What Makes Civilization Page 4
In assessing the significance of such long-distance transfers it is misleading to refer to metals, timber, coloured stone, tree resins, and aromatics as ‘exotica’ or ‘luxuries’. This diminishes their importance, implying that they were little more than ‘optional extras’ for elite groups whose power over their subordinates was otherwise assured. Such views may have been tenable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time it was widely believed that, in dry climates, the political structures of ‘despotic’ states were a direct outgrowth of their dominant mode of farming, using irrigation channels to water otherwise arid and infertile lands. Political historians such as Karl Wittfogel, adapting Marx’s definition of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’, argued strongly that centralized bureaucracy—and the hierarchies it supported—were grounded in the managerial requirements and inherent inequities of large-scale irrigation farming. But it has since become apparent that irrigation arrangements and the direct organization of arable land feature little in early administrative records from Egypt and Mesopotamia. Most farming took place in a fairly decentralized manner, making use of natural flood basins and well-drained levee soils formed by the annual inundations of their respective river systems, a view supported by detailed archaeological surveys in both regions. It has also become clear that small-scale irrigation networks—and the customary systems of cooperation and conflict-resolution required to manage them—had a deep prehistory extending back to pre-urban times (the earliest, excavated in central Iraq and western Iran, date to the sixth millennium BC), and continued to operate long after the emergence (and subsequent collapse) of centralized political systems. Recent fieldwork in northern Syria (notably at the site of Tell Brak, on a tributary of the Khabur River) further demonstrates a precocious growth of urban settlement and bureaucracy around 4000 BC, in a region where rainfall was sufficient to support agriculture without recourse to irrigation.
As Jonathan Friedman and Kajsa Eckholm (1979) argued some decades ago, ‘to insist, as is usually done, that the evolution of high cultures is based on the agricultural surplus of intensive irrigation is to systematically avoid the problem that surplus grain cannot be locally transformed into bronze, cloth, palaces (of imported stone), fine jewellery and weapons—hallmarks of the great civilization.’ It was precisely through the acquisition and strategic deployment of these ‘outside’ resources—as markers of distinction, as forms of currency, and as signs of sacred power—that dynastic elites maintained their special relationship to the society of the gods, which in turn legitimated the hierarchical structures of human societies. Here we encounter a paradox to which I will return numerous times throughout this book: it was through contact with their gods that the societies of Egypt and Mesopotamia expressed their uniqueness, their distinct attachments to land, locality, origins, and place. Yet the earthly bodies of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian gods were ritually manufactured, nourished, and cared for in similar ways, using similar materials that could not be found locally in either area. In seeking to understand the roots of cultural difference—the distinctive ‘forms’ of Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization—we are therefore drawn inexorably into a world of mixtures and borrowings. The outer contours of that world can be traced, in a preliminary fashion, through the lens of a single medium: the iridescent blue stone known as lapis lazuli.
2
ON THE TRAIL OF BLUE-HAIRED GODS
Yet there are sufficient reflections of Gilgamesh and other Near Eastern epics, tales, and literary motifs within Homeric epic to make quite clear that Near Eastern epic was probably quite familiar in the Aegean area, and not only at the time (roughly around 700 BC)when the Homeric epics themselves are believed to have been composed.
Susan Sherratt, ‘Archaeological Contexts’ (2005)
Among the most remarkable archaeological discoveries of recent years are the gold casings of two human figures, respectively 60 and 30 centimetres tall, found within a mud-brick building in northern Egypt, and dated to around 3200 BC. Metalwork of any kind is rarely preserved from such remote periods. Most was melted down and recycled in antiquity. The statue coverings from Tell el-Farkha, a cluster of low mounds in the Nile Delta, are a startling exception to this rule of preservation. Carefully reconstructed, they now lie in state in the Cairo Museum. Here and there remain gaps in the reconstruction, chinks in their armour through which passes light refracted from their glass cases, robbing them of the illusion of solidity. Also on display are the tiny gold rivets that once pierced these metallic skins, pinning them to wooden cores which have long since decayed; and a bead necklace upon which was strung a large disc of deep red carnelian.
With their mask-like faces, tall penis sheaths, and strangely elongated fingers, the statue coverings are a disconcerting sight for visitors attuned to the bodily aesthetics of later Egyptian art, who may feel that they have accidentally intruded upon a different, more alien cultural realm. Yet in one respect, they stand clearly and firmly at the beginning of a long-lived tradition of royal representation. All is in the eyes and eyebrows, cut away to receive the deep blue inlays of lapis lazuli which are still visible around the smaller of the two faces. Many centuries later the same iridescent stone, flecked with golden pyrite, still framed the eyes of Tutankhamun’s funerary mask (1327 BC), and enclosed the protective eye of the god Horus on bracelets around the mummified arms of Shoshenq II (890 BC) in his tomb at Tanis, then the gateway to the Mediterranean world from which Wenamun departed on his journey to Byblos.
On royal and divine statuary, Egyptian artisans often combined lapis with turquoise mined from the Sinai Desert, where Old Kingdom rock carvings proclaim the king’s control over the land and its resources. Blue glass and the silica compound known as faience were most likely invented to imitate the aesthetic properties of these coveted stones, and to disseminate their magical properties beyond the inner elite. A common Mesopotamian term for ‘glass’ is ‘stone of the kiln’ (as opposed to ‘the mountain’), while Egyptian sources refer to it as ‘stone of the kind that flows’. By the middle of the second millennium BC, local manufacture of these vitreous materials—rendered from common quartz sand with tiny admixtures of precious minerals—had spread westwards towards the Aegean, where real lapis beads were found by Heinrich Schliemann over a century ago, ornamenting the bodies of warrior-kings buried in the Shaft Graves of Mycenae (c.1600 BC).
In Mesopotamia, as in Egypt, the sacred aesthetics of blue hair is widely in evidence. Thin bands of lapis form the eyes and eyebrows of serene statuettes from the Early Bronze Age palace at Mari (c.2500 BC). And the Royal Tombs of Ur, of broadly the same date, supply evidence of collective funerary rites in which entire royal households—warriors, musicians, and female mourners bedecked in elaborate headdresses of gold and lapis—confronted their shared death in a pageant of solar yellow and night-time blue, their bodies anointed with liquids poured from conch shells, drawn from the Indian Ocean. An Egyptian ritual incantation inscribed within the pyramid of Unas around 2350 BC empowers the dead king to ‘cultivate lapis lazuli’ just as he makes acacia grow along the Nile, and binds together the cords of plants whose knotted stems embody the unity of the Two Lands. And in the epics of the Sumerian kings, composed around the same time, it is the desire for blue stone to furnish the temple of the goddess Inanna that drives the rulers of Uruk into competition with the lord of Aratta: a mythical city beyond the eastern mountains, whose inhabitants are said to ‘cut the pure lapis lazuli from its block’ (Chapter 5). In Egyptian cosmology, the visual properties of this blue stone are closely linked to concepts of life force, organic growth, and regeneration; while in Mesopotamian literature, as the archaeologist Dan Potts (1997) points out, ‘lapis-like’ was a standard metaphor for great riches, ‘a synonym for all things bright and splendid, especially the beard or other features of heroes and deities’.
Map 3. The lapis lazuli route, from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, c.2500 BC
Deeply woven into the sacred and political la
ndscapes of the Nile Valley and the Mesopotamian alluvium, lapis lazuli (like gold) was nevertheless exotic to both. The nearest sources of lapis lay far to the east, above the winding river valleys of Badakhshan in northern Afghanistan, and in the rugged folds of the Chagai Hills, in western Pakistan. To arrive in either region over land this material first had to circumvent the great wastes of the Iranian Plateau—the Dasht-e Kavir and the Dasht-e Lut—penetrating the Zagros Mountains through one of a small number of seasonal passes that opened onto the fertile alluvial plains of the Tigris. From there it was transported by donkey caravan or wheeled carts directly across the plains of northern Iraq, or up the Euphrates and then west to the Mediterranean coast, passing along the Syrian Saddle; a grassy corridor between the mountains and the desert, traversing the hundred or so miles from north-west Mesopotamia to the Gulf of Iskenderun (Greek Alexandretta).
The overland passages through highland Iran were difficult, becoming choked with snow in the winter months. During the course of the third millennium BC they seem to have been gradually superseded by maritime commerce in the Arabian Sea, which provided faster and more economic links for traders supplying Central Asian goods to the city-states of Sumer. Ships carrying precious minerals (including lapis) and a variety of other commodities set sail from anchorage points along the arid Makran coastline of southern Pakistan, which was isolated from the worst effects of the summer monsoon, entering the Persian Gulf via the Straits of Hormuz. The port today called Bandar Abbas, sitting directly astride the Straits, may have provided a second major maritime outlet with ready access to the Iranian Plateau via the Halil River, where an important urban settlement—and epicentre of a far-flung trade in ornate stone vessels, the distribution of which reaches from the Indus to the eastern Mediterranean—has been located at the site of Jiroft, in southern Iran.
Like the Silk and Spice Roads of later antiquity, the Bronze Age lapis routes were more than just conduits for material resources. They were also the channels along which meanings and values spread between otherwise disparate groups, crossing the four thousand miles of mountain, desert, and plain that separate the mines of Badakhshan from the mouth of the Nile. As the largest consumers of metals and minerals in the region, the city-states of lowland Mesopotamia, whose populations can only be crudely estimated in tens of thousands, played a dominant role in this process of transmission. Tastes cultivated there influenced patterns of consumption far beyond the Sumerian plain. Among the cuneiform archives at Ebla, on the edge of the Syrian steppe, was found a manual listing more than fifty different varieties of lapis lazuli, known by both their local and Sumerian names. A rich cache of personal ornaments, recovered from the palace at Mari, further demonstrates the strong influence of Sumerian fashions at a key transit point between Mesopotamia, the Anatolian highlands, and the Syrian coast. And specific parallels for complex styles of jewellery, found in abundance in the Royal Tombs of Ur, can be documented across a truly vast area, extending from the city of Mohenjo-daro on the floodplain of the Indus to the fortified citadel of Hissarlik, the site of Homer’s Troy, overlooking the Aegean Sea (Chapter 6). The classical historian Robert Drew Griffith (2005) notes how Homer’s deities, and the heroes under their protection, are distinguished from ordinary mortals by their blue hair, eyebrows, and lashes, a legacy, perhaps, from the gods of the ancient Near East?
Following the trail of the blue-haired gods, we are confronted by more questions than answers. Why should an apparently arbitrary equation between the experience of the sacred and the aesthetic qualities of a particular coloured stone be replicated across such enormous distances, and such varied cultural settings? How did lapis attain a value and exclusivity that cut across the boundaries of visual style and representation, which so clearly distinguish the products of Egyptian craft workers from those of Mesopotamia? By what processes did such distinct cosmologies as those of Egypt and Sumer come to share a common material of construction, exotic to both? As will become apparent, we are not dealing here with an isolated case of diffusion, but rather with a key that unlocks a larger realm of camouflaged borrowings.
3
NEOLITHIC WORLDS
It was in Neolithic times that man’s mastery of the great arts of civilization—of pottery, weaving, agriculture and the domestication of animals—became firmly established … Each of these techniques assumes centuries of active and methodical observation.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1966)
Like honey and imported cedar resin, which Sumerian kings mixed into the mortar of mud-bricks to bring blessings upon a new temple, lapis lazuli may be usefully characterized as a ‘sticky’ material. Not quite, perhaps, in the literal sense of a physical adhesive, but rather in the sense of a social attractor; a material towards which beneficial acts and forces gravitate. Blue, especially when applied to the staring eyes of votive statues, was the colour of supplication, inviting offerings and good fortune, and small tablets of lapis lazuli have been found within the foundations of Early Dynastic temples at Mari and Uruk, where they were carefully placed during rituals that marked the various stages of building a sacred dwelling. Above all, lapis was an attractor for other dazzling materials, especially gold and tin (the crucial additive to copper in making bronze), sources of which clustered along the river valleys between Kandahar and Kabul, where lapis cobbles could also be found (Chapter 6). But the close association between lapis and other exotic materials can be traced back far beyond the Bronze Age.
At the site of Tepe Gawra, on a tributary of the Tigris River with seasonal access to the Iranian highlands, a grave dating to around 4000 BC was found to contain lapis eye-shaped ornaments (perhaps from a statue), around five hundred lapis beads, and a hair ornament composed of lapis, turquoise, and gold. Suggestive traces of blue pigment were also noted around the head and upper body of the individual interred there. The other contents of this burial form a remarkably complete inventory of the exotic highland materials then already in circulation on the Mesopotamian plains, among them some hundreds of turquoise beads, gold body ornaments, electrum beads (made from an alloy of gold and silver), and two blades worked from obsidian—a dark volcanic stone whose sources lie in the remote uplands of central and eastern Turkey. In Egypt lapis beads first appear in prehistoric burials of the fourth millennium BC, some centuries older than the Tell el-Farkha statues. Here again the blue stone did not travel alone, but was accompanied by shells and other coloured ornaments made from minerals extracted along the desert margins of the Red Sea coast.
The ‘Fertile Crescent’: Crossroads of Africa and Eurasia
Such long-range movements of precious highland minerals are, in fact, a much older feature of life in the Near East than these limited examples suggest. Lapis lazuli was a relatively late arrival on the scene, making its first documented appearance in lowland Mesopotamia during the sixth millennium BC. Thousands of years earlier, the first farmers of the ‘Fertile Crescent’—the bridge between Africa and Eurasia, and the setting for the earliest domestication of plants and animals—were already accomplished traders in obsidian, marine shells; ornaments of horn, tooth, and bone; and a host of organic commodities.
In a very practical sense, the vertical movement of resources from uplands to lowlands was integral to the transition from hunter-gatherer to early farming economies, the hallmark of the Neolithic period. To evolve into fully domestic strains, the earliest cultivated cereals (wheat and barley) and managed herd animals (sheep and goat) had to be genetically isolated from their wild progenitors, a process which involved downward transplantation—by human, rather than natural, agency—from their native habitats on the slopes of hills and mountains (where the first experiments in domestication took place) to the seasonally watered soils of oases, lake margins, and river fans, where farming became fully established. Such restricted lowland environments—rich in mud and clay, but poor in most other forms of mineral life—are well exemplified by the spring of ‘Ain es-Sultan (Jericho), on the outskirts of t
he Jordan valley in modern-day Palestine. There, in the shadow of the Judean Mountains, Neolithic settlement around 9000 BC produced a town of some three hectares, overlooked by a monumental stone tower and terracing systems, defending its mud-brick streets and houses against the seasonal incursion of floodwaters.
Within centuries, similar lowland niches had been colonized by farming groups around virtually the whole of the Fertile Crescent, as far east as the arid plain of Deh Luran in south-west Iran, watered by streams descending from the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. The growth of permanent settlements, with their vernacular forms of mud-brick architecture, gave rise to a distinctive landscape of tells: artificial mounds built up over centuries of sedentary occupation. Some thousands of these man-made hills—vestiges of a mode of habitation now all-but-extinct—can be seen today across a large swathe of Eurasia, from the Balkans to western India. The landscape of prehistoric and Bronze Age tells also extends tentatively onto the African landmass, colonizing sandy promontories that project above the floodplain of the Nile Delta.
The Neolithic communities of the Near East, which took form after the end of the last Ice Age (c.12,000 BC), were the forerunners of urban societies not just in their agricultural achievements, but in a whole variety of social and technological innovations. As early as 8500 BC, small groups of colonists were making the crossing from the Turkish or Syrian coast to eastern Cyprus in sail-less boats, laden with large fauna (cattle, pig, sheep, goat, and fallow deer). The same groups also carried cereal crops and obsidian from sources in the highlands of central Turkey, traces of which have been unearthed in the island settlements they founded. On the opposite side of the Fertile Crescent there are tantalizing indications that, by the late sixth millennium BC, simple sail-powered craft may already have been plying the route from southern Mesopotamia to the Gulf of Oman, where the coastal waters teemed with fish and edible molluscs.