Two years ago, I had a science teacher who maintained that the Middle East was a lost cause, believing it was in a perpetual state of war since the moment it was settled. Along with illustrating that having a science degree does not make you qualified to talk about history, this also showed something depressing: most of what the average American knows about the Middle East is either false or extremely distorted. With this blog series on the history of the Middle East, I hope to rectify that.
We’re going to start at the beginning. ‘Ain Ghazal. Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of it, I just learned about it a week ago. However, I would like to use it to illustrate something. Almost every American knows about Jamestown: it was the first “Successful European settlement in America”. In order to make the city stand out, three qualifiers had to be attached. Successful, as the Vikings tried and failed to settle the Americas; European, as the Olmec had a thriving culture that predated Jamestown by over three thousand years; and in America, as a large number of European cities predated it. ‘Ain Ghazal? It doesn’t need any qualifiers. It was the first.
Located in the northwestern region of present-day Jordan, ‘Ain Ghazal is the oldest known city. No loopholes. ‘Ain Ghazal was settled in the Neolithic period, around 7200 BCE, and because of its age and the fact that writing would not be invented for another four thousand years, much of the city’s history remains a mystery. It was discovered in the 1970s, and underwent excavation in the 1980s and 1990s. From these excavations, we know that they made statues, because the statues have been found in the ruins. We know they had paint, because the statues were painted. We know they made houses out of mud brick, because those were the ruins. Furthermore, archeological evidence indicates that they farmed and supplementing their diet via domesticated goats. Right there, you see two important innovations that are still used today: farming, and domestication of animals. All Jamestown gave us was several new and interesting ways to starve to death.
