What Makes Civilization Page 7
Like all myths, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta deftly combines elements of the real and the unreal. Attempting to unravel fact from fantasy is unwise. It may then be no more than serendipity that the site of Uruk—identified over a century ago with the mound of Warka in southern Iraq—has come to occupy a central place in modern understandings of the emergence of cities and writing. Excavations there have produced evidence for the earliest development of the cuneiform script (c.3300 -3000 BC) in the form of tablets documenting the management of commodities and labour by large urban institutions, which were concentrated within a walled precinct atop the centre of the mound. Archaeological survey of the surrounding landscape suggests that by this time the city had already grown to around 250 hectares, dwarfing other settlements on the Mesopotamian plain, and perhaps containing as many as 20,000 residents. Some archaeologists now prefer the term ‘Uruk Expansion’ over Gordon Childe’s ‘Urban Revolution’ as a label for this process. The reason is that the urbanization of Uruk is associated with an equally striking spread of southern Mesopotamian cultural influence over much of the Fertile Crescent.
On first impression, the effect seems akin to that of a volcanic eruption. By the late fourth millennium BC the lowland plains of south-west Iran appear totally submerged, their major centres (such as Susa) engulfed by Sumerian products. Along the Syrian Euphrates appear new settlements, such as the 10-hectare site of Habuba Kabira, a miniature Uruk in every respect, other than the absence of cuneiform writing. On the adjacent, rain-fed plains of northern Mesopotamia, southern manufactures began to replace or supplement local products. Still wider impacts can be traced as a series of ever-thinning ripples, washing over the Taurus and Zagros Mountains towards the Black Sea and the Iranian Plateau, and spilling into the Mediterranean where small quantities of Mesopotamian goods were projected as far south as Upper Egypt. The latter included commodity seals, which were quickly adapted for use with local vessel forms.
On closer inspection, however, this spread begins to look less like an indiscriminate eruption, and more like an escalating series of strategic advances from south to north. Many of the areas affected had themselves been moving steadily towards urban life for some centuries, and possessed local systems of bureaucratic management which—although still non-literate—were a direct outgrowth of Ubaid practices such as the use of seals and standardized metrical systems. The expansion of Uruk ‘colonies’ and ‘outposts’, as Guillermo Algaze (1993) terms them, follows a commercial logic. They occupied the interstices of important trade corridors, both overland and riverine. Where no such gaps existed, they intruded directly into the heart of existing local settlements, large and small, from the Upper Euphrates to the highlands of western Iran. Archaeologists recognize these intrusions by the appearance of Uruk-style buildings, storage and serving vessels, and accounting devices among otherwise local forms of material culture. This was by no means the first great colonial venture in human history, among which we must count the initial expansion of our species throughout the globe, and the subsequent displacement of hunter-gatherer groups by Neolithic farmers. It was, however, the first instance of a type of colonial movement—familiar from more recent eras—in which entire communities budded off from an urban metropolis, re-establishing themselves in distant locations, yet maintaining distinct identities and regular trade relations that linked them to their cities of origin.
A similar ability to maintain extended communities over great areas lay at the heart of the Harappan cultural expansion, within and beyond the Indus Valley, a thousand years later (c.2600-1800 BC). The two networks—Uruk and Harappan—share other similarities which hint at common, underlying principles of organization. In both cases evidence for hereditary inequalities between different sectors of the population (e.g. in the form of rich dynastic burials) is conspicuous by its absence. And in both cases there is a remarkable similarity of form between settlements of all sizes within the commercial network. Very large sites such as Mohenjodaro, in the Sind province of Pakistan, and Uruk (both about 250 hectares) are essentially scaled up versions of very small or even tiny ones, a few hectares or less in size. As Daniel Miller (1985) observed some time ago, to find any kind of similarity in the layout of sites so widely differing in scale suggests something significant about the societies in question.
No less striking is what Miller refers to as a ‘lack of individualization’ in the realm of material culture, from house forms (including the use of uniform dimensions for mud-bricks) to ceramic vessels, across sites of all scales. Hence the massive building complexes that occupy the central walled district of Uruk (known as ‘Eanna’ in later periods) follow the long-established tripartite plan of ordinary households, lending credence to the view that they were conceived as ‘Houses of the Gods’ on an immemorial model of village life. Ritual practices generated through the routines of domestic activity—and concerned with such everyday household matters as personal hygiene, storage, hospitality, and food preparation—appear in each case to have been reproduced on a monumental scale, and with an emphasis on collective rather than exclusive participation. Consider, for example, the great assembly halls of the Eanna complex at Uruk, accommodating up to three hundred people at a time, or the vast bathing facilities at the heart of Mohenjo-daro. (In an earlier study I have tried to show how a similar story—with hierarchical institutions emerging out of the micro-practices of daily life—can be told for Egypt, but with a special emphasis upon the body itself as metaphor and mediator of relationships between kings, gods, and mortals; see Wengrow 2006, and also Chapter 8.)
The process of magnification, however, also involved significant changes in the character of collective life, which are particularly visible in the relations between the living and the dead. Human remains are near absent from sites within the Uruk cultural network, and are similarly rare within the Harappan cultural zone. The dead, it seems, were expelled from the space of the living and removed to special burial grounds outside the walls of the settlement, perhaps exemplified by the funerary site of Tell Majnuna near the city of Nagar (Tell Brak) in northern Syria. Comparable reforms in the treatment of the dead are known to have accompanied urbanization in other, better-documented periods of history. Philippe Ariès (1994) reports, for example, that Roman law codes ‘forbade burial in urbe, within the city … so that the sanctitas of the inhabitants’ homes would be preserved’; and the Early Church Fathers would later argue that intramural burial polluted ‘the very limbs of Christ’ (that is, the City of God and its inhabitants, created in His image). The increasingly systematic expulsion of the dead from Mesopotamian settlements during the fourth millennium BC indicates that the growth of cities was associated with new concepts of purity and contagion, which also had implications for the world of commodities.
The Wheels of Commerce
The emergence of cities in Mesopotamia coincides with a range of innovations in large-scale commerce and extensive farming. Their distribution extended far beyond Mesopotamia itself, and formed part of a wider technological milieu from which emerged the distinctive forms of both Egyptian and Sumerian society. The use of pack donkeys is attested in surrounding regions, from Egypt to highland Iran, by c.3300 BC. Around the same time evidence for the adoption of cattle-drawn ploughs appears across a truly enormous area, from farming communities dispersed along the Neolithic fringes of northern Europe to the cities of the Sumerian plain. Wheeled carts, also drawn by cattle, are depicted on some of the earliest written documents from Uruk, and a new interest in the industrial application of rotary power is further reflected in the use of the potter’s flywheel (driven by hand) to produce standardized packaging, suitable for the bulk transport of liquid commodities. (The bow-drill was a much earlier, Neolithic invention, while the lapidary engraving wheel was a later innovation of the second millennium BC, as was the use of a foot-powered wheel for throwing pots.) Intensification of ceramic production is also evident in the adoption of modular, factory-line processes of assembly for standa
rd vessel forms, particularly liquid containers. Along with these developments we find an important refinement in the marking of sealed commodities, which served to further distinguish Uruk products from those of neighbouring regions. In place of stamp seals, use of which continued elsewhere, Uruk and its colonial offshoots employed cylindrical seals engraved with intaglio designs. The more complex of these designs were technological marvels in their own right: masterpieces of lapidary carving, all the more astonishing (and difficult to counterfeit) for the fact that they were rendered in reverse, so as to produce a correct impression when rolled over the clay sealing of a commodity vessel.
Map 5. Major sites in Egypt and Mesopotamia, c.4000 to 2000 BC
In pursuing new commercial strategies, cities on the southern alluvium enjoyed a unique combination of advantages. Under irrigation the extraordinary fertility of river-borne soils provided surplus cereal crops to feed a centralized workforce, and for conversion into more sophisticated comestibles (varieties of bread and beer). The wetlands around the head of the Persian Gulf—teeming with fish, crabs, and turtles—added an important source of protein to the urban diet, while consumption of meat and dairy products was reserved for festive occasions. Major centres such as Uruk, Larsa, Ur, and Eridu also sat astride the confluence of three major axes of water transport: the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, and a network of east–west contacts crossing the marshy profile of the Gulf, then located some 200 kilometres inland of its present location. To place these early cities in their proper environmental context today requires an effort of the imagination. The lateral movement of the Tigris and Euphrates beds over the past few thousand years has left their ruins high and dry above the central desert of southern Iraq. But their walled defences were once arrayed along the fringes of a maritime seaboard, and the deep scars of river canals which coursed through the heart of their sacred precincts are still clearly visible at sites such as Nippur—the seat of the Enlil, overlord of the Sumerian pantheon—sitting watch over the northern frontier of the alluvium.
In his (1993) The Uruk World System, Guillermo Algaze offers an explanation for the Uruk Expansion of the fourth millennium BC that would no doubt have found approval with the author(s) of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. The key, he argues, lay in the competitive export of labour-intensive goods manufactured from locally abundant resources: principally dyed and woven textiles, and processed consumables such as alcoholic drinks, dairy products, unguents, animal fats, and oils, which feature widely in the earliest cuneiform records from Uruk. Wool textiles—durable and lightweight products, easily transported, and able to absorb the value added by skilled weavers, fullers, and dyers—were particularly crucial in this regard, as they would prove to be millennia later in laying the foundations of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Detailed documentation of the textile industry and its central role in long-distance trade is available from the third millennium BC, by which time the palace and temple estates of Sumer were routinely processing raw wool by the thousands of tons, using an encumbered (largely female) workforce.
A proportion of finished textiles was regularly traded onwards by networks of specialized merchants, reaching centres of consumption as far as central Anatolia (modern Turkey) where the business archives of a later Assyrian trading colony (c.1900 BC) have survived at the site of Kanesh, near modern Kayseri. They reveal a scrupulously organized bilateral trade—supported by complex credit arrangements between multiple urban stakeholders—with tin (an essential component of bronze) and fine textiles moving northwards onto the Anatolian plateau by donkey caravan, and a regular flow of gold and silver moving back in the other direction to the city of Ashur, on the northern reaches of the Tigris. Silver, from the mid-third millennium onwards, was highly valued as a standard measure of exchange in lowland Mesopotamia, used in transfers of fixed and mobile property. Assyrian (north Mesopotamian) traders were thus able to generate substantial profits by using relatively small amounts of Anatolian silver to purchase bulk quantities of tin and textiles from production centres further south. These commodities were then traded back over the Taurus mountains into central Turkey, where they were in high demand, in return for large shipments of silver (acquired at a highly favourable rate of exchange), which could be reinvested in the purchase of new merchandise to support further commercial ventures of the same kind. This was Bronze Age venture capitalism at its finest.
Algaze suggests that, by the late fourth millennium BC, the consumers of Mesopotamian export goods already formed an extended supply chain, filtering raw materials (such as metals, timber, and precious stones) from a vast catchment area towards the urban centres of the southern alluvium. We thus find Uruk enclaves of varying scale occupying highland passes through the Zagros (the corridors to the copper resources of the Iranian Plateau, and beyond them the lapis mines of Afghanistan), and the Taurus Mountains above the Upper Euphrates (en route to Anatolian deposits of copper, silver, and gold). The argument is convincing in its essentials, but leaves open a fundamental question: why would products manufactured in southern Mesopotamia have been especially desirable in the first place? After all, many of the goods concerned were already locally produced in neighbouring regions, and were therefore being exported on what amounts to a ‘coals to Newcastle’ basis. To address this question, we should examine more closely the contents of the earliest written documents from Uruk. First, though, it is necessary to briefly define what is and is not meant by ‘writing’ in this context.
Writing: The ‘Spiritualism of the State’
In the story of Enmerkar, composed a thousand years after the invention of the cuneiform script, writing is invented to convey a challenge from the King of Uruk to the Lord of Aratta. The king’s speech is too long for his messenger to remember, so Enmerkar—ever the innovator—inscribes it on a tablet of clay. Given our modern reliance on writing to convey language at a distance, we might find this a plausible context for the origins of writing itself; but we would be wrong.
The earliest cuneiform inscriptions are in fact made up largely of ideograms; graphic symbols that represent ideas rather than units of language such as phonemes. They are usually combined with numerical and metrological symbols, and among them we find signs for a wide range of domestic animals, birds, fish, plants, stones, types of metal (and metal artefacts), textiles, dairy products, and professional roles and titles. But the structural arrangement of these signs does not follow the linear structure of natural speech, and was never intended to do so. Instead it uses a visual format attuned to mathematical notation, dividing the surface of the tablet into boxes arranged in vertical columns, each containing a combination of ideograms and numerals. This is readily explained by the bureaucratic, bookkeeping functions that cuneiform writing was originally designed to fulfil. The ‘muse’ which inspired its inventors was not epic poetry, song, or royal decrees, but the no less compelling language of commodity flows, into and out of the great households of the earliest cities. The subsequent adaptation of cuneiform writing to represent the grammar and syntax of spoken language, and eventually to record literature, took centuries to unfold. A major stimulus came around the middle of the third millennium BC, when the script was increasingly used to write elements of non-Sumerian languages, such as the Semitic languages used at Ebla and Mari in Syria: cultural mixing and blending, once again, the mother of invention.
Karl Marx described bureaucracy as ‘the spiritualism of the state’, creating a carefully patrolled domain of phantom entities—signs that stand for beings and things—to exist alongside real people and objects. The earliest written signs were of precisely this nature, standing in for concrete things rather than units of speech, and signifying their changing relationships within a closed system where number, order, and rank were the only significant dimensions of value. In Egypt, as I have discussed more fully elsewhere (Wengrow 2006), the emergence of writing had a similarly close relationship with the world of commodities. As in Mesopotamia, script invention was tied to the standar
dization of material goods, and to the adoption of specialized marking systems—including the use of cylinder seals, an imported technique—to classify and differentiate types of produce. Most of the earliest known hieroglyphic inscriptions relate in one way or another to the differentiation and ranking of consumables. They appear on labels, seals, or other marks which—applied to the surface of ordinary, mass-produced commodity containers—served to ascribe special origins of one sort or another to their contents, identifying them as products of royal estates, as exotic luxuries, or as ‘the best’ of a given type of produce. In Egypt, the early development of these marking systems was directly associated with the organization and performance of elite funerary rituals, in which vast quantities of wealth were taken out of circulation to furnish the tombs of deceased kings and courtiers: a striking case of bureaucracy in the service of sacrifice.
In order for such parallel worlds of administrative representation to function, real objects and sentient beings (both human and animal) also had to undergo a degree of change in the direction of uniformity: one vessel, unit of metal, or head of cattle the same as another. The great number of non-numerical signs in the early cuneiform corpus from Uruk indicates strong cultural resistance to the imposition of such a rigid scheme of order. More than 1,500 ideograms are attested, and many are only infrequently used. But the turn towards standardization nevertheless had far-reaching effects upon Mesopotamian economy and society.