Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [62]
What’s so special about the “cradle of civilization”?
Okay. You’re back in elementary school and your teacher pulls down one of those window-shade maps that tend to snap right back up. The teacher is already in trouble, since this seems more like slapstick comedy than school. Then you open your first World Civilizations textbook to a list of “key words” and see “Fertile Crescent,” and “Cradle of Civilization,” “Hammurabi’s Code,” “Nebuchadrezzar’s Hanging Gardens,” and “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.” The phrases are almost clichés, but they contain more than a nugget of truth, capturing the extraordinary accomplishments of the people and empires of Mesopotamia, where much of civilization began.
So what is so special about this part of the world? Why did these people in this rather dry, hot, and unappealing part of the world produce so many of civilization’s “firsts”? Why here?
As any real estate broker will tell you, it comes down to three things—location, location, location.
Ancient Mesopotamia spanned a geographic area that now includes most of modern Iraq, eastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey. It extended from the marshy lowlands on the Persian Gulf in the south to the highlands of the Taurus Mountains (bordering modern Turkey) in the north, and from the Zagros Mountains (in modern Iran) in the east to the Syrian desert in the west.
The oldest known communities in ancient Mesopotamia were villages established in the Zagros foothills more than nine thousand years ago. These early sites, such as Jarmo in northern Iraq, were among the world’s oldest known human settlements, along with the biblical city of Jericho, near the Dead Sea, Tell Hamoukar in modern Syria on the fringes of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, and Catalhoyuk (also called Catal Huyuk, and pronounced cha-tahl-hu-yook) in modern Turkey. With ample water supplies in otherwise dry areas, it was here that people first began to cultivate wheat and barley, domesticate animals, build crude mud houses, and keep herds of goats, sheep, and pigs.
Around 6000 BCE, some of these early farmers moved south, to the region between the future site of Babylon and the Persian Gulf. Drawn to the rivers, they settled in what became the heart of ancient Mesopotamia, in the southern end of the flat plain between the Tigris and Euphrates, roughly the area between modern Baghdad and Basra, which became all too familiar to a world that watched the war in Iraq unfold during the spring of 2003. Like the Nile, the rivers of Mesopotamia also flood, and farmers began to dig irrigation canals that would water their otherwise dry lands. This intensive agricultural undertaking demanded cooperation—and with it, the beginnings of a social order.
As the old story from Aesop put it, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” The intensive communal agriculture allowed people to successfully farm, provided a constant source of food that encouraged larger settlements, and led to expanding populations. Without the pressure of needing to hunt and gather food, communities set down permanent roots and grew. Over time, their stability allowed them to produce textiles, pottery, and other inventions that marked the beginnings of civilization. The first wheel, for instance, was not used by Fred Flintstone in the Stone Age, as generations of cartoon lovers may believe, but more likely by anonymous Mesopotamians around 6500 BCE.
As their agricultural improvements succeeded, populations flourished, and the division of labor became more complex. A social hierarchy developed, in which a ruling class emerged that was responsible for organizing production and trade. The region was also lacking in many basic natural resources, such as wood, stone, and metal ores. Again, necessity led to the invention of dried mud bricks for construction. This shortfall in raw materials also made trading for other resources more important, and