ENVIRONMENT
In this lecture
I will discuss the implications of the tangible physical environment on our
material, daily lives and as it helps mold intangible aspects of human culture,
individual and group identity in the Ancient Middle East.
Summary of the dichotomous land/climatic types - desert and
oasis - that generally characterize the Middle East.
OASIS DESERT
a) Descriptive
Tame Wild
Verdant Bare
Fertile Barren
Confined Open
b) Socio-Cultural
Cultivated Uncultivated
Watered Dry
Civilized Barbaric
Settled Nomadic
Protected Vulnerable
c) Overall
Mental/Emotional Impact
Dramatic
Harsh
Threatening
Dominating
Spiritual
Together these physical, cultural and subjective qualities
comprise the environment of the Middle East as understood by its human
inhabitants. Together the help shape
their social and cosmological experience.
1. First, what is the natural environment?
2. We would all probably answer that it
includes:
- Geography
- Topography - land and water forms
- Climate
- Natural Resources: Vegetation
Animal
Minerals
-Relationship with the wider universe -
stars, planets, sun.
3. Impact: Physical Context
In terms of
impact on human culture we would most likely and correctly understand that the
specific physical environmental context within which we live would influence
our material lives and even potential prosperity to a considerable extent:
- farming or ranching potential
- what is available to eat
- the materials we use for building
homes
- the natural resources that we
trade.
4. Impact: Fluctuations
Also, we would understand that some
physical phenomena are unpredictable and can greatly affect our lives:
Droughts or Floods
Earthquakes
Storms
Tidal waves etc.
This material
impact is probably the aspect of the physical environment that appears most
immediate to our daily experience and is familiar as an important influence our
daily lives.
C.
Material Aspect of Ancient Mid East Culture
1. This is of course even truer in the case of
non- industrial people like the people of the Ancient Middle East who are much
more directly affected by their environments and their fluctuations.
2. Every aspect of their material world was
molded to a large extent by their environmental limitations and opportunities:
- The environment dictated what plants and
animals were available for domestication and farming
- The deserts and great rivers determined
where people could live and what types of technologies they would have to
invent to irrigate their arid lands
- The overall distribution of natural
resources dictated their economic potentials
- Geography dictated the
trading routes through a largely inhospitable land and whether one could travel
by land, sea or river.
- It also to a large
extent influenced whether people could create large unified political states
- areas of unified geography with good communications and naturally
defensible borders like Egypt or people would have to live in vulnerable areas
of easy access to potential neighbors like much of Mesopotamia.
Thus as we will see throughout the course the physical
environment played a vital role in influencing the material lives of the people
of the Middle East.
D. Psychological
Manifestation
Natural Landscape as
Human Interpretation
1. But there is another
part to the question that I posed "What is the natural environment?"
and it lays in the realm of the human mind and more especially in the
psychological aspect of our experience as social and encultured beings.
2. First, on a simple
level, we should rephrase the question to ask: "In what sense does the
natural world exist for us as aware human individuals and groups?"
3. While there is in an
absolute sense a physical environment that exists with or without humans to
inhabit it, to us it only exists when we have experienced it through our senses
- vision, smell, touch. This sensed
reality is then understood through our minds.
4. This is an
interpretive act and explains why different artists for instance see the same
piece of landscape in very different ways.
It also explains why each of us has experienced unique feelings and
emotions from personal experience of a natural feature or context that may
leave others unmoved.
E. Human Landscape as Culture.
1. However, this also
works on the group or cultural level, It also explains why many of the people
who live in a certain environment share emotions and feelings about the place
they live in and are affected similarly by it.
For instance the Southwest brings a set of shared emotions very
different from the eastern woodlands.
2. More specifically, it
also explains why many people see specific natural features as sacred to
particular groups. While a feature may
be physically no different than its fellows, it carries special significance on
the mental plane to its group. In this
mental sense people and place are just two linked and interdependent parts of a
single cultural environment.
3. Thus natural environment
is more than a passive context within which the story of our daily lives and
group histories is written. It also
plays a very active role in shaping the cultural mentalities and group
psychologies of the people who inhabit it.
4. Thus we must bear
these two complementary aspects of the natural environment in mind when looking
at the archaeology and history of the people of the Middle east - together they
explain the great differences between the Mesopotamian and Egyptian outlook on
life as expressed in their art, writing, social formations and archaeological
remains.
5.
For example: Egyptians felt relatively secure in their
geographically-circumscribed Nile Valley with its predictable climate and
hydrological pattern and built a society based on cosmology that reflected this
sense of order, balance and immutability.
- In
their writings they contrasted their fortunate situation with their less
fortunate neighbors – the “barbaric” Asiatics.
6.
By contrast Mesopotamians lived in a more volatile physical world where
earthquake, flood and drought were frequent and their towns were easily
accessible and vulnerable to their nomadic neighbors of the eastern
highlands. This is reflected in a sense
of insecurity and vulnerability to the forces of nature that are manifested as
the divinities whose actions brought either peace or plenty or war and famine
(Enki – capricious god of sweet water, Enlil god of storm).
7. Place. The natural environment also contained
specific places (unique and general) that were sacred to their inhabitant
(“sacred geography”). These were
incorporated into Middle Eastern belief systems and exerted varying degrees of
influence on statecraft, religion and daily life.
For example:
- The primordial mound of mud from which Egypt was created
symbolizes the life-giving fertility of the Nile Valley and appears in symbolic
form in Egyptian temples as a central element of religion.
- The Egyptian Capital- Memphis- was located in a vital
geographical place – the conjunction of the Nile Valley with its Delta
(present-day Cairo). This was
conceptualized as the place where the dead king Osiris was found and brought
back to life by his sister Isis with whom the engendered the living divine king
Horus. The place thus integrates the
physical and metaphysical themes central to the ideology of Egyptian divine
kingship.
- On a more general level all Sumerian
cities were the property of divinities, thus were sacred places. Their administrations (the “manor estates of
the gods”) were seen as mirroring the divine order on earth; thus they were
symbols of the cosmological order of Sumer.
- Enki as god of the
sweet water was present in all irrigation and river water. Thus the divinity of this “general” but
vital place was omnipresent in Sumerian everyday life.
F
The Environment of the Middle East
1. In this section of
today’s lecture I describe the chief geographic and climatic features that
influenced the history of human life in the greater region.
2. First distances.
- 1000 miles between
mouths of Nile and Tigris/Euphrates
- 2500 miles between
southern Egypt and the Upper Indus R.
- 1500 miles between
mouths of Indus and Tigris/Euphrates
3. Yet all of these
areas while developing distinctive cultures were in touch with each other
throughout much of their histories through direct or indirect contact. We thus have a basic feature of our course -
the interactions of very different histories within a general course of
cultural evolution.
4. The greater area of
our study is very diverse yet is enclosed within quite clear borders that
enclose rather confined set of possibilities for human life and separate them
from very different forms.
5. Internally contains consistent geographical
patterns whereby pairs of environmental forms alternate to encourage their
human inhabitants towards inventing the techniques and life-styles that
ultimately led to the 3rd millennium civilizations.
6. Borders:
North: Black Sea and Caucasus Mountains
The great steppe lands and deserts of
Central Asia
East: Himalayas and Tropical Indian Plains
South: Arabian Sea
and Tropical Africa
West: Sahara Desert, Mediterranean, and Damp
forested Europe
7. Internal Pattern:
Alternating lowland
desert-mountain-high plateau regions with lowland deserts traversed by great
river systems:
- Egypt and
Mesopotamia traversed by Nile and Tigris/Euphrates Rivers and bounded by
Levantine Mountains, Anatolian Plateau in west and Zagros Mountains and Iranian
Plateau in East.
- Iranian Plateau and its peripheral mountain ranges (Baluchi
Highlands and Kopet Dags) separating Indus Valley and central Asian well
watered areas.
8. In this juxtaposition
the highland areas and adjacent lowland desert River Valleys are for most of
our period most important for understanding the development of complex
societies while the intervening plateaus and seas are important in
understanding the mature of interaction between the areas.
9. Highlands of Levant,
Anatolia, Zagros, Kopet Dags and Baluchistan were the areas that your reading
splits into piedmont, semi-arid highlands, foothills, and intermontaine
valleys. These generally possessed
enough rainfall to support dry farming extending from sparse scrub and
grassland to open stands of forest higher up and were the natural habitat for
the grasses and animals whose domestication provided the basis for settled life
after 8500 BC.
10. Later the alluvial
valleys of Nile, Tigris/Euphrates, Indus, Northern slopes of Kopet Dags became
the homes for great urban civilizations after 4000 B.C. Provided abundant water that through
irrigation could support great population densities.
11.
Broken Plateaus, especially Iran, became the entrepots for trade and
supported locally precocious societies based on the production and shipment of
trade items across the region. Also the
nomadic way of life possible in these zones interacted with the settled areas
in a symbiotic economic and social pattern that persists till today. The
nomad’s flocks providing necessary dairy, textile and meat resources while the
cities provided water in dry periods, grains and manufactured goods. Nomads also operated many of the
long-distance caravan routes that linked the great river valleys.
12.
Coastal societies of the Persian Gulf such as Bahrain, Oman, (Dilmun)
did the same by connecting the river valley civilizations by sea and providing
these connecting routes with stopover points along the way. These seaports also grew prosperous as
middlemen along the great sea-routes.