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an ingenious, patient, skilled and youthful culture, not one of white-bearded Druids or terrifying, blood-soaked chieftains. They come later, in the Bronze Age. The henges and the huge roundhouses were eventually abandoned. We cannot tell why. It may have been because of rising population pressures which caused conflict over scarce and degraded agricultural land. At any rate, a bloodier age lay ahead, as it did for the Fertile Crescent and for Neolithic China too. Yet we should remember that the age of peaceful farming communities, worshipping the sun and moon, tending their animals and crops, trading at their borders with others and eventually building remarkable monuments, lasted in Britain for thousands of years, much longer than empires, dynasties or democracy. It never happened again – in Britain, or in Europe.
    The last word on this ought to go to Rodney Castleden:
    With something approaching ecological balance and communities as a matter of routine living peacefully within their means, it is possible to see within the Neolithic culture an object lesson for modern industrial economies and societies in the west. They show few signs of outlasting the Industrial Revolution by morethan two or three centuries, whilst the Neolithic subsistence economy lasted ten times as long.
     
    This is a strong warning, but there are simply far too many of us now, depending on too much consumption, to really be able to heed it. And anyway, even as the British henge-builders were coming to their mysterious end, humanity was about to make the next stride towards recorded history – into the city.
    The Cities of the Plain
     
    South-east of Catalhoyuk two mighty rivers run south towards the sea. The Fertile Crescent saw the first farmers and the first large settlements, and so it is not surprising that it also gave birth to the first cities and the first empires. ‘Mesopotamia’ simply means the land between these two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. As they get nearer the sea, they slow and sprawl, curling into tangled deltas. A wonderfully rich farming area of dark, moist soil became available just before the start of the marshes. It offered similar advantages to the watery land around Catalhoyuk, but on a much bigger scale, and it attracted people from all over the region. They settled down in homes built first of reeds and later of mud bricks, coalescing into villages. What is probably the first city, Eridu, emerged about seven thousand years ago, not so long after Catalhoyuk was abandoned. Within a few hundred years there were many more towns in the area. Eridu was a brick-built settlement with layer upon layer of temple buildings, and may have started as a communal site at which different villages could worship the gods. These were altogether bigger places. There would be no gentle anarchism here.
    The villages had had to come together, to create and then to maintain, the complicated system of waterways and dykes needed for agriculture. Workers had to be organized to do this; the excellent farming produced surpluses of grain and these allowed the introduction of rulers and priests, who developed temples and employed servants to tend them. Because the Mesopotamian world was a muddy, watery, sun-baked flatland it is not surprising that its most characteristic major buildings would be ziggurats, raised pyramid-platforms where gods could be worshipped. All around the world people have associated gods with height, and in this land of no mountains the only way to reach up was to build. Eridu itself was built on a low mound by a freshwater lagoon, with the desert on one side, the marshes on another and the farming land on another.
    It was the perfect meeting-point of different geographies and its gods were headed by the male Apsu, who represented sweet water, and the female Tiamat, representing salt water. But the water gods did not pay enough attention: Eridu probably lost its dominance around four thousand years ago when, it seems,