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  While the maritime crossing to Cyprus may have been the work of groups already firmly committed to a farming lifestyle, the development of sailing technology probably owes more to populations of hunter-gatherer-fishers who continued to inhabit coastlands and marshy river mouths opening onto the Arabian Sea, long after groups further inland had adopted an agricultural mode of existence. Hunters and foragers, contemporaries of the earliest farmers, also appear to be at least partly responsible for the earliest known examples of monumental sculpture in the Near East (c.9000 BC), which can no longer be regarded as a distinct achievement of urban societies. This is dramatically exemplified at Göbekli Tepe, a site raised high above the plains of southern Turkey, where ceremonial centres—populated by gigantic stone images of ferocious animals, some fully sculpted and others carved in relief onto T-shaped pillars over 3 metres high—stand guard between the Mesopotamian lowlands and the hilly passes leading into the Taurus Mountains. Unlike the free-standing megaliths of western Europe, constructed some six millennia later, the standing stones of Göbekli Tepe are lodged within the walls of circular or apsidal buildings. Once regarded, like monumental architecture, as an urban innovation, the systematic extraction of milk from herd animals and its processing into dairy products can now also be traced back to a much earlier period (the seventh millennium BC), most clearly among the early cattle-keepers of western Turkey. Rather than a uniform progression of technological stages, followed simultaneously by communities across the Near East, these various innovations took place in specific social and environmental contexts, only then spreading along expanding lines of contact and exchange.

  Between Continents: Egypt on the Prehistoric Fringe

  Social forms and material forms interpenetrate. Among Neolithic societies, the distribution of materials used as personal ornamentation, such as coloured stones and marine shells, maps out recognizable ‘circuits’ or ‘networks’ of exchange, the shifting contours of which can be traced over millennia of prehistoric interaction. Long before the epics of Gilgamesh were committed to writing, the inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent no doubt told stories of heroic journeys to distant mountains in search of jealously guarded bounty. Some flavour of these lost worlds of the imagination is preserved in the complex traces of Neolithic art and ritual, which again fall into recognizable regional styles, smaller than—and interlaced by—the more extensive networks of cross-regional trade.

  Map 4. Prehistoric cooking traditions, and the spread of farming, c.10,000 to 5000 BC

  To the modern eye, the excavated remnants of Neolithic villages (c.9000–7000 BC) from the plains of central Turkey to the foothills of the Zagros often resemble complex art installations: elaborate microcosms, where the dwelling spaces of the living merge with the remains of the dead and with the body-parts of wild animals, brought into and displayed within domestic houses: a ‘cultural domestication’ which, as Ian Hodder (1990) points out, often foreshadowed biological domestication. From the Jordan Valley to the Middle Euphrates, we also find the dismembered skulls of the ancestral dead—carefully curated, and revivified with plaster and paint—stored beneath house-floors and village squares. Some were ornamented with cowrie shell eyes, or anointed with exotic pigments; tangible evidence of their links to faraway places and people. Later, when painted pottery was introduced (c.7000-5000 BC)these ancestral rites were abandoned or transformed in favour of new ceremonies of hospitality and kinship. Again the richly painted ceramics (and no doubt the styles of decorated basketry, which they so carefully emulate) fall into clear zones of distribution: shared worlds of domestic ritual, linking villages hundreds of kilometres apart on the Mesopotamian lowlands.

  The Neolithic societies of Egypt and Sudan (c.6000–4000 BC) borrowed selectively from their neighbours to the east, cultivating not just new plants and animals, but also a distinctive regional identity which is evident in every facet of their material remains, and which I go on to describe in the section that follows. But Egypt also lay on the cusp of a major divergence in prehistoric societies, which long precedes the origins of farming. As Randi Haaland (2007) observes, this divergence is most clearly evident in modes of food preparation and consumption, initially applied to wild plant and animal species. Assemblages of ceramic cooking vessels, dating back to around 9000 BC, have been found across much of what is now the Sahara Desert, including the Sudanese (but not Egyptian) part of the Nile Valley. Between around ten and six thousand years ago much of this region—from the Red Sea to the Atlantic coast—was savannah, occupied by widely dispersed communities of hunters, fishers, and foragers who led relatively sedentary lives, concentrated around shallow lakes and surrounding wetlands. These early Saharan ceramics are among the world’s oldest, rivalled only by the early pottery traditions of eastern Asia. They were decorated with impressed designs, executed with fish-spines, probably to imitate the appearance of netting. In the Fertile Crescent of south-west Asia, by contrast, pottery production was rare or non-existent for some thousands of years after the beginnings of agriculture, making its first widespread appearance (in both plain and painted forms) only around 7000 BC.

  As Dorian Fuller and Michael Rowlands (2010) have noted, this broad regional contrast is best explained by the different processing techniques used to release nutrients and remove toxins from wild plant resources, techniques which seem to have been replicated over extremely large areas. Across much of northern Africa the early presence of ceramics implies forms of cuisine in which locally abundant cereals (millet and sorghum) were transformed into nutritious foods (porridge and beer) by boiling, just as fish and other meats were cooked mainly by stewing in sealed containers. In western Asia, where pottery was initially absent, a contrasting emphasis can be found upon the grinding of wild plants (including native wheat and barley) into flour and their subsequent baking to make flat breads (ancestors of the pita and chapatti), which went together with the open-air roasting of meats. At the site of Ohalo, by the shores of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, this grinding-and-roasting tradition can be traced back to 20,000 BC, some ten millennia before the onset of farming. Neolithic societies along the Egyptian Nile may initially have adopted elements of both culinary traditions. But there is no doubt that by 4000 BC, when evidence for larger settlements begins to emerge, Egypt had become fully incorporated into what David Edwards (2003) terms the ‘bread-eating world’ of western Asia.

  The implications of this regional contrast between cooking traditions based on boiling and roasting extends far beyond matters of diet. Bread came to play a central role in the dynastic societies of Egypt and Mesopotamia, both as a staple food and as a component of sacrificial offerings presented to gods and ancestors (further discussed in Chapter 7). In both areas the baking of processed cereals and the roasting of meat were central elements of religious feasting. Fuller and Rowlands observe how these particular modes of culinary devotion can be seen to derive from a common cultural reservoir that was exclusive to neither the Nile nor the Euphrates, but was instead the outcome of (pre) historical connections between them, connections which also extended to neighbouring societies across much of western Eurasia. While allowing for such underlying commonalities, however, it is important to recognize significant differences in the forms of Neolithic society that developed in the Nile Valley and south-west Asia, and to acknowledge the close affinities that also existed between Egypt and her African neighbours to the south.

  Body Cultures: The Nile and North-East Africa

  Throughout the Egyptian Nile Valley and southwards to the convergence of the Blue and White Niles in central Sudan, Neolithic cemeteries of a broadly similar kind have been excavated along the arid margins of the floodplain, where lack of moisture guards against the decomposition of their contents. Among the many hundreds of known Neolithic burials—of men, women, and children—it is difficult to find even one in which the corpse has not been carefully wrapped and adorned with the customary equipment for social life: clothing made from the hides of cattle and oth
er animals, a rich toolkit of cosmetic instruments including stone palettes on which pigments (collected from the Eastern Desert) were ground to make body paint, a bewildering variety of small vessels for food and medicine, and exuberant beadwork comprising such exotic elements as shells, jasper, and carnelian from the Red Sea littoral, and turquoise brought from the Sinai Desert. By 3500 BC experiments were underway to further extend the symbolic potential of the body in death through artificial preservation with resin-soaked bindings (the beginnings of mummification), but also through the post-mortem dismemberment and separate burial of various body-parts. Combs, pins, bangles, cosmetic palettes, and ceramic vessels—the conventional tools of self-presentation—were also newly elaborated at this time with images of wild animals, plants, and other natural features: miniature landscapes distributed over a shifting topography of human forms. Five centuries later (c.3000 BC) these same object types had become conventional—but, by this time, highly restricted—media of royal display.

  Here emerges an important and long-lived contrast between the prehistoric communities of the Nile Valley and south-west Asia, one still clearly discernible centuries later in the literature and monuments of dynastic Egypt and Mesopotamia (Chapter 8). At a broad level of generality it can be observed that Neolithic communities in western Asia recognized strong symbolic and material affinities between the substance of human bodies and the substance of houses. Houses contained the activities of the living, but were also partly composed of the bodily remains of the dead, which were physically incorporated into their clay fittings and furnishings. De-fleshed bones, when not stored and archived in special charnel houses, were built into domestic spaces; and the disarticulated skulls of certain individuals, as mentioned earlier, were accorded special treatment, coated with the same plaster and paint used to regenerate the ageing surfaces of domestic buildings. Local funerary traditions varied, but a broad concern with the material fabric of the house as a point of communion with the dead can nevertheless be identified across this entire region, from central Turkey to the Zagros piedmont. The Neolithic societies of the Nile Valley were different. Certainly they exploited a wide array of materials such as reeds, acacia, and alluvial mud in the construction of domestic dwellings. Yet the household seems not to have played an equivalent role as focal setting and substance for the ritual life of the group. To a far greater extent, it was through and upon the structure of the body itself—its skin and hair; its diverse contents; its emissions and cavities; its passage between life and death—that the community inscribed its presence in the landscape, and celebrated the enduring vitality of its institutions.

  In drawing such a broad regional contrast between the Neolithic cultures of the Nile Valley and southwest Asia—with their respective emphasis upon the elaboration of ‘body’ and ‘house’ as metaphors and materials of social attachment—it is important to recall that the differences were not born of isolation, but through a long process of exchange and interaction. None of the domestic plant and animal species on which the dynastic economy of Egypt was based were indigenous to the African continent. Wheat, barley, and flax for linen—often wrongly considered ‘immemorial’ features of the Egyptian landscape on the basis of later tomb depictions—all had to be introduced from outside, and were present only after about 4500 BC. The native fauna of North Africa included Barbary sheep and wild cattle, which may have been subject to local forms of herd-management as early as 9000 BC. But none of these experiments seem to have resulted in any lasting interdependence between humans and the species involved.

  Only around 6000 BC were fully domesticated varieties of sheep and goat introduced to Egypt from the Fertile Crescent of south-west Asia. On current evidence, the main route of transfer may well have been a maritime one, arriving at a point on the Red Sea coast and reaching the Nile Valley via a network of seasonal river-channels (or wadis). Today these channels are thoroughly dried out, but they once supported a range of fauna and flora, richly depicted in the rock art of Egypt’s Eastern Desert. Along with new herd animals, whose arrival in Africa preceded that of cultivated cereals by more than a thousand years, came new habits of mobility and heightened familiarity with the mineral-encrusted passes through the Egyptian and Nubian Deserts, where new materials awaited discovery. The story of the Neolithic in the Nile Valley is not, then, the expected one of migratory hunter-gatherers choosing to settle down in permanent villages, but rather one of settled fisher-hunter-foragers electing to go (conspicuously) on the move with their herds.

  4

  THE (FIRST) GLOBAL VILLAGE

  The great transformations of humanity are only in part reported in terms of the revolutions in technology with resulting increases in the number of people living together.

  Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and its Transformations (1953)

  In his Man Makes Himself (1936), V. Gordon Childe, the most influential prehistorian of the twentieth century, identified two great revolutions in human history prior to the Industrial Revolution: the Neolithic Revolution, which saw the invention of farming, and the Urban Revolution of the fourth millennium BC, which saw amongst other things the invention of writing and the first experiments in large-scale cohabitation. In doing so he also—and inevitably, perhaps—created a fault-line in our understanding of prehistory, which has since obscured the momentous developments in village life that came after the origins of agriculture but preceded the Urban Revolution on the Mesopotamian plain. This much neglected phase in world history needs a name. Perhaps it is best described as the first era of the ‘global village’, to literalize Marshall McLuhan’s metaphor for the electronic age. It was a period in which regional distinctions collapsed in the face of new communication media, creating a kind of mass consciousness which was nevertheless contingent upon the localized enactment of concrete activities: specific ways of making and doing things within houses and villages.

  In many ways, this fateful fifth millennium is a period of paradoxes. It has no clear parallels in the historical or ethnographic records of recent village societies. In the Mesopotamian lowlands it is known as the Ubaid period, after the site of Tell el-‘Ubaid in southern Iraq. But its innovations were the outcome of interlocking developments across a much larger area, extending from the Cilician Gates, overlooking the Mediterranean, to the Gulf of Oman, on the Arabian Sea. It precedes the invention of the cuneiform script, and yet it crystallized the technological and social foundations upon which writing developed. It antedates the first cities, yet its settlements—sometimes smaller in scale than their Neolithic precursors, and rarely exceeding five hectares—already exhibit many features of urban life, such as specialized bureaucratic procedures and a complex division of craft activities. Its modes of consumption and exchange were also very different from those of earlier prehistory. They involved new media such as smelted and cast metals, wheel-finished pottery, and alcoholic drinks, bringing with them important changes—and no doubt disruptions—in social life. Implicit in all these developments was an acceleration in the rhythm of exchange between lowland villages and their highland and coastal neighbours.

  The Beginnings of Metallurgy

  Let us begin with metals, as their unique capacity for fusion and shape-shifting was central—both symbolically and practically—to the wider transformations in question. Copper, lead, gold, and silver were all known to early Neolithic societies in their native forms. They were initially valued (like exotic stones) as rare substances that could be cold-worked by hammering, rubbing, and incising. But the radical transformation of ores into metal by heat was achieved only in the fifth millennium BC. Gordon Childe described this discovery as the ‘beginnings of chemistry’, at the same time pointing out the aura of magic and ritual which must have surrounded the mutation of brittle stone into a tough, yet plastic medium.

  As Mircea Eliade, the historian of religion, would later observe, this breakthrough had its roots in ‘the demiurgic experiences of the primeval potter’ (1978: 7). And it can be placed on a
still longer continuum of technological discovery, which begins with the use of fire to transform raw flesh into cooked meat, a practice perhaps coeval with the evolution of culture itself. This long genealogy of human engagement with the effects of fire upon matter has had its impact on many areas of social life, including religion and language. Even today metalworkers talk of alloy ‘recipes’, just as Mesopotamian texts use words for cooking and roasting to describe the refinement of metal. This symbolic association of metalworking and cuisine can be traced back to the Ubaid period at Değirmentepe, in highland Turkey. There familiar household rituals provided a framework for the organization of metallurgical activities, with the forge becoming an extension of the domestic hearth.

  In the case of metallurgy, unlike cooking food or firing clay, the resulting change of state (from solid, to glowing liquid, and back to solid) was reversible, and could be endlessly repeated with no loss of substance. It was this capacity for endless translation between distinct realms of meaning that differentiated metals from earlier commodities such as precious stones, whose forms could only be altered to new tastes by their progressive reduction through chipping or carving. Metalwork—even when cast into some locally meaningful shape—was never truly ‘finished’, but always carried residual significance as a commodity, capable of transferring its value to some new cultural context (consider the sad fate of Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince, whose statue body, stripped of its golden skin, is melted down for scrap).