Early Near East Neolithic Cultures

The term 'Fertile Crescent' was coined by James Henry Breasted (1865-1935) to refer to a geographical area in the Near East. This area has a semi-arcing shape which stretches from the Jordan Valley to the Euphrates and Tigris estuary. It includes Israel, Lebanon, the Levant, Palestine, and western Syria in the west. It continues across northern Syria and Anatolia's highland plateau (modern Turkey) before turning southwards, to reach the foot of the Zagros Mountains, part of today's Iraq and Iran.

Three main phases can be distinguished here, during which the distant effects of the most recent ice age came to an end and true farming was gradually adopted. These involve the late Epi-Palaeolithic period which corresponds to the last groups of hunter-gatherers as they underwent a process of becoming sedentary. These people formed part of the Natufian culture in the Levant and the Zarzian in the Zagros area between 12,500-9500 BC.

Those cultures eased into the first phase of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, or PPN, under the banner of 'Type A' or PPNA, a categorisation which was framed by Kathleen Kenyon. During this period the first experiences took place of wild plant cultivation and animal management, between 9800-8600 BC.

The second part of the PPB was the 'Type B' phase, or PPNB, during which plant and animal domestication appeared. These became the dominant food resources at the end of the period around 7000 BC, which is when the first pottery appeared in most parts of the Fertile Crescent. This was succeeded around 6000 BC by the Pottery Neolithic: full-blown farming with full-blown pottery creation and the beginnings of true civilisation.

However, this process of development had already met with problems during the seventh millennium BC, perhaps due to aridisation in the changing post-glacial climate, and perhaps also due to over-intensive early farming. Early traces of farming in Greece can be found around 6800 BC. This immediately predates the start of the Sesklo culture, and also shows that 'proper' farming development there was happening at about the same time as in the Near East. Early farmers would subsequently enter Europe in a big way to found a Neolithic Farmer revolution there.

Influences from the Neolithic farmer cultures of Old Europe can be seen in the archaeology of western Anatolia, specifically in the Troad and Dardania. But the task of covering those cultures is a complex business. Further influences seem to have been infiltrating into Eastern Europe during the seventh millennium BC. These culminating in the adoption in the Caucasus region of farming around 6000 BC.

At roughly the same time as farming first reached Europe from Anatolia, around 7000 BC onwards, early Chinese communities also saw the development of farming under the Yangshao culture, a development which appears to have taken place internally rather than being introduced from the Near East.

As for the farming itself, early wheat types had grain which was contained in spikelets with tightly adhering glumes. From the earlier part of the domestication process, roughly between 8500-7800 BC, free-threshing tetraploid wheat forms appear at Tell Aswad in the Damascus basin, with them thereafter becoming more common. Unlike hulled wheat forms, these wheat forms have thinner, reduced glumes, meaning that the grain is released when the ears are threshed.

Within the period which encompasses the seventh and sixth millennia BC a further development occurred. This took place as agriculture diffused beyond the Fertile Crescent into regions which border the southern Caspian Sea. Here this free-threshing wheat hybridised with a local wild goat-grass (Aegilops tauschii), giving rise to hexaploid free-threshing bread wheat.

The system which has evolved to catalogue the various archaeological expressions of human progress is one which involves cultures. For well over a century, archaeological cultures have remained the framework for global prehistory. The earliest cultures which emerge from Africa are perhaps the easiest to catalogue, right up until human expansion reaches the Americas. The task of cataloguing that vast range of human cultures is covered in the related feature (see link, right). Archaeological cultures remain the framework for global prehistory.

Near East Kingdoms

Early Cultures

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