Page 26 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

8 Bronze and Stone

go, as far as present knowledge extends, to the people of Jericho

in the Jordan valley north of the Dead Sea, who as early as
6800 b.c. already lived in a walled city and practiced agriculture.
But it was not long before the science of sowing corn and taming
cattle seems to have reached north Iraq. It was longer before
the first settlers began to reclaim the swamps of the lower valley,
where the Euphrates and the Tigris approach one another and
form a single river system.
These days of early settlement are long ago forgotten, and

we should perhaps refrain from complicating our narrative with
the mention of forgotten things. Like the Egyptian, the Meso­
potamian of 2000 b.c. knew that seedtime and harvest had existed
from the beginning of things.
Yet farming was very different in Mesopotamia from what
it was in Egypt—and very different in south and in north Meso­
potamia. In the north, the area of Mosul and the Kirkuk oil fields,
the first long-forgotten fanners had built their villages. This is
a country of steep valleys and wide uplands, with cold winters

and hot dry summers. And it is a region with winter rains. It is
thus farmed more as we know farming, with extensive grazing,
and with crops of barley and emmer, which can be sown with a
reasonable expectation that they will get sufficient natural water­
ing to grow and ripen. Provided that they are harvested before
the parching heat of summer, they can be sowed at will, and
it is fairly easy to get two crops a year.
In the south, from a little north of Baghdad down to the

beginning of the swamps which, then as now, stretch down to
the Persian Gulf, the situation superficially resembles that of
Egypt. The water level in the Tigris and the Euphrates rises
and falls with the melting of the snows in the Turkish and Persian
mountains, and the Euphrates in particular carries much fertile
silt when it is at its height. The rivers reach their highest level
two months earlier than the Nile, in June and July, and will then,
if unchecked, flood wide areas, just as the Nile does. But the
Nile runs in a narrow valley, and the farmer of 2000 b.c. can

watch the floods with satisfaction, knowing that within two
months the river will return of itself to its old bed, and only
such water will remain as he himself dams up for his own use.