Toynbee is not the first historian to introduce the notion of “progress” in his work, and the fallacy of this procedure has been well demonstrated by Collingwood.[20] Of his arguments we can quote only two passages. He maintains that a historian comparing two historical periods or ways of life must be able to “understand (them) historically, that is with enough sympathy and insight to reconstruct their experience for himself.” But that means that he has already accepted them as things to be judged by their own standards. Each is for the historian “a form of life having its own problems, to be judged by its success in solving those problems and no others. Nor is he assuming that the two different ways of life were attempts to do one and the same thing and asking whether the second did it better than the first. Bach was not trying to write like Beethoven and failing; Athens was not a relatively unsuccessful attempt to produce Rome.”

Collingwood then indicates the exceptional (and really purely academic) case in which one may be entitled to speak of progress,[21] and in doing so touches upon a subject with which modern man is particularly concerned:

Can we speak of progress in happiness or comfort or satisfaction? Obviously not.... The problem of being comfortable in a medieval cottage is so different from the problem of being comfortable in a modern slum that there is no comparing them; the happiness of a peasant is not contained in the happiness of a millionaire.

Toynbee, though he is less precise than Collingwood, does formulate what he means by progress. He equates it with growth, and “growth is progress towards self-determination.”[22] But Toynbee, who is a believing Christian, surely knows that self-determination may not be a matter of gradual advance at all, but rather a flash-like illumination in which one’s true nature stands revealed. As a rule, the sequel to this experience is a life-long struggle for a realization of the vision. Why could not this type of self-determination also, like the slow and gradual realization, have an analogy in the life of civilizations? Flinders Petrie and others have maintained that every significant trait of Egyptian culture had been evolved before the end of the Third Dynasty. We find once more that Toynbee has uncritically proclaimed the universal validity of one of several possible sequences. And if he describes “the consummation of human history” as “accomplishing the transformation of Sub-Man through Man into Super-Man”[23] and calls this “the goal towards which ‘the whole creation groaneth and travaileth’ (Romans viii, 22),”[24] we may respect his faith but can hardly accept it as the argument of an “empirical student of history.”[25]

It is, in fact, odd that Toynbee, who opens his work with an excellent statement of the relativity of historical thought, who complains that “a local and temporary standpoint has given our historians a false perspective,” remains himself so completely under the spell of a nineteenth-century western outlook. His evolutionary bias, his empiricism, and his treatment of civilizations as “specimens of a species” are all of a piece. He sometimes equals Spengler in myth-making, treating his equation of civilizations and living beings as a reality, and appealing to biological opinion to uphold a historical conclusion.[26] His use of “species” and “genus” obscures the fundamental fact that science can study individuals as members of a species only by ignoring their individual characteristics. The historian, following this course, would defeat the very purpose of his work.

In fact, Toynbee’s vaunted empiricism is an attempt to transpose the method of the natural sciences, where experiment is essential and experience is reduced to figures, to history, where experiment is impossible and experience subjective. Toynbee’s “experience” (a word which, in the case of a historian, may stand for intimate acquaintance with historical data) is confined to classical antiquity and its western descendant. It is an odd fact that he should have supposed this limited field capable of supplying the conceptual apparatus with which every historical phenomenon could be comprehended, and that he should have done this, not unconsciously, but knowingly, although unaware of the enormity of his assumption. For anyone moving outside western tradition should soon discover the truth that the values found in different civilizations are incommensurate. And so we find Toynbee, like Spengler, doing violence to the evidence and forcing each civilization into a preconceived system of categories. In his case the system is not, like Spengler’s, an imaginative construction; but it is derived from the crucial period in western history when the Roman Empire disintegrated. His generalization of particular circumstances results not in historical errors but in irrelevancies. It would be a tedious and laborious task to demonstrate this to the full; but let us take two characteristic quotations referring to Egypt.

Toynbee expects to find in every civilization an analogy of the early Christian Church in the Roman Empire, and thus postulates for Egypt an “Osireian Church” as a “universal church created by an internal proletariat.”[27] Now, a “church” as an organized body of believers was not known in Egypt at any time (nor in Mesopotamia, for that matter). The worship of Osiris, always a main concern of the king, spread through all classes of the population, but merely as one among many devotions which filled the life of every Egyptian; the god was never honoured by one group more than by another. And, in fact, no section of the population of Egypt can be called a proletariat if this word is to remain applicable to imperial Rome or to modern times. If, elsewhere,[28] Toynbee describes the expulsion of the Hyksos invaders from Egypt as due to a “union sacrée between the dominant minority of the Egyptiac society and its internal proletariat against the external proletariat as represented by the Hyksos” one can only say that the words, severally and in conjunction, do not apply. But he continues:

for it was this reconciliation at the eleventh hour that prolonged the existence of the Egyptiac society—in a petrified state of life-in-death—for two thousand years beyond the date when the progress of disintegration would otherwise have reached its natural term in dissolution. And this life-in-death was not merely an unprofitable burden to the moribund Egyptiac society itself; it was also a fatal blight upon the growth of the living Osireian church ... for this union sacrée ... took the form of an amalgamation of the living worship of Osiris with the dead worship of the official Egyptiac pantheon.

Reading this, one would not suspect that the five centuries following the expulsion of the Hyksos are the most brilliant epoch of Egyptian history. One would also not assume that after about one thousand years of this “life-in-death,” religious texts glorifying Amon-Re were written which in profundity of thought and literary splendour belong to the greatest in Egyptian literature, and are its nearest approach to the majestic monotheism of the Old Testament.[29] Surely an “empirical” approach would have started from the fact that Egyptian civilization did actually retain its vitality over an unusually long period. Toynbee, however, declares that the Egyptian achievements in the second and first millennia B.C. are but illusions, for the scheme to which he is committed (although it is alien, and hence irrelevant, to Egyptian history) requires a “time of troubles” before the Middle Kingdom[30] which must be followed by a “universal church” with its two types of proletariat. Thus the confessed “empiricist” adheres to a preconceived system and disposes of the facts by proclaiming the Hyksos period “a date when the process of disintegration would otherwise have reached its natural term in dissolution.” (The italics are mine.)

The scheme which we have criticized in its application to Egypt is intended to render account of the dynamics of civilizations in their last phases. For the early phases, the classical world cannot supply ready-made notions. Here Toynbee introduces a set of formulas which may be summarized in his own words:

Growth is achieved, when an individual, or a minority, or a whole society, replies to a challenge by a response, which not only answers the particular challenge that has evoked it, but also exposes the respondent to a fresh challenge which demands a fresh response on his part. And the process of growth continues, in any given case, so long as this recurrent movement of disturbance and restoration and overbalance and renewed disturbance of equilibrium is maintained.[31]

But communities react differently under a common challenge; some are apt

to succumb whereas others strike out a successful response through a creative movement of Withdrawal-and-Return, while others again, neither succeed in responding along original lines nor fail to respond altogether, but manage to survive the crisis by waiting until some creative individual or creative minority has shown the way through, and then following tamely in the footsteps of the pioneers.

These plausible words do not, upon closer inspection, explain the problem which concerns us. The “creative movement of Withdrawal-and-Return” is illustrated by examples which rob it not only of its obvious, but of all definite, meaning.[32]

The other formula—that of “Challenge-and-Response”[33]—is not evolved from inside history either but is applied, as it were, from the outside; and its applicability, let alone its power to explain the facts, is often more than doubtful. “Challenge-and-Response” is sometimes used to describe a true conflict; sometimes it refers merely to the ordinary seesaw of historical fortune. Always, however, it has a misleading ring, since observed facts are called a response, to a hypothetical challenge construed to meet those facts. In Volume II, “The Range of Challenge-and-Response,” we find headings like “The Stimulus of Hard Countries,” “The Stimulus of New Ground,” “The Stimulus of Blows,” “The Stimulus of Pressure,” “The Stimulus of Penalization,” and so on. The primary data of history merely show that certain peoples achieved greatness; Toynbee thinks that the adverse conditions which he enumerates served as stimuli. That may be so. In any case, it does not explain the fact which, above all others, requires explanation, namely, that in some cases these conditions worked as stimuli and in others they did not. I do not find, therefore, that the formula is conducive to understanding; it must in each case invent a challenge to fit a historical reality which it labels response.

Our criticism does not proceed from a positivistic belief in a so-called “scientific” historiography which is supposed first to assemble objective facts which are subsequently interpreted. Our objection here is not against Toynbee’s procedure, but against a terminology which obscures what is the starting-point, and what the outcome, of his procedure. And we make the further criticism that he does not actually evolve from each particular historical situation the notion of a particular challenge to which it can be construed as a response; he applies the formula, as I have said, from the outside, and it is therefore doomed to irrelevance. For example: Toynbee considers the descent of the prehistoric Egyptians into the marshy Nile valley as their response to the challenge of the desiccation of North Africa. In their new homeland they faced, in due course, as a further challenge, “the internal articulation of the new-born Egyptiac society” and failed. The truth is that the Egyptians flourished exceedingly for two thousand years after the Pyramid Age; but Toynbee thinks they failed because he cannot conceive of a “response” in Egyptian terms, but only in those with which he is familiar: secular government, democracy, and the Poor Law.[34] But since neither the rich nor the poor Egyptians took this view of their state, Toynbee’s conclusion is irrelevant. It is true that he quotes the tales which dragomans told to late Greek travellers about the oppressive rule of the builders of the pyramids. But the actual folk-tales of Pharaonic Egypt show us that the people took as great a delight in tales of royalty as the public of the Arabian Nights took in the doings of the despot Harun al Rashid. Snefru, whom Toynbee names, is known as one of the most popular rulers in legend. The fact of the matter is that Toynbee should have started from an analysis of the “response.” This would not have shown, as Toynbee has it, that “Death laid its icy hand on the life of the growing civilization at the moment when the challenge that was the stimulus of its growth was transferred from the external to the internal field [from the subjugation of nature to the organization of society, H.F.] because in this new situation, the shepherds of the people betrayed their trust.”[35] Studied without preconceived ideas the “response” of the Egyptians stands revealed as a vastly different achievement. The ideal of a marvellously integrated society had been formed long before the pyramids were built; it was as nearly realized, when they were built, as any ideal social form can be translated into actuality; and it remained continuously before the eyes of rulers and people alike during subsequent centuries. It was an ideal which ought to thrill a western historian by its novelty, for it falls entirely outside the experience of Greek or Roman or Modern Man, although it survives, in an attenuated form, in Africa. It represents a harmony between man and the divine which is beyond our boldest dreams, since it was maintained by divine power which had taken charge of the affairs of man in the person of Pharaoh. Society moved in unison with nature. Justice, which was the social aspect of the cosmic order, pervaded the commonwealth. The “trust” which the people put in their “shepherds” was by no means what Toynbee imagines; their trust was that Pharaoh should wield to the full the absolute power to which his divinity entitled him, and which enabled him—as nothing else could—to ensure the well-being of the whole community.

It seems to me that these discussions have cleared the ground for our understanding. Generalizations based on a limited historical experience, and theorizing, however ingeniously conducted, must fail to disclose the individual character of any one civilization or of any one series of events. We must concentrate on what Ruth Benedict called the “selected segment of the arc of possible human behaviour,” “the characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society.” In our own terms: In studying the birth of a civilization we are concerned with the emergence of its “form.”

II. THE PREHISTORY OF THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

At the end of our last chapter we said that the study of the birth of a civilization means watching the emergence of its “form.” We have also seen that this “form” is elusive, that it is not a concrete mould, or a standard which we can apply to our observations to see whether they conform with it. We have described it as “a certain consistency in orientation, a cultural style.” Recognizing it amounts to discovering a point of view from where seemingly unrelated facts acquire coherence and meaning. Even so the “form” of a civilization remains intangible; it is implicit in the preoccupations and valuations of the people. It imparts to their achievements—to their arts and institutions, their literature, their theology—something distinct and final, something which has its own peculiar perfection. Therefore a discussion of the emergence of form entails a knowledge of a civilization in its maturity, a familiarity with its classical expression in every field. Then it should be possible to work backwards from better-known to early times until the point is reached where the familiar phenomena are lost sight of and where, conversely, their emergence must be postulated.[36]

This procedure, however, has a double disadvantage. It obscures development because it moves against the current of time; and it fails to describe, first of all, the conditions under which the civilization took shape—in other words, its prehistoric antecedents. Now I am not prepared to attempt a definition of the distinction between prehistory and history in general terms, for even within the ancient Near East the distinction is problematical.[37] I shall simply use the term “prehistory” to denote the period preceding the emergence of Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization, and shall discuss first the climatic conditions in the Near East at that time and then the form of society which prevailed before the events with which we are primarily concerned took place.

At present the arable lands of Egypt and Western Asia are embedded in large tracts of desert. But it seems that in the Ice Age the pressure of cold air over Europe compelled the Atlantic rain storms to travel east by a more southerly track so that the whole area from the west coast of Africa to the Persian mountains was a continuous belt of park and grassland. In Algeria and southern Tripolitania hunters of the Old Stone Age engraved images of elephants, buffaloes, and giraffes on rocks now surrounded for hundreds of miles by an arid waste where life is utterly impossible. Paleolithic implements have been found on the high desert which flanks the Nile valley, and in Syria, Palestine, and Kurdistan. Carved tools found in Palestine (Fig. 1, A, B) and the engravings from North Africa find close parallels in the splendid engravings and paintings from the caves of southern France and northern Spain.

We want to dwell for a moment on the paleolithic remains in order to insist that even these distant hunters cannot be understood as “part of nature.”[38] From paleolithic times onwards, man has been aware of being involved, not only with his kindred, but with superhuman powers. This dual involvement becomes apparent as soon as we find more than the mere bones and implements of man. In France and Spain hunters of the Old Stone Age left us astonishing paintings and engravings depicting the game upon which they were dependent. These works of art are found in the remote depths of caves and could only be reached at mortal risk. Analogies found among modern people still living in the Stone Age allow us to see in the marvellous images of the beasts, the traces of dancing feet on the soil of the caves, the stones marked with linear signs, the figures of masked or dancing men, expressions of a coherent religious conception, proclaiming man’s intimate and reciprocal relationship with the animals, and beyond these, with the divine. Such a brief formula is, of course, ludicrously inadequate;[39] for one thing it substitutes articulate concepts for unreflected experience. But we formulate it in order to emphasize that, from the first, man possessed creative imagination, and we have to reckon with this in considering social cohesion. If the earliest men of whom we have knowledge co-operated in order to trap and kill animals far more powerful than themselves, their hunting differed toto cælo from the hunting of a pack of wolves. Their art proves that their relation with their game was not a mere matter of killing and devouring, and that their parties were kept together, not merely by common need, but also by imaginative, religious conceptions, made explicit, not in doctrine, but in acts.

The transition from paleolithic to neolithic culture is not yet known; but we do know that a change of climate, which started in the Old Stone Age, continued in the New, and very gradually changed living conditions throughout the Near East. Libya remained rich in vineyards, olive trees, and cattle up to the end of the second millennium B.C.—a fact which may be surmised from records of booty brought back from there: by a Pharaoh of the First Dynasty;[40] by Sahure of the Fifth Dynasty (about 2475 B.C.), who listed 100,000 head of cattle and more than 200,000 each of asses, goats, and sheep;[41] and finally by Ramses III (about 1175 B.C.), who was still able to take away 3600 head of cattle, in addition to horses, asses, sheep, and goats.[42] At the opposite end of the Near East, in south-eastern Iran, Sir Aurel Stein was unable to round up a “minimum of local labour” to investigate the thickly dotted ruins of ancient settlements.[43] Nevertheless, progressive desiccation marked the period from perhaps 7000 B.C. onwards, turning the plateaux from grassland into steppe and, ultimately, into desert, and making the valleys of the great rivers inhabitable. When meadows and shrub lands began to emerge from the swamps and mudflats along the river courses, man descended from the highlands.

Now the earliest inhabitants of the valleys were in possession of a considerable body of knowledge which the hunters of the Ice Age had lacked. And we do not know how the change from old to new, from the Old Stone Age to the New Stone Age, came about; for nowhere has a series of continuous remains covering the transition been recognized. I use this word advisedly, for we shall see in a moment that the change was of such a nature that its earliest consequences may well defy recognition. We know, however, that this change, like the later one with which we are more especially concerned, took place in the Near East.[44]

The outstanding new feature of the neolithic age is agriculture, with emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum) and six-rowed barley (Hordeum hexastichum) as the main crops. Now the wild ancestors of these grains survive even to-day in Syria and Palestine. In the same region, in caves on Mount Carmel, were discovered remains of the earliest men who used sickles.[45] This does not prove, of course, that they cultivated grain; they may merely have harvested grasses which grew wild. The point is of importance since these people—known in archaeological literature as Natufians—belong to the very end of the Old Stone Age. Yet the Natufians were the initiators, or at least the early practitioners, of a technique of harvesting which survived in the earliest agricultural settlements of neolithic times. Their peculiar sickles consisted of a grooved haft of bone in which short pieces of flint—“teeth”—were mounted (Fig. 1 A, B).[46] Such sickles are also found in the oldest settlements in the Fayum (in Egypt) (Fig. 1 D),[47] at Hassuna in northern Iraq,[48] and at Sialk near Kashan in Persia (Fig. 1 C).[49] They date perhaps about 5000 B.C., possibly a thousand years or more after the Natufians. In Egypt, during the First Dynasty (about 3100 B.C.), the sickle-haft was improved by being curved; it was now made of wood but retained its cutting edge of small flints (Fig. 1 E),[50] and sickles of this type were used as late as the Twelfth Dynasty (about 2000 B.C.).[51] In Iraq, too, sickles with curved wooden handles in which flint teeth were set were used as late as the Second Early Dynasty period, about 2700 B.C.[52] In Asia Minor and Europe no trace of the hafts has survived, but the distinctive flint teeth have been found in Anatolia, South Russia, on the Danube, and at the western end of the Mediterranean at Almeria. They occur also throughout North Africa. It is clear, then, that the diffusion of agriculture consisted not merely in spreading the knowledge of emmer and barley but in a simultaneous diffusion of the odd and complex harvesting tool, first used, as far as we know, by the Natufians. Radiating from the Near East, the new knowledge spread in widening circles, reaching the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea about 2500 B.C.[53] However, many questions remain at present unanswered. When did men undertake to improve the wild grasses and to produce, by cross-breeding and selection, the vastly more nutritious grains which were known to the earliest farmers of the neolithic period? When, in fact, was the extraordinary first step taken and the satisfaction of immediate needs limited in order to save seeds, store them, safeguard them against insects and rodents, and sow them when the time was propitious? This may have been done by the Natufians, but of this we know nothing. Furthermore, we do not know how far agricultural methods had advanced when they began to be diffused throughout the Old World. In particular we know nothing about the origin of irrigation, which played so large a part in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and which has been repeatedly recognized as a factor greatly furthering social and political cohesion, since it makes each settlement dependent on its neighbours. We must, therefore, consider this invention.

It deserves notice that irrigation can be resorted to by people who do not cultivate but collect wild-growing plants. This is done, for instance, by certain Indians of the Great Basin of Western North America,[54] and their methods could very well have been followed by the Natufians utilizing the wadi running at the foot of their cliffs. We may admit, then, that irrigation could have been one of the features of the original agricultural complex which spread from the Near East; but there are serious arguments to the contrary.

In the first place, the spread of agriculture seems to have been achieved by means of a slow migration of the cultivators. Primitive hoe or garden cultivation (which is still practised) exhausts the soil it uses. It ignores rotation of crops or fallowing; after some years a fresh piece of ground must be cleared and sown. When the neighbourhood has been farmed, the village moves farther into the bush. The smallness of the neolithic settlements and of their cemeteries,[55] and the manner in which they spread into the European continent, suggests this type of slow but continual migration outwards from the centre where agriculture was first practised. There is no dependence on irrigation to be observed here.

In the second place, there are African parallels which suggest that the earliest agriculture in the Nile valley and Mesopotamia could also have proceeded without irrigation. The conditions in these river valleys in antiquity resembled closely those found nowadays on the Blue Nile, where semi-Hamitic nomads, the Hadendoa, sow and harvest in the simple manner which we shall now describe. It is possible, therefore, to postulate similar simple methods for the prehistoric Egyptians. Burckhardt renders his observations in the Taka country of Nubia as follows:

About the latter end of June ... large torrents coming from the South and South-east pour over the country and in the space of a few weeks cover the whole surface with a sheet of water, varying in depth from two to three feet.... The waters, on subsiding, leave a thick slime, or mud, upon the surface, similar to that left by the Nile.... Immediately after the inundation is imbibed, the Beduins sow the seed upon the alluvial mud, without any previous preparation whatever. The inundation is usually accompanied by heavy downpours. The rains last several weeks longer than the inundation but they are not incessant, falling in heavy showers at short intervals.

The people appear to be ignorant of tillage. They have no regular fields; and the Dhourra, their only grain, is sown among the thorny trees and tents, by dibbling large holes in the ground, into each of which a handful of the seed is thrown. After the harvest is gathered, the peasants return to their pastoral occupations; they seem never to have thought of irrigating the ground for a second crop with the water which might everywhere be found by digging wells. Not less than four-fifths of the ground remains unsown; but as the quantity of Dhourra produced is generally sufficient ... they never think of making any provisions for increasing it, notwithstanding that, when the inundation is not copious, or only partial (no one remembers it ever failing entirely) they suffer all the misery of want.[56]

This kind of procedure could not, of course, have been invented in Palestine and Syria where rivers with regularly recurring inundations are unknown. However, the same results can be achieved where there are copious spring rains. Newberry says of the Alabdeh (Hamites living between the Nile valley and the Red Sea): “Some of these nomads sow a little barley or millet after a rainstorm, and then pitch their tents for a while till the grain grows, ripens and can be gathered. Then they move on again with their little flocks.”[57]

There are, then, many ways in which a temporary abundance of water can be utilized by simple people to produce crops, and it may well be that the systematic distribution of water which marks the agriculture of historical times in Egypt and Mesopotamia did not exist in prehistoric times at all. We shall see that the problem of drainage was at first as important as that of irrigation, or rather more so; in this respect the modern analogies do not hold good.

The uncertainty attached to the earliest phases of agriculture makes it impossible to speculate on the immediate social consequences of the invention of food production. One would expect these to consist in a greater emphasis on local rather than tribal groupings, a limitation of outlook and horizon, a progressive differentiation of separate settlements as a result of their attachment to the soil. But the introduction of agriculture probably did not mean the more or less speedy transition to a fully settled life or to a socio-political organization on a large scale.[58] Nor did it mean that all the other ways of finding sustenance were neglected. A “partial exploitation of the environment”[59] is characteristic of modern savages who have become stuck in a backwater, but not of the true primitives of antiquity. The Natufians may have sown a catch crop or gathered wild grasses, but they also hunted deer and speared fish. All the early settlements of the Near East show signs of a many-sided economy, although in all of them agriculture played an important part. In all of them, too, we find stock-breeding; and this is an innovation which we must simply take for granted since its origin and motivation is at present quite obscure.[60] The Natufians did not possess domestic animals.

Other inventions, too, were known throughout the Near East in the earliest settlements of the New Stone Age. Pottery-making is one of them, weaving another. It is hardly to be wondered that we cannot follow the first phases of their existence. If the earliest pots, for instance, were only dried in the sun or lightly baked or were merely clay-lined baskets, they cannot be expected to have survived. And it may be considered exceptionally fortunate that of early textiles a few scraps have survived for six or seven thousand years.[61] It is likewise only due to the refinements of modern excavation technique that the oldest of the successive settlements of Hassuna, near Mosul (Fig. 2), was recognized as a camp site, consisting of no more than a number of hearths, still containing wood ashes. They were made of “potsherds and pebbles set in a kind of primitive cement” with pottery lying around them.[62] Only in higher levels did adobe walls appear. This single instance in which a very early settlement was recognized explains why others remain unknown.[63] But we know that after (or during) the time of the Natufians these important discoveries were made and diffused among villages stretching from the Nile valley through the Delta and thence in a great arch (Fig. 51) from Jericho in the south, via Byblos and Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast to Mersin in Cilicia; then, through the Amuq plain, east of Antioch, via Carchemish on the Euphrates to Tell Halaf and Chagar Bazar in North Syria to Nineveh and Hassuna near Mosul, and on eastwards, to Sialk near Kashan in central Persia.

Throughout this region we find small self-contained and self-supporting settlements. Some beads, shells, or other luxuries may have been imported from more or less distant regions by means of hand-to-hand barter. Occasionally a rare raw material, such as obsidian—volcanic glass, flaked and used, like flint, for tools—was obtained regularly from outside. For the rest, one gets an impression of a somewhat stagnant prosperity in which the great new inventions were thoroughly exploited but little changed from generation to generation for a very long time. There are differences in the crafts: flint tools, pot designs (even ceramic techniques), and personal ornaments differ from region to region and even, as in prehistoric Thessaly, from village to village. There are also changes in style in the course of time. But these local and temporal differences must not detain us as we survey the prehistory of the ancient Near East with a view to the subsequent development. For that purpose we can divide the region into three parts: the two great river valleys and the area between, in which the rich plains of North Syria were the most important part. This central area was prosperous, but it remained unprogressive until the second millennium, dependent on the great cultural centres in Egypt and Mesopotamia. For that reason, we shall confine our attention to the river valleys.

Modern Egypt, even if we disregard the aridity of its climate, differs entirely from the land with which we are here concerned. Nowadays the whole of the country is so intensively cultivated that it does not possess sufficient grazing for its cattle, and one sees cows, buffaloes and asses tethered at the desert edge and fed on cultivated crops such as clover. The river is thoroughly controlled. The desert valleys—wadis—are devoid of vegetation except for bushes of camel-thorn. But in prehistoric, as well as in Pharaonic times, Egypt was a land of marshes in which papyrus, sedge, and rushes grew to more than man’s height (Fig. 3). The wadis, too, teemed with life; they are best described as park land where as late as the New Kingdom (1400 B.C.) man could hunt Barbary sheep, wild oxen, and asses, and a wide variety of antelopes with their attendant carnivores. It has been pointed out[64] that the methods of hunting prove that different types of landscape could be found here. Sometimes rows of beaters are shown driving the game towards the hunter or into nets, a method possible only in areas which are somewhat thickly wooded. At other times lassos are used, which presuppose pampa-like open spaces with low shrub.

In the valley, the annual flood of the Nile continuously changed the lay of the land. When the water overflowed the river banks the silt, previously kept in suspension by the speed of the swollen current, precipitated. Some of this precipitation raised the river bed, the remainder covered the banks and the area closest to them; towards the edges of the valley there was comparatively little deposit. Thus banks of considerable height were formed, and after some years the weight of water broke through these natural dikes to seek a new course in low-lying parts, some distance away. The old bed turned into swamp, but its banks remained as ridges and hillocks whose height and area were increased by wind-blown dust and silt caught at their edges. Trees took root, and man settled there, sowing his crops and grazing his beasts in the adjoining lowlands, to retire with them to the high ground of the old banks when the river overflowed. During the inundation, fish, wild boar, hippopotamus, and huge flocks of water birds invaded the surrounding fields and supplied an abundance of food throughout the summer.

All traces of these settlements in the valley proper have long since disappeared; they have been not merely silted over but washed away by the changes in the river’s course.[65] This explains why we find traces of early settlements only at the edge of the valley, on the spurs of detritus at the foot of the high cliffs. We must imagine the valley, not flat and featureless as it is to-day, but dotted with hamlets perched on the high banks of former watercourses and surrounded by an ever-changing maze of channels, marsh, and meadow. Even as late as the First Intermediate period, just before 2000 B.C., the populace of a province in Middle Egypt left their homes and hid in swamps in the valley to escape the dangers of civil war and marauding soldiers.[66] And the early predynastic settlements at the valley’s edge were built in groves; among the remains of huts and shelters, tree roots of considerable size have been found.[67]

The prehistoric, “predynastic,” period of Egypt clearly falls into two parts or stages (Fig. 4). The earliest of these is known in three successive phases called Tasian, Badarian, and Amratian,[68] each a modified development of its predecessor. Together they represent the African substratum of Pharaonic civilization, the material counterpart of the affinities between ancient Egyptian and modern Hamitic languages; of the physical resemblances between the ancient Egyptians and the modern Hamites; and of the remarkable similarities in mentality between these two groups which make it possible to understand ancient Egyptian customs and beliefs by reference to modern Hamitic analogies.[69] The second stage of predynastic culture—called Gerzean[70]—is in many ways a continuation of Amratian; in other words, the preponderantly African character remained. But new elements were added, and these point to fairly close relations with the East, with Sinai, and with Palestine. Foreign pottery was imported from that quarter. A new type of Egyptian pottery, implying a change in ceramic technique, was derived from a class of wavy-handled vases which were at home in Palestine. Several new kinds of stone used for vases may have come from Sinai,[71] and the increase in the use of copper points certainly to closer relations with that peninsula. Although flint remained in use and flint-work achieved an unrivalled beauty and refinement, copper was no longer an odd substance used for luxuries but appeared in the form of highly practical objects: harpoons, daggers, axes (one of which weighs 3½ pounds).[72] The language of the country may also have been affected.[73]

The innovations of Gerzean can best be explained as the effect of a permeation of Upper Egypt by people who had affinities with their Asiatic neighbours and derived from them certain features of their culture.[74] We know that in historical times a similar gradual but continuous drift of people from Lower Egypt into Upper Egypt can be observed.[75] During the Gerzean period the country seems to have become more densely populated; and it has been suggested that the reclamation of the marshland was begun.[76] Such work presupposes co-operation between neighbouring groups and organization of men in some numbers. We may assume that this took place, but on a strictly limited scale. For there are no signs of large political units. There are no ruins of great size, no monuments of an exceptional nature; and if it is objected that these may have existed but may not have been discovered yet, we must insist on the significant fact that among the many thousands of predynastic graves which have been found, there is not a single one which by its size or equipment suggests the burial of a great chief.[77] The Gerzean innovation did not change the general character of the country’s culture; the remains suggest a prosperous homogeneous population, fully exploiting its rich environment and loosely organized in villages and rural districts. It was in this setting that the efflorescence of Pharaonic civilization occurred.

In Mesopotamia the corresponding change took place in the extreme south, in the marshy plain between the head of the Persian Gulf and the higher ground which stretches north from Samarra and Hit.[78] This older diluvial part of the country had been farmed already for many centuries before the south was inhabited. The northern farmers had passed through three phases which can be distinguished by their material equipment (see chronological table at end of book).[79] When the third was predominant in the north, men from the Persian plateau entered the southern marshes. Under present conditions it would be inconceivable that highlanders would elect to do so, or even that they would be able to survive there. But in the fifth and fourth millennia B.C. the Iranian plateau had not yet become a salt desert. Many rivers, descending from the surrounding mountains, ended in upland seas without an outlet and ringed by swamps. Even to-day, in eastern Iran, marsh dwellers are found on the shores of the great lake of the river Hamun.[80] Like the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, they build boats and huts of reeds, fish and keep water buffaloes and cattle. Similar conditions must have prevailed over much of Persia in the period we are discussing, and immigrants from such regions would be well prepared to face life in the delta of the Euphrates and Tigris.

The pottery made by the earliest settlers of South Mesopotamia shows that they came from Persia. At first they retained the tightly interwoven geometric designs used in their homeland;[81] but left to themselves they soon adopted an easier flowing, careless decoration (called Al Ubaid) which remained in use for many centuries and represents the Persian tradition in only a very debased form. In many places it is found on virgin soil, which shows that the settlers spread farther through the country of which they had at first occupied only certain localities. At Ur, for instance, detailed observations were made which reveal the conditions in which men lived when the site was first inhabited. The relevant layers show:

a stratum of irregular thickness composed of refuse resulting from human occupation—ashes, disintegrated mud brick, potsherds, etc. This went down almost to sea-level; below it was a belt about one metre thick of mud, grey in colour above, and darkening to black below, much of which was clearly due to the decay of vegetation. In it were potsherds, sporadic above but becoming more numerous lower down and massed thickly at the bottom, all the fragments lying horizontally; they had the appearance of having sunk by their own weight through water into soft mud. At a metre below sea-level came stiff, green clay pierced by sinuous brown stains resulting from the decay of roots; with this all trace of human activity ceased. Evidently this was the bottom of Mesopotamia.[82]

Southern Mesopotamia resembled the Egyptian Delta, rather than the Nile valley where cliffs constrain the meanderings of the river, and old banks and spurs provide high ground. In Mesopotamia the lowest course of Euphrates and Tigris presents, even to-day, a wilderness of reed forests where the Marsh Arabs lead an amphibious existence (Fig. 6). All traffic is by narrow bituminous skiffs; the people fish and keep some cattle, living in reed huts built on mattresses of bent and trodden-down reed stems. Their dwellings are described as follows:

at one end is a low and narrow aperture which serves as a doorway, window and chimney combined; on the rush-strewn and miry floor sleep men and women, children and buffaloes, in warm proximity ... the ground of the hut often oozing water at every step.[83]

The chiefs’ reed tents are more impressive; they are large tunnels of matting covering a framework of reed bundles which form semicircular arches. Doors and windows are arranged in the mats closing either end. We know that such structures were also used in the fourth millennium B.C., for they are represented, with all the necessary detail, in the earliest renderings of sacred buildings, notably the byres and folds of temple animals (Fig. 5).

But modern savages are but diminished shadows of the true primitives, and the ancient people of the Al Ubaid period exercised a mastery over the marsh to which the modern inhabitants never as much as aspire. Moreover, the people of the Al Ubaid period belonged to the most advanced group of the prehistoric farmers. Copper was used in their homeland for axes and adzes and even for mirrors. Bricks were known there, too; and brick buildings and the waterproofing of reeds with bitumen are certified for the period. It is likely that some reclamation and drainage of marshland was undertaken. In any case, the men of the Al Ubaid period appear from the first as cultivators, and we are free to imagine their fields as shallow islands in the marsh or as reclaimed and diked-in land.

The vitality and power of these earliest settlers is astonishing. Their influence can be traced upstream, where their pottery replaced the Tell Halaf wares completely, even occurring in appreciable quantities in North Syria. Since it has nothing to recommend it as an article of export, we must assume that its makers came with it and settled widely throughout the upper reaches of Tigris and Euphrates. Nevertheless, the Al Ubaid people were simple cultivators like their contemporaries in Egypt and their predecessors in northern Iraq and Syria. This is most clearly shown by their inability to organize trade in order to obtain the copper which they had been accustomed to use in their country of origin. Once settled in Mesopotamia and removed from the sources of the metal, they used a substitute material that was locally available, making axes (Fig. 7a), choppers, and sickles (Fig. 7b) of clay which they fired at so high a temperature that it almost vitrified and thus obtained a useful cutting edge. These implements were, of course, very brittle and were broken by the hundreds. But they could be easily replaced; and the isolated settlements achieved that autarchy which is characteristic of early peasant cultures.

And yet the Al Ubaid period has left us some remains which suggest that certain centres began to be of outstanding importance and that a change in the rural character of the settlements was taking place. At Abu Shahrein in the south,[84] and at Tepe Gawra in the north, temples were erected. And these not only testify to a co-ordinated effort on a larger scale than we would expect within the scope of a village culture, but show also a number of features which continue in historical times—for instance: the simple oblong shape of the sanctuary, with its altar and offering table; the platforms on which the temples were set; the strengthening buttresses (which developed into a system of piers and recesses, rhythmically articulating the walls). Moreover, it is likely that at Eridu there was continuity, not only of architectural development, but of worship. In the absence of inscriptions this contention cannot be proved. But the god worshipped there in historical times was called Enki—lord of the earth, but also god of the sweet waters. He is depicted surrounded by waters (for he “had founded his chamber in the deep”) and fishes sport in the streams which spring from his shoulders. Now an observation made during the excavation of the Al Ubaid temples suggests that the same god was adored in them. At one stage the offering table and sanctuary were covered with a layer of fish bones six inches deep, remains, no doubt, of an offering to the god of whom it was said: