Egypt. It helps that Iraq and Egypt are also where people invented writing. When the written record began, prehistory could grow into history.
Cities developed not just in the Middle East, but also in Pakistan, India, and China, where great civilizations have risen and receded as they interacted with the rest of the world over 3,000 or 4,000 years. They also arose in the Americas, where Europeans and the diseases they carried wiped out advanced native societies in the 16th century AD.
In this chapter, you can find out about early civilizations and how their ruins teach us about people gathering, collaborating, and trading in greater numbers as they recognized shared needs for safety, sustenance, order, and justice. Forms of law, religion, and philosophy developed and led, by a long, circuitous path, to modern ways of thinking and governing. They developed systems of writing, without which we couldn’t study history. The world that you and I know started to take shape in those first urban societies as cities grew into city-states, civilizations, and eventually empires.
Building Jericho’s Walls for Mutual Defense
The Bible says that Joshua and the Israelites raised a ruckus that brought down the walls of Jericho, a city in Canaan (today’s Palestinian-administered West Bank). Jericho appears to be one of the world’s oldest cities; it predates even the early civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern Iraq. What the Bible doesn’t say is that Jericho’s walls of perhaps 3,200 years ago were built on top of walls that were built on top of walls. (Maybe that’s why those walls toppled so easily when Joshua and his posse arrived.) Scientists date the settlement’s earliest buildings to as early as 9000 BC, which is about 11,000 years ago. True, Jericho was abandoned and rebuilt maybe 20 times, but when you’re talking about thousands of years, what are 20 do-overs?
Scientists say Jericho’s living quarters were first round and then in later levels the style changed to rectangular. Researchers can speculate about the residents’ lifestyle based on the stuff found lying around—pottery and animal bones stand up to time rather well. Human skulls fitted with realistic plaster faces, for example, may have been creepy reconstructions of dead loved ones or slain enemies.
Most significantly, the walls and tall stone tower of Jericho tell a story. They show researchers that residents worked together for a common goal: to build civic structures that provided community defense. Working together in such an organized way — whether voluntarily or under the orders of a hard-handed ruler — is a sign of civilization.
Unfortunately, archaeologists don’t know the names and stories that passed from generation to generation by word of mouth in the earliest centuries of Jericho. You can assume that people gossiped about romances and affairs. Guys no doubt bragged about the size of the fish they almost caught in the Jordan River. They surely teased and trash talked, especially after a little too much wine. And they must have told stories. But civilization didn’t wait for a way to write things down so that later generations could read about its beginnings.
Planting Cities along Rivers
Although Jericho grew at a desert oasis (a prehistoric pit stop, if you will), it wasn’t far from the River Jordan. Other early cities, those of the best-known early large-scale civilizations, formed along rivers in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), Egypt, India, and China.
Settling between the Tigris and Euphrates
Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was an inviting place to stop and settle. The lower rivers, as they neared the Persian Gulf, formed a great marsh with plentiful fish, birds, and other wildlife. Late Stone Age people lived there in reed huts. As hunter-gatherers and herders who lived around the swamp and in the hills to the north turned increasingly toward the hot new farming lifestyle (a gradual change that probably took thousands of years), the fertile valley to the northwest of the marshland beckoned.
By about 5000 BC, barley and flax farmers dug networks of irrigation canals from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and their tributaries and built villages along those canals. These communities fueled a hot real estate market, becoming fashionable neighborhoods that grew into about a dozen impressive cities of the Sumerian civilization, followed after 2000 BC by the great city-state of Babylon and its successive empires. (A city-state is a city that’s a nation in itself, like modern-day Singapore and Monaco.)
From about 2700–2300 BC, the leading city-state in southern Mesopotamia was Ur, home to the Bible’s Abraham. Like other cities in the region, Ur was built of mud bricks. Besides fertilizing the fields and inspiring epic mud-wrestling battles, the mud of the river valley proved the best building material in an area with little stone or wood.
Getting agricultural in Africa
Northern Africa, where the great Sahara Desert is today, was once fertile grassland with generous rainfall. It was a good place for animals to graze and a great place for nomadic hunters, gatherers, and herders to wander, stop to try a little farming, and establish villages.
FLOODING ON A MYTHIC SCALE
The early cities of Mesopotamia benefitted from rivers and the mud that periodic floods spread over the land. Yet floodwaters could rise disastrously high. Between the ruins of one Sumerian city and the ruins of the city that came before it, 20th-century archaeologists found a deep layer of dried mud — evidence of a terrible flood. To the Sumerians, a flood on that scale — one that swept away cities — must have seemed to be end of their world. Mud tablets (the first books) found in the ruins of the Mesopotamian city of Nineveh contain The Epic of Gilgamesh, which includes a story of how the gods decided to wipe out mankind with a flood, but one man named Utnapishtim, his family, and his animals were saved. Is this the same story as the Bible’s account of Noah and the Flood? Not exactly, but many scholars think the tale of Utnapishtim may be an earlier version of the same legend.
Farming worked only if the people came back to the places where they planted the seeds to harvest the crop. Eventually, they stuck around. With the promise of a regular food supply, it was easier for nomadic people to stop wandering and establish roots in agricultural villages (pun intended).
