Chemistry

Brick building is taking place at Çatalhöyük around 6000 BCE.

Its people appear to have lived relatively egalitarian lives with no apparent social classes, as no houses with distinctive features (belonging to royalty or religious hierarchy, for example) have been found so far.

The most recent investigations also reveal little social distinction based on gender, with both men and women receiving equivalent nutrition and apparently, having relatively equal social status as typically found in Paleolithic cultures.

In upper levels of the site, it becomes apparent that the people of Çatalhöyük were gaining skills in agriculture and the domestication of animals.

Female figurines have been found within bins used for storage of cereals such as wheat and barley that are presumed to be a deity protecting the grain.

Peas were also grown, and almonds, pistachios, and fruit were harvested from trees in the surrounding hills.

Sheep were domesticated and evidence suggests the beginning of cattle domestication as well.

However, hunting continued to be a major source of meat for the community.

The making of pottery and the construction of obsidian tools were major industries.

Obsidian tools were probably both used and traded for items such as Mediterranean sea shells and flint from Syria.

Among archaeological sites in Anatolia, Çatalhöyük features native copper artifacts and smelted lead beads, but no smelted copper.

Clays containing the metallic element aluminum are used in Mesopotamia by 5300 BCE to manufacture high-quality pottery.

The Varna necropolis holds at least two hundred and ninety-four graves, many containing sophisticated examples of metallurgy (gold and copper), pottery (about six hundred pieces, including gold-painted ones), high-quality flint and obsidian blades, beads, and shells.

The graves have been dated to 4700-4200 BCE (radiocarbon dating, 2004) and belong to the Eneolithic Varna culture, which is the local variant of the KGKVI.

There are crouched and extended inhumations.

Some graves do not contain a skeleton, but grave gifts (cenotaphs).

The symbolic (empty) graves are the richest in gold artifacts.

Three thousand gold artifacts were found, with a weight of approximately six kilograms.

Grave 43 contained more gold than has been found in the entire rest of the world for this epoch.

Three symbolic graves contained masks of unfired clay.

The findings showed that the Varna culture had trade relations with distant lands (possibly including the lower Volga and the Cyclades), perhaps exporting metal goods and salt from the Provadiya rock salt mine.

The copper ore used in the artifacts originated from a Sredna Gora mine near Stara Zagora, and Mediterranean Spondylus shells found in the graves may have served as primitive currency.

The culture had sophisticated religious beliefs about afterlife and developed hierarchal status differences: it offers the oldest known burial evidence of an elite male (the end of the fifth millennium BCE is the time that Marija Gimbutas, originator of the Kurgan hypothesis, claims the transition to male dominance began in Europe).

The high status male buried with the most remarkable amount of gold held a war adze or mace and wore a gold penis sheath.

The bull-shaped gold platelets perhaps also venerated virility, instinct, and warfare.

Gimbutas holds that the artifacts were made largely by local craftspeople.

Antimony, both as a metal and in its sulfide form, is familiar to ancient peoples.

An artifact made of antimony dating to about 3000 BCE was found at Tello, Chaldea (part of present-day Iraq).

A settlement on the archaeological site of Tepe Yahya, in Iran, one hundred and forty miles (two hundred and twenty-five kilometers) south of present Kerman, intermittently occupied from 4500 BCE, thrives from 3100 to 2900 BCE as a center of commerce and overland trade, including the export of chlorite, probably used for bleaching and stripping of textiles.

Researchers have detected cobalt in Iranian necklace beads of the third millennium BCE.

Large building projects between 2613 and 2494 BCE require expeditions abroad to the area of Wadi Maghareh in order "to secure minerals and other resources not available in Egypt itself.”

Carbon in its diamond form has been known since very ancient times.

The term diamond, which is a corruption of the Greek word adamas, “proper", "unalterable", "unbreakable, untamed", accurately describes the permanence of this crystallized form of carbon.

Diamonds are thought to have been first recognized and mined in India, where significant alluvial deposits of the stone could be found many centuries ago along the rivers Penner, Krishna and Godavari.

Diamonds have been known in India for at least three thousand years but most likely six thousand years.

Graphite, the name for the other crystalline form of carbon, is derived from the Greek verb graphein, “to write”, and reflects its property of leaving a dark mark when rubbed on a surface.

Graphite was long confused with both the metal lead and a superficially similar substance, the mineral molybdenite (molybdenum sulfate).

Tyre, which probably enjoys some primacy over the other cities of Phoenicia in the tenth and eleventh centuries, is ruled by kings whose power is limited by a merchant oligarchy.

The thirteenth-century BCE sarcophagus from Byblos (mentioned earlier in the text) is reused for King Hiram of Tyre in the tenth century BCE.

The Phoenician culture, a cosmopolitan blend of Egyptian, Anatolian, Greek and Mesopotamian influences in religion and literature, reaches its greatest height during this age.

The Bible names the notorious Jezebel, wife of King Ahab, as the daughter of Ethbaal, “king of Tyre and Sidon.” (The Old Testament also tells of Queen Jezebel employing the naturally occurring sulfide of antimony as a cosmetic to beautify her eyes.)

According to the Hebrew scriptures, the city of Tyre supplies cedars, carpenters, masons, and bronzesmiths for the kings of Israel.

The greatness of Nineveh, which had been greatly enlarged by Assyrian ruler Sennacherib in about 700 BCE, is short-lived.

The Assyrian empire had begun to show signs of weakness in about 633 BCE, and Nineveh had been attacked by the Medes, who, joined by the Babylonians and Susianians,  attack it again in about 625 BCE

Nineveh falls in 612 BCE, and is razed to the ground.

The people in the city who cannot escape to the last Assyrian strongholds in the West are either massacred or deported. (Many unburied skeletons will be found by the archaeologists at the site.)

The Assyrian empire now comes to an end, the Medes and Babylonians dividing its provinces between them.