Sanctuary

Centuries before the first pharaohs, when the great kingdoms had not yet been born, primitive tribes formed the first societies in the valleys of the great rivers Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris, in Anatolia, and on the edge of deserts and mountains. Sedentary villages already existed millennia before agriculture and the domestication of animals, inhabited by hunter-gatherer clans who practiced a nomadic life only when climatic changes affected the resources of their territory. These people organized communities that maintained intense trade during the Stone Age, exchanging a wide variety of products, sometimes transported over two thousand kilometers from their place of origin without the aid of any animal, sometimes navigating rivers and seas. Before pottery, before the widespread use of copper, before the domestication of the horse, before the plow… complex hunter-gatherer societies gathered wild grains to make wheat and barley flour, drank beer, ate bread… and erected sanctuaries and temples, which archaeology has only just begun to uncover. At the dawn of time, the first chapters of human history unfolded; it was an era in which only one animal had been domesticated: the dog. However, humanity was not left to its own devices; powerful gods watched… and sometimes intervened.