Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 57

The early cities of Mesopotamia benefitted from rivers and the mud that periodic floods spread over the land. Yet floodwaters could rise disastrously high. Between the ruins of one Sumerian city and the ruins of the city that came before it, 20th-century archaeologists found a deep layer of dried mud — evidence of a terrible flood. To the Sumerians, a flood on that scale — one that swept away cities — must have seemed to be end of their world. Mud tablets (the first books) found in the ruins of the Mesopotamian city of Nineveh contain The Epic of Gilgamesh, which includes a story of how the gods decided to wipe out mankind with a flood, but one man named Utnapishtim, his family, and his animals were saved. Is this the same story as the Bible’s account of Noah and the Flood? Not exactly, but many scholars think the tale of Utnapishtim may be an earlier version of the same legend.

Farming worked only if the people came back to the places where they planted the seeds to harvest the crop. Eventually, they stuck around. With the promise of a regular food supply, it was easier for nomadic people to stop wandering and establish roots in agricultural villages (pun intended).

Something ironic happened in North Africa over the thousands of years when the agricultural lifestyle was taking hold. The weather slowly changed so that it rained less. Grasslands gave way to sand. Over many generations, fewer seeds sprouted, and fewer sprouts matured; ultimately, villages rose and fell without people being aware of what was happening to the world around them. As the climate changed, more and more folks gathered up the kids (and the goats, assuming that they’d caught onto that crazy new domestic-animal trend) and headed into Asia and the Middle East. In northeastern Africa, they crowded into a sliver of land with a terrific source of water: the Nile.