August 14, 2022

16.PRIMITIVE NOMADIC PEOPLES | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS


16.PRIMITIVE NOMADIC PEOPLES

It was not only in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley that men were settling down to agriculture and the formation of city states in the centuries between 6000 and 8000 B.C. Wherever there were possibilities of irrigation and a steady all-the-year-round food supply men were exchanging the uncertainties and hardships of hunting and wandering for the routines of settlement. On the upper Tigris a people called the Assyrians were founding cities; in the valleys of Asia Minor and on the Mediterranean shores and islands, there were small communities growing up to civilization. Possibly parallel developments of human life were already going on in favourable regions of India, and China. In many parts of Europe where there were lakes well stocked with fish, little communities of men had long settled in dwellings built on piles over the water, and were eking out agriculture by fishing and hunting. But over much larger areas of the old world no such settlement was possible. The land was too harsh, too thickly wooded or too arid, or the seasons too uncertain for mankind, with only the implements and science of that age to take root. For settlement under the conditions of the primitive civilizations men needed a constant water supply and warmth and sunshine. Where these needs were not satisfied, man could live as a transient, as a hunter following his game, as a herdsman following the seasonal grass, but he could not settle. The transition from the hunting to the herding life may have been very gradual. From following herds of wild cattle or (in Asia) wild horses, men may have come to an idea of property in them, have learnt to pen them into valleys, have fought for them against wolves, wild dogs and other predatory beasts.

A CONTEMPORARY LAKE VILLAGE

These Borneo dwellings are practically counterparts of the homes of

European neolithic communities 6000 B.C.

So while the primitive civilizations of the cultivators were growing up

chiefly in the great river valleys, a different way of living, the

nomadic life, a life in constant movement to and fro from winter

pasture to summer pasture, was also growing up. The nomadic peoples

were on the whole hardier than the agriculturalists; they were less

prolific and numerous, they had no permanent temples and no highly

organized priesthood; they had less gear; but the reader must not

suppose that theirs was necessarily a less highly developed way of

living on that account. In many ways this free life was a fuller life

than that of the tillers of the soil. The individual was more

self-reliant; less of a unit in a crowd. The leader was more

important; the medicine man perhaps less so.

NOMADS IN EGYPT

NOMADS IN EGYPT

NOMADS IN EGYPT

Egyptian wall painting in a tomb near ancient Beni Hassan, middle

Egypt. It depicts the arrival of a tribe of Semitic Nomads in Egypt

about the year of 1895 B.C.

Moving over large stretches of country the nomad took a wider view of

life. He touched on the confines of this settled land and that. He

was used to the sight of strange faces. He had to scheme and treat for

pasture with competing tribes. He knew more of minerals than the folk

upon the plough lands because he went over mountain passes and into

rocky places. He may have been a better metallurgist. Possibly bronze

and much more probably iron smelting were nomadic discoveries. Some of

the earliest implements of iron reduced from its ores have been found

in Central Europe far away from the early civilizations.

On the other hand the settled folk had their textiles and their pottery

and made many desirable things. It was inevitable that as the two

sorts of life, the agricultural and the nomadic differentiated, a

certain amount of looting and trading should develop between the two.

In Sumeria particularly which had deserts and seasonal country on

either hand it must have been usual to have the nomads camping close to

the cultivated fields, trading and stealing and perhaps tinkering, as

gipsies do to this day. (But hens they would not steal, because the

domestic fowl—an Indian jungle fowl originally was not domesticated by

man until about 1000 B.C.) They would bring precious stones and things

of metal and leather. If they were hunters they would bring skins.

They would get in exchange pottery and beads and glass, garments and

suchlike manufactured things.

From an ancient and curiously painted model in the British Museum

Three main regions and three main kinds of wandering and imperfectly

settled people there were in those remote days of the first

civilizations in Sumeria and early Egypt. Away in the forests of

Europe were the blonde Nordic peoples, hunters and herdsmen, a lowly

race. The primitive civilizations saw very little of this race before

1500 B.C. Away on the steppes of eastern Asia various Mongolian

tribes, the Hunnish peoples, were domesticating the horse and

developing a very wide sweeping habit of seasonal movement between

their summer and winter camping places. Possibly the Nordic and Hunnish

peoples were still separated from one another by the swamps of Russia

and the greater Caspian Sea of that time. For very much of Russia

there was swamp and lake. In the deserts, which were growing more arid

now, of Syria and Arabia, tribes of a dark white or brownish people,

the Semitic tribes, were driving flocks of sheep and goats and asses

from pasture to pasture. It was these Semitic shepherds and certain

more negroid people from southern Persia, the Elamites, who were the

first nomads to come into close contact with the early civilizations.

They came as traders and as raiders. Finally there arose leaders among

them with bolder imaginations, and they became conquerors.

This monarch, son of Sargon I, was a great architecht as well as a

famous conqueror. Discovered in 1898 among the ruins of Susa, Persia

About 2750 B.C. a great Semitic leader, Sargon, had conquered the whole

Sumerian land and was master of all the world from the Persian Gulf to

the Mediterranean Sea. He was an illiterate barbarian and his people,

the Akkadians, learnt the Sumerian writing and adopted the Sumerian

language as the speech of the officials and the learned. The empire he

founded decayed after two centuries, and after one inundation of

Elamites a fresh Semitic people, the Amorites, by degrees established

their rule over Sumeria. They made their capital in what had hitherto

been a small up-river town, Babylon, and their empire is called the

first Babylonian Empire. It was consolidated by a great king called

Hammurabi (circa 2100 B.C.) who made the earliest code of laws yet

known to history.

The narrow valley of the Nile lies less open to nomadic invasion than

Mesopotamia, but about the time of Hammurabi occurred a successful

Semitic invasion of Egypt and a line of Pharaohs was set up, the Hyksos

or “shepherd kings,” which lasted for several centuries. These Semitic

conquerors never assimilated themselves with the Egyptians; they were

always regarded with hostility as foreigners and barbarians; and they

were at last expelled by a popular uprising about 1600 B.C.

But the Semites had come into Sumeria for good and all, the two races

assimilated and the Babylonian Empire became Semitic in its language

and character.