The Fertile Crescent and the lost days of Sumer

Throughout June and July, the Historical Writers’ Forum’s Blog Hop has been publishing posts regarding various singularly significant historical events. Please be certain to visit the  Hop's Facebook Page to catch up on posts you may have missed and up and coming posts. Today it is my turn and I’m going to look at more of a process rather than a single event. 

Approximately 12,000 years ago humanity altered its lifestyle and destiny in the most fundamental way. For most of our history, humans have led a nomadic lifestyle, at least for part of the year, obtaining nourishment from hunting, fishing and gathering; very much like the traditional lifestyles of Amazonian tribes, Kalahari bushmen and native aborigines. 

These prehistoric hunter/gatherers had collected wild grains at least 105,000 years ago. But it was not until approx. 11,500 years ago (in the Epipaleolithic) that stone age people actively began cultivating founder crops of wheat, barley, peas, lentils and chickpeas. The archaeological evidence points this as first occurring in the Levant region, part of what was termed “The Fertile Crescent”. This occurred as the climate began to warm, as the Pleistocene Ice Age yielded to the climate of the current Holocene geological epoch. 

Fertile Crescent - Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Fertile Crescent is a sickle shaped area extending from the Mediterranean Sea at Egypt, through the Levant, through Syria and Southern Turkey and then down through Iraq – ancient Mesopotamia -following the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Persian Gulf. Historically this region was blessed with extremely fertile soils, with an abundance of fresh and brackish water sources, far removed from the arid lands they are now. This really was almost the biblical Garden of Eden, with many edible plant species native to the region. 

The transition from hunter gatherers to settled farmers was a long process, no doubt replete with trial and error, with many prehistoric cultures coming and going. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment that such a fundamental change in lifestyle began. We are in a process of learning more about this lost period, the most exciting development perhaps being the discovery of the Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey. It is a temple perhaps from the dawn of agriculture at around 10000 BCE but exhibiting levels of remarkable sophistication. It might well cause a complete re-evaluation of our prehistory. At present its offering more questions than answers, such as why was it purposely filled in and buried?

Göbekli Tepe - Ancient Origins

It was, in the former British Protectorate of Palestine, in 1928, that the British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod, initially searching for biblical archaeology, discovered the Natufian culture of the late Epipaleolithic. During this time, the Levant was a rich land of oak forests and high scrublands. The Natufians were prehistoric hunter gatherers, practicing a semi-permanent sedentary culture. They reused settlements, building walls and setting post holes as well as using caves. Their stone age technology involved using microliths, small flint blades, to process kills and to make rudimentary sickles to cut plants. What set these people apart from previous stone age cultures in this region was the rudimentary agriculture they began practising during the Younger Dryas period - a 1000-year interruption in the warming of the climate. It is thought this caused drought, endangering wild cereals growing on the wild scrublands. The Natufian people had become dependent on the gathering of these cereals and began to clear areas to actively sow these plants. Using these wild grains these people baked unleavened bread initially. However (as recently discovered evidence indicates) they even brewed beer. This is some 8000 years earlier than previously thought beer was first brewed. Bread and beer occurring together makes sense, as both use yeast. Using yeast allows for the baking of leavened bread. It was also this culture that is thought to have first domesticated dogs; two Natufian burials have been found to include the skeletal remains of canids.

 

Temperature Graph - WUWT

It was in Mesopotamia that archaeological evidence points to a real agricultural revolution taking place. Situated at the Upper Tigris and Euphrates valleys, around 9500BCE, people began living in permanent settlements of round mud dwellings, farming lentils, wheat and barley as well as domesticating pigs and sheep. The archaeological record of the Syrian village of Tell Abu Hureyra shows the switch from the hunting of gazelle to the farming and processing of grains. The mainstay nutritional value of bread - one of the oldest processed  foods - cannot be overstated. It is perhaps not surprising that the staff of life has such cultural significance among many cultures, even being used in religious ritual. The farming of cattle would take another 1000 years with animals descended from the wild Aurochs being domesticated in areas of modern Turkey and Pakistan. 

Agriculture allowed for  population growth and the establishment of sedentary human settlements, enabling a surplus of crops and livestock to be raised, and an end to having to move due to exhaustion of wild game. By 8000BCE agriculture was fully established along the Nile. It’s also intriguing that around this time, independent of the cultures of the Fertile Crescent, agriculture began to spring up in different areas of the globe, using native plants to these regions, such as rice and millet in China, and maize and potatoes in Mexico. Its intriguing to contemplate that there may have been considerable cultural interaction in this prehistoric world, as the domestication of plants and animals began to become the norm. Around 6000BCE domestic species appear in the Iberian Peninsula and pigs are farmed in the forests of Europe. 

However, it is in Mesopotamia where settlements, that can truly be described as cities, begin to take shape as the Stone Age yielded to the Copper and then Bronze Ages. In southern Iraq, a prehistoric people - the Ubadians - began farming and constructing mud brick dwellings. They have left fine examples of pottery and developed trade links as far away as Oman for copper. The Ubadian society would be supplanted by the Sumerian civilisation, which was established between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Sumerian society would last for approximately 3000 years and create the template for all government and urban societies that followed.  Yet astonishingly the Sumerians were almost entirely forgotten for thousands of years, until archaeological discoveries were made in the C19th. 

The Sumerians were a fascinating civilisation, founded around 4000BCE, they were independent city states, each with their own king, linked by a common language and culture. At the time, the shoreline was further inland than now, their main city of Ur was situated on the Persian Gulf of antiquity. 

Where the Sumerians originated from is somewhat of a mystery, as their language was different from those of neighbouring Semitic cultures. Some have postulated that they were originally of North African origin migrating from the green Sahara, others that they could have been descendants of our old friends the Natufians, or even originally Dravidians from the Indus river area. 

It might well be a mixture of cultures that explains the genesis of Sumer. One of their oldest cities was that of Eridu on the Persian Gulf, which fused the proto-Sumerian Ubaidian farmers, Semitic herds people and fisher folk of the southern Mesopotamian marshlands. Living in an area of low rainfall the Sumerians drained marshes and built canals to irrigate their crops. 

Sumer showing ancient coastline - Wikipedia

Such projects require a defined division of labour and as such, Sumerian society evolved and made great strides in innovation, which we take for granted now. Sumerian trade links became even more extensive than the Ubadian, their influence, goods and ideas stretching west to Egypt and east to the Indus. As well as goods, communication and record keeping were essential for trade and so it was that their written language of Cuneiform developed. Initially for bookkeeping this written communication flowered into one capable of great literature, perhaps best illustrated with The Epic of Gilmagesh – a poem which may have inspired in part the Iliad, The Odyssey and perhaps even sections of the Hebrew bible, such as the great flood myth. 

Cuneiform - the Epic of Gilmagesh

Sumer had an established religion, although each city had their own patron god or goddess. Each city was built around the religious centre – the Ziggurat, the design of which may have influenced that of Egyptian pyramids. The Sumerians believed that it was humanities’ task to work alongside the gods and establish order from chaos. To do this the gods required people to cooperate and set aside their petty differences for the common good. Men and women enjoyed equal status in Sumerian society. The Sumerians really thought themselves as shapers of the earth, altering the land for their agriculture to prosper. They studied cosmology, recorded their history, wrote farmer’s almanacs, introduced taxation (and tax cuts!), developed literary devices, wrote fables, set moral codes on behaviour and set up schools. They even invented the concept of time, dividing day and night into 12 hours, each hour consisting of 60 minutes, each minute made up of 60 seconds.

 

However, there is always a snake in the garden, the Sumerians also conducted the first recorded war, with their successful campaign and sacking of the city of Elam around 2700BCE. The Sumerians did practice slavery, mainly to work their fields, although some would also serve in homes too. Slaves would be either debtors, able to buy their freedom or prisoners taken in war as part of  plunder.  As farmers group together, creating towns and in turns cities, freedom from subsistence farming allows for the development of specific professions and trade. Life becomes easier, yet it also creates greed and  societal hierarchies develop. The fields that supply food, once painstakingly drained from the marshes by their forebears, becomes a valuable commodity. There are the haves and the have-nots, and on the  very bottom rung of society are the slaves. Regrettably its a truism that slavery is as old as civilisation itself.

Sumerian Warriors - The Standard of Ur

Sumeria itself had a long decline and was conquered itself by Sargon of Akkad around 2340BCE, who appreciated it as an administrative centre of the Akkadian Empire. Sumer and Akkad had long had a history of cultural exchange. After a relatively brief Sumerian renaissance, the rise of Babylon, and resurgence of the Elamanites, combined with overuse of the land finally put paid to its political power, if not its cultural influence, around 1750BCE. Interestingly around the time of its decline, especially its conquest by Babylon there was a notable change of women’s rights in Sumerian society, illustrated by the marginalisation of goddesses in favour of a more patriarchal Babylonian supreme deity, Marduk. Empires came and went, centres of power shifting north to the Assyrians and Hittites, and east to Persia. Ancient Sumer was a mere imperial province, its cities, gods and goddesses forgotten.

It is perhaps fitting that, lying forgotten in and under the sands of time, Sumeria’s later discovery was down to monotheist archaeologists seeking biblical evidence. What they found was not only the wellspring of the bible, but of human civilisation itself.