The Attacking Ocean (9 page)

As humans settled on the delta, changes wrought by the river and ocean became more muted. By 4500 B.C.E., the Mediterranean was still about ten meters below modern levels, the river gradient was somewhat steeper than today, and the climate was somewhat wetter. However, sea level rise continued more slowly and the delta’s gradient shallowed around 2000 B.C.E. as the climate became significantly drier. No less than five river channels still deposited large quantities of silt along the coast. Two thousand years later, at about the time of Christ, the sea level was only about two meters below modern levels. Extensive wetlands continued to flourish along a coast increasingly shaped by waves and sea level fluctuations. As the climate became drier, so the lagoons and lakes by the coast continued to be a major source of fish, waterfowl, and other foods.

RISING SEA LEVELS and river silt shaped Ta-Mehu and its wetlands, but ultimately it was humans who turned the delta, and all of Egypt, into what one can accurately call an organized oasis. The process took many centuries and continues to this day.

Fifteen thousand years ago, when the Ice Age ended, the entire human population of the Nile valley from the Sudan to the Mediterranean was probably little more than a thousand souls. They lived in small bands, scattered in large hunting territories along the Nile banks. As sea levels rose and the river filled the valley with sediment, hunting populations increased, especially in favored areas, one of which must have been the coastal wetlands of the delta. But the human imprint would have been faint. Smoke from a fire at the edge of the reeds, dogs barking, the occasional fisher spearing catfish in shallow water: the people of the delta relied on a highly portable tool kit and would have moved from place to place within large territories depending on the season of the year.

The blossom of the lotus, the delta, was open to a much wider eastern Mediterranean world, where farming began before 9000 B.C.E. At the time when agriculture began to spread rapidly throughout the Middle East after 8000 B.C.E., the delta was still an arid floodplain with a rapidly changing coastline, which may have made farming a difficult proposition until sea level rise slowed around 5500 B.C.E. and floodwaters and silt nourished the flat and hitherto infertile terrain. Most likely, most hunting bands living near the mouth of the Nile settled close to the wetlands behind the coast, where fish and waterfowl, as well as reeds and plant foods, abounded. The situation was like that in Doggerland and southern Mesopotamia, where the rich food resources of marshes formed by interaction of rivers and a rising ocean created a swath of wetland environments. In such landscapes, whether in Europe or in Mediterranean lands, farming may have begun as a side activity to supplement a diet of game, fish, and plants, with the foods close at hand in the wetlands serving as backup against crop failure.

Farming soon began to play a more prominent role in human existence. The Nile world changed completely within a thousand years. No one knows when farming first came to the isolated world of the Nile valley. We can never prove it, thanks to deep silt accumulations, but most likely Egypt’s first farming communities developed close to Ta-Mehu’s marshlands in the shifting landscape of the northern delta. At first, there would have been few changes. Every day, fishers standing in canoes would spear fish in quiet lagoons. In winter, the villagers would trap
waterfowl or hunt them with bows and arrows as migrants arrived by the thousand. Thus it had been for centuries, and so it continued, except for patches of cleared ground close to small, huddled villages of reed huts, where wheat would ripen in winter. Like the ancestors of the Marsh Arabs in southern Mesopotamia (see
chapter 4
), such communities must have continued to flourish for many centuries, deep into the time of the pharaohs, people on the margins, protected from the outside world by narrow channels and thick reeds.
¹⁰

Elsewhere farming soon transformed daily life. Fish and game were still important. The farmers went out at dawn after waterfowl with stone-tipped arrows or after fish with spears. Everyone continued to dwell in low reed-and-matting houses partially sunk into the ground. The small fields lay close to the water, the crops harvested with flint-bladed sickles in spring, the grain stored in subterranean pits, where archaeologists found seeds thousands of years later. These humble farming settlements, whether along the great river or around the wetlands and lakes of the deltas, were the forebears of the thousands of agricultural villages that supported the elaborate panoply of ancient Egyptian civilization in later times.

Some of the delta’s shadowy wetland communities thrived for many centuries, but other farmers flourished in the delta away from the marshes, growing crops in the months after the inundation. We have a fleeting portrait of one such village named Merimde Beni-salame, northwest of Cairo, occupied as early as 4800 B.C.E., where farmers dwelled for as long as a thousand years.
¹¹
Like the earliest farmers in Mesopotamia (see
chapter 4
), the Merimde people relied heavily on local raw materials, especially reeds. They lived in small wattle-and-reed huts with oval floor plans. We can imagine a huddled settlement of weathered, circular dwellings set near marshy terrain, surrounded by small fields and tucked among tall reeds, standing on slightly higher ground that remained dry during the inundation. In the hot and humid late summer, the waters would recede, the stubble from the previous crop would appear in the fields. Standing ankle-deep in the floodwaters, men and women would turn over the rich black soil and the freshly deposited silt with digging sticks and stone-bladed hoes. If the inundation was bountiful, green shoots
of the new wheat crop would appear in the damp earth a few weeks after planting.

There were dozens of small farming villages like Merimde across the delta by 4000 B.C.E., places where life remained unchanged for many generations, governed by the waters of the Nile. Come late summer, floodwaters from far upstream would reach the delta, overflow from braided river channels, and settle over harvested fields. As the inundation receded, fine silt suspended in the water would descend on the cleared land. Most years, the villagers would divert the water from plot to plot with small dikes, turning the wet ground with digging sticks and stone-bladed houses for the new crop. Then came planting, growth, and, months later, harvest, an endless cycle of backbreaking labor even in good flood years. The annual waters flushed out salt from the ground; the river silt fertilized the soil and helped keep the ocean at bay.

Each village was a seemingly isolated community, but ancient kin ties and complex marriage and social relationships linked settlements near and far. Everyone living in the delta must have been aware of a wider world far beyond the confines of wetlands and small fields. This awareness came by word of mouth, from travelers in canoes, who had visited larger settlements, and in the form of occasional exotic artifacts such as lustrous copper ornaments and axes brought to the Nile from far beyond the horizon.

From the beginning, Ta-Mehu was a crossroads, its people wedded both to the Nile and to the world beyond the ocean. Perhaps the first traders to visit the delta arrived on donkeys from across the Sinai. They carried copper and semiprecious stones, shiny obsidian prized as tool-making stone, and small exotica such as lustrous beads easily carried in saddlebags. The delta and the valley upstream were treeless, except for palms, a world where everyone traveled by water in flat-bottomed boats. Prevailing northerly winds carried cargoes and people to towns and petty kingdoms up the Nile. The current brought them downstream. It was a matter of time before some of these rivercraft ventured out on the ocean, coasting laboriously to the east, where Lebanon’s fabled cedars were already widely prized.

By 3500 B.C.E., some delta settlements were much larger, especially
an eighteen-hectare town and cemetery at Maadi, now under a suburb of Cairo, one of several sites of this age in the region.
¹²
The inhabitants were above all farmers and herders, but the artifacts from the settlement reveal a kind of cultural crossroads—clay vessels from Upper Egypt and the desert, flint tools like those made in the Levant, and numerous copper objects, not only simple artifacts like needles, but also axheads that now replace stone ones, the ore coming from the southeastern corner of the Sinai Peninsula. At another center, ninety-five kilometers west of Alexandria, there are signs of an increasing social complexity, as Egyptian society developed its own distinctive beliefs and, eventually, pharaonic ideology.
¹³

THE MOST DRAMATIC sea level changes after the Ice Age culminated with the final inundation of Doggerland, with the severing of the Bering Strait and the flooding of continental shelves off Asia, eastern North America, and elsewhere. Fortunately for humanity, only a few million people lived on earth, almost all of them hunters, gatherers, and fisher-folk, who yielded to the attacking sea. Except in a few more densely populated environments like Baltic shores, there was space enough for all in a warming world marked by all manner of environmental changes. By 6000 B.C.E., sea level rise was slowing, with fewer dramatic changes, except for rare events like the flooding of the Euxine Lake. Nevertheless, our vulnerability to sea level change increased slowly over thousands of years of major and minor environmental changes and steady population growth.

Nowhere does one discern this more clearly than in Ta-Mehu, the Egyptian delta, where the sea battled with the Nile. The river ponded as the Mediterranean rose. Silt accumulated, and farmers irrigated the new land. The sediment-rich soil and the eternal rhythm of the annual inundation laid the foundations for ancient Egyptian civilization. For thousands of years, the delta served as a granary, and urban and rural populations mushroomed. All was well until sea levels rose more aggressively in modern times, creating a time bomb of human vulnerability to a newly aggressive ocean.

4
“Marduk Laid a Reed on the Face of the Waters”

Marduk, Creator of the universe and of humankind, lord of thunderstorms, presided over the primordial cosmos between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the great rivers of Mesopotamia. He defeated the dragons of chaos and fashioned the spiritual and human world of the Sumerians, the first city dwellers on earth:

And then he created humans:

Blood I will mass and cause bones to be.

I will establish a savage, ‘man’ shall be his name.

Verily savage man I will create.

He shall be charged with the service of the gods.
¹

Mesopotamian civilization developed in a patchwork of small city-states on the floodplain between the Euphrates and Tigris in what is now southern Iraq over five thousand years ago. Sumerian lords presided over a harsh, tumultuous landscape of violent storms and sudden floods. Their civilization arose in an incubator of extreme temperatures, dense marshes, deserts, and rising sea levels, a recipe for cosmic and environmental chaos if ever there was one. Yet this complex, oft-changing landscape of conflict between salt- and freshwater nurtured some of the earliest cities on earth.

According to Sumerian legend, Marduk, “most potent and wisest of gods,” mounted his storm chariot and forged order out of chaos with floods, lightning, and tempest. Order and chaos, great marshes, the threat of flood and renewed violence in the natural world and the cosmic
realm: The Sumerians lived in a green and well-watered land, but at the mercy of violent rivers and changing sea levels. Only the Tigris and Euphrates with their floods made habitation possible on an arid plain besieged by climatic extremes where summer temperatures regularly soar to a humid 49 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit) and winters bring violent storms, heavy rain, and chilling temperatures. The great rivers emptied into a marshy delta before flowing into the Persian Gulf, the so-called Lower Sea. These marshes and the rising waters of the Gulf played a significant, even decisive, role in the rise of civilization.

THE STORY BEGINS in the Lower Sea. Twenty-one thousand years ago, at the final climax of the Ice Age, the Persian Gulf was almost entirely dry land, an arid depression with only one river flowing through its deepest axis in an incised canyon to the Gulf of Oman that was over a hundred meters lower than today.
²
Scientists call this watercourse the Ur-Schatt, made up as it was of the modern-day Euphrates, Karun, and Tigris Rivers. Where there is now a clogged river delta at the head of the Gulf there were only narrow floodplains on either side of rivers hurrying their way downstream, following relatively steep gradients.

Sea levels here rose after fifteen thousand years ago, as they did elsewhere in the world. The rise appears to have averaged about a centimeter a year until about 7000 B.C.E., when the rate of climb slowed. A centimeter a year does not seem like much, but the cumulative effects of even a quarter century’s rise would have been noticeable across flatter terrain, where seawater would have spread more rapidly horizontally than vertically. Six thousand years of rapid sea level change had a dramatic effect on the basin that was to become the Persian Gulf. The first four thousand years filled the deeply incised canyon of the Ur-Schatt in its lower and middle reaches. Subsequently the rising ocean inundated the broader and shallower parts of the region. Water spread laterally at a rate of about 110 meters annually, one of the fastest such climbs anywhere in the post–Ice Age world. At times before the final slowing after about 7000 B.C.E., the lateral transgression over flatter terrain may have exceeded nearly a kilometer a year.