It was not until after the end of the Ice Age, about 11,600 years ago (or 9,600 BCE) that cities came into being, arising in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, in what is now the countries of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and parts of Egypt, Turkey, and Iran. The oldest cities are Damascus in Syria (established between 10,000 and 8,000 BCE) and Jericho in the Jordan Valley (established around 9,000 BCE). Other ancient cities include Eridu, Uruk and Ur, all located in present-day Iraq and all part of the ancient kingdom of Sumeria, which were established later, between 5,400 and 3,800 BCE.
Given that settling down to farm the land was so bad for people (as shown by the state of their teeth), you might wonder why cities arose at all. After all, farming is back-breaking work. The type of crops that lend themselves to farming all contain carbohydrates (which is why they are so bad for your teeth.) And all of this settling down means that people have much less variety of food to eat than their nomadic neighbors.
So why would anyone do it?
The short answer is because it saved time.
Nomads were wanderers, people who didn’t live in any one place but moved from place to place. Some of them practiced transhumance farming, where they would move their animals up to higher hills or mountains in the summer, and lower valleys in the winter.
But the more ancient tradition is of wandering without necessarily having a fixed place in mind. This flexibility allows people to keep away from places that experience difficult conditions like floods, drought and fires. It allows them to take advantage of a variety of different foods that appear at different times of the year. But it is also true that nomads spend a great deal of time looking for that food.
Of course, the environment that nomads inhabit is harsh. They don’t live in dwellings. The most they would do (like the Mongols) is have some kind of portable housing like tents that can be easily carried from place to place. If you live on the Mongolian plateau, you will experience the brutal cold of winter, with nighttime lows dropping as far as minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And, you will have to endure sharing the land with dangerous animals, like wolves, bears, lions and tigers.
In such a harsh climate, nomadic men do not have the luxury of telling half of the population not to “bother your pretty little head about it, dear.” Everyone has to contribute to survival. Which means that women are important members of society, having an equal or near-equal status to men.
But when people settle down to farm, things change.
Stayed tuned for Part II of this essay ~ The Role of Women in Settled Cultures ~ which will appear next week.
MAIDEN FORGOTTEN, Book 2 of my TWELVE CURSED MAIDENS series drops on Amazon on 12 January 2027.
