The Early History of the Ancient Near East (9000-2000 BC) Read online

  The Near East is exceptionally suited to the documentation of all stages from the earliest human settlements up to the emergence and evolution of regional states. The invention of writing in Babylonia around 3100 B.C. was only one of many significant innovations in this early period. It is thus impossible to assign it the value given to it, for example, in the concept of a differentiation between “prehistorical” and “historical” phases of human development, depending on whether written sources of information are available or not, as if one could only speak of history when written evidence existed.

  Unfortunately, this concept, which was held to be valid for a long time, and led to an overestimation of the importance of written sources, also led to a development under which works like the present one still have to suffer. Because the philological disciplines claimed to be able to make universal pronouncements about the state, the community, the economy, religion, and “daily life” based on written texts, archaeologists hardly ever felt it necessary to deal with any fields apart from those manifestly allotted to them, above all art and architecture. Any archaeology of the “historical” periods was therefore in a position to exclude whole areas of research dealing with ancient civilizations. However, for the branches of archaeology concerned with civilizations without writing and those that existed before writing was invented, it was a totally different story. They naturally had to investigate all aspects of the civilization in question, including, for example, society and the economy.

  This different type of approach has, in fact, had some effect on the treatment of the ancient civilizations of the Near East. Although, as noted, the invention of writing did not mark any particularly significant historical turning-point, it subsequently acquired importance owing to the division of academic study of the ancient Near East into two spheres. Thus, for example, we know much more about basic nutrition and the domestic flora and fauna of the early period than we do about those of the “historical” period, because remains of animals and plants have been found and analyzed in excavations of “prehistoric” settlements, which is hardly ever true of excavations of “historical” settlements. In the latter case it was assumed that the relevant information could be recovered from an analysis of the texts, by asking the right questions. This can hardly be expected, however, since a selection process was already in operation in choosing what was considered worthy of being written down, and we have no way of knowing what the criteria of selection were.

  Archaeology should therefore make use of the methods valid for research into earlier, preliterate periods even when it is concerned with “historical” periods. A barrier seems to have been reached when, parallel to its responsibilities for the preliterate period, archaeology is also expected to pronounce on the economic, social, and political context of the “historical” period. This seems to belong so clearly to the realm of textual interpretation that any of the, admittedly rough, statements and estimates an archaeologist can make appear superfluous. However, though this is fundamentally true, it does not hold good for the early literate period in Mesopotamia, because here we have only comparatively few historically useful texts at our disposal. In addition, these early texts were obviously not written to inform people in later ages about circumstances at that time. In fact, their usual aim was not to describe things exactly as they happened, but to describe them in such a way as to make them fit in with a specific view, follow a particular trend, or legitimate a certain course. Hence it seems possible, not only that the rougher outlines sketched by archaeological surveys have at times been more objective than the literary evidence, but that in many cases archaeology can contribute information in areas where texts have nothing to add to our knowledge—for example, we need only mention the important issues, discussed later in more detail, of the origins of settlements and settlement systems, the changes that took place in them, and almost all contacts between different settlements that fell short of hostilities. If one disregards economic texts, it was mostly wars and conquests that motivated men to write about relationships between settlements, not the normal relationships whose description would give an account of the actual development of those settlements.

  Since they have hardly ever been manipulated, archaeological sources are usually more dependable than literary ones, but they are difficult to use. Hence, even the construction of a firm foundation for all further investigations, dating, or the confirmation of chronological contemporaneity or noncontemporaneity, causes considerable problems, especially when we take into account the role played by chance in the way evidence has been handed down to us.

  The difficulties standing in the way of arriving at an absolute chronology—that is, fixing the exact chronological distance between any event and our era—are self-evident in the case of a period about which we have no historical documentation. On the other hand, techniques such as the so-called carbon 14 method have not yet achieved a degree of dependability and accuracy that would allow us to use their results without some reservations. However, in spite of these reservations, a chronological framework based partly on carbon 14 dating, which has been accepted by many researchers as a working hypothesis, has been used here, inasmuch as our historical imagination is incapable of managing without the aid of some reference to dates. In using this chronology I am not making a judgment as to whether the system is right or wrong. It simply makes it easier for those interested in the history of Mesopotamia to communicate, as well as making it easier to use other literature (see fig. 1).

  Figure 1. Chronological chart. Author’s original.

  However, as a rule, absolute dates—that is, dates giving the exact length of time up to the present day—will be used as little as possible. Instead, reference will be made to the relative chronologies developed for the individual regions of the ancient Near East. In these chronologies, observations that an event happened before or after another event and of the chronological contemporaneity of different finds and events are combined into groups or systems even if the intervals of time or the distance in time from our own era cannot normally be exactly defined.

  These relative chronological systems are based on stratigraphy and typology. The principle of stratigraphy is based on the hypothesis that, where excavations of an undisturbed site are concerned, the very top layers and the things found there are generally more recent than the objects buried beneath them. This is most obviously true for sites where a house has been built on the remains of an older house, but of course it is also true of layers of rubble, whose position one on top of the other shows how the layers were piled up one after the other on the site under consideration. The chronological sequence of the different constructions, or at least the point in time at which the objects under discussion landed upon the site, can be clearly established, both for the houses and for the objects found in them or in the layers of rubble.

  Beside this assured method of establishing differences in age, we have to set the typological method, which it is true cannot do without borrowing the results of stratigraphy: still in essence it bases its theories upon different observations. The basic principle underlying typology is that the causes of the changes that take place in everything subject to molding or shaping by man lie in changes in raw materials, technology, functions, taste, or artistic expression.

  Series of such changed forms in a given category can be arranged so that their individual members can be closely related in time to neighboring ones, as either precursors or further developments of the latter. In determining the chronological direction of such a group, we are dependent on those cases in which it can be proved without doubt that the form of one link in the chain would be inconceivable without a prototype in the shape of another link or in which one form is a vestige of a previous one. The more nearly perfect form or prototype is then quite obviously older, and hence only the direction of the series derived from these observations can correspond to reality.

  One additional, more frequently used, way of fixing the chronological alignment of a typologic
al series is possible when two or more individual links in such a chain are found in some stratigraphic context. The study of objects in terms of stylistic evolution, a method borrowed from art history, can also be counted among the typological methods. This particular method attempts to find clues to a “before” and “after” from the decoration of the objects themselves, and from this it attempts to abstract criteria for the general thrust of development.

  Our relative chronological systems are accordingly based, directly or indirectly, on stratigraphical sequences discovered during excavations. This explains why the names of excavation sites are often used as the accepted terms for the periods referred to in such relative chronological systems. Such terms, which do not entail value judgments, have not been used consistently, however, and as one approaches “historical” periods, for which, it is assumed, “historical” terminology should be adopted, they gradually give way to less value-free terminology.

  Thus, for example, the periods from which the names of rulers and their dynasties are known to us are called after particular dynasties, although these were not the only dynasties that existed at that time, and possibly were not even the more important. An “Early Dynastic” period was designated as preceding these well-known periods, although there is absolutely no reason to suppose that there were no dynasties prior to it.

  Periods that were not clearly understood were promptly defined as transitional periods. In one particular case, in order to name a period, the name of a ruler was used, even though in the meantime it has been shown that he was not even alive during the period named after him.

  In addition to this vagueness about names, archaeological contexts only infrequently permit a clear demarcation between one period and the next. Drawing such dividing lines is thus very much a matter of the judgment of the individual scholar, depending on which criteria are used in each individual situation. It is therefore clear that it is not possible to have one universally valid chronological scheme, but only systems that fit specific criteria in given situations and show certain inadequacies in others.

  The view that it is not one of the least of the aims of a relative chronological system to serve as a general foundation for the understanding of as many interested people as possible led, in the end, to the setting up of a hybrid system that took individual names for particular periods from different systems and put them together in new and different ways. Here, too, the subjectivity involved in the selection process cannot be overlooked. However, in spite of its inconsistencies and vulnerability to criticism, this combined system is generally accepted, and it is therefore used here. It would have been nice to have developed a chronological system of my own that would have been better adapted to the particular direction pursued in this work, the development of forms of political organization as an aspect of historical development. Nonetheless, I resisted this temptation in order to guarantee the comparability of scientific results.

  In this book, the role of the natural environment and the changes that took place in it during the initial growth and subsequent development of the early civilizations of the Near East will be emphasized more strongly than usual. In contrast to mere assumptions made about these influences in earlier times, new research has provided enough evidence for us to make direct connections between changes in the environment and the growth of these civilizations without falling into the dangerous proximity of ecological determinism.

  Unfortunately, the evidence we have for the chronological and geographical area we know as the Near East is very unevenly distributed. In addition to the difficulty of, for example, gaining evidence about the climate in antiquity, there is the fact that hardly any research has yet been carried out into the ecological microstructures of the Near East. Results that hold true for one part of the Near East may not be accepted for the whole area and can therefore only be applied with reservations to other parts or to the whole region. Nevertheless, for at least part of the area—Babylonia and western Iran—these findings are just sufficient to permit us occasionally to use ecological conditions to explain cultural phenomena.

  This work is, of course, in no position to offer a history of the rulers, the dynasties, or the centers of power in the early preliterate periods. On the other hand, the author does not wish to restrict himself to an account of the sequence and possible relationships between different archaeological sites and the things found there. Without making the mistake of using situations known to us from a later time to project back to earlier ones, we shall try to elicit, from the materials available for the early periods themselves, some statements about economic and social structures. From the position and type of settlements, and the spatial relationships between them, one can, for example, make statements about the individual settlement systems of one particular region or period, which can then provide points of departure for statements about the size and centrality of the organizational structures that existed there. In this case, we make use of the basic theories and methods developed by settlement geography.

  The basic patterns, founded on the opposition between centralization and decentralization, which view the growth of centrality as the visible expression of hierarchical subordination, and see the degree of centrality as a measure of the organizational stage of development of a settlement system, fit in very nicely with our aims and resources.

  The different sizes of the settlements and their positions in relation to one another are one measure of hierarchical subordination. Here, one assumes that, as a rule, places in which “central functions” can be found—that is, institutions that existed to serve a larger area than their now home settlements, such as central administration, centralized cult establishments, and so forth—would be bigger than the settlements they catered to and that these larger places could be reached equally well from all the outlying settlements. Hence they represent, more or less, the geographical center of such a group of settlements.

  The basic facts necessary to describe these ancient settlement systems, such as the location and size of the settlements, and the chronology of their existence, are all archaeologically tangible. The necessary proviso is that the settlement systems of the ancient Near East conformed to the same laws as do the systems we find in the modern world, on the basis of which the methods of settlement geography were developed.

  This conformity has been demonstrated by so many examples that we can definitely assume we are treading on firm ground. It must, however, be mentioned that not all systems of relationships between settlements can be understood in this way. For example, if the central place differed only qualitatively and not quantitatively from the other places, the distinguishing mark of greater size would be missing.

  However, with this process it cannot be stressed often enough that success depends not only on whether such methods are transferable but also on the dependability of the archaeological information used. In concrete terms, this means that success depends on how far it is possible to judge the period of a settlement and the size of the place in question from surface finds. The process needs no justification when we are dealing with an appraisal of the last phase of the settlement, because by definition these remains will be lying undisturbed on the surface, but clearly problems arise in connection with more ancient settlement phases, whose remains will, as a rule, be covered up by the remains of one or several more recent phases.

  However, experience has shown that, as a rule, signs of all the different settlement phases will be present on the surface. The deeper the level in question, the fewer remains there will be on the surface, of course, but in every period the construction of wells or shafts exhumed much material from older layers. Great care must be taken in any appraisal of these more ancient finds, especially in assessing the size of the settlements during such phases. This means that any figures that refer to the size of a settlement or the length of time it was settled must, as a rule, be understood as minimum statements.

  Here we must also mention one further point. The terms village, city, and
state, which are normally used in the archaeological literature, are so changeable that one would really prefer to do without them. Their definition becomes easier if we follow the example of settlement researchers, who assess the importance of a settlement by its relationship to its (settled) surroundings. The main terms that must then be used are center and surroundings, which together form a compact system, insofar as both parts of a settlement system are permanently dependent on each other.

  The people living in the surrounding area are dependent on the “central functions” in the center, such as, for example, temples, warehouses, and the administration or social leadership. On the other hand, the center requires compensation for its services in the shape of tribute or taxes paid by the inhabitants of the surrounding area. Such interdependence between the inhabitants of a central settlement and those in the surrounding area first becomes comprehensible to the archaeologist, however, when the people living in the surrounding area have also organized themselves into settlements. The place where the central functions are carried on for settlements of this sort is on a higher organizational level precisely because of its centralized functions and may thus be called the center of the settlement system. Since this mutual relationship provides us with a lowest common denominator, we may define this place as a “center of the first order” and call the system a simple, or two-tier, settlement system (cf. fig. 11).

  Such a system works only if the settlements are close enough together to make continuous exchange possible. Hence there are optimal limits. On the one hand, there are maximal limits, determined by transportation between the center and the remotest dependent settlement, and, on the other, minimal limits, determined by the area required for the central functions to have sufficient clients to employ them to capacity.