Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [30]
But in the place where the five rivers met, the descendants of Tep and Hwll, and others like them, continued to hunt undisturbed, and if a few adventurous folk succeeded in crossing the Channel to the island from time to time, they too followed the ancient hunting ways of the region during this long period.
But elsewhere, the story was very different, for some time before 5,000 B.C., the greatest revolution that the western world has ever known took place. It started in the Middle East and from there it spread over most of Europe: this revolution was the introduction of farming.
It changed everything. It was the beginning of the modern world. Following game, a single family even in a region like Sarum had needed many miles of land over which to roam in search of food; but for sowing crops and raising livestock, a few dozens of acres was enough and food could be stored. It was the beginning of wealth as it has been known ever since. Whereas up to this point in history, man had been only a figure in the landscape, now he began to dominate the land, controlling it and shaping it to his own purpose.
By four thousand years before the birth of Christ, these epoch-making changes had produced extraordinary results.
In the warm and fertile lands between the great rivers Tigris and Euphrates in present day Iran, an inventive and busy people – the Sumerians – were building the world’s first hill towns. They were made of mud and brick and their summits were crowned with temples. Elsewhere in the Middle East, other peoples were developing new and sophisticated crafts: in Egypt they made linen; in Mesopotamia, clever jewellers were combining copper brought down from the mountains with glass, in beautiful and intricate patterns to make the ornamental work called faience. On the coast of Saudi Arabia, divers searched the oyster beds for pearls which they exported, and in the Levant, merchants were putting out to sea in small ships rigged with square leather sails, carrying cargoes of copper, ivory and brightly painted pottery.
Further north, in Europe, there were no towns. But in that huge belt of land stretching from the Danube to the Baltic, farmers were planting crops, raising livestock, and burning the stubble to enrich the soil; and they were building huge wooden barns and houses, sometimes a hundred feet long. Further west, in Brittany on the northern coast of France, the farmers were learning to decorate their stonework and pottery with elaborate patterns of spirals, arcs and circles that seemed to have no end.
The Neolithic Age of farmers and builders in stone was well under way, and the age of the new metal alloy, bronze, would soon begin.
But not in Britain.
For in Britain, cut off by the sea from these developments, it was still the time of the hunter.
One summer morning, about four thousand years before Christ, a party of six small boats entered the shallow harbour by the hill and turned up the slow moving river that led towards Sarum.
The boats were made of brightly painted skins stretched over a wooden framework; they were each about fifteen feet long, broad, with a fairly shallow draught, and they had been paddled across the English Channel at great risk from the coast of Brittany. They had no sails and were really designed for river work, but luckily the weather during their crossing had been unusually calm.
There were twenty fighting men in the boats, together with their women and children; both men and women wielded the paddles and they wore simple sleeveless jerkins made of leather or woven wool which left their arms conveniently bare for this hard work. The boats also contained four dogs, eight lambs, twelve small calves, ten piglets and a quantity of supplies, including the all important clay pots that contained seeds for sowing. The