Palaeolithic individuals led an unsettled life; this nomadic society of gatherers and hunters has little control above their food supply. Starting around 8000 B.C. yet, individuals started to grow their own food, raise their own creatures, and organise into long-term communities. Although, like their Palaeolithic forerunners, the Neolithic individuals (from neos, meaning “new” in Greek) used rock to make fundamental weapons and tolls, organised agriculture and animal husbandry left more time plus labour for some other tasks, for example, creation of clay boats. Since their size as well as weight made them hard to take, clay boats are characteristic of communities that are fixed.
Their first appearance was made by Neolithic villages in the Near East, an area consisting approximately of modern day Turkey, Iraq and Iran. A late case of Neolithic painted pottery from this area is a beaker from Susa (present day Shush in Iran) dating to c. 4000 B.C. The exceptionally abstracted creature types included within patterned edges are typical to a lot of works of art from this place. Ornamentation takes precedence over naturalism to make designs with exquisite stylised creatures, like the narrow band of elongated dogs beneath a frieze of graceful long necked fowl across the very top of the beaker, as well as the marvellous ibex with ring-shaped horns, it is body composed of two curved triangles, that predominates the big central part. In comparison with Palaeolithic depictions of creatures, which might represent efforts to command the animal kingdom, creatures domesticated, appear only to decorate this Neolithic vase.
The Paleolithic folks who created cave paintings were gathers and monadic hunters. Neolithic culture (New Stone Age), which first appeared in the Near East c. 8000 B.C. is characterised by settled hamlets, domesticated plants and aminals, and the crafts of pottery and weaving. The highly abstracted, stylised creatures types, representative of the “Animal Style”, and routines decorating this Neolithic beaker from Iran are usually seen in workds from the primeval Near East. An ibex (wild coat), with enlarged, ring-shaped horns as well as a body consisting of two curved triangles, decorates the center of the boat. The top band features lanky, long-necked fowl, and, right underneath, the beaker is encircled by a group of dogs that are elongated.
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The early Neolithic agricultural communities slowly evolved into more sophisticated societies, with systems of government, law, proper faith, and, maybe above all, the first appearance of writing, thereby indicating the beginning of recorded history as well as the end of prehistory. The political structures switched between conglomerations of alone ruled city states and governments that were centralised under one leader.
The city states of the Near East often fought with one another. Moreover, the dearth of natural obstacles made the region especially exposed to invasion. This nearly continuous war proved to be a regular topic of western artwork. A further destabilising variable was the climate that is unpredictable; drought, floods, storms, and the like harassed the inhabitants of the area. This, they understandably tended to worry greatly about survival in this world – a world of natural disasters, political instability and invasions.
From about the fourth millennium B.C. the Sumerians inhabited southern Mesopotamia, a Greek place name meaning “the land between the rivers”, that’s the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. They devised a kind of writing when a stylus, typically a span of reed cut at an angle, was used to impress characters and the wheel.