For a long time it was assumed that these two groups, which were easy to differentiate, followed one another chronologically. However, several excavations have provided evidence that they could also have occurred simultaneously.
Then it was thought that the differences could be explained geographically, Halaf pottery occurring more in Anatolia, Syria, and the western part of northern Mesopotamia, and Samarra pottery occurring more in the eastern and southern regions of northern Mesopotamia, as far as the Zagros. The overlap of the sites where these pots were found is, however, very large, if one can talk of a dividing line between the sites at all.
The next attempt at an explanation was based on the assumption that the two pottery groups conceal different population groups, each with different ways of life, the one made up of cultivators and the other of livestock farmers. Apart from the fact that the preceding survey has shown that these pure forms probably did not yet exist as opposites at this period, it would be amazing if, given the regional differentiation that has been partially substantiated for the area in question, there were not also quite different ways of life in existence.
We shall certainly not succeed in finding an answer to this question until the number of places investigated has increased considerably, just as only an increase in this field of research will allow us to make any assertions about the relationships that must surely have existed between the different settlements. It is small comfort that, even if no positive statements can be made, at least nothing has appeared that would contradict the picture drawn above of the general process of development.
If we now return to the question, posed at the beginning of this chapter, of the reasons for the beginning of regional differentiation in the Near East, one explanation seems to be in the forefront. The differences seem to be between regions that fulfil the spatial requirements for the development of more complex settlement systems and areas that are too small in scale for this. It is clear that this explanation on its own can hardly be considered satisfactory. Otherwise, why did broader areas of the Near East, the wide plains of northern Mesopotamia and northern Syria, not develop forms of organization similar to Susiana? The size of the ecological unit cannot be the reason for regional differentiation—or at least not the only one.
In looking for other criteria to differentiate Susiana and Lower Mesopotamia—which was soon to be central to developments here—from the other plains of the Near East, we soon come upon a further basic factor: the difference in the availability of water. Since the most recent evidence available on climatic development and climatic correlations indicates that the relative climatic structures and, above all, the relative frequency of precipitation in these regions were hardly any different from what they are today—that is, that the gradation of the individual regions in relation to one another was about the same—we may assume that, in contrast to the other areas for which early settlement activity has been established, the great plains of Susiana and Babylonia did not have enough precipitation even then to guarantee continued plant cultivation.
Today, Lower Mesopotamia is completely outside the area in which dry farming can be practiced, whereas at least part of Susiana is in an area in which it is highly probable that sufficient precipitation can be expected. Crop cultivation without irrigation is thus possible only in parts of Susiana, and it is not possible at all in Lower Mesopotamia. This difference between the main regions of the Near East has been repeatedly cited as the main reason for the difference in development. According to this older view of things, the rise of Lower Mesopotamia can be explained by the fact that to carry out any irrigation, and especially to maintain the technical facilities necessary for it, larger organized associations of all those who participated in such an irrigation system became necessary. This view would only be correct, however, if in the days when the settlement of these great plains was taking place, it was necessary to irrigate in the manner we know from texts of later Babylonia: with the help of long feeder canals from the Euphrates, the waters of which—valuable because always insufficient—had to be carefully distributed among those who lived on its banks. However, as we shall see below, such irrigation systems, although they did in fact require a complex administrative system, belonged to a later stage of development. The existence of complicated irrigation systems can definitely be ruled out for the early periods.
This derives from the observation that the sea level in the Gulf was high before the climatic changes, so that large areas in the extreme south of Lower Mesopotamia were submerged, while at the same time the rivers were carrying so much water that in the critical seasons large sections of the rest of the alluvial plains were also flooded. Even if the change in climate did, in the end, mean that large areas of the country were no longer under water and so could, to a large extent, be settled, this can only mean conversely that for a long period of time there was so much water in the country that large areas were available for cultivation at a time when there was still sufficient water on hand in a profusion of small, even minute, creeks and waterways. Wherever artificial irrigation was necessary, there was, therefore, water available, without any great effort being needed to obtain it. Hence, the thesis, attractive enough in itself, that it was the need to administer water supplies that encouraged the rapid development of Susiana and in Babylonia no longer coincides with our knowledge of the situation.
Figure 18. Mean annual precipitation in the modern Near East. After W. van Zeist. “Reflections of Prehistoric Environments in the Near East,” fig. 3, in P. J. Ucko and G. W. Dimbleby, (eds.), The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals (London, 1969).
However, the main argument is correct. Even if the presence of artificial irrigation does not automatically mean that this necessarily had to take place in the context of a larger organization, there is a considerable difference between this type of agriculture and dry farming. Not only did more physical energy have to be invested; the intellectual challenge was also greater. The ground can be much more intensively farmed with the help of irrigation—that is, greater yields can be achieved from a given area of land than by dry farming. In addition, the increase in yields could be strengthened by the fact that barley, which in its uncultivated state has two rows of grain, had reacted to the complete change of milieu brought about by cultivation using artificial irrigation with a considerable increase in its six-row mutants, and that selection in favor of the six-row variety was thus a rapid success. This variant seems to have spread in a very short space of time throughout the whole of the Near East. Although the grains of two-row barley do appear to have been larger than the ones of the six-row variety, so that the increase in yield does not amount to an arithmetical 300 percent, the average yield was at least half as much again when the six-row variety was planted.
Different factors thus united to allow a higher yield to be obtained and made it possible to feed more people from the yield of a given area. Or, to put it another way, the area of land surrounding a settlement that was necessary to feed a given population could become considerably smaller. The consequence was that in regions with irrigation, the settlements could move much closer together than in areas where the cultivation of plants depended only on natural precipitation.
This difference, however, had far-reaching consequences. Increased proximity encourages cultural and economic exchange, but it also encourages the development of conflicts, or an increase in their intensity. If, in addition, they occurred in areas that were as a whole densely populated, such conflicts could not be resolved by the people moving away from one another—a method by which they might even have been avoided in the first place.
Living together in such close quarters meant that conflicts had, rather, to be actively controlled, leading to the setting up of rules for resolving conflicts. As we have already seen, situations where people lived together in close proximity could only arise in the intensively cultivated irrigation areas. Thus it was also the inhabitants of these areas—that is, especially of Babylonia—wh
o found themselves confronted by these challenges and had to find answers to them. The need to establish rules enabling people or communities to live together is far more important in encouraging the higher development of civilizations than the need to create purely administrative structures. Hence, we can cite the specific characteristics of the great southern plains, particularly their size and their need for irrigation, as the reasons for the uneven development of parts of the Near East.
The fact that these different regions still had much in common at the end of this period in spite of this can be shown by the spread over most of the Near East of the technique of painting we name for the place where it was discovered in southern Iraq, Tell al-Ubaid, to which we have already referred. After what were at times very distinctive and detailed styles of painting in the earlier periods, Ubaid painting was increasingly restricted to concentric bands, garlands, wavy lines, or other all-round patterns. This trend took hold of almost all the regions of the Near East simultaneously, with greater or lesser intensity. We have already noted that this basic trend cannot be put down to the migration of a particular population group or to some other sort of grouping, but is rather the visible sign of the introduction and spread of a new technical device, the pivoted work surface.
Our main interest here is the idea that the spread of a technological innovation is tied up with specific preconditions; the acceptance of such an innovation is only conceivable when we can reasonably expect that it will help solve particular problems. Hence, the introduction of this new device over wide areas of the Near East at almost the same time means that, at least in the areas involved in the production and use of pottery, the problems were the same or similar. As previously observed this innovation aimed at an increase in productivity and must be seen as an aspect of the evolving division of labor. Its introduction signals a higher degree of professionalization. These are definitely processes that go beyond the narrow limits of pottery manufacture and that can shed light on contemporary Near Eastern economic organization as a whole. In the areas that took on this technical innovation, very similar economic problems and needs probably existed in other spheres as well. Hence these economics were very similar. It should be noted, however, this is not true for the Ubaid period itself, but for the phase before that, which appears to have been a period where, from our observation of the forms of settlement, no clear differentiation had as yet taken place among the regions of the Near East.
We do, however, have an example from the Ubaid period with a similar thrust, which has also already been mentioned: the introduction of the potter’s wheel equipped with axle bearings, which followed that of the pivoted surface. This appeared in the latter part of the Ubaid period and was basically responsible for the obvious difference between the pottery of the Ubaid period and that of the following Uruk period.
This innovation, too, was certainly connected with the progressive division of labor and with the demand for greater specialization and increased productivity. Hence it, too, was clearly tied to the obviously increasing needs of a specific form of economy. Unlike the rotating work surface, the potter’s wheel did not spread rapidly over large areas of the Near East. It could only make a breakthrough in the more highly developed regions.
The decoration of pottery, especially painting, which is often at the very center of the discussion, can hardly be approached in an unbiased way since, all too often, the distribution of a particular style of painting or a particular range of patterns is linked to reflections on the distribution or the migratory patterns of population groups.
The discussion of the Ubaid painting style has probably best illustrated the difficulties inherent in such a manner of proceeding, as has also our earlier discussion of the problem of the simultaneous existence of Halaf and Samarra pottery. Any interpretation of the relationships between different pottery groups should therefore be subject to strict limits, which can only be defined where statements can be made that go beyond the stage of talking about contemporaneity or noncontemporaneity. Even if, in the following paragraphs, specific conclusions are drawn from one observation, it is only because the statements are of a very general nature.
Our discussion is concerned with the question of how many different, well-defined pottery groups there were for each respective period in the Near East, and how their relationships to each other changed over the years. The result can be quickly sketched if we take the beginnings of pottery production as the start and the Ubaid horizon as the end of the period under observation. At the beginning we come across a situation where, although there are common factors in production techniques, the groups of decorative patterns are so different from one another that, for example, pottery can differ from one small area to the next in the Zagros Mountains.
After taking a great leap, we do see at the end of this development that, although there are still definitely recognizable local differences, common characteristics predominate. The developments in the period in between—to the extent that we know about them—do not contradict the assumption that what we have here is a continuous development.
The units within which we can talk of pottery types that are closely related grow larger and larger as time goes on. This development is astonishing, because we would be more likely to think of greater unity coming at the beginning and of individual groups differentiating themselves from it at the end. We cease to be astonished, however, if we set this development in its proper relationship to development in general.
First we should consider possible reasons for decorating pottery vessels with different patterns. If it is true that pleasure in decorating useful objects played a part in this, it is at least as important that here was an opportunity to introduce differences, to set oneself apart from other large and small groups or other individuals. Differentiation between the families of one settlement, and also between the larger units who live together in a settlement, has great significance for the life of every community. Hence it is no wonder that, in a period for which we must assume that the main structures in society were based on family relationships, we find that one element of differentiation is especially clearly defined.
In the following period, other aspects besides the progressive division of labor by the formation of hierarchies and social differentiation—neither of which can manage without status symbols—determined the course of social development, which was increasingly dependent upon the exchange of raw materials, and also of finished products and experience. If, on the one hand, the regions were drawn closer together by this, on the other, the painting of pottery lost its role as the main method of demonstrating social differentiation. In a society beginning to organize its social differentiation according to quite different criteria, the possibilities of expressing this differentiation must of necessity also have been different. It is highly probable that these other forms of differentiation hardly ever existed in a form as easily accessible for us as the painting of pottery. The assertion that there were direct relationships between developments in the types of pottery and social conditions may anticipate the next chapter. In the above sense it is indeed only consistent that, after the largely insignificant painting of the late Ubaid period in Lower Mesopotamia, which is almost exclusively content with concentric bands, the pottery of the following Uruk period should have no, or almost no, painting. It is certainly no coincidence that this is the first period where we can point to a form of society we can call “stratified.”
In the light of these facts, it is clear that we must be extremely careful about interpreting both similarities (or “relationships”) and nonsimilarities in pottery types, in the sense of the relationship or nonrelationship between the groups responsible for making them. We are confronted here with a very concrete warning, which may be generalized beyond the field of research into pottery. In the course of the rest of this study, we shall come up against yet other concrete cases that render dubious the linking of archaeological relationships and ethnic units.
By the end of the perio
d dealt with in this chapter, the switches had been set for further differentiation. This took place both from a geographical point of view, in that the regions of the Near East had begun to grow even further away from one another, and from a social point of view, inasmuch as an even stricter articulation of society continued in the direction already taken. Favored by the climatic changes noted above, Lower Mesopotamia became the main scene of action for the developments that followed.
FOUR
The Period of Early High Civilization (ca. 3200–2800 B.C.)
The term “early high civilization” comes from a period when research into the history of the Near East had advanced to the point where the external chronological parameters and some of the specific characteristics of the individual periods had become clear, but the details that would have allowed us to understand the internal connections of the society in question were not yet known. The fact that cylinder seals, writing, monumental architecture, and art—all of which played such an important role in the later development of the Near East—emerged in Babylonia within a short space of time led people to conclude that this era represented a particular high point in history. They likewise felt justified in assuming, from the sudden emergence of these achievements, that the culture of the previous period had been at a notably low point of development. “Early high civilization” is moreover, a term that stems from a period in which people had no difficulty imagining that the emergence of a new ethnic group made possible the scaling of new peaks of cultural development.
Since then, there have been developments that have obliged us to reappraise assertions about any ethnic group’s unique talents. At the same time our knowledge of early periods has grown to the point where we are better able to recognize the developmental patterns underlying the complex we have grown used to calling “early high civilization.” If we continue in spite of all our many reservations to use the term, “early high civilization,” it is because useful, well-established terms should not be abandoned unless this is absolutely unavoidable.
The Early History of the Ancient Near East (9000-2000 BC) Page 8