The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  Although it is therefore doubtful whether Egyptian civilization can be traced to Mesopotamian origins, it is likely that the latter came first. But why should one civilization appear earlier than the other? And why at that time and in that place? The simple answer may be to look at the related geographical situations of Mesopotamia and of the narrow zone in which the first neolithic advances were made.

  There was clearly more than one ‘Mesopotamia’. The famousartificial irrigation and its miracles were actually located in Lower Mesopotamia and only after the fifth millennium. Northern Mesopotamia was a dry zone looking towards the Euphrates and becoming progressively better watered to the east, thanks to the streams and springs of the Armenian mountains and the proximity of the Zagros. A land of hills and low plateaux, it corresponded in part to what we have earlier described as the Fertile Crescent. We know that agriculture and animal husbandry spread from the very ancient original sites to extend to the entire zone between northern Syria and the Iranian plateau, thus taking in a swathe of northern Mesopotamia. The people here had no need to travel to find the earliest rudiments of civilization: they were already on the spot.

  It was in the north therefore that the earliest Mesopotamian cultures developed. They are known after their very fine painted ceramics: Hassuna (about 6000 BC); followed by Samarra (about 5500) and Halaf (5000). Viewed from close up, the development is very complex, with a variety of origins: the Halaf culture, for example, did not derive from the two previous groups, and in some areas was overlaid on the still existing Samarra. But in each case, one can clearly recognize a trading area, given concrete shape by the spread of the characteristic ceramics. We find Hassuna and Samarra pottery confined to northern Iraq, while the Halaf zone is much wider, lying between the Euphrates and the Great Zab, a tributary of the Tigris. It was on the Iranian side, at Arpachiya in particular, that the art of Halaf ceramics developed in its most perfect form, and it was no doubt on the Syrian side, where it would have encountered echoes of Samarra and a strong local tradition of metal-working, that the Halaf culture developed the use of copper.

  These successive cultures both echo and explain one another. The same is not true of the colonization of southern Mesopotamia. The earliest traces of this have been found at the southern site of Eridu, dating from about the fifth millennium; later traces appear at El Obeid and Uruk. The unprecedented scale of the irrigation schemes here must have mobilized many labourers, no doubt the surplus populations of the various Mesopotamian settlements, towns and villages from which pioneers emigrated. One particularly important immigration was that of the Sumerians, who gave the name of Sumer to the lower valley with its irrigation. We know little or nothing, alas, about these hardy and intelligent people, who laid the solid foundations of the civilization which famously grew up between the Tigris and Euphrates. Even their language, and their script, although the latter has been deciphered, do not reveal the secret of their origin. It was thought at one time that they came from Turkestan, or even the Indus. They may simply have been farmers from eastern Iran, from the region later to become Persepolis. Their early pottery suggests the influence of northern Mesopotamia, Samarra or Halaf. But this southern culture very quickly developed along its own lines, thanks to a new type of agriculture, which brought about a revolution in their way of life.

  The Sumerians had settled on uncultivated and inhospitable land. The soil was certainly rich, composed of river mud which would be easy to till and to plant, and capable of providing fabulous yields (eighty grains harvested for every one sown, according to the Bible), but it had first to be reclaimed from stagnant waters, from huge reedbeds inhabited only by fish, waterfowl and wild beasts. The climate was torrid and the rainfall scanty, yet the floodwaters from the rivers were as catastrophic as the dry season. These rivers ran through a bed raised up by their own alluvial deposits, high above the plain, behind natural levees of their own creation, yet not strong enough to contain their regularly tumultuous floodwaters, caused by the melting of the Armenian snows. When that happened, the water spilled over the plain, turning every depression into a marsh. To avoid their crops being swept away, the earliest settlers had to strengthen the natural dykes, build channels to drain away excess water into pools later used as reservoirs to water plants parched by the summer drought. This all required not only unremitting labour, repeated year after year under the blazing sun, but also many technical miracles, the digging of raised-up canals for example with downhill sluices, or the cutting of irrigation channels far from the original river bank. Some divine assistance may have been called for: Enki, the fish-god of Eridu, is said to have revealed to humans the secrets of mastery over the waters.

  Once the waters had been domesticated, Lower Mesopotamia did indeed become ‘the garden of Eden’, where waves of immigrants came to settle, where there was an abundance of cereals, fruit trees and sesame (the essential source of oil in the Middle East for ages to come), and of course that marvel among trees, the date-palm.

  The centre of gravity of Mesopotamia moved south as a result. While civilization had originally come from the north, now it would be located entirely in the south, and all those fragile early centres would be wiped out, swept away by the sheer weight of the massive civilization of the lower valley, triumphant and naturally expansionist.

  Egypt: similar but not identical

  Egypt too found that its mighty river was not an easy ally. If it did not exactly have to be conquered, it did need engineering work: the chief problem was to increase the area of arable land which was washed over then uncovered in the natural floodplain of the Nile. The situation was not the same as that on the Euphrates: Egypt and Mesopotamia would never be identically placed.

  The most obvious reason is that Egypt was from the start surrounded by deserts, with arid wastes cutting it off on all sides. It was the increasing dryness of the climate which had created Egypt, by intensifying the encroachment of the Saharan sands from the seventh and sixth millennia onwards. Populations of mixed origin (brachycephalic, dolichocephalic, Negro, Mediterranean, and some related peoples of Cro-Magnon descent) fled there from the south, the east and the west, sometimes leading to confrontations. These refugees were moving closer to the vital water supply. This was the origin of the independent cantons and districts of Egypt, the future nomes.

  It took time before the waters were brought under control. The Nile might have been reduced in volume by the increasing drought, even losing some of its tributaries, but it remained a monstrous natural phenomenon, a powerful body of water. Like the Mesopotamian rivers, it had built up its bed, creating on either side undulating banks of soft mud, over which it flooded every year, leaving pools and marshes behind it as it retreated. Water seeped into every hollow and lay stagnant. Lake Fayum, before it was ‘improved’, was a huge swamp, covered in water plants. The super-rich zone of the Nile Delta, constantly accumulating further territory, was a labyrinth of lagoons, of low-lying amphibious islands and marshy swamps. It was a paradise for wild beasts and throughout Egyptian history it remained a refuge for human fugitives. The magnificent bas-reliefs decorating the tombs of Saqqarah (about 1500 BC) show hunters gliding in flat-bottomed boats among a medley of creatures: fish, crocodiles, hippopotami, and every kind of waterfowl: ibis, herons, ducks, kingfishers. Men and beasts alike could slip through the high clumps of papyrus, their forests of huge ribbed stems forming the regular background to hunting scenes in the Delta. On their great umbrella-tops, birds built their nests. A thousand years later, exactly the same scenery appears on the brightly coloured frescoes of the eighteenth dynasty: the same hunters, the same impenetrable thickets, the same light boats built of rushes bound together in thick bundles, the same flying birds, the same threatening hippopotami lurking in the depths of the marshes. Beyond these images we can glimpse the wildlife of early Egypt, its inhospitality to man.

  But unlike the valleys of the Tigris or Euphrates, the regular flooding of the Nile between the summer solstice and the autumn equ
inox allowed for a predictable farming calendar. The flood brought everything that was needed, water and black Nile mud, but it was confined by natural features to the valley bed, since the river was enclosed on both sides by the hills of the desert, the Arabian chain to the east and the Libyan relief to the west. So in Egypt, floodwaters did not have to be checked and brought under control, merely channelled.

  Prodigious feats of labour were nevertheless called for, to fill in the marshy hollows, to strengthen the banks, or to set up levees (embankments) running across the valley between the two deserts. The double strip of farmland on either side was thus divided into a series of basins, held in by levees. When the floods came, the embankments were breached, then closed again once the basins were covered with rich muddy water to about a metre or two in depth. They would remain submerged for at least a month before the water would drain away by the force of gravity, from basin to basin. So, apart from the great labour of building the embankments (which should not be underestimated) a regular pattern was in place: the river brought water and fertility and prepared the way for crops. The earliest ‘machines’ for artificial irrigation appeared rather late in Egypt: the shaduf, possibly an import from Mesopotamia where it was to be found in the third millennium; the noria which came with the Persians in the sixth century BC; and the Archimedes screw, imported by the Greeks inabout 200 b c. Egypt had been able to manage without these techniques for a long time: the embankments of the Nile had done the work unaided.

  Surviving texts from Mesopotamia tell of much more complex activities. Here irrigation was far more artificial than on the banks of the Nile. The water level was under constant surveillance and one sluice or another was always having to be ‘opened’ or ‘diverted’, sending surplus water to the marshes or basins; the flow of irrigation had to be directed first one way then another, and there was a constant battle against the reeds, grass and mud which blocked the rivulets; sometimes the land had to be ploughed to enable the water to penetrate the earth (‘getting out the oxen to water the earth’). In the surviving letters giving orders or describing the work accomplished, there are many vivid images. We may perhaps conclude with Maurice Vieyra: ‘Egypt was a gift from the Nile. Mesopotamia was made by human hands’ (1961).

  Other kinds of progress: the potter’s wheel

  The victory over water was accompanied by other achievements and advances. Let us start with the most basic.

  The invention of the potter’s wheel in Lower Mesopotamia in the first half of the fourth millennium is one such. The first turned pots seem curiously devoid of any concern for beauty: they are very simple, in plain colours, beige or light yellow. Only after two or three centuries did they start to be decorated with red or purple glaze, still using plain colours. This was the style known to us as Uruk. In about 3400, and on the same sites, it began to replace the simple but delicate ancient ceramics of Eridu and El Obeid, or the inventive and beautiful pottery of nearby Susiana. Then this undistinguished and not particularly attractive pottery spread to the whole of Mesopotamia, where the great tradition of painted ceramics seems to have died out entirely.

  This was perhaps only logical. Uruk was already an enormous city for the time (possibly 20,000 inhabitants); it was in touch with other large towns along the river and once it had acquired the wheel, it was able to turn out industrial pottery in large quantities, probably using less experienced labour than before. This undecorated pottery was exported in all directions in bulk, both in north and south Mesopotamia. Products varied only in shape. This was the first appearance of the ‘functional’ pot. During the latter half of the fourth millennium, then, inventiveness, imagination and taste were to be found surviving among the potters of neighbouring Iran, sometimes in surprisingly poor villages, rather than in the great cities of Mesopotamia, which were at the cutting edge of progress. Every time one finds any local production in Mesopotamia where the potters have retained some skill in painting, it always happens to be in the regions in direct contact with Iran. Such for instance is the red and black pottery of the Jemdet Nasr period (c. 3200), related to the ‘scarlet ceramics’ of the Diyala valley and also found on Iranian sites or in Mesopotamian towns such as Mussian near the Diyala (c. 2800). The same can be said of the ‘Ninevite V’ style which spread in about 3000 through the region that would later be called Assyria, at one end of the passes leading to Azerbaijan.

  In Egypt, amusingly enough, stone and clay seem to have been in competition with each other. Throughout the fourth millennium and beyond, hand-made pottery had become progressively refined in its firing procedures, colours and designs. At the same time, vessels made of polished stone, which called for hours of work, became a rare luxury, although the technology of flint tools had by then reached a magnificent level of precision and accuracy (witness the perfect regularity of the Jebel el-Arak blade, cut according to the undulation technique). But with the last pre-dynastic age, at about the time when Mesopotamia began regularly employing the potter’s wheel, the Egyptians invented a stone-drill, worked by a handle. This made it possible to hollow out a block of stone with far less effort, and it is after this that we find the great age of stone cups and vases in Egypt, made of various materials each more beautiful than the last. Concurrently, from about 3200, the style of ceramics declines in quality, design and glaze, and shapes become utilitarian. The wheel, which was not in general use until 2600, although it had been invented earlier, led to increased output of pottery, but did not restore it to its past grandeur. Specialized and stereotyped designs were dictated by the vessel’s destination. It was not usually decorated. In the coloured display pieces which have been found, the paint is generally fragile, having beenapplied after firing, and would easily have been removed by water. What is known as Egyptian porcelain, so famous during the Middle Empire and exported overseas, was actually vitrified enamel, baked in a kiln on a base made of stone or agglomerated stone dust and usually in a mould. The poor quality of pottery in Egypt helps explain the great vogue there of imported Cretan and Mycenaean ceramics from the fifteenth century BC.

  Farming: crops and animals

  Other more important kinds of progress affected crops and animals. It is impossible to work out how much was contributed by the first hill-farmers and how much by the pioneers of the large crop farms in the plains. What we can be sure of is the steady improvement of cereal species, fruit-trees, olives, vines and date-palms. More breeds of animals were domesticated. In Mesopotamia, domestic animals, whether inherited from the neolithic era or acquired more recently, included dogs, sheep, goats, pigs, oxen, onagers and later asses (which were not native). Latecomers were horses and camels, both imported, the first from the northern steppes, the second from Arabia, hence their names of ‘ass of the north’ and ‘ass of the south’.

  The Egyptians had domesticated or captured the same or similar species, as well as other examples of African fauna. They had even experimented, sometimes rather unwisely, with such birds and beasts as pelicans, leopards, herons, cranes, antelopes, hyenas and gazelles. Other initiatives were of more permanent value. They successfully domesticated cats, Nile geese – flocks of which are depicted on the bas-reliefs of the third millennium – pigeons, and chickens, which appear only in about 1500 BC. The Annals of Tutmosis III refer to this extraordinary bird which could lay eggs at any time of year.

  Even more significant in Mesopotamia than the training of asses as beasts of burden in the third millennium, was the feat of harnessing oxen to carts and ploughs. The early plough, a kind of hoe dragged along by a team of animals, can be identified on Mesopotamian seals of the fourth millennium, but it is not impossible that wooden ploughs with metal or even flint ploughshares existed even earlier, perhaps in the Fertile Crescent. In Egypt, where the plough appeared in the fourth millennium, grain was sown broadcast, then buried by ploughing or the hoofs of animals. In Mesopotamia in the second millennium, a sort of mould-board was fixed on to the plough handle. The grain fell into the open furrow and was covered b
y a rear-fitted harrow.

  Should one call the arrival of the plough a revolution? It is tempting to do so. It certainly led to the spread and acceleration of agriculture even on fairly poor soil, and improved possibilities of cultivating the same land with short fallow periods. Longer fallow periods, which led to the growth of trees and shrubs, entailed the practice of slash-and-burn. But this method could not destroy the grass growing on short-term fallow land: for that a plough was needed. This progress was followed by an increase in the number of mouths to feed – unless it was the other way round and an increase in population called the technology into being.

  There was another consequence. Until now, women had been in charge of the fields and gardens where cereals were grown: everything had depended on their tilling the soil and tending the crop. Men had been first hunters, then herdsmen. But now men took over the plough, which they alone were allowed to use. At a stroke, it might seem that the society would move from being matriarchal to patriarchal: that there would be a shift away from the reign of the all-powerful mother-goddesses and immemorial fertility cults presided over by priestesses to be found in neolithic communities, and towards the male gods and priests who were predominant in Sumer and Babylon. At least, if we could be sure of this, it would be a good example of economic determinism! But the Earth Mother retained an important role, even after the appearance of the plough, and would continue to reign for a long time to come, especially in the Aegean religions in Crete and later in Greece. No doubt in this domain developments were too long-term and too complicated to be summed up in any formula. The domestication of large animals like asses and oxen, followed by horses and camels, took centuries. Metal-working, a noble craft reserved for men, was also to tip the balance towards male domination of society and its beliefs, ‘from a queen resembling the Earth Mother to a king resembling Jupiter’ as Jean Przyluski put it. But here again, it was the result of centuries of social change. In the Babylonian myths, the sun god Marduk has to kill the terrible she-dragon Tiamat in order to createheaven and earth from her body. But in Sumer, the goddess Inanna was still queen of fertility, the deity to whom the fruits of the earth were offered (cf. the Warka vase).