Peter Haugen - World History For Dummies

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.

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.

River floods spread rich, silt-laden mud. Besides being fun to squish around in, this mud built up over eons and enriched the soil of the valleys where organized human society would first take hold on a large scale. Good soil and readily available water enabled primitive farmers to increase their annual yields and feed ever-larger populations. It follows that early cities, early legal codes, and systems of counting and writing — all elements of civilization — would also arise in these river valleys.

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.

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.

The switch to farming was anything but sudden. From their experience gathering edible grass seeds, tribal people knew that if there was enough rainfall, the ground where they beat or trampled seeds to remove the inedible hulls would eventually become green with new growth of that same grass. Having seen stray seeds sprouting, over time people tried spreading some of the fattest seeds on the ground in the hope of growing more of the same.

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).

Something ironic happened in North Africa over the thousands of years when the agricultural lifestyle was taking hold. The weather slowly changed so that it rained less. Grasslands gave way to sand. Over many generations, fewer seeds sprouted, and fewer sprouts matured; ultimately, villages rose and fell without people being aware of what was happening to the world around them. As the climate changed, more and more folks gathered up the kids (and the goats, assuming that they’d caught onto that crazy new domestic-animal trend) and headed into Asia and the Middle East. In northeastern Africa, they crowded into a sliver of land with a terrific source of water: the Nile.

Villages sprang up in the Nile Valley as early as 5000 BC. A thousand years later, people in the valley were burying their dead with meticulous care and ornamentation, a trend that led to big things, such as Egypt’s pyramids. Villages and towns became cities that eventually came together into larger civilizations until the long river valley held just two nations: Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. Then, around 3100 BC, a great king named Menes (also known as Narmer, although that may have been the name of a slightly later king) united Egypt and built a capital at Memphis. The city in Tennessee is named after it.

Further up the Nile (or further down in Africa, if you’re looking at a map), another culture developed in Upper Nubia, or Kush (where Sudan is today). Influenced by Egypt’s culture, the Kushites built pyramid-shaped tombs in the Egyptian style. Egypt ruled the Kushites from 2000–1600 BC and again from 1500–900 BC. Later, in the eighth century BC, the Kushites turned on their northern neighbors and brought down Egypt’s ruling dynasty, ruling over Egypt until about 671 BC.