7.3 The near east: 5000 to 3000 b.c.

Arabian peninsula

Back to The Near East: 8000 to 5000 B.C.

This was the fount and breeding place of the Semitic peoples, although at this particular time only Bedouins and nomad tribesmen existed and there was no true civilization, at least in the western two-thirds of the peninsula. Recent excavations on the Island of Bahrain and adjacent Saudi Arabia have suggested the presence of a vanished empire which the Sumerians referred to as "Dilmun", center of earthly paradise. Excavated objects indicate commercial activity oriented both towards India and Mesopotamia. Surface shards and implements have been dated back to about 4,000 B.C. (Ref. 176 ) Apparently after the Wet Phase, about 4,000 B.C. there was a progressive dessication of the Arabian peninsula which may have contributed to the northward migrations of peoples into the Syrian Desert which began shortly thereafter. (Ref. 88 ) Additional Notes

Mediterranean coastal areas of israel and lebanon

The people of the coast in these early millennia may have been of the original Mediterranean race now represented in this part of the world only by the Georgian Caucasians. Timnal, in southern Israel, was a source of large amounts of surf ace ores of malachite, so there was a Chalcolithic Palestinian civilization called the Ghassulian Culture, using the first deliberate alloy, arsenical copper. (Ref. 8 ) The original locations of coastal towns, and later major cities, was occasioned to great extent by the location of springs and thus there has of ten resulted continuous occupation of the same spots over many centuries, with the consequent rise of debris mounds, or tells (Ref. 88 ). Additional Notes

Iraq and syria

Iraq is the area of the ancient Mesopotamia, a word derived from mesos meaning "between" and potamos or "river". The wheel and the plow are thought by most to have been invented or brought here sometime about 3,500 B.C.1. Cattle were used as beasts of burden about the same time. There is evidence of irrigation on a steppe east of Mesopotamia by 5,000 B.C., and classically historians have described three more or less separate civilizations which developed in the river basins of Mesopotamia perhaps as early as 4,500 B.C. The most important of these will be discussed first:

SUMER (On the Euphrates River)All historians seem agreed that the Sumerians were non-Semitic, but their origin is much disputed. Some have suggested Iberian or Dravidian affinities. McEvedy (Ref. 136 ) thinks they may have been part of the aboriginal Caucasian people and to this is added the opinion of Sir Leonard Woolley (Ref. 238 ) that their language was that of the early Caucasians. They used copper from 5,000 B.C. onward and their clay tablets give us records back to 3,300 B.C. in the city of Ur, which was then a seaport. The geography of Mesopotamia has changed greatly through the millennia. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, the Karun River from the Persian mountains and Wadi al Batin, draining the heart of Arabia, all enter the Persian Gulf, the latter two at almost right angles to the former two. Many millennia ago, the last two rivers discharged a mass of silt across the gulf, which then extended even north of present day Baghdad, and eventually made a bar against which similar silt of the two chief rivers piled up, forming dry land directly across the gulf. The effect was to turn the upper end of the then existing gulf into a stagnant lake which was still fed by the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, but which then turned from salty to brackish and then to actual fresh water. Eventually, of course, even the lake built up with silt, making the area the most fertile land on earth. Although Ur, then on the sea coast, became the great capital of Sumer, the city of Eridu, south of this, seems older and in a nearby village of al'Ubaid there has been found ancient pottery, in some ways similar to pottery also found at Susa, in ancient Elam and which might have a common ancestry from some foreign place. Could the origin be Bahrain, the island down the gulf where Danish excavations now show a civilization possibly older than Sumer? There is a Sumerian legend which tells how a race of monsters, half fish and half human, came from the Persian Gulf, led by Oannes, and introduced the arts of writing, agriculture and metallurgy.