Along the middle Euphrates in Syria, the site of Mureybet was occupied from the 12th to the 8th millennium BCE. It is one of the earliest known agriculture-based settlements, the domestication of plants, one of the forces that brought about the Neolithic Revolution, was traced in successive strata, making of Mureybet one of the reference sites for the progress of the Neolithic in the Ancient Near East. Length 2,800 km Elevation of the source 4,500 m Average discharge 818 m³/s Area watershed 765,831 km² Origin  Eastern Turkey Mouth  Shatt al Arab Basin countries Turkey Syria Iraq Boat on the Shatt-al-Arab The Euphrates (the traditional Greek name for the river, which is... The Neolithic Revolution was a term first suggested in the 1920s by the Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe as a description of the switch made by ancient peoples from nomadic, hunter-gatherer behaviour to a settled, agrarian way of life, during the neolithic period. ... The Neolithic, (Greek neos=new, lithos=stone, or New Stone Age) was a period in the development of human technology that is traditionally the last part of the Stone Age. ... Overview map of the Ancient Near East The term Ancient Near East or Ancient Orient encompasses the early civilizations predating Classical Antiquity in the region roughly corresponding to that described by the modern term Middle East (Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, Anatolia), during the time roughly spanning the Bronze Age from...

In 1971, Jacques Cauvin began the excavation at Mureybet, identifying four main archeological levels,beginning with the pre-pottery, pre-agricultural culture of the Late Natufian. Cauvin discovered that the people of Mureybet at the earliest levels lived in round houses made of limestone bricks, with a clay mortar. In later strata, houses were rectangular. The village evolved from the exploitation of wild plants to the cultivation of cereals: primitive einkorn wheat has been found at Mureybet, and the villagers began to grow peas and barley. The Natufian culture existed in the Mediterranean region of the Levant. ... Binomial name triticum boeoticum Einkorn wheat is a wild species of wheat, Triticum boeoticum. ...

The work on the site was urgent, cut short in 1993 by the filling of the reservoir, Lake Assad.

Artifacts from the Mureybet site, including corpulent figurines of a goddess, are held at the National Museum of Antiquities, Damascus, among the most important artifacts that have been found are counting tokens, comparable to tokens from many Near Eastern sites. The token system was the earliest system employing concrete signs for transmitting information, predating writing by millennia. Damascus by night, pictured from Jabal Qasioun; the green spots are minarets Damascus (Arabic officially دمشق Dimashq, colloquially ash-Sham الشام) is the capital city of Syria and is the oldest inhabited city in the world. ...

External links

• "Les carnets d'Archéologie:
• "Les Mureybetains" (in French, illustrated)