The relatively abrupt end of the Chalcolithic cultural complex of the Levant poses many questions. Did it die of its own accord as the old ideologies and social orders collapsed? Did the impact of external events lead to its demise and replacement by a different culture? Or was the ultimate cause, as usual, another change in the climate?
Our data (Figs. 3 & 3a) show an abrupt decline in precipitation around 3500 B.C.E., followed by a short revival for about a century, and then another extreme decline, reaching the lowest peak for the entire Holocene around 3200 B.C.E. This trend continued for about two centuries, turning, at around 3000 B.C.E. into a very humid climate. Thus one can conclude that at least the Levant went through two phases of extreme dryness between 3500 and 3000 B.C.E.
A survey of the archaeological record shows that these two dry phases coin- cided exactly with the record of fundamental changes in the material culture.
The trouble is that the new period is characterized more by the absence than by the presence of definite and remarkable cultural features which contributed to the confusion in the archaeological terminology in Syria-Palestine for the half millennium between the end of the Chalcolithic period around 3500 B.C.E.
and the establishment of the first full-size towns or cities around 3000 B.C.E.
Following the American school of W.F. Albright and G.E. Wright, the term
‘Early Bronze Age I’ is widely accepted in Israel. The French school under de Vaux called everything before the establishment of the urban Early Bronze Age
towns ‘Late Chalcolithic’, as de Vaux saw no connection between this phase and the Early Bronze Age. The later generation of French scholars, such as J. Perrot and P. de Miroschedji, called it ‘Pre-Urbain’. The British under K. Kenyon, how- ever, saw a great deal of similarities between the two, as did the Americans, and called this period ‘Proto-Urban’. As already noted, and regardless of school, everything in archaeology must be divided into three parts, using Arabic or Roman numbers and capital or lower case letters denoting chronological peri- ods, cultural entities, ‘horizons’ ‘assemblages’ or some combination thereof. In addition, every excavator felt free to expand and complicate the old system or invent his own, normally on the grounds of a particular excavation without any relationship to other sites or a larger framework. M. Zohar suggested to follow the neutral German term “Zwischenzeit” and called any ill-defined in-between period as ‘Transitional’ or ‘Intermediate’.
The reason for this picture is that in the Levant the period following the end of the Ghassul-Beer Sheva culture is characterized more by the absence than by the presence of definite and remarkable cultural features. The archaeological evidence, culled from exposures at the base of excavated sites and cemeteries such as Megiddo XX/XIX, Beit Shean XVII to XVI, Beit Yerah/Khirbet Kerak, and Tell el-Far’ah (N) near Shechem in northern Israel, consists of a limited repertoire of simple pottery types and basic tools that had their roots in the preceding period and continued into the following one. Their descriptions may sound tedious but they represent the only substantial archaeological evidence of the possible ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of the population of this most crucial time just prior to the so-called Urban Revolution.
A type called ‘Impressed’ or ‘Umm Hammad’ Ware (Proto-Urban D) can be the earliest type of pottery and is found predominantly in the Jordan Valley and may represent a population with its roots in the preceding period. Another common type is called ‘Red Burnished’ and is found in the central and southern part of the country (in K. Kenyon’s terminology ‘Proto-Urban A’). It shows a clear break with earlier Chalcolithic fashions and the question is open whether this ware is a revival of ancient traditions of the Pottery Neolithic B, to which is has many obvious links, or an entirely new phenomenon. If this style is something new, the next open question is whether it developed locally or did it come from somewhere else?
A peculiar assemblage of small jars and juglets is called ‘Line-Groups Paint- ed’ Ware, mostly found in tombs restricted to the east-central and eastern part of Palestine-Transjordan (Kenyon’s ‘Proto-Urban B’). Another restricted type consists of ‘Grey-Burnished’ bowls with a soft and soapy feel, often found together with red-on-white ‘Grain-Wash’ painted large storage vessels in the north of Palestine. These types of pottery appear late in our period and are a fashion common in Anatolia (Kenyon’s Proto-Urban C). Our difficulty is the fact that the geographical distribution of these pottery types not necessarily coincide with the range of other types of artifacts.
The rare settlements consist of scattered villages or nomads’ camps in an even distribution without larger concentrations of populations or any archi- tectural aspirations. House plans range from simple round huts to rectangular houses of modest size. E. Braun found oval and apsidal houses in the Jezreel
Valley in northern Israel that are clearly linked to a northern tradition found at Dakerman near Byblos in Lebanon and Jawa or other sites in Transjordan.75 S.W. Helms report on his excavations at Jawa deserves a special comment.
The relatively large settlement is located on the basalt plateau in the desert of northern Jordan. It consists of several layers of domestic architecture, retaining walls serving as defenses and a complex system of water collection and storage facilities. The finds include bones of domestic goats/sheep and cattle, the latter being equally important as the former. “The prevalence of sheep and cattle remains (relative to goats) implies irrigation to improve grazing” (p. 252).
It has several occupation phases throughout the second half of the fourth millennium, with a minor phase of resettlement during the Middle Bronze Age. The principle phase of desertion occurred around 3000 B.C.E. Helms is at a loss to explain the growth, flourishing and decline of Jawa in such arid surroundings. He performs many hydrological calculations based on today’s climatic conditions to explain its secret, which do not hold water, as he, like most of his colleagues, is blissfully oblivious of climatic changes. One glance at Fig. 3a. shows the extreme wet phase followed by an equally dry phase just at that time.76
In spite of the loose term “Bronze Age”, flint tools knapped in a charac- teristic manner known as ‘Canaanite blades’ remained the most prolific and characteristic tool in the Levant.77There is hardly any art to speak of, whether painting on pots or walls, except a few crude figurines. Similarly, there is an absolute lack of evidence of an elaborate ritual or ceremonial life comparable to the Chalcolithic period, or of any ‘higher’ social organization, as appeared in the later phases of the urban Early Bronze Age. Each region has its own strong local flair in many types of artifacts, and a simple subsistence economy without evidence of substantial trade. The not very complex funerary cult mostly in natural caves and some artificial tombs indicates some form of ancestor cult characteristic of mobile and simple tribal social structure.
The most intriguing results are seen in southern and southeastern Palestine.
The settlement and cemetery of Bab edh-Dhra’ on the Lisan Peninsula in eastern Palestine, the caves of Lachish and Site H in Wadi Ghazzeh have close links with Egyptian sites such as Maadi and beyond.78The corbelled vaults of the
“charnel houses” at Bab edh-Dhra are very similar to thenawamis, corbelled tombs in the Sinai and the deserts of Egypt and Arabian Peninsula and already mentioned. These similarities are hardly coincidental and an expression solely of trade relations, but could be signs of an increased mobility of people between northern Africa and Asia, as we shall see below.
All this clearly points to a time of subsequent great social and economic changes: the proliferation of pastoral nomads as a social phenomenon of the
75E. Braun, “The Problem of the ‘Apsidal’ House and Some Notes on the Architecture of the Early Bronze I Period in Israel, Jordan and Lebanon”Palestine Exploration Quarterly121:1–43 (1989).
76S. W. Helms,Jawa – Lost city of the black desert, Methuen & Co., London (1981).
77S.A. Rosen, “The Canaaean Blade and the Early Bronze Age”IEJ33:15–29 (1983).
78A.F. Roshwalb,Protohistory in Wadi Ghazzeh: A Typological and Technological Study Based on the MacDonald Excavations. Dissertation, University of London, p. 332 (1981).
greatest importance for the history of the Near East and for laying the founda- tions of the ‘Urban Revolution’; man’s first, and apparently pathetic, attempt at ‘civilization’ – the building of crowded cities (civitae) inhabited by vertical hierarchies with absolute power over their subjects through organized religion, wars, and slavery, and expressed by an architecture which still haunts us, be it the pyramids of Egypt, the ziggurats, temples and walls of Mesopotamia, or the extravagantly massive defense walls of the Anatolian and Syrian-Palestinian cities.
Civilization as we understand it has had its beginning in Sumer during the Uruk period, ca. 4000 to 3100 B.C.E., and was contemporary with the Chalcolithic period in most other parts of the ancient Middle East. Also in Mesopotamia this problematic transitional period has led the archaeologists and historians to give it various names: Pre-Dynastic; Protoliterate – or, fol- lowing the archaeological practice of naming a culture after the site where it was first recognized – the Uruk and then Jemdet-Nasr period in the south; and the Tepe Gawra period in the north. The German excavations at the modern village of Warka (ancient Uruk and Biblical Erech), and the home of Gilgamesh, concentrated on the great temple complex of E-anna, dedicated to Inanna, and the temple of Anu, the sky-god. The pottery is, quite significantly, simple and undecorated, but with a fine gray slip and made for the first time on a fast wheel and is found over a large part of the southern Mesopotamian plain. A peculiar type of ware during the late Uruk period is the ‘bevelled rim bowl’, a mass- produced mould-made open bowl with straight sides, found by the thousands near construction sites of this period. It could have been a measuring device for rations, or a bread form, or both. At the E-anna level VI we find a par- ticular building method of burned bricks, decorated with stone or burnt clay cones stuck into the plaster of the building. Most important was the finding for the first time of clay balls and round tablets inscribed with pictographs and numbers as accounting and mnemonic devices for economic activities of the temple, sealed by cylinder seals. These early cylinder seals were undoubtedly some of the finest ever made in Mesopotamia, and with them developed an art style for stone and copper sculptures. The later Uruk phase also saw the expan- sion of the southern culture upriver along the Euphrates where the impressive town sites of Habuba Kabira and Gebel Aruda are pivotal in understanding the spread of the ‘Urban Revolution’ into other parts of the ancient Near East.
The following Jemdet Nasr period, from ca. 3100 to 2900 B.C.E., is a transition to the Mesopotamian ‘Early Dynastic Period’ and the urban Early Bronze Age in other parts of the Near East. Important finds are at the name site, Jemdet- Nasr, at Uruk and Nippur, at Tell ‘Uqair – the site of the ‘Painted Temple,’ and at Khafajeh – the site of the temple to the moon-god Sin. In general, it was a period of stagnation and even decline in some areas. And as so often, it nevertheless did produce some of the most magnificent pieces of ancient art. It is possible, however, that these unique finds were heirlooms of an earlier period. Cylinder seals were manufactured using a drill, and pottery was mass-produced on a wheel.
In Egypt, the end of the Gerzean period is even darker, corresponding to an early phase of the Palestinian Early Bronze Age I. Some scholars, including
Kaiser and Wildung,79 introduced a ‘Late Gerzean’ or ‘Naqada III’, based on the development of a particular storage jar with wavy ledge handles, and on some other artifacts such as particular flint tools. Another conundrum is the hypothetical ‘Dynasty O’ – a series of important rulers from Upper Egypt probably dominating most of the country before the established ‘First Dynasty’
of the official king lists recorded by ancient Egyptian scribes themselves. The commemorative mace-heads and stone palette incised with a primitiveserekh (royal names in the shape of a temple facade topped by a heraldic animal, the forerunner of the later cartouches) of a king known as ‘Scorpion’ was found together with pottery imported from Palestine in an early temple at Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt. The question of how many rulers there actually were and how long that period lasted is a hotly debated issue.
One of the conundrums of the origin of Egyptian civilization was the un- deniable strong Mesopotamian influence during this period we have already mentioned – the relatively sudden appearance of writing, cylinder seals and mud-brick architecture with recesses, in conjunction with Mesopotamian art motifs such as serpent-necked animals, griffins, rows of animals, represen- tations of high-hulled ships and people with Near Eastern or Mesopotamian dresses. The excavations at Tell el-Fara’in, ancient Buto, show the same deco- rative elements of cones and spikes stuck in mud-brick walls as those in the temple facades at Uruk, with a plethora of southern Mesopotamian trade goods dated to Uruk IV/V (Protoliterate B), and the periods immediately following, prove close contacts with Asia and rises the question about the ways these con- tacts were materialized. There is little doubt that the sea lanes linking Egypt with ports on the Syrian and Palestinian coast, indeed, flourished. But, they also ran parallel with much traveled overland caravan routes secured by Egyp- tian military and trading posts, which were established along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and extended deep into the coastal plain of Palestine and beyond as they continued throughout the area now known as the Syrian and Arabian Desert. The largest Egyptian settlement in the southern Levant was at Tell ‘Erani, once mistakenly called ‘Gat’ near Ashkelon,80and in Nahal Besor.81
79W. Kaiser, “Zur Südausdehnung der vorgeschichtlichen Delta-Kulturen und zur frühen Entwicklung Oberägyptens”Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts41:61–87 (1985).
D. Wildung,Ägypten vor den Pyramiden – Münchener Ausgrabungen in Ägypten. von Zabern, Mainz (1981).
80B. Brandl, “Evidence for Egyptian Colonization in the Southern Coastal Plain and Lowlands of Canaan During the EB I Period” in:The Nile Delta in Transition: 4th–3rd Millennium B.C.(Proceed- ings of the Seminar Held in Cairo, 21–24 October, 1990, at the Nederlands Institute of Archaeology and Arabic Studies), E.C.M. van den Brink (ed.), and The Israel Exploration Society, Jerusalem (1992).
Ibid. “Observations on the Early Bronze Age Strata of Tel ’Erani,” inL’Urbanisation en Palestine à l’âge du Bronze Ancien. Bilan et Perspectives des Recherches Actuelles, Actes du Colloque d’Emmaus 20–24 octobre 1986, ed. P. de Miroschedji,. BAR International Series, 527(II), London (1989).
81E.D. Oren, “Early Bronze Age Settlements in North Sinai: A Model for Egypto-Canaanite Inter- connections” inL’Urbanisation en Palestine à l’âge du Bronze Ancien. Bilan et Perspectives des Recherches Actuelles, Actes du Colloque d’Emmaus 20–24 octobre 1986, ed. P. de Miroschedji., Lon- don, BAR International Series, 527(II), 389–406 (1989).
At Azor near Tel Aviv, A. Ben-Tor found a cemetery with allegedly “African”
skeletons.82
It is astonishing that all these tantalizing hints of intense contact between Egypt and the Fertile Crescent has never aroused the suspicion of the archae- ologists or historians of the region. The newest excavations in what is now the arid Sinai Peninsula and the Negev Desert show an increasingly dense pattern of interrelated village sites where “we can begin to understand how these cul- tures survived in the desert and, indeed, thrived” (according to S Rosen). No agricultural village, and much less dozens or perhaps hundreds of them, has ever “thrived” in the middle of a waterless desert. It must have escaped the at- tention of the excavator that the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E. witnessed the beginning of the most humid climatic phase in Near Eastern history. The now arid swaths of dry desert along the inner fringe of the Fertile Crescent were then covered with vegetation and dotted with springs and watering holes.
The precipitation was clearly far above the minimum required for extensive agriculture as well as intensive local horticulture and pastures for herds of grazing animals.
The consolidation of the Egyptian state and the establishment of a state- controlled exchange system had a direct and far-reaching impact on her un- friendly neighbors to the south and to the northeast – there was apparently no threat of enmity in the west. The greatest importance of this expansion of Egyptian influence into Palestine is the penetration of groups of Semitic- speaking -groups of cattle herders riding on donkeys from northeastern Africa into the Near East.83We are quite confident that the preceding cultures of the Ghassul-Beer Sheva phase and their contemporaries in Syria and Mesopotamia were not Semitic. They were probably related to a general linguistic substra- tum of one or more Asiatic language families, one of which is represented by Sumerian, and identified with the help of toponyms already a time ago.84 By the middle of the third millennium B.C.E. (the mature Early Bronze Age), we find the first Semitic names in the earliest readable documents from Tell Fara and Tell Abu Salabikh in Mesopotamia85 and Ebla/Tell Mardikh in northern Syria (see Appendix III: Near Eastern Languages).86
The arrival of the pastoral nomads was an important turning point in the history of our region. They cannot live without the farmers from whom they obtain their cereals, fruits and other victuals in exchange for the cheeses, wool
82A. Ben-Tor, “Two Burial Caves of the Proto-Urban Period at Azor”Qedem1. The Hebrew University Jerusalem (1975).
83M. Zohar, “Pastoralism and the Spread of the Semitic Languages” in:The Levant: Archaeological Materials in Anthropological Perspectives, Monographs in Old World.
84I.J. Gelb, “The Early History of the West Semitic Peoples”Journal of Cuneiform Studies15:27–47 (1961).
85R.D. Biggs,Inscriptions from Tell Abu Salabikh. Oriental Institute Publications 94, University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1974).
86I.J. Gelb, “Ebla and the Kish Civilisation” inLa Lingua di Ebla: Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Napoli 21–23 Aprile 1980, Seminario di Studi Asiatici, Series Minor XIV, L. Cagni, (ed). Istituto Universitario Orientale, 7–73, Naples (1981).
and skins of their animals.87And when they have nothing to offer, as it might have happened during drought years, they simply take. Nomadic people have always been warriors, ‘lean and mean’; they not only fight continuously with other nomads over wells and pastures, but constantly hover, like birds of prey, on the edge of the fertile fields, ready to pounce on the stores of the farmers at the slightest sign of weakness. Their appearance and growing importance in the social fabric introduced an element of insecurity and turbulence into what appears to have been the hitherto relatively peaceful conditions of the Chalcol- ithic or the early E. B. I period.88Their presence undoubtedly encouraged the native population to build the first walls of defense around their settlements and organize themselves under warlords – very often nomads themselves – in order to withstand the danger – another important factor contributing to the evolution of urbanization and with it, civilization began.
87A.M. Khazanov,Nomads and the Outside World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1984).
88P. Steinkeller, “Early Political Developments in Mesopotamia and the Origin of the Sargonic Empire”
in:Akkad, the First World Empire: Structure, Ideology, Traditions, ed. M. Liverani, Padua,History of the Ancient Near East Studies5, 107–113 (1993).