What if Farming begins in the Fertile Crescent had gone differently?

Wild wheat and barley are first sown and harvested on purpose in the hills of the Levant.

If it had gone differently: Bands keep foraging; there is no surplus, no permanent settlement, no state, history's clock never really starts.

1. -3200Writing appears in Sumer, Records, law and literature stay oral for centuries; states can't grow past what one memory holds.
2. -1754The Code of Hammurabi, Law stays the private memory of kings and priests; the idea of a public, written, predictable rule arrives centuries late.
3. -1050The Phoenician alphabet, Writing stays a scribal priesthood's monopoly of hundreds of signs; ordinary merchants and citizens never learn to read.