Yet Jericho has several features which make it historically unique and give it a symbolic status of its own. Unlike the forgotten villages elsewhere, it is monumental, older than the Bible, layer upon layer of history, a city. The ancient sweet-water city of Jericho was an oasis on the edge of the desert whose spring has been running from prehistoric times right into the modern city today. Here wheat and water came together and, in that sense, here man began civilisation. Here, too, the bedouin came with their dark muffled faces out of the desert, looking jealously at the new way of life. That is why Joshua brought the tribes of Israel here on their way to the Promised Land – because wheat and water, they make civilisation: they make the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey. Wheat and water turned that barren hillside into the oldest city of the world.
All at once at that time Jericho is transformed. People come and soon become the envy of their neighbours, so that they have to fortify Jericho, turn it into a walled city, and build a stupendous tower, nine thousand years ago. The tower is thirty feet across at the base and, to correspond, almost thirty feet in depth. And climbing up beside it the excavation reveals layer upon layer of past civilisation: the early pre-pottery men, the next pre-pottery men, the coming of pottery seven thousand years ago; early copper, early bronze, middle bronze. Each of these civilisations came, conquered Jericho, buried it, and built itself up; so that the tower lies not so much under forty-five feet of soil as under forty-five feet of past civilisations.
Jericho is a microcosm of history. There will be other sites found in coming years (there are some important new ones already) which will change our picture of the beginnings of civilisation. Yet the power of standing in this place, the vision backward along the ascent of modern man, is profound in thought and in emotion equally. When I was a young man, we all thought that mastery came from man’s domination of his physical environment. Now we have learned that real mastery comes from understanding and moulding the living environment. That is how man began in the Fertile Crescent when he put his hand on plant and animal and, in learning to live with them, changed the world to his needs. When Kathleen Kenyon rediscovered the ancient tower in the 1950s, she found that it was hollow; and to me, this staircase is a sort of taproot, a peephole to the rock base of civilisation. And the rock base of civilisation is the living being, not the physical world.
By 6000 BC Jericho was a large agricultural settlement. Kathleen Kenyon estimates that it contained three thousand people, and covered eight or ten acres within the walls. The women ground the wheat with the heavy stone implements that characterise a settled community. The men shaped, patted and moulded the clay for building-bricks, some of the earliest known. The marks of the brick-makers’ thumbprints are still there. Man, like the bread wheat, is now fixed in his place. A settled community also has a different relation to the dead. The inhabitants of Jericho preserved some skulls and covered them with elaborate decoration. No one knows why, unless it was a reverential action.
No one who was brought up on the Old Testament, as I was, can leave Jericho without asking two questions: Did Joshua finally destroy this city? And did the walls really come tumbling down? Those are the questions that bring people to this site and turn it into a living legend. To the first question, there is an easy answer: Yes. The tribes of Israel were fighting to get into the Fertile Crescent which runs up the Mediterranean coast, along the mountains of Anatolia, and down towards the Tigris and Euphrates. And here at Jericho was the key that locked their way up the mountains of Judea and out into the Mediterranean fertile land. This they had to conquer, and they did about 1400 BC – about three thousand three hundred to three thousand four hundred years ago. The Bible story was not written down until perhaps 700 BC; that is, the account is about two thousand six hundred years old as a written record.
But did the walls come tumbling down? We do not know. There is no archaeological evidence on this site that suggests that a set of walls one fine day really fell flat. But many sets of walls did fall, at different times. There is a Bronze Age period here where a set of walls was rebuilt at least sixteen times. Because this is earthquake country. There are tremors here still every day; there are four major quakes in a century. It is only in the last years that we have come to understand why earthquakes run along this valley. The Red Sea and the Dead Sea lie along a continuation of the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. Here two of the plates that carry the continents as they float on the denser mantle of the earth ride side by side. As they thrust past one another along this rift, the surface of the earth echoes to the shocks that well up from below. As a result, earthquakes have always erupted along the axis on which the Dead Sea lies. And in my view that is why the Bible is full of memories of natural miracles: some ancient flood, some running dry of the Red Sea, the Jordan running dry, and the walls of Jericho falling down.
The Bible is a curious history, part folklore and part record. History is, of course, written by the victors, and the Israelis, when they burst through here, became the carriers of history. The Bible is their story: the history of a people who had to stop being nomad and pastoral and had to become an agricultural tribe.
Farming and husbandry seem simple pursuits, but the Natufian sickle is a signal to show us that they do not stand still. Every stage in the domestication of plant and animal life requires inventions, which begin as technical devices and from which flow scientific principles. The basic devices of the nimble-fingered mind lie about, unregarded, in any village anywhere in the world. Their cornucopia of small and subtle artifices is as ingenious, and in a deep sense as important in the ascent of man, as any apparatus of nuclear physics: the needle, the awl, the pot, the brazier, the spade, the nail and the screw, the bellows, the string, the knot, the loom, the harness, the hook, the button, the shoe – one could name a hundred and not stop for breath. The richness comes from the interplay of inventions; a culture is a multiplier of ideas, in which each new device quickens and enlarges the power of the rest.
A cornucopia of small and subtle artifices as important in the ascent of man as any apparatus of nuclear physics.
Carpenter working on a piece of turned wood with a saw. Greek, 6th century BC.
Clay treaty nail, Sumerian, 2400 BC.
Baker’s oven with bread cooking. Clay model. Greek Islands, 7th century BC.
Settled agriculture creates a technology from which all physics, all science takes off. We can see it in the change from the early sickle to the late. At first glance they look very much alike: the sickle of ten thousand years ago of the gatherer, and the sickle of nine thousand years ago when wheat was cultivated. But look more closely. The cultivated wheat is sawed with a serrated edge: because if you hit the wheat, then the grains will fall to the ground; but if you gently saw it, the grains will be held in the ear of corn. And sickles have been made like this ever since then – into my boyhood in the First World War, when the curved sickle with the serrated edge was still what you cut wheat with. A technology like that, physical knowledge like that, comes to us out of every part of the agricultural life so spontaneously that we feel as if the ideas discover man, rather than the other way about.
The most powerful invention in all agriculture is, of course, the plough. We think of the plough as a wedge dividing the soil. And the wedge is an important early mechanical invention. But the plough is also something much more fundamental: it is a lever which lifts the soil, and it is among the first applications of the principle of the lever. When, long afterwards, Archimedes explained the theory of the lever to the Greeks, he said that with a fulcrum for the lever he could move the earth. But thousands of years before that the ploughmen of the Middle East had been saying ‘Give me a lever and I will feed the earth’.
I have remarked that agriculture was invented at least once again, much later, in America. But the plough and the wheel were not, because they depend on the draught animal. The step beyond simple agriculture in the Middle East was the domestication of draught animals. The failure
to make that biological move kept the New World back at the level of the digging stick and the pack; it did not even hit on the potter’s wheel.
The wheel is found for the first time before 3000 BC in what is now southern Russia. These early finds are solid wooden wheels attached to an older raft or sledge for drawing loads, which thereby is converted into a cart. From then on the wheel and axle becomes the double root from which invention grows. For example, it is turned into an instrument for grinding wheat – and using the forces of nature to do that: the animal forces first, and later the forces of wind and water. The wheel becomes a model for all motions of rotation, a norm of explanation and a heavenly symbol of more than human power in science and in art alike. The sun is a wheeled chariot, and the sky itself is a wheel, from the time that the Babylonians and the Greeks mapped the turning of the starry heavens. In modern science natural motion (that is, undisturbed motion) goes in a straight line; but for Greek science, the form of motion that seemed natural (that is, inherent in nature) and in fact perfect was motion in a circle.
About the time that Joshua stormed Jericho, say 1400 BC, the mechanical engineers of Sumer and Assyria turned the wheel into a pulley to draw water. At the same time they designed large-scale irrigation systems. The vertical maintenance shafts still survive like punctuation marks across the Persian landscape. They go down three hundred feet to the qanats or underground canals that make up the system, at a level where the natural water is safe from evaporation. Three thousand years after they were made, the village women of Khuzistan still draw their water ration from the qanats to carry on the everyday chores of ancient communities.
The bow-lathe is one of the classical schemes for turning linear into rotary motion.
Mid 19th-century carpenters at work with a bow-lathe, Central India.
The qanats are a late construction of a city civilisation, and they imply the existence by then of laws to govern water rights and land tenure and other social relations. In an agricultural community (the large-scale peasant farming of Sinner, for instance) the rule of law has a different character from the nomad law that governs the theft of a goat or a sheep. Now the social structure is bound up with the regulation of matters that affect the community as a whole: access to land, the upkeep and control of water rights, the right to use, turn and turn about, the precious constructions on which the harvest of the seasons depends.
By now the village artisan has become an inventor in his own right. He combines the basic mechanical principles in sophisticated tools which are, in effect, early machines. They are traditional in the Middle East: the bow-lathe, for example, which is one of the classical schemes for turning linear into rotary motion. Here the scheme depends, ingeniously, on winding a string round a drum and fastening the ends of the string to the two ends of a sort of violin bow. The piece of wood to be worked is fixed to the drum; it is turned by moving the bow to and fro, so that the string rotates the drum that holds the piece of wood, which is scored by a chisel. The combination is several thousand years old, but I saw it used by gipsies making chair-legs in a wood in England in 1945.
A machine is a device for tapping the power in nature. That is true from the simplest spindle that the Bakhtiari women carry, all the way to the historic first nuclear reactor and all its busy progeny. Yet as the machine has tapped larger sources of power, it has come more and more to outdistance its natural use. How is it that the machine in its modern form now seems to us a threat?
The question as it strikes us hinges on the scale of power that the machine can develop. We can put it in the form of alternatives: Is the power within the scale of the work for which the machine was devised, or is it so disproportionate that it can dominate the user and distort the use? The question therefore reaches far back; it begins when man first harnessed a power greater than his own, the power of animals. Every machine is a kind of draught animal – even the nuclear reactor. It increases the surplus that man has won from nature since the beginning of agriculture. And therefore every machine re-enacts the original dilemma: does it deliver energy in response to the demand of its specific use, or is it a maverick source of energy beyond the limits of constructive use? The conflict in the scale of power goes back all the way to that formative time in human history.
Agriculture is one part of the biological revolution; the domestication and harnessing of village animals is the other. The sequence of domestication is orderly. First comes the dog, perhaps even before 10,000 BC. Then come food animals, beginning with goats and sheep. And then come draught animals such as the onager, a kind of wild ass. The animals add a surplus much larger than they consume. But that is true only so long as the animals remain modestly in their proper station, as servants of agriculture.
It is unexpected that the domestic animal should turn out exactly to contain within itself, from then on, the threat to the surplus of grain by which the settled community lives and survives. Most unexpected, because after all it is the ox, the ass, as a draught animal that has helped to create this surplus. (The Old Testament carefully urges that they be treated well; for instance, it forbids the farmer to yoke an ox and an ass to the plough together, since they work in different ways.) But round about five thousand years ago, a new draught animal appears – the horse. And that is out of all proportion faster, stronger, more dominant than any previous animal. And from now on that becomes the threat to the village surplus.
The horse had begun by drawing wheeled carts, like the ox but rather grander, drawing chariots in the processions of kings. And then, somewhere around 2000 BC, men discovered how to ride it. The idea must have been as startling in its day as the invention of the flying machine. For one thing, it required a bigger, stronger horse – the horse was originally quite a small animal and, like the llama of South America, could not carry a man for long. Riding as a serious use for the horse therefore begins in the nomad tribes that bred horses. They were men out of Central Asia, Persia, Afghanistan and beyond; in the west they were simply called Scythians, as a collective name for a new and frightening creature, a phenomenon of nature.
For the rider visibly is more than a man: he is head-high above others, and he moves with bewildering power so that he bestrides the living world. When the plants and the animals of the village had been tamed for human use, mounting the horse was a more than human gesture, the symbolic act of dominance over the total creation. We know that this is so from the awe and fear that the horse created again in historical times, when the mounted Spaniards overwhelmed the armies of Peru (who had never seen a horse) in 1532. So, long before, the Scythians were a terror that swept over the countries that did not know the technique of riding. The Greeks when they saw the Scythian riders believed the horse and the rider to be one; that is how they invented the legend of the centaur. Indeed, that other half-human hybrid of the Greek imagination, the satyr, was originally not part goat but part horse; so deep was the unease that the rushing creature from the east evoked.
We cannot hope to recapture today the terror that the mounted horse struck into the Middle East and Eastern Europe when it first appeared. That is because there is a difference of scale which I can only compare with the arrival of tanks in Poland in 1939, sweeping all before them. I believe that the importance of the horse in European history has always been underrated. In a sense, warfare was created by the horse, as a nomad activity. That is what the Huns brought, that is what the Phrygians brought, that is what finally the Mongols brought, and brought to a climax under Genghis Khan much later. In particular, the mobile hordes transformed the organisation of battle. They conceived a different strategy of war – a strategy that is like a war game; how, warmakers love to play games!
The strategy of the mobile horde depends on manoeuvre, on rapid communication, and on practised tactical moves which can be strung together into different sequences of surprise. The remnants of that remain in the war games that are still played and that come from Asia, such as chess and polo. War strategy is always regarded by those who w
in as a kind of game. And there is played to this day in Afghanistan a game called Buz Kashi which comes from the kind of competitive riding that was carried on by the Mongols.
The Greeks when they saw the Scythian riders believed the horse and the rider to be one; that is how they invented the legend of the centaur.
Greek vase painting, c.560 BC. Centaurs and a warrior arming.
The men who play the game of Buz Kashi are professionals – that is to say, they are retainers, and they and the horses are trained and kept simply for the glory of winning. On a great occasion three hundred men from different tribes would come to compete, though that had not happened now for twenty or thirty years, until we organised it.
The players in the game of Buz Kashi do not form teams. The object of the game is not to prove one group better than another, but to find a champion. There are famous champions from the past, and they are remembered. The President who supervised this game was a champion who no longer played. The President gives his orders through a herald, who may also be a pensioner of the game, though less distinguished. Where we should expect to see a ball, there is instead a headless calf. (And that macabre plaything says something about the game, as if the riders were making sport of the farmers’ livelihood.) The carcass weighs about fifty pounds and the object is to snatch it up, defending it against all challengers, and carry it off through two stages. The first stage of the game is riding off with the carcass to the fixed boundary flag and rounding the flag. After that the crucial stage is the return; as he sweeps round the flag, constantly challenged, the rider heads for home and the goal, which is a marked circle in the centre of the mêlée.