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The change from hunting and foraging to farming was one of mankind's great revolutions. The consequences of this fundamental change of lifestyle are with us still.

The Near East is one of the handful of heartlands from which farming spread. That has long been accepted. Yet our picture of the process has gradually changed. The civilizations of the Fertile Crescent - Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt - captured the attention of archaeologists from the earliest days of antiquity-hunting. Their pyramids and temples could scarcely be missed. Their wealth of art and craft seduced the eye. Their writings, once deciphered, made their society comprehensible. The attractive phrase The Fertile Crescent conjured up the spread of ancient civilization from Sumeria through the Levant to Ancient Egypt. We might leap to the conclusion that farming began in the deltas of the rivers Tigris, Euphrates and Nile.

Nurtured by the hills

That is not so. The beginnings of farming were far humbler and leave less obvious traces. It has taken the techniques of modern archaeology to uncover the clues in seeds and bones. Now we have evidence of plant cultivation and stock-breeding over five millennia before the first civilizations. Melinda Zeder summed up the leap in understanding over the last decade. By the late 1990s a consensus had formed that animal domestication began around 10,000 to 9,500 years ago. Then scientists gained new tools: genetic analysis of animal bone and improved radiocarbon dating. Fascinating new findings have pushed that date back to 11,000 years ago. Zeder's map shows that the native sheep and goats of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains were the earliest domesticates, with pigs and cattle following. ^{1M. Zeder, Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: Origins, diffusion, and impact, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol. 105 (2008), no. 33, pp.11597-11604.} Arable farming too began on the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent. The first crop cultivation flourished on higher ground, where fields could be rain-fed, rather than needing irrigation.

Foragers before farmers

Before cultivation even began, abundant resources in the region where the Levant meets Anatolia, and down the Mediterranean edge of the Levant, encouraged hunting and foraging groups into a more settled lifestyle. They may have started by moving to and from their base camps seasonally. Eventually some lived in permanent settlements. The best-known of these sedentary foraging cultures is the Natufian (14,500 to 11,500 BP), in what is now Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The Natufian people built villages of round pit-houses on stone foundations.

Similar villages grew up at the junction of the Taurus and Zagros foothills from about 12,000 BP. At Göbekli Tepe, in what is now Turkey, the world's first megalithic monument has been uncovered. Circles of pillars are adorned with elaborate animal reliefs. These are similiar to those at a later monument in Nevali Çori, 30 kilometers to the north-west of Göbekli, suggesting a continuity of population from Mesolithic to Neolithic. Gobekli Tepe's builders probably lived in a nearby settlement at Sanliurfa. Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt found that the most common bone remains at Göbekli Tepe are those of aurochs, an extinct species of ox. Aurochs required a communal effort to hunt. A hunting band which could do that was large and well-organised, capable of building such a monument. The density of population in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent must have been far higher than average for hunter-gatherers. ^{2O. Bar-Yosef, The Natufian culture and the Early Neolithic: Social and economic trends in Southwestern Asia, chapter 10 in P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds.),Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis (2002); B. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans (2008), pp. 90-91; P. Bellwood, First Farmers: the origins of agricultural societies (2005), pp. 63; S. Scham, The World's First Temple, Archaeology, vol. 61, no. 6, (November/December 2008); G. Chandler, The Beginning of the End for Hunter-Gatherers, Saudi Aramco World, vol. 60, no. 2 (March/April 2009), pp. 2-9.}

First farmers

Among other food-sources, foragers made use of the stands of wild wheats and ryes that had sprung up along the edge of the zone roamed by wild sheep and goats. Then came the Big Freeze of the Younger Dryas around 12,700 years ago. The worsening climate may have driven sedentary foragers to cultivation. The earliest tentative experiments in plant management date at least as far back as c. 12,000 BP, though crop domestication was not well established until c.10,500 BP (8,000 BC), when the climate was improving once more. Meanwhile both sheep and goats were domesticated in the hilly band stretching from the northern Zagros to southeastern Anatolia between c. 11,000 and 10,500 BP, and perhaps even earlier. The domestication of pigs and cattle followed. Farming began before the first pottery was made, so the earliest farming period is known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA). Populations grew rapidly at this time. Most PPNA hamlets and villages are three to eight times larger than the largest Natufian sites. ^{3M. Savard, M. Nesbitt, and M.K. Jones, The role of wild grasses in subsistence and sedentism: new evidence from the northern Fertile Crescent, World Archaeology, vol.  38, no. 2 (2006), pp. 179-196; O. Bar-Yosef, The Natufian culture and the Early Neolithic: Social and economic trends in Southwestern Asia, chapter 10 in P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds.),Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis (2002); M. Zeder, Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: Origins, diffusion, and impact, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol. 105 (2008), no. 33, pp.11597-11604; P. Bellwood, First Farmers: The origin of agricultural societies (2005), pp. 59-60.}

In the Zagros mountains people had begun deserting their cave dwellings to create villages while still hunter-gatherers. Some of those villages, such as Zawi Chemi Shanidar and Nemrik, in what is now northern Iraq, bridge the change from foraging to farming. In western Iran the newly-discovered site at Sheikhi-Abad in Kermanshah Province includes the remains of a house, and a possibly ritual space decorated with horns of sheep and goats. Radiocarbon dates to 11,800 years ago (9,800 BC) would make it the earliest Neolithic village in the world, if it was founded by farmers.^{4R.L. Solecki and A.P. Agelarakis, The proto-neolithic cemetery in Shanidar Cave (2004); S.K. Kozowski, Nemrik: An Aceramik Village in Northern Iraq (2002); Traces of First Human Settlement in Kermanshah, Iran Daily, 24 August 2008; Goddess statue found inwestern Iran, [Iranian] PressTV, 6 September 2008; Most ancient Mid East village discovered in western Iran, Iranian Students News Agency 24 May 2009; Middle East oldest village found in Iran, [Iranian]PressTV 25 May 2009.}

The next stage is conventionally labelled the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB). By about 9,500–9,000 BP (7,500-7,000 BC) diverging economies had crystallised. There were farmer-herders living on domesticated crops and livestock; there were herders supplementing their diet by hunting, and there were nomadic foragers. With these divisions come the first hints of tribal society. Cultural clues, such as house design or types of tool, suggest a patchwork of societies. Farming had expanded into the Zagros foothills east of the Tigris, into southern Anatolia and from there to Cyprus. That last colonization tells us that sea-worthy craft could be built by this time.^{5O. Bar-Yosef, The Natufian culture and the Early Neolithic: Social and economic trends in Southwestern Asia, chapter 10 in P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds.),Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis (2002).}

In the farming belt some settlements have been investigated, such as Çatalhöyük, begun around 9,400 BP (7,400 BC) and Çayönü, occupied between 9,400 and 8,800 BP (7,400-6,800 BC), both in Anatolia, and Abu Hureyra in Syria. In striking contrast to the round houses of the Natufian period, these settlements evolved into complexes of rectangles, built of sun-dried mud brick, plastered over. Çatalhöyük and Çayönü were conglomerates of buildings without streets. People moved around on the flat roofs, entering their houses by ladders leading down from holes in the roofs. Such a huddle would give protection from predators, but lacked the characteristics of a truly urban settlement, such as public buildings or market squares.^{6I. Hodder, Çatalhöyük: the Leopard’s Tale, Revealing the mysteries of Turkey’s ancient ‘town’ (2006) R. J. Braidwood et al., Beginnings of Village-Farming Communities in Southeastern Turkey, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 71, no. 2 (1974), pp. 568-572; B.F. Byrd, Public and private, domestic and corporate: The emergence of the southwest Asian village, American Antiquity, vol. 59, no.4 (1994), pp. 639-666.} The southern Mesopotamian cities would emerge from the organised society required for major irrigation projects.

Mesopotamia and Elam

The burgeoning farming communities seem to have over-exploitated the land. Constant cultivation, over-grazing and felling trees for timber and fuel led to erosion and loss of fertility. Çatalhöyük was one of a number of sites abandoned between around 8,900 and 8,000 BP (6900-6000 BC). As groups of farmers looked for new areas to settle, there was piecemeal migration from the hills onto the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Mediterranean coast, and the banks of the Karkeh River in what is now southwest Iran.^{7B. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans (2008), pp. 93-4.}

The Halaf Culture (5900-5300 BC) in Northern Mesopotamia was an interesting exception to the transition from round to rectangular houses. Dutch, German and Italian excavators have uncovered more of its circular dwellings (tholoi) in recent years. Its farming people later built rectangular structures as well, but these often seem to be for storage. The simplest one-room circular structures mainly had a cupola-shaped roof. This round-plan architecture may have come from the Caucasus or Zagros, along with metallurgy, which the Halaf people introduced to Mespotamia. The Halaf Culture is also notable for the fine pottery produced at Tell Arpachiyah, a village of potters with cobbled streets. ^{8R.M. Munchaev, The Halaf Culture: peculiaries of the V mill. B.C. North Mesopotamian architecture, Al-Rafidan, vol. XVIII (1997), pp. 69-79; I.E.S. Edwards, The Cambridge Ancient History, part 1 (1980), pp. 277-9; C. Burney, Arslantepe as a gateway to the highland, a note on periods VIA-VID, in M. Frangipane et al (eds.), Between the Rivers and Over the Mountains (1993), pp. 314f; D.W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2007), pp.282-4.}

Reliable water sources would make the riverine plains more attractive to farmers and herders alike. From the material clues left behind, it seems that some herder-hunters spread into Mesopotamia from Northern Arabia, while farmers moved down from the northern and eastern hills. Yet as settlements crept southwards down the Tigris and Euphrates, they moved away from the zone of rain-fed crops. The earliest evidence of canal irrigation in Mesopotamia (c. 6,000 BC) is from Choga Mami, east of the Middle Tigris. This formed part of the highly-organized Samarra culture, named for the type-site of Tell es-Sawwan, near Samarra. The Samarran people had pottery of the Halaf style, from further north. Their culture in turn gave birth to the cities of Sumer, to judge by the Samarran pottery that appears at the earliest Sumerian settlements, along with the einkorn strain of wheat native to the north.^{9D.T. Potts, Mesopotamian civilization: the material foundations (1997), pp. 51-54; for a critical review of the long debate over the origins of the Sumerians, see A. Soitysiak, Physical anthropology and the Sumerian problem, Studies in Historical Anthropology, vol. 4 (2004[2006]), pp. 145-158.}

The first cities in the world appeared in Mesopotamia. Apart from their size, they were distinguished by massive public buildings, and written bureaucratic records. In northern Mesopotamia the beginnings of urban life can be seen in Nagar (now Tell Brak in northern Syria), which controlled one of the major roads leading from the Tigris Valley north to the metal sources in Anatolia and west to the Euphrates and the Mediterranean. By 3800 BC it had large buildings, extensive workshops and an estimated population of 20,000 people, not counting its suburbs.^{10J. Oates, Early Mesopotamian urbanism: a new view from the north, Antiquity (1 September 2007).} The first substantial settlement in southern Mesopotamia was Eridu, around 3,700 BC. Powerful Uruk flourished about 3,500 BC. In Egypt Hierakonpolis achieved city status about the same time. Similar cities developed by 3,000 BC in Elam. The Elamite culture flourished to the east of Mesopotamia, on the Khuzestan Plain in what is now Iran. Susa grew from a village into the capital of Elam. In this period there were not only more settlements, but more varieties of them: cities, towns, villages and hamlets.

Agriculture on the alluvial plain created by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers required community effort. Rainfall was very limited and all crops needed irrigation. The reward was a food surplus from the rich soils, which could be used to support temples, leaders and bureaucrats. However the plains lacked timber or building stone and metal deposits. Copper and timber could be imported from Elam, where metallurgy was advanced, but also from further afield. Trade routes developed between the plains cities and the highlands as far as Anatolia, the Caucasus and perhaps Lebanon. Goods were imported by sea up the Persian Gulf from as far away as India.^{11H. Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians (2004), pp. 11,16, 28.}

Languages and genes

Traders from afar would give the cities of Sumer a cosmopolitan air. We can imagine people from various quarters visiting and settling there. One immigrant group dominated - the speakers of Semitic. The earliest Sumerian records give us names both Sumerian and Semitic. Sumerian is a language with no known relatives. It was spoken by Sumerians at the time they developed writing. Semitic is one of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages and probably arose approximately 4,500 BC in the Levant. It includes Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew. ^{12A. Kitchen et al, Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of Semitic languages identifies an Early Bronze Age origin of Semitic in the Near East, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, published online before print (April 29, 2009), doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.0408; A. Y. Militarev, Once more about glottochronology and the comparative method: the Omotic-Afrasian case, Aspects of Comparative Linguistics, vol. 1 (2005), pp. 339-40.} The Semitic-speakers in Sumer may have initially been nomads on the fringes of the plain. As foraging societies melted away in the region, the division lay between the nomadic pastoralists and the settled farmers. Herders could be attracted into town for various reasons, ranging from hardship among poorer pastoralists to the wealthy looking for a stake in the running of city-states. By the time records start, Semitic names were associated with the region which became known as Akkad, around the city of Kish, ruled by a Semitic dynasty, and speaking the ancient Semitic language Akkadian. Semitic names gradually increased in Sumer over the next 500 years, while the use of the Sumerian language declined. By 1,800 BC Sumerian was a dead language.^{13H. Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians (2004), pp. 20-21.}

This region has so often been a battleground and witnessed so many migrations that it would be foolish to expect present populations to be a genetic mirror of the Neolithic pattern. Yet there is some pattern in the distribution of Y-DNA chromosome haplogroups, as Mirvat El-Sibai and colleagues have discovered. The region overall is strong in haplogroups E1b1b, J1 and J2, thought to have spread with the Neolithic, and also has significant amounts of G and R1b. The Iranians have far more J2 than J1, whereas the opposite is true for Egyptians and Kuwaitis, while Jordanians have roughly twice as much J1 as J2. This confirms previous deductions that J1 is strongly present in Semitic language-speakers. Jacques Chiaroni, Roy King and Peter Underhill looked deeper. They compared the distribution of rainfall with the distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroups, and concluded that J2 were the agricultural innovators who followed the rainfall, while J1 remained largely with their flocks. ^{14H. Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians (2004), p.12; Mirvat El-Sibai et al., Geographical Structure of the Y-chromosomal Genetic Landscape of the Levant: A coastal-inland contrast, Annals of Human Genetics online 16 Aug 2009: doi:10.1111/j.1469-1809.2009.00538.x; R. King and P.A. Underhill, Congruent distribution of Neolithic painted pottery and ceramic figurines with Y-chromosome lineages, Antiquity 76 (2002), pp. 704-714; J. Chiaroni, R.J. King and Peter A. Underhill, Correlation of annual precipitation with human Y-chromosome diversity and the emergence of Neolithic agricultural and pastoral economies in the Fertile Crescent, Antiquity, vol. 82 (2008), no. 316, pp. 281–289.}

Though the greatest density of J1 today centres on the southern Levant, Jacques Chiaroni, Roy King and their colleagues found that the highest haplotype diversity of the major sub-clade J1e was in the Zagros/Taurus mountain region, the cradle of the Neolithic. High diversity provides a clue to origin. They consider that people carrying haplogroup J1e spread Semitic languages across the region.^{15J. Chiaroni et al, The emergence of Y-chromosomehaplogroup J1e among Arabic-speaking populations, European Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 18 (2010), pp. 348–353. Note that they use Zhivotovsky evolutionary rate for calculatution of dates. This gives estimates roughly three times too old.} By contrast J2 appears to be correlated with a very old Middle Eastern language, nicknamed the Banana language from its syllabic duplication, which appears in some personal names used in Sumerian texts, such as Inanna, goddess of love. Roy King notes that although Iran has some of the highest levels of J2 in the world, the greatest genetic diversity within the haplogroup is found today in South Eastern Anatolia, Northwestern Iraq and among Palestinians living in coastal Israel. Using STR mutation rates calculated by Zhivotovsky et al, he theorises an expansion of J2 between 19,000 and 25,000 BCE.^{16R. King, Neolithic Migrations in the Near East and the Aegean: Linguistic and Genetic Correlates, chapter 8 in P. Peregrine (ed.), Ancient Human Migrations: A Multidisciplinary Approach (2009).} But these mutation rates are widely felt to deliver estimates three times too old. In which case, the expansion of J2 would fall between roughly 6,000 and 8,000 BC, with the growing Neolithic population.

Sergio Tofanelli and colleagues have investigated the modern-day distribution of Y haplogroup J1 (M267) across North Africa as well as the Middle East. They reject the idea that this can be explained simply by the spread of Islam. They find that coalescence times for lineages point to the more distant past: the period between 5,500 and 7,200 BP (3,500-5,200 BC).^{17S. Tofanelli etal, J1-M267 Y lineage marks climate-drivenpre-historical human displacements,European Journal of HumanGenetics, advance online publication 15 April 2009.}

The wet period as the Ice Age glaciers melted saw deserts bloom. Odd as it may seem today, the Eastern Sahara was the cradle of pastoralism in Africa. From a beginning there about 8,500 BC, the herding lifestyle gradually spread. Semi-nomadic tribes roamed the Sahara and presumably Arabia. Then a shift to a cooler, drier climate from around 5,500 BC encouraged pastoralists to seek better-watered havens in the highlands, such as the Atlas range, the Tassili massif and southern Arabia. The cave paintings of Tassili, Southern Algeria, capture the pattern of their lives. Tofanelli et al feel that Y-DNA J1 is the genetic legacy of the dispersal of pastoralists in the Sudanese Sahara, North Africa and Arabia. ^{18S. Tofanelli etal, J1-M267 Y lineage marks climate-driven pre-historical human displacements, European Journal of Human Genetics, advance online publication 15 April 2009; H.E. Wright, Global Climates Since the Last Glacial Maximum (1993), fig. 9.17; S. Kröpelin et al, Climate-Driven Ecosystem Succession in the Sahara: The Past 6000 Years, Science vol. 320, no. 5877 (9 May 2008), pp. 765-768 suggest the Sahara became arid more gradually; F.A. Hassan, Archaeology and linguisticdiversity in North Africa, chapter 11 in P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds.),Examining the Farming/Language Disperal Hypothesis (2002).}

The cooler climate and over-exploitation of resources led to the failure of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the Levant. Some Near Eastern farmers crossed Sinai into North Africa around 6,000 BC, taking sheep, goats, wheat and barley with them. That agro-pastoralist dispersal has been linked to subclades of the Y haplogroups E1b and R1b. It seems that these early farmers spread one branch of the Afroasiatic language family - African North Afrasian - which includes Ancient Egyptian, the Berber languages of North Africa and the Chadic languages of West Central Africa. There is a strong correlation between the Chadic languages and a subclade of R1b1 discovered by Fulvio Cruciani and colleagues, defined by marker V88. Its distribution suggests that it migrated south across the Sahara as the region gradually turned drier, leaving a pocket of V88 in what is now the Siwa oasis near the western border of Egypt.^{19B.Arredi et al, Apredominantly neolithic origin for Y-chromosomal DNA variationin NorthAfrica,American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 75, no.2(2004), pp.338-45; F. Cruciani et al., Human Y chromosome haplogroup R-V88: a paternal genetic record of early mid Holocene trans-Saharan connections and the spread of Chadic languages, European Journal of Human Genetics (2010), pp. 1–8}(Some linguists have argued that Proto-Afroasiatic dates back long before the Neolithic and arose in the Ethiopian Highlands. Alexander Militarev countered by showing that Proto-Afroasiatic incorporated farming terms.) ^{20A. Militarev, The prehistory of a dispersal: the Proto-Afrasian (Afroasiatic) farming lexicon, chapter 12 in P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds.), Examining the Farming/Language Disperal Hypothesis (2002); A. Y. Militarev, Once more about glottochronology and the comparative method: the Omotic-Afrasian case, Aspects of Comparative Linguistics, vol. 1 (2005), pp. 339-40.}

As the Sahara dried out, from around 4,800 BC some farmers took refuge in the Nile Valley, with its reliable water source.^{21F.A. Hassan, Archaeology and linguistic diversity in North Africa, chapter 11 in P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds.), Examining the Farming/Language Disperal Hypothesis (2002)} As in Mesopotamia, the complexities of irrigation agriculture welded together an organised society. It was the start of a civilization which lasted thousands of years.

Dairy farming

The first herders kept animals for slaughter. The idea of milking them came later. How can we tell when milking started? Archaeologists first deduced this from the study of animal bones. We would expect animals kept for meat alone to be killed young. That is indeed the picture gained from early Neolithic sites in the Near East. If the average age at slaughter rises, that is a clue that domesticated animals have another use for their keepers.

The discovery of additional uses for animals, such as milk, wool, riding and traction, has been termed the Secondary Products Revolution. We can see it as a second stage of farming, that came too late to be carried across Europe with the first wave of farmers. These discoveries did not all take place at the same time or in the same place, but together they are the cultural signature of the age of metal.

Now scientific analysis of fat residues on pottery can clarify the place and time that milking became important. A study of more than 2,200 pottery vessels vessels from sites in the Near East and southeastern Europe pointed to northwestern Anatolia. The lowland, coastal region around the Sea of Marmara favoured cattle-keeping. Pottery from these sites dating from 6500–5000 BC showed milk being processed. Processing into cheese and other dairy products would enhance the keeping qualities of the food. It would also aid digestion in a population that had not yet developed the ability to digest milk as adults.^{22R.P. Evershed et al., Earliest date for milk use in the Near East and southeastern Europe linked to cattle herding, Nature, vol. 455 (25 September 2008), pp. 528-31.}

Fruit of the vine

With agriculture came alcohol. Farmers took some time to work up to wine. In China, where rice-cultivation developed independently of the Near Eastern Neolithic, a type of mead was brewed as early as 7,000 BC with rice, honey, and fruit. This is the earliest evidence of man-made alcohol so far found in the world. The earliest alcoholic drink in the Near East was probably a beer made from fermented barley. This partly explains why beer-drinking spread so widely in the West. The habit would have travelled across Europe with the first farmers. The other reason why wine-drinking was more circumscribed than beer-swilling in the ancient world is that grapes flourish in sunny climates. Grapes grew wild on the southern shores of the Black and Caspian Seas, climbing trees like lianas. They seem to have been first cultivated on the sunny southern slopes of the Caucasus. The earliest evidence of wine production so far has come from sites in Georgia and Iran, dating from 6000 to 5000 BC. Ancient jars of c. 6000 BC have been found at Shulaveri in south eastern Georgia, with the residue of wine still coating their inner surfaces. Similar residues have been found in jars of c. 5400 B.C in the Neolithic settlement of Hajji Firuz Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of northwestern Iran. ^{23M. Nelson,The Barbarian's Beverage: a history of beer in ancient Europe (2005); P. E. McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (2003); P. E. McGovern and Solomon H. Katz, The Origins and Ancient History of Wine (2000); P. E. McGovern et al., Fermented beverages of pre- and proto-historic China, PNAS, vol. 101 no. 51 (December 21, 2004), pp. 17593-17598; P. E. McGovern, Uncorking the Past: The quest for wine, beer and other alcoholic beverages (2009).}

The Ancient Egyptians left us a fresco depicting the process of viticulture from grape-growing to wine-making. Vines were not native to Egypt. The staples of the Egyptian diet were bread and beer. Beer was brewed on an industrial scale in Egypt's first city, Hierakonpolis, and later by royal breweries.^{24J.R. Geller, From Prehistory to History: Beer in Egypt, in R. Friedman and B. Adams (eds.), The Followers of Horus (1992), pp.19-26; D. Samuel, Brewing and baking in P.T. Nicholson and I. Shaw (eds.), Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (2000), pp. 537-576.} So wine would have been a luxury, perhaps initially imported. Archaeologists have found notes of vintages stored in royal palaces. Wine probably arrived in Europe before Egypt. Long before this fresco, grapes were being harvested in Greece. 6,500-year-old crushed grapes were found in Neolithic houses at Dikili Tash, which may well have been pressed in wine-making.^{25S.M. Valamoti et al, Grape-pressings from northern Greece: the earliest wine in the Aegean?, Antiquity, vol. 81, no. 311 (March 2007), pp. 54–61.} The Greeks spread wine-drinking throughout the Mediterranean, while the Romans had a considerable trade in wine to those beer-drinking barbarians beyond their borders, and encouraged vine-cultivation within them. So now we know whom to blame.

Metal from the hills

Just as there has been a bias towards early riverine civilizations in thinking about the origins of agriculture, so we find a tendency to assume that new technologies, such as the potter's wheel, wheeled vehicles and metallurgy had their origins there. The cities of Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt and Elam were advanced in their organisation. They had writing and bureaucracy. What they did not have, though, were the raw materials with which to experiment with new technology. The cities of the plains had to import timber and metal.

So attention has turned to the forest-steppe zone in the search for the earliest wheeled vehicles, and mountain copper-belts for the beginnings of the age of metal. Man and magpie love to collect shiny objects. Millennia before true metallurgy people were attracted to blue and green copper ores and naturally-occurring (native) copper. In the cradle of the Neolithic, people used them for personal adornment. Copper belts run through the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia to the Zagros Mountains of Iran. In the core of this area - what is now eastern Turkey and Northern Iraq - people began to cold-work native copper. As early as c. 8000 BC there is evidence from sites such as Cayonu Tepesi in eastern Turkey of some application of heat to ease the production process.^{26B. W. Roberts, C.P. Thornton and V.C. Pigott, Development of metallurgy in Eurasia, Antiquity, vol. 83 (2009), pp. 1012–1022.}

Where did copper smelting start? Bewilderingly, the technique crops up at around 5,000 BC in places far from the cradle of the Neolithic, but equally blessed with seams of copper ore. Early copper smelting sites have been found at Tal-i Iblis in south-eastern Iran and at Belovode in eastern Serbia. Given the difficulty of acquiring the technology, and its arrival in multiple places at roughly the same time, it seems likely that the knowledge of copper-working was passed on within a family or clan. We may picture them initially trading the worked objects that appear quite widely, and then members of the clan perhaps settling in societies wealthy enough to support specialists. The home of smelting was probably in Anatolia, where copper had already been exploited for so long. But in Iran copper alloys were gradually developed. The Zagros Mountains are rich in mineral resources, so metal-workers could mix copper with arsenic or iron to harden it. The technique of making arsenical copper bronze spread to the copper-rich Caucasus by 3,700 BC. True bronze (a copper-tin alloy) did not appear until around 3000 BC.^{27B. W. Roberts, C.P. Thornton and V.C. Pigott, Development of metallurgy in Eurasia, Antiquity, vol. 83 (2009), pp. 1012–1022; C. P. Thornton, The Emergence of Complex Metallurgy on the Iranian Plateau: Escaping the Levantine Paradigm, Journal of World Prehistory (2009): DOI 10.1007/s10963-009-9019-1.}

From one small corner of Western Eurasia came agriculture, alcohol and metallurgy. Rice-based agriculture developed independently in China, along with rice-wine. But there is no evidence for the independent discovery of metal-working anywhere else in Eurasia. Despite its origin in the Near East, it seems that the knowledge of smelting was carried far and wide by Indo-European speakers in their wanderings.

Notes

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