Starting around 7500 BC, the villagers of Çatalhöyük (central Türkiye) – which housed over 5,000 inhabitants – lived by planting cereals and rearing sheep while starting to hammer copper into useful tools. Near Raqqa, Syria, villagers in Tell Sabi Abyad built granaries for their food stores and used clay tokens to record how much they possessed. The oldest intact cloth, found in Çayönü, (Türkiye) dates to 7000 BC. Safe in walled villages, women had more children who could be weaned and fed porridge, but 50 per cent of them died young because they lived in intimate proximity to people and animals which made them prey to diseases: then as now, epidemics were symptoms of the species’ success, not its failure. But they required more settlements to organize the growing of more food: between 10,000 and 5000 BC, the world population scarcely grew from four million to five million. For most of history – the next eight and a half millennia – life expectancy was around thirty.
Small towns developed in Iraq, Egypt and China, followed by Pakistan/India where fecund, moist riverine soils along with the most useful breeds of domesticated animals gave these four regions a boost in the formation of sophisticated societies that would grant them supremacy over Eurafrica for many millennia.
All over the world, people started to raise megalithic stone structures, often in circles: around 7000 BC, Nubians – not Egyptians but sub-Saharan Africans – pulled huge stones from far away and raised them at Nabta Playa in circles linked to the observance of stars. The first commodities and luxuries were traded or exchanged: from Iran to Serbia, copper, gold and silver were mined and crafted; lapis lazuli was used in burials; and in the Yangtze Valley, the Chinese started to make silk.
In Malta, Germany, Finland and later England, communities moved gigantic stones across long distances to build structures that were – possibly – temples to follow the sun, to predict rain, to sacrifice humans, to celebrate fertility. Faith was interlinked with power and family: both men and women did the hunting and farming, but the latter probably raised the children and spun textiles: the oldest cotton has been found in the Jordan Valley. In Africa, where families weaved raffia and bark cloth these clans may have been run by women with power descending through the female line.* In Eurasia, the value of female skills began to be calculated: fathers charged a bride price to future husbands who if powerful could keep several women and protect their children. Originally families honoured both male and female lineages, but to avoid conflicts over land or grain they at some point started to favour the male lineage, though genetically all descendants were identical – a tradition that still endures in many places into the age of iPhones. Yet even in Iraq women could rise to power.
KUBABA: FIRST QUEEN
At Eridu, on a lagoon in Iraq near the mouth of the Euphrates River on the Persian Gulf, around 5400 BC, fishermen and shepherds founded a village where they raised a temple to the god Enki. So rich was this environment that other cities were built nearby, so close that they could almost see other. The invention of the spindle whorl – a sphere with a hole – to make cloth may have been the first gadget, developed as early as pottery and agriculture, with consequences far beyond its immediate usefulness. Difficult to create, cloth was essential but expensive: societies were arranged around food, war and cloth. Eridu was one of the first towns in Sumeria, followed by Ur and Uruk, where a terraced platform was built to Anu, the sky god, topped off with a temple – a ziggurat.
Their leaders were both patriarchs and priests. Their gods were partly playful hucksters, but they evolved into harsher judges who threatened rule-breakers and then policed something altogether greater stilclass="underline" the afterlife. The gods got bigger as the rulers and communities got bigger and the competition with others became fiercer.*
It is not known how Uruk, now home to over 20,000 people, was organized – there were no palaces and there is mention of ‘the people’ – but there were priest-kings and the temples controlled the wealth: the idea of property probably started with reference to special treasure and artefacts set aside for the sacred within these temples.
To the north, on the Eurasian steppes, horses – the animals that would help humans dominate the terrestrial until the nineteenth century – were being domesticated. Around 3500 BC, horses were fitted with bits so they could be ridden. Soon, the wheel was developed in Ukraine/Russia, where the first linguistic references to wheels appear. It is likely the wheel reached Iraq before the horses: the earliest wagons were pulled not by horses but by another member of the equid family, the kunga – a sturdy cross between female donkey and Syrian ass, the first example of human interbreeding of animals – depicted in art pulling early four-wheeled wagons. The remains of one was recently discovered in Syria. The new technology spread to India; kungas vanished; and the horse empowered shepherds to become ferocious, nomadic cavalry and families to move across vast distances to settle in new lands. War already drove technology: wagons were weaponized as chariots, so prestigious that warband chiefs fielded charioteer armies. When they died, they were buried with horse and chariot. The steppe peoples found copper reserves too: at Sintasha, north of the Aral Sea, bronze was created by mixing copper and tin from Bactria (Afghanistan), used for weapons and decorations.
These horsemen were soon led by sword-swinging warlords who built strongholds with high audience chambers, perhaps the first palaces – one stands at Arslantepe (eastern Türkiye) – and buried heroic male warriors in extravagant tombs with food, swords and jewellery.
Around 3100, the people of Uruk – which meant the Place – may have invented writing, initially pictograms, but then took to marking clay with the wedge-end of a reed, a process that we call cuneiform, which means wedge-shaped. The first named people in history are an accountant, a slave master and two enslaved persons. The first receipt, confirmed by the first signature of the first named person – the accountant – reads:
‘29,086 measures barley. 37 months. Kushim.’
Another records the ownership of En-pap X and Sukkalgir, the first named enslaved people. These were slave-owning societies. We do not know when slavery started, but it was probably at the same time as organized fighting. Most enslaved people were war captives or debtors. Royal taxes paid for soldiers who captured the slaves who now built the cities or toiled within family households: a history of family is also a history of slavery.
Towards 2900, kings – starting as Big Men, Lugalene in Sumerian – appear as rulers of all the Iraqi cities that now engaged in vicious wars: ‘Kish was defeated and the kingship taken to Uruk. Then Uruk was defeated and the kingship taken to Ur.’ Kingship ‘descended from heaven’ and it soon became hereditary. The crown was not inherited by eldest sons; kings had many children by chief wives and junior women. They chose the most able – or the more ferocious son killed his brothers. What they gained in ability they lost in stability for the children fought for power, and often destroyed the very realm they coveted. As people in Britain celebrated their rites at Stonehenge,* one of the first family rulers, around 2500, was Kubaba of Kish, the world’s first female potentate that we know of, who owned taverns and brewed beer, and who was succeeded by her son and grandson. We know nothing else about them but a lot about their world.
These kings now built palaces alongside the rich temples; they ruled with a hierarchy of courtiers, generals, tax collectors. Writing was a tool for ruling, recording the ownership of property, transactions in grain and promulgation of laws. The Sumerians created pictures of themselves, men and women, not just praying but also drinking – and loving. They recorded recipes, and both men and women celebrated their enjoyment of sex; they drank beer through straws and imbibed opium. Later they studied mathematics and astronomy.