government. Around these centers, which must have covered
the whole Nile Valley, were villages of diff erent sizes, visible
from a chain of smaller cemeteries north of Tjebu. In ancient
Egyptian times they were rather small; from what is known
of the cemeteries we can expect that populations reached not
much more than 100 people per village. However, in Greek
and Roman times Nile Valley settlements were oft en quite big,
and many of them had the size of small towns. Th e Egyptian
language does not distinguish between town and village in
precisely the way that English does. Th ere are several words
for settlements, but they may relate to their function and not
necessarily to their size.
Not much is known about farmhouses and small agri-
cultural units. In general, we can assume that even in towns
and local centers a high proportion of the population lived
from agricultural work. From written sources we know that
houses or estates existed in the countryside and were involved
in food production. Only farmhouses of the Ptolemaic Period
(ca. 304–30 b.c.e.) have been excavated showing that they at
least were sometimes big buildings.THE MIDDLE EAST
BY AMY HACKNEY BLACKWELL
When the last ice age ended about 11,000 b.c.e., humans
spread through the Middle East. Th e climate was good, and
rainfall was relatively high for the region. As a result, grass-
lands and forests expanded and provided more food for
humans, who quickly inhabited the entire Fertile Crescent,
an area stretching from Israel and Lebanon to the Zagros
Mountains. Th ese hunter-gatherers sought out regions that
included more than one ecological zone so that they could
exploit a variety of food sources. Th ey lived in small, highly
mobile bands, sheltering in temporary camps that they could
easily dismantle when conditions deteriorated.
Starting around 10,000 b.c.e. people began settling in
locations for longer periods as they grew dependent on cer-
tain types of plant foods. For example, the Natufi an people
of modern-day Israel lived on acorns and pistachio nuts that
grew in a belt in the central part of the region. Th ey built per-
manent villages with underground storage pits and occupied
these settlements for many generations. Th e people of Abu
Hureyra on the Euphrates River in Syria also built a perma-
nent village, hunting and fi shing and gathering plant foods
from the nearby forests. By about 9500 b.c.e. permanent set-
tlements were common throughout the region.
Th e fi rst farming settlements appeared around 8000 b.c.e.
in the Levantine corridor, a narrow strip about 15 miles wide
along the Jordan River from the Damascus Basin to Jericho.
Th is corridor had ample water supplies with a naturally high
water table, a rarity in the region. Th e readily available wa-
ter meant that people could farm without irrigation. Th e area
also had plentiful sources of wild food, including legumes,
nuts, and game. Th ese settlers built villages of mud-brick huts
that housed perhaps 100 to 200 residents. As the products ofagriculture furnished more of peoples’ diets, settlements be-
came more nearly permanent with farmers were tied to their
fi elds and women tied to their grinding stones. People now
lived in the same place for generation aft er generation. When
populations grew, it became harder for people to deal with
sudden catastrophes such as droughts.
Because rainfall was low and rivers were the only reliable
source of water in the region, settlement patterns in Meso-
potamia were dictated by the presence of rivers. All major
Mesopotamian cities were built near the banks of either the
Tigris or the Euphrates. Some of the earliest-known Meso-
potamian cities were Ur, Uruk, and Eridu, built by the Sume-
rians near the mouth of the combined Tigris and Euphrates
sometime between the sixth and the fourth millennia b.c.e.
Some archaeologists believe that Eridu was the fi rst city ever
built; Sumerian tradition held that Eridu was the fi rst city
before the Great Flood to have a king. Southern Mesopota-
mia was wetter than it is now, and it was conveniently lo-
cated on trade routes, which made it an attractive location
for settlement.
Th e population of the Mesopotamian river settlements
grew quickly. At fi rst the cities were fairly small and sur-
rounded by farming villages, but the climate changed this
pattern. Around 3800 b.c.e. the climate grew drier, and the
fl oods that the farmers relied on began arriving later, aft er
harvest. People who had lived in the countryside were unable
to farm anymore and abandoned their homes. Some became
nomadic herders, wandering with their animals in search of
pasture. Others left the outlying villages and moved into the
cities in search of food. By 3200 b.c.e. Sumerian civilization
had become highly urbanized. Historians estimate that by
2800 b.c.e. some 80 percent of the Sumerian population lived
in cities clustered in southern Mesopotamia.
Ur, Eridu, and a group of several other cities within sight
of one another were home to thousands of Sumerian farm-
ers who used the rivers’ annual fl oods to irrigate their fi elds.
Small villages extended out from the cities along networks
of canals that carried water away from the rivers. Diff erent
communities specialized in diff erent products, such as pot-
tery, fi shing, or metalwork. Each city had a government that
organized irrigation and food distribution and conducted the
rituals considered necessary to propitiate the gods. Several
land and sea trade routes converged on the area. Th e cities
in the region constantly fought over scarce water and land
resources.
People had begun colonizing the upper part of the river
during the fi ft h millennium b.c.e. Th ese cities grew larger
during the third millennium b.c.e. and came under the lead-
ership of warlords who competed with one another for water
and land. When water was plentiful the settlement pattern
resembled that of the early fourth millennium in southern
Mesopotamia, with towns spread out from cities, but urban-
ization proved inevitable there as well. Th e Akkadian civi-
lization (2350–2100 b.c.e.), for example, arose in the fertile
Habur plain south of the Anatolian plateau when, as had hap-966 settlement patterns: The Middle East0895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i966 966 10/10/07 2:30:36 PM