THE LANDS OF THE BIBLE ( = NEAR EAST)
Given the importance of the Bible to European cultures, it
is then not surprising that the first permanent body anywhere for
archaeological research was the Palestine Excavation Fund. The PEF was
established in London in 1865 with the full support of the establishment by the
amazingly multi-faceted George Grove (1820–1900): civil engineer, musicologist
(he launched the Dictionary of Music and Musicians that still bears his name)
and, of course, biblical scholar. The inaugural meeting was presided over by
the Archbishop of York, who declared that: ‘This country of Palestine belongs
to you and me, it is essentially ours…. It is the land to which we may look
with as true a patriotism as we do this dear old England, which we love so
much.’ Not surprisingly, the PEF is still very much in existence, with Her
Majesty the Queen as its patron and the Archbishop of Canterbury as President.
Grove made sure that Austen Henry Layard was present and spoke at the inaugural
meeting. This was because Layard was famous in public life and for his campaigns
in Mesopotamia at Nimrud and Nineveh on the Tigris, between 1845 and 1851. Now
the presence of Layard tells us two important things: first, that the whole of
the Near East, from Egypt to Mesopotamia, was necessarily included in the scope
of biblical archaeology, and not merely Palestine itself; and second, that
research and excavation beyond Europe in this period were not necessarily or
even usually carried out by antiquarians and scholars, but by explorers whose
cast of mind is best captured in Layard’s own words:
I had traversed Asia Minor and Syria, visiting the ancient
seats of civilization, and the spots which religion has made holy. I now felt
an irresistible desire to penetrate to the regions beyond the Euphrates, to
which history and tradition point as the birthplace of the wisdom of the West.
Most travellers, after a journey through the usually frequented parts of the
East, have the same longing to cross the great river [Euphrates], and to
explore those lands which are separated on the map from the confines of Syria
by a vast blank stretching from Aleppo to the banks of the Tigris. A deep
mystery hangs over Assyria, Babylonia and Chaldea. With these names are linked
great nations and great cities dimly shadowed forth in history; mighty ruins, in
the midst of deserts, defying, by their very desolation and lack of definite
form, the description of the traveller; the remnants of mighty races still
roving over the land; the fulfilling and fulfilment of prophesies; the plains
to which the Jew and the gentile alike look as the cradle of their race. After
a journey in Syria the thoughts naturally turn eastward; and without treading
on the remains of Nineveh and Babylon our pilgrimage is incomplete.
(Layard 1867:2; my emphasis)
So note that Syria was quite well known, being an interior
extension of the Levantine seaboard. Someone as early as Francesco Petrarcha
(Petrarch), from whose lifetime (1304–74) the Renaissance is conventionally
dated, wrote a guidebook to the Holy Land, the Itinerarium. The ‘unknown
interior’, reaching through to Persia, began as relatively far west as Aleppo,
about half-way between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates. Layard’s pilgrimage
originally had nothing at all to do with archaeology, but started out merely as
a romantic overland adventure to Ceylon where, after six years legal training
in Britain, he had been offered a job in a relative’s law firm. Layard in fact
made two such ‘pilgrimages’, described in two popular works— this one from
which I have just quoted, namely: Nineveh and its Remains:
A Narrative of an
Expedition to Assyria During the Years 1845, 1846 and 1847 (1867); and Nineveh
and Babylon: A Popular Narrative of a Second Expedition to Assyria, 1849–51
(1853) (this latter additionally containing ethnological accounts of Yezidis).
Both were bestsellers and brilliantly capture the flavour of those times. If
organizing to excavate abroad is difficult now, which it often is, imagine what
it would have been like in the days of the backward and decaying Ottoman
Empire, when travel was on foot or horseback and transport was by donkey.
Further, it is important to realize just how little historically was known of
the Near East before Layard started digging, even of periods that were fully
historical in the sense that written texts had existed there for millennia.
Writing in 1851, Layard gives us this summary of what was then known:
Although the names of Nineveh and Assyria have been familiar
to us from childhood, and are connected with the earliest impressions we derive
from the Bible, it is only when we ask ourselves what we really know concerning
them that we discover our ignorance of all that relates to their history, and
even to their geographical position. (Layard 1867, Introduction xix; my
emphasis)
And he sets out what little was then known as:
A few fragments scattered amongst ancient authors, and a
list of kings of more than doubtful authenticity, is all that remains of a
history of Assyria by Ctesias; whilst of that attributed to Herodotus not a
trace has been preserved. Of later writers who have touched on Assyrian
history, Diodorus Siculus, a mere compiler, is the principle. In Eusebius, and
the Armenian historians, such as Moses of Chorene, may be found a few valuable
details and hints, derived, in some instances, from original sources, not
altogether devoid of authenticity.
(ibid.: xvii)
But, whose authenticity could not be checked, still less
extended, without excavation. And this despite the fact that northern
Mesopotamia formed part of the Roman Empire during part of the second and third
centuries. It was not even known that the biblical Tower of Babel was merely a
folkloric memory of a standard Mesopotamian ziggurat.
The science of accidental survivals The city of Bristol has
a double connection with Mesopotamia and Persia, for both Claudius Rich
(1787–1821) and Henry Rawlinson (1810–95), who jointly laid the basis for the
work of Layard and Paul Emile Botta, were Bristol men. Not coincidentally,
Bristol was Britain’s first serious west-facing port, the one from which Cabot
had sailed to Nova Scotia in 1497, and a first-rank mercantile centre and a
centre for scholarship in the broadest sense. Rich was appointed resident in
Baghdad for the remarkable East India Company (cf. Keay 1991) when he was still
only 21 years old, yet he arrived in Baghdad via travels at least as extensive
and interesting as those undertaken decades later by Layard. The great pioneers
were first of all well-educated adventurous travellers.
It was Rich who
provided the first collection of Mesopotamian artefacts in Europe. Nonetheless,
when deposited in the British Museum, this collection amounted to ‘a case
scarcely three feet square, enclos [ing] all that remained, not only of the
great city of Nineveh, but of Babylon itself’ (Layard op.cit.: xxii). However,
what laid the specific basis and inspiration for subsequent excavation was the
publication in London in 1815 of Rich’s Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon and his
expanded Second Memoir on Babylon in 1818 which, according to Seton Lloyd
(1980:65), Virtually exhausted the possibilities of inference without
excavation’.
They did, however, arouse interest all over Europe. Nonetheless,
it was not the British who first followed up the possibilities, but the French,
sending the naturalist and oriental scholar Paul Emile Botta to represent them
as consular agent in Mosul. It was he who discovered the site of Kuyunjik,
where in December 1842 ‘the first modest trenches were cut in the summit of the
palace-mound’ (ibid.: 96), thereby inaugurating over 150 years of excavation in
Mesopotamia. Finding only some fragments of alabaster and inscribed bricks, in
March of 1843 Botta transferred his excavations to Khorsabad, 22.5 kilometres
to the north. There spectacular limestone slabs of sculptured figures were immediately,
and gratifyingly, uncovered. This turned out to be the site of Dur Sharrukin,
built de novo in the eighth century BC by Sargon II (722–705 BC) as the new
capital of Assyria.
Those finds, which were exactly of the sort wanted at the
time, namely spectacular museum exhibits, galvanized Layard. He was at that
time employed as assistant to Stratford Canning, the British Ambassador to the
Sublime Porte in Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, of which Mesopotamia,
like most of the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean, was then a part. So, early
in 1845, Canningput some money at Layard’s disposal to allow him to dig at
Nimrud, where he was convinced there were other Assyrian palaces. It took
Layard only twelve days to reach Mosul (ibid.:100). He began digging on 9
November at the site of Nimrud, which was the ancient city of Kahlu, biblical
Calah (Genesis). Located on the east bank of the Tigris at its junction with
the Greater Zab, a major tributary, Nimrud was, from around 880 BC, the second
capital of Assyria.
The earliest, dating from at least the third millennium,
was the eponymous city of Ashur. Khorsabad (Dur Sharrukin), about 20 kilometres
northeast of Mosul, was built by Sargon II late in the eighth century but was
only briefly capital before the move to Nineveh under Sennacherib. In the very
first day’s digging two major palaces were discovered on the mound—the
Northwest and the Southwest—exposing slabs containing long cuneiform
inscriptions and others with inscriptions and scenes of battle. On 28 November
the monumental slabs bearing bas-reliefs started coming to light, and from then
on it was only a matter of time before the British Museum took over funding in
exchange for all the major finds.
This sensible arrangement nonetheless had to
be pressed on reluctant Trustees by Canning and his friends in London. As
usual, the BM was excessively parsimonious, and the amounts allocated did not
even permit Layard to excavate to standards he would have wished. Instead he
was driven ‘to obtain the largest possible number of well preserved objects of
art [sic!] at the least possible outlay of time and money’ (ibid.: 108). So it
is not that all excavators of the time were blind to the necessity of rigorous
methods; rather, then as now, they were painfully aware of the financial,
temporal and political constraints upon them. As Layard himself lamented:
The smallness of the sum placed at my disposal [by the BM]
compelled me to follow the same plan in the excavations that I had hitherto
adopted [when financed by Canning], viz. to dig trenches along the sides of the
chambers, and to expose the whole of the slabs, without removing the earth from
the centre. Thus, few of the chambers were fully explored, and many small
objects of great interest may have been left undiscovered. As I was directed to
bury the building with earth after I had explored it, to avoid unnecessary
expense, I filled up the chambers with the rubbish [sic!] taken from those
subsequently uncovered, having first examined the walls, copied the inscriptions
and drawn the sculptures.
(ibid.)
And for much of the time he had to do this copying himself
for lack of a trained draughtsman or artist. By contrast, of Botta’s Monument
de Nineve (1849–50) in five large volumes, no less than four comprise drawings
by the artist Flandin, specially sent by the French government to illustrate
Botta’s finds. Botta’s Khorsabad sculptures were dispatched to the Louvre in
1846. At Nimrud in that year Layard discovered the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser
III, sculpted into twenty small reliefs covering all four sides and bearing a
long cuneiform inscription beneath.
It includes a reference to the King of
Judah bringing tribute. By 1847, in addition to confirming the sites of both
Nimrud and Nineveh, Layard had ‘discovered the remains of no less than eight
Assyrian palaces connected, as was subsequently proved, with such illustrious
names as Assurnasiripal, Sargon [II], Shalmaneser, Tiglath-pileser,
Adad-nirari, Esarhaddon and Sennacherib’ (Lloyd 1980:122). He shipped to the British
Museum hundreds of tons of sculpture and the Black Obelisk. Layard’s finds
during his second season, from 1849 to 1851 are, if anything, more important,
for it was during that campaign that he found Sennacherib’s library: cuneiform
clay tablets covering the floor of two large chambers to over 30 centimetres in
depth. Three years later, Hormuzd Rassam, Layard’s former assistant and
successor, found the archive of Sennacherib’s grandson Assur-banipal. Despite
large excavation losses, together they amounted to over 24,000 whole or largely
intact tablets (Campbell-Thomson 1929, cited in Lloyd 1980:126). Much of what
we know of Mesopotamian arts and sciences comes from copies lodged in those
Assyrian libraries.
Fortunately, cuneiform could by now be read. It was,
however, not Claudius Rich, but his successor from 1843 in the Baghdad
Residency (replacing a certain Colonel Taylor), Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, who
was the first to translate cuneiform. And he did this not from clay tablets, of
which very few were known at that time, but from a great trilingual inscription
carved into the rock at Behistun, 122 metres above the road from Hamadan to
Kermanshah, about 35 kilometres east of Kermanshah, in what was then Persia.
The Behistun inscriptions are the Rosetta Stone of Assyriology. The Behistun
inscriptions were copied by Rich between 1835 and 1837, when he was resident at
Kermanshah as military adviser to the Shah’s brother, the governor of
Kurdistan. It is a declamation in Persian, Elamite and Babylonian by ‘Darius,
the King, son of Darius’ trumpeting his genealogy and triumphs. As Persian is
an Indo-European language, this and the titulary (the proper names and descent
indications) assisted translation, so that as early as 1837 Rawlinson had
succeeded in deciphering the first two paragraphs of the inscription, and this
was sent as a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society. It is from this paper of 1837
and another in 1839 that Rawlinson was hailed as the ‘father of cuneiform’.
Babylonian, a semitic language, and Elamite, one, like Sumerian, without known
associations, all remained to be tackled. But at least cuneiform script was no
longer inscrutable by 1840. In 1846 a complete translation by Rawlinson was
published in two volumes by the Royal Asiatic Society as The Persian Cuneiform
Inscription at Behistun. Rawlinson later capped this with his famous memoir: On
the Babylonian Translation of the Great Persian Inscription at Behistun.
Indeed, this Old Persian text is the earliest known example. The Rosetta Stone
itself, discovered when the Napoleonic expedition was reinforcing the fort at
Rosetta in the Delta, was immediately recognized as amajor find by Pierre
Bouchard, an engineering officer. Taken to Alexandria, French scholars
immediately began to translate the Greek inscription, which occurred under two
texts in unknown scripts.
When the Egyptian campaign was lost, the stone passed
into British hands and was sent to London, where the Society of Antiquaries
made copies and casts for distribution to scholars in universities. It is now
displayed in the British Museum. Bearing inscriptions in Greek, Egyptian
hieroglyphic and Egyptian demotic, this priestly decree of 196 BC ‘deals with
the honours heaped on Ptolemy V Epiphanes, by the temples of Egypt on the
occasion of the first anniversary of his coronation’ (James 1983:16). This
stela enabled Jean François Champollion (1790–1832) of Figeac to translate
Egyptian hieroglyphs for the first time (1822– 4). It was a most fitting
culmination of the efforts of the scholars accompanying Napoleon’s expedition,
who conducted the first comprehensive scientific survey of Egyptian antiquities
(as scholars had accompanied Alexander of Macedon’s great eastern expedition).
Their researches were lavishly published by the state between 1809 and 1828 as
Description de l’Egypt, comprising nine volumes of text and eleven volumes of
illustration, for which 200 artists prepared over 3,000 figures. They were not
confined to monuments and topography, but showed the flora, fauna and ethnology
also. The whole project represents a great monument to the Enlightenment, as
was the French archaeological work undertaken in Rome during the Napoleonic
Wars (cf. Ridley 1992). There had been many expeditions to Egypt during the
eighteenth century from a number of European countries. Indeed, one published
in 1735 was also entitled ‘Description of Egypt’: ‘containing many strange
observations on the ancient and modern Geography of this country, on its
ancient monuments, its morals, customs, the religion of its inhabitants, on its
animals, trees, plants…’ by Louis XIV’s Consul General in Egypt, Benoit de
Maillet, a great procurer of antiquities, but also a considerable scholar.
Egypt had never been cut off from the rest of the Mediterranean and Europe in
the way that Mesopotamia had been. Ease of access up the Nile had made Egypt,
with its distinctive geography, exotic culture and massive monuments, a
favourite tourist resort for Greeks and then Romans. Scholars from both
societies also visited and published invaluable accounts: Herodotus and Strabo,
Didorus Siculus and Plutarch. And so, after the Renaissance recovery of ancient
Greece, Egypt was the first ancient civilization to be rediscovered. In a sense
it had never been ‘lost’, embedded as it was in both biblical texts and
classical authors, the twin pillars of western culture. From the early
seventeenth century, Capuchin and Dominican monks and Jesuits had bases in
Cairo from which to preach the Gospel. In a scientific spirit, just before the
outbreak of the English Civil Wars, the astronomer John Greaves visited Giza
and Saqqara in 1638–9. In 1646 he published a description of the pyramids,
providing both measurements of them and references to earlier work including
writers in Arabic. In 1726, Claude Sicard, the chief of the Jesuit mission in
Cairo, who had travelled throughoutEgypt and mapped it, published the first
detailed geographical account, his Geographical Comparison of Ancient and
Modern Egypt. Temples and towns, pyramids and sphinx, the desert and the sown,
the river and the sky; fabled antiquity amidst pressing immediacy.
The sheer
contrasts of Egypt, then as now, were irresistible to tourists as well as to
scholars. Unfortunately, the country was thereby also open to vandalism and
souvenir hunting. This ease of access by water, plus the ease of clearing away
sand or sandy soil, made despoliation of Egyptian antiquities all too easy; not
just by visitors, or even by treasure plunderers, but also by natives stripping
stonework to build other structures, or by peasant sebakh digging, that is,
seeking organic material for fertilizing fields. Grave and tomb robbing was
also a native tradition reaching back to antiquity. Indeed, toward the end of
the third millennium, during the First Intermediate Period, King Merikare of
the Ninth/Tenth Dynasty (Herakleopolitan) admitted to his son that he had been
guilty of looting tombs, and records of ancient trials for looting survive from
more stable periods. Nothing in Egypt was safe, and this is what prompted the
novelist Amelia Edwards to call the Egypt Exploration Fund into being in 1882
(after 1919 Egypt Exploration Society), the task essentially being that of
rescue or conservation archaeology. Broad support was, however, gained from the
appeal to biblical archaeology, in particular, as the public announcement
stated, to excavate in the Delta, for ‘here must undoubtedly lie concealed the
documents of a lost period of Biblical history—documents which we may
confidently hope will furnish the key to a whole series of perplexing problems’
(Drower 1982:9).
Again the society’s sponsors included the Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi, several bishops, Lord Carnarvon, energetic
President of the Society of Antiquaries, in addition to Sir Henry Layard,
Robert Browning and Professor Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s associate. The immensity
of this challenge is what kept William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) in
the field for over 50 years from 1880, the longest period of fieldwork ever
undertaken by any individual (cf. Drower 1985). When he arrived in Egypt, even
the official antiquities service established by Auguste Mariette was still
really only interested in objets d’art, while some few scholars back in Europe
were interested in texts. Indeed, Mariette had originally been sent out to find
Coptic texts. Appointed Director of Excavations in 1858 by the Khedive, Said
Pasha, Mariette exercised autocratic power, ‘forbidding anyone but himself to
excavate, he undertook far more than he could effectively control’, for what
his personal control might have been worth. Alas
dynamite was employed to remove obstacles, and later
buildings ruthlessly removed to reveal the earlier monuments beneath. The
temples of Edfu and Dendera, and a part of Karnak were cleared; mastaba tombs
in Maidum and Saqqara were cleared out by the dozen. No adequate record was
made of most of his discoveries, and little attempt was made to conserve for
posterity what had been exposed.
(Drower 1982:11)
In showing, amongst much else, that sites cannot just be
cleared of something regarded as mere overburden to reveal the glories of the
artefacts and monuments beneath (as Mariette was wont to do), Petrie helped lay
the basis for archaeology as such: that is, as a field discipline and as a
branch of historical studies, one where empirical material had to be combined
with imagination, and serve as a control upon it to provide genuine insights.
For, as he wrote in the opening pages of Methods and Aims in Archaeology:
The power of conserving material…of observing all that can
be gleaned; of noticing trifling details which may imply a great deal else; of
acquiring and building up a mental picture; of fitting everything into place
and not losing or missing any possible clues —all this is the soul of the work,
and without it excavating is mere dumb plodding.8 (Petrie 1904:5)
He did this in part by stressing the key importance of
pottery, hitherto only valued if intact and ‘artistic’. On the contrary, Petrie
argued that mundane pottery, everyday cheap, often homemade stuff, was in fact
of higher value to archaeology. It would not form heirlooms, but in its
immediate discard and replacement it would serve as temporal and cultural
indicators, a view also shared by Worsaae (1821–85), the pioneer of
palaeobotany, and by Pitt-Rivers (1827–1900). As ‘the General’ wrote in 1892:
‘the value of relics, viewed as evidence, may…be said to be in an inverse ratio
to their intrinsic value’ (Bowden 1991:3). Indeed, like Worsaae (1849:156)
before him, who had also emphasized the crucial importance of context,
Pitt-Rivers (1887:xvii) stressed the importance of recording the apparently
trivial: ‘Every detail should, therefore, be recorded in the manner most
conducing to facility of reference, and it ought to at all times to be the
chief object of the excavator to reduce his own personal equation to a
minimum.’ Further, by seriating pottery into evolutionary sequences, cultural
continuity and development over time could be demonstrated, as Petrie famously
did with Egyptian predynastic pottery.
With their artefact-associations, this
can be seen to be a powerful and flexible interpretive technique, not merely a
substitute for absolute chronology. To this process of seriation (ardently
advocated by PittRivers) Petrie gave the name ‘sequence dating’. Stratigraphic
relationships at a particular site are used to arrange the order of appearance
of attributes in a class of objects. Similar finds from other sites can then be
relatively dated by comparison. Each type in the Egyptian predynastic series
received a number between 30 and 80, and the series commenced at number 30 to
allow for the integration of earlier material when it would be found (Drower
1985:251–2). However, the term ‘typology’ seems to have been invented by the
‘great sequencer’ himself, Pitt-Rivers (Bowden 1991:55), although his
latercontemporary, the outstanding Swedish archaeologist Oscar Montelius (1843–
1921), was also justly famous for his typological series. Not for nothing then,
was Petrie called by the Egyptians the ‘father of pots’. As he wrote in 1891:
And once settle the pottery of a country, and the key is in
our own hands for all future explorations. A single glance at the mound of
ruins, even without dismounting, will show as much to anyone who knows the
styles of pottery, as weeks of work may reveal to a beginner. (cited in Moorey
1991:29)
But although he planned and recorded thoroughly, and
published at the end of each season by dint of working seven-day weeks, Petrie
did not record stratigraphic profiles in Egypt, since he was generally dealing
with single-period sites, and/or ones swamped with blown sand. When, however,
he did excavate a conventional tell (mound) site, as at Tell el-Hesy in
Palestine (1890), he did indeed draw a profile, grasping ‘precociously if
crudely’ the significance of stratigraphy (ibid.: 28). Stratigraphic excavation
techniques were introduced to Japan in 1917 by Hamada Kosaku, a Japanese art
historian who had studied with Petrie in England (Barnes 1993:31). We take
pottery so seriously now, as an absolutely central component of the material
record, that it is hard to appreciate that rigorous excavators of the first
decades of the twentieth century—notably those from the Deutsche
OrientGesellschaft9—despite their meticulous excavation and recording technique,
nevertheless failed to use pottery properly as a sequencing tool. In 1880,
Colonel Augustus Lane Fox (1827–1900) became Pitt-Rivers, the change of surname
a condition of his inheriting the estate of Cranborne Chase from his uncle
Horace Pitt, sixth Baron Rivers, who died childless that year.
The Colonel,
later promoted to Lieutenant General, was now in possession of a property
extending over 10,930 hectares and an annual income of around £20, 000 (Bowden
1991:31). With prehistoric sites and Romano-British sites located on his own
estate, and with the finances to be able to excavate and publish properly, we
see the aforementioned advances coming together in his meticulous work. To the
rigour of the military engineer he added considerable anthropological knowledge
and research in material culture. And, as with Arthur Evans, the excavator of
Knossos from 1900, his private wealth supported thorough and thus lengthy
excavation with full three-dimensional recording of everything found.
Pitt-Rivers’ lavish, privately printed volumes are the worthy result (1887,
1888, 1892, 1898). By the beginning of the twentieth century, then, archaeology
as a discipline with its own distinctive and rigorous methodology had been
formed. This is not to say that the rigour of ‘best technique’ was widely or
consistently applied early in the century or even during most of it. ‘Best
technique’ is in any event itself a moving target.
Although the pioneers practised excavation that we would not
recognize as archaeology, without them there would be no archaeology; and
without archaeology the greatest expanse of human experience would remain a
blank and we would thereby be even more disoriented than we presently are as we
tumble into the third millennium.
SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Archaeology, as it is practised toward the end of the
twentieth century, is social archaeology, attempting to reconstruct from
artefactual evidence the configuration of a previous society in order to
discover how it functioned.10 The lead in this was given by Vere Gordon Childe
(1892–1957), the greatest archaeological theorist of the first half of the
twentieth century. He was the author of many major publications, professional
and popular, and Director of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of
London, when in 1950 he published a seminal article entitled ‘The Urban
Revolution’. It set out criteria identifying the advent of complex,
state-ordered society across the Old World in the Bronze Age. Consciously or
not, all contemporary archaeologists use his interpretive criteria in some
form. So much is this the case that his concepts have become the ‘natural’ and
‘obvious’ ways to think about early civilizations.
11 And it was Childe, after
all, who most cogently pointed out that it is not the real world to which human
beings adapt, but what they imagine the world to be like (Trigger 1989: 261).
In what follows I use Childe’s criteria as a grid to ensure that like is
compared with like in each region examined. For each early civilization I first
set out its unique trajectory from Late Palaeolithic to Neolithic, discussing
in detail the sites that provide the evidence. From there I examine the
Chalcolithic—the period of explosive specialization—urbanism and the rise of
the state, in the process characterizing the society so formed. Finally, in
order to summarize what has been discovered and to enable crosscultural
comparisons to be made, I use Childe’s criteria as a twelve-point checklist
concluding each chapter. A summary table of checklist results begins the final
chapter, which could be read with advantage before starting the chapters on
specific areas.
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