to have existed in Sumer – but which Egypt did not in fact adopt until the second millennium when the Hyksos invaded the Nile Delta using chariots and horses. After studying the sequence of cultural and trading relations in the Middle East, the same expert concludes that the two civilizations probably never had any serious contacts except through intermediaries, such as the link-towns on the Syrian-Lebanese coast.
All the same, the development of the Nile Valley civilization in about 3000 BC shows every sign of being a ‘sudden mutation’. While it may not have been the result of ‘a massive invasion of Egypt by Asiatic peoples’, some writers do attribute it to ‘the infiltration of small groups of immigrants including… artisans’, that is to some kind of ‘catalytic influence on the emerging kingdom of the Nile’, at a time when pol
itical unity was being achieved with the first pharaohs. This may be the case. Another hypothesis, that the incomers were Mesopotamians who ‘came round the Arab peninsula by sea’, is not impossible. Yet if Asiatic influence was so strong and decisive, it is surely surprising that Egyptian culture should from the start have been marked by its own special and original style, one which it would never subsequently abandon. From earliest times, it was ‘monolithic, singular… and intolerant of any dialogue’. In the Narmer Palette, one of the most characteristic examples of an artefact showing a typically Mesopotamian motif (two fantastic beasts with long interlocking necks), the subject is the only thing that is Mesopotamian, since both form and handling display features and conventions which were to distinguish Egyptian art for three millennia. Menes-Narmer’s outstretched arm, victoriously threatening his prostrate enemy, prefigures exactly the gesture of Tutmosis III, fifteen hundred years later, in the temple to Ammon at Karnak.
The Mediterranean in the Ancient World Page 9