Throughout this region we find small self-contained and self-supporting settlements. Some beads, shells, or other luxuries may have been imported from more or less distant regions by means of hand-to-hand barter. Occasionally a rare raw material, such as obsidian—volcanic glass, flaked and used, like flint, for tools—was obtained regularly from outside. For the rest, one gets an impression of a somewhat stagnant prosperity in which the great new inventions were thoroughly exploited but little changed from generation to generation for a very long time. There are differences in the crafts: flint tools, pot designs (even ceramic techniques), and personal ornaments differ from region to region and even, as in prehistoric Thessaly, from village to village. There are also changes in style in the course of time. But these local and temporal differences must not detain us as we survey the prehistory of the ancient Near East with a view to the subsequent development. For that purpose we can divide the region into three parts: the two great river valleys and the area between, in which the rich plains of North Syria were the most important part. This central area was prosperous, but it remained unprogressive until the second millennium, dependent on the great cultural centres in Egypt and Mesopotamia. For that reason, we shall confine our attention to the river valleys. Modern Egypt, even if we disregard the aridity of its climate, differs entirely from the land with which we are here concerned. Nowadays the whole of the country is so intensively cultivated that it does not possess sufficient grazing for its cattle, and one sees cows, buffaloes and asses tethered at the desert edge and fed on cultivated crops such as clover. The river is thoroughly controlled. The desert valleys—wadis—are devoid of vegetation except for bushes of camel-thorn. But in prehistoric, as well as in Pharaonic times, Egypt was a land of marshes in which papyrus, sedge, and rushes grew to more than man’s height (Fig. 3). The wadis, too, teemed with life; they are best described as park land where as late as the New Kingdom (1400 B.C.) man could hunt Barbary sheep, wild oxen, and asses, and a wide variety of antelopes with their attendant carnivores. It has been pointed out[64] that the methods of hunting prove that different types of landscape could be found here. Sometimes rows of beaters are shown driving the game towards the hunter or into nets, a method possible only in areas which are somewhat thickly wooded. At other times lassos are used, which presuppose pampa-like open spaces with low shrub.