Michael Cheilik (Ref. 28) from City University of New York, calls this period the Chalcolithic (Chalcos = copper, lithos = stone). After draft animals were domesticated and wheeled vehicles were invented transportation over long distances became possible. A stage of intellectual development known as mythopoeic (myth-making) arrived and persisted for centuries. The forces of the universe became appreciated and personal. Sometime in this era came the "Dawn of Civilization" as in a few areas true civilizations appeared. It is probably not unbelievable then, that also at this period the weather and climate was the most ideal of the last 100,000 years, with the possible exception of our own time – the past one-half century. (Ref. 28,224)
As we shall see in the development of this period of history, Egypt and Mesopotamia have long competed in the historians' annals for the honor of being the oldest source of civilization. Very recently carbon-14 dating and bristle-cone dendrology studies in correlation, have suggested that some of the Mediterranean islands (particularly Malta) may have had an advanced culture before such appeared in the fertile Nile Valley. (Ref. 164). Furthermore, recent Danish archaeological excavations on the island of Bahrain in the Arabian Gulf have revealed a civilization antedating that of Mesopotamia' The recent revision of the carbon dating has now even placed some of the stone towers and megaliths of the British Isles back to corresponding early dates. What does this mean? It is difficult to conceive of extensive civilizations developing only on islands. More probable is the thought that these islands were only refuges or way-stations for a seagoing people who had been dislodged by some catastrophe from their original homes, perhaps as yet undiscovered and unidentified. Coast lines have changed, old lands are now covered by seas, and many cities may yet lie buried under sand dunes, lava and ashes or water in many parts of the world. Along the Afro-Asiatic coasts much has changed even since the 5th century B.C. when Hanno sailed down the Atlantic African coast with sixty galleys and 30,000 settlers who established ports which have now become inland fields. The Romans discovered an old city on the Atlantic coast of Africa, already very ancient when they found it, with impressive sun-oriented, megalithic structures. They called this "Maqom Semes", "City of the Sun" or "Lixus, the Eternal City" and felt it to be older than any city inside the Mediterranean. These impressive ruins are now no longer on an island or the coast, but are half-buried on a headland on a ridge surrounded on all sides by flat fields of the Lucus River delta, with the ocean only barely visible in the distance. This is about three miles upstream from the modern city of Larache, Morocco, which is itself about seventy miles down the African coast from the Strait of Gibralter. Engle (Ref. 62) has reported that the ocean shore line in western South America about 6,000 years ago was much to the east of where it is today. Could not this also be true of the western coast of Africa? At any rate, in the ruins "A large Roman mosaic of Neptune bears witness to former links with the ocean, while the ruins of Arab mosques and Roman temples cover earlier Berber and Phoenician structures, refitted in turn from gigantic blocks hauled from far away by the unknown sun-worshippers who first chose this site"[6]. On the other hand, dry land has sunk into the Atlantic, making underwater canyons extending out into the ocean floor from African river mouths. Ocean floors have never ceased to move, and some great geological disaster disturbed the Atlantic and split the countryside of Iceland, creating a giant rift canyon that runs across it and beyond in the ocean floor[7]. Radio-carbon datings of a tree embedded in lava in this rift indicated that the catastrophe occurred around 3,000 B.C. Does this have some bearing on the shifting of peoples around the Mediterranean at this time and the rather sudden "new" locations of civilizations on the islands and then subsequent locations in Egypt and Mesopotamia?
Sudden changes occurred on Malta and Crete and Cyprus at about 3,000 B.C. with a sudden end to the Neolithic phase and the beginning of a major new era. If a geological occurrence about that time in the Atlantic was great enough to split Iceland, it seems possible that tidal waves would have caused far reaching disasters, forcing population groups to search for new lands, and such events could have been remembered in many peoples legends as the time of the great flood. As Alexander Marshack (Ref. 130) has written, “art, agriculture, science, mathematics, astronomy, the calendar, writing, cities - these things could not have happened "suddenly". The question is how and over how many thousands of years did the preparation require? (Ref. 130, 95, 61, 164)
Back to Africa: 8000 to 5000 B.C.
In this period there were Cushitic speaking Hamitic people along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden on the coastline of the horn of Africa. In Egypt, sometime between 4,500 and 3,100 B.C. the Badarian Culture existed, with agriculture, irrigation, clearing of jungles and swamps and pictographic writing, which may have been imported from Sumeria. These Badarians may have come from south of Egypt via the Red Sea and Wadi Hammarat, but it is possible that immigrants from Jericho also arrived, bringing food-producing techniques. The overall population of the lower Nile was probably less than 20,000 at 5,000 B.C. (Ref. 83) The climate was cold and damp and the people wore kilts or long skirts made of linen or skins with the fur inward. They lived in some type of tents or perishable wall homes.
Hippopotami and crocodiles were in evidence, and in the area of el Badari there are bodies of dogs, sheep and oxen wrapped in matting or linen. This suggests possible reverence for these animals. Lower Egypt had domestic grazing animals from the Levant by about 4,500 B.C., but the Badarians lived primarily in middle Egypt and their pottery dates to the second half of the 5th millennium by thermoluminescence. That they had outside contacts is evidenced by ivory spoons, shells from the Red Sea and turquoise beads from the Sinai. Recent finds of a vast number of reed ships, many with masts and sails have been made in the long dried-up wadi between the Nile and the Red Sea which may well date back to this period. The Egyptians are basically Hamitic, but may well have added mixtures of Nubian, Ethiopian and Libyan natives, coming from the Sahara as it slowly dried, along with immigrant Semitic or Armenoid tribes. Cattle were used as beasts of burden perhaps by 4,000 B.C. The sail was used from about 3,500 B.C. on, and pottery dating to 3,100 bears paintings of sickle-shaped sailing vessels, apparently built with reeds and complete with cabins and centerboards. Egypt was first united as the "Old Kingdom" under Menes[8], who, as king of Upper Egypt, subdued Lower Egypt and united the two with a new capital established at what was later called Memphis. Although Egypt had no copper or tin, it did have gold and there were fabulous goldsmiths in Memphis (actually a clan of dwarfs) from the early days of the United Kingdom. (Ref. 175, 94, 95, 45, 213)
A Neolithic Hamitic culture was present in Algeria and Morocco with agricultural settlements and pottery by 5,000 B.C. The Sahara was quite wet from 7,000 to 2,000 B.C. and the many lakes reached their maximum extent about 3,500 B.C. when Lake Chad covered some 200,000 square miles. It is now the only remaining lake with 15,000 square miles of water. The rivers of the Sahara ran inland so that alluvial material gradually filled up the inland basins, blocking and slowing the streams. In the fierce sun that followed the changing climate, the water evaporated and the marshes dried out. Salt deposits are still worked at such places as Amadror, Teghaza and Taoudenni which are simply old inland basins. The people of the wet Sahara were Negroid and they raised domesticated cattle and left beautiful works of art on rocks with some figures as high as twenty-six feet. Elephants, antelope, water animals and fish were abundant. The Negroid people of this era were not the Bushmanoid, round-headed people pictured on the rock drawings before 6,000 B.C. (Ref. 8, 176)
At 4,000 B.C. there were two languages of the western Sudan family - Yoruba and Idoma - but they were already very different and had apparently been diverging for several thousand years. (Ref. 83) In tropical Africa there were probably scattered bands of peoples whose descendants are the pygmies of the Zaire forests and Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. The first true Negroes probably lived as fishermen along the Nile and the Niger rivers and the savannah north and west of the forest about 4,000 B.C. (Ref. 175, 83)
Archeologist M.A. Hoffman of the University of South Carolina (Ref. 316) writes of the factors allowing the development of the "first nation", under Narmer (Menes). At Hierakonopolis, in Upper Egypt, about 3800 B.C., there was slight seasonal rainfall, wooded grasslands, fertile flood plains and easy access to the Nile. There were two settlements in the area with mud-brick and wattle-and-daub houses spread over a 100 acre area and having perhaps as many as 10,000 people. This is called the Amratian period (also Naqada I) and excavations have produced maceheads, as symbols of central authority. A huge pottery industry was present, making Red Ware pottery which was traded up and down the Nile. Some was used in the elaborate burials which were part of the Egyptians' religious beliefs. Just after 3500 B.C., however, with the area becoming more arid, potteries were abandoned and the Amratian period came to an end, as people moved into more thickly settled villages along the wetter Nile flood plain, initiating the Gerzean or Naqada II period, which lasted until 3100 B.C. An elite class in the new villages built temples, palaces, larger tombs and possibly an irrigation system, rendering the flood plain able to produce bigger and more reliable harvests. But the water management and excess grain storage problems demanded more central control. Various kings fought for dominance and finally it was Narmer, who succeeded in political unification of the entire Egyptian Nile valley
Back to The Near East: 8000 to 5000 B.C.
This was the fount and breeding place of the Semitic peoples, although at this particular time only Bedouins and nomad tribesmen existed and there was no true civilization, at least in the western two-thirds of the peninsula. Recent excavations on the Island of Bahrain and adjacent Saudi Arabia have suggested the presence of a vanished empire which the Sumerians referred to as "Dilmun", center of earthly paradise. Excavated objects indicate commercial activity oriented both towards India and Mesopotamia. Surface shards and implements have been dated back to about 4,000 B.C. (Ref. 176) Apparently after the Wet Phase, about 4,000 B.C. there was a progressive dessication of the Arabian peninsula which may have contributed to the northward migrations of peoples into the Syrian Desert which began shortly thereafter. (Ref. 88)Additional Notes
The people of the coast in these early millennia may have been of the original Mediterranean race now represented in this part of the world only by the Georgian Caucasians. Timnal, in southern Israel, was a source of large amounts of surf ace ores of malachite, so there was a Chalcolithic Palestinian civilization called the Ghassulian Culture, using the first deliberate alloy, arsenical copper. (Ref. 8) The original locations of coastal towns, and later major cities, was occasioned to great extent by the location of springs and thus there has of ten resulted continuous occupation of the same spots over many centuries, with the consequent rise of debris mounds, or tells (Ref. 88). Additional Notes
Iraq is the area of the ancient Mesopotamia, a word derived from mesos meaning "between" and potamos or "river". The wheel and the plow are thought by most to have been invented or brought here sometime about 3,500 B.C.1. Cattle were used as beasts of burden about the same time. There is evidence of irrigation on a steppe east of Mesopotamia by 5,000 B.C., and classically historians have described three more or less separate civilizations which developed in the river basins of Mesopotamia perhaps as early as 4,500 B.C. The most important of these will be discussed first:
SUMER (On the Euphrates River)All historians seem agreed that the Sumerians were non-Semitic, but their origin is much disputed. Some have suggested Iberian or Dravidian affinities. McEvedy (Ref. 136) thinks they may have been part of the aboriginal Caucasian people and to this is added the opinion of Sir Leonard Woolley (Ref. 238) that their language was that of the early Caucasians. They used copper from 5,000 B.C. onward and their clay tablets give us records back to 3,300 B.C. in the city of Ur, which was then a seaport. The geography of Mesopotamia has changed greatly through the millennia. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, the Karun River from the Persian mountains and Wadi al Batin, draining the heart of Arabia, all enter the Persian Gulf, the latter two at almost right angles to the former two. Many millennia ago, the last two rivers discharged a mass of silt across the gulf, which then extended even north of present day Baghdad, and eventually made a bar against which similar silt of the two chief rivers piled up, forming dry land directly across the gulf. The effect was to turn the upper end of the then existing gulf into a stagnant lake which was still fed by the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, but which then turned from salty to brackish and then to actual fresh water. Eventually, of course, even the lake built up with silt, making the area the most fertile land on earth. Although Ur, then on the sea coast, became the great capital of Sumer, the city of Eridu, south of this, seems older and in a nearby village of al'Ubaid there has been found ancient pottery, in some ways similar to pottery also found at Susa, in ancient Elam and which might have a common ancestry from some foreign place. Could the origin be Bahrain, the island down the gulf where Danish excavations now show a civilization possibly older than Sumer? There is a Sumerian legend which tells how a race of monsters, half fish and half human, came from the Persian Gulf, led by Oannes, and introduced the arts of writing, agriculture and metallurgy.
The Sumerians had wheeled vehicles[9], wheel-made pottery, sailboats and animal-drawn plows. The sailboats were of particular interest because recent information indicating a much greater and extensive maritime trade with large, reed, wash-through ships has been made available. Thor Heyerdahl, constructing such a ship from the reeds of the Tigris Euphrates delta region in 1980 has demonstrated that such ships could sail to India and to Africa. The concept that the civilization of Bahrain may have antedated Sumer is compatible with a new theory suggested by Heyerdahl (Ref. 95) and discussed under II,C of this chapter. From the records of Ur there is evidence of the presence of boats of almost one hundred tons and a ceramic boat model in the Iraq Museum with a cylindrical footing for its mast dates back to at least 4,000 B.C. The potters' wheel was invented in Erech about 3,000 B.C., perhaps along with the brick mold.
These same Sumerians developed the duodecimal system of measurement giving rise to our twelve inches to the foot, sixty minutes in an hour and three hundred sixty degrees in a circle. In addition to the island "Dilmun", they mention "Magan" as a distant copper mountain and "Meluhha" which may well have been the great Indus Valley civilization. At 5,000 B.C. they had primitive irrigation systems used to water fields as far as three miles on either side of a river. The resulting larger and richer crops, along with the necessity of water administration systems, probably led to the growth of some of the towns. Eventually, however, this leaching out of the earth's salts led to soil infertility. The food of Sumer included barley, wheat, millett, chickenpeas, lentils, beans, turnips, onions, garlic, leeks, cucumbers, lettuce, cress and mustard. There was plenty of fish and some beef and veal if one could afford it. The beef source, however, was from animals after their useful worklife was over and therefore it was tough. Mutton was common along with goat and pork, the last only until about 1,800 B.C. The Indo-European nomads roaming through the Mid-East may have started the loathing of pork, since they could be herded only with difficulty and had little stamina for movement. Forty percent of the Sumerian grain yield was used for ale production, but since no hops were available there was no true beer.
A temple workman received the equivalent of 2.2 American pints of ale a day and senior dignitaries five times that amount, some of which they may have used as currency. The cultivated grape came to Mesopotamia from the Caucasus about 5,000 B.C. and in later years, as the irrigation soured the soil and grain became more difficult to grow, many people took to either grape or date wines. (Ref. 211, 95, 238, 136, 94, 175, 213)
AKKADIA-KISH This second center of civilization consisted of a Semitic people living to the north and west of Sumer with a separate culture. There is evidence that their Third Dynasty was in effect as early as 3,638 B.C. More will be heard about them in the next chapter.
A third center of civilization with copper weapons and tools, hieroglyphic writing and domesticated animals appeared east of Sumer, with a capital at Susa. Older writers thought that they might have been a Negroid[10] people, some moderns feel that they were probably the ancestors of the Medes, while McEvedy (Ref. 136) writes that they were relatives of the Sumerians, in that they were a part of the original Caucasian race of Georgians. We are speaking of the ancient country of Elam, a part of present Iran. There was much copper around the southern Caucasus, the shore of the Caspian Sea and down to the Persian Gulf. Remains of a Chalcolithic culture have been found at Anau, Tepe Hissar and Rarjy dating to 3,000 B.C. Painted pottery cultures with mixed farming and trade activity existed in central Iran in the 2nd half of the 5th Millennium. Copper lying free had been found and hammered into utensils beginning about 7,000 B.C. and about 5,000 B.C. copper was obtained by firing malachite which releases the flowing metal at a relatively low temperature. Tin ore, of ten found with malachite, soon yielded its metal and the tin-copper (bronze) alloy resulted in some areas by 3,800 B.C. The best bronze, consisting of 15% tin, is three times as hard as copper alone. (Ref. 21, 45, 136)
In this era there were colonies of the Cycladian civilization along the coast and a well developed Chalcolithic culture of basic Caucasian peoples inland. A 1978 study of skeletons from a dig at Kalinkaya in central Anatolia, dating to this period, indicated that the people were relatively short, the men averaging five feet four inches and the women just five feet. 20% of the women had healed ankle fractures or foot bone changes, probably from falls in their rocky country homes. There is some indication of nutritional stress in bowed tibiae, flattened long bones and flattened pelvic inlets. 33% of the limited number of skeletons studied showed vertebral osteoarthritis (compared to 50% in modern United States), and 12% showed extremity osteoarthritis (compared to 29% in modern U.S.) (Ref. 4). Agricultural societies were well distributed and there was trade and migration with other countries of the Near East. (Ref. 88)
Forward to The Near East: 3000 to 1500 B.C.
Although there is still much confusion and argument about the origin and domestication of the camel, recent writers suggest that domestication occurred in southern Arabia possibly as early as the 4th millennium B.C. and their use was extended to Egypt even before the first dynasty, that is, before 3100 B.C. (Ref. 313) Another recent writer, Hamblin (Ref. 315), however, although agreeing that domestication occurred among the southern Arabian tribes, would put the date much later, at 2500 B.C.
When ancient Israel was under Ptolemaic control late in the 4th millennium B.C., Jemmeh in the northwestern Negev desert was occupied by a small group of Chalcolithic hunting and farming people, but subsequently it was apparently abandoned for some 1,300 to 1,400 years. (Ref. 295)