Why sheep count: Lack of textile trade stymied Israel’s growth for millennia, study shows

During the Early Bronze Age, the Southern Levant’s inability to support mass sheep herding left the region lagging behind Syria and Mesopotamia. But literacy is key for longevity

A fragment of a rare 3,800-year-old textile, dyed with the Kermes vermilio insect. (Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority)
A fragment of a rare 3,800-year-old textile, dyed with the Kermes vermilio insect. (Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority)

Around 5,000 years ago, some ancient civilizations in the Near East were transformed and propelled into economic and political greatness by increasingly sophisticated systems of human control over nature.

It was the Early Bronze Age, and Syria and Mesopotamia were experiencing significant advancements in agriculture and herding. At the same time, the Southern Levant (including modern-day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and Jordan) remained behind. According to a new study published in the latest issue of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal at the end of last year, this was mainly due to the region’s inability to support sheep herding on a vast scale and, therefore, produce and trade wool.

“Sheep and goats are among the most important early domesticated animals,” the paper’s author, Dr. Alex Joffe, told The Times of Israel over a video call. “They were especially significant for what is defined as secondary products, or anything that had an economic or social value besides their meat: milk, hair, blood, bones, as well as their ability to carry weights or pull plows.”

Joffe currently serves as the director of Strategic Affairs at the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). He also hosts the podcast “This Week in the Ancient Near East.”

The researcher explained that he has been studying questions connected to the region’s urbanization process for decades.

The statue of the praying figure Ebih-Il, dating back to circa 2400 BCE, represents a nice illustration of a woven Mesopotamian-style skirt made of wool. It currently belongs to the Louvre. (Wikipedia)

“What is a city? How is it created? What are the behaviors associated with creating a city? These questions have been accompanying me for a long time,” he said.

In recent years, he felt that scholars had insufficiently explored the role of textiles, particularly wool, in the development of the Levant.

“If we look at Mesopotamia and Syria, some written sources suggest that there were individual cities whose territory could hold 300,000 sheep,” Joffe said. “Therefore, we are talking about hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of sheep and goats throughout the region.”

“These numbers had deep political implications,” he added.

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

“The textiles that were produced served as staple financial products,” he noted. “This means that they were goods that could be given out by these institutions to their employees and associates to pay or reward them.”

The capacity of political and economic leadership to rely on nonperishable goods that could easily travel, be stored, and exchanged fueled significant economic growth. Wealth could be accumulated, cities and estates could be developed, new alliances could be formed, and more people could be paid for their services.

In Southern Levant, the situation was very different.

“In the third millennium BCE, the number of palaces in Southern Levant was significantly lower,” said Joffe. “In addition, palaces and villages were much smaller than in Mesopotamia. I argue that that the reason for this phenomenon is the lack of wool trade.”

To understand the region’s potential to support sheep herding, Joffe looked at surveys documenting the number of sheep in the area in the first half of the 20th century.

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

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

The numbers might have been even lower in the Early Bronze Age, and they did not allow any wool surplus. Perhaps not by chance, the oldest wool remains identified in the area date only to the Middle Bronze Age (2000 BCE – 1550 BCE).

Dr. Alex Joffe, director of Strategic Affairs at the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). (Courtesy)

“Palaces and elites could not pay those who worked for them with textiles that could be nicely folded and loaded on a donkey, nor used them to encourage or reward political alliances,” Joffe said. “Instead, they used olive oil and wine.”

Olive oil and wine presented significant shortcomings; they were perishable and storing or moving them was complicated. Therefore, these goods did not allow economic and social growth similar to that of Mesopotamia.

Asked about how Southern Levant’s backwardness influenced the general history of the region, Joffe said that the area remained economically and politically underdeveloped  consistently throughout history.

However, he mentioned one significant exception. While for many millennia, Southern Levant’s economic and social challenges were also reflected in its cultural life, around the year 1000 BCE something shifted dramatically.

“In the fourth and third millennia, several Near East peoples were experimenting with forms of writing,” Joffe said. “Those living in Lebanon, Syria, and Mesopotamia were taking Egyptian signs, radically simplifying them, and creating what would become the first alphabets. By 2300, they were writing letters to each other, inventorying products, and creating stories. Nothing like this was happening in Southern Levant at that time.”

An early 12th century BCE Canaanite alphabet inscription found at Lachish in 2014. (courtesy of Yossi Garfinkel, Hebrew University)

In the first millennium, however, the Israelites and especially the Judeans, started to write down their national narratives in the form of biblical stories, and this would guarantee their survival as a people until today.

“What we learn is that no matter the size of the economy, people with writing skills had a better chance of survival,” Joffe said. “The peoples of Syria and Mesopotamia did have their national myths, and we are familiar with at least some of them thanks to contemporary documents. However, these stories did not preserve them as nations, regardless of their political and financial sophistication at the time.”

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