The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (47 page)

FIGURE 45.
   The site of Tell Abada, in the Diyala River region of Iraq, featured a series of residences for elite families of the ‘Ubaid 3 period. All of the houses had multiple patios or courtyards, and some may have had a second story above the one shown. (The house at the top was 48 feet wide.)

Archaeologists differ in their interpretation of this building, built between 6,000 and 5,600 years ago. Most, however, see it as a public building, with its lower story devoted to tons of stored grain. If this interpretation is correct, it indicates that ‘Ubaid 4 society had large public institutions, perhaps supported by contributions of grain from every family.

Long-Distance Exchange in ‘Ubaid 4 Times

It will come as no surprise that ‘Ubaid 4 communities engaged in exchange. That exchange, however, apparently went beyond visits to trading partners in other regions. ‘Ubaid 4 societies had actually begun to place trade enclaves in the upper Euphrates region of Syria and Turkey.

The people of Southern Mesopotamia knew that Turkey’s Taurus Mountains had exposures of copper, silver, lead, and gold. The route to those mineral resources followed the Euphrates to its upper tributaries. It was simply a matter of convincing your trade partners to let you build houses in their village.

Değirman Tepe, a village on the upper Euphrates in Turkey, had a residential ward with painted pottery that Joan Oates has declared to be “pure ‘Ubaid.” Tell Abr, on the Great Bend of the Euphrates in northern Syria, also had evidence of ‘Ubaid 4 residents. These villages were not situated at the actual mineral outcrops, however; they occupied places where trade goods could be placed on boats and sailed down the Euphrates.

Villages will not permit an enclave of visitors in their midst unless there is something in it for them. We cannot simply say, therefore, that the ‘Ubaid 4 elite wanted gold, silver, lead, copper, timber, turquoise, and lapis lazuli. We also have to ask what the societies of the Euphrates headwaters wanted in return. Fortunately, the behavior of many of the societies described in earlier chapters of this book suggests a two-part answer.

The first part of the answer is based on the Tlingit and their Athapaskan trading partners. How did the Tlingit get furs from the Athapaskans? They married Athapaskan women and betrothed their own sisters and daughters to Athapaskan headmen. How did the Athapaskans respond? Many became “Inland Tlingit,” claiming hereditary rank through their in-laws and negotiating the right to display Tlingit heraldic crests.

The second part of the answer involves the Shan and the Kachin. When the Shan elite wanted jade from the mines of the Kachin hills, what did the Kachin leaders want in return? Prestigious brides and irrigated Shan rice. And how did Kachin leaders react when they received the brides and rice? They began dressing and acting like their elite in-laws, converting to Buddhism and adopting Shan symbolism.

If I am sitting on a Turkish silver mine, I will let someone put an enclave in my village if he brings me a bride who raises my prestige. Occasional gifts of Mesopotamian barley to increase my beer supply would not hurt either.

The Nature of Society in Southern Mesopotamia

The forensic evidence for social inequality in Southern Mesopotamia is less compelling than the evidence we saw in Northern Mesopotamia—no infants buried with alabaster statues, and no youths interred with alabaster goblets, obsidian necklaces, stone maceheads, or official-looking seals. The marble scepters and cosmetic palettes from Tell Abada provide our best evidence for sumptuary goods.

We are skeptical that Southern Mesopotamian society had only achievement-based differences in prestige. Unfortunately, we are forced to rely on circumstantial evidence for inequality.

Consider the differences in residence. Some families at Tell Abada lived in two-story mud-brick houses with 20 to 25 rooms on the lower floor alone. Their desire for privacy was such that their houses were entered indirectly through antechambers, and some rooms could be reached only by passing through eight doors and several patios.

Standing in contrast to these large brick houses were the reed huts in the fishermen’s ward at Eridu. To be sure, the occupants of these reed houses may have had an occupational specialty. It is nevertheless hard to see them as equal in status to the occupants of the large houses at Tell Abada.

Then there is the cemetery at Eridu, where most people were laid to rest in brick boxes, but a minority were simply buried in the sand. It was a subtle difference, but not one to be dismissed out of hand.

Finally, there is Temple 7 at Eridu. This well-made temple had two entrances. One, at the head of the stairs, was obviously for general worshippers. The other, leading to the altar end of the inner sanctum, appears to have been for the priestly staff of the temple. Most preindustrial societies whose temples were managed by actual priests had hereditary inequality. Head priests, in fact, tended to be drawn from the elite and underwent training unavailable to commoners.

In terms of Irving Goldman’s three sources of power, we believe that ritual and religious authority was most heavily stressed in the Southern Mesopotamian ‘Ubaid. The shift from men’s house to temple relegates clan ancestors and lesser spirits to the background and brings deities or celestial spirits to the foreground. It is in the interest of the aristocracy that temples be built for the highest deities, to whom they owe their right to lead society.

To continue with Goldman’s sources of power, expertise was probably second only to religious authority. Seals and seal impressions in clay suggest the emergence of officials whose expertise lay in controlling the movement of commodities. Fishermen, leather workers, alabaster carvers, Halaf potters, and ‘Ubaid potters all suggest expertise at crafts. The creation of secular public buildings implies councils or assemblies with the expertise to share the burden of decision making.

Without the defensive walls, ditches, watchtowers, and burned elite residences that we saw in the north, we cannot be sure how important Goldman’s third source of power—military prowess—was to Southern Mesopotamia. In later chapters we will learn that it would become very important in Mesopotamia’s future.

THE NATURE OF LEADERSHIP IN EARLY MESOPOTAMIA

We now need to place the differences between Northern and Southern Mesopotamia into a broader context, one that permits comparisons with other parts of the world.

Archaeologist Colin Renfrew has called attention to some interesting differences among the prehistoric European rank societies of 5,000 to 3,500 years ago. Some of these societies, he notes, produced impressive public monuments but left almost no evidence for the personal aggrandizement of their leaders. Other European societies filled the graves of their leaders with objects of wealth and rank but left fewer impressive public monuments. Renfrew wisely decided not to regard these as alternative types of societies; he treated them as two extremes of a continuum and called them “group-oriented” and “individualizing.”

In the years since Renfrew’s original suggestion, many of his fellow archaeologists have proposed similar schemes, sometimes using contrasting terms such as “corporate strategy,” “individual negotiation,” or “networking.” Unfortunately, many of these later scholars have committed the very mistake Renfrew avoided. They act as if they have discovered mutually exclusive types of societies when they are actually looking at the extremes of a continuum in which all available strategies were used.

We can provide examples of Renfrew’s continuum without even stepping outside the Tibeto-Burman language family. In their thendu, or rank, mode the Konyak Naga were led by an individualizing chief called a great Ang. At the opposite end of the continuum were the Apa Tani, for whom all leadership decisions were group-oriented. Both the Konyak Naga and the Apa Tani had hereditary inequality, and both kept slaves. But while the names of individual great Angs lived on in legend, the Apa Tani councillors were the group-oriented members of an oligarchy.

The wealth of a great Ang came from tribute and sumptuary goods. The wealth of an Apa Tani aristocrat came from his privately owned rice paddies. In both societies these disparities in wealth were tolerated because the rich were of aristocratic birth. Renfrew never suggested that his group-oriented societies were egalitarian. He understood that both extremes of his continuum had hereditary inequality, albeit expressed in different ways.

In Mesopotamia our impression is that while the north and south shared many institutions, the societies in the north were more individualizing and the societies in the south more group-oriented. With the wisdom of hindsight, we know that the future of Southern Mesopotamia was to become an oligarchy with a ruler whose decisions were informed by a council of elders. This later Mesopotamian society would have a multilevel hierarchy of administrators, some of whom would be trusted commoners.

To be sure, a few Mesopotamian archaeologists regard Southern ‘Ubaid society to be so group-oriented as to have been egalitarian. We consider this unlikely on several grounds, one of which was the obvious replacement of men’s houses with temples. As we have seen in a number of living societies, this replacement reflects a change in social logic, similar to that of the gumsa or ranked Kachin. While families of lower rank continued to involve clan ancestors and lesser spirits in their rituals, the Kachin elite were permitted to pray directly to higher deities or celestial spirits. Higher deities, as mentioned earlier, do not visit men’s houses, tholoi, or any other kind of clan house. They visit temples or shrines where they are given offerings, some of them burnt on altars or podia.

Finally, we come to the problem of wealth. Were the families who lived in the grandest ‘Ubaid houses a hereditary aristocracy, or did they simply own lots of irrigated land? The answer, we suspect, is “both.” Egalitarian societies, as we have repeatedly seen, have a low tolerance for disparities in wealth. Hereditary rank, on the other hand, provides justification for such disparities. After all, a society that has no concept of nobility cannot have “nobles by wealth.”

FIFTEEN

The Chiefly Societies in Our Backyard

From Memphis to New Orleans, the Mississippi takes a winding route past wetlands and antebellum mansions and the oxbows of its former course. With his windows shut and his air conditioner on, the traveler passes signs for barbecues and po’ boys, Delta blues, and the well-groomed battlefields of the War between the States. A few miles south of Natchez, Highway 61 crosses a tributary called St. Catherine Creek. If the traveler picks this moment to text message, he misses a chiefly center of historic importance.

The Fatherland site, as the former chiefly center is known today, was partly defended by the natural bluffs of St. Catherine Creek. It was one of a number of settlements under the authority of a Natchez chief called the Great Sun. Founded roughly 800 years ago, the Fatherland site was still occupied when French explorers arrived in 1682. The French built a garrison called Fort Rosalie. They traded with the Natchez and wrote useful eyewitness accounts. By 1729, however, the French had become so annoying that the Indians decided to massacre them and leave.

In 1698 the population of the Natchez was estimated at 3,500, a thousand of whom may have been warriors. The French calculated that there might have been somewhere between nine and a dozen Natchez settlements, all modest in size except for one. Archaeologists believe that the largest community, known as the Grand Village of the Natchez, was located where the Fatherland site sits today. Fatherland fits the French description of a chiefly center with an elite residence, an old temple, and a new temple, all occupying platform mounds.

In 1718 a French engineer named Antoine le Page du Pratz visited the Grand Village. Both the Great Sun and his brother, a War Chief named Tattooed Serpent, lived there at that time. Du Pratz made friends with Tattooed Serpent, who lived in a cane-and-clay house 30 feet long and 20 feet high, overlooking the village from the crest of an earthen mound. Next to this mound was a ritual plaza, described by one French writer as 300 paces long and 250 paces wide. At the south end of the plaza was another earthen mound, this one supporting a two-room, cane-and-clay temple that measured 65 by 40 feet. On the opposite side of St. Catherine Creek were the homes of an estimated 30 to 40 extended families, totaling more than 400 persons.

Du Pratz lived among the Natchez for four years and was present at the funeral of Tattooed Serpent in 1725. His account is so detailed that several archaeologists have attempted to confirm it by finding the remains of Tattooed Serpent. The problem is that Natchez nobles were only buried long enough for their flesh to decay, after which their bones were cleaned and kept in a hamper in the temple. It would be difficult to determine which hamper of curated bones belonged to Tattooed Serpent.

Archaeologists believe that the southernmost mound at the Fatherland site is the place to look. That mound has, in fact, produced the remains of several superimposed temples. Below the floors of those temples were more than 20 burials, ranging from complete skeletons to reburied limb bones and isolated skulls. None can be definitively identified as Tattooed Serpent.