The Cradle of Civilization

Although it may not seem like it sometimes I have other interests besides politics and economics. Some of these include cooking, family history, opera, and dogs, all of which I post about from time to time.

One of the things I’m interested in is the very earliest history. History began about 5,000 year ago. By that I don’t mean that things started happening about 5,000 years ago. I’m not Bishop Ussher.

I mean that human beings first start writing about themselves around that time. Over the period of the last twenty-five years or so I’ve made a sort of casual hobby of reading everything I could get my hands on about that narrow (at least in geological terms) sliver of time between about 4,000 BCE and 2,500 BCE and I’ve learned something very important. Where the cradle of civilization is, where culture, knowledge, and learning had its foundations depends entirely on the nationality of the author.

I’ve read claims from Romanian historians that Romania is the cradle of civilization, claims by Georgian archaeologists that civilization started in Georgia, claims by Turkish writers that the foundations of civilization were laid on the Anatolian plateau, and claims by Arab writers that the very earliest history is to be found somewhere on the Arab Peninsula. It’s where the Garden of Eden was located, right?

That’s why I wasn’t terribly surprised to learn that a team of Armenian archaeologists has announced that Mesopotamian civilization had its origins in Armenia:

PanARMENIAN.Net – Unique discoveries revealed as a result of excavations at Shengavit (4000-3000 B.C.) confirm that Armenia is the motherland of metallurgy, jeweler’s art, wine-making and horse breeding.

A group of archaeologists studying the ancient city concluded that 4000-3000 B.C. Armenia was a highly developed state with exclusive culture. The excavations are carried out by an Armenian-American archaeological expedition.

Director of the Scientific and Research Institute of Historical and Cultural Heritage of the RA Ministry of Culture Simonyan said that for example, the glass beads discovered at the territory of Shengavit are of a higher quality than the Egypt samples.

“Meanwhile, the amount of revealed horse bones at the territory has exceeded all expectations of the researchers. With respect to this, German paleozoologist Hans Peter Wertman stated that he has not observed such a quantity of horses in the entire Ancient East.

The significance of the observation about glass beads is that for many, many years Egypt has been assumed to be where glass was invented and Egyptian glass beads have been found as much as 4,500 years old. If the Armenian examples of glass are from 3,000 BCE, they’d predate the earliest Egyptian examples by 500 years.

There’s more on the site here.

In all seriousness I think that Turkey’s claims are pretty solid. Extremely ancient cities eight or ten thousand years old with populations of 10,000 or more have been found on the Anatolian plateau and the original genetic stock for a lot of the crops we depend on, e.g. wheat, barley, and rye, seem to have originated there. It’s truly fascinating on how widespread so many of the building blocks of urban civilization were at such an early time in history.

On a related note the Burmese government is putting money into trying to prove that Burmese culture arose independently of foreign influences. Maybe right down to the evolution of the Burmese people (the article isn’t entirely clear). Archaeology isn’t a science, it’s a vendetta.

2 comments… add one
  • PD Shaw Link

    Of course, the site is on the Ararat Plain, just below where Noah’s ark settled.

    BTW/ There was another genetics study published on Britain / Ireland. Basically, comparing genetic samples from points in Ireland, Scotland and England with Sweden, Bulgaria and Portugal. Seems like some odd selections since it would have been more interesting to compare Basque/Celtiberians from Iberia or Danish/Norwegians from Scandinavia.

    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/06/the-english-are-like-the-irish-genetically/

  • The post touches on a subject that’s a perennial source of irritation to me: the leftover adverse effects of the false and arguably racist “family tree” model of language.

    There’s no reason for human languages to be arranged in a family tree as was done in the 19th century. Languages are not genetic phenomena, things you inherit from your parents, they are network phenomena, things that arise from interactions.

    When you’ve processed that understanding you can begin to make sense of real languages, e.g. English which has its strongest affinities with Germanic languages and Old French but also has affinities with Celtic and other languages or French itself which has affinities with Latin, German, and Celtic languages.

    It also enables one to make sense of something like Elamite which has affinities to two of the three ancient proto-families.

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