The Oxford History of the Biblical World (4 page)

Not long after 10,000
BCE
, as the glaciers receded and the region became less wet, the changes in climate coincided in the Near East with significant developments in technology, settlement patterns, social organization, and the size of human populations. Sometimes termed the “Neolithic revolution,” this process was gradual rather than sudden, and different regions (and different sites within those regions) exhibit considerable variation in the pattern and pace of change. Still, by the mid-ninth millennium (a date determined principally by radiocarbon dating), the aeons-old mode of subsistence based on hunting wild game and gathering wild fruits and vegetables was giving way to food production. The domestication of both animals and plants remains one of the most remarkable human accomplishments. Grains and legumes came under cultivation, and the breeding of sheep, goats, dogs, and, later, pigs and cattle began. The men and women engaged in these activities were of necessity settled, or, in the case of pastoralists, seminomadic. Their camps, villages, towns, and even cities are more and more in evidence as the four millennia (ca. 8500–4500
BCE
) of the Neolithic Age unfold. Their populations grew, their technology advanced, they had frequent encounters with other groups, some quite distant. The Neolithic Age, then, set patterns for successive millennia of development. Down to the present, subsequent changes in many respects have been elaborations of those patterns.

One of the largest and most important sites of this period in the entire Near East has only recently been excavated. It is located just northeast of modern Amman, Jordan, at a spring called in modern Arabic Ain Ghazal (“the spring of the gazelle”) that feeds the Zarqa River (the biblical Jabbok), and was continuously occupied for more than two millennia, beginning about 7200
BCE
. At its greatest extent Ain Ghazal covered over 12 hectares (30 acres), making it three times as large as its contemporary, Neolithic Jericho. The earliest settlement was relatively small, covering 2 hectares
(5 acres), and half of the faunal remains recovered were of wild animals. Forty-five species are represented, reflecting the area’s rich ecosystem, with gazelle the most frequently occurring.

The Neolithic revolution had already begun at Ain Ghazal in the village’s earliest years. Domesticated goats constituted half of the entire faunal repertoire, showing that domestication was well under way. In addition to wild fruits and nuts, such grains as wheat and barley and such legumes as chickpeas, peas, and lentils were grown. The houses were permanent structures, usually with two or three rooms, some of which were as large as 5 meters (16 feet) square. The stone walls, and later the floors, were plastered, and some were decorated with a red paint in a variety of designs. Adults and children were buried under the floors of the houses or in their courtyards, perhaps an expression of the continuity of the family even after death. Some of the skulls had been removed from the rest of the skeleton and plastered over, perhaps in the likeness of the deceased. A number of figurines of humans and animals have also been found, and, most remarkably, a group of over thirty clay-plaster statues and busts of both adults and children, some nearly a meter (3 feet) long.

In the succeeding centuries, the settlement grew because of its ecologically advantageous location and the growing sophistication in agriculture and animal husbandry. By 6000 the village had become 10 hectares (25 acres) large. Domesticated pig and cattle made their appearance, as did dogs, and the villagers’ dependence on hunting for animal protein had diminished. During the next five centuries (ca. 6000–5500
BCE
, Pre-Pottery Neolithic C), the site reached its maximum size of more than 12 hectares (30 acres) and had a population of perhaps several thousand. Domesticated animals by now accounted for 90 percent of the animal bones. Not surprisingly, architectural styles had changed, and the typical house had become smaller, another sign of population expansion.

Like other Neolithic sites, Ain Ghazal gives evidence of trade with distant regions. There are seashells from both the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and copper and semiprecious stones from sources as distant as the Sinai Peninsula. Obsidian is also found. This volcanic glass was often favored in the Neolithic Age for use in knives and other tools and weapons, although stone continued to be the primary raw material for these artifacts. Analysis of the chemical composition of obsidian has traced it to two areas, in southeastern Turkey and central Armenia, with obsidian from both regions occurring in Neolithic sites in the Levant as far south as Beidha, hundreds of kilometers away. Whether the trade in obsidian was direct or indirect cannot be determined, but its existence shows the beginning of economic, cultural, and eventually political interrelationships among widely separated communities.

The final period of occupation at Ain Ghazal, from 5500 to 5000
BCE
, brings with it yet another significant innovation, pottery. For the ancients the development of ceramics was probably less significant than it has proven for modern researchers. Although pottery made long-term storage more convenient, such storage was already possible in the form of baskets for dry goods and animal skins for liquids—both of which continued in use for millennia. The discovery that clay, when fired at high temperatures, would become hard and durable, was made independently at a number of sites in different regions and at different times in the Neolithic Age, and it occurs
relatively late at Ain Ghazal. The new technology, however, became widespread, and by 5000, ubiquitous. Clay, the raw material for ceramics, was readily available, and most pottery was locally made, at first by hand, then on the wheel (although hand manufacture continued to be reserved for some types of vessels). Although ceramic bowls, cups, plates, jars, and other forms are easily broken, they were easily and inexpensively replaced, and the sherds simply discarded. But these sherds are indestructible, and they have become one of the most commonly found and most important tools for archaeologists.

From the end of the Neolithic Age on, pottery fragments, even on the surface of the ground, are a sure sign of human occupation. Over the millennia, pottery changed, but slowly and generally synchronously, so that the materials used, the forms, and the decorations became cultural and chronological markers. Over the past hundred years, archaeologists have accumulated a repertoire of these changes, so that pottery becomes an important tool for dating, especially in later periods when radiocarbon dates are less precise. Indeed, until coins become widely used beginning in the Persian period, pottery can be the most important chronological indicator for the Near Eastern sites and levels in which it is found, since datable written remains are often sparse or nonexistent. Within a narrow confine, different types of ceramics can be used to elucidate social stratification and political control. Moreover, as containers for goods traded and even as an object of trade itself, pottery is an indicator of commercial and hence cultural interchange.

Another important site for this period is Jericho, in the Jordan Valley just north of the Dead Sea; until the discovery of Ain Ghazal it was the type-site for the Levant. Like Ain Ghazal, Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) is endowed with an abundant water supply, in the form of a spring that produces as much as 4,000 liters (1,000 gallons) per minute. This spring produced a large oasis in a region of marginal rainfall and warm climate, enabling agriculture to be carried out with ease and virtually year-round. At Jericho, we find essentially the same chronological development as at Ain Ghazal, although the occupation at Jericho begins earlier and is not continuous. As at Ain Ghazal, the burials at Jericho are generally beneath the floors of houses and often have special treatment of the skulls.

In one respect Jericho is anomalous. In general, Neolithic sites are unfortified villages, as are settlements of the immediately following Chalcolithic period, but at the very beginning of the Neolithic era Jericho is a walled enclosure—perhaps even, anachronistically, a city. A stone rampart surrounds the site, at this time covering about 4 hectares (10 acres). This wall was successively rebuilt over the centuries, reaching a maximum width of 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) and a height of more than 6 meters (20 feet). A moat encircled the wall, and just inside the wall was at least one massive circular stone tower, more than 8 meters (26 feet) high, with a diameter of about 9 meters (30 feet) at the base and 7 meters (23 feet) at the top. Inside this tower was a twenty-two-step staircase leading from its base to its top. This complex enclosure system was in use for only a millennium or so, and its function is unclear, although defense is the most reasonable hypothesis. (An alternative explanation proposes a religious use, but archaeologists too often attribute religious functions to discoveries they do not fully understand.) In any case, the construction and maintenance of the system would have required considerable labor, presumably by specialists
whose activity the larger community (probably numbering fewer than a thousand) would have had to compensate. At Jericho, then, and probably at other Neolithic sites as well, we should presume the existence of specialization of tasks and concomitant complexity in social organization that will in the Early Bronze Age (around 3000
BCE
) evolve into full urbanism.

Because of its ecologically advantageous setting, Tell es-Sultan in the Jericho oasis was rebuilt in successive periods, although with some gaps in occupation. It thus exemplifies one of the most familiar features of the ancient and modern Near Eastern landscape, the mound known in Arabic as
tell,
in Hebrew as
tel,
in Turkish as
huyuk,
and in Persian as
tepe
. A tell is the accumulated debris—generally trapezoidal in silhouette—of successive human occupations. Originally, settlers would choose to live on a natural hill, both for defensive purposes and because springs are often found at the base of hills. Houses were built of stone and sun-dried mud-bricks, and, from the Early Bronze Age on, fortifications as well. These settlements often survived for centuries, but eventually they fell victim to natural catastrophes or war, or were simply abandoned because of a change in rainfall patterns or the drying up of the water supply. But other settlers returned to the same site, sometimes immediately and sometimes later, building their town atop the ruins of the previous one. As this pattern was repeated, sometimes a dozen or more times, the site slowly built up, with the earlier debris often held in place by the foundations of the fortifications. Thus were formed the mounds of many cities, to borrow a phrase from Frederick Bliss, a late nineteenth-century excavator of Tell el-Hesi in southwestern Palestine.

Understandably, these mounds were the primary focus of archaeological work in the Levant in the first century or so of systematic excavation. They can often be identified with cities mentioned in biblical and other texts, and thus their occupational history is illuminated by references to them in ancient sources. Moreover, their stratigraphy, though invariably complex, provides a diachronic record of changes in architecture, burial customs, technology, food sources, and the like—changes that can be dated by ceramic chronology. Because of the preoccupation of many excavators with the relationship between excavated remains and the Bible, many of the principal tells in Palestine have been partially excavated more than once, cumulatively yielding a detailed record of the political history and material culture of the region since prehistoric times. As one moves farther away from Palestine, the number of excavated tells decreases, even though in such areas as northern Syria the mounds are more numerous. In Jordan and Syria especially, countless sites have never been excavated.

Since the last third of the twentieth century, more attention has focused on smaller sites, often occupied for only one period, and these have been studied not only by actual excavation but also often by surface survey. This type of investigation often pays more attention to social history than to political history, which is essentially the record of the elite. Many of the sites cannot be identified with ancient place-names, and some are no more than small villages not mentioned in ancient sources. But the investigation of these sites has illuminated the settlement patterns of various periods and the complex relationships between large urban centers and smaller satellite towns and villages, as well as the way of life of ordinary people.

The periodization of history—its division into various eras, and the nomenclature given to those eras—is misleading. It implies sudden change, caused by migration, invasion, variations in climate, or other punctual events. But what is more apparent from the archaeological record is continuity, both through time and across a wide geographical area. Change occurs, of course, but it is almost always gradual and the process is observable.

In the mid-fifth millennium
BCE
there begins the so-called Chalcolithic Age, a name derived from the Greek words for copper and stone. This period (ca. 4500–3300
BCE
) was so named because metallurgy becomes widespread, although stone tools also abound. The Chalcolithic is followed, in archaeological nomenclature, by the Bronze Age (subdivided into Early, Middle, and Late) and then by the Iron Age. But this terminology, based on technology, conveys the wrong impression. Stone artifacts continued to be used throughout the Bronze Age and beyond; some agricultural villages in the Middle East today still use stone blades in harvesting and threshing tools, and stone mortars and pestles have been commonplace in daily life up to modern times. Moreover, iron objects appeared before the beginning of the Iron Age, and well into it bronze remained the most widely used metal.

Once recorded history begins, periodization is based on political events in Egypt and elsewhere. This is the case with the subdivision of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. Subsequent periods are delineated by shifts in imperial control—the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, for example.