Sacred Commodities: The Mesopotamian Origins of Product Branding
In total, some five thousand cuneiform documents, dating between 3300 and 3000 BC, have been recovered from the site of Uruk. Other centres on the southern alluvium have yielded much smaller numbers. A small proportion are lists of terms for particular types of wood, metal, dairy products, etc., as well as terms for professional crafts and statuses within the urban administration. These inventories most probably served as mnemonic aids, and provide an insight into the nature of scribal training. Most of the surviving documents, however, are either short receipts for goods or more consolidated accounts, which were originally compiled into business archives. After the information they contained ceased to have any useful function, these archives were dumped in the vicinity of the Eanna complex, or used as ballast in the construction of later buildings.
From their contents it can nevertheless be deduced that a primary application of the writing system lay in distinguishing between subclasses of products on the basis of their constituent materials, ingredients, and labour. Labour was itself quantified in standard, commoditized units of timekeeping, from which our own sixty-minute hour is ultimately derived. And the same system of calculation was extended to particular goods, notably grain, with time values such as months and days doing double service as standard commodity units. Among the goods in question we find cheese, butter oil, and fat enumerated in various grades and flavoured varieties. Some eighty varieties of fish, used as sources of oil and dried protein, are recorded. But by far the most common accounts deal with disbursements of grain, including semi-processed forms such as barley malt, groats, and flour, used to produce fermented cereal products (types of bread and beer). Fine-grained classifications of finished goods reflect distinctions of purity, strength, and taste, further enhanced by the addition of condiments and spices. The scribes also distinguished woven products by fineness of mesh and weight, and certain high quality types of wool and finished textile were designated ‘fit for the en: an important administrative role which, as previously noted, probably also included the presentation of offerings to the cult statue of the city god.
What more, then, can be inferred about the institutions responsible for producing these accounts? Clearly they were in a position to influence the flow of labour and resources between various sectors of the Sumerian economy, even if most aspects of productive life were physically located elsewhere, in other parts of the city or beyond its walls. Exact measurements and classifications of ingredients in the texts further indicate that products passing through these urban institutions were subject to systems of quality control, differentiating them from less closely regulated varieties of the same goods, which were widely available elsewhere. The cuneiform signs for food products are often depictions of the ceramic containers in which they were stored and transported, suggesting that packaging had itself become a strong marker of identity for finished products. And containers, in turn, were sealed with mechanically produced images linking them to prominent public institutions. Many of these images, applied with cylinder seals, appear to address concerns of provenance and trust quite directly. Some depict people at work in the manufacture of ceramics, dairy products, and textiles (closely associated with female labourers, shown with distinctive pig-tail hairstyles). Others depict a standardized male figure with a beard, turban and woven skirt—perhaps to be identified with the en of contemporary written documents—engaged in collecting and transporting finished goods, or dedicating them to a temple: an act which implied their suitability for inclusion within the regular regime of offerings made to the gods.
Seals were to surface imagery what the reusable casting mould was to the production of three-dimensional objects: works of art in the first age of mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin might have put it, had he looked beyond the Classical Greeks. Analyses of the clay sealings from Uruk-period containers show that they sometimes travelled hundreds of kilometres with the products to which they were attached, but their application would have been no less significant for local urban consumers. Theirs was already a world of standardized goods, quite familiar to us in some respects. Most of the finished products that surrounded them in everyday life no longer carried any visible trace of their producers’ individual identities, owing to the division of production processes along extended chains of specialized labour. And the complex blending of ingredients and raw materials from multiple sources further ensured that the origin of goods had become increasingly hard to discern.
In much the same way as modern brand labels, seal images addressed these new uncertainties by creating fictional biographies—often of sacred origin—for goods which were otherwise anonymous. No doubt seals were also used for other, more straightforwardly bureaucratic purposes, such as the authorization of economic accounts. But they nevertheless formed part of what we are fully justified in referring to as the world’s first ‘brand economy’, addressing a paradox which has since remained common to all large-scale economic systems, both capitalist and non-capitalist, from the origin of cities to the present: the paradox of living in a society made up of individual actors, whose relationships must nevertheless be formed and sustained through the circulation of impersonal goods.
6
FROM THE GANGES TO THE DANUBE: THE BRONZE AGE
Thus, studies of world-systems must consider how
the economic can be encompassed by the cultural and the sacred.
Philippe Beaujard, ‘The Indian Ocean in Eurasian
and African World-Systems before the Sixteenth
Century’ (2005)
Geologists have a technical term for the vast band of highland mineral resources which extends, continuously, from the Alps to the Himalayas, before it descends towards the Indian Ocean. Steering its way through the Caucasus and Zagros ranges, and then sweeping up to the Pamirs (the ‘Roof of the World’) the ‘Eurasian metallogenic belt’ comprises—at various points along its length—deposits of gold, silver, copper, and tin (a necessary component, with copper, in the manufacture of bronze). Thrown up by the clash of the Eurasian and Afro-Arabian tectonic plates in the Mesozoic era, it straddles the area occupied 200 million years ago by a long-extinct body of water known as the Tethyan Ocean. On its east–west journey, the metallogenic belt traverses widely differing ecologies. As a result, the mineral riches of one quarter of the world are scattered from temperate valleys to subtropical coastlines, as though by some trickster at the dawn of time. But, as I go on to describe, what the primeval movements of the Earth’s crust had pulled apart, the humanly constructed world of the Bronze Age—a world increasingly dominated by predatory elites—conspired to reunite.
The Transformation of Western Eurasia, C.3000-2000 BC
For archaeologists, the ‘Bronze Age’ has become a conventional term of reference for the third and second millennia BC in the Near East. The roots of the term, however, lie in the classification of European prehistory, where time must be measured without the aid of written sources. In origin it forms part of the chronological scheme known as the ‘Three Age System’—Stone, Bronze, Iron—first devised in the early nineteenth century to reflect the changing sequence of cutting implements in the archaeological record. A side effect of this scheme in Europe was to tie the study of chronology to the study of technological change, conceived as a progressive narrowing of the limits to human intervention in the natural world. Specialists in the study of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, working mainly with texts and visual representations, use a different style of chronology based upon the reconstructed sequences of dynastic reigns. Here royal proclamations and King Lists tend to drown out the clamour of pots, tools, and weapons. Hence what archaeologists call the ‘Early Bronze Age’—broadly the third millennium BC encompasses the ‘Early Dynastic’ phase in Mesopotamia and the ‘Old Kingdom’ of Egypt, as well as the periods either side of them, which have their own conventional names and subdivisions (see Chronology Chart).
The great river v
alleys of the Nile, Tigris–Euphrates, and Indus have traditionally been viewed as isolated cradles of Bronze Age civilization, separated by vast tracts of thinly populated land. Surrounding regions—such as the Persian Gulf and the great intermontane basins of Central Asia—were long regarded as dormant spaces, patiently awaiting the dawn of the Silk and Spice Routes in the first millennium BC. Urban life was assumed to have sprung up only in regions of exceptional agricultural potential, where a dominant river course compressed people and local resources into symbiotic relationships. Over the past few decades, as a result of new fieldwork, it has become apparent that this picture must be jettisoned. Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus were indeed major centres of population and innovation in the Early Bronze Age, but they were not alone.
By 2500 BC a network of walled cities such as Shahdad and Shahr-i Sokhta—comparable in magnitude to those of the Mesopotamian lowlands—extended across the Iranian Plateau, occupying large internal drainage basins on the margins of forbidding deserts (the Dasht-e Kavir and the Dasht-e Lut). Towns such as Tepe Yahya and Tal-i Malyan had also sprung up on the overland routes between Mesopotamia and the Makran coast, sandwiched within rain-fed fluvial valleys between the dense folds of the Zagros Mountains. Far to the north existed other alluvial enclaves formed by run-off from the wall of mountains (the Elburz and Kopet Dagh) that bridges the Anatolian Plateau and the Hindu Kush: inland deltas—among them the Zeravshan, Tedzen, and Murghab of Turkmenistan—flowing into the dark sands of the Kyzylkum and Karakum Deserts. Urban settlement on their fertile soils shifted gradually from west to east during the course of the third millennium, culminating in the fortified ‘oasis cities’ of Bactria and Margiana (c.2100–1800 BC). These great walled enclosures, with their eye-catching bastions and burgeoning craft workshops, maintained contacts with the pastoral nomads of the Eurasian steppe, whose seasonal migrations extended to the frontiers of China. At much the same time (c.2200 BC) towns of considerable size and sophistication emerged in the Persian Gulf, from the northern coastal strip of Oman to the island of Bahrain (historical Dilmun).
The common features of these new urban worlds are more easily defined than the differences between them—differences of social and ritual organization, which reflect their diverse ecologies and cultural foundations. Each commanded access to a broad spectrum of resources, including agricultural products to sustain local manufacturing industries as well as key commodities such as metals and precious stones obtained from nearby highlands. All occupied niches of fertile farmland, fed by a variety of artesian and river-borne waters, and strategically located upon major trade routes extending between the great alluvial plains of the Punjab and Mesopotamia. And all shared certain basic techniques of commerce, whose lineage can be traced back to the Uruk Expansion: the use of seals (each major urban network had its own distinct repertory of commodity marks), mass production of wheel-made ceramics in standard volumes, and the circulation of metal ingots as currency. Systems of metrology, which have been carefully reconstructed from the stone weights found on archaeological sites, were also common to all. Given this striking range of similarities, it seems likely that other techniques of economic organization such as the management of farming estates were widely shared. Detailed information is lacking, however, outside Mesopotamia. A further network of fortified settlements, smaller in scale but similar in organization, stretched across the great landmass of Anatolia, bridging the waters of the northern Aegean and extending towards the frontiers of temperate Europe. The kingdom of Egypt, too, was part of this extended family of societies, but as I go on to discuss in Chapter 8 it also differed in important ways from its urban neighbours in Eurasia.
Relationships between these various regions go beyond formal resemblances. Each formed one segment in an extensive—albeit loosely integrated—commercial network, comprising both land and sea routes, which linked the economic fate of societies from the eastern Mediterranean to the foothills of the Himalayas. A wide range of commodities, notably metals, circulated continuously among them, and tools of commerce such as seals and weights moved freely between them, as did the major techniques of bulk transport (pack-donkey caravans, ox-driven carts, and sailing ships), all of which crystallized between the fourth and third millennia BC. Cities in the Indus Valley shared the same metrological standard as trading entrepots in the Persian Gulf, whose scales of measurement were in turn compatible with those of lowland Mesopotamia as far north as Ebla, and perhaps even beyond. This was trade on a scale of magnitude, and at a level of sophistication, which is still too often regarded as a unique feature of the modern world.
Links in a Chain: The Role of Bronze
As a designation of technological change, the Bronze Age must be handled with care. Bronze—an artificial alloy of copper and tin—is superior to pure copper in its mechanical properties. The addition of tin increases hardness, making sturdier weapons and sharper cutting implements, and also lowers the overall melting point, making casting easier. It was once widely supposed that the discovery of these technical advantages led to a rapid diffusion of bronze technology from the Near East to central Europe, where bronzes (made from tin extracted in the German Erzgebirge) begin to appear around 2300 BC. But it is now apparent that the mechanical properties of pure copper were superseded long before the discovery of tin-bronze at the beginning of the third millennium BC. The first enhancements, beginning more than a thousand years earlier, were achieved by smelting arsenic-rich copper ores, which produce a material comparable to bronze in hardness and ease of casting. On the Iranian Plateau, with its rich ore deposits, arsenic copper remained the preferred medium for cutting implements well into the Bronze Age. Egypt also resisted the new alloy until the second millennium BC and appears to have accorded it a value lower than pure (unalloyed) copper, which was favoured for the manufacture of royal and divine statuary, and other equipment used in ritual dedications.
Even in those areas where tin-bronze was adopted, mechanical efficiency seems to have played little role in its initial uptake. During the third millennium BC the new material was most enthusiastically embraced in three specific locations: the Mesopotamian lowlands, central Anatolia, and the northern Aegean (including the coastal promontory around Troy, and neighbouring islands). In all three regions its appearance coincides with an increased consumption of gold, and with the arrival of a brace of new techniques for the production of highly ornamental metalwork. Vessels and elaborate items of personal display—including a dazzling variety of pins, rings, diadems, head-dresses, necklaces, and bracelets—dominate these assemblages. Among them we find some of the earliest examples of decorative techniques for jewellery still widely in use today such as granulation, stone-setting, gilding, and chasing, many of them pioneered in the urban workshops of Mesopotamia. In its mode of consumption, bronze was then initially closer to gold and lapis lazuli (Chapter 2) than to utilitarian copper, from which it was visually distinguished by its lighter hue. And this is further reflected in its contexts of deposition. The trail of bronze-finds between Sumer and the Aegean is a series of jumps between richly laden tombs and concealed treasures, from the Royal Tombs of Ur to the hoards of Troy, and the carefully hidden jewellery deposits of Poliochni and Aigina. This last collection of objects, buried beneath a house floor at the site of Kolonna, contained a distinctive type of carnelian bead with etched decoration, originating in the workshops of the Indus Valley.
Historians of metallurgy Tamara Stech and Vincent Pigott (1986) have argued that the selection of bronze as an elevated medium of display was closely linked to the restricted manner of its acquisition, and the political control thereby exercised over its circulation. Together with gold and lapis lazuli, much of the tin used in the Near East during the Early Bronze Age was extracted from alluvial deposits in the distant highlands of Afghanistan, though sources also existed in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. The movement of all three materials can be linked to the revival of Sumerian maritime trade in the Persian Gulf and its eastwa
rd extension at the end of the fourth millennium BC. Merchants based in the Indus Valley seem likely to have acted as mediators in this trade, maintaining a strategic presence at the confluence of the Amu Darya (Oxus) and Kokcha Rivers in northern Afghanistan, where a remote outpost of Harappan culture has been discovered at the site of Shortugai. But the question remains: why, at the beginning of the third millennium, was an artificially produced material added to the existing suite of luxury metals already in circulation? Stech and Pigott suspect an economic motive, linked to the increasing importance of another metal—silver—in the Mesopotamian economy.
By around 2500 BC, as I noted in Chapter 5, silver had achieved the status of currency among the urban elites of the Mesopotamian lowlands. The palace archives from Ebla document its circulation in standard units (cast ingots classified and no doubt hallmarked according to purity) totalling amounts that sometimes exceeded several tons in a single transfer. Silver was recognized as a medium for the purchase of both landed and moveable property, and its price was linked to that of gold. But whereas tin sources were concentrated far to the east of Sumer, supplies of silver lay to the west in precisely those areas which followed Mesopotamian fashions by adopting tin-bronze for prestige display: central Anatolia, and the northern Aegean. The commercial significance of bronze, then, begins to come into clearer focus. Unlike copper or gold, which were locally available in Anatolia, this was a manufactured substance over which Mesopotamian elites exercised a tight trade monopoly. So long as that monopoly was maintained, bronze could be used as a visual marker of their exclusive status for both domestic audiences and foreign trade partners. For the small but competitive communities of Anatolia and the Aegean, silver was a convenient price to pay for membership of this illustrious club, whose entry card was the display of bronze upon the bodies of the living and the dead and also, no doubt, on those of gods and heroes.
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