Syrian History   Rivalries About a Cradle The oldest remains testifying to human settlement in Syria go as far back as one million years. They were unearthed in the valleys of the Orontes and the Nahr-el-Kebir on riverbanks. We are still very far from the roughly two million, three hundred thousand years which is the age of the famous « Lucy», exhumed in the valley of the Omo in Ethiopia. Actually, in Syria there is a huge gap of 400 to 500,000 years between the hardly visible signs of settlement we mentioned and the oldest evidence of an extended human activity. This will carry us back to Paleolithic, and in particular, to the site of EI-Latamneh in the valley of the Orontes, but also to some other places. Let us skip this period to reach the early Neolithic age which is particularly interesting in this part of the universe. Because of various excavations, Syria claims, at least in its present state of knowledge, the title of the oldest « country » in the world where Man ended his nomadic life to settle down in hamlets and villages. This is a particularly important moment in the evolution of mankind to the credit of a culture called the Natoufian which spread its area of influence from the Nile to the Euphrates, between 10,000 and 8,200 B.C. The Decisive Jump The most representative Syrian site of Natoufian culture was established around the middle of the 9th millenium B.C. in the valley of the Euphrates, in the place called Muraybet. Man had not yet made the decisive jump which made him into a farmer. He still remained attached to his old methods of existance, living from the proceeds of hunting, fishing, and seasonal picking of wild fruits, but his range of action was limited by his sedentarization. He found enough to eat in game (bovine, wild boar, gazella, deer, fish and mollusks,) so he did not have to travel far to fetch food. This solution eventually led man to cultivating his first plants. This took place in Muraybet about 7,800 B.C., at least in the present state of research on fossilled pollens. Other places in this area of the world claim to have been the cradle of agriculture, such as Jericho in the Jordan valley in Palestine, Tell Assouad, 40 kms Northeast of Damascus, and some sites in Kurdistan. Whatever this precedence, Muraybet has the advantage of letting us witness, if we may say so, the passage from the pre-agricultural stage to a social organization based on the production of food.     Next
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