Fertile Crescent drove significant technological, social, and political developments in human history
The term Fertile Crescent was coined in 1914 by archaeologist James Henry Breasted from the University of Chicago. It refers to a region in the Middle East that historically covered the areas of what are now Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, forming a large crescent shape. Today, most scholars believe that Egypt should not be included in this definition, as agriculture did not originate there but was imported from elsewhere.
The transition from prehistory to history first occurred in the Fertile Crescent, the very area where agriculture was discovered, and also in another region, Egypt, which is adjacent to the Fertile Crescent. For the first time, humanity did not emerge from prehistory all at once. While the inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent and Egypt were already organized into cities with diverse populations, possessing metal weapons and other tools, and had developed writing, the rest of the world still lived in Neolithic conditions. Some regions, such as India and later China, quickly achieved similar progress, while others remained more backward. In some continents, like South America or Oceania, certain populations were still living in the Stone Age until relatively recently.
During the Paleolithic era, different species of the genus Homo survived by hunting game, fishing, and gathering wild plants, mollusks, and insects. These hunter-gatherer bands remained nomadic and never established permanent settlements. They had an abundance of large game to hunt, but wild grains were scarce, and the population density was low. Furthermore, the tools needed for harvesting, processing, and storing cereals had not yet been invented.
Later, the decline in resources provided by hunting became particularly noticeable. Overhunting led to a sharp decrease in the availability of large game like gazelles, forcing people to hunt smaller prey like hares and birds, which required the use of the bow, a tool that spread during this period. To survive, they needed to gather more edible plants, such as wild cereals and legumes, which fortunately became more abundant due to a new climate. The increase in wild grains allowed for more prolonged stays in a single camp, where the women of the community may have developed the first farming techniques by planting seeds near their dwellings and selecting the most suitable species for cultivation. The Fertile Crescent, in this way, appears to have been spared the population collapse that affected other regions, such as much of Europe. More stable and numerous settlements emerged, growing from small bands of a few dozen people to larger communities of one to two hundred individuals, referred to as tribes, which later spread around the world. Like the earlier bands, these tribes maintained an egalitarian social system with minimal wealth differences.
The increasing importance of wild plants in their diet spurred technological advances in the areas of harvesting, processing, and storage. They invented flint-bladed sickles with bone handles, baskets for transporting the harvest, mortars, and pestles for removing the chaff from the grains, drying techniques, and underground silos for preserving the collected crops for longer periods. Although initially developed for wild grains, these innovations proved essential for the eventual transition to agriculture.
Map of the Fertile Crescent
During the Mesolithic period, the first animals were domesticated, and the earliest sedentary settlements were established. However, the pace of human evolution accelerated significantly during the Neolithic era, which saw a true revolution with the discovery of agriculture. Humans domesticated plants and animals, thus beginning to produce their own food. This transformation deeply altered human history, leading to unprecedented population growth, the birth of villages, cities, and states. Social life and political organization underwent profound changes, and new techniques and knowledge increased humanity's ability to manipulate and transform natural resources.
This fundamental transition in human history occurred for the first time around 8000 BCE within the Fertile Crescent.
But, note: agriculture and animal husbandry were not inventions exclusive to Europe. They independently appeared in at least five different regions around the world, three of which were in the Americas, emerging later:
- Around 3500 BCE in Mexico, maize, beans, squash, and turkeys were domesticated, while at roughly the same time in the Andes and Amazon regions, potatoes and llamas were cultivated.
- About a thousand years later, in the eastern part of what is now the United States, sunflowers began to be cultivated.
The other two regions where humanity made the leap toward agricultural life are in Asia:
- The Fertile Crescent, the first area in the world to develop agriculture and the region most responsible for spreading this new method of sustenance, domesticated many of the key species for agriculture (such as wheat, barley, emmer, peas, lentils, chickpeas) and livestock (including goats, sheep, cattle, and pigs) some centuries before 8000 BCE.
- Also in this region, around 4000 BCE, the first fruit trees, such as olive, fig, pomegranate, and grapevine, were domesticated.
- In China, meanwhile, the cultivation of millet and rice had already been discovered by around 7000 BCE.
From the Near East and China, agriculture and animal husbandry spread to other areas of the world. The spread occurred either through the migration of the first farmers to new territories or through the neighboring peoples learning these techniques, which was the more common scenario. Thanks to this imitation, agriculture reached India and Egypt around 7000 and 6000 BCE, respectively. In Europe, Greece and southeastern regions adopted the crops and animals of the Near East by around 6000 BCE, but it took another millennium for this transition to reach Italy, Spain, and southern France, and even longer for the northern regions.
Several factors made the Fertile Crescent the ideal setting for the agricultural revolution:
- Mediterranean Climate: characterized by long, dry summers and mild, wet winters, this climate was ideal for the development of annual plants with large seeds and non-woody stems, like the various cereal species found in Syria up to 9,000 years ago, as well as wild legumes. The region was home to wild variants of the eight fundamental Neolithic crops: emmer, einkorn (the ancestor of modern wheat), barley, flax, chickpeas, peas, lentils, and bitter vetch.
Seedless prehistoric figs has been discovered at Gilgal I in the Jordan Valley, suggesting that fig trees were planted as early as 11,400 years ago. - Self-pollinating Plants: the presence of self-pollinating plants and those capable of cross-pollination provided a geographical advantage since they did not rely on other plants for reproduction.
- Irrigation: natural irrigation in the form of seasonal flooding played a crucial role in the fertility of the region from the Bronze Age onward. Over time, maintaining efficient irrigation systems and managing soil salinity became essential for sustaining agricultural productivity.
- Domesticated Animals: four of the five most important domesticated animals (cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs) were present in the Fertile Crescent. The fifth, the horse, was found in nearby regions.
Small wild cats (Felis silvestris) were also domesticated in this region.
This combination of favorable factors established the Fertile Crescent as a primary center for the birth of agriculture and animal domestication, driving significant technological, social, and political developments in human history. But, while in the Mediterranean, unlike in the Fertile Crescent, people struggled greatly to wrest even minimal sustenance from the arid land, the immense rivers of the Fertile Crescent and Egypt (the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile) provided water that made otherwise dry regions fertile. It can be said that the water from these great rivers nourished the first human civilizations, just as, later on, other great rivers, namely the Indus and the Yellow River (Yangtze), would sustain the Indian and Chinese civilizations.
Last update: October 8, 2024
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