PANALBA

Out of Eden - The Coming of the Plough (Part 1)

Dave McNicoll 12/20/2009 10:40 AM

It's probably no coincidence that the Holy Land is where it is, seeing as it sits on one of the world's great junctions where African, European and Asian worlds come together, and often collide. Religions are based on our attempt to understand life and death, and to make sense of all that is around us. Faith, which is something different, allows us to give answers to these questions without necessarily providing proof. Seismic events in any culture will have a bearing on folk memory, and in the faith of ancient cultures those events are attributed to God or gods and become parables and the mainstay of the religion that fosters that faith. Few places on Earth have undergone the kind of seismic changes that the Levant underwent 7-12 thousand years ago, and those events remain ingrained in our psyche to this day. The ripples would spread across the globe and Scotland wouldn't escape the changes unleashed by these tectonic events.

By the end of the last major Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago, the human population of Europe and the Middle East had been reduced significantly and was isolated in a few pockets across the region - places like the Alpine valleys, the Mediterranean Coast and the Levant. These people, Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers, were for the most part nomadic: that is, they wandered across vast territories following food and the seasons, sometimes trekking thousands of miles. Yet, in the Holy Land they weren't - they were settled. The reason is no mystery: of all the regions of Europe and western Asia, this quarter was a lush paradise, with more edible plants than you could imagine, and more game than it was possible to hunt. Why? Due to its geographical location - it got the best of all worlds.

Not all animals can be domesticated, and not all plants brought under cultivation, but the lush arc of verdant prosperity stretching from the Holy Land to the Tigris and Euphrates river basins in modern Iraq, and known generally as the ‘Fertile Crescent', would find itself home to 8 out of the worlds 10 main cultivated grasses and 4 of the 5 main domesticated animals. What would be the point of roving around like our ancestors did on Europe's Atlantic edge, when it was all on your doorstep. But, all good things come to an end, and we usher in seismic event number one to hit the Natufian peoples of the Holy Land 11,500 years ago.

Known in Scotland as the ‘Loch Lomond Re-Advance' and elsewhere as the ‘Younger Dryas', the millennia and a half from 9,500 BC saw a significant cooling of the Earth, and a substantial growth in glacial ice, including the British Isles. As well as making higher latitudes much colder it also locked up more moisture in the ice caps, thus making mid-latitude regions, such as the Levant, much dryer and less lush. Almost overnight (in geological terms, but in perhaps less than 50 years) the lush parkland of the Jordan was transformed into an arid scrubland, much like the Sahel region to the south of the Sahara today. Paradise was gone, within maybe as little as two generations, but the Natufians had an ace up their sleeve: they did something that no other human population on the planet had ever done before - they employed systematic agriculture.

"Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life . . . Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden; to till the ground" Genesis 3:17 / 3:23

The expulsion from the Garden of Eden could easily be the folk memory of the very real and acute vanishing of a real paradise, forcing the native tribes to adopt this new system to survive. Either way, it would become the lot of man to till the ground. I'm not going to delve into any detail on the mechanics of this new revolution, save to say that the it was borne out of observation of nature - and it seemed to work in producing enough grains and meat to support a reasonable population in an increasingly harsh environment. The human ability to adapt to nature and to adapt nature itself had been our greatest strength in surviving the cards we're often dealt with as a species, and agriculture is simply one adaptation; but, boy did it catch on!

Although the dog had already been domesticated during the Ice Age, virtually everything else that we know from farming and animal husbandry began at this point in the Fertile Crescent. Probably due to similar climatic pressures, the Chinese were also heading off on an independent agricultural trajectory, as would Meso-America in due course, but neither would be like the explosion and influence coming out of the Middle East.

10,000 years ago the Ice Age finally ended and the plant warmed up swiftly and significantly, reaching the Holocene (the geological term for our current time) high around 8500 years ago. These warm periods tend also to be closely followed by major pluvial events, that is period of wet weather in other-wise arid regions. From around 6000 BC to 4000 BC the Sahara and Arabian deserts all but vanished, replaced instead by a lush rainforest and grasslands. The Holy Lands returned to the verdant parkland lost during the Younger Dryas. By this time, agriculture had really taken off, spreading has it had throughout the Middle East, and then down the Nile into Egypt, and as far as the Indus in the east and the Danube valley in the west. This new wet period would only serve to accelerate the process, and indeed make richer and more advanced those civilisations that had adopted the practice early. In time city states developed in the Levant (Jericho is the worlds oldest continually inhabited city), Babylon (modern Iraq) and of course most famously Egypt, Turkey and Greece. Some of these states would go on to form great Empires, as the riches of farming made the elite wealthy and powerful - the real story of human development, the human condition, had been born.

Agricultural based, cohesive societies require structure, order and a hierarchy. These new eastern empires were filled with kings, scribes, civil servants, craftsmen, tradesmen, free farmers and slaves. It also engenders a clerical class - firstly to tell the ‘origin story', why we are here and how to contemplate the world, its life and death; and of course secondly to bring the masses to heel with a universal, un-questioned religion, geared to the worship of the ruling class. This particular clerical class would have enormous influence as farming edged ever further north - but the physical expression of that influence would be much varied, and the British Isles would adopt a particularly interesting and lasting system. Basically, it was a system where everyone knew their place and would sing from the same hymn-sheet, whether they wanted to or not. It was a patriarchal society, and women in the main became chattels, although further from the centre the old ways of the Mother Goddess would be increasingly intertwined.

The other great Seismic event to hit this burgeon civilisation of the Middle East was the opening of the Bosporus Straits and the flooding of the Black Sea basin by water from the Mediterranean, due to the final melting of the huge Laurentide Ice sheet in North America. Archaeological evidence shows that there were substantial farming communities along the coastline of the previously freshwater lake, and with a sea-level rise in the region of 6 inches a year that is pretty much a disaster of literally biblical proportions. Thousands would have been displaced, as their world drowned before their eyes. Many would have found themselves in the safety and fertile lands of the Levant, where their story would have been woven into the tapestry of the native religions.

"And it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. . . the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up and the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights." Genesis 7:10 / 7:11

Could this be a succinct way to describe the early Holocene pluvial event and the flooding of the Black Sea basin? Indeed following the flood in Genesis the sons of Noah return to farming, but look for new lands in the east - perhaps a long lost memory of their travels to the Levant or Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Interestingly, many cultures share a flood story from roughly the same time frame - the consequences of the rise of the sea at the end of the Ice cannot be underestimated.

From the Middle East, the new systems of farming, animal husbandry and social order were exported through Greece up the Danube Valley and along the Mediterranean Sea coast where climatic conditions favoured similar cereal cultivation and animal welfare. To the north of the Alps, where the environment was very different, the system was adapted to meet the new conditions, and finally as farming met the alien worlds of the British Isles and Scandinavia all that remained was the concept of growing things, rearing livestock and having social order - the rest including city states, writing, attitudes towards women and civilisation had been severely watered down, if not altogether vanished. As Middle Eastern and Egyptian cultures flourished and became all-powerful the planted seed of the Neolithic farming world of our ancestors with their standing stones and burial chambers was coming of age.