Adam and Eve Depart, Enter Cain the Planter and Abel the Shepherd

Abstract

In the Middle East, a semi-arid and partly arid region, survival was endangered by either a shortage of water or a surplus. This led the inhabitants to invest mind and body in various water works to regulate the sources of water. To execute these works the society had to be organized in a certain hierarchy. The projects regulating flows most probably started in small mountain valleys and spread to the wider plains in order to regulate bigger flows. This enabled the development of irrigated agriculture, essential in an arid region. This was the case in Jericho, where the remains of an urban community are found which practiced agriculture at the early dawn of civilization. After several centuries the irrigation systems were expanded to the gigantic scale exercised in valleys of the big rivers. On the border of the irrigated valleys two other systems developed. One was the settled agricultural society dependent on rainwater or winter floods. The second was the nomadic society which had to become accustomed to random fluctuations in the abundance of sources of supply.