Occasionally, and certainly not always in conjunction with bevel-rimmed bowls, there have been finds of Babylonian artifacts in excavations in Syria, and even in sites further west. Cylinder seals of the abstract group from the tradition of the Babylonian Late Uruk–Jamdet Nasr period have come to light in the sites in question without their having a substantive relation to their environment, thus giving the impression of being exotic, isolated pieces. Unfortunately we can also obtain no information from the wider context in order, for example, to answer the question of whether it is of any significance that only abstract and never figurative seals, and only original seals and almost never impressions of seals have been found. Only one thing seems certain: the appearance of such isolated pieces can hardly prompt us to suppose that economic conditions at these sites were of the same type as the ones that led to the invention of cylinder seals in Babylonia.
In spite of all these reservations, the seals and the bevel-rimmed bowls mentioned above are a very welcome aid to dating. Although earlier estimates sought to assign all of these seals to the horizon of the Jamdet Nasr period, we have in the meantime learned that they already belonged to the inventory of the Late Uruk period. We are indebted for this piece of knowledge to finds of such seals in Habuba Kabira South and Chogha Mish, at both of which sites the period of settlement, as we have said, concluded before the end of the Late Uruk period.
The expansion of Babylonian civilization along the Euphrates to the north, which led to the establishment of the settlements on Syrian territory, did not come to a halt at the borders of the great plain. It then spread along the course of the river into the mountain regions, where the type of understanding arrived at with the local civilization was clearly different from that in the area of the Syrian plain. Here we are more able to recognize parallels with the situation in northern Mesopotamia, and above all in the Zagros area.
As in the Zagros area, we encounter relationships between finds here that are clearly not local and unambiguously show influences from the sphere of the Late Uruk period civilization. However, they are very far from showing such direct correspondences as, for example, in Habuba. What are probably the most impressive complexes of finds have been furnished by Arslan Tepe near Malatya and Tepecik near Elazig in the Keban reservoir area. This last-named place is of special interest to us here because it has been possible to show that local pottery and foreign-influenced pottery existed on the same site, but in different places. The situation corresponds to that of Godin Tepe in reverse. The pottery made under foreign influence came from a residential quarter that established itself on flat ground in front of a settlement—represented exclusively by locally determined pottery—built on a settlement mound that was already elevated.
Unfortunately, we know far too little about this region too, especially about the aspects that go beyond merely enumerating and sorting out the pottery. Here, too, the local pottery was still shaped by hand without the aid of the potter’s wheel, but here this is largely also true of the pottery that shows foreign influence.
This excursion through the neighboring regions has provided new understanding of the nature of the influence Babylonia had over these areas. Whether we talk of “expansion” or “attraction,” however, we shall obviously not get any closer to an explanation if we see only either trade or imperialist expansion behind this influence, or even if we assume that it was a quasi-inadvertent expansion. It is possible that two factors went hand in hand in this development. On the one hand, there was the fascination on the part of the “underdeveloped” areas when faced with the complex way of life and the knowledge of Babylonia; on the other, Babylonia needed to organize the import of raw materials, and perhaps also the export of manufactured goods, to satisfy a rapidly expanding internal economy.
Here, the archaic texts from Uruk will certainly be of further help as soon as they are completely comprehensible. Thus, for example, the texts about metal will throw light on an important branch of imports, while texts about textiles are concerned with products that possibly played a role in exports. However, the evidence for a relationship between local people and strangers that was not always without its problems cannot be overlooked. The existence of a “citadel” such as Godin and a walled settlement such as in Habuba shows that the relationships were not always free from conflicts.
One other observation is almost more important, because it affords us a glimpse into an area normally closed to us because of the shortage of primary information. The fact that from the east across the whole northern area and into the west, all the neighboring regions were in one way or another incorporated by Babylonia either directly or indirectly into a network of relationships stronger than there had ever been before shows that this extension of influence was not aimed directly at one region, but spread out in all directions.
If individual local civilizations reacted differently to this expansion, it may be because different approaches were used according to region. However, this seems rather to mirror differences in the local civilizations.
In view of the special affinity between Susiana and Babylonia, Susa’s assumption from Babylonia of the whole complex of Late Uruk period civilization does not come as a surprise. The other regions, in spite of all their internal differences, may be divided into two groups, the plains and the mountains. In the case of the plains—Syria and northern Mesopotamia—what strikes us as a common aspect is the fact that newcomers established their own settlements, sometimes in conjunction with older settlements, as was the case with Nineveh, and that in these settlements they led the existence to which they were accustomed in their homeland in every detail and with all the facilities they were accustomed to. In the archaeological material we have found, we have hardly any evidence of reciprocal influences between these settlements and the local ones.
In the mountain regions the local differences were greater. Here, too, however, a common denominator can be seen in that the settlements established by strangers could be directly connected with local settlements. Above all, it is clear that reciprocal influence was considerably greater and much more in evidence here. To explain the different reactions by merely attempting to trace them back to different topographical features would certainly be too short-sighted a way of looking at things. On the other hand, we shall be stretching our limited material too far if we attempt to give any more extensive explanation. Thus, the only fact we are left with is that the neighboring areas, which, because of our lack of material, all appear to loom up at us out of a sort of fog of uniformity, were differentiated amongst themselves.
While we can probably call the Late Uruk period the beginning of this cultural expansion—and this is roughly true everywhere—the date at which it ended seems to be more uncertain. The only date we can fix with certainty is that of the ending of this influence in Syria/Anatolia—that is, for the area of the upper Euphrates—as the finds from Habuba make clear. The settlements there were already abandoned before the end of the Late Uruk period and it is highly likely that this also signaled the end of the expansion into Anatolia. A similar date seems to hold good for northern Mesopotamia, where very little has been found that has to be categorized as belonging to the Jamdet Nasr period.
The situation in Susiana and in the Iranian hinterland is obviously different. With the creation of its own variants of early writing and of other developments, the tradition of the Late Uruk period was carried on into the Jamdet Nasr period in a Susiana that was still only very thinly populated. This description also fits Tepe Malyan, on the other side of the Zagros Mountains. In other places, such as Godin Tepe and Tepe Yahya, it is, for the moment, difficult to decide when the end of direct influence came about. But it was surely before the beginning of the Early Dynastic period in Babylonia.
Up until now, one region has been left out of our discussions because conditions were completely different there—the Gulf region. Any evaluation of this area must be an especially cautious one, because archaeological research work there has only just
begun. It may look for the moment as if this region was only connected to the larger cultural network of the neighboring regions from time to time and on a temporary basis, interrupted by longer or shorter phases for which no coherent cultural evidence is available. However, this is clearly in part the result of inadequate sources of information. Therefore, for the time being, we have no evidence at all for the existence of a well-defined local civilization, let alone for a Babylonian-influenced civilization of the Late Uruk period.
Finds from graves in Abu Dhabi and Oman throw a sudden and powerful light on the subject. There, we find weapons and pottery that so clearly resemble those of the Jamdet Nasr period that there can be no doubt that these objects came from Babylonia. Their presence is easily explained, since the rich sources of copper in Oman were obviously already known and exploited before this time. It is, however, harder to explain why there is not a continuous sequence of evidence for this. For the time being, the context of these finds is completely obscure.
Whether or not this phase of Babylonia’s direct influence was of varied intensity and lasted for different lengths of time in the different neighboring regions, it must be noted that in all these areas, including Susiana, the phase was a relatively short one. In addition, it hardly left behind it the kind of long-term impressions that would speak for a permanent connection with Babylonian development. In the Early Dynastic I period, which introduced a new and important phase in internal political development in Babylonia and was connected with a further consolidation of economic and social processes, only local traditions survived in the neighboring areas, a continuation of what had—as it seems to us—continued to exist side by side with the alien influences. Here, too, however, we are once again warned to be cautious because of the far too limited material available to us. In the later Early Dynastic period such centers as Assur in northern Mesopotamia and Tell Huera and Ebla in Syria call attention to themselves through well-established complexes of objects that are clearly in the mainstream of the Babylonian tradition. Like the ones in Ebla they can at this time even demonstrate a phase of their own further development of what they had taken over, so that we would at least like to assume that a certain openness was created by the earlier, more direct relationships.
The era of early high civilization between ca. 3200 and 2800 B.C. was the period in which the different regions of the Near East developed furthest away from one another. In this context, Babylonia was, without doubt, the region that produced the most complex economic, political, and social orders.
FIVE
The Period of the Rival City-States (ca. 2800–2350 B.C.)
As was the case with the previous period, it is difficult for us to give any one reason for the beginning of this period that would be similarly applicable throughout the Near East. Here, too, the names we give and our definition of chronological limits are tailored to fit the area that made the most striking progress, and that therefore provides us with the most obvious opportunity for chronological differentiation. If this means that the title of the chapter also seems, at first, to apply only to Babylonia, it may nonetheless, in a limited sense, be valid for other areas of the Near East. There, at the end of this period, the first recognizably larger units emerged and came into political contact with one another and with Babylonia. So that even if this period of time is defined rather more by Babylonia than by other regions, its chronological limits cannot be clearly fixed even for Babylonia, because there we have a completely unbroken, continuous development.
This applies to the economy, the social structure, and to architecture and art. However, at the same time, political developments become apparent that were clearly qualitatively different from any previous ones. There were problems caused by further environmental changes and, above all, by internal changes in the society. There would continue to be problems, with a continual striving for solutions.
There were two changes in particular, one long-term and one short-term, but both concerned with the provision of water, which encouraged the speeding up of development. In chapter 4, it was made clear that the waters continued to recede, as indicated by the fact that the water level in the Gulf continued to fall. In the first half of the third millennium B.C., the level of the sea continually sank, and at the same time the rivers held less water.
These changes must have had at least two effects on the economics of the water supply in Babylonia. One was that, as a whole, less water could be used to irrigate the land. The other was that the lowering of the sea level in the Gulf meant that the lower courses of the rivers dug more deeply into the land and thus had the collateral effect of drawing even more water from the surrounding land. From now on, because of the shortage of water, more and more effort had to be expended in transporting water to the places where it was most needed. As we have seen, this necessity had clearly led to the construction of canals as far back as the Early Dynastic I period. Thus, the first steps had been taken that, in the following period, would lead to the building up of the enormous Mesopotamian canal system that became so well known from later literature.
We shall see how the further receding of the waters involved continual refinement of the irrigation system and how, finally, measures had to be taken to use and even to store—with the aid of ingenious arrangements like reserve basins—that part of the water that, even in an intensive irrigation system, flowed past the fields and was not used. We must also note here that this unleashed one of the greatest countrywide catastrophes, the progressive salinization of the soil.
However, the changes in the water supply did not only affect agriculture. They also affected the settlement structure of the land, as has already been mentioned for the Early Dynastic I period. Considered from the general point of view that settlements could only survive on a permanent basis if they lay on a watercourse that provided water throughout the year, the gradual receding of the water into fewer watercourses must have involved a gradual linkage between the settlements and these few remaining watercourses. We have already seen this happening in the previous period, where the tendency began to emerge for settlements to concentrate around the courses of the larger rivers, while the area between the rivers became increasingly empty. This tendency can also be observed in this period.
In addition, as it had done previously, it led to the tendency for a few settlements to grow larger at the expense of the others. In the hinterland of Uruk, which has thus far been used in our discussion as a control area, the number of settlements decreased from sixty-two to twenty-nine by comparison with the Early Dynastic I period. However, at the same time the average size of the settlements increased to thirty-eight hectares. If we apply our rather rough measurements here, we discover that during the later part of the Early Dynastic period—the period we are now dealing with—the main body of the population was concentrated in such urban centers, while small settlements out in the countryside had almost ceased to exist.
This fact becomes even more pronounced if we add together the areas of all the settlements of less than thirty hectares (“rural settlements”), and set this against the relevant number of settlements of more than thirty-one hectares (“urban settlements”). If we compare the surface area of the large sites with that of the small ones, we arrive at a ratio of 2:8 for the Late Uruk period. Approximately six hundred years later, during the Early Dynastic II period, the ratio had been reversed and now stood at 9:1 in favor of the larger sites. According to our rough estimates, this would mean that approximately nine-tenths of the population lived in settlements larger than thirty hectares.
Let us now return to an earlier idea. A greater concentration of people living closely together created social conflicts within any city whose size was limited by city walls. The resolution of these conflicts provided the impulse for what we call the development of civilization. In the processes mentioned above, we already have enough evidence to support the theory that even during the Early Dynastic period there was enough impetus to provide for further rapid development in
Babylonia; however, there was an additional source of conflict.
Assuming that what we have been discussing up to now lay within the sphere of the long-term change I have mentioned, something happened at the end of the Early Dynastic period that aggravated the situation in a decisive fashion. Because of a change in the course of the river, an arm of the Euphrates that lay farther to the east replaced the old main channel of the river—which had developed out of a jumble of side channels during the period of early high civilization, on which such places as Nippur, Shuruppak, and Uruk lay—as the new main river. Sites situated along this new main course, such as Adab, Zabalam, and Umma, blossomed during the following period and were able to achieve great political significance in the way Umma did at the end of the Early Dynastic period. The importance of places on the old main course of the river decreased, sometimes at a faster and sometimes at a slower pace. The city of Uruk was clearly hardest hit by these changes, since the density of population within the city walls was considerably reduced after the Early Dynastic I period.
The development that stands out most clearly for us in this connection is the rapid increase in size, importance, and power of Umma, which was probably directly set in motion and made possible by the change in the course of the river. This had far-reaching consequences. In order to understand these in detail we must, in what follows, speak a little more fully about an observation made during the evaluation of the research done in the hinterland of Uruk. If we take the relationship of Uruk to its hinterland during the period from Late Uruk to Early Dynastic I as an example and determine—on the basis of the distribution of settlements around Uruk—something like a sphere of influence around the center, which is hard to define, and then do the same for other centers contemporaneous with Uruk, like Nippur or Girsu, we find that at the times under consideration the supposed areas of influence were far apart (see the areas sketched in around the sites in fig. 52 and the period maps in fig. 20).
The Early History of the Ancient Near East (9000-2000 BC) Page 15