6,000 Years of Murder – Part One: Valley Girls

Tim: The Wicked + The Divine #36 finally gave us a definitive list of every damn Recurrence that has occurred since Ananke first started exploding heads, so we thought we’d take a walk through the annals of history (stop sniggering at the back!) and provide some context for what was happening at the time.

In our first batch of places and times, humanity develops urban settlements, written language and a cinema snack with an excellent profit margin. Spoilers (for real-world history, mostly) after the cut.

3862BC – Upper Nile
We kick off with the big boy of early civilisations, in what will soon become Egypt. It’s worth noting that our very first introduction to Ananke and her sister in issue #34 didn’t give us a location, just a time, so we have no way of knowing where we were then, beyond ‘somewhere deserty’.

Anyway – the Upper Nile in the mid 39th century BC is an interesting place. The 5.9 Kiloyear event just happened, ending an extended period of wet and rainy conditions (the Neolithic Subpluvial) in Northern Africa and leading to intense aridification in and around the Sahara. This sudden dryness triggered migration to the river valleys of the Nile, with its nice predictable flood plains, and as more people gathered in a smaller area with ample capacity for agriculture… that’s the beginnings of a civilisation, baby!

3770BC – Mesopotamia
From baby Egypt, we travel to another of the big players when it comes to early civilisation: Mesopotamia. At this point in human history, making a city of any decent size requires a lot of farms and, with irrigation still in its infancy, farming works best in river valleys. Therefore, early civilisations were mostly found in these areas, and the region between the Tigris and Euphrates was the Mac Daddy.

What’s going on in Mesopotamia? Well, there have already been permanent settlements in the area for almost 1,500 years, but the Ubaid period is about to come to a rapid close – at least in Northern Mesopotamia, where the same 5.9 Kiloyear event is making the area harder to farm, and will clear out most human presence for almost 1,000 years. Not a particularly successful Recurrence, then.

3678BC – The Indus Valley
We continue heading east on our tour of early civilisation’s hot spots and find our way to the Indus Valley, the hottest and dankest of those all-important river valleys. The Indus Valley civilisation will later mysteriously vanish and be replaced (there’s a whole bunch of theories about why and who by) but right now it’s thriving, and it has Lothal to prove it.

Lothal was one of the southernmost cities of the Indus Valley civilisation, and included the world’s earliest known dock. Established a little bit after Ananke and co had been around, it was a thriving trade centre that connected with settlements as far away as West Asia and Africa. Discovered in 1954, it’s nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Nice work, Indus Valley civilisation!

3586BC – The Yellow River
Our journey east brings us to the Yellow River in modern-day China, and the final of the big four “major civilisations of the ancient world”. People have been gathering around the Yellow River since almost 10,000BC, but the line of when those settlements and cultures turned into full-blown civilisations is heavily debated.

At this point, we’re entering the late period of the Yangshao culture, which flourished in the area that would become Northwest China. The people are still using stone tools and haven’t really embraced domesticated animals, but they are also creating decorated pottery and produce small amounts of silk. We’ve also got the first rammed earth wall produced around the Xishan settlement, suggesting permanent communities of substantial size.

3495BC – Uruk
Oh shit kids, it’s the Uruk period! We’re back in lower Mesopotamia, and as the change in background suggests, we’ve got legit urbanisation. Uruk was a Sumerian city boasting a population of up to 50,000 people at its peak, and at the period we catch up with it, it has well-established trade routes with the rest of Mesopotamia and is expanding into what would become the Sumerian civilisation.

Full-blown urbanisation and trade means several innovations. We have writing (hello cuneiform!), we have accounting (hello bureaucracy!), we have goddamn tin (HELLO BRONZE!). All these advances may have helped Ananke’s sister learn a trick or two, as this is when we first see her fight back against Ananke’s serial murder habit. Full blown civilisation for the win!

3403BC – The Fortaleza Valley
So far, we’ve not visited the Americas in our tour of Neolithic man, but that’s about to end, as we hop over the Atlantic to the Norte Chico civilisation in ancient Peru. Like all the others, we’re near a river valley, or in this case a cluster of them – the Supe, Pativilca and Fortaleza valleys. While large-scale human settlement isn’t going to hit for another 300 years, we already have a small city in the form of Huaricanga, the oldest urban gathering in the Americas.

With the lack of decent animals to domesticate (sorry, llamas), early American civilisations focused on agriculture, with sweet potatoes and corn forming a central part of the diet of most Huaricanga residents. Interesting fact – the first evidence of popcorn was found in New Mexico, dated to circa 3600BC, so we can probably assume it’s reached down to Norte Chico by this point. Maybe that accounts for the friendly greeting between Ananke and her adversary.

3311BC – Western Europe
Western Europe, with its stupid lack of big reliable river valleys, has been chugging along in the background so far, unable to keep up with the advances of places like Mesopotamia and Egypt, which are currently busy beginning the Bronze Age and domesticating cattle. There have been scattered cultures (the Boians, the Wartbergs, the Funnelbeakers) but nothing to really write home about, because writing hasn’t reached here yet.

With five healthy civilisations on the go now, the Indo-Europeans could do with a Recurrence boost, and while the spread of Bronze Age civilisations is going to do the heavy lifting, Western Europe is giving the Stone Age a last hurrah. Tribes and cultures in this area have got pretty good at moving rocks around, and while Stonehenge won’t happen for another 1,000 years or so, we’ve got constructions like Maumbury Rings, the Carnac Stones and others popping up all over the shop. That said, Ananke is definitely slumming it at this point.

3219BC – The Indus Valley
Enough of those filthy Europeans, let’s head back to the Indus Valley, where the Bronze Age is kicking off in earnest. It’s all centred on the city of Harappa, which is beginning to act as a centralised authority for the region, as well as establishing trade networks with related regional cultures and even distant ones for rarer materials. Crops include peas, sesame seeds, dates and cotton, and animals including the water buffalo are being domesticated.

Most importantly, the Indus Script (aka the Harappan script) has been developed. Largely pictograph-based, there’s huge debate over whether the script constitutes a writing system or even a language, but the use of it on seals could represent more complex trading, a more established religion or, from the interaction between Ananke and her sister, some extremely specific greetings cards.

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