Cycles of Civilization in Northern Mesopotamia, 4400–2000 BC

Abstract

Abstract:The intensification of fieldwork in northern Mesopotamia, the upper region of the TigrisEuphrates basin, has revealed two cycles of expansion and reduction in social complexity between 4400-2000 BC. These cycles include developments in social inequality, political centralization, craft production and economic specialization, agropastoral land use, and urbanization. Contrary to earlier assessments, many of these developments proceeded independently from the polities in southern Mesopotamia, although not in isolation. This review considers recent data from excavations and surveys in northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey with particular attention to how they are used to construct models of early urban polities.Key words: Mesopotamia, complex society, urbanism, collapse 1 IntroductionOver a span of more than two millennia, northern Mesopotamia witnessed the emergence of urban complex society, its collapse and rebirth, and a further episode of collapse. This time span (ca. 4400-2000 BC) has been intensively studied by archaeologists over the last two decades, largely because of twin push (the closure of Iraq to foreign archaeology) and pull (salvage campaigns in advance of dam projects) forces. As a result, what was once considered to be the periphery of early urbanism and state formation in southern Mesopotamia (modern southern Iraq) has emerged as a region of interest in its own right. In many ways we now have a superior understanding of major social developments in the north (e.g., urbanism, craft production, agricultural and pastoral organization, the development of the landscape) than we do for the south, and improvements in chronology have revealed that many aspects of social complexity that were once assumed to have been imported from southern Mesopotamia have earlier and entirely indigenous origins.This review describes the development of social complexity from 4400 BC to the collapse of urban society at the end of the 3rd millennium BC in northern (or upper) Mesopotamia, defined here as the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys and the plains and steppe between them that fall today in northern Iraq, northern Syria, and southeastern Turkey (Fig. 1).Much archaeological research in the region, and in the Near East in general, adopts a culture historical approach that emphasizes typology and the development of sequences of material culture; here the emphasis is on anthropologically oriented research published since 1990.Geographically, the focus is on the river valleys and alluvial plains of Syria, and particularly the Upper Khabur basin of Hassake province. Occasionally I refer to sites beyond northern Mesopotamia proper when they are relevant to the discussion, particularly the western Syrian 2 cities of Ebla and Umm al-Marra; the important Syrian city of Mari, on the Euphrates near the Iraqi border, is largely southern Mesopotamian in orientation and will be not be discussed (although see Margueron 2004).In Mesopotamian archaeology generally, social complexity is described throug...

Contextualizing Early Urbanization: Settlement Cores, Early States and Agro-pastoral Strategies in the Fertile Crescent During the Fourth and Third Millennia BC

“…Striking differences between the settlement trajectories of different parts of North Mesopotamia have become clear over the past decade (Algaze 1999;Wilkinson 2000a;Ur 2010a). For example, recent publications demonstrate that urbanization in the Khabur drainage basin of northeastern Syria exhibits deep roots, which extended well back into the fourth and fifth millennia BC al-Quntar et al 2011;Stein 2012), whereas in the environmentally marginal steppe between the Balikh and Khabur Rivers, urban-scale settlement did not develop until the early third millennium BC (Meyer 2010b; Table 1).…”

“…Yoffee 2005;Yoffee et al 2005). City and state development are inherently regional phenomena, and more recent discussions of North Mesopotamian urbanism, in addition to focusing upon excavation, cuneiform texts and material culture, also include the increasing evidence of settlement patterns from regional surveys throughout the northern Fertile Crescent (Wilkinson 2000a;Casana 2007;Ur 2010a;Matney 2012;McMahon 2013, pp. 464-465;Philip 2007).…”

“…The above perspectives are employed to describe and contextualize the two main phases of urbanization recognized for the Fertile Crescent (Akkermans and Schwartz 2003;Ur 2010a):…”

Mapping patterns of long-term settlement in Northern Mesopotamia at a large scale

“…This basin in northern Mesopotamia is a critical locus for the study of the origins and development of urbanism in the Near East, and for the study of the organization of settlement under early states and empires (see reviews in refs. [13][14][15]. Therefore, we choose this region to develop and test strategies for mapping anthrosols at large scale and for quantifying the volume of all sites visible from this map.…”

The impact of large animal extinctions on nutrient fluxes in early river valley civilizations

“…However, there is an interesting possible shortterm impact of the loss of nutrient replenishment in outlying lands. There is a large and complex literature on the rise of early cities (Childe 1950, Carter 1977, Ur 2010, including theories that involve environmental, religious, economic or military themes, but all require an initial increase in human population density. For instance, in his seminal paper on the urban revolution, Childe (1950) hypothesizes that agriculture began to produce a food surplus large enough to release resident specialists from food production.…”