The First Nomads Become Farmers

Long, long ago, people did not have homes. They wandered from place to place. They were nomads.

In order to eat, women and children picked roots,

nuts,

berries,

and plants,

and they collected other food, like eggs,

wild honey,

and lizards

and snakes.

Men hunted with spears,

and with bows and arrows,

and sometimes they could catch fish.

Nomads built tents,

and sometimes they lived in caves.

These cave paintings, in Lascaux Cave,

were painted by nomads long ago.

In The Story of the World, the girl Tarak catches lizards,

so her mother could make a stew with them.

The stew could feed the whole camp.

Something is fertile if things, like plants, grow easily there.

This green valley is very fertile.

This shape is called a crescent.

Sometimes the Moon has a crescent shape.

Here is a place called the Fertile Crescent.

It was where Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt are now.

Long ago, those countries did not exist. Only the land existed, and nomads living on the land.

Here is the Tigris River,

and here is the Euphrates River.

The Tigris and Euphrates were next to each other, see?

That area between the two rivers was very fertile. Green things grew well there.

The area between the rivers was called Mesopotamia.

It was easy to find food in Mesopotamia.

There was wild grass,

wild barley

and wild wheat.

So nomads began to live, and stay, in Mesopotamia.

They began growing things themselves—that is what we call farming!

Plants need water. So the farmers started digging ditches from the river to their crops. Those became canals!

They also used a machine called a shaduf to get buckets of water for their crops.

Reeds like these grew next to the rivers.

The early settlers made houses out of reeds,

or out of mud bricks.

It was easier for people to live together. So collections of houses started— the first villages.

In villages, animals were kept in a central pen.

The villagers were afraid that they would be attacked by people outside the village.

So they built walls around their villages, and the villages grew.

The villages became the first cities, like Jericho.

Jericho was here,

near this famous river, called the River Jordan,

in a place that later became Israel.

The End