The World

All over the world, people started to raise megalithic stone structures, often in circles: around 7000 BC, Nubians – not Egyptians but sub-Saharan Africans – pulled huge stones from far away and raised them at Nabta Playa in circles linked to the observance of stars. The first commodities and luxuries were traded or exchanged: from Iran to Serbia, copper, gold and silver were mined and crafted; lapis lazuli was used in burials; and in the Yangtze Valley, the Chinese started to make silk.

In Malta, Germany, Finland and later England, communities moved gigantic stones across long distances to build structures that were – possibly – temples to follow the sun, to predict rain, to sacrifice humans, to celebrate fertility. Faith was interlinked with power and family: both men and women did the hunting and farming, but the latter probably raised the children and spun textiles: the oldest cotton has been found in the Jordan Valley. In Africa, where families weaved raffia and bark cloth these clans may have been run by women with power descending through the female line.^* In Eurasia, the value of female skills began to be calculated: fathers charged a bride price to future husbands who if powerful could keep several women and protect their children. Originally families honoured both male and female lineages, but to avoid conflicts over land or grain they at some point started to favour the male lineage, though genetically all descendants were identical – a tradition that still endures in many places into the age of iPhones. Yet even in Iraq women could rise to power.

KUBABA: FIRST QUEEN

At Eridu, on a lagoon in Iraq near the mouth of the Euphrates River on the Persian Gulf, around 5400 BC, fishermen and shepherds founded a village where they raised a temple to the god Enki. So rich was this environment that other cities were built nearby, so close that they could almost see other. The invention of the spindle whorl – a sphere with a hole – to make cloth may have been the first gadget, developed as early as pottery and agriculture, with consequences far beyond its immediate usefulness. Difficult to create, cloth was essential but expensive: societies were arranged around food, war and cloth. Eridu was one of the first towns in Sumeria, followed by Ur and Uruk, where a terraced platform was built to Anu, the sky god, topped off with a temple – a ziggurat.

Their leaders were both patriarchs and priests. Their gods were partly playful hucksters, but they evolved into harsher judges who threatened rule-breakers and then policed something altogether greater still: the afterlife. The gods got bigger as the rulers and communities got bigger and the competition with others became fiercer.^*

It is not known how Uruk, now home to over 20,000 people, was organized – there were no palaces and there is mention of ‘the people’ – but there were priest-kings and the temples controlled the wealth: the idea of property probably started with reference to special treasure and artefacts set aside for the sacred within these temples.

To the north, on the Eurasian steppes, horses – the animals that would help humans dominate the terrestrial until the nineteenth century – were being domesticated. Around 3500 BC, horses were fitted with bits so they could be ridden. Soon, the wheel was developed in Ukraine/Russia, where the first linguistic references to wheels appear. It is likely the wheel reached Iraq before the horses: the earliest wagons were pulled not by horses but by another member of the equid family, the kunga – a sturdy cross between female donkey and Syrian ass, the first example of human interbreeding of animals – depicted in art pulling early four-wheeled wagons. The remains of one was recently discovered in Syria. The new technology spread to India; kungas vanished; and the horse empowered shepherds to become ferocious, nomadic cavalry and families to move across vast distances to settle in new lands. War already drove technology: wagons were weaponized as chariots, so prestigious that warband chiefs fielded charioteer armies. When they died, they were buried with horse and chariot. The steppe peoples found copper reserves too: at Sintasha, north of the Aral Sea, bronze was created by mixing copper and tin from Bactria (Afghanistan), used for weapons and decorations.

These horsemen were soon led by sword-swinging warlords who built strongholds with high audience chambers, perhaps the first palaces – one stands at Arslantepe (eastern Türkiye) – and buried heroic male warriors in extravagant tombs with food, swords and jewellery.