settlement patterns: Asia and the Pacific pened around 3800 b.c.e., a drought drove people from the countryside into the cities While cities were a viable solution to minor drought, major droughts were too much for them Around 2200 b.c.e a major drought afflicted all of Mesopotamia The cities could no longer feed their residents, and the people dispersed, leaving their former homes to sink into ruin When the rains returned about 1900 b.c.e., the people returned as well, though to different sites; the rivers had changed course, and some of the former city sites were no longer habitable Cities continued to be the dominant settlement form in the region Throughout the Middle East people followed similar patterns, gathering around rare water sources In the Levant people settled near rivers, lakes, and other sources of water The Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee were major population centers from early times The coastline was also valuable to fishermen and sea traders In Arabia there was so little water that very few people lived there The ones who did manage to settle there permanently built towns on the coasts of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea In Anatolia most people lived along the Black Sea and Aegean coastlines, which had fertile land and a healthy climate People had settled the coast of the Black Sea (at that time called the Euxine Sea) by the seventh century b.c.e When the weather grew warm and wet around 5800 b.c.e the population on the shores of the sea increased as more farmers took advantage of the fertile soil Also around 5800 b.c.e the waters of the sea began rising, and the entire area flooded, forcing residents to abandon their homes and flee to higher ground Many of them moved into eastern Europe The central part of the Anatolian peninsula was mountainous and heavily forested, which made living conditions difficult, though some hardy souls lived in caves in the rocks By the time of the Greek and Roman empires, the western and northern coasts of Anatolia were heavily populated with towns, large cities, and farmsteads In Persia the most fertile area was the coastline of the Caspian Sea, which received more rain than any other part of the Relief fragment showing Assyrian soldiers towing a boat through shallow water (Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago) 967 country Human settlements were concentrated in this region Settlements also clustered along the trade route that led between India to the east and Mesopotamia to the west Persian rulers built cities throughout their realm; major cities were Susa, near Babylon, and the Seleucid capital of Persepolis ASIA AND THE PACIFIC BY KIRK H BEETZ Most paleontologists believe that early humans spread eastward from Africa along the southern coast of Asia Many of their settlements would now be underwater They would have chosen to settle where the fishing was good, spreading inland only where the hunting and gathering were easy and probably not establishing villages inland until population pressures forced them to move Their villages would have been far apart and their overall population would have been thinly spread over the landscape Humans reached the southeastern edge of Asia long before the beginning of the last ice age From Southeast Asia people moved slowly to outlying islands In about 30,000 b.c.e people began to settle Australia, probably inhabiting its northwestern coast, where they could establish fishing villages They spread slowly through what was then a mostly wet continent, arriving at Tasmania in about 29,000 b.c.e and reaching the far southern edge of Australia in about 22,000 b.c.e By 10,000 b.c.e they were a thinly spread population of about 300,000 people whose villages tended to be near sheltering rocks and forests, where they could escape direct sunlight in what was becoming a mostly dry, hot land The earliest-known Indian culture is the Harappan civilization (ca 2600–ca 1500 b.c.e.) of the Indus River valley in northwestern India and Pakistan The first major cities discovered by archaeologists were Harappa and Mohenjo Daro Both of these cities were near the Indus River, which for a long time had archaeologists believing that the Indus River was the focus of Harappan settlements Yet the Vedas tell of a major river, the Sarasvati, that was the focus of important events The Vedas are sacred works of Hindus that were the oral tradition of the Vedic peoples who invaded India in about 1500 b.c.e and which were written down sometime between the 500s and 300s b.c.e It turns out that the Sarasvati had existed but dried up between 2000 and 1000 b.c.e It was east of the Indus River, and it appears to have had far more Harappan settlements along it than did the Indus The Harappans were farmers and traders Most of their population lived near rivers, and they used irrigation canals to water their farmlands In general, they used every bit of arable land for growing crops and built their homes on land that was more rocky than the land they farmed Although most of their settlements were along the Indus and Sarasvati rivers, every river in the valley had at least one village along it They also had many villages in wet lowlands near the Gulf of Kachchh and the Gulf of Khambhat on the coast of the Arabian Sea and at least a few villages well