Syria: An Outline History

Chapter 1

Origins

We may begin in the Ice Age. One of the effects of the accumulation of masses of frozen water in the ice sheets of the northern hemisphere and on the highest mountains was to lower the level of the sea by several tens of metres. As it happens this had only a marginal effect on Syria because the sea bottom plunges steeply at the coast. The coast therefore advanced westwards only a few kilometres or even less. But another effect was to deflect southwards the track of the climatic depressions which now flow from the Atlantic into western and particularly into south-western Europe all the year round, but mainly in spring and autumn. This in fact happens even now in the Mediterranean in the winter, when cyclonic storms funnel along the sea, pushed south by the high pressure which builds over Eurasia in the cold weather. During the Ice Age this high pressure was the norm in all seasons, and so the wet storms came.

Given the flow of these moisture-laden depressions, the cooler temperature generally (perhaps 8 or 10°C lower generally than now), and the high mountains along the Syrian coast, Syria’s weather was drastically different than it is today. The Lebanese mountains were permanently snow covered, and housed glaciers, the quantity of rain in the coastlands was much increased, and the penetration of rainstorms inland beyond the mountains was much greater and more effective. The rivers were full and powerful, cutting down the present deep valleys, finding their way through the hills by opening up faults and wearing away at them – the Orontes especially. The snow and ice cover guaranteed year-round water flows. Rains were heavy and happened in all seasons.

This all meant that the deserts were smaller than now. Much of inland Syria was tree-covered, and the steppe lands behind the coastal mountains spread far to the south. The animal life included large beasts up to and including mammoths, which could find enough food because of the increased vegetation. And the animal life included at least two varieties of mankind – Homo neanderthalis and Homo sapiens – though by the end of the Ice Age, only the latter survived.

The Ice Age ended in a mixture of sudden rises in temperature – sometimes raised only for a time, with the occasional relapse – and a gradual thaw. The effect in Europe was to open up the Arctic margins to colonization by trees as the great ice sheets retreated northwards; in Syria the effect was even more drastic. The water-laden depressions became less frequent, and eventually became solely winter phenomena as now; the summers became dry and hot; the mountain glaciers and snows melted, and the rivers after a time of great power as the snows melted, were less full; and from its refuge in southern Arabia the desert spread north.

The vegetation changed. Deciduous trees retreated northwards and uphill and were replaced by spikier, tougher, Mediterranean trees such as olive and terebinth and carob; the treeline in the mountains climbed to colonize the melting snowfields. Inland, trees were replaced by grasslands. Moving eastwards therefore one would find, as now, a fairly well-watered (except in summer) coastal area populated by a variety of trees, then a region of grasslands, the steppe, and lastly the encroaching and invading desert. Always bearing in mind, of course, that the complex physical geography of the land meant there were areas where changes were either less drastic or more so.

For the human inhabitants, of course, this would have been an incremental disaster. Their customary processes of gathering food, either by hunting or by foraging, became in some areas steadily more difficult and time-consuming. Some of their campsites – they were all nomadic – became uncomfortable, either by a decreasing access to water in a dry landscape, or by the disappearance of the game whose earlier presence had been the purpose of choosing the camping site. Rivers and streams dried up and vanished; lakes disappeared or became intermittent – or salt, as their waters evaporated.

The people had in fact several choices for coping with this period of drying and warming. The obvious one was to leave, following the game, which tended to withdraw northwards, searching for the water, a process which would probably mean leaving the interior for the wetter coastlands. They could resort to violence, driving away other humans whom they would see as competitors for the increasingly scarce resources. Or they could stay (or resist eviction) and make do. It is the last group that was the most important for the future, both for Syria and for other humans.

A final alternative, of course, was that they could simply die, and no doubt starvation accomplished this in places. However, there were obviously relatively few people in the country, and all of them were mobile, and the changes in the climate were relatively slow, so it is unlikely that either violence against others or death by starvation was at all common. Some families, however, certainly moved away, into other nearby lands where the rains were larger, longer, or more persistent. Studies of human remains in Palestine have linked them with remains from Europe, or, alternatively, from Africa – presumably meaning Egypt – emphasizing how mobile these populations were.

It was the people who remained in Syria who devised a new way of life which enabled them to produce enough food to allow them to survive. They resorted to consuming some of the foods which had sustained the animals they had hunted. Most of these animals were herbivores, grass browsers. Grass, of course, is insufficient to sustain humans, but the foragers knew well enough that the seeds of some grasses contained a usable food resource, once broken open. In a series of inventions spread over perhaps a thousand years the practices of agriculture – not eating all the harvest, but keeping some back to plant and grow in the next year, digging and planting, reaping and threshing, grinding the seeds, and the processing of the flour taken from the seed, from milling to baking, were all worked out.

Not only was this all done as a result of a series of bright ideas developed by the erstwhile foragers – probably mainly by the women – but it was a process which occurred almost simultaneously all over Syria and in the hills overlooking the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. The several communities of the region remained nomadic for a long time, and their various ideas were passed around between groups when they met. Periodic meetings, feasts, and marriages – exogamy was probably normal – will have produced a wide understanding of the geography of the whole region, of the changes taking place in the climate (even if not why) and of the best means of coping with the problematic times. Because these people were poor in material resources and lived long ago we must not imagine they were slow of understanding or unwilling to adopt changes.

In Syria we know this was happening in Palestine as early as perhaps 10,500 BC, within a thousand years of the beginning of the end of the Ice Age. This comparatively rapid reaction to the change in the climate is a measure of the stress on the local environment produced by these changes. The type site is at Wadi en-Natuf in Palestine, where a small temporary settlement has been excavated, showing a group of huts (or at least the rings of stones laid down as foundations and to pin down the roofs, which were probably of hide). The huts had hearths, and evidence of tools clearly used to harvest grasses was found. The most telling artefact is a knife from Ain Mallaha (Eynan) near the Sea of Galilee, whose blade has the characteristic shiny deposit produced when grass is cut; the knife was of bone; its handle was carved to imitate the head of an animal. These people might have invented agriculture – and if they did not do so then they quickly adopted it from those who had – but they were not about to give up hunting for meat.¹

This small, and briefly occupied, set of huts is the precursor of the other developments which agriculture produced. The first, of course, was a more stable food supply, combined with the determination and willpower to store food for later use rather than consume it right away. For the supply was not mobile, unlike the animals which the new farmers’ ancestors had followed and hunted, and which to a degree they still did. Rather, their stationary food supply – the fields – had to be guarded against those very animals. In a way this was surely a welcome development, since if the animals tried to get at the fields of cultivated grasses, they were that much easier to hunt. But the balance of nutrition now shifted from meat to vegetable foods, and the greater value of the farmers’ produce required that the community becomes immobile, and is settled at one place. At first no doubt this was regarded as purely temporary, until the field could be harvested, and a new field would be sown later elsewhere, but it will have quickly become obvious that some places were better than others for producing food – indeed it is likely that it took no more than a moment’s thought to appreciate this. The end result was a village, more or less permanent. Many of these probably lie at the bases of the innumerable tells which are so widely distributed throughout Syria.

Natufian sites are found scattered throughout Palestine and Jordan, spread from the Negev northwards, favouring no particular area, though the Jordan Valley and the coast south of the Carmel Ridge seem popular. The accumulation of dots on a map makes it look as though the region was well populated, but this is misleading since none of the settlements was occupied for more than a generation. Perhaps the longest lasting was Jericho, but even that was abandoned. The Damascus oasis, the Ghuta, had been a lake in the wet years and when this was reduced to the two small lakes now remaining several Natufian settlements appeared. On the coast of Palestine at Wadi Fallah/Nahal Oren a village of at least fourteen houses was built – implying a population of perhaps fifty. Similar temporary villages, possibly on sides reoccupied over several growing seasons, are at Ain Mallaha in the Huleh Valley in northern Palestine, at Mureybat in the Euphrates Valley, and at Abu Hureyra nearby. Further east the Upper Khabour, where several streams flow from the hills eventually to unite in the Khabour River, was the area for other sites of the Natufian type. Excavators have detected some differences between the various groups of settlements, occasioning academic disputes, but overall they are very similar; differences are hardly surprising in such a divided land.²

The early results of the development of agriculture were an increase in the population, because of the more stable food source and the less dangerous lifestyle compared with hunting, and the permanent or semi-permanent settlement of that population in one place; the two together produced populated villages which in favoured cases grew into settlements large enough to be called towns. Most of these were, however, only permanent in the sense that they lasted several generations. All were eventually abandoned, sometimes after only a single season, no doubt to be replaced by another and similar village not far off, where the people pursued much the same way of life. In the absence of any explicit testimony as to the reasons for the abandonment, soil exhaustion is perhaps best assumed.

Hunting, however, was by no means abandoned. Men continued to search out and take their toll of the herbivores. Cattle, goats, and above all gazelles, were hunted and killed. The gazelles in fact had established a regular migration pattern from south to north and back again, which was the opportunity for them to be attacked by the hunters as they passed. At Abu Hureyra the gazelles contributed overwhelmingly to the meat diet.³ Some of the smallest Natufian sites, lasting a few days only, and in places not good for farming, are assumed to have been hunters’ camps.

The series of developments which shifted the Syrian population from a complete reliance on hunting to a heavy dependence on agriculture, took several millennia to work through. At Abu Hureyra, for example, it was not until the mid-eighth millennium that goats and sheep displaced gazelles as the main meat source – and so that domesticated animals replaced hunted. The expansion of the population was inevitably slow. Amongst hunters the span of life is normally little more than thirty or so years, just long enough to reproduce; few of them ever became old; many of the youngest did not survive. Living an agricultural life at first made little difference, particularly to the women who, in addition to the constant dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, had to do much of the agricultural work; the men were still hunters, and then became the herders, and as pressure on resources developed as the climate became hotter and drier, they had to guard the crops against all enemies, had to build, make tools, plough, herd animals (who were domesticated out of the former hunters’ prey) and do much of the heavy harvest work. Agriculture as a way of life may have resulted in a much more dependable food supply, but it came at the cost of a more laborious work style.

The Natufian is one of the earliest agricultural cultures, but it existed at much the same time as other similar cultures spread over the whole region from Sinai to the Zagros Mountains. Archaeologists give several names of these groups based on minute differences in their finds. ‘Natufian’ tends to be confined as a label to Syria from the Sinai to the Euphrates, but similar cultural developments existed throughout the Middle East. These are also grouped into an overall culture called the ‘Pre-Pottery Neolithic’ – ‘Neolithic’ being the usual term for Stone Age farmers. Pottery was invented and developed partway through this cultural sequence, one of the several cumulative changes which took place over several millennia.

The geography of this culture follows the presence of water. The villages are spread across the north Syrian steppeland and along the better-watered coastlands as far south as Sinai. Apart from the better food supply this greater stability also encouraged the development of architecture and the invention of useful tools and products (such as pottery). In fact pottery is a good example of the way innovation occurred.

The earliest pottery was of poor quality, with far too much temper included, usually of chaff, so that the finished product tended to crumble away. Clay, of course, had been used for various purposes in the past (figurines, hooks, plaster) – and even some bowls of plaster (‘white ware’) had preceded pottery, as had baskets lined with this plaster, or made of hide. There was clearly a demand for containers. Making a hollow pot was now possible, and soon became a necessity. Probably the idea originated in Anatolia; what therefore arrived in Syria was the idea, not the actual pottery. From the start the pots were produced for domestic use, no doubt to hold water and store food. Every settlement at first had its own types, shapes, and decoration of pot – decoration appears from the very beginning. All this strongly suggests that once again it was the women who were the inventors. Fairly quickly improvements resulted in better tempers – grits especially – standard shapes and more robust fabrics, but also a great variety of these. Not only that but the shapes and decoration appears as very similar over wide areas.⁴ The development of pottery is a testimony to the inventive interchange of ideas – and no doubt of people – throughout Syria. The preceding attempts to make containers – baskets, white ware, hide bags, also testify to experimentation.

The manufacture of pottery required also the ability to construct kilns (the early pottery was probably baked in the open), to select the most suitable clays, and to shape the clay into predictable forms. When the kilns were invented, the potters developed the ability to control the heat inside the kiln in order to ensure the optimum condition of the finished pots and to ensure that the decoration, when paint was applied, was of the anticipated colour. Thus a whole series of new skills was developed – the use of heat in particular would be crucial in the future manufacture of metal goods. The use of pottery also had its effect on the human users, giving them the ability to store food and water, to cook in more ways than simply in a fire.

The people were thus capable, as their successors have also been, of innovating, and of accepting innovations; they could think big and carry out large-scale projects, such as the recently discovered Gobekli Tepe stone circle in the Jazirah. The society may have had chiefs and certainly had specialists – good potters, for example, and especially skilled hunters – but there are signs that each village was itself a unit of government. Some were no doubt controlled by chiefs, but this was not necessarily the obvious form of government. At Jerf al-Ahmar on the east bank of the Euphrates was found a circular building, sunk 2m into the ground, and the walls lined with stone. Vertical beams inset into the walls supported a roof. A bench a metre wide ran round the building inside the wall; six posts, placed equidistantly supported the roof, which was no doubt of poles and thatch with a central hole for light. The walls were plastered and decorated; the bench was lined by stones which were carved with geometrical decorations.⁵

This building illustrates many aspects of the society of about 8,700 BC. The design is clearly one for a community meeting place – there was no indication of domestic occupation. It was well constructed and must have lasted quite a number of years; it was also elegant and pleasing to the eye; being sunk in the earth and shaded by a roof, it was probably cool in the summer. It had been a communal activity both to build it and was surely used for communal meetings. The design implies all this. What discussions took place is not known; religious ritual is possible, though there was no evidence of this. Much more likely it was the scene of village meetings where communal discussions took place and decisions were made. The form of government implied is, given the small size of the community, democratic; there was enough room in the meeting house to accommodate all the heads of families of the village.

These people were as artistic as they were practical, with painted plaster on their house walls, highly decorated pottery, well made tools of stone (and probably of wood). They carved figurines of animals and people in wood and stone, and moulded them of plaster or clay, models which they no doubt treasured and displayed. They built secure houses, and communal buildings, often with an eye to pleasing form. The people may have had comparatively short lives, but they were also, it seems, comparatively rich in both material things and cultural matters.

The nomadic style of life had thus been changed into one in which the majority of the people stayed in only one place for their whole lives. And yet they could not exist only on what they produced for themselves. Trade was necessary, and had existed in some form or another since the Ice Age, and probably before. (The importation of the idea of pottery from Anatolia is an example.) Some stones, for example, were particularly useful for making tools. Of these one of the easiest to recognize is the smooth, shiny black of obsidian, which holds a sharp edge even better than flint; it is also very attractive to look at, and perhaps this was as strong an attraction as its quality as a cutting tool or an arrow point. It is also relatively easy for archaeologists to detect its origin, and many of the examples found in Syria were carried there from sources in Anatolia.⁶ Trade in obsidian carried examples as far as coastal Palestine. Living in one place did not result in a total ignorance of the rest of the world outside Syria, and probably many of the people knew a good deal about Syria itself.

The populations of the farms and villages and towns were stable and even growing slowly in numbers, and they were obviously descended from the original Ice Age hunting population whose successors had invented farming. They instituted an area of notably productive agriculture, but there is no sign of, and no reason to believe that, they were supplemented by migration from outside the country, other than a movement out of the expanding desert areas into the lands where agriculture was possible, and the arrival of occasional adventurous travellers and traders. The population grew by natural reproduction, not by invasion and immigration.

This is not to say that there was no violence. In a population descended from and including hunters, violence is only to be expected, and one of the earliest settlements, at Jericho, had elements of fortification about it. Rectangular building forms quickly replaced the circular huts of the Ice Age and the Natufians, probably because, once dried bricks began to be used for construction, such a building shape was now logical – but circular forms were not forgotten and seem to have been used for particularly important buildings, such as the circular meeting place at Jerf al-Ahmar. Rectangular buildings were often built with common party walls, so that from the outside the village presented the aspect of a blank wall (with entrance to rooms from the roof and by ladders), but this apparent fortification may be merely an accident of the architecture; such places were usually surrounded by workplaces such as pottery kilns and threshing floors outside the walls. Nevertheless, one may assume that fighting took place, and that leaders emerged.

A good deal of anthropological speculation has been undertaken to produce theories of the operation and organization of these Natufian societies. Often this tends to wander off into the wilder reaches of theory, losing touch with the ground reality. For the reality is archaeological findings, and that can only provide some facts – such as the circular meeting place at Jerf al-Ahmar (which, of course, may have been nothing of the sort). Certain assumptions seem reasonable. Once semi-permanent villages were established some sort of local government became necessary. Those circular meeting huts suggest an egalitarian society. If a region succumbed to violence, leaders or chiefs probably emerged.⁷ But none of this is in any way apparent in the archaeological remains. Settlements were regularly abandoned after a shorter or a longer time, and whether the whole population transferred as a unit to a new site, or dissolved into family units, each of which went their own way, is not known; in either case it is likely that any earlier political organization was shaken up.