Q&A for History of Mankind (25)

Ancient Arabia & Ancient castration, plus a side dish of cannibalism

To check all previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.

This is the twenty-third Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.

An important note: if you have been a paying subscriber for over a week and you didn’t get that email about the questions, please reach out to me. I want to make sure everyone is getting the correct stuff in a timely manner.

With that out of the way, we’re also going to be looking at a couple of papers that pertain to prehistoric Arabia, a much misunderstood region of the planet that is also among those that have changed the most, because of climate patterns, over the last 10,000 years or so.

In “The ramparts of Khaybar. Multiproxy investigation for reconstructing a Bronze Age walled oasis in Northwest Arabia,” Guillaume Charloux et al report that they’ve found evidence that the Khaybar Oasis was entirely enclosed by a rampart in pre-Islamic times, like several other large regional walled oases in north-western Arabia (Tayma, Qurayyah, Hait, etc.).

Using cross-referencing of survey and remote sensing data, they found remains of a rampart initially some 14.5 km long, preserved today over just under half of the original route (41 %, 5.9 km and 74 bastions). This is not modern in any shape of form: it dates to between 2250 and 1950 BC, an era when few locations on the planet were walled.

Khaybar is an interesting place. In modern times, it’s just a two hour drive away from Madinah, the city where the Prophet Muhammad found refuge some 2,500 years after the ramparts were erected.

Like I wrote in “From Narmer to Gilgamesh,” what are now smallish oases scattered around a forbidden desert were, up to some 5,000 years ago, wetlands within a dry steppe full of wildlife where Arabs tended their flocks. There were fewer camels (much less useful in warfare than horses), no caravans avoiding sandstorms, but rather a landscape that resembled the modern American Midwest, or the plains of northern China:

Jubbah, a modern town in the middle of the Nefud Desert southeast of present-day Jordan, was the center of a large, well-watered basin around a lake at least 20 kilometers long that was quickly vanishing during this era. In this region there are ancient rock carvings showing slender cattle with exposed ribs, which indicates the kind of stresses inhabitants were exposed to. Khaybar, an oasis some 150 kilometers north of Medina, was then much larger and part of a network of so-called “funerary avenues” connecting Arabian oases.

The climatic history of Arabia is not some regional oddity. The fact that Arabia has been mostly drying out for the last five millennia has turned out to be hugely important for mankind: if one doesn’t understand that Arabia was not always (mostly) desert-like as it is now, one can never understand how come so many Arabs came out of there, to settle and colonize various parts of the Middle East and Africa, as they were forced out of steppes steadily turning into death-traps for their families and domestic animals. Jordan and Sumer/Iraq were the first destinations for mass Arab migrations because they were closest:

The Jordan valley is only part of a long rift on the Earth's surface, starting south in East Africa and moving north all the way to the Ghab Valley in Syria, through which the Orontes (Asi) flows to the sea. Damascus, northeast of the snowcapped Mount Hermon, is close to the Hamad, the “stony desert”, but it's very fertile thanks to the River Barada, its distributaries and lakes, and has been one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited sites, with cultivation practically continued since the end of the Younger Dryas.

For tribes sweeping from the east, many of which eked out a difficult livelihood on the quickly drying marshes and springs of the Jordan plateau and central Arabia during the late 4th millennium BC, these regions had to look like a paradise, well worth a fight. Such migrant flows, increasing from 3100 BC, came under Sumerian influence especially in northern Mesopotamia, which saw much construction activity at the turn of the millennium and the first half of the 3rd millennium BC, with cities like Akshak, in modern Iraq, and Ebla and Mari, in Syria, rising in size and influence.

The second paper is less focused on the Arabian peninsula itself, and looks broadly at the genetic history of Soqotra, an island off the Horn of Africa that was settled by a little-known Eurasian population millennia before the the Christian era.

What is of most interest to me in “Medieval DNA from Soqotra points to Eurasian origins of an isolated population at the crossroads of Africa and Arabia,” (Nature) is that authors Kendra Sirak et al note that first cousin marriage exploded on the island not when it was settled, but after it was Arabized and Islamized in the Middle Ages.

The issue of first cousin marriage and its impacts is one that I often cite because it has significant social and genetic repercussions. Like I wrote in The Bronze Age Cold War early last year:

First-cousin marriage leads to multiple genetic issues and a general decline in IQ, as shown by multiple studies, and appears to have been particularly widespread since the prehistory among the very clannish societies of Arabia. The paper “Parallel-Cousin (Father’s Brother’s Daughter, or FBD) Marriage, Islamization, and Arabization,” by Andrey Korotayev (published in Ethnology, vol. 39, no. 4, University of Pittsburgh- Of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education, 2000, pp. 395–407) argues that Islamization later became a strong and significant predictor of parallel-cousin marriage: “While there is a clear functional connection between Islam and FBD marriage, the prescription to marry a FBD does not appear to be sufficient to persuade people to actually marry thus, even if the marriage brings with it economic advantages. A systematic acceptance of parallel-cousin marriage took place when Islamization occurred together with Arabization.” As late as 1983, Justine McCare reported in “FBD Marriage: Further Support for the Westermarck Hypothesis of the Incest Taboo,” that various studies of Arab Middle Eastern communities indicate that FBD marriages constitute a statistically significant 9% to 30% of all marriages contracted in villages.

For a detailed discussion on the later history of cousin marriage in Christian and other societies, please check the 18th Q&A for a A History of Mankind and The Christian Church Didn't Save the West from Cousin Marriage.

Please remember that all older posts and more, as you know, can be easily found here. Now, for the readers’ questions, on the history of castration, ancient European place names, Athens Vs Sparta and when exactly cannibalism became icky (yes, paid subscribers are getting spicy with their questions):