Abstract
This paper employs data from selected sample survey areas in the northern Fertile Crescent to demonstrate how initial urbanization developed along several pathways. The first, during the Late Chalcolithic period, was within a dense pattern of rural settlement. There followed a profound shift in settlement pattern that resulted in the formation of large walled or ramparted sites (‘citadel cities’) associated with a more dynamic phase of urbanization exemplified by short cycles of growth and collapse. By the later third millennium BC, the distribution of larger centres had expanded to include the drier agro-pastoral zone of northern and central Syria, termed here the ‘zone of uncertainty’. This configuration, in turn, formed the context for Middle Bronze Age settlement, and the pattern of political rivalries and alliances that typified the second millennium BC. Evidence is marshalled from archaeological surveys and landscape analyses to examine these multiple paths to urbanization from the perspectives of (a) staple production within major agricultural lowlands; (b) the shift towards higher risk animal husbandry within climatically marginal regions; (c) changes in local and inter-regional networks (connectivity); and (d) ties and rights to the land. Textile production forms the core of the proposed model, which emphasizes how the demand for wool and associated pasture lands opened up new landscapes for agro-pastoral production and settlement. The resultant landscapes of settlement are then compared with the picture in the southern Levant where a more restricted zone of uncertainty may have limited the opportunities for agro-pastoral production.
Highlights
Urbanization and state formation have formed a central pillar of the discussion of the development of ancient Near Eastern civilizations, but this debate has frequently become polarised between evolutionary models (e.g. Flannery 1999) and more historically contingent models of processes of development (e.g. Yoffee 2005; Yoffee et al 2005)
On the other hand, knowing the importance of livestock raising, and wool in particular, to Syrian centres such as Ebla, we suggest that the EB IV agro-pastoral communities of the southern Levant may, at least peripherally, have been involved in the resourcing or seasonal management of the vast animal herds that occupied the rangelands of the Syrian steppe in EB IV
Our review of the development of fourth and third millennium BC settlement using key sample areas drawn from the northern Fertile Crescent has indicated the existence of several distinctive settlement structures and diachronic trajectories (Table 4)
Summary
Urbanization and state formation have formed a central pillar of the discussion of the development of ancient Near Eastern civilizations, but this debate has frequently become polarised between evolutionary models (e.g. Flannery 1999) and more historically contingent models of processes of development (e.g. Yoffee 2005; Yoffee et al 2005). Instead of using the landscape of the zone of uncertainty to produce a diversified range of staple crops and livestock (for which it was not really suited), they may have regarded it as ideal for agro-pastoral activity, the ‘opportunistic stocking’ of sheep and goats Such a herding strategy allows the number of livestock to increase in accordance with the availability of forage so that the growing herd can be converted into ‘capital’ in years of good rainfall, whereas bad years can entail herd numbers being reduced as necessary In the absence of significant southern power centres during EB IV, such a process would presumably reflect the gradual reorientation of communities in the southern Levant towards a northern sphere, through the opportunities offered by this new and physically distant core
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