The Rise of Civilization [antikvár]

Introduction The Near East has sometimes been described as the cradle of civilization. Civihzations have been born, and died, at different times in many parts of the world, springing from diverse origins whose only assessable common factor was a sufficiency of natural resources to support a wealthy economy and the social institutions associated with it. All these developments cannot be discussed within the compass of a single book or the competence of any two professional archaeologists, and this volume concentrates on the Near East for two main reasons. It affords the earhest and probably the best-known example of the process that led from the first agricultural settlements to literate, city-dwelling communities. Secondly, those communities were the foundation of Mesopotamian culture, which in turn had a profound influence on later societies both in its own region and in the Mediterranean lands from which our civihzation sprang. The region is one of wide contrasts both in geography and in climate. It is bordered on the north and east by the mountains and high plateaus of Anatolia and Iran, on the west by the coastal ranges of the Levant and on the south by the Arabian massif Much of the central basin, through which the Tigris and Euphrates flow to the Arabian Gulf, is barren steppe habitable only by nomads, and rainfall sufficient for cultivation is now available only in the highlands and in a strip of land - the so-called Fertile Crescent - that runs from the Levant around the northern and northeastern rim of the plain. There have been minor fluctuations of climate, but the pattern of ancient settlement suggests that the overall picture has not greatly changed in the last 10,000 years. But in various parts of the Fertile Crescent and in the mountain ranges on its borders there lived, after the end of the Last Ice Age, wild species of the animals and plants that were the first to be domesticated, and formed the basis of the earliest farming eco- nomies throughout western Asia and Europe. The Near East in the last 200 years has often been the scene of intense political rivalries between European powers because it lay astride one of their principal routes of communication with India and the Far East. Among the first to take an interest in its antiquities were their diplomatic representatives and travelers, but they were long concerned only with the spectacular remains of early civilizations, partly because these illustrate the background of the Biblical world, and partly because the idea of the great antiquity of man, and hence the study of prehistory, did not take shape even in Europe until httle more than 100 years ago. We trace the development of this idea, and the mounting tide of research into the earhest settled Near Eastern societies that has resulted from it in the last two generations. Much of the evidence with which we have to deal has been produced in the last 30 years, partly through a concentration of archaeological interest, partly by the development of new techniques that enable us to recover much more information about the economy and way of life of the first farmers. Our account of the evidence deals first with the origins of farming throughout the region and the earliest, isolated settlements of a size and complexity that entitle them to be called towns. We then narrow the field to Mesopotamia, considering the spread of rain-fed agriculture in the northern plain and the earliest appearance of irrigation techniques that made possible the exploitation of land outside the rainfall zone. Finally we consider the extension of settlement, dependent on widespread irrigation, in the rich alluvium of southern Mesopotamia, the urban society that grew up there and the progressive extension of its influence over large areas of the Fertile Crescent. Our story ends with the invention of writing when thissociety emerges into history as the Sumerian civihzation.