Households and the Emergence of Cities in Ancient Mesopotamia

Abstract

The world's first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium bc. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptations to meet the goals of elite members of society, or society as a whole. This study proposes an alternative model. By reviewing indigenous terminology from later historical periods, it proposes that urbanism evolved in the context of a metaphorical extension of the household that represented a creative transformation of a familiar structure. The first cities were unintended consequences of this transformation, which may seem ‘revolutionary’ to archaeologists but did not to their inhabitants. This alternative model calls into question the applicability of terms like ‘urbanism’ and ‘the state’ for early Mesopotamian society.

5 Bridging House to Neighborhood: The Social Dynamics of Space in Burkina Faso, West Africa

“…A focus on the social house has been a fruitful avenue for archaeological and ethnological research incorporating diverse indigenous social formations into anthropological inquiry (e.g., Beck ; Carston and Hugh‐Jones ; Chiang ; Drucker‐Brown ; Dueppen , ; González‐Ruibal ; Joyce and Gillespie ; Sparkes and Howell ; Ur ). This trend was inspired by Levi‐Strauss (, , ), who defined the house as “a corporate body holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial wealth, which perpetuates itself through the transmission of names, its goods, and its titles down a real or imaginary line, considered legitimate as long as this continuity can perpetuate itself in the language of kinship or of affinity and most often, of both” (Levi‐Strauss , 151).…”

al‐Khafaji reinterpreted: New insights on Umm an‐Nar monuments and settlement from Bat, Oman

“…In this manner, domestic structures can be deeply entangled with the functions of many social systems while simultaneously existing to support one or more households (cf. Schloen, ; Steadman, ; Ur, ).…”

State and Empire in Early Mesopotamia

“…At least in the context of early Mesopotamia, it can be argued that historically empire preceded the fiscal state. At the same time, the so-called city-states of the Early Dynastic Period, again contrary to common understanding, are difficult to be taken as states despite their nomenclature (Ur 2014). It is believed that for the study of the ancient world in general and the emergence of the primary state in particular, 'bringing the empire back in' will provide a more powerful thread for a history with its rightful beginning (Colomer 2008;Garfinkle 2012;Mann 1986).…”

“…In a way early Mesopotamia has unduely been lagging behind the theoretical trends in recent decades, perhaps to do with the fact that archaeological works in Iraq have been halted by contemporary political situation (Ur 2012). On the other side, archaeologists working in Mesopotamia also made remarkable contributions by readdressing theoretical problematics, restudying evidence available from earlier times, and integrating insights from fieldworks elsewhere (Forest 2005;Ur 2014;Wright 2006;Yoffee 2005).…”