Page 458 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The Beginning of an Era

one on the Nile, one on the lower Euphrates and Tigris, one on
the upper Tigris, and one on the Indus.
In Europe there are farming communities, reasonably se
sufficient, with flint implements and too small an agricultural
surplus to support large armies and all the apparatus of conquest
and empire.
Between these two, the primary producers and the in-
dustrialized” civilizations, trade tends to grow up, vastly en­
couraged by the advantages of bronze over stone and the
geographical accidents of the location of copper and tin lodes.
This is a picture of a fairly stable, progressive, expanding
economy.
But upon it is superimposed the pressure of nomad pas­
toralists, Indo-European-speaking in eastern Europe and south
Russia, Semitic-speaking in the Syrian desert and the Arabian
peninsula. These are forced outward from their homelands by
population—and perhaps climatic—pressure, attracted towards
the farmlands and the civilized regions by the lure of a higher
standard of living, and given the means to expand by the do­
mestication first of the horse and later of the camel.
Both the civilized communities of the Middle East and the
farming communities of Europe have a stable and resilient cul­
ture that can absorb and assimilate quite a considerable influx.
Nomads invading the farmlands automatically become farmers,
nomads invading the civilizations automatically become civi­
lized—providing the pressure is not too great.
We see it happening in this millennium. The Semitic speak­
ers push into the civilized regions of Mesopotamia and then of
Egypt and, after no more than a slight pause for absorption,
actually stimulate Mesopotamia and Egypt to a higher degree of
cultural integration. The Indo-European speakers press into
farming Europe from the east and into the civilized east from
the north.
In Europe they are first absorbed without difficulty, though
their cattle-herding mode of life remains overprinted upon the
agriculture that preceded it. In the Middle East they assimilate
civilization, mix with (and often rule) existing peoples, or else
form their own states on the pattern of the civilized nations. Only