A History of the World (7 page)

We are told this simple anarchism is inherently unstable. Perhaps it is, but the people of Catalhoyuk seem to have managed pretty well for at least fourteen hundred years. There was enough surplus wealth for paintings, pottery and weaving, and a good diet; but not enough for swords or taxes. Lucky them.

The Child-people of Stonehenge

Our prejudices about early mankind are so smeared with blood and glinting with warriors that we have to ask whether the Catalhoyuk story of – relative – peace and love was rare, even unique. One way of trying to answer this is to travel forward in time, but to a more primitive part of the world that offers interesting comparisons.

What is now called Britain developed more slowly than the Fertile Crescent, and had a harsher climate. While Catalhoyuk was rising, nine thousand years ago, the ice sheet was only just finally leaving the British highlands, and the lowlands there were thinly populated by hunters and gatherers. As the ice went, Britain became mostly covered
with thick forests of oak, elm, alder and lime, plus birch and willow in the north. A squirrel could have crossed from one side of it to the other without ever setting foot on the ground. Or so it is said.

Two thousand years further on, after Catalhoyuk had risen and was on the way down again, Britain was still a tough place for farmers but they were already changing the landscape. They had started on small strips of coastal land and were now hacking back the forest and planting clearings with wheat. This slash-and-burn agriculture is only a short-term proposition. The soil gets quickly exhausted and more clearing must follow, with the previous ‘fields’ left to revert to woodland. A thousand years later – for we are still at the stage where change happens slowly – the clearings were bigger. Something like regular farmland was appearing, particularly in the south of what is now England, ploughed and no doubt fertilized and weeded.

The people were growing primitive varieties of wheat and barley and maybe flax. They seem to have grown no vegetables, but added berries and nuts to their diets. They ploughed with oxen, reared cattle, pigs and some sheep, and from very early on had domesticated dogs – the bones of some dogs looking like those of modern Labradors and some like terriers’ have been found. Dogs, among the first domesticated animals, contributed vital help for guarding and hunting. But the historian Rodney Castleden has noted that from their bones it is clear that ‘some dogs lived to be old, beyond their useful working lives, so their owners kept them out of affection’.
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The doggy people themselves did not live to be old. An analysis of bones from one community in Orkney, which was then an advanced part of the British Isles, shows that 70 per cent were either teenagers or in their twenties. Just 1 per cent were over fifty. This was a young society, evidently. The skulls suggest they were delicate, fine-featured people, nothing like the heavy, glowering early Britons of popular legend. We do not have their clothes, of course: a culture existing in a warm, moist Britain that mostly built and carved out of wood, and wore woven wool, leather and possibly flax capes, hats and tunics, leaves very little behind. But by looking at the tiny remnants of similar cultures on mainland Europe, and studying buckles, pins and tools that have survived, it is possible to plausibly posit the kinds of tightly sewn and comfortable clothes the British wore.

Though we call this the Neolithic or ‘new stone’ age, we might as
accurately call it the age of wood and leather. People started by living in rectangular wooden homes wearing leather clothes (made supple and smooth using disgusting techniques apparently involving copious amounts of urine, cow dung and raw animal brains). They went on to wear woven clothes and to live in larger, communal houses and in villages centred on cleverly built roundhouses, where hundreds could sleep under the same roof.

Speaking of the people living at Skara Brae, the beautifully made stone village started around five thousand years ago on a curving bay in Orkney and uncovered by a storm in 1850, Castleden says the overall impression is of a high level of domestic comfort: ‘Living conditions for ordinary people were apparently at least as good as they were in medieval Britain over four thousand years later: at Skara Brae probably rather better.’
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Walking through some of the homes and passages of Skara Brae today vividly recalls the domestic cosiness of Catalhoyuk – the same family rooms with dressers and places to sleep and corridors, all made in stone, rather than mud and plaster. There may or may not have been chieftains and priests, but this was not a war-torn culture.

In the Middle and Late Stone Age, the Orkneys and Shetlands were, far from being marginal archipelagos, advanced places. Their pottery circulated around Britain, and their stone circles, burial places and villages were unusually large and complex. They were way ahead, for instance, of the damp southern bog now known as London.

For centuries historians have found it impossible to believe that early British culture could have developed so impressively, leading up to the great monument of Stonehenge itself, just by gentle evolution. There must, surely, have been a warrior or priestly elite directing things, and perhaps having arrived as invaders from the continent? Yet there is no evidence of any such elite, nor of a cultural migration. There seems no reason not to believe that the British developed more like the people of Catalhoyuk had, in communities of a rough equality, scattered in their hundreds across the agricultural land and connected by trade links. For all the vivid modern legends of human sacrifice (there may have been some) and violent death, Neolithic Britain has left remarkably little evidence of war or organized violence, and none at all of castles or palaces.

But if so, how were so many people mobilized to create Stonehenge,
or the awesome ‘hill’ at Silbury – which involved shifting as much earth as the average Egyptian pyramid being built at the same time – or the stone villages and monuments of the Orkney and Shetland islands themselves?

These were astonishing achievements. We are talking of people with no metal, no towns, nothing we would recognize as writing. But they lived on islands traversed by roadways connecting thousands of village settlements – the ‘Sweet Track’ in the Somerset wetlands, three miles of split oak, needing ten thousand pegs and made six thousand years ago, is Europe’s oldest built road – and must have produced the essential tools, including flint blades and axes, on a virtually industrial scale. The flint mines were deep enough to require miners working with little lamps. The boats carrying produce around the coasts must have been comparatively big – either dugout canoes tied together or even animal-skin vessels on a skeleton of wood. There is evidence of windlasses, of sophisticated joinery and immaculately made stonework. This is a sophisticated and patient culture.

Above all, there was time and there was cooperation. Stonehenge grew over a thousand years, more or less, starting with an earthwork, before it became a vast structure including eighty-two bluestones dragged 150 miles from Wales, and the sandstone, or sarsen, blocks weighing up to 53 tons each, taken from around twenty miles away. These were shaped, smoothed, raised and then topped with more, as lintels. How was it done? Various overground and water-borne routes have been proposed. Wheels were known, but it is thought the stones would have been too heavy, and the ground too rough, for wooden axles to cope. They could have been rolled on logs, but that would have been a very long job indeed. Sledges are thought more likely, drawn by oxen or teams of men, after the Welsh stones had been unloaded from boats.

As to shaping and raising them, there are several possible and plausible techniques, including using wedges and fire to crack the stones, digging wood-lined pits to raise them, and building slowly raised platforms to put the huge lintels in place. It is an awesome achievement but it did not require giants – or tyrants. The large tribal communities of the area, by working together and allowing themselves as much time as it took (rather as the later builders of cathedrals worked in generations of time), could have managed the various evolutions of
Stonehenge, and the other great Neolithic sites, even the supremely impressive ziggurat-cum-hill at Silbury.

Hardly anybody disagrees about what Stonehenge was used for. Its alignments to the rays of the rising midsummer sun show that it was a temple of some kind. It was not an accurate stone calendar, as some have claimed, but complex markers for moonrise show a detailed interest in lunar cycles. Some new carbon-dating of post holes, where the measurements were taken, suggests this began incredibly early, around ten thousand years ago – so before Catalhoyuk. We cannot know the details of British beliefs so far back, except that they were associated with the sun, bringer of warmth and fertility, and with the moon, and so must have involved the seasonal celebrations and prayers typical of farming people everywhere. The huge barrow graves, with bones broken and burned before burial, suggest a reverence for ancestors and tribal or family continuity, which is certainly echoed in the white-plastered rooms of Anatolia. Darkness and death, a close interest in the seasons and the awesome power of the sun, family and memory; the rest is detail.

So we must think of an ingenious, patient, skilled and youthful culture, not one of white-bearded Druids or terrifying, blood-soaked chieftains. They come later, in the Bronze Age. The henges and the huge roundhouses were eventually abandoned. We cannot tell why. It may have been because of rising population pressures which caused conflict over scarce and degraded agricultural land. At any rate, a bloodier age lay ahead, as it did for the Fertile Crescent and for Neolithic China too. Yet we should remember that the age of peaceful farming communities, worshipping the sun and moon, tending their animals and crops, trading at their borders with others and eventually building remarkable monuments, lasted in Britain for thousands of years, much longer than empires, dynasties or democracy. It never happened again – in Britain, or in Europe.

The last word on this ought to go to Rodney Castleden:

This is a strong warning, but there are simply far too many of us now, depending on too much consumption, to really be able to heed it. And anyway, even as the British henge-builders were coming to their mysterious end, humanity was about to make the next stride towards recorded history – into the city.

The Cities of the Plain

South-east of Catalhoyuk two mighty rivers run south towards the sea. The Fertile Crescent saw the first farmers and the first large settlements, and so it is not surprising that it also gave birth to the first cities and the first empires. ‘Mesopotamia’ simply means the land between these two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. As they get nearer the sea, they slow and sprawl, curling into tangled deltas. A wonderfully rich farming area of dark, moist soil became available just before the start of the marshes. It offered similar advantages to the watery land around Catalhoyuk, but on a much bigger scale, and it attracted people from all over the region. They settled down in homes built first of reeds and later of mud bricks, coalescing into villages. What is probably the first city, Eridu, emerged about seven thousand years ago, not so long after Catalhoyuk was abandoned. Within a few hundred years there were many more towns in the area. Eridu was a brick-built settlement with layer upon layer of temple buildings, and may have started as a communal site at which different villages could worship the gods. These were altogether bigger places. There would be no gentle anarchism here.

The villages had had to come together, to create and then to maintain, the complicated system of waterways and dykes needed for agriculture. Workers had to be organized to do this; the excellent farming produced surpluses of grain and these allowed the introduction of rulers and priests, who developed temples and employed servants to tend them. Because the Mesopotamian world was a muddy, watery, sun-baked flatland it is not surprising that its most characteristic major buildings would be ziggurats, raised pyramid-
platforms where gods could be worshipped. All around the world people have associated gods with height, and in this land of no mountains the only way to reach up was to build. Eridu itself was built on a low mound by a freshwater lagoon, with the desert on one side, the marshes on another and the farming land on another.

It was the perfect meeting-point of different geographies and its gods were headed by the male Apsu, who represented sweet water, and the female Tiamat, representing salt water. But the water gods did not pay enough attention: Eridu probably lost its dominance around four thousand years ago when, it seems, there was a major flood. The next great city, Uruk, had begun at around the same time, and at its height had a population of around eighty thousand, which would have made it the world’s largest settlement, with ten times as many people as Catalhoyuk. Its king Gilgamesh is the subject of the first work of literature with a named hero – the first name in history. Gilgamesh may or may not have been a real king but his story, which incorporates a biblical-scale Flood, is a very human one of sex and betrayal, friendship and failure, journeying and death.

We know this because eventually it was written down. At Uruk and other towns of the Mesopotamian plain, the symbols scratched on clay tablets, which represented quantities and ownership of corn, beer and other goods that were traded, developed so far that they became writing. Over many centuries a system of notation and recording evolved into a system that could record stories and ideas. The reason was identical to the one that created Uruk in the first place. Climate changes, in this case leading to an even hotter, drier environment, compelled the farmers to build much larger and more sophisticated waterways to keep their land productive. Individual families or villages were far too small, and had too little spare time, to achieve what was needed. Only by combining in large numbers, organized by managers, could they survive. The managers seem to have been priests, or at least to have been based in the temples, from where they oversaw vast irrigation projects.