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Why sheep counts: The lack of textile trade has been the growth of Israel’s growth for thousands of years, as the study shows

Why sheep counts: The lack of textile trade has been the growth of Israel’s growth for thousands of years, as the study shows

About 5,000 years ago, some old civilizations in the Middle East were transformed by increasingly sophisticated systems of human control over nature through increasingly sophisticated systems of human control and appeared in economic and political size.

It was the early Bronze Age, and Syria and Mesopotamia recorded considerable progress in agriculture and feast. At the same time, the southern Levant (including today’s Israel, West Bank and the Gaza and Jordan) remained behind it. According to a new study, which was published in the recent edition of the Cambridge Archeological Journal at the end of last year, this was mainly due to the inability of the region, to support and therefore want to produce and act for a large extent.

“Sheep and goats are among the most important early domesticated animals,” said the author of the newspaper, Dr. Alex Joffe, opposite the Times of Israel about a video call. “They were particularly important for what is defined as secondary products, or something that had an economic or social value in addition to their meat: milk, hair, blood, bones and their ability to wear weights or pull plows.”

Joffe is currently the director of strategic matters at the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (Asmea). He also organizes the podcast “this week in the old Middle East”.

The researcher said that he had been investigating questions related to the region’s urbanization process for decades.

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The statue of the prayed figure Ebih-il, which up to around 2400 BC. BC is equipped with a nice illustration of a woven skirt in the Mesopotamian style made of wool. It is currently part of the Louvre. (Wikipedia)

“What is a city? How is it created? What are the behaviors connected to the creation of a city? These questions have been with me for a long time, ”he said.

In recent years he has believed that scholars had not adequately examined the role of textiles, especially textiles, in the development of the Levante.

“When we look at Mesopotamia and Syria, some written sources indicate that there were individual cities whose territory could hold 300,000 sheep,” said Joffe. “That is why we speak over hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of sheep and goats in the entire region.”

“These figures had deep political effects,” he added.

According to Joffe, palaces, temples and private companies were important controllers and users of sheep and goats in Mesopotamia.

“The textiles that were manufactured served as basic products for staple foods,” he noted. “This means that they were goods that these institutions were able to spend on their employees and employees to pay or reward.”

The ability of the political and economic leadership to rely on non -perishable goods that could easily travel, could be stored and could be exchanged. Prosperity could be accumulated, cities and lands could be developed, new alliances are formed, and more people could be paid for their services.

The situation was very different in the southern Levant.

“In the third millennium by”, palaces and villages were also much smaller than with Mesopotamia. I argue that the reason for this phenomenon is the lack of wool trade. “

In order to understand the potential of the region to support the sheep mixture, Joffe examined surveys that document the number of sheep in the region in the first half of the 20th century.

Goats and sheep run to their troughs in a hamlet in the South Hebron Hibls, West Bank, May 17, 2024. (Maya Alluzzo/AP)

According to a document from 1926, the region had 290,854 sheep and 571,289 goats. Eight years later, they fell on 157,235 sheep and 307,316 goats.

The numbers could have been even lower in the early Bronze Age, and they did not allow any wool surplus. Perhaps not by accident, the oldest wool only remains identified until the middle Bronze Age (2000 BC – 1550 BC.

Dr. Alex Joffe, director of strategic matters at the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (Asmea). (Decency)

“Palaces and elites could not pay those who worked for them with textiles that could be folded well and loaded onto a donkey to promote or reward political alliances,” said Joffe. “Instead, they used olive oil and wine. “

Olive oil and wine showed significant defects; They were perishable and it was complicated to store or move them. Therefore, these goods did not allow economic and social growth similar to that of Mesopotamia.

When asked how Southern Levante influenced the general history of the region, Joffe said that the area remained economically and politically consistently underdeveloped in the course of history.

However, he mentioned an important exception. While many millennia of Southern Levant also reflected in his cultural life, the year 1000 BC. BC so that a bit dramatic.

“In the fourth and third millennia, several peoples in the Middle East experimented with forms of writing,” said Joffe. “Those who lived in Lebanon, Syria and Mesopotamia took Egyptian signs, simplify them radically and created what the first alphabets would become. Around 2300 she wrote to each other letters, inventorize products and stories created. At that time, nothing like that in South Sevant. “

A Canaanit -Alphabet -Alphabet -Alphabet found in Lachish in Lachish in 2014 in Lachish

In the first millennium, the Israelites and especially the Judeans began to write down their national stories in the form of biblical stories, and this would guarantee their survival as a people to this day.

“We learn that people with writing skills had a better chance of survival regardless of the size of the economy,” said Joffe. “The peoples of Syria and Mesopotamia had their national myths, and we know at least some of them thanks to contemporary documents. However, they did not preserve these stories as nations, regardless of their political and financial sophistication at the time. “

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