In 3500 BCE, the vast majority of humans lived outside the complex cities that emerged in the river basins of Afro-Eurasia. Outside those river basin societies, people continued to live as hunters and gatherers. Others lived in small farming-based villages or as pastoralists tending flocks. These communities existed beyond the reach of the great urban centers. Yet here, too—in the Aegean, Anatolia, Europe, and parts of China—small towns emerged, agriculture advanced, wars were fought, and trade existed; but these societies did not expand with the great leaps and bounds of the river-basin centers. (See Map 2.7.)
MAP 2.7 | Settlements outside the River Basins: The Eastern Mediterranean and Europe, 5000–2000 BCE
Urban societies in Southwest Asia, like those in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley, had profound influences on societies in Anatolia, the Aegean, and western Europe.
Trace the main routes for the spread of agriculture. Based on those routes, how did agriculture spread in this period?
Locate the icons for copper and flint. Based on your reading of the chapter, how might these commodities have shaped the culture in the regions in which they were located?
Many of the cultures outside the river basins—notably in the Aegean, Anatolia, and Europe—had a distinctive warrior-based ethos, such that the top tiers of the social ladder held chiefs and military men in the highest regard rather than priests and scribes. This feature was especially evident in Europe and Anatolia, where weaponry rather than writing, palisades (defensive walls and turrets) rather than palaces, and conquest rather than commerce dominated everyday life. Here, too, the inhabitants moved beyond stone implements and hunting and gathering, but they remained more egalitarian than river-basin folk and did not evolve much beyond small societies led by chiefs.
CURRENT TRENDS IN WORLD HISTORY
Climate Change at the End of the Third Millennium BCE in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley
During the long third millennium BCE, the first urban centers in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, central Asia, and South Asia flourished and grew in complexity and wealth in a wet and cool climate. This smooth development was sharply if not universally interrupted beginning around 2200 BCE. Both archaeological and written records agree that across Afro-Eurasia most of the urban, rural, and pastoral societies underwent radical change. Those watered by major rivers were selectively destabilized, while the settled communities on the highland plateaus virtually disappeared. After a brief hiatus, some recovered, completely reorganized, and used new technologies to manage agriculture and water. The causes of this radical change have been the focus of much interest.
After four decades of research by climate specialists working together with archaeologists, a consensus has emerged that climate change toward a warmer and drier environment contributed to this disruption. Whether this disruption was caused solely by human activity, in particular agriculture on a large scale, or was also related to cosmic causes such as the rotation of the earth’s axis away from the sun, is still a hotly debated topic. It was likely a combination of factors.
The urban centers dependent on the three major river systems in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley all experienced disruption. In Egypt, the hieroglyphic inscriptions tell us that the Nile no longer flooded over its banks to replenish the fields with fresh soil and with water for crops. Social and political chaos followed for more than a century. In southern Mesopotamia, the deeply downcut rivers changed course, disrupting settlement patterns and taking fields out of cultivation. Other fields were poisoned by salts brought on through overcultivation and irrigation without fallow periods. Fierce competition for water and land put pressure on the central authority. To the east and west, transhumant herders, faced with shrinking pasture for their flocks, pressed in on the river valleys, disrupting the already-challenged social and political structure of the densely urban centers.
In northern Mesopotamia, the responses to the challenges of aridity were more varied. Some centers were able to weather the crisis by changing strategies of food production and distribution. Some fell victim to intraregional warfare, while others, on the rainfall margin, were abandoned. When the region was settled again, society was differently organized. The population did not drastically decrease, but rather distributed itself across the landscape more evenly in smaller settlements that required less water and food. It appears that a similar solution was found by communities to the east on the Iranian plateau, where the inhabitants of the huge urban center of Shahr-i Sokhta abruptly left the city and settled in small communities across the oasis landscape.
The solutions found by people living in the cities of the Indus Valley also varied. Some cities, like Harappa, saw their population decrease rapidly. It seems that the bed of the river shifted, threatening the settlement and its hinterland. Mohenjo Daro, on the other hand, continued to be occupied for another several centuries, although the large civic structures fell out of use, replaced by more modest structures. The Ghaggar-Hakra (as a year-round river) had dried up long before Harappan settlements of the third millennium. The urban settlements along the course of its seasonal flow had already formed as an adaptation to an earlier climate change, since their inhabitants had likely clustered along the dried-up riverbed as a topographical feature that would focus monsoon flows even in the absence of a year-round river. And to the south, on the Gujarat Peninsula, population and the number of settlements increased. They abandoned wheat as a crop, instead cultivating a kind of drought-enduring millet that originated in West Africa. Apparently, conditions there became even more hospitable, allowing farming and fishing communities to flourish well into the second millennium BCE.
The evidence for this widespread phenomenon of climate change at the end of the third millennium BCE is complex and contradictory. This is not surprising, because every culture and each community naturally had an individual response to environmental and other challenges. Those with perennial sources of fresh water were less threatened than those in marginal zones where only a slight decrease in rainfall could mean failed crops and herds. Notably, certain types of social and political institutions were resilient and introduced innovations that allowed them to adapt, while others were too rigid or shortsighted to find local solutions. A feature of human culture is its remarkable ability to adapt rapidly. When people are faced with challenges, the traits of resilience, creativity, and ingenuity lead to cultural innovation and change. This is what we can see, even in our own times, during the period of environmental stress.
Millet.This hardy grain, cultivated for its resistance to drought, persists in the desert environment of present-day western Pakistan.
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
How did the response to drought in the Indus Valley differ from the response in Mesopotamia?
Imagine that the climate during the third millennium BCE had not changed. How do you think this might have affected the development of ancient Egypt?
How has our understanding of global climate change affected the way we study prehistory?
Explore Further
Behringer, Wolfgang, A Cultural History of Climate (2010).
Bell, Barbara, “The Dark Ages in Ancient History. 1. The First Dark Age in Egypt,” American Journal of Archaeology 75 (January 1971): 1–26.
Middleton, Guy D., Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths (2017).
Singh, Ajit, et al., “Counter-Intuitive Influence of Himalayan River Morphodynamics on Indus Civilisation Urban Settlements,” Nature Communications 8, article no. 1617 (2017), doi:10.1038/s41467-017-01643-9.
Weiss, Max, et al., “The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamian Civilization,” Science (New Series) 261 (August 20, 1993): 995–1004.
Aegean Worlds
Contact with Egypt and Mesopotamia affected the Aegean worlds (the part of the Mediterranean Sea between the Greek Peloponnese and Anatolia), but it did not transform them. Geography stood in the way of significant urban development on the mountainous islands, on the Anatolian plateau, and in Europe. Even though people from Anatolia, Greece, and the Levant had populated the Aegean islands in the sixth millennium BCE, their small villages endured for 2,000 years before becoming more complex. On mainland Greece and on the Cycladic islands in the Aegean, fortified settlements housed local rulers who controlled a small area of agriculturally productive countryside.
Metallurgy developed in both Crete and the Cyclades, southeast of mainland Greece. There is evidence of more formal administration and organization in some communities by 2500 BCE, but the norm was scattered settlements separated by natural obstacles. One exciting recent find has been reported by scholars excavating a ritual center at Dhaskalio, a small islet off the coast of the Aegean island of Keros that was likely attached by land to Keros in the early Bronze Age. At this site, excavations have revealed mid-third-millennium BCE workshops for working imported metals like copper, as well as elaborate monumental engineering projects, including staircases and drainage tunnels, constructed with imported stone.
By the early third millennium BCE, the seafaring peoples of Crete, the largest island in the Aegean, had made occasional contact with Egypt and the coastal towns of the Levant, encountering new ideas, technologies, and materials as foreigners arrived on its shores. People coming by ship from the coasts of Anatolia and the Levant, as well as from Egypt, traded stone vessels and other luxury objects for the island’s abundant copper. Lacking a rich agrarian base, most communities on Crete remained small at fewer than 100 inhabitants, and only a few grew over time. By the middle of the third millennium BCE, a more complex society was emerging in eastern Crete. During the second millennium BCE, Knossos, located in a rich agricultural plain, became the primary palace-town in an extended network of palaces. Evidence from burial sites suggests that some households belonged to an elite class, for they took gold jewelry and other exotic objects with them to their graves. Aegean elites did not reject the niceties of cultured life, but they knew that their power rested as much on their rugged landscape’s resources as on self-defense and trade with others.
Anatolia
The highland plateau of Anatolia shows clear evidence of regional cultures focused on the control of trade routes and mining outposts. True cities did not develop here until the third millennium BCE, and even then they were not the sprawling population centers typical of the Mesopotamian plain. Instead, small communities emerged around fortified citadels housing local rulers who competed with one another. Two impressively fortified centers were Horoz Tepe and Alaça Hüyük, which have yielded more than a dozen graves—apparently royal—full of gold jewelry, ceremonial emblems, and elaborate weapons.
Another important site in Anatolia was Troy, which would later be the site of the Trojan War of the late second millennium BCE. Troy developed around 3000 BCE on the Mediterranean coast in a fertile plain, nearly 2,000 years before the war that was made famous by the Iliad. The settlement had monumental stone gateways, stone-paved ramps, and graves filled with gold and silver objects, vessels, and jewelry. Parallel grave goods on Crete, on the Greek mainland, and as far away as Ur, in Mesopotamia, show that Troy participated in a trading system linking the Aegean and Southwest Asian worlds. At the same time, the peoples of Troy faced predatory neighbors and pirates who attacked from the sea—an observation that explains its impressive fortifications.
Stonehenge.This spectacular site, located in the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, in southwestern England, is one of several such megalithic structures found in the region. Constructed by many generations of builders, the arrangement of the large stone uprights enabled people to determine precise times in the year through the position of the sun. Events such as the spring and autumn equinoxes were connected with agricultural and religious activities.
Europe: The Western Frontier
At the western reaches of the Afro-Eurasian landmass was a region featuring more temperate and also more frigid climates with smaller population densities. Its peoples—forerunners of present-day Europeans—began to make objects out of metal, formed permanent settlements, and started to create complex societies. Here, too, hierarchies replaced egalitarian ways. Yet, as in the Aegean worlds, population density and social complexity had limits.
More than in the Mediterranean or Anatolia, warfare dominated social development in Europe. Two contributing factors were the persistent fragmentation of the region’s peoples and the type of agrarian development they pursued. The introduction of the plow and the clearing of woodlands expanded agriculture. Agrarian development here was not the result of city-states or dynasties organizing irrigation and settlement (as in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley), but rather the result of households and communities wielding axes for defense and for cutting down trees. Compared with the river-basin societies, Europe was a wild frontier where violent conflicts over resources were common.
The gradual expansion of agricultural communities eventually reached a critical point. The growth of flint mining to an industrial level (as evident in the thousand shafts sunk at Krzemionki, in Poland, and the flint-mining complex of Grimes Graves, in England) indicates a social and economic transformation. Most important, mining output slashed the cost and increased the availability of raw materials needed to make tools for clearing forested lands and tilling them into arable fields. As agricultural communities proliferated, some became villages that dominated their regions. But nowhere did these societies create large cities and corresponding states.
By 3500 BCE, the more developed agrarian peoples had coalesced into large communities, constructing impressive monuments that remain visible today. In western Europe, large ceremonial centers shared the same model: enormous shaped stones, some weighing several tons each, set in common patterns—in alleyways, troughs, or circles—known as megalithic (great stone) constructions. These daunting projects required cooperative planning and work. In the British Isles, where such developments occurred later, the famous megalithic complexes at Avebury and Stonehenge probably reached their highest stages of development just before 2000 BCE.
By 2000 BCE, the whole of the northern European plain had come to share a common material culture based on agriculture, the herding of cattle for meat and milk, the use of the plow, and the use of wheeled vehicles and metal tools and weapons, mainly of copper. The most characteristic objects associated with this shared culture were the Corded Ware pots—so-called from the cords used to impress lines on their surfaces. The fact that this new economy was found in areas extending from present-day Ukraine in the east to the Low Countries in the west is evidence of the much-improved communications that linked and united previously disparate and widely separated regions.
Corded Ware Pots.Traded across northern Europe, this pottery is known for its ornamental grooves, made when twisted cords were pressed into the wet clay.
Increasing communication, exchange, and mobility among the European communities led to increasing wealth but also sparked organized warfare over frontier lands and valuable resources. In an ironic twist, the integration of local communities led to greater friction and produced regional social stratification. The violent men who now protected their communities received ceremonial burials complete with their own drinking cups and weapons. (See Interpreting Visual Evidence: Burials and Long-Distance Trade.) Archaeologists have found these warrior burials in a swath of European lands extending from present-day France and Switzerland to present-day central Russia. Because the agricultural communities were now producing surpluses that they could store, residents had to defend their land and resources from encroaching neighbors.
An aggressive culture was taking shape based on violent confrontations between adult males organized in “tribal” groups. War cultures arose in all western European societies, marked by the universal presence of a new drinking instrument, the “bell beaker”—so named by archaeologists because it resembled an inverted bell. Armed groups carried these cups across Europe, using them to swig beer and mead distilled from grains, honey, herbs, and nuts.
“Bell Beaker” Pottery.Named for their characteristic inverted bell shape, these cups were carried across western Europe by tribes who primarily used the vessels to consume alcoholic beverages like beer or mead.
Warfare had the ironic effect of accentuating the borrowing among the region’s competing peoples. After all, the violent struggles and emerging kinship groups fueled a massive demand for weapons, alcohol, and horses. Warrior elites borrowed from Anatolia the technique of combining copper with tin to produce harder-edged weapons made of the alloy bronze. Soon smiths were producing them in bulk—as evidenced by hoards of copper and bronze tools and weapons from the period found in central Europe. Traders used the rivers of central and northern Europe to exchange their prized metal products, creating one of the first commercial networks that covered the landmass.
The Americas
In the Americas, environmental factors limited the size of human settlements. Here the techniques of food production and storage, transportation, and communication restricted the surpluses for feeding those who did not work the land. Thus, these communities did not grow in size and complexity. For example, in the Chicama Valley of Peru, which opens onto the Pacific Ocean, people still nestled in small coastal villages to fish, gather shellfish, hunt, and grow beans, chili peppers, and cotton (to make twined textiles, which they dyed with wild indigo). Around 3500 BCE, these fishermen abandoned their cane and adobe homes for sturdier houses, half underground, on streets lined with cobblestones.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of such villages dotted the seashores and riverbanks of the Americas. Some made the technological breakthroughs required to produce pottery; others devised irrigation systems and water sluices in floodplains. Some even began to send their fish catches inland in return for agricultural produce. In the remains of these villages, archaeologists have recovered sacred spaces, fire-pit chambers, and tombs that reveal an elaborate religious life. These ceremonial structures highlighted communal devotion and homage to deities as well as rituals to celebrate birth, death, and the memory of ancestors.
In the Americas, the largest population center was in the valley of Tehuacán (near modern-day Mexico City). Here the domestication of corn created a subsistence base that enabled people to migrate from caves to a cluster of pit-house villages that supported a growing population. By 3500 BCE, the valley held nothing resembling a large city, although it teemed with inhabitants. People lived in clusters of interdependent villages, especially on the lakeshores: here was a case of high population density, but not urbanization.
Sub-Saharan Africa
The same pattern occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population grew but did not concentrate in urban communities. About 12,000 years ago, when rainfall and temperatures increased, small encampments of hunting, gathering, and fishing communities congregated around the large lakes and rivers flowing through the region that would later become the Sahara Desert. Elephants, rhinoceroses, gazelles, antelopes, lions, and panthers roamed, posing a threat but also providing a source of food. Over the millennia, in the wetter and more temperate locations of this vast region—particularly the upland mountains and their foothills—permanent villages emerged.
As the Sahara region became drier, people moved to the desert’s edges, to areas along the Niger River and the Sudan. Here they grew yams, oil palms (a tree whose fruit and seeds produce oil), and plantains (a fruit similar to bananas). In the savanna lands that stretched all the way from the Atlantic Ocean in West Africa to the Nile River basin in present-day Sudan, settlers grew grains such as millet and sorghum, which spread from their places of origin to areas along the lands surrounding the Niger River basin. Residents constructed stone dwellings and dug underground wells and food storage areas. As an increasing population strained resources, groups migrated south toward the Congo River and east toward Lake Nyanza, where they established new farms and villages. Although population centers were often hundreds or thousands of miles apart and were much smaller than the urban centers in Egypt and Mesopotamia, widespread use of the same pottery style, with rounded bottoms and wavy decorations, suggests that they maintained trading and cultural contacts. In these respects, sub-Saharan Africa matched the ways of life in Europe and the Americas.
