Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

3

The Birth of the Gods, the Evolution of House and Home

As we have seen, for Merlin Donald the great transformation in human history was the change from episodic thinking to mimetic, because it allowed the development of culture, ‘the great escape from the nervous system’. Before this book reaches its conclusion we shall have encountered many other candidates for the single most important idea in history: the soul, the experiment, the One True God, the heliocentric universe, evolution – each of them has passionate supporters. Some of these ideas are highly abstract concepts. For most archaeologists, however, humans’ ‘greatest idea’ is a far more down-to-earth practical notion. For them, the domestication of plants and animals – the invention of agriculture – was easily the greatest idea because it produced what was by far the most profound transformation in the way that humans have lived.

The domestication of plants and animals took place some time between 14,000 and 6,500 years ago and it is one of the most heavily studied ideas in pre-history. Its origins at that time in history are intimately related to the climatological record of the earth. Until, roughly speaking, 12,000 years ago, the average temperature of the earth was both much colder and more variable than it is now. Temperature might vary by as much as 7° in less than a decade, compared with 3° in a century now.¹ Around 12,000 years ago, however, the earth warmed up considerably, as the last ice age finally ended and, no less important, the climate stabilised. This warming and stabilisation marks the transition between the two major periods in earth’s history, the Pleistocene and the Holocene. This was in effect the ‘big trigger’ in history and made our world possible.²

It is safe to say that while we are now fairly clear about where agriculture began, how it began, and with what plants and animals, there is no general agreement, even today, about why this momentous change occurred. The theories, as we shall see, fall into two types. On the one hand, there are the environmental/economic theories, of which there are several; and there are the religious theories, of which at the moment there is only one.

The domestication of plants and animals (in that order) occurred independently in two areas of the world that we can be certain about, and perhaps in seven. These areas are: first, south-west Asia – the Middle East – in particular the ‘fertile crescent’ that stretches from the Jordan valley in Israel, up into Lebanon and Syria, taking in a corner of south-east Turkey, and round via the Zagros mountains into modern Iraq and Iran, the area known in antiquity as Mesopotamia. The second area of undoubted independent domestication lies in Mesoamerica, between what is now Panama and the northern reaches of Mexico. In addition, there are five other areas of the world where domestication also occurred but where we cannot be certain whether it was independent, or derived from earlier developments in the Middle East and Mesoamerica. These areas are the highlands of New Guinea; China, where the domestication of rice seems to have had its own history; a narrow band of sub-Saharan Africa running from what is now the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria across to the Sudan and Ethiopia; the Andes/Amazon region, where the unusual geography may have prompted domestication independently; and the eastern United States.³

One reason for the distribution about the globe of these areas has been provided by Andrew Sherratt, from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. His theory is that three of these areas – the Middle East, Mesoamerica and the south-east Asian island chain – are what he calls ‘hot spots’: geologically and geographically they have been regions of constant change, where incredible pressures generated by tectonic plates moving over the surface of the earth created in these three places narrow isthmuses, producing a conjunction of special characteristics that are not seen elsewhere on earth. These special characteristics were, first, a sharp juxtaposition of hills, desert and alluvium (deposits of sand or mud formed by flowing water) and, second, narrow strips of land which caused a build-up of population so that the isthmus could not support traditional hunter-gathering.⁴ These ‘hot spots’ therefore became ‘nuclear areas’ where the prevailing conditions made it more urgent for early man in those regions to develop a different mode of subsistence.

Whatever the truth of this attractively simple theory, or in regard to the number of times agriculture was ‘invented’, there is little doubt that the very first time, chronologically speaking, that plants and animals were domesticated, was in the ‘fertile crescent’ of south-west Asia. To understand fully what we are talking about we need to grasp the nature of the evidence about domestication, which means in the first instance understanding the relatively new science of palynology, or pollen analysis. Plants – especially the wind-pollinated tree species – each produce thousands of pollen grains every year, the outer skins of which are very tough, and very resistant to decay. Pollen varies in shape and size and, being organic, can be carbon-dated. Its age and genus, if not its species, can therefore often be determined and this has enabled archaeo-botanists (a relatively new specialism) to reconstruct the surface vegetation of the earth at different periods in the past.

Plant remains (i.e., not just pollen) have now been identified and radio-carbon dated from hundreds of sites in the Middle East and, according to the Israeli geneticist Daniel Zohary, the picture is more or less clear. First, there were three cereals which formed the principal ‘founder crops’ of Neolithic agriculture. In order of importance, these were: emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum, subspecies dicoccum), barley (Hordeum vulgare) and einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum). They first appeared in the tenth and ninth millennia BP. Second, the domestication of these cereals was accompanied by the cultivation of several ‘companion plants’, in particular the pea (Pisum sativum), the lentil (Lens culaniris), the chickpea (Cicer arietinum), bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia) and flax (Linum usitatissimum).⁵ In each case, the original wild variety, from which the domestic crop evolved, has now been identified; this enables us to see what advantages the domestic variants had over their wild cousins. In the case of einkorn wheat, for example, the main distinguishing trait between wild and cultivated varieties lies in the biology of seed dispersal. Wild einkorn has brittle ears, and the individual spikelets break up at maturity to disperse the seed. In the cultivated wheat, on the other hand, the mature ear is less brittle, stays intact, and will break only when threshed. In other words, to survive it needs to be reaped, and then sown. The same is true for the other crops: the domesticated varieties were less brittle than the wild types, so that the seeds are spread only once the plant has been reaped, thereby putting it under man’s control. Comparison of the DNA of the various wheats all over the fertile crescent shows that they are fundamentally identical, much less varied than the DNA of wild wheats. This suggests that in each case domestication occurred only once. ‘The plants with which food production started in the South West Asia “nuclear area” were transported (already as domesticated crops) to initiate agriculture all over these vast territories.’⁶

A number of specific sites have been identified where domestication may have first occurred. Among these are Tell Abu Hureyra and Tell Aswad in Syria, which date back to 10,000 years ago, Karacadağ in Turkey, Netiv Hagdud, Gilgal and Jericho, in the Jordan valley, and Aswan in the Damascus basin, also in Syria, which date back even further, to 12,000–10,500 BP. An alternative theory – still speculative – is that man’s increasing control of fire enabled him to burn huge tracts of forest, and that the tender grasses and shoots that would have grown up amid the burnt remains would themselves have been, in effect, domesticated plants and would have attracted herbivorous game.⁷ This would have needed a knowledge of ‘slash and burn’ technology and tools sufficient to cut down large trees – to create firebreaks. It is by no means certain that early humans had such tools.

In the case of animal domestication the type of evidence is somewhat different. In the first place we should note that the general history of the earth helped somewhat: after the last Ice Age most species of mammal were smaller than hitherto.⁸ One or more of three criteria are generally taken as evidence of domestication: a change in species abundance – a sudden increase in the proportion of a species within the sequence of one site; a change in size – most wild species are larger than their domestic relatives, because humans found it easier to control smaller animals; and a change in population structure – in a domestic herd or flock, the age and sex structure is manipulated by its owners to maximise outputs, usually by the conservation of females and the selection of sub-adult males. Using these criteria, the chronology of animal domestication appears to begin shortly after 9000 BP – that is, about 1,000 years after plant domestication. The sites where these processes occurred are all in the Middle East, indeed in the fertile crescent, at locations which are not identical to, but overlap with those for plant domestication. They include Abu Hureyra, at 9400 BP, Ganj Dareh in Iran, at 9000–8450 BP, Gritille in Turkey, at 8600–7770 BP, and Tell Aswad, Jericho, Ramad, ’Ain Ghazal, Beida and Basta, all just post-dating 9000 BP. In most cases, the sequence of domestication is generally taken to be: goats then sheep, to be closely followed by pigs and cattle. ‘The transformation from a hunting and collecting economy, perhaps beginning with the cultivation of wild cereals, to the establishment of permanent villages and a mixed agricultural economy with fully domesticated races of plants and animals, took place over at least 3,000 years.’ There was no radical break; for many years people simply tended ‘wild gardens’ rather than neat smallholdings or farms as we would recognise them. There was a transition period where hunter-gatherers culled smaller animals. Pigs do not adjust to the nomadic way of life, so their domestication implies sedentism.⁹

So far as animal domestication is concerned, it first took place in the hilly/mountainous region where modern-day Iran, Iraq and Turkey meet, the most likely reason for this being that, in a situation where most wild species were not naturally domesticable, hilly regions (with a variety of altitudes and therefore of vegetation) would have produced the greatest range of animal species, and the greatest variation of individuals within species. Such an environment would have been the most likely to have produced smaller types, more amenable to control.

For the Old World, then, the location and timing of agriculture is understood, as are the plants and animals on which it was based. Further, there is a general agreement among palaeobiologists that domestication was invented only once and then spread to western Europe and India. Whether it also spread as far afield as south-east Asia and central Africa is still a moot point, and the most recent genetic evidence of farmers (as opposed to their plants) is not as conclusive as it might be. It shows that modern-day Greeks share 85–100 per cent of their (relevant) genes with Middle Easterners (from Baghdad, Ankara and Damascus), whereas Parisians share only 15–30 per cent. Some archaeologists have suggested that this means that it wasn’t the idea that spread, but people practising the idea, but not everyone accepts this.¹⁰

Much more controversial, however, are the reasons for why agriculture developed, why it developed then, and why it developed where it did. This is clearly of major importance in understanding mankind’s mental development. It is also an even more interesting question than it looks when you consider the fact that the hunter-gathering mode is actually quite an efficient way of leading one’s life. Ethnographic evidence among hunter-gatherer tribes still in existence shows that they typically need to ‘work’ only three or four or five hours a day in order to provide for themselves and their kin. Skeletal remains of Stone Age farmers reveal more signs of malnutrition, infectious diseases and dental decay than those of their hunter-gatherer predecessors. Why, therefore, would one change such a set of circumstances for something different where one has to work far harder? In addition, reliance on grain imposed a far more monotonous diet on early humans than they had been used to in the time of hunting and gathering. In any case, when people first domesticated crops, these remained a minor part of the diet for centuries, possibly more than a thousand years. Again, why the change?

One theory is that the switch to agriculture was made for ritualistic or social reasons, because the new foods were rare luxuries, which gradually spread, the way designer goods do in our own day. Lentils, for example, grow just two per wild plant and would hardly have staunched the hunger of a Stone Age family. Yet lentils are among the first crops of the Near East. Some palaeontologists feel beer was the most important end-product of these grains, the importance of alcohol in a ritual feast being obvious.

But the most basic of the economic arguments stems from the fact that, as has already been mentioned, some time between 14,000 and 10,000 BP, the world suffered a major climatic change. This was partly a result of the end of the Ice Age which had the twin effects of raising sea levels and, in the warmer climate, encouraging the spread of forests. These two factors ensured that the amount of open land shrank quite dramatically, ‘segmenting formerly open ranges into smaller units and arranging the niches for different species by altitude and type of vegetation . . . Sedentism and the reduction of open range encouraged territoriality. People began to protect and propagate local herds, a pre-domestication practice that can be referred to as food resource management.’¹¹ A further aspect of this set of changes was that the climate became increasingly arid, and the seasons became more pronounced, a circumstance which encouraged the spread of wild cereal grasses and the movement of peoples from one environment to the next, in search of both plants and animal flesh. There was more climatic variety in areas which had mountains, coastal plains, higher plains and rivers. This accounts for the importance of the fertile crescent. Grasses were naturally prevalent in this Near Eastern region (wild stands of emmer and einkorn wheat, and barley, exist there to this day). But it is not difficult to work out what happened. ‘The harvested batch of seeds would be selected in favour of non-shattering and uniform maturation. As soon as humans began to sow the seeds they had harvested, they automatically – even if unintentionally – initiated a process of selection in favour of the non-shattering genotype.’¹²

Mark Nathan Cohen is the most prominent advocate of the theory that there was a population crisis in pre-history and that it was this which precipitated the evolution of agriculture. Among the evidence he marshals to support his argument is the fact that agriculture is not easier than hunter-gathering, that there is a ‘global coincidence’ in the simultaneous extinction of mega-fauna, the big mammals which provided so much protein for early humans, a further coincidence that domestication emerged at the end of the Pleistocene Age, when the world warmed up and people became much more mobile, and that the cultivation of wild species, before agriculture proper, encouraged the birth of more children. It is well known, for instance, that nomads and hunter-gatherers control the number of children by not weaning them for two years. This limits the size of a group that is continually on the move. After the development of sedentism, however, this was no longer necessary, and resulted, says Cohen, in a major population explosion. Cohen also claims that evidence for a population crisis in antiquity can be inferred from the number of new zones exploited for food, the change in diet, from plants which need less preparation to those which need more, the change in diet from larger animals to smaller (because larger ones were extinct), the increasing proportion of remains of people who are malnourished, the specialisation of artefacts which had evolved to deal with rarer and rarer animals and plants, the increased use of fire, for cooking otherwise inedible foodstuffs, the increased use of aquatic resources, the fact that many plants, though available as food in deep antiquity, were not harvested until around 12,000 BP, that grass (cereals) is a low priority in food terms, and so on and so on, all of which Cohen contends is corroborated by archaeological excavation. For him, therefore, the agricultural revolution was not, in and of itself, a liberation for early humans. It was instead a holding action to cope with the crisis of overpopulation. Far from being an inferior form of life, the hunter-gatherers had been so successful they had filled up the world, insofar as their lifestyle allowed, and there was no place to turn.¹³

It is another attractively simple hypothesis but there are problems with it. One of the strongest criticisms comes from Les Groube, who is the advocate of a rival theory. According to Groube, who is based in France, it is simply not true that the world of deep antiquity was in a population crisis, or certainly not a crisis of overpopulation. His argument is the opposite, that the relatively late colonisation of Europe and the Americas argues for a fairly thinly populated Earth. For Groube, as man moved out of Africa into colder environments, there would have been fewer problems with disease, simply because, from a microbial point of view, the colder regions were safer, healthier. For many thousands of years, therefore, early man would have suffered fewer diseases in such places as Europe and Siberia, as compared with Africa. But then, around 20,000 years ago, an important coincidence took place. The world started to warm up, and man reached the end of the Old World – meaning that, in effect, the known world was ‘full’ of people. There was still plenty of food but, as the world warmed up, many of the parasites on man were also able to move out of Africa. In short, what had previously been tropical diseases became temperate diseases as well. The diseases Groube mentions include malaria, schistosomiasis and hookworm, ‘a terrible trinity’. A second coincidence also occurred. This was the hunting to extinction of the mega-fauna, which were all mammals, and therefore to a large extent biologically similar to man. All of a sudden (sudden in evolutionary terms), there were far fewer mammals for the microbial predators to feast on – and they were driven to man.¹⁴

In other words, sometime after 20,000 years ago, there was a health crisis in the world, an explosion of disease that threatened man’s very existence. According to Groube’s admittedly slightly quirky theory, early humans, faced with this onslaught of disease, realised that the migrant pattern of life, which limited childbirth to once every three years or so, was insufficient to maintain population levels. The change to sedentism, therefore, was made because it allowed people to breed more often, increase numbers, and avoid extinction.

One thing that recommends Groube’s theory is that it divorces sedentism from agriculture. This discovery is one of the more important insights to have been gained since the Second World War. In 1941, when the archaeologist Gordon Childe coined the phrase ‘The Neolithic Revolution’, he argued that the invention of agriculture had brought about the development of the first villages and that this new sedentary way of life had in turn led to the invention of pottery, metallurgy and, in the course of only a few thousand years, the blossoming of the first civilisations.¹⁵ This neat idea has now been overturned, for it is quite clear that sedentism, the transfer from a hunter-gathering lifestyle to villages, was already well under way by the time the agricultural revolution took place. This has transformed our understanding of early man and his thinking.

Although present-day ‘stone age’ tribes are by no means a perfect analogue of ancient hunter-gatherers (for one thing, they tend to occupy marginal areas), it has become clear that ‘primitive’ peoples do have an intimate knowledge of the natural world in which they live. And, although they may not practise full-scale agriculture, they certainly cultivate both plants and animals, in the sense of clearing areas and planting grasses or vegetables or fruits. They sow, drain and irrigate, they practise rough herding and ‘free range movement’. They keep pet mammals and birds and are fully aware of the medicinal qualities of certain herbs. This is surely a halfway stage between the old idea of hunter-gatherers and full-blown agriculture. By the same token, ‘there is now a considerable body of evidence in support of the view that some resource-rich locations in the Levant were occupied year-round during the terminal Pleistocene (more specifically in the Natufian and Khiamian periods: c. 10,500–8300 BC) by “sedentary foragers” who developed . . . techniques of plant exploitation, including storage and possibly small-scale cultivation . . . and who lived year round in settlements of up to half a hectare in area’.¹⁶

The fact that sedentism preceded agriculture has stimulated the French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin to produce a wide-ranging review of the archaeology of the Middle East, which enables him to reconcile many developments, most notably the origins of religion and the idea of the home, with far-reaching implications for the development of both our basic and our more speculative/philosophical innovations. If tools and the control of fire were the first ideas, clothing and shelter soon followed.

Cauvin, late director of research emeritus at the Institut de Prehistoire Orientale at Jalés in Ardèche, France (between Lyons and Marseilles), starts from a detailed examination of the pre-agricultural villages of the Near East. These begin, he says, between 15,500 and 12,500 BC, at Kharaneh in Jordan, with ‘base camps’ up to 2,000 square metres in extent and which consist of circular depressions in open air sites. Between 12,500 and 10,000 BC, however, the so-called Natufian culture extended over almost all of the Levant, from the Euphrates to Sinai (the Natufian takes its name from a site at Wadi an-Natuf in Israel). Excavations at Eynan-Mallaha, in the Jordan valley, north of the Sea of Galilee, identified the presence of storage pits, suggesting ‘that these villages should be defined not only as the first sedentary communities in the Levant, but as “harvesters of cereals” ’.¹⁷

The Natufian culture also boasted houses. These were grouped together (about six in number), as villages, and were semi-subterranean, built in shallow circular pits ‘whose sides were supported by dry-stone retaining walls; they had one or two hearths and traces of concentric circles of posts – evidence of substantial construction’. Their stone tools were not just for hunting but for grinding and pounding, and there were many bone implements too. Single or collective burials were interred under the houses or grouped in ‘genuine cemeteries’.¹⁸ Some burials, including those of dogs, may have been ceremonial, since they were decorated with shells and polished stones. Mainly bone art works were found in these villages, usually depicting animals.

At Abu Hureyra, between 11,000 and 10,000 BC, the Natufians intensively harvested wild cereals but towards the end of that period the cereals became much rarer (the world was becoming drier) and they switched to knot grass and vetch. In other words, there was as yet no phenomenon of deliberate specialisation. Analysis of the microblades from these sites shows they were used both for harvesting wild cereals and for cutting reeds, still more evidence for the absence of specialisation.

Cauvin next turned to the so-called Khiamian phase. This, named after the Khiam site, west of the northern end of the Dead Sea, was significant for three reasons: for the fact that there were new forms of weapons, for the fact that the round houses came completely out of the ground for the first time, implying the use of clay as a building material, and, most important of all, for a ‘revolution in symbols’.¹⁹ Natufian art was essentially zoomorphic, whereas in the Khiamian period female human figurines begin to appear. They were schematic initially, but became increasingly realistic. Around 10,000 BC the skulls and horns of aurochs (a now-extinct form of wild ox or bison) are found buried in houses, with the horns sometimes embedded in the walls, an arrangement which suggests they already have some symbolic function. Then, around 9,500 BC, according to Cauvin, we see dawning in the Levant ‘in a still unchanged economic context of hunting and gathering’ (italics added), the development of two dominant symbolic figures, the Woman and the Bull. The Woman was the supreme figure, he says, often shown as giving birth to a Bull.

Cauvin sees in this the true origin of religion. His main point is that this is the first time humans have been represented as gods, that the female and male principle are both represented, and that this marked a change in mentality before the domestication of plants and animals took place. It is easier to see why the female should be chosen rather than the male. The female form is a symbol of fertility. At a time when child mortality was high, true fertility would have been highly prized. Such worship was designed to ensure the well-being of the tribe or family unit.

But Cauvin’s second important point, over and above the fact that recognisable religion as we know it emerged in the Levant around 9500 BC, is that this all took place after cultivation and sedentism had begun, but before domestication/agriculture proper.

He turns next to the Mureybetian culture. This is named for Tell Mureybet, near the Euphrates, in what is now Syria. Here the houses are already more sophisticated, with special sleeping areas, raised, separate hearths and storage areas, with flat mud roofs supported by jointed joists. Between the houses, communal open spaces contained several large ‘fire-pits’. These pits were of a type frequently encountered in the Near Eastern Neolithic: they were basin-shaped, and were often found packed full of pebbles. So they may have functioned on the model of the present-day Polynesian oven, where the pebbles store the heat of a fire lit on their surface, and then give off that heat over a long period. The fire-pits of Mureybet are generally surrounded with animal bones that are to a greater or lesser degree charred. ‘Their utilisation for the communal cooking of meat seems reasonably probable.’²⁰ What most excited Cauvin, however, was an important change in architecture that began to occur at Mureybet after 9000 BC. ‘It is at this point that the first rectangular constructions known in the Near East, or in the world, appear.’ Both houses and storage areas become rectangular (though some houses had rounded corners). These constructions were built out of chalk blocks ‘chipped into cigar shapes’ and bonded with mortar. Rectangular houses allowed more to be gathered into small spaces and Cauvin speculates as to whether the reason for this was defence.

Another important innovation at Mureybet was the use of baked clay for the manufacture of female figurines. ‘It [clay] is also used for very small receptacles, although we are still a millennium and a half ahead of the general use of pottery in the Near East . . . It follows that the action of fire in consolidating these modelled objects was well known and intentionally practised by the people of Mureybet from 9500 BC.’²¹

Cauvin’s central point, then (and there are others who share his general view), is that at places such as Mureybet, the development of domestication was not a sudden event owing to penury, or some other economic threat. Instead, sedentism long preceded domestication, houses had already changed from the primitive round structures, half underground, to rectangular buildings above ground, and bricks and symbolic artefacts were already being produced. From this, he says, we may infer that early man, roughly 12,000–10,000 years ago, underwent a profound psychological change, essentially a religious revolution, and that this preceded domestication of animals and plants. (This argument is reminiscent of Merlin Donald’s, that the first use of language was for myth, not more ‘practical’ purposes.) This religious revolution, Cauvin says, is essentially the change from animal or spirit worship to the worship of something that is essentially what we recognise today. That is to say, the human female goddess, flanked by her male partner (the bull), is worshipped as a supreme being. He points to carvings of this period in which the ‘faithful’ have their arms raised, as if in prayer or supplication. For the first time, he says, there is ‘an entirely new relationship of subordination between god and man’.²² From now on, says Cauvin, there is a divine force, with the gods ‘above’ and everyday humanity ‘below’.

The bull, he says, symbolises not only the male principle but also the untameability of nature, the cosmic forces unleashed in storms, for example. Batons of polished stone are common throughout the Mureybetian culture, which Cauvin says are phallic symbols. Moreover, Cauvin discerns in the Middle East a clear-cut evolution. ‘The first bucrania of the Khiamian or Mureybetian remained buried within the thickness of the walls of buildings, not visible therefore to their occupants. Perhaps they only metaphorically wanted to ensure the resistance of the building to all forms of destruction by appealing to this new symbolism for an initial consecration [i.e., when the houses were built]. The time had not yet come for direct confrontation with the animal.’²³ After that, however, bovine symbolism diffused throughout the Levant and Anatolia and at ’Ain Ghazal we see the first explicit allusions, around 8000 BC, to the bull-fighting act, in which man himself features.²⁴ Man’s virility is being celebrated here, says Cauvin, and it is this concern with virility that links the agricultural revolution and the religious revolution: they were both attempts to satisfy ‘the desire for domination over the animal kingdom’.²⁵ This, he argues, was a psychological change, a change in ‘mentality’ rather than an economic change, as has been the conventional wisdom.

On this reading, the all-important innovation in ideas is not so much the domestication of plants and animals, but the cultivation of wild species of cereals that grew in abundance in the Levant and allowed sedentism to occur. It was sedentism which allowed the interval between births to be reduced, boosting population, as a result of which villages grew, social organisation became more complicated and, perhaps, a new concept of religion was invented, which in some ways reflected the village situation, where leaders and subordinates would have emerged. Once these changes were set in train, domesticated plants at least would have developed almost unconsciously as people ‘selected’ wild cereals which were amenable to this new lifestyle.

These early cultures, with the newly domesticated plants and animals, are generally known as Neolithic and this practice spread steadily, first throughout the fertile crescent, then further, to Anatolia and then Europe in the west, and to Iran and the Caucasus in the east, gradually, as we shall see, extending across all of the Old World. In addition to farming and religion, however, a third idea was included in this spread: the rectangular house. Foundations showing different variations have been found, in Anatolia, at Nevali Cori in Iran, and in the southern Levant, but the evolution of circular houses into rectangular ones with rectangular rooms appears to be a response to the consequences of domestication and farming. There was now more need for storage space, for larger families and, possibly, for defence (with sedentism the number of material possessions grows and there is more to envy/steal). Rectangular rooms and houses fit together more efficiently, are easier to vary in size, allow more ‘interior’ rooms, and make more use of shared walls.²⁶

We have here then not so much a renaissance as a naissance, a highly innovative time – relatively short – when three of our most basic ideas were laid down: agriculture, religion, the rectangular house. The mix of abstract and practical down-to-earth ideas would not have been recognised by early humans. Religion would have suffused the other two ideas as each activity spilled over into the other.

When Jericho was excavated by the British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod in the 1930s she made three discoveries of interest in the context of this chapter. First, the settlement consisted of about seventy buildings, housing perhaps as many as a thousand people: Jericho was a ‘town’. Second, she found a tower, eight metres high, nine metres in diameter at the base, with an internal staircase of twenty-two steps. Such architecture was unprecedented – it would have needed a hundred men working for a hundred days to build such an edifice.²⁷ Garrod’s third discovery, unearthed at Terrace B, was a good example of a Natufian baking/cooking unit. ‘This terrace seems to be provided with all the equipment required for the processes: the pavement, partly preserved, would be suitable for hand-threshing and husking; the cup basins and the numerous stone mortars would be suitable for the grinding or milling of the grain; the one larger basin would serve for mixing the ground grits or rough “flour” with water; and all this was found not far from ovens.’²⁸

There was no clay. All tools and personal accessories of the Natufians were produced by the meticulous grinding of stone on stone, or stone on bone.²⁹ The first use of clay in the Middle East is documented at Jericho (ninth millennium BC), at Jarmo (eighth) and at Hacilar (seventh), where it was found mixed with straw and chaff and husks – in effect the by-products of threshing – used to bind bricks. At both Jericho and Jarmo depressions were discovered in the clay floors.³⁰ ‘Whether used as basins for household activities, or as bins, or as ovens with “boiling stones”, the main interest lies in the fact that these immovable receptacles are located together with the ovens and hearths in the courtyards, the working spaces of the houses. We may now conclude . . . that some accidental firing, due to the proximity of the various acts of preparing-cooking-baking the ground wheat or barley in the immovable basins and the oven, was the cause of the transformation of the mud clay into pottery.’³¹ Johan Goudsblom speculates as to whether the preservation of fire became a specialisation in early villages, giving the specialists a particular power.³²

Among archaeologists there has been some debate that the earliest forms of pottery have never been found, because what has been found is too good, too well made to represent ‘fumbling beginnings’.³³ So perhaps pottery was invented there earlier, even much earlier. This would fit with the fact that the very first pottery was made in Japan, as part of the Jomon culture, as early as 14500 BC, among people who were full-time hunter-gatherers.³⁴ The Jomon Japanese were extremely creative, with very sophisticated hand-axes, and they also invented lacquer. However, no one knows exactly why Jomon pottery was invented or what it was used for (it has even been suggested that large numbers were smashed, in some form of ceremony). The full development of pottery, as one of the ‘cultures of fire’, is better illustrated through its development in the Middle East.

At the early Neolithic site of Çatal Hüyük in Turkey (seventh millennium BC), two types of oven were found built next to one another. ‘One is the normal vaulted type of baking oven. The second is different in that it has a fire chamber divided into two compartments by a half brick some 15cm high below the main chamber. The front part of these ovens and kilns, which evidently protruded into the room, was destroyed, and was evidently removed to take out whatever was baked in them, whether pots or bread. With the next firing/baking, the front part would be covered over again, which is of course easily done in mud.’³⁵ It appears from shards found at Jarmo, Jericho and Çatal Hüyük that pots were made from coils of clay laid in rings and then smoothed over. Dung and grasses were the fuel used, rather than wood.³⁶

At a village like Teleilat al Ghassul, near the northern edge of the Dead Sea, in Jordan, we see both stone tools and early pottery, as this important transition occurs. Frederic Matson found during his excavations at Tepe Sarab, near Kermanshah in western Iran (a site roughly contemporaneous with Jarmo), that there were but three principal diameters of the vessels. Does this suggest three functions? He found that, once invented, the technology of pottery quickly improved. For example, methods were found to lower the porosity of the clay, using burnishing or more intensive firing and, sometimes, the impregnation of organic materials. Vessels that were too porous lost water too quickly; but vessels needed to be a little porous so that some water evaporated, helping to cool what remained.³⁷

Some early pots were left plain, but decoration soon appeared. Red slip was the first type of decoration used, together with incising, using the fingers. ‘The discovery that the brown earth will fire to a bright red colour might have come from camp fires.’³⁸ The most common pot shapes at the earliest sites are globular (for rodent-free storage), part of which was underground, and open bowls, probably used for gruel or mush made from the seeds of wild and cultivated plants.³⁹ After the first pots – blackened, brown or reddened as the case might be – creams and mottled grey began to appear (in Anatolia, for instance).⁴⁰ Cream-ware especially lent itself to decoration. The earliest decorations were made by hand, then by pressing such things as shells into the clay before firing.⁴¹ Lids, spouts and flaring rims also evolve, and from here on the shape and decorations of pottery become one of the defining characteristics of a civilisation, early forms of knowledge for archaeologists for what they reveal about ancient societies.

The Woman and the Bull, identified by Cauvin as the first true gods, as abstract entities rather than animal spirits, found echoes elsewhere, at least in Europe in the Neolithic period. They occurred in very different contexts and cultures, together with a symbolism that itself differed from place to place. But this evidence confirms that sedentism and the discovery of agriculture did alter early humans’ way of thinking about religion.

Between – roughly speaking – 5000 BC and 3500 BC, we find the development of megaliths. Megaliths – the word means ‘large stones’ – have been found all over the world but they are most concentrated, and most studied, in Europe, where they appear to be associated with the extreme western end of the continent – Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, Britain and Denmark, though the Mediterranean island of Malta also has some of the best megalithic monuments. Invariably associated with (sometimes vast) underground burial chambers, some of these stones are sixty feet high and weigh as much as 280 tons. They comprise three categories of structure. The original terms for these were, first, the menhir (from the Breton men = stone and hir = long), usually a large stone set vertically into the ground. The cromlech (crom = circle, curve and lech = place) describes a group of menhirs set in a circle or half-circle (for example, Stonehenge, near Salisbury in England). And third, the dolmen (dol = table and men = stone), where there is usually an immense capstone supported by several upright stones arranged to form an enclosure or chamber.⁴² The practice now is to use plain terms such as ‘circular alignment’ for cromlech.

Most of the graves were originally under enormous mounds and could contain hundreds of dead. They were used for collective burial, on successive occasions, and the grave goods were in general unimpressive. Very rarely the chambers have a central pillar and traces of painting can be seen. As Mircea Eliade has said, all this ‘testifies to a very important cult of the dead’: the houses where the peasants of this culture lived have not stood the test of time, whereas the chamber tombs are the longest-surviving structures in the history of the world. Perhaps the most impressive structures of all are the stone temples of Malta, which some archaeologists consider may have been a sacred island in pre-history. The most striking, according to Colin Renfrew, is at Ggantija on Gozo, the more northerly of the Maltese archipelago. ‘In front of the Ggantija is a spacious terrace, some forty metres wide; supported by a great retaining wall, the façade, perhaps the earliest architecturally conceived exterior in the world, is memorably imposing. Large slabs of coralline limestone, set alternately end-on and sideways-on, rise to a height of eight metres; these slabs are up to four metres high for the first course, and above this six courses of megalithic blocks still survive. A small temple model of the period suggests that originally the façade may have been as high as sixteen metres.’⁴³ In one of the other Maltese temples, Tarxien, on Malta itself, relief carvings of spirals were found, together with friezes of animals and, most surprising of all, ‘a large fragment of a colossal statue of a seated woman. Originally she must have attained a height of two metres in the seated position. This must be the earliest colossal statue in the world.’⁴⁴ Several smaller stone structures have also been found, most of them ‘fat ladies’, ‘splendidly plump personages in stone’.⁴⁵ The basic idea, of a seated goddess, possibly pregnant, certainly recalls the Natufian figures discussed by Cauvin.

What ideas lay behind the worship in these temples? Renfrew’s researches on the island of Arran, in Scotland, have shown that the tombs there are closely related to the distribution of arable land and it therefore seems that these tomb/temples were somehow linked to the worship of a great fertility goddess, which developed as a cult as a result of the introduction of farming, and the closer inspection of nature that this would have entailed. We can, however, say a little more about this set of beliefs. Although it is very variable, megalithic sites are often sited so that ‘the countryside falls into certain patterns around them. The classic megalithic site is on a platform part-way down a spur which runs from higher ground behind. From the site itself, a bowl or valley in the land will be noticeable below, while the horizon will be surrounded by ridges of hills which wrap around behind the spur.’⁴⁶ These sitings are believed to relate to ancient beliefs about sacred landscape – geomancy. ‘The happy site is almost always sheltered by the hills, slightly elevated within them, and connected to them by land through which the geodic currents flow. In the angle formed by the junction of such hills, the geomancer looked for a “little hollow or little mound”, from which the chain of hills around can be seen to form “a complete horseshoe” with one side open, and streams that run away gently rather than steeply.’⁴⁷ From about 1930 onwards, modern dowsers have explored megalithic sites and picked up very powerful reactions in their vicinity. One dowser, Guy Underwood, published in 1969 a map of primary dowsing lines under Stonehenge which showed that twenty lines converged on the site.⁴⁸ Some, but by no means all megalithic sites are also grouped in straight lines that, when connected on a map, link several places which, in England, have names that end in the syllable ‘ley’. (These are called leylines.) Whether there is anything to this, it does seem to be true that several megalithic circular alignments were prehistoric astronomical observatories. Knowledge of the sun’s cycle was clearly important for an agricultural community, in particular the midwinter solstice when the sun ceases to recede and begins to head north again. From the mound, features on the horizon could be noted where the midwinter solstice occurred (for example), and stones erected so that, on subsequent years, the moment could be anticipated, and celebrated. Sun observatories were initiated round 4000 BC but moon ones not until 2800 BC. Tombs usually faced east. Chris Scarre, of Cambridge, argues that many of these huge stones are taken from sacred parts of the landscape, ‘places of power’ – waterfalls, for example, or cliffs, which have special acoustic or sensory properties, such as unusual colours or texture, and are taken to form shrines in areas that are important for hunting or domestication. This, he says, explains why these stones are transported sometimes over vast distances but are otherwise not modified in any way.⁴⁹

There may however be a further layer of meaning on top of all this. A number of carvings have been found associated with megalithic temples and observatories – in particular, spirals, whorls and what are called cup-and-ring marks, in effect a series of concentric Cs.⁵⁰ Elsewhere in Europe, as we shall see in just a moment, these designs are related to what some prehistorians have referred to as the Great Goddess, the symbol of fertility and regeneration (not everyone accepts this interpretation). In Germany and Denmark, pottery found associated with megaliths is also decorated with double circles and these too are associated with the Great Goddess. Given the fact that, in the very earliest times, the fertility of women must have been the greatest mystery and greatest miracle known to mankind, before the male function was discovered, and given the fact that menhirs almost by definition resemble the male organ, it is certainly possible that the megalithic cromlechs were observatory/temples celebrating man’s new-found understanding. The sexual meaning of menhirs is not simply another case of archaeologists reading too much into the evidence. In the Bible, for example, Jeremiah (2:27) refers to those who say to a stone: ‘You have begotten me.’ Belief in the fertilising virtues of menhirs was still common among European peasants at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘In France, in order to have children, young women performed the glissade (letting themselves slide along a stone) and the friction (sitting on monoliths or rubbing their abdomen along certain rocks)’.⁵¹

It is not difficult to understand the symbolism. The midwinter solstice was the point at which the sun was reborn. When it appeared that day, the standing stones were arranged so that the first shaft of light entered a slit in the centre of the circular alignment, the centre of the world in the sacred landscape, which helped to regenerate the whole community, gathered there to welcome it. A good example of this is Newgrange in Ireland.

One final word on megaliths. While Orkney and Malta cannot really be called part of the same early culture, there are signs in both that there was a special caste of people, apart from the general population, in sizeable megalithic communities. ‘In Malta, the skeletons of those associated with the temples after 3500 BC indicate a lightly muscled people, who ate a special diet which wore down their teeth very little for Neolithic times.’ The bones of animals slaughtered at an uneconomically early age, associated with inhabitants who lived in houses luxurious for the time, suggests that there was already in existence a social division between people with, at the top, a special caste, a combination of ruler, priest and scientist.⁵²

At much the same time as megalithic ideas were proliferating, but in a different part of Europe, a different form of worship of essentially the same principles was evolving. This part of the continent is generally referred to as ‘Old Europe’, and includes Greece and the Aegean, the Balkans, southern Italy and Sicily and the lower Danube basin and Ukraine. Here the ancient gods have been studied by the Lithuanian scholar, Marija Gimbutas.

She finds a complex iconography grouped around four main entities. These are the Great Goddess, the Bird or Snake Goddess, the Vegetation Goddess, and the Male God. The snake, bird, egg and fish gods played their part in creation myths, while the Great Goddess was the creative principle itself, the most important idea of all. As Gimbutas puts it, ‘The Great Goddess emerges miraculously out of death, out of the sacrificial bull, and in her body the new life begins. She is not the Earth, but a female human, capable of transforming herself into many living shapes, a doe, dog, toad, bee, butterfly, tree or pillar.’⁵³ She goes on: ‘. . . the Great Goddess is associated with moon crescents, quadripartite designs and bull’s horns, symbols of continuous creation and change . . . with the inception of agriculture’.⁵⁴ The central theme was the birth of an infant in a pantheon dominated by the mother. The ‘birth-giving Goddess’, with parted legs and pubic triangle, became a form of shorthand, with the capital letter M as ‘the ideogram of the Great Goddess’.⁵⁵

Gimbutas’ extensive survey of many figurines, shrines and early pottery produced some fascinating insights – such as the fact that the vegetation goddesses were in general nude until the sixth millennium BC and clothed thereafter, and that many inscriptions on the figurines were an early form of linear proto-writing, thousands of years before true writing, and with a religious rather than an economic meaning. By no means everyone accepts Gimbutas’ ideas about proto-writing but her main point was the development of the Great Goddess, with a complicated iconography, yet at root a human form, though capable of transformation into other animals and, on occasion, trees and stones.⁵⁶ There is a link here, back to Lewis-Williams’ ideas of the mind in the cave, ‘releasing’ living forms from the rock surfaces.

At this point, then, say around 4000 BC, there is a small constellation of ideas underlying primitive religion, all woven together. We have the Great Goddess and the Bull. The Great Goddess, emerging via the Venus figurines, symbolises the mystery of birth, the female principle, and the regeneration of nature each year, with the return of the sun. This marked a time when the biological rhythms of humans and the astronomical rhythms of the world had been observed but not yet understood. The Bull and stones represent the male principle but also suggest, via the decorated caves of the Palaeolithic age, the idea of a sacred landscape, special locations in man’s environment where significant occurrences take place (having mainly to do, first, with hunting, then with agriculture). These are early humans’ most basic religious ideas.⁵⁷

There was another reason why stones and the landscape should become sacred, and it had nothing to do with astronomy. At some point after 4000 BC, early humans experienced the apparently magical transformation by which solid rock, when treated in a certain way through heat, can produce molten metal, sometimes of a very different colour.

Pottery, as we have seen, was the first of five new substances – the ‘cultures of fire’ – which laid the basis for what would later be called civilisation. The other four were metals, glass, terra-cotta and cement. Here we shall concentrate on metals but the other pyrotechnological substances underline the continuing importance of fire in antiquity, and show how sophisticated early humans became in their understanding, and manipulation, of heat and flame.

Although archaeologists now order the ‘ages’ of man into the Stone, Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages, in that order, the first use of a metallic substance was almost certainly iron, around 300,000 years ago, when ochre found favour as decoration. Haematite in particular was popular, possibly because of its colour – red, the colour of blood and life. By Neolithic times (8000–6000 BC), there appear to have been special workshops in places like Çatal Hüyük to produce red ochre and green malachite in cakelike lumps, as a storage technique.⁵⁸ In pre-pottery Jericho three life-size plaster figures thought to portray divinities were covered in ochre. But houses too were painted red at other sites in the Middle East. As pottery developed, ochre continued as the favoured colour, though blue-green took over as the colour considered most beneficial to the dead.⁵⁹

If the colour, lustre and even the weight of metals made their impact on early humans, it was as raw rocks, or in the beds of rivers and streams that they first encountered them. From this, they would have discovered that some rocks, such as flints and cherts, became easier to work with on heating and that others, like native copper, were easier to hammer into serviceable tools. Gradually, therefore, as time passed, the advantages of metals over stone, wood and bone would have become apparent. However, when we think of metallurgy in antiquity we mainly mean one thing – smelting, the apparently magical transformation by which solid rock can be transformed into a molten metal. One can easily imagine the awesome impact this would have had on early humans.

Copper ores are found all over the fertile crescent region but invariably in hilly and mountainous regions. Archaeologists are inclined therefore to think this is where metallurgy began, rather than in river valleys. The area favoured nowadays is a region ‘whose inhabitants, in addition to possessing ore and fuel, had adopted some form of settled life and were enjoying a chalcolithic culture’.⁶⁰ This area, between the Elburz mountains and the Caspian Sea, is the front-runner for the origin of metallurgy, though the Hindu Kush and other areas have their adherents too. ‘That the discovery was fortuitously made can hardly be doubted, for it is inconceivable that men, simply by taking thought, would have realised the relationship existing between malachite – a rich-blue, friable stone – and the red, malleable substance, which we call copper.’⁶¹ Because such a link was regarded then as magical, the early copper-smiths were believed to have superhuman powers.

At one stage it was believed that ‘the camp-fire was the original smelting furnace’. No more. Quite simply, the hearths at around 4000 BC were not hot enough. Without a forced draught, ‘a camp fire, though giving enough heat to cook the food and to warm the feet . . . would not produce a temperature much higher than about 600° or 650°. Such copper ores as malachite, the easiest to deal with, are not reduced at temperatures lower than 700° to 800°C, and metallic copper does not melt below 1083°C.’ It is not only the temperature that acts against campfires. Not being enclosed, the atmosphere would not have been conducive to ‘reducing’ (separation).⁶² On the other hand, well before the discovery of smelting, much higher temperatures would have been obtained in some pottery kilns. Two-chambered kilns, with the fire down below and the pots above, had been evolved by the fifth millennium, temperatures as high as 1200°C being obtained, for example, at Susa (Iran) and Tepe Gawra (near Mosul, in Iraq).⁶³ The atmosphere in these baking chambers would have been of a strongly reducing character and modern experiments have confirmed that a spongy copper could be smelted in this way. The accident may have happened when ancient potters used malachite to colour pottery – ‘and then got the shock of their lives, when the colour delivered was very different from that anticipated’.⁶⁴

By placing the invention of two-tiered pottery kilns – towards the end of the fifth millennium – next to the archaeological observation that certain copper objects were discovered at Susa, Al ‘Ubaid, Nineveh and Ur, we can conclude that smelting was discovered about 4300 BC. We know that by 4000 BC knowledge of the process had spread to a number of regions in western Asia and that, by 3800 BC, copper smelting was being practised ‘comparatively widely’ in the ancient world.⁶⁵ ‘By the early years of the third millennium BC, the people of Sumer had created the first important civilisation known to us in which metals played a conspicuous role.’ (The oldest known stock of metal tools dates from 2900 BC.) From these dates onward copper was the dominant metal in western Asia and north Africa until after 2000 BC.⁶⁶

Insofar as early metallurgy was concerned, after the discovery of smelting two advances were crucial. These were the discovery first of bronze and second of iron. There are two mysteries surrounding the advent of the Bronze Age, certainly so far as the Middle East is concerned, where it occurred first. One mystery lies in the fact that tin, the alloy with copper that makes it much harder, as bronze, is relatively rare in nature. How did this particular alloy, therefore, come to be made for the first time? And second, why, despite this, were advances so rapid, with the result that, between about 3000 BC and 2600 BC, all the important advances in metallurgical history, save for the hardening of steel, were introduced?⁶⁷

In one sense, we should call the early Bronze Age the alloy age. This is because for many years, either side of 2000 BC, and despite what was said above, objects that might be called bronze had a very varied chemical make-up. Alloyed with copper, and ranging from less than 1 per cent to 15 per cent, there could be found tin, lead, iron and arsenic, suggesting that although early man had some idea of what made copper harder, more malleable and gave its tools and weapons a better edge, he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the precise details of the process. The exact composition of bronze also varied from area to area – between Cyprus, Sumer and Crete, for example. The all-important change-over from copper to real bronze occurred in the first quarter of the second millennium BC. ‘Tin differs from copper – and the precious metals – in that it is never found in nature in a pure state. Instead, it is always in chemical combination. It must therefore have been smelted, though (and this is another mystery) hardly any metallic tin has ever been found in excavations by archaeologists. (In fact, only one piece of pure tin older than 1500 BC has ever been found.)’⁶⁸

Though the exact origins of bronze are obscure, its attractions over copper were real enough, once its method of production could be stabilised, and its increasing popularity brought about considerable changes in the economy of the ancient world. Whereas copper was found in a fairly large number of localities, this was not the case with bronze for, as was said above, in neither Asia nor Europe is tin ore widely distributed. This limitation meant that the places where tin was mined grew considerably in importance and, since they were situated almost entirely in Europe, that continent had advantages denied to Asia and Africa. The fact that bronze was much more fluid than copper made it far more suitable for casting while its widespread use in weapons and tools simply reflects the fact that, provided tin content could be kept at 9–10 per cent, hammered bronze is usually a good 70 per cent stronger than hammered copper. The edges of bronze tools were at least twice as hard as copper.⁶⁹

This final fact about bronze was very important. The sheer hardness of bronze meant that the edges of daggers became as important as their points, encouraging the development of swords. Moreover, this development coincided with the domestication of the horse in the steppe countries of Europe, and the wheel in Sumer. Warfare was therefore suddenly transformed – in fact, it changed more rapidly than at any other time until gunpowder was used in anger in China in the tenth century AD.⁷⁰

The Bronze Age reached its peak around 1400 BC. It was a time when iron was scarce and valuable. Tutankhamun reigned for only a very few years as a pharaoh in Egypt, and died about 1350 BC, but his tomb, famously discovered and excavated by Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter in 1922, contained – besides vast quantities of gold, jewels and fabulous ornaments – a dagger, headrest and bracelet all made of iron.⁷¹ There were also some very small models of tools, barely an inch long, also made of iron. In all cases this was smelted iron, not meteoric.

The earliest iron instruments date from, roughly, 5000 BC, in northern Iraq, Iran and Egypt. But only one of these was smelted, the others being fashioned from meteoric iron. Another early instrument comes from Ur and dates to the early part of the third millennium BC. However, it seems likely that when iron was produced as early as this it had not been recognised as a new metal, or even as a metal at all.⁷² Iron needs higher temperatures than copper (1100°–1150°) in order to be separated from its ore, and it needs a larger furnace, so that the particles of iron can drop away from the smelting zone and accumulate below, collecting into a lump usually called a ‘bloom’.⁷³ Such a procedure seems to have first been developed and practised within the territory of the Hittite confederacy. The Hittites established a state in central Turkey and northern Syria, 1450–1200 BC, where for a while they successfully challenged the Assyrians and Egyptians.⁷⁴ According to Theodore Wertime, the first deliberately smelted iron seems to have been produced when bronze products had reached perfection and where copper, lead and iron ores were in abundance: northern Anatolia along the shores of the Black Sea.⁷⁵ In other words, the success of bronze, the rarity of tin and the abundance of iron induced the Hittites to experiment. The technique appears to have been a closely guarded secret for several hundred years, with the craftsmen keeping the vital details within their families and charging a very high price for their wares. To begin with it was looked upon as a truly precious metal, more valuable than gold according to ancient records; only ornaments were made of it and the secrets of iron were probably not known outside the Hittite sphere of influence before 1400 BC.⁷⁶ (It is likely that the iron dagger found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb had been made under Hittite supervision.) By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, the Hittite confederation had encountered troubled times and, by 1200 BC, the cat was out of the bag, and full knowledge of iron-making spread to other parts of Asia.⁷⁷ The Iron Age truly dates from when the metal ceased to be precious.⁷⁸

Besides its other attractions, iron smelting was less complicated than copper production. Provided there were bellows sufficiently strong to provide a current of air, a single-tier furnace was enough, as compared with the elaborate two-tier, kiln-type furnace which was needed for copper ore to be reduced in crucibles. Furnaces of quite simple design were used during the first thousand years of iron smelting – therefore, once the secret was out, almost anyone could make iron, though naturally smelting tended to be conducted where the ores could easily be mined and where charcoal was readily available. Like tin, iron differs from copper and gold in never being found free in nature, except as the very rare meteorites that fall to earth. Like copper, none of its ores were found in the great river valleys, but in many nearby areas they were to be found in abundance. The most important mining and smelting enterprises of the later years of the second millennium were established in the neighbourhood of the Taurus and Caucasian mountains, and in Armenia.

The crucial process in iron production – carburisation, by which iron is converted into steel – was probably developed in the two centuries after 1200 BC on the coastal areas of the eastern Mediterranean. To carburise iron, it is heated ‘in intimate contact’ with charcoal for a long period, a discovery that must have been accidental (uncarburised iron is not as strong as bronze).⁷⁹ Mount Adir in north Israel is one site of early carburised iron, Taanach and Hazorea in Palestine are others.⁸⁰ In the Odyssey, Homer shows some awareness that the quenching of carburised iron also enhances its hardness.

Given its versatility, hardness, and low cost, one might have thought that the new metal would be rapidly adopted. Bowl-shaped ingots were certainly being traded in the late Bronze Age.⁸¹ Nevertheless, the earliest collection of iron tools that has been found in Egypt dates only from about 700 BC, a millennium and a half after its use by the Hittites.⁸² In Works and Days, Hesiod refers to the men of his own era as a ‘race of iron’.⁸³

Metallurgy was quite sophisticated from early on. Welding, nails and rivets were early inventions, in use from 3000 BC. Gold plating began as early as the third millennium, soon followed by the lost-wax technique, for making bronze sculptures.⁸⁴ In terms of ideas, three uses to which metals were put seem to have been most profound. These were the dagger, as was mentioned earlier, the mirror, and coins. Mirrors were particularly popular among the Chinese, and the Romans excelled at making them, finding that an alloy of 23–28 per cent tin, 5–7 per cent lead, and the rest copper, served best. Reflections were later considered to be linked to man’s soul.⁸⁵

Money does not occur in nature, says the historian Jack Weatherford. Jules Renard, the nineteenth-century French writer, put it another way: ‘I finally know what distinguishes man from the other beasts: financial worries.’ The first forms of money were commodity money, ranging from salt to tobacco, coconuts to rice, reindeer to buffaloes. The English word ‘salary’ derives from the Latin salarius, meaning ‘of salt’. (Roman soldiers were perhaps paid in salt, to flavour their otherwise bland food.⁸⁶) The as, a Roman coin, represented the value of one hundredth of a cow. The English word ‘cattle’ is derived from the same Latin root as the word ‘capital’. As early as the third millennium BC, however, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia began using ingots of precious metals in exchange for goods. The ingots, of gold or silver and of uniform weight, were called minas or shekels or talents.⁸⁷

The transition from proto-money to coins proper took place in Lydia, in what is now Turkey, some time between 640 and 630 BC. The very first coins were made of electrum, a naturally occurring mixture of gold and silver, and they were about the size of a thumb nail, and almost as thick as a thumb, like a small ingot. They were stamped with a lion’s head, to ensure their authenticity, and the stamping had the effect of flattening them, making them more like the coins that we use today.⁸⁸ Whether the first coins were used exactly as we use money now is open to doubt. The first coins would have been so valuable they could never have been anything like ‘change’. The main breakthrough, to commodification, probably came with the introduction of bimetallic coinages, gold and silver and/or copper. This may have been introduced in the third or second centuries BC, when they were used to pay people in Greece who had been selected for political office by ballot (see Chapter 6).

But the eventual change in life that the invention of money brought about was momentous. It was in a Lydian city, Sardis, that the first retail market was introduced, when anyone could come to the market and sell, for money, whatever they had. In the archaeological record the oldest traded material is obsidian, a very fine, jet-black and shiny volcanic glass, which was mined at a single source in southern Turkey but was found all over the Middle East, where its transparent, reflective, super-cutting properties made it magical and much sought after.⁸⁹ But all sorts of new activities were sparked by the invention of money. At Sardis, for instance, the first known brothels were built, and gambling was also born.⁹⁰ More fundamentally, the advent of money enabled people to break out from their kin group. Money became the link between people, creating a nexus that had not been possible under the barter system. In the same way, money weakened traditional ties and that, in time, had profound political implications. Work and human labour became a commodity, with a coin-related value attached, and therefore time too could be measured in the same way.

In Greece, near to Lydia, and therefore quickly influenced by this new development, money encouraged the democratisation of politics. Under Solon, the old privileges were abolished and eligibility for public office became based on (landed) wealth.⁹¹ Democracy arose in cities with market economies and strong currencies. Furthermore, the wealth generated by such commerce allowed for greater leisure time, out of which the Greek elite built its pre-eminence in philosophy, sport, the arts, in politics itself. Counting had existed before money, but the emergence of the market, and a money economy, encouraged rational and logical thinking, in particular the Greek advances in mathematics that we shall be exploring in a later chapter. The German economic historian Georg Simmel observed in his book The Philosophy of Money, ‘the idea that life is essentially based on intellect, and that intellect is accepted in practical life as the most valuable of our mental energies, goes hand in hand with the growth of a money economy’.⁹² He added, ‘those professional classes whose productivity lies outside the economy proper have emerged only in the money economy – those concerned with specific intellectual activity such as teachers and literary people, artists, physicians, scholars and state officials’. This is overstating the case somewhat (teachers and doctors existed before money), but the point has validity.

Money also vastly promoted international trade. This, more than anything, helped the spread of ideas around the globe. After Sardis, the great urban centres of the world were as likely to be market towns as places of worship, or the homes of kings.