A History of the World Read online

  Farming was the most important human revolution of all. It produced not only an immense political change, as hierarchies grew from the sweat and success of farmers, but also less easily tracked changes in human consciousness. Presumably, the settled communities lost touch with the wider geography that their hunting forebears had known; and, with the ‘other’, the unknown, surrounding them. Villagers turned a little in on themselves and away from the lands of the wild beasts and passing hunter groups. Farming would eventually allow food surpluses for leaders and full-time priests; people able to live without actually ploughing or herding themselves.

  But the arrival of farming also meant the emergence of the home, or homeland. And as the archaeology shows, settling down produced people who could pay in grain or hides for ‘luxury’ materials such as salt, sharp cutting stones, pretty shells and herbs. So quite early on, traders must have been carrying their packs along newly worn tracks. It turned out to be a rather more complex bargain than the first handful of fatter seeds might have suggested.

  The rise of farming does indeed shape all of later history. The relative paucity of animals to domesticate, and the later start at farming that was the fate of the people who had arrived in Mesoamerica, meant that the civilizations established there were about three thousand years behind those of Europe and Asia and so would be very vulnerable to conquest. The degradation of the soil in the Mesopotamian delta led to the fall of the Sumerian civilization, and the overuse of agricultural land in the classical world led eventually to the desertification of North Africa. Both of these farming failures created political vacuums – relatively thinly populated stretches of land – which in due course would accelerate the spread of Islam.

  Thin soil propelled both Vikings and Mongols. But first came towns.

  Gentle Anarchists

  One day, Tokyo and London, LA and Moscow, will be gone and forgotten. One day far in the future – let us hope – undulating mounds of stone, weirdly shaped green cover and buried walls, motorways and metal objects, will lie quietly, as planetary scars. If this is hard to imagine, reflect that the first towns are already long gone. Some are buried deep below today’s towns. Long before the walls of Jericho fell to Joshua’s priests’ trumpets, it had been an ancient settlement, one of the oldest in the world, with a fresh spring, mud-brick dwellings and even a wall and a tower, though these are thought to have been to protect its people against floods rather than attackers.

  North of Jericho, on the Anatolian plains of today’s Turkey, are scores of odd-looking mounds, roughly symmetrical hills, gently rising above the modern fields of wheat, barley and maize. Quite probably, most of them are the remains of Neolithic towns, each once home to thousands of people: a lost, noisy world of early farmers and their families who had settled down and worked together for many centuries, worshipping leopard-gods, saving up for goods from far away, making jokes, marrying and burying their dead.

  All this is a reasonable guess because one of these mounds has been opened up, initially by British archaeologists. It has proved to be a revelation, a treasure trove of knowledge about what happened after the shift to agriculture. Today Catalhoyuk is a small area of excavated earth under metal canopies, with a modest collection of archaeologists’ housing near by. It looks a little like a film director’s set for a movie set in the trenches. It is rather less well known than Rome or Angkor Wat, but in human history it is almost as significant.

  Its buildings were lived in from around 9,500 to 7,700 years ago. It has no defensive walls. Nor does it have any buildings much grander than the others, or standing apart. There are no signs of rulers, priests, warrior quarters, lesser workers’ huts – it is just one egalitarian hive. In some ways the homes feel remarkably modern. With a hearth and a living room, a pantry close by, and other rooms which seem to have been bedrooms, the typical home was kept scrupulously clean with regular whitewashing of the walls and floor. When you walk around, the strangeness vanishes and these dwellings, about the size of a modern city apartment or a cottage, feel familiar – modest, but big enough.

  Yet the sense of familiarity is only skin-deep. This is not a town as we know towns. Catalhoyuk had no streets, no squares or public buildings. Its people entered their honeycomb of homes through door-openings in the roofs, with ladders leading down, almost as if they were entering man-made caves. They socialized, we must assume, on the roofs which, connected together, would have made a large, safe, flat space for craft work or gathering and talking, and probably had canopies to keep off the sun. (In this area of Turkey, with its broiling summers, people still often sit out on the rooftop under a shade, and sleep overnight there too.)

  The houses were renovated or rebuilt by partially knocking down the original, then building upwards on the ruins, so that they grew almost like a human coral, structure on structure. In places, there are eighteen separate layers of homes. Rooms were ornately decorated with plastered bulls’ heads, paintings of leopards and of hunts, and with stone and clay figures of women and animals. Unlike Jericho and other early urban centres, here everything seems to happen in the home. The current lead archaeologist for the site, Ian Hodder of Stanford University, says: ‘In a modern town we would expect to identify different functional areas and buildings such as the industrial and residential zones, the church or mosque or temple, and the cemetery. At Catalhoyuk all these separate functions occur in one place, in the house.’15

  In these houses people stored their food, enough for a single family, in large carved wooden containers, and wove baskets and mats; they made daggers and belt buckles from flint and bone, polished obsidian mirrors, created bracelets and other jewellery; made curious stamp-seals, perhaps for marking property or their own skin; and they cooked and cleaned. All about was excellent farming land, streams and ponds with fish and birds; and the population grew to around seven thousand, perhaps ten thousand – which made it one of the largest human settlements on earth at the time. From the rubbish tips outside the town we can tell they lived well, on wild pigs, ducks, geese, sheep, fish, barley and oats.

  The most striking thing about Catalhoyuk is where the bodies were buried. The dead were carefully curled up – ‘lovingly’ seems a reasonable description – and then interred under the floors of the houses, under the stoves, or under the platforms where the living slept. Some think they were first exposed to be picked clean by vultures; the current view is that this was not so, and people simply got used to the smell of decomposition. Some of the dead had their heads removed after death, and these were then plastered and painted and kept. Presumably they were the heads of significant people, perhaps the one-time heads of households. They seem to have been dug up, replastered and buried again, a kind of family memento that would be recycled through generations. One house had more than sixty corpses in it.

  There are more mysteries in Catalhoyuk: in the houses, the bulls’ heads and paintings of leopards suggest a worship of natural power and aggression in the world outside. The inhabitants did not need David Attenborough to bring a sense of the danger of the sunlit outside world into the dark, cave-like womb of the home. But the practice of building home after home on the same site, and burying family members there and preserving heads, all point to ancestor worship, common throughout China and Japan, and indeed in the Mediterranean world up to Roman times.

  These are people living in nuclear families, or at least nuclear homes, and identifying themselves with their parents, grandparents and back through the generations. They are saying, ‘We are this ground, this place, this footprint on the soil; a strong assertion of settlement after the thousands of years of nomadic roving. Does that sound odd? If so, it is only because most of us are now real city-dwellers who have lost any direct connection with a specific patch of earth, one that belonged to our ancestors. But for most of human history this identification of lineage and land was normal (even if burying granny under the stove was not).

  The second part of the Catalhoyuk message is about equality. As time goes
on, and layers grow upon layers, there are some houses that are larger, more decorated and with more burials than others – which suggests the slow emergence of dominant or more powerful families. But there is still nothing like a ruling or priestly class. Catalhoyuk offers a glimpse of an alternative society before the rise of class divisions, the warriors, chiefs and kings of later towns. It is a more peaceful society, poised somewhere between the early farming villages and the fighting empires ahead. Catalhoyuk enthusiasts see it as an egalitarian Eden, where women were venerated, there was no war, and families with only small amounts of personal property lived peaceably and cooperatively together.

  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’.16

  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.’17 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 rai
sing 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.