Forgot to mention domestication of animals, this would be high up on the ladder of the earliest things that drove human technology & survival plus would also figure into human ritual worship & psychological views to. The domestication of dogs for alarm systems & the hunt (you could also eat them if necessary) horses & camels while grazing sheep & goats changed the topography of much of the ME. Men were entirely dependent on the animals they kept, this was reflected in the central earliest themes.
Much of the way human thinking evolves is tied in very closely with those exercises of keeping & caring for animals. One sees this in just so many allusions & metaphors of the lion kings, the sacrificial goat or "good shepherd"
An we find going back to Egypt or ancient Greece preserved in their art
The Greek Hermes , the Good Shepherd 550BC:
He is the lord of the herds, epimélios and kriophoros, who leads them to the sweet waters, and bears the
tired ram or lamb on his shoulders, and assists them with the shepherd's crook, the kerykeion.
The Christian 300AD, 800yrs later
Good Shepherd from the Catacomb of Priscilla, 250-300
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