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.