The Penguin History of the World

Why this began to happen cannot exactly be explained, but the overwhelming presumption must be that the root cause was over-population in the lands from which the intruders came. Over-population may seem a paradoxical notion to apply to a world whose whole population in about 4000 BC has been estimated only at between 80 and 90 million – that is, about the same as Germany’s today. In the next 4,000 years it grew by about 50 per cent to about 130 million; this implies an annual increase almost imperceptible by comparison with what we now take for granted. It shows both the relative slowness with which our species added to its power to exploit the natural world and how much and how soon the new possibilities of civilization had already reinforced man’s propensity to multiply and prosper by comparison with prehistoric times.

Such growth was still slight by later standards because it was always based on a very fragile margin of resources and it is this fragility which justifies talk of over-population. Drought or desiccation could dramatically and suddenly destroy an area’s capacity to feed itself and it was to be thousands of years before food could easily be brought from elsewhere. The immediate results must often have been famine, but in the longer run there were others more important. The disturbances which resulted were the prime movers of early history; climatic change was still at work as a determinant, though now in much more local and specific ways. Droughts, catastrophic storms, even a few decades of marginally lower or higher temperatures, could force peoples to get on the move and so help to bring on civilization by throwing together peoples of different tradition. In collision and co-operation they learnt from one another and so increased the total potential of their societies.

The peoples who are the actors of early history in this region belonged to the light-skinned human family (sometimes confusingly termed Caucasian), which emerged in Europe. It is one of the three major regional groups of the species Homo sapiens (the others being African and Asian). Linguistic differences have led to other attempts to distinguish them. All the peoples in the Fertile Crescent of early civilized times have been assigned on philological grounds either to ‘Hamitic’ stocks who evolved in Africa north and north-east of the Sahara, to ‘Semitic’-language speakers of the Arabian peninsula, to peoples of ‘Indo-European’ language who, from southern Russia, had spread also by 4000 BC into Europe and Iran, or to the true ‘Caucasians’ of Georgia. Most of these classifications are suspect, but they give some idea of the dramatis personae of the early history of the Fertile Crescent and its environs. Their historic centres all lay around the zone in which agriculture and civilization appear at an early date. The wealth of so well-settled an area must have attracted peripheral peoples.

By about 4000 BC most of the Fertile Crescent was occupied and we can begin there to attempt a summary of the next 3,000 years which will provide a framework for the earlier civilizations. Probably Semitic peoples had already begun to penetrate it by then; their pressure grew until by the middle of the third millennium BC (long after the appearance of civilization) they would be well established in central Mesopotamia, across the middle sections of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The interplay and rivalry of the Semitic peoples with other groups, who were able to hang on to the higher lands which enclosed Mesopotamia from the north-east, is one continuing theme some scholars have discerned in the early history of the area. By 2000 BC the peoples whose languages were of the Indo-European group have also entered on the scene, and from two directions. One of these peoples, the Hittites, pushed into Anatolia from Europe, while their advance was matched from the east by that of the Iranians.

Between 2000 BC and 1500 BC branches of these sub-units dispute and mingle with the Semitic and other peoples in the Crescent itself, while the contacts of the Hamites and Semites lie behind much of the political history of old Egypt. This scenario is, of course, highly impressionistic. Its value is only that it helps to indicate the basic dynamism and rhythms of the history of the region in ancient times. Much of its detail is still highly uncertain (as will appear) and little can be said about what maintained this fluidity. None the less, whatever its cause, this wandering of peoples was the background against which the first civilization appeared and prospered.

2 Ancient Mesopotamia