Tiêu đề V. Gordon Childe_ The Urban Revolution in Mesopotamia ✅

5 THE URBAN REVOLUTION IN MESOPOTAMIA METALLURGY, the wheel, the ox-cart, the pack-ass, and the sailing ship provided the foundations for a new eco- nomic organization. Without it the new materials would remain luxuries, the new crafts would not function, the new devices would be just conveniences. The societies living, albeit precariously, on the Syrian steppes or the plateaux of Iran, like those inhabiting the Mediteuanean coasts and temperate Europe, could still scrape along with- out feeling the imperious need to face the formidable task of reconstructing the whole fabric of neolithic barbarism. The alluvial valleys of the great rivers offered a more exacting environment, but also greater material rewards for its exploitation. In them Copper Age villages turned into Bronze Age cities by processes more fully described in Man Makes Himself. In a small tract no larger than Denmark, on the Tigris- Euphrates delta, the ancient Sumer (Shinar in the Bible), the transformation can be followed step by step in the archaeological record. Sumer was new land only recently raised above the waters of the Persian Gulf by the silt carried down by the two rivers. It was still covered with vast swamps, full of towering reeds, interrupted by arid banks of mud and sand, and periodically inundated by floods. Through tortuous channels among the reeds the muddy waters flowed sluggishly to the sea. But the waters teemed with fish, the reed brakes were alive with wild fowl, wild pig, and other game, and on every emergent patch of soil grew date palms offering every year a reliable crop of nutritive fruit. By contrast to the arid desert on either side, this jungle must have seemed a paradise. If once the flood waters
98 WHAT HAPPENED IN HISTORY could be controlled and canalized, the swamps drained, and the arid banks watered, it could be made a Garden of Eden. The soil was so fertile that a hundred-fold return was not impossible. Actually, documents dating from 2500 · B.c. indicate that the average yield on a field of barley was eighty-six times the sowing. Here, then, farmers could easily produce a surplus above their domestic needs. They would have to; raw materials requisite for equip- ment were not so bountifully provided. From alluvial mud you cannot pick up stones or flints suitable for even the simplest cutting tools. Even such substances, as well as timber and stone for building, had to be imported from outside the delta. But the river channels not only unite the whole plain but provide moving roads on which lmaLs can easily transport the essential materials from the mountainous lands upstream or from across the Persian Gulf. Trade was necessary, but also relatively easy. Inci- dentally, if material for axes and knives had to be imported in any case, copper would be found more economical than the less durable stones and flints. The first pioneers arrived in Sumer with an equipment similar to that found in countless Copper Age settlement mounds in Iran and no less closely resembling that of Halafian villages in Syria and Assyria (p. 8 I). The oldest settlement yet recognized is marked by a tiny shrine at Eridu. Successive reconstructions and enlargements of the shrine converted its site into a tell surmounted by the historical temple of the god, Ea. The sixth reconstruction of the primeval shrine formed the centre of a village of reed huts of the al 'Ubaid culture described on p. 8I. Remains of similar al 'Ubaid villages have been found on the sites of most historical cities - Erech, Eridu, Lagash, Ur - in Sumer, but not yet farther upstream in what became Akkad. At all these sites the barbarian villages of the first al 'Ubaid colonists are separated from the oldest 'historical' cities (in which legible written documents occur) by fifty or more feet of debris, accumulated as in Syrian and Iranian