"The history of man is divided very unequally." "There is his biological evolution." "All the steps that separate us from our ape ancestors." "Those occupied some millions of years." "And then there is his cultural history." "All that separates us from the few surviving hunting tribes of Africa, or food gatherers of Australia." "And all that enormous cultural gap is, in fact, crowded into a few thousand years." "It's extraordinary to think that only in the last 12,000 years has civilisation, as we understand it, taken off." "There must have been an extraordinary explosion in 10000 BC." "And there was." "It was a quiet explosion." "It was the end of the last ice age." "This is spring in Iceland." "Which replays itself every year." "But which played itself once over Europe and Asia when the ice retreated." "And man, who had come through these incredible hardships, had marched up from Africa over the last million years, had battled through three ice ages, suddenly found the ground flowering, the animals surrounding him." "And moved into a different kind of life." "It's usually called the agricultural revolution." "But I think of it as something much wider - the biological revolution." "There was intertwined in it the cultivation of plants, and the domestication of animals, in a kind of leap frog." "And under this ran the crucial realisation that man dominates his environment in its most important aspect." "Not physically, but at the level of living things, plants and animals." "With that, there comes an equally powerful social revolution." "Because now it became possible..." "More than that, it became necessary for man to settle." "And this creature that had roved and marched for a million years, had to make the crucial decision:" "Whether he would cease to be a nomad and become a villager." "We have an anthropological record of the struggle of conscience of a people who makes this decision." "The record is the Bible." "The Old Testament." "As for people who never made it, there are few survivors." "There are some nomad tribes who still go through these vast transhumance journeys from one grazing ground to another " "the Bakhtiari in Persia for example." "And you have actually to travel with them and live with them to understand that civilisation can never grow up on the move." "Everything in nomad life is immemorial." "The Bakhtiari have always travelled alone." "Quite unseen." "Like other nomads, they think of themselves as a family." "The sons of a single founding father." "The Jews used to call themselves the children of Israel or Jacob." "The Bakhtiari take their name from a legendary herdsman of Mongol times," "Bakhtyar." ""And the father of our people, the hill man Bakhtyar, came out of the fastness of the southern mountains in ancient times." "His seed was numerous as the rocks on the mountains and his people prospered."" "The patriarch Jacob had two wives and he worked as a herdsman for seven years for each of them." "Compare the patriarch of the Bakhtiari." "His first wife had seven sons." ""Fathers of the seven brother lines of our people."" "His second wife had four sons." ""And our sons shall take for wives the daughters from the father's brothers' tents, lest the flocks and the tents be dispersed."" "Sheep and goats were first domesticated about 10,000 years ago." "Only the dog is an older camp follower than that." "The life of the nomads is an endless struggle." "An endless ritual to live by keeping their animals alive." "The object of the system of cross-cousin marriage, for example, is to ensure that the flock and the simple technology that goes with it is preserved within the family." "The Bakhtiari bake bread in the biblical manner, in unleavened cakes on hot stones." "The girls and the women wait to eat until the men have eaten." "The function of women is to produce men children." "Too many she-children are a misfortune." "They threaten disaster." "Like the men, the lives of the women centre on the flock." "They have only the simple technology that can be carried on daily journeys from place to place." "They milk the herd and they make yoghurt from the milk by churning it in a goatskin bag on a primitive wooden frame." "The simplicity is not romantic." "It's a matter of survival." "When the women spin wool, with their simple, ancient devices, it's for immediate use, to make the repairs that are essential on the journey and no more." "(Simple repetitive tune)" "The Bakhtiari life is too narrow to have time or skill for specialisation." "If they need metal pots, they barter them from settled people." "A nail, a stirrup, a toy... or a child's bell..." "is something that is got from outside the tribe." "There is no room for innovation, because there is not time between evening and morning to develop a new device or a new thought." "Not even a new tune." "The only habits that survive are the old habits." "The only ambition of the son is to be like the father." "It's a life without features." "Every night is the end of a day like the last." "And every morning will be the beginning of a journey like the day before." "(Cock crows)" "When the day breaks, there is one question." "Can the flock be got over the next high pass?" "This is the pass Zadeku, 12,000 feet high, which the flock must somehow struggle through." "The tribe must move on." "The herdsmen must find new pastures every day," "Because at these heights, grazing is exhausted in a single day." "The Bakhtiari undertake a journey of 250 miles every spring over the high mountain passes to reach their summer pastures." "And in the autumn, they will come all the way back." "Before 10000 BC, nomad peoples used to follow the natural migration of wild herds - as the Lapps still follow the reindeer." "But sheep and goats have no natural migrations." "When man domesticated them, he took on the responsibility of nature." "The nomad must lead the helpless herd." "They crossed six ranges of mountains." "They marched through snow and the spring flood water." "And in only one respect has their life advanced beyond 10,000 years ago." "They have pack animals, horses, donkeys, mules, which have only been domesticated since that time." "Nothing else in their lives is new." "And nothing is memorable." "Nomads have no memorials, even to the dead." "Where was Jacob buried?" "The only mounds that they build are to mark the way." "This is the pass of the women." "Treacherous but easier than the high pass." "It's a heroic adventure and yet the Bakhtiari are not so much heroic as stoic." "Resigned because the adventure leads nowhere." "The summer pastures themselves will only be a stopping place." "There is no promised land." "Who knows in any one year whether the old, when they've crossed the pass, will be able to face the final test?" "The crossing of the Bazuft River." "Three months of meltwater have swollen the river." "The tribesmen, the pack animals, the women, and the flocks are all exhausted." "It will take a day to manhandle the flocks across the river." "The head of the family has worked seven years, as Jacob did, to build a flock of 50 sheep and goats." "He expects to lose ten of them in the migration, if things go well." "If they go badly, he may lose 20 out of his flock of 50." "Those are the odds of nomad life, year in and year out." "And beyond that, at the end of the journey, there will still be nothing except an immense traditional resignation." "But this here now is the testing day." "Today is the day on which the young become men." "Because the survival of the herd and the family depends on their strength." "Crossing the Bazuft River is like crossing the Jordan." "It's the baptism to manhood." "For the young men, life for a moment comes alive here." "And for the old... for the old, it dies." "~ SHOSTAKOVICH:" "Symphony No5 Opus 47" "What happens to the old when they can 't cross the last river?" "Nothing." "They stay to die." "Only the dog is puzzled to see a man abandoned." "The man accepts the nomad custom." "He has come to the end of his journey." "The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture." "What made that possible?" "An act of will by men surely." "But with that a strange and secret act of nature." "At the end of the ice age, a hybrid wheat appeared in the Middle East." "It happened in many places, a typical one is the ancient oasis of Jericho." "Jericho is older than agriculture." "The first people that came here and settled by the spring in this otherwise desolate foreground were people who harvested wheat, but did not yet know how to plant it." "That's an extraordinary piece of foresight." "They made sickles which have survived out of flint." "Garstang found these when he was digging here in the 1930s." "The holders in which these were fitted have been found." "And so I've reconstructed the kind of sickle with which they went out and found the wild wheat and harvested it." "Here it is." "The ancient sickle edges set in a modern piece of gazelle horn of the kind that they used, or they used bone." "There no longer survives up here on the tell the kind of wild wheat that they harvested." "But the grasses that are still here must look very like the wheat that they found." "That they gathered for the first time by the fistful and cut with that sawing motion of the sickle that reapers have used for all the 10,000 years since then." "That was the Natufian pre-agricultural civilisation and of course it couldn 't last." "It was on the brink of becoming agriculture and that's the next thing that happened here on the Jericho tell." "The turning point of the spread of agriculture in the old world was almost certainly the occurrence of two forms of wheat with a large, full head of seeds." "Before 8000 BC, wheat was not the luxuriant plant it is today." "It was merely one of many wild grasses that spread throughout the Middle East." "The time-lapse film shows six weeks of growth of a primitive wild wheat of this kind." "By some genetic accident, the wild wheat crossed with a natural goat grass and formed a fertile hybrid." "That accident must have happened many times in the springing vegetation that came up after the last ice age." "In terms of the genetic machinery that directs growth, it combined the 14 chromosomes of wild wheat with the 14 chromosomes of goat grass and produced emmer with 28 chromosomes." "That's what makes emmer so much plumper." "The hybrid was able to spread naturally, because its seeds are attached to the husk in such a way that they scatter in the wind." "For such a hybrid to be fertile is rare, but not unique among plants." "But now the story of the rich plant life that followed the ice age becomes more surprising." "There was a second genetic accident, which may have come about because emmer was already cultivated." "Emmer crossed with another natural goat grass and produced a still larger hybrid with 42 chromosomes, which is bread wheat." "That was improbable enough in itself." "And we know now that bread wheat would not have been fertile but for a specific genetic mutation on one chromosome." "Yet there's something even stranger." "Now, we have a beautiful ear of wheat, but one which will never spread in the wind." "Because the ear is too tight to break up." "And if I do break it up, why, then the chaff flies off and every grain falls exactly where it grew." "Can I just remind you that's quite different from the primitive wheats like emmer." "You see, the ear is much more open." "And if this ear breaks up, then you get quite a different effect..." "You get grains which will fly in the wind." "The bread wheats have lost that ability." "Suddenly man and the plant have come together." "Man has a wheat that he lives by, but the wheat also thinks that man was made for him, because only so can it be propagated." "That happened about 10,000 years ago." "And it happened in the fertile crescent of the Middle East of which this is a characteristic piece." "This is the ancient sweet water city of Jericho." "The oasis on the edge of the desert whose spring has been running from prehistoric times right into the modern city." "Here man began civilisation." "Here, too, the Bedouins came with their dark muffled faces out of the desert, looking jealously at the new way of life." "That's why Joshua brought the tribes of Israel here on their way to the Promised Land." "Because wheat and water, they make civilisation, they make the promise of the land flowing with milk and honey." "Wheat and water turned that barren hillside into the oldest city of the world." "All at once, Jericho is transformed." "People come and almost at once become the envy of their neighbours." "So they have to fortify Jericho, turn it into a walled city and build 9,000 years ago this stupendous tower." "The tower is 30ft across at the base, and, of course, well over 30ft in depth." "And climbing up beside it, layer upon layer of past civilisation." "The early pre-pottery men, the next pre-pottery men, the coming of pottery 7,000 years ago." "Early copper." "Early bronze." "Middle bronze." "Each of these civilisations came, conquered Jericho, buried it and built itself up." "So that we are under 45ft of past civilisations." "When Kathleen Kenyon rediscovered this ancient tower in the 1950s, she found that it was hollow." "And, to me, this staircase is a sort of taproot, a peephole to the rock base of civilisation." "And the rock base of civilisation is the living being, not the physical one." "By 6000 BC, Jericho was a large agricultural settlement." "Kathleen Kenyon estimates that it contained 3,000 people and covered eight or ten acres within the walls." "The women ground the wheat with the heavy stone implements that characterise a settled community." "The men shaped, patted and moulded the clay for these bricks, some of the earliest known." "The marks of the brick-maker's thumb prints are still there." "Man, like the bread wheat, is now fixed in his place." "A settled community also has a different relation to the dead." "The inhabitants of Jericho preserved some skulls, and covered them with elaborate decoration." "No-one knows why, unless it was a reverential action." "No-one who was brought up on the Old Testament, as I was, can leave Jericho without asking two questions." "Did Joshua finally destroy this city?" "And did the walls really come tumbling down?" "Those are the questions that bring people to this site and turn it into a living legend." "To the first question, there's an easy answer." "Yes." "The tribes of Israel were fighting to get into the fertile crescent, which runs up the Mediterranean coast, along the mountains of Anatolia, and down the Tigris and Euphrates." "And here, Jericho was the key that locked their way up the mountains of Judea, and out into the Mediterranean fertile land." "This they had to conquer." "And they did, about 1400 BC - about 3,300, 3,400 years ago." "The story was not written up until perhaps 700 BC." "That is, the Bible story... is about 2,600, 2,700 years old as a written record." "But did the walls come tumbling down?" "We don 't know." "There's no archaeological evidence on this site that suggests that a set of walls one fine day really fell flat." "But many sets of walls did fall all the time." "There is a Bronze Age period here where a set of walls was rebuilt at least 16 times." "Because this is earthquake country." "There are tremors here still every day." "There are four major quakes in a century." "The Bible is a curious history." "Part folklore... and part record." "History is, of course, written... by the victors." "And the Israelis, when they burst through here, became the carriers of history." "The Bible is their story." "The history of a people who had to stop being nomad and pastoral, and had to become an agricultural tribe." "Agriculture creates a technology from which all physics, all science, takes off." "Let me remind you, at the beginning, I showed you two sickles." "And at first glance, they look very much alike." "The sickle of 10,000 years ago of the gatherer and the sickle of 9,000 years ago, when wheat was cultivated." "But look more closely." "The cultivated wheat is sawed... with a serrated edge." "Because if you hit the wheat, then the grains will fall." "But if you gently saw it, the grain will be held in the ear of corn." "And sickles have been made like this ever since then, into my boyhood in the First World War when the curved sickle with the serrated edge was still what you cut wheat with." "Technology like that, physical knowledge like that, comes to us out of every part of the agricultural life." "The most powerful invention in all agriculture is, of course, the plough." "We think of the plough as a wedge dividing the soil." "And the wedge is an important early mechanical invention." "But the plough is also something much more fundamental." "It is a lever which lifts the soil." "And it is the first application of the principle of the lever." "When, long afterwards, Archimedes explained the theory of the lever to the Greeks, he said that with a lever he could move the earth." "But thousands of years before that, the ploughmen of the Middle East had been saying," ""Give me a lever and I will feed the earth."" "Agriculture was invented at least once again much later in America." "But the plough and the wheel were not, because they depend on the draft animal," "The step beyond simple agriculture in the Middle East was the domestication of draft animals." "The wheel is found for the first time before 3000 BC and from then on, the wheel and the axle become the taproot from which invention grows." "For example, it's turned into an instrument for grinding wheat." "And using the forces of nature to do that, the animal forces first, and later the forces of wind and water." "The wheel becomes a model for all motions of rotation." "About the time that Joshua stormed Jericho, the mechanical engineers of Sumer and Assyria turned the wheel into a pulley to draw water." "At the same time they designed large-scale irrigation systems." "The vertical maintenance shafts still survive." "They go down 300ft to the qanats or underground canals that make up the system." "3,000 years after they were made, the village women of Khuzistan still draw their water ration from the qanats and carry on the everyday chores of ancient communities." "They are a late construction of a city civilisation and they imply the existence by then of laws to govern water rights and land tenure and other social relations." "In an agricultural community, the rule of law has a different character from the nomad law that governs the theft of a goat or a sheep." "Now the social structure is bound up with the regulation of matters that affect the community as a whole." "Access to land." "The upkeep and control of waterways." "The right to use, turn and turn about, the precious constructions on which the harvest of the seasons depends." "By now the village artisan has become an inventor in his own right." "He combines the basic mechanical principles in sophisticated tools which are, in effect, early machines." "This is a lathe which is turned by moving a bow to and fro, so that the string rotates the drum that holds a piece of wood, which is scored by a chisel." "The combination is several thousand years old." "But I saw it used by gypsies making chair legs in a wood in England in 1945." "A machine is a device for tapping the power in nature." "That's true of the simplest spindle that the Bakhtiari women carry, all the way to the historic first nuclear reactor and all its busy progeny." "How is it that the machine in its modern form now seems to us a threat?" "It begins when man first harnessed a power greater than his own." "The power of animals." "Every machine is a kind of draft animal, even the nuclear reactor." "It increases the surplus that man has won from nature since the beginning of agriculture." "Agriculture was one part of the biological revolution." "And the domestication and harnessing of village animals was the other." "The animals add a surplus much larger than they consume." "But that's true only so long as the animals remain modestly in their proper station as servants of agriculture." "It's unexpected that the domestic animal should turn out exactly to contain within itself, from now on, the threat to the surplus of grain, by which the settled community lives and survives." "Most unexpected." "Because, after all, it is the ox, the ass as a draft animal, that has helped to create this surplus." "But round about 5,000 years ago, a new draft animal appears, the horse." "And that is out of all proportion." "Faster, stronger, more dominant than any previous animal." "And from now on, that becomes the threat to the village surplus." "The horse had begun by drawing wheeled carts, like the ox, but rather grander, drawing chariots in the processions of kings." "And then, somewhere around 2000 BC, man discovered how to ride it." "They were men out of central Asia " "Persia, Afghanistan and beyond." "In the west, they were simply called Scythians - a terror that swept over the countries that did not know the technique of riding." "The Greeks, when they saw the Scythian riders, believed the horse and the rider to be one." "That's how they invented the legend of the centaur." "We cannot hope to recapture today the terror that the mounted horse struck into the Middle East and eastern Europe when it first appeared." "That's because there is a difference of scale, which I can only compare with the arrival of tanks in Poland in 1939, sweeping all before them." "In a sense, warfare was created by the horse as a nomad activity." "That's what the Huns brought." "That's what the Phrygians brought." "That's what, finally, the Mongols brought." "And brought to a climax under Genghis Khan much later." "The remnants of that remain... in the war games that are still played." "War strategy is always regarded by those who win as kind of game." "And there is played to this day in Afghanistan a game called Buzkashi, which comes from the kind of competitive riding that was carried on by the Mongols." "The men who play the game are professionals." "That is to say, they are retainers." "And they and the horses are trained and kept for the glory of winning." "On a great occasion like this, 300 men from different tribes will come to compete." "Though that has not happened now for 20 or 30 years." "They don 't form teams." "The object of the game is not to prove one group better than another, but to find a champion." "There are famous champions from the past." "And they are remembered." "The president who supervised this game was a champion who no longer played." "This is the president." "He gives his orders through a herald." "(Man shouts in local dialect)" "Where we should expect to see a ball, there is instead a headless calf." "And that macabre plaything says something about the game, as if the riders were making sport of the farmers' livelihood." "The carcass weighs about 50lb." "And the object is to snatch it up, defending it against all challengers, and carry it off through two stages." "The first stage of the game is riding off with the carcass to the fixed boundary flag, and rounding the flag." "After that, the rider heads for home and the goal, which is a marked circle in the centre of the melee." "The game is going to be won by a single goal." "So no quarter is given." "This is not a sporting event." "There's nothing in the rules about fair play." "The tactics are pure Mongol." "A discipline of shock." "The astonishing thing in the game is what routed the armies that faced the Mongols." "That what seems a wild scrimmage is, in fact, full of manoeuvre." "And dissolves suddenly with the winner riding clear to score." "Only after the game is the winner himself carried away by the excitement." "He should have asked the president to sanction the goal." "And by missing that point of etiquette in this uproar, he's jeopardised the victory." "It's nice to know that the goal was allowed." "(Shouts in local dialect)" "(Applause)" "The Buzkashi is a war game." "What makes it electric is the cowboy ethic, riding as an act of war." "It expresses the monomaniac culture of conquest." "The predator posing as hero, because he rides the whirlwind." "But the whirlwind is empty." "Horse or tank, Genghis Khan or Hitler or Stalin, it can only feed on the labours of other men." "~ PROKOFIEV:" "Romeo And Juliet" "(Thunder rumbles)" "And that conjunction says something important about the origins of war in human history." "Of course, it's tempting to close one's eyes to history and instead to speculate about the roots of war in some possible animal instinct." "As if, like the tiger, we still had to kill to live or like the robin red breast, to defend a nesting territory." "But war, organised war, is not a human instinct." "It is a highly planned and co-operative form of theft." "And that form of theft began 10,000 years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide." "The evidence for that we saw in the walled city of Jericho and its prehistoric tower." "That is the beginning of war." "Genghis Khan and his Mongol dynasty brought that thieving way of life into our own millennium." "From 1200 to 1300, they made almost the last attempt to establish the supremacy of the robber who produces nothing and who in his feckless way comes to take from the peasant, who has nowhere to flee, the surplus that agriculture accumulates." "Yet that attempt failed." "And it failed because in the end there was nothing for the Mongols to do except themselves to adopt the way of life of the people they conquered." "When they conquered the Muslims, they became Muslims." "They became settlers, because theft, war is not a permanent state that can be sustained." "Of course, Genghis Khan still had his bones carried about as a memorial by his armies in the field." "But his grandson Kublai Khan was already a builder and settled monarch in China." "You remember Coleridge's poem." ""In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree."" "The fifth of the heirs in the succession of Genghis Khan, was the Sultan Oljeitu, who came to this forbidding plateau in Persia to build a great new capital city, Sultaniyya - of which, what remains is his own mausoleum," "which later was a model for all Moslem architecture." "Oljeitu was a liberal monarch, who brought here men from all parts of the world." "He himself was at one time a Christian, at another time a Buddhist, and finally a Muslim." "And he did at this court attempt really to establish a world court, the one thing that the nomad could contribute to civilisation." "He gathered from the four corners of the world the cultures, mixed them together and sent them out again to fertilise the earth." "It's the irony of the end of the bid for power by the Mongol nomads here that when Oljeitu died, he was known as Oljeitu the Builder." "The fact is that agriculture and the settled way of life were established steps now in the ascent of man." "And had set a new level for a form of human harmony which was to bear fruit into the far future." "The organisation of the city."