Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c10.12

c10.12

These Natufian sites cannot be dated accurately, but all probabilities together imply a date well before 5000 B.C. Our earliest historical dates in Western Asia are round about 3000 B.C., and all we can say of the prehistoric cultures is that they are earlier than this date, and that one thousand years seems the very least space of time into which we can compress the long series of successive prehistoric phases in Mesopotamia or Persia. The relationship of these phases, marked by innovations in pottery styles, tool types, architectural or burial customs, can be established from the stratification in the ancient settlement sites, where village after village or town after town was built and rebuilt on the rubbish of its ruined predecessor, until a mound or ‘tell’ is formed which may be as much as a hundred feet high. Excavation of such a ‘tell’ may give a sequence A, B, C, D, E from the first to the last settlement on the site: another mound may begin at D and continue on not only through E but to F, G, and H. And recently it has been found that the ‘A’ level (i.e. the earliest human occupation recognized) in one area, such as Southern Mesopotamia, may be preceded by earlier occupations, I, II, III, in country to the north that was habitable at a time when Southern Mesopotamia was still under the ancient Persian Gulf. To continue this diagrammatic way of describing stratification, if in phase ‘E’ we find evidence of an actual concrete date, known from recorded history and represented by an inscription or some object whose style can be fitted into a historical phase, we can at once say that A, B, C, and D phases are earlier than this, and that F, G, and H are later. The more sites on which we find the same relative sequence, the more sure can we be that the scheme is valid for a large area, and not just for a single site or a few close together. (Table I, p. 65).