What Makes Civilization Read online

  The initial discovery of metallurgy could have been made in any number of places around the margins of the Fertile Crescent where fuel and metallic ores were obtainable in sufficient quantities. But only through its wide dissemination could metals become valued as a general medium of exchange. This accounts for the broadly simultaneous appearance, during the fifth millennium BC, of evidence for smelting, forging, casting, and alloying on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea (with access to the rich metal deposits of the Iranian Plateau), in the Turkish highlands above the Euphrates (close to the poly-metallic ores of the Taurus Mountains), and as far south as the arid margins of the Negev Desert (a few days journey from the copper sources of southern Jordan). The flow of metals around this circuit has been demonstrated through chemical analysis of a hoard of ornate copper artefacts—cast in the lost-wax technique—which was found in the Judean Desert of southern Israel. They contained traces of arsenic and antimony, the nearest sources of which lie 1000 kilometres distant, in eastern Turkey or Azerbaijan.

  No less striking than the spread of metallurgical knowledge was the dissemination of new farming techniques. The practices of grafting and artificial pollinating, which form the basis of tree-crop horticulture, are widely in evidence by the end of the Ubaid period. Again it is difficult to identify a single point of origin for their development, and the techniques themselves may have long preceded their widespread application (there is tentative evidence, in Israel, for fig domestication at around 9000 BC). What distinguishes the fifth millennium is both the local intensification of these techniques and the cross-regional transfer of specific tree-crops around the Fertile Crescent: olive, fig, and almond spreading along the Syrian coast; vine and pomegranate across the foothills of the Taurus; and the date palm from the marshy head of the Persian Gulf. Such transfers reflect, not just the transmission of new farming methods, but also of new modes of consumption and social display, further reflected in a growing preference for wool textiles over earlier types of garment woven from flax. It is at this time that we detect the development of new sheep breeds with fleecy coasts (as opposed to the naturally hairy varieties of the early Neolithic period), initially concentrated in the uplands of western Iran.

  Villages into the Melting Pot

  The combined result of all these changes, as Andrew Sherratt (1999) first pointed out, was a dramatic proliferation in the range of consumables available to prehistoric societies around the entire Fertile Crescent. Their creative hybridization generated entirely new food products—unprecedented flavours, smells, and sensations—and modes of personal appearance, just as the mixing of different metals created new materials with previously unknown properties of form and colour.

  What was the role of the Mesopotamian lowlands in this process, which Sherratt has called ‘the diversification of desire’? Lacking a distinct repertory of raw materials, villagers on the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates were nevertheless ideally positioned to play the role of go-between, mixing and matching commodities from regions as diverse as the mountains of Turkey and the coastal lagoons of the Persian Gulf. Particularly significant, as Sherratt noted, was the transfer of yeasts from cultivated fruits to malted cereals, which marked the beginnings of leavened bread and wheat beer (an innovation subsequently transferred—along with the grapevine—to another cereal-rich alluvial plain, that of Egypt, by the late fourth millennium BC). In adopting the role of inventive mediators, Mesopotamian villagers reshaped the social world of the household to increase productivity, disseminating new styles of consumption, and refining the techniques of commerce. Certain aspects of this process, which laid the cultural foundations of urban life, stand out with particular clarity in the archaeological record.

  First of all, we are immediately struck by the homogenization of built environments in villages across the entire Mesopotamian plain. The resulting situation meant that a hypothetical villager from southern Iraq, entering a house 1000 kilometres away in the Turkish highlands, would have felt broadly at ease with the domestic arrangements he found there: a long, T-shaped hall with a focal hearth at one end, branching off into a series of side-chambers. He would also have recognized a familiar suite of ceramic serving utensils, such as handled drinking cups and spouted jars. Both vessel types were novelties of this period, and their spread implies the adoption of shared forms of hospitality, and perhaps also ritual practices, across a vast area. This new uniformity in pottery is partly accounted for by the adoption of the slow potter’s wheel, a manually turned disc on a central pivot. Its use increased the output of decorated ceramics, and led to a degree of standardization in vessel shapes and ornamentation, accompanied by the disappearance of highly individualized handmade wares. Use of the wheel was also symptomatic of a new rigidity in the control of domestic crafts (and perhaps specifically of female labour), achieved through the spatial segregation of tasks within the household and the introduction of machinery that constrained movement.

  The Changing Face of Clay

  There is no evidence for the use of pack donkeys or ox-driven carts in the Near East until the fourth millennium BC, so the flow of goods between Ubaid villages may still have been relatively small scale. Trade was nevertheless subject to new forms of regulation through the use of special accounting devices and techniques of commodity marking, all of which were based upon a single medium of communication: the clay from which customary tokens of contract were formed, and which later bore the impression of seals and the earliest written signs.

  Across the Fertile Crescent, clay figurines of pregnant women and domestic animals—together with geometric tokens—had, since Neolithic times, provided communities with a shared language of signification. Almost since the beginnings of farming the manual process of shaping, firing, and even breaking these miniature forms seems to have been closely linked to the conduct of important social transactions, perhaps involving exchanges of kin as well as animals and other goods. Around 7000 BC, in northern Mesopotamia, the symbolic role of clay in regulating commodity transfers was extended through the development of specialized sealing practices for storage vessels. This involved placing a band of wet clay over the mouth of a container and impressing it with a carved stone amulet (which did double service as a personal ornament), leaving a distinguishing mark that could be used to trace the product back to a particular individual or institution: a point of origin.

  This seemingly innocuous development would have far-reaching consequences, still detectable in today’s consumer cultures. The presence of a clay sealing demonstrated the integrity of the package and its contents, particularly important in the case of organic comestibles, and had the potential to reduce the risks involved in exchanges between unfamiliar partners. But it also introduced a new potential for mystification into the circulation and consumption of commodities. Then, as now, breaking a seal always disturbs a prior set of relationships: between the owner of the sealed object, the owner of the seal used to fasten it, and the agencies evoked by the image carved on the seal’s surface, which were sometimes of a supernatural kind. It is therefore both something of a violation and something of a temptation, setting in motion a chain of consequences, the outcomes of which cannot always be foreseen, and may lead to misfortune. Seals have the potential to rewrite social history, and as such have often been viewed as portentous and dangerous objects in their own right. Later Mesopotamian ‘dream omens’ credited them with magical powers, including the power to produce or destroy offspring.

  As the range of commodities expanded during the Ubaid period, the miniature designs impressed onto their clay sealings became more vivid and diverse. Among them we find a new bestiary of real and fictitious animals in poses of violence or copulation, a panoply of scenes showing people drinking and feasting, and a hybrid figure with human body and ram’s head, who holds aloft a pair of snakes. This rapidly expanding cast of characters—and the real human agents behind their production—now stood guard over the world of commodities, occupying an important space o
f the social imagination between products and their consumption. Once broken and removed from their containers, clay sealings could also be stored as records of transaction, and evidence from Tell Sabi Abyad in northern Syria suggests that this was an aspect of their use from the very beginning. New possibilities of control were thereby generated over a vital social commodity: the memory of relationships formed through the exchange of goods.

  By the middle of the fourth millennium BC, another new commercial technique had been introduced, involving the enclosure of groups of miniature commodity tokens within hollow clay spheres known as bullae. The outer surfaces of these spheres bear the imprint of seals, and also of impressed numerical signs corresponding to the tokens within. The linked use of bullae, seals, and tokens was followed quite rapidly by the appearance of the first clay tablets impressed with numerical signs, and similarly overlain with seal impressions. Urban institutions, responsible for the organization of unprecedented numbers of people and things, provided a context within which the established role of clay as a recipient of signs was further abstracted from physical processes of storage and exchange. Here the stylus would soon come to supplement the seal, allowing abstract information to be classified, quantified, and otherwise manipulated in a bureaucratic manner.

  The Dark Millennium

  To summarize, the fifth millennium BC was a period of remarkable cultural symbiosis in the absence of marked urbanization or political centralization. The disruption of this pattern of development may have begun to the south of Mesopotamia, in the distinctive setting of the Persian Gulf, where current reconstructions suggest a significant—but localized—change in environmental conditions around this time. The Gulf is only 35 metres deep in most places, and much of it could be crossed on foot just 12,000 years ago. Since that time, its shallow basin—once no doubt densely inhabited by fishers, hunters, and foragers—had been gradually filling with waters from the Arabian Sea, pushing these groups into ever closer contact with the occupants of the Mesopotamian alluvium. Ubaid serving vessels and their local imitations are found as far south as the Straits of Hormuz. Trading activity along these routes (in search of timber, metals, and precious stone) would surely have continued to expand eastwards towards the Indus, were it not for an episode of climatic deterioration which commenced around 4000 BC.

  Archaeologists working in the Gulf refer to this episode as the ‘dark millennium’: a localized period of high aridity and site abandonment along the eastern Arabian coastline, which coincides suggestively with the Urban Revolution in Mesopotamia, and with the reorientation of Sumerian trade towards the north and east. Maritime links between Sumer and the Gulf of Oman, temporarily severed, would only be fully restored towards the onset of the Early Bronze Age (c.3000 BC). By that time, the aggressive northward expansion of Mesopotamian trading contacts along the Euphrates had decisively altered the fate of societies from Egypt to the deserts of central Asia.

  5

  ORIGIN OF CITIES

  Go up, pace out the walls of Uruk,

  Study the foundation terrace and examine the brickwork.

  . . . . . . .

  Three and a half square miles is the measure of Uruk!

  [Search out] the foundation box of copper,

  [Release] its lock of bronze,

  Raise the lid upon its hidden contents …

  From the Epic of Gilgamesh (second

  millennium BC, translated by B. R. Foster)

  A cuneiform text known as the Sumerian King List describes the descent of kingship from heaven into the cities of the Mesopotamian plain. Kingship comes down from on high as an unsolicited gift from the gods. Neither fully possessed nor reciprocated, its arrival on earth sets in motion a cycle of violence whereby one city in turn abducts it from another. Attested in various recensions from the late third into the second millennium BC, the King List precisely enumerates the time that each city held onto kingship, from the millennia-long dominion of godlike heroes, such as Gilgamesh and the divine shepherd Dumuzi, to the reigns of mortal rulers whose years are counted on a human scale, and whose existence can often be corroborated from other sources. In constructing a mythical lineage for the dynastic powers of its day, the content of the King List is strongly conditioned by the political circumstances of its composition, and cannot be reliably used to reconstruct the political history of earlier periods. Nevertheless, its narrative structure, which takes the existence of cities as a given—requiring no explanation—reveals a pervasive attachment to urban life which finds only limited parallels in Egyptian literary sources, and has its roots in much earlier transformations.

  The beginnings of urbanization in Mesopotamia can, in fact, be traced back a full two thousand years before the composition of the Sumerian King List, to the fourth millennium BC. Little is known about systems of government in these very earliest cities. The high ranking title of en—also documented from later periods—occurs in cuneiform texts from Uruk by the end of the fourth millennium, although its meaning may have changed considerably over the centuries. By the Early Dynastic period (c.3000-2350 BC), for which fuller records exist, it relates to the ruler’s administrative and ritual duties in serving the cult of the city-god. At Ur the sovereign and military leader was termed lugal (literally: ‘big man’) and the term ensi carried a similar meaning in the city-state of Lagash. Archaeological evidence for the existence of palaces—in the sense of royal households distinct from the temples of the gods—has not been conclusively identified in Mesopotamia prior to the third millennium BC. In considering the nature of earlier forms of urban government we can look, with due circumspection, to other types of institution, which formed part of the fabric of city life in later periods. These included the major temples, with each city claiming a special—but not exclusive—relationship to a particular deity; the assemblies of city elders; wards located within the city walls but still organized on traditional family lines (‘urban villages’, as Nicholas Postgate (1992) calls them); and also mercantile organizations, based outside the fortifications in the city harbour. As I go on to discuss, however, it is the material record of the fourth millennium BC which—even in the absence of directly informative texts—provides our most reliable testimony to the nature of social and economic life in the world’s first cities.

  As a point of entry to the origin of cities in the fourth millennium BC, it is worth contemplating what becomes of a village-based society when individual households—the given units of social organization since Neolithic times—are increasingly unable to regulate the content of goods passing through them. The fifth millennium BC had been a period of spiralling experimentation and hybridization in dietary practices and material culture. It generated unprecedented diversity in the world of goods, but also introduced new uncertainties into the realm of domestic consumption and exchange. Many of the commodities now in wider circulation, notably dairy products and alcoholic drinks, were susceptible to natural deterioration as well as deliberate adulteration, and had potentially harmful effects when corrupted or wrongly consumed. The multiplication of products also generated new ambiguities concerning the origin of goods, which were amplified through the proliferation of commodity seals and labels—in a plethora of regional styles—among village communities. Metals too could be blended from multiple points of origin, and their circulation in cast and alloyed forms added a new liquidity (and unpredictability) to material transactions. Such transformations cannot be adequately circumscribed within the realm of ‘economy’. They touch upon fundamental areas of social life such as trust, personal health, and hygiene. In this chapter I argue that the origin of cities, writing, and centralized institutions of unprecedented scale was in significant part a response to these uncertainties, pioneered on the southern alluvium of Mesopotamia.

  Uruk, Handicraft of the Gods

  Around four thousand years ago scribes in the Mesopotamian city of Nippur wrote down a myth about the origins of commerce. It is known as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. Enmerkar is intro
duced as the king and builder of the Sumerian city of Unug. This is the city called Uruk in the Akkadian language, and also in modern archaeological parlance. In the Hebrew Book of Genesis it appears under the name of Erech—alongside Babel, Akkad, and Calneh—as one of the primeval kingdoms of Shinar (Sumer), the land settled after the Great Flood, and the setting for the ill-fated episode at the Tower of Babel. In the Sumerian epic, the Lord of Aratta lives in a distant highland region where the environmental conditions of Sumer are reversed. Grain is scarce, but the mountains yield an endless harvest of precious metals and stones. In the absence of trade and writing, whose origins are linked in the story, Enmerkar must obtain these goods to furnish a dwelling for the goddess Inanna, and secure her favour. This he achieves by answering a series of challenges. He must send a cargo of grain to Aratta in open, porous nets; fashion a sceptre from a material that is not wood, reed, metal, or any known stone; and match the fighting dog of the Lord of Aratta with a dog of his own, whose coat is of an unknown colour and pattern. Enmerkar finds ingenious technical solutions to all these problems. He fills the nets with sprouted barley, fabricates a new material for the sceptre, and (a little fraudulently) manufactures an elaborate textile to act as a new coat (in both senses!) for the dog. Salvation for the city comes through the inventive use and transformation of local resources, and the plot concludes with Inanna’s decision to institute peaceful trade between Uruk and Aratta.