6

The First Civilizations

(5000–c.1500 BC)

How the art of writing ushered in an era known as ‘history’

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN history and prehistory can be summarized in a word: writing. Writing allowed people to keep records of what happened and when. It meant they could pass on stories to other generations without change or error. With writing came the beginning of what is called ‘recorded’ history. Everything before is prehistory, or prehistoric.

Recorded human history really begins at the same time as writing first appears – and that happened in the earliest human civilizations of the Middle East about 5,000 years ago, which takes us to within a tenth of a second to midnight on the twenty-four-hour clock of earth history.

No one knows who actually invented writing. It is highly unlikely that any one person did. People may have begun to experiment with the first scratches and scribbles as long as 10,000 years ago as a way of keeping track of the cycles of the moon and stars. However, it was only about 5,000 years ago that the first clear use of written symbols by a settled civilization appeared, initially as a way of keeping commercial records and accounts. Merchants of the Middle East drew simple pictures on clay tablets to identify particular goods. Next to them they scraped counting marks to show a quantity. These tablets were baked in ovens to make their marks permanent, creating an unchangeable set of records showing exactly who had received what goods. Writing helped people manage their accounts of trade and exchange.

But making drawings on clay was a time-consuming and laborious business. It made more sense to come up with a shorthand code to speed the process up. Over time, wedge-shaped strokes replaced the pictures because they were easier and quicker to mark on to the tablets. These strokes were made using a kind of pen made out of reed in the shape of a modern-day cutting knife. This style of writing is called cuneiform and it forms the basis for three of the oldest written languages: Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian.

Mesopotamia, and a once-in-a-lifetime discovery

Sumeria was located in the heart of modern-day Iraq, close to the Persian Gulf (see plate 5). It was one of the first regions where mankind’s new itch to control nature extended into the business of building artificial worlds in the form of cities and states. It is also where experts believe writing emerged.

Sumeria was a perfect place for early settled communities of humans. By 10,000 years ago sea levels had risen by nearly 130 metres from their low point, and in this part of the world the climate was wetter, and therefore better for growing crops, than it is now. It is only in the last 5,000 years or so that temperatures have increased and rainfall has fallen to make the Middle East the sandy, barren land we know today.

A wetter climate was ideal for growing crops such as wheat, barley and grapes that need winter rainfall. And just the right kind of wild animals – those perfect for domestication, such as goats, sheep and oxen – lived on the slopes and hillsides of the region. Such animals could be used as a source of food, as power for pulling ploughs and carts, and to provide raw materials for making clothes, bottles and leather goods.

The ancient region in which the first Sumerian cities emerged is called Mesopotamia. In Greek this means ‘between the rivers’. The Euphrates and the Tigris were used to supply water to the nearby land through systems of man-made irrigation channels, dykes, reservoirs and dams. These meant people could purposely flood their fields to provide just the right conditions for their artificially chosen crops to thrive. The river valley also provided two large, long, flowing superhighways to carry people and their possessions from one riverside city to the next.

Thanks to a remarkable archaeological discovery made in the 1840s by a young amateur British archaeologist named Austen Layard, it is now known that a writing system developed in ancient Sumeria about 5,000 years ago. Rather than stick around in London to practise law, as he had been trained to do, Layard decided to head off for a life on the island of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, off the southern tip of India, which was then under British rule.

Layard never got to Ceylon. He stalled in the Middle East, in Persia, where he became fascinated by the history of the region, and in particular by a strange large mound near the town of Mosul, on the banks of the Tigris. He was so curious about this odd-looking man-made hill covered in dust and sand that he persuaded the British ambassador in Turkey to pay for an archaeological dig to see what lay beneath it. On 9 November 1845, Layard, with a team of local tribesmen, started excavations. Within hours their brushes and spades revealed the walls of an ancient palace covered with stone slabs, each one tightly inscribed with a curiously shaped form of unknown ancient writing.

This wasn’t just a fancy royal palace with a few old graffiti marks that Layard had stumbled across. After a series of excavations, two palaces and a huge royal library were unearthed on the site, which turned out to be what remains of the ancient biblical city of Nineveh (see plate 5). Layard uncovered a staggering 20,000 clay tablets, including king lists, histories, religious texts, mathematical and astronomical treatises, contracts, legal documents, decrees and royal letters. They provide a fascinating insight into ancient times that has transformed our understanding of when and where the first civilizations emerged, and what they were like.

Probably the most famous tablets from the Nineveh hoard are those that tell of the adventures of an early King of Sumeria called Gilgamesh. He ruled over one of the first Sumerian cities, called Uruk, situated on the east bank of the Euphrates in what is now southern Iraq. At its height as many as 80,000 people lived in Uruk, making it then the largest city in the world.

Life in ancient Sumeria

The Epic of Gilgamesh and the other stories found inscribed on the clay tablets tell us a great deal about how the Sumerian people viewed the world. They give us, for example, some of the first written evidence of religious beliefs.

The Sumerians believed that the gods met each New Year’s Day to decide what fateful events would happen in the coming year. Their decisions resulted in all manner of disasters, such as droughts and floods, as well as unexpected good fortune like bumper harvests and military success. Aside from these annual decisions, everything else was, they believed, predetermined by the stars.

The Sumerians and their successors in Assyria and Babylon believed that the world rested on a flat disc, surrounded by water on all sides. Above the sky was a tin roof punctured with small holes through which the celestial fires of heaven could be seen. They studied these holes (the stars), and watched them rotate each night along a predictable path. They discovered that five large stars behaved in a different, unexplained way. They believed these were the stars of the gods – we know them today as the five planets visible to the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The Sumerians dedicated one day to each of the five randomly moving stars, which, with the sun and the moon, made the seven days of the week. The names we use in English, derived from the Latin later used by the Romans, show the legacy we still owe to the Sumerian system: Saturday (for Saturn), Sunday (for the sun), Monday (for the moon). The link is clearer in French for the other weekdays: mardi (Mars), mercredi (Mercury), jeudi (Jupiter) and vendredi (Venus).

The Sumerians constructed towers, called ziggurats, so they could be closer to the heavens. These were terraced pyramids built from sun-baked clay bricks. The top of each tower was flat and on it was built a shrine or temple to a god. Only priests were allowed inside them, since these were believed to be the dwelling places of the gods.

It isn’t just our seven-day week that we owe to these ingenious people. They were also prodigious mathematicians. Amongst the clay tablets found by Layard is evidence of complex arithmetic, with different combinations of vertical strokes and V shapes used to represent the numbers one to nine. The Sumerians developed a system of mathematics based on the number 60, because there are so many ways of dividing it up (by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30).

Their genius for astronomy and mathematics was matched by their inventiveness at making things with their hands. These people are credited with inventing the wheel. Wheels were first used for making clay pots – pottery turntables. It didn’t take long for the wheel to be adapted as a device for transporting goods. Tamed asses were used to pull the first carts. Solid wooden wheels were later replaced by spoked wheels, which could carry more weight, making them ideal for war chariots.

Like all human civilizations, even the ingenious Sumerians could not survive for ever. They learned that living in one fixed location, rather than moving from place to place as hunter-gatherers do, came at a considerable price. After many generations of intensive farming the land became less fertile, owing to increasing levels of salt, which spread across the fields through artificial irrigation. To start with they responded by switching from growing wheat in favour of barley, which could tolerate higher salt levels, but before long even that crop just withered away as the soil turned sour. By about 2000 BC the land around the mouths of the Euphrates and Tigris had become impossible to farm, and cities like Ur and Uruk fell into permanent decline.

Their misfortune was another’s opportunity. The mighty Sargon the Great (ruled c.2270–2215 BC) built one of the world’s first empires around Akkad, a city located hundreds of miles further up the Euphrates, where the land was still rich and fertile (see plate 5). A seventh-century BC clay tablet describes how Sargon’s mother cast him off as a baby in a basket of rushes. Eventually, in a striking resemblance to the story of Moses in the Bible, he was found and cared for by the King’s water drawer, Akki, and reared as his son.

As the southern Sumerian cities declined they fell victim to Sargon’s conquests, becoming part of his enormous new domain, which stretched from present-day south-west Iran to the Mediterranean coast. Cultures diffused two ways. While the Akkadian language gradually started to replace Sumerian cuneiform, the Sumerians’ knowledge of craftsmanship and technology spread far and wide across the vast Akkadian empire.

By evolving a system of writing, the Sumerian civilization allowed recorded history as we know it to begin. The written word meant that knowledge could be transferred, without error or change, from one part of the world to another, and from one generation to the next. It was one of the most potent tools for organizing the construction and administration of man’s first artificial worlds.

The power of the Pharaohs

No human so far in our story has ever claimed to be a god. Holy men of the hunter-gathering peoples venerated the spirits and the gods of the earth, sky, beasts and woods, but there is no suggestion that they ever thought they themselves were divine. Rather, these ancient people were so in awe of the gods that they sensed their presence all around, from the pinpricks in the tin roof of the heavens to the awesome forces of floods, thunder, lightning, sunshine, moon, rivers, woods and war. So, to make the leap from seeing the gods as other-worldly to regarding them as real, living, breathing, walking and talking humans is a big one. What power and magnificence would be bestowed on the person who managed to convince others that he was a god on earth!

According to one early human civilization one member of Homo sapiens could indeed be a living god, possessing that most precious gift so fruitlessly craved by King Gilgamesh – divine immortality. They called him Pharaoh. He ruled a stretch of North Africa which we now call Egypt through a succession of more than thirty dynasties lasting about 3,000 years. He was thought to be a living god because of the absolute command he could exert over his people. Such supreme authority came from a unique combination of natural advantages.

Pharaoh was all powerful. His people created for him extraordinary monumental buildings in the forms of palaces, temples and tombs – the only survivor of the famous seven wonders of the ancient world is the Great Pyramid of Giza, built as a tomb for one of the earliest pharaohs, called Khufu (known as Cheops in Greek), who died in 2566 BC. This monumental construction originally towered skywards a massive 147 metres – that’s over fifty metres taller than Big Ben. It still contains more than two million blocks of stone, each one weighing more than a pick-up truck. Hundreds of thousands of people worked to build structures like this. Modern experts are still at a loss to explain how the ancient Egyptians could have cut, transported and hauled into place so many huge blocks of stone, raising them into the sky from the flat, sandy desert in defiance of everything natural around.

The Egyptians were the first example of a human civilization whose rulers amassed extreme wealth and absolute power over men. Their unprecedented riches and glory were underpinned by the belief that when they left this world they would join the gods in heaven for all eternity. Those who curried sufficient favour could be taken along too, if Pharaoh so chose, entering into a blissful life of everlasting peace.

From about 6,000 years ago nature gave these aspiring all-powerful human rulers a big helping hand in the form of a river and some strategic changes in the climate. Together they transformed the north-eastern tip of Africa into one of the most fertile and best protected lands on earth.

Unlike the rivers of Mesopotamia, the Nile naturally floods once a year, bringing with it a supply of fresh, nutrient-rich sediment – perfect for growing crops. With a natural supply of nutrients and a fresh deluge of water each year, there was no risk of salt poisoning here. Following the end of the Ice Age 11,000 years ago, North Africa was a verdant land of rolling grasslands dotted with trees and vegetation. Over the years, hunter-gathering tribes established themselves near the Nile, settling into small villages and communities. They learned to domesticate the wild cattle, goats and sheep that grazed the savannah, providing them with plentiful supplies of milk, wool and leather. Over time, knowledge about farming crops such as wheat, barley, grapes and flax reached them via nomadic traders from Mesopotamia and directly from people like the Natufians. These river dwellers were now ideally placed to grow into a rich and powerful civilization.

They also had another advantage. About 6,000 years ago the land around the upper Nile began to dry out – partly as a result of cyclical changes in the earth’s axis that redirected rainfall patterns and partly because new human activities such as growing crops and herding animals reduced natural water levels. By 4,000 years ago what had once been a landscape full of crocodiles and hippos wallowing in plentiful streams of water had become the arid land we know today as the Sahara Desert.

The encroaching desert was good news for these people because it provided them with an almost impenetrable barrier to invaders. There was no need for city walls, towers, castles or elaborate military installations here. From about 2000 BC the only way other people could disrupt the ancient Egyptians’ way of life was either to cross hundreds of miles of barren desert or to come by sea, which was an equally daunting challenge due to the natural defences of the boggy, reedy marshlands of the lower Nile delta. Thanks to these natural barriers, the Egyptian people lived in relative peace and security for much of their history, able to develop their own way of life with little outside interruption.

The Nile brought another gift too – one which helps explain why it was here that such powerful rulers were able to rise and take for themselves the title of god. The river provided a two-way highway that allowed easy passage up and down the country. The current arrangement of the earth’s tectonic plates means that the prevailing winds across Egypt blow north to south – in the opposite direction to that in which the river flows. A vessel could simply float downstream, then raise a sail for the return journey. What could be better for controlling a kingdom than a well-protected fertile valley with an easy-to-navigate two-way river system? Nowhere on earth had as many helpful natural ingredients to aid the growth of an advanced human civilization as did Egypt 5,000 years ago.

The miracle of the Nile

Legend has it that in about 3150 BC a King called Menes united the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt. It was he who began the 3,000-year-long reign of the Pharaohs, during which time the Egyptian way of life changed remarkably little. The ruler’s governors imposed taxes on the people in the form of food, not money. The idea was that if the weather turned bad or the river floods were weaker than expected, there would still be plenty of food kept in a central store to support the population. It wasn’t hard for a population to worship their ruler as if he were a god when it was he who provided their only insurance in the event of a run of poor harvests.

Pharaoh had to have somewhere to store all this food, hence the need for some of his taxes to be paid in the form of manual labour to build huge granaries and storehouses. The Nile’s floods meant that the farmland all round the river was underwater for at least three months a year – usually from late June until the end of September. During these months hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers could sail downstream, construct for their Pharaoh some of the most magnificent buildings ever made by humankind, and then head home on the favourable winds.

All this helped make Pharaoh – in the popular mind – a living god on earth. It therefore followed that everything possible should be done to make sure that when their god departed this world, his soul should pass as effortlessly as possible into the next life. Here Pharaoh could continue to protect the people from other gods and disasters such as war, drought, famine and disease.

Awesome tombs were constructed for the pharaohs, their families and friends, initially in the form of pyramids, the largest of which are just south of modern-day Cairo, at a place called Giza. More than a hundred pyramids were built during the Old Kingdom, but only three massive structures survive to this day – the biggest being the one built by the Pharaoh Khufu. This pyramid took twenty-three years to build and used the labour of more than 100,000 slaves and farmers. Originally, it was cased in brilliant white limestone and topped off with a gold cap. The purpose of this massive monument was to provide an everlasting structure in which to store Pharaoh’s body so he could use it again in the next life.

Dead bodies were preserved using a process of mummification, learned over many generations, which typically took as long as seventy days to complete. All the body organs were cut out and placed in a series of canisters called canopic jars, including the brain, which was pulled out of the head through the nose using a special instrument with a hook on the end. The heart was the only organ left in the body – so it could be weighed in the next life by the gods to help judge if the person had lived a virtuous life on earth.

The body was dried out with salty crystals and then stuffed, covered with oils and ointments and finally wrapped in bandages. The completed mummy was packed inside a coffin, which, in the case of a Pharaoh, was placed at the heart of the pyramid in the King’s burial chamber. Surrounding the body was everything that the dead Pharaoh could possibly need in the afterlife: food, drink, pets (mummified, of course), games, toys, crowns, tableware, daggers, spears, clothes, books, pictures, magic spells . . . The tombs of important people contained teams of servants called shabti. These were dolls, sometimes carved out of wood, sometimes of semi-precious stone. Their purpose was to come to the assistance of the dead soul whenever he or she needed help.

Many of the ancient Egyptians’ most sacred beliefs were encoded in The Book of the Dead, a collection of magic spells and stories, often illustrated with scenes from this world and the afterlife, written by the living for the benefit of the dead. Verses from the book were placed on scrolls inside tombs to help the souls of the dead pass through the dangers of the underworld and into an afterlife of bliss.

By the time of the New Kingdom (starting in about 1550 BC), the capital of Egypt had been moved upstream, from Memphis to Thebes. Here the burials continued, but with one important difference. Now the Pharaohs, along with their families and friends, placed their tombs in secret locations underground. This was to protect against looters, who had taken advantage of the occasional interludes in Egyptian history when central power broke down, such as when the Hyksos invaded on their chariots from the north and overran the lower part of the country between about 1674 and 1548 BC.

Hundreds of tombs have been discovered in the Valleys of the Kings, Queens and Nobles, near Thebes. Even though they were underground, many have been looted in the intervening years. But, remarkably, some have survived almost completely intact. Massive temples, built by the rich to glorify the gods, still stand to this day, such as the one at Karnak.

The original Indiana Jones

On 4 November 1922 a British archaeologist who had been searching the valleys near Thebes for more than fifteen years stumbled across some steps leading to an unknown tomb. What Howard Carter discovered was the burial chamber of a little-known Pharaoh called Tutankhamun, who died when he was only about nineteen. For a long time it was thought he had been murdered, because his mummy shows a mysterious bump on the back of the head. But it is now thought that this young ruler died from gangrene after breaking his leg, probably while out hunting. The discovery of the tomb transformed our understanding of Egyptian civilization. A huge hoard of treasure was packed inside the chamber; the most famous object of all was found bound to the head of the mummified boy-king: his funeral mask, made out of solid gold.

Ancient Egypt was so well endowed with natural resources and protective barriers that it had little need to develop military technology in the same way as other nearby civilizations. Why bother protecting yourself when nature has so kindly managed your defences in the form of surrounding desert and marshes? Why bother going on the attack when staying put along the banks of the Nile provided more than enough natural resources? In the end, this contributed to Egypt’s downfall. After 3,000 years of almost uninterrupted dynastic rule a wave of invasions swept over the empire, starting with the Assyrians in 671 BC, the Persians in 525 BC, followed by the Greeks in 332 BC and the Romans in 30 BC. By this time ancient Egypt as a separate, distinct civilization had reached its end.

Fertility, trade and equality in the Indus Valley

Not many people can genuinely claim to have discovered a lost world. But one day in 1827 a British spy called Charles Masson had the privilege of becoming one of them. He left his army base in Agra, India, site of the world-famous Taj Mahal, and headed west with a fellow soldier on some unknown errand – it is even possible he was deserting. On his journey he stumbled across the ruins of an ancient city at a place called Harappa, now situated in north-east Pakistan, which included what looked like a castle on top of a hill. Lying on the ground he found jewels, bangles and arm rings, as well as the remains of three ancient chariots. Masson knew he had found something extraordinary, but it wasn’t until a hundred years later that professional excavations revealed the full extent of this lost civilization, hidden for thousands of years beneath the mud, sand and dust.

Serious archaeological excavations began in the 1920s. They revealed that Harappa was one of the largest cities in what is now called the Indus Valley Civilization. More than 2,500 different sites have since been discovered. These settlements were established at about the same time as the first towns and cities of ancient Egypt and Sumeria – that is, starting from about 3300 BC. Over about 1,700 years people living here developed what many experts consider to be the most advanced and impressive society on earth at the time. Then, quite suddenly, they vanished, seemingly into thin air. To this day no one knows exactly why or where they went.

The people who lived at Harappa arrived from an ancient settlement called Mehrgarh, located near a town called Sibi in modern-day Pakistan. From about 2600 BC the landscape dried up as the climate changed and these people moved north to the more fertile river valley of the Indus. By the end of the second millennium BC people living in the Indus Valley had built a number of stunning cities. They contained many of the features we associate with modern living, making them unique in the world at that time.

These people were brilliant town planners. Their streets were laid out in convenient, well-measured grid patterns, like a modern American city. Each street had its own sewerage and drainage systems, which were, in some people’s opinion, more advanced than many found in modern-day Pakistan and India. Excavations have unearthed a series of large public buildings, including assembly halls and a meeting place for up to 5,000 citizens. Public storehouses, granaries and bath houses were surrounded by colonnaded courtyards. Indus Valley builders even used a type of natural tar to stop water from leaking out of what is almost certainly the world’s first ever artificial public swimming pool. One house has the remains of what looks like an under-floor heating system, pre-dating the famous Roman hypocaust system introduced more than 2,000 years later.

Each house had access to a well, and waste water was directed to covered drains, which lined the main streets. Some houses opened on to inner courtyards and small lanes, and for the first time houses were built on more than one level. The people wove cotton, fired exquisite pottery and crafted copper and bronze into jewellery and statues. Metal workers lived here in abundance. Evidence of at least sixteen copper furnaces has been uncovered in Harappa alone.

Unlike Egypt and Sumeria, there is a noticeable absence of royal tombs. There are no ziggurats, pyramids, temples or big palaces characteristic of a rich, dominant ruling class. What makes the Indus Valley Civilization so interesting is that it suggests a way of life which was organized and efficient but above all egalitarian. Most people, it seems, shared their wealth and lived in comparative equality.

This civilization was based on trade, because it needed access to raw materials such as copper and tin from other places. One Indus Valley city, called Lothal, featured a massive artificial dock with a dredged canal and loading bays for filling and emptying ships.

Everything about the Indus Valley Civilization seems to have been far before its time – from the sanitation of its streets and the central heating of its houses to the fabulous dockyards and meticulous works of art. Craftsmen and women were on a par with farmers, tradesmen – even priests. They all seem to have worshipped what is known as a mother goddess, which accounts for the hundreds of female figurines, including an exquisite small bronze dancing girl, found in sites throughout the region.

Plenty of evidence suggests that until about 4000 BC, and in some areas until 1600 BC, much of Europe and the Near East lived in a similar way.

The Age of Stonehenge

Remarkable remains have been found buried in the graves of Neolithic farming people across Europe, who lived from about 8000 to 3000 BC, which is when the first bronze tools and weapons appear, and what is known as the Bronze Age begins. Mostly, people were buried together, men and women equally, in large communal graves called barrows. Studies of their bones have shown that these people did not generally die as a result of violence.

More than 10,000 tombs and barrows are known about in Western Europe alone. These are called megalithic because huge structures are often to be found near these graves, usually built from large blocks of local stone. Many were set upright in circles, like the sites in England at Stonehenge and Avebury. Elsewhere they were constructed as temples, with altar tables at one end or in the centre. Famous examples such as Hagar Qim and Mnajdra survive on the island of Malta.

Many thousands of megalithic structures still stand as monuments to the farming people who spread out from the Near East with their domesticated animals and seeds from about 7000 BC. Mostly they travelled along the coasts by sea, and up river valleys such as those of the Danube and the Rhine, fertile areas with rich soil and plentiful moisture for their crops. Some skirted the Mediterranean coasts, establishing themselves on islands such as Malta. They then travelled north and west, settling in Portugal, northern Spain and Brittany before reaching England, Ireland, Wales and as far up as the Orkney islands off the coast of Scotland, where some of the best-preserved structures and stone houses still remain.

These people deliberately changed the natural environment around them to support their new agricultural lifestyles. Between 6000 and 3000 BC millions of trees were cut down all over Europe to make way for fields. Large areas of open moorland such as Dartmoor and Exmoor in the West Country of England were formerly ancient forests, cut down by Neolithic farmers to provide open areas to grow crops and graze livestock. They needed to do this so they could settle permanently in small villages and towns – with some communities as large as 500 inhabitants.

There is no evidence to suggest that these people were violent. As at Harappa, there is no trace of a dominant ruling class. Objects buried alongside dead early Neolithic people were typically figures of goddesses, not axes, arrowheads or spears. The absence of violent death, fortifications and weapons of war suggest that these were peaceful times. Villages were built along fertile valley floors, not on the tops of hills, implying that territorial aggression, invasion and terror were little known.

Like the population in the Indus Valley, early European Neolithic farmers were sophisticated and technologically advanced. They too had a distinctive form of written symbolism. Objects covered with swirling whorls and spiral shapes have been found at more than a hundred megalithic sites across Europe. It is likely that these inscriptions were some form of communication between the people and their gods and goddesses in the world beyond.

The worship of the Mother Goddess

Some experts believe megalithic societies were matrilineal, with women placed at the apex of society – not as rulers, but as birth-givers. Perhaps a line can be traced from the Natufian women of Lebanon (see page 95), or even as far back as the Venus of Willendorf, that 24,000-year-old statue of a pregnant woman found in Austria (see page 81). After all, women were the original seed gatherers while men went out to hunt. It was they who probably developed the most expertise in agriculture, using a mixture of instinct and common sense to select the best seeds for the next year’s crops, unwittingly instituting what we now call artificial selection.

The mother goddess took a variety of forms. Sometimes she was a snake, or a vulture, or the moon. Each symbol represented a cycle of death, birth and regeneration: the snake hibernates, then wakes up and sheds her skin; the vulture recycles dead flesh by eating it; and the moon dies and is reborn every twenty-eight days, mirroring the feminine menstrual cycle.

Moon worship was highly advanced in megalithic times. It has recently been recognized that temples such as Stonehenge were originally built to glorify the moon as well as the sun. Every month shafts of moonlight line up perfectly with gaps in the massive stones, the architects having positioned them precisely to accommodate the subtly shifting patterns of the moon’s varying rising and setting cycles, which repeat themselves exactly every 18.6 years. The full moon has had historic and religious significance going back thousands of years, since it was by the light of the full moon that many hunter-gathering tribes hunted, providing the best opportunities for a good catch.

The matriarchy of Minoan Crete

Europe’s mother goddess culture came to its climax on the Mediterranean island of Crete in the second millennium BC. Here it also survived longest. Crete thrived on trade routes that linked the Mediterranean with the rest of megalithic Europe and North Africa. The flowering of the island’s Minoan civilization coincided with the growth of the Indus Valley Civilization, from c.3300 to 1700 BC. Homer, a Greek poet who wrote in the eighth century BC, claimed there were as many as ninety cities on Crete, and archaeologists have found a number of ‘palaces’, including the largest of all at the island’s capital, Knossos.

The discovery of this ancient island civilization was chiefly the work of Sir Arthur Evans, an eccentric but meticulous Victorian archaeologist. As soon as he set foot on Crete in 1894, Evans rigorously pursued the mystery of the mythical King Minos, who, legend has it, ruled from a fabulous palace at Knossos which housed an appalling monster, the Minotaur. Half-man, half-bull, this beast lived in an impenetrable maze and feasted off the flesh of still-living virgins.

Minoan Crete was like a heart pumping at the centre of the Bronze Age trading system. Its trade links stretched as far as Mesopotamia in the east and Spain in the west. Tin and copper were traded for smelting into bronze, while luxury crops such as bright-yellow saffron were grown in the island’s fields and exported as flavouring for food.

Evans discovered that the people who lived on ancient Crete followed the megalithic tradition. Women and men had equal rights. Wall paintings from the palaces of Knossos and Phaistos show that women were able to express themselves freely. They are depicted as bare-breasted, wearing short-sleeved shirts open to the navel and long, flowing, layered skirts.

Statues, vases and wall paintings show images of sporting contests where women competed equally alongside men. The island’s favourite sport was the impossible-sounding bull-vaulting. An acrobat (sometimes female) would grab the horns of a bull and somersault on to its back. Then, in a second somersault, she would leap off its back and land upright with her feet back on the ground. No wonder Minoan women were the first people known to have worn fitted garments and bodices – essential prerequisites, you would think, for a sport like this.

Women did not dominate society, but they did oversee it. Frescoes at the palace of Thera, on the island of Santorini, a hundred kilometres north of Crete, show women standing on balconies overseeing processions of young men carrying an animal for sacrifice. Most priests on Minoan Crete were female. Under Minoan law women retained full control of their property. They even had the right to divorce at pleasure. It was a tradition too that a mother’s brother was responsible for bringing up her children. Customs such as these, which seem strange to us today, lingered long in the Mediterranean mind.

Minoan palaces were not mighty and dominant like those in Egypt or Sumeria. Rather, they functioned as the region’s communal administrative and religious centres, providing a place of work for craftsmen, storage spaces for food and temples for goddess worship. One look at a reconstruction of the palace at Knossos and you can understand why Greek invaders might later imagine that the corridors and irrigation channels resembled an impenetrable maze.

Like the traders of the Indus Valley and other European megalithic people, the Minoans had their own form of symbolism, which shows that their civilization was culturally and technologically advanced. In 1903 archaeologists excavating the palace of Phaistos, on the southern side of the island, found a disc thought to date from some time between 1850 and 1600 BC. It contains forty-five unique symbols arranged in a spiral shape, resembling the swirls found on vases at Knossos. No one really knows who made the disc, or what the symbols mean, but it does show that the people of Minoan Crete were artistic, prosperous and highly ingenious.

Following excavations at a site called Akrotiri in 1967, the Minoans are now known to have spread to the island of Santorini. There, archaeologists have discovered the remains of a vast, ancient island city which had been buried for thousands of years under thick layers of volcanic ash. Although only the southern tip of the town has so far been examined, houses three storeys high have been unearthed with fine wall paintings, stone staircases, columns and large ceramic storage jars, mills and pottery. Minoan Akrotiri even boasted a highly developed drainage system, featuring the world’s first known clay pipes with separate channels for hot and cold water supplies.

A distinct pattern is discernible from the evidence that has been left by these early civilizations. Stretching from the ancient Indus Valley, right across the mountains of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), to the islands of the Mediterranean and as far as the topmost island of Orkney in Scotland, what emerges is a series of like-minded civilizations whose temples and graves bear witness to a lifestyle of peace and a veneration for mother nature. Their common belief in the continuous cycle of birth, death and regeneration is personified by their worship of a mother goddess in all her forms: snake, vulture, pregnant woman or moon. Excellence in craftwork, technical skill and exquisite art are some of their legacies, along with a spirit of natural equality.

It was not to continue. During the second millennium BC the last of these early civilizations fell. New power in the form of military might was in the process of sweeping across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Warriors had by now worked out how to live off the profits of others, ushering in an age when human elitism, ruthlessness and terror had their true beginnings.