The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (74 page)

The population of Gawra may have dropped below 100 at this point, arguably too low for a community with so many important public buildings. We therefore suspect that Gawra was serving the needs of a wider region. Level VIII had no defensive works, but it probably should have, because it was eventually attacked and burned.

Rothman was impressed by the escalating richness of Gawra’s elite burials. By Level VIII they looked like the burials of a stratified society, with gradations of rank within each stratum.

The simplest burials in Levels XI–VIII (85 out of a total of 301) had been placed directly in the earth. Some of these individuals had little or nothing in the way of grave goods. Others wore bracelets or necklaces of rock crystal, obsidian, turquoise, mother-of-pearl, carnelian, or even gold.

Another 78 burials, however, had been placed in mud-brick tombs. Many of these individuals were buried in garments from which only the golden studs, ribbons, and rosettes had survived. Some had ivory combs or ivory-inlaid pins for their hair. Meals for their afterlife had been placed in vessels carved from marble, serpentine, or obsidian. Some people in the tombs wore necklaces, bangles, and other ornaments of gold, silver, copper, turquoise, and lapis lazuli. Among their possible symbols of office were maceheads and stamp seals.

Among those given their own mud-brick tombs were youths, children, and infants. One such infant, Burial 12, was accompanied by 331 beads and other ornaments. Among the raw materials used were gold, turquoise, lapis lazuli, ivory, and carnelian.

While the individuals in brick tombs at Gawra received the most impressive sets of stone vessels and symbols of office, personal ornaments of exotic material were not restricted to the tombs. A possible analogy for this situation can be found in sixteenth-century Colombia and Panama, where the wearing of gold was not restricted to members of the most highly ranked families.

Gawra knew about the Southern Uruk cities but seems to have created its own stratified society. It did just fine without cylinder seals, cone mosaic temples, or clay accounting tablets. Most importantly, it continued Northern Mesopotamia’s tradition of individualizing leaders who made flamboyant use of prestige goods.

Arslantepe.
   On Turkey’s Malatya plain, a well-watered region in the headwaters of the Euphrates, lies the archaeological mound of Arslantepe. Founded more than 6,000 years ago, Arslantepe went on to become the civic and ritual center of an indigenous highland society.

According to excavator Marcella Frangipane, Arslantepe had several different kinds of public buildings. Building XXIX, perhaps contemporary with the Middle Uruk period, appears to have been a hall for public assembly. It stood on a platform of huge stone slabs and mud-bricks; its walls were five feet thick; and its main hall was almost 60 feet in length. Not far away lay another massive building whose rooms contained scores of seal impressions, mass-produced ceramics, and other traces of craft activity.

At a time equivalent to the Late Uruk period, Arslantepe featured several temples, each accompanied by a series of storage units. Temples A and B, despite having been built between 5,300 and 5,100 years ago, do not resemble typical Uruk temples. Instead of a central cella, each has an inner room 30 by 15 feet in size, entered from a much smaller outer room. Lacking the complex pilasters and wall cones of Uruk temples, these buildings were clearly the product of a local highland tradition.

Frangipane reconstructs Arslantepe society as stratified, with a ruling class and commoners. The rulers occupied a palatial residence with polychrome wall paintings. Their staff made use of corvée labor, oversaw the flow of commodities, and intensified wool and mutton production. Their temple staff could draw on storerooms full of grain. Arslantepe was in contact with Uruk peoples but had become a proto-state in its own right rather than an Uruk enclave.

Northern Communities Clearly Founded by Immigrants from Southern Mesopotamia

We last looked at the Great Bend of the Euphrates while describing the early village of Abu Hureyra. The Great Bend was also home to two later settlements, Jebel Aruda and Habuba Kabira South, which look as if they had been built by people from Southern Mesopotamia.

Jebel Aruda.
   The community of Jebel Aruda covered seven or eight acres of a steep bluff overlooking the Euphrates. The center of the community was a walled precinct with at least two Late Uruk temples. To either side of this precinct a Dutch archaeological team found extensive residential neighborhoods that included elite families. In one storeroom at Jebel Aruda the excavators found eight copper axes of roughly equal weight which, according to Guillermo Algaze, almost certainly served as ingots.

Habuba Kabira South.
   Only five miles south of Jebel Aruda was an even larger Late Uruk settlement. This was Habuba Kabira South, which may have covered more than 50 acres. Habuba Kabira was naturally defended on the east by the 25-foot bluffs of the Euphrates. On the west it was defended by a wall with regularly spaced watchtowers.

Its German and Belgian excavators discovered that Habuba Kabira was a fortified city with streets, residential neighborhoods, artisans’ wards, bureaucrats who kept accounts on clay tablets, and an acropolis with public buildings. The metalsmiths at Habuba Kabira had facilities for extracting both lead and silver from the same mineral ore.

Jebel Aruda and Habuba Kabira were not embedded in a preexisting city. They were newly founded in the Late Uruk period, lasted 100 to 150 years, and were abandoned at the end of the Late Uruk period. According to archaeologist Joan Oates, the “identity of material culture, ideology, accounting practices, use of space and building techniques render inconceivable any interpretation other than that the settlements at both Habuba and Jebel Aruda were built and lived in by south Mesopotamians.”

That having been said, archaeologists are not in agreement regarding the motivation behind these Southern Mesopotamian forays into the Great Bend. Were they placed there by Uruk itself, to serve as middlemen in its trade with Turkey and the Mediterranean coast? Or were they founded by members of noble Uruk lineages who saw no political future for themselves in the south? We have seen that both primogeniture and ultimogeniture could force some elite sons and their followers to seek new territories.

Resolving these issues will be difficult, but not hopeless. It requires the tracing of any obviously imported pottery vessels to their Southern Mesopotamian clay sources and the use of DNA and bone chemistry to find out from which urban center of Southern Mesopotamia the immigrants came. Archaeologists can then ask whether that urban center was growing, losing population, or experiencing upheaval during the Late Uruk period.

Northern Societies Whose Lives Were Changed by Southern Mesopotamian Immigrants

Hacinebi.
The village of Hacinebi occupied a defensible limestone bluff above the Euphrates in southern Turkey. To the north lay the Taurus Mountains; to the south lay the Northern Mesopotamian steppe.

Founded more than 6,000 years ago, Hacinebi grew to cover eight acres. During its first two or three centuries of occupation, Hacinebi belonged to a society in which large villages were surrounded by small satellite villages. Excavator Gil Stein recovered modest evidence of inherited rank; one infant at Hacinebi, buried in a jar, was accompanied by two silver earrings and a copper ring.

Between 5,500 and 5,300 years ago, at a time equivalent to the Middle Uruk period in Southern Mesopotamia, an apparent Uruk enclave established itself in the northern part of Hacinebi. In light of the earlier ‘Ubaid 4 trade enclaves at places like Değirman Tepe and Tell Abr, this Uruk enclave was not without precedent. It did, however, lie an impressive 780 miles north of the city of Uruk.

For hundreds of years the families of the Uruk enclave continued to maintain a lifestyle as much like that of their homeland as possible. For example, even though flint was available near Hacinebi, they used overfired clay sickles like those of Southern Mesopotamia. They ate more sheep and goats and fewer cattle and pigs than the local Hacinebi families.

The Uruk enclave used both stamp seals and cylinder seals. They received their own shipments of goods, accompanied by clay bullae covered with seal impressions. They made their own beveled-rim bowls from local clay. Scattered through their refuse were ceramic cones like those used to decorate Uruk temples.

Relations between the Uruk enclave and the Hacinebi people seem to have been peaceful; Stein found no defensive wall, such as the one encircling the Uruk outpost at Godin Tepe. Hacinebi, therefore, continues the tradition of conflict-free enclaves that began in the ‘Ubaid period.

Tell Brak.
   The Khabur River is the last major tributary feeding the Euphrates on its journey south. Its upper tributaries cross the Northern Mesopotamian steppe, homeland of the rank societies of the Halaf period. At least two communities in this region may have grown to the size of cities before Uruk developed its four-level hierarchy. They were undoubtedly part of a widespread chain reaction, but their initial growth cannot be explained by immigration from Southern Mesopotamia.

One of those early cities was Tell Brak on the Jaghjagh tributary of the Khabur. First excavated by Max Mallowan in the 1930s, Brak was already occupied in Halaf times. It had grown to more than 100 acres by the Northern Mesopotamian equivalent of the Middle Uruk period, at which time it was surrounded by satellite communities. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries Joan and David Oates carried out new excavations at Tell Brak, sometimes collaborating with Geoffrey Emberling, Henry Wright, and others.

It appears that during a time equivalent to the Early and Middle Uruk periods, Brak took a backseat to no one. Some 5,800 to 5,500 years ago, it already had a wall with a monumental city gate. Within the next few centuries it achieved its maximum urban size of 106 acres. The rulers of Brak commissioned a huge temple that would undergo three subsequent rebuildings; its final stage was completed approximately 5,300 to 5,100 years ago.

The final stage of this temple is estimated to have measured 97 by 81 feet. There is no question that its builders were familiar with Uruk temples, since they gave it the usual cone mosaic decoration, niches, and pilasters.

Look closely at the temple, however, and you will see local features, almost suggesting a kind of ethnic resistance to Southern Mesopotamia. To begin with, the temple’s sides, rather than its corners, were aligned to the cardinal directions. This situation reminds us of Tilcajete’s choice of an astronomical orientation different from Monte Albán’s. Second, the temple’s central cella is shaped like a Latin cross rather than a long, narrow rectangle. Third, the builders of the temple made abundant use of metals from the nearby mountains. The walls of the cella were given copper paneling impressed with a human eye motif. This motif has given the building its nickname, the Eye Temple.

During a time equivalent to the Late Uruk period, Tell Brak began to show more signs of Southern Mesopotamian interference in the lives of its occupants. Cylinder seals, seal impressions, bullae, and tokens became more and more common, as did houses built with the small, distinctive type of brick used extensively at Uruk itself. This period of increased Uruk contact, however, does not seem to have been beneficial to Brak. Some 5,300 to 5,100 years ago it shrank steadily, as if its population, resources, and tribute were being siphoned off.

Tell Hamoukar.
   On an eastern tributary of the Khabur River, barely five miles from the modern border between Syria and Iraq, lay Tell Hamoukar. Already occupied in Early Uruk times, Hamoukar had grown to 32 acres and erected a defensive wall by the Middle Uruk period.

Excavators McGuire Gibson and Muhammad Maktash found that during the Middle Uruk period, Hamoukar had abundant stamp seals and seal impressions but no tablets with early writing. Within Hamoukar’s city walls they found evidence for beveled-rim bowls, domed ovens, a bakery, and a brewery. Apparently wheat, barley, and oats were being converted into meals for large work crews.

Then suddenly, at the end of the Middle Uruk period, Hamoukar was the scene of a massive attack. Thousands of sling missiles, many of them blunted by impact, were found in a layer of debris from burning and destruction. By Late Uruk times, a colony of people using Southern Mesopotamian pottery and artifacts had settled into Hamoukar.

The Hamoukar case allows us to make two points. First, indigenous processes of urbanization and state creation were under way in the north by Middle Uruk times. Second, by the Late Uruk period, Southern Mesopotamia evidently had a military advantage over the north. The south did not create the cities of the north, but it had the power to destroy them. In the words of Gibson and Maktash, this “was not a case of a more developed [southern] core expanding its influence into an underdeveloped [northern] periphery, but of equally matched areas in cooperation and competition over a long time, with the south eventually colonizing parts of the north.”

WHY CLUSTER TOGETHER IN CITIES?

Some 5,000 to 4,750 years ago, as pointed out by Guillermo Algaze, none of the surviving settlements in Northern Mesopotamia were large enough to be called cities. Some archaeologists take this as a sign of promise unfulfilled, as if the creation of cities was a lofty goal to which all societies should aspire. We cannot agree.

Our earliest ancestors lived in small-scale societies where everyone knew his or her relationship to everyone else. Nothing could be further from Rousseau’s State of Nature than a city. Short of living in a space station, one could hardly imagine a more artificially created environment.

Why, then, would people cluster together in cities? We favor Robert McC. Adams’s explanation of urbanization in Susiana, which involves “the drawing together of the population into larger, more defensible political units.” Many rural populations of the Uruk period felt exposed and vulnerable; they left their fields and corporate kin groups for the security of the city wall. Still other people fled wounded cities such as Susa, emigrating to regions where they had no traditional right to farm the land. Those with craft skills found work in the city. Those without skills became sharecroppers on the estates of temples or wealthy families. Still others performed manual labor in return for rations of barley and beer.