Households and the Emergence of Cities in Ancient Mesopotamia

Jason Ur

doi:10.1017/s095977431400047x

Abstract

The world's first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium bc. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptations to meet the goals of elite members of society, or society as a whole. This study proposes an alternative model. By reviewing indigenous terminology from later historical periods, it proposes that urbanism evolved in the context of a metaphorical extension of the household that represented a creative transformation of a familiar structure. The first cities were unintended consequences of this transformation, which may seem ‘revolutionary’ to archaeologists but did not to their inhabitants. This alternative model calls into question the applicability of terms like ‘urbanism’ and ‘the state’ for early Mesopotamian society.

Highlights

At some point during the fourth millennium BC, farmers and herders in Mesopotamia began to concentrate in large, densely occupied settlements, the best known of which is Uruk
Archaeologists have interpreted the record of the Uruk period as the beginnings of urbanism as a settlement form, and the state as a political structure
Interest in the demographic aspects of urbanism and the state has waned in favor of functional approaches (Feinman 1998), this study considers the basic question of why inhabitants remained in growing settlements, or chose to move into them

Summary

Introduction

At some point during the fourth millennium BC, farmers and herders in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey; see Fig. 1) began to concentrate in large, densely occupied settlements, the best known of which is Uruk (modern Warka). More recent approaches attempt to make later developments contingent on earlier political (Wright 2006) or economic (Algaze 2008) events, but these processes are generalized, rather than tied to local history This critique might seem inappropriate for an essentially protohistoric time period, but many of these models have their basis in reconstructions of Mesopotamian society of the mid to late third millennium BC, a time from which abundant textual sources on sociopolitical structures are available. 2100-2004 BC) is generally considered to represent the apex of the centralized bureaucratic state, and it is often used as a model for essentially prehistoric urban polities in the Uruk period a thousand years earlier (e.g., Liverani 2006; Algaze 2008) To the contrary, it is a strong example of the large polity organized on the principle of the household. The houses show variation in scale and appointments, and in the case of Tell Abada even a nested arrangement, but the social structures of these communities were unable to counter fissioning tendencies; the settlements themselves all remained quite small

20 Meters

Findings

Discussion and Conclusions