Chapter Six

1.For a more detailed discussion and specific references to archaeologically attested imports in Uruk period levels of southern Mesopotamian sites, see Algaze (1993 [2005a], 74–84); and Moorey (1994). The following references should be added to the aforementioned discussions by Algaze and Moorey: bitumen, see Connan (1999) and Schwartz, Hollander, and Stein (1999); wood, see Moorey and Postgate (1992); and Engel and Kürschner (1993); wine, see Algaze (1995); Badler, McGovern, and Glusker (1996); and McGovern (2003, 43–63, 160–64).

2.While the Sammelfund was found in the Jemdet Nasr–period level at Warka (Eanna III), the hundreds of objects comprising this hoard appear to consist principally of heirlooms that can be dated to the Uruk period on stylistic grounds (Heinrich 1936).

3.Woven textiles, being entirely organic, leave no trace in the archaeological record, save for occasional impressions of cloth preserved on metal corrosion (e,g., Barber 1991, 132–33) or sealing clay (Ochsenschlager 1993, 55). However, those impressions are likely to be representative only for the coarser grades of cloth, grades that would not have featured significantly in exports.

4.Note, however, that some tools associated with weaving have been noted in the context of Uruk sites, although we still lack a comprehensive study of the data that would allow us to differentiate which of these objects were used in the context of domestic versus industrial weaving. Cases in point for the tools are a variety of elongated spatula-like implements made of bone (e.g., Delougaz and Kantor 1996, 110; pl. 128x, y, aa), which may have served as loom shuttles. Archaeology also provides evidence, however fragmentary and nonquantifiable, for other aspects of the textile production process at the time, including spinning, storing of thread, and sewing. These can be inferred, respectively, from stone or terracotta spindle whorls (e.g., Delougaz and Kantor 1996, 104–9, n. 26, pls. 29q– z, 30j–o, 126a–m), terracotta thread spools (e.g., Delougaz and Kantor 1996, 107, n. 31, pls. 30a–g, 126y–bb), and bone needles (e.g., Delougaz and Kantor 1996, 110, pl. 128v–y).

5.In later periods, Mesopotamian societies imported substantial amounts of wine from the Upper Euphrates region, which was shipped downstream via the river from either Carchemish and/or Mari (Finet 1969), and it would stand to reason that similarly situated Uruk outposts along the Euphrates (Habuba-süd, etc.) may have served as collection, bottling, and transshipment points for wine produced in the high plains of Upper Mesopotamia, where both wild and domestic grapes thrived in antiquity.

6.See chapter 6, note 1.

7.The Limestone Temple in Eanna V was approximately 27 × 80 m in size

(2,160 m2). The principal Eanna IVb-a structures in the same area include (all measurements are approximate and derived from fig. 3): Temple D: 80 × 50 m

(4,000 m2); Temple C: 20 × 55 m (1,100 m2); Palace E (“Square Building”) 55 × 55 m; (3,025 m2); Pillared Hall: 40 × 17 m (680 m2); Stone Cone Mosaic Temple: 20 × 30 m (600 m2); Riemchengebaüde: 20 × 20 m (400 m2); Building F: 20 × 33 m (660 m2); and Mosaic Court Building: 20 × 33 (660 m2). To this must be added the roughly contemporary White Temple (18 × 22 m = 396 m2) and Steingebaüde (25 × 30 m = 600 m2) in the Anu Ziggurat area (fig. 2). Thus, the known (i.e., excavated) area of public structures at the core of Warka in the final phase of the Uruk period minimally occupied an area of approximately 12,121 square meters, requiring anywhere between 16,800 and 33,600 linear meters of roofing timber at rates comparable to those calculated by Margueron for the Limestone Temple. To be sure, while all of this timber had to have been imported into the alluvium over the long term, not all of it needed to have been procured at any one time since, no doubt, a significant portion of the timber used in any one building phase would have been salvaged from earlier architecture.

8. Adams (1981, 122) notes, however, that stone bowls in complex shapes and exhibiting particularly skilled craftsmanship were much more common in Uruk period sites in the Warka region than in the Nippur-Adab area.

Chapter Seven

1.Note, however, that the two data sets are not entirely comparable insofar as Pollock’s cutoff for town-sized settlements is 8 hectares as opposed to Adams’s 10 hectares.

2.In arriving at this number, Nissen follows Adams’s (1981, 69, 349–50) equally conservative estimate of 100 persons per hectare of occupied area as determined by surface survey. The difficulties of making precise correlations between area and population in the Mesopotamian case have been the subject of a review by Nicholas Postgate (1994), who uses the actual layout of neighborhoods in thirdand second-millennium Mesopotamian cities to estimate their population, and concludes that actual densities in those cities could have been as high as 900 plus persons per hectare.

3.According to Adams (1981, 69, 75, tables 3 and 5, respectively), sites 10 hectares in extent and larger amounted to 39 percent of a total occupied area of the Uruk survey area in the Late Uruk period (382 ha). This comes out to about 149 ha worth of “urban-sized” occupations. To this must be added a further 150 hectares to account for the increased estimate of the urban extent of Uruk itself at this time. Urban-sized occupations in the Uruk area in the Late Uruk phase thus amounted to about 299 hectares out of a total of 532 hectares, or just under 60 percent.

4.See chapter 7, note 1.

5.It should be noted that Wilkinson (2000b, fig. 5) had originally suggested

that regional population densities in the north Jazirah region were higher than those in the south throughout the fourth millennium, but after comparing both data sets using Dewar’s algorithm he no longer believes that this was the case (Kouchoukos and Wilkinson 2007, 16–18, fig. 10).

6.Both Umma (WS 197) and Aqarib (WS 198) were at the edge of Adams’s 1968 survey area, but could not be properly surveyed at that time because of extensive sand dunes covering the area (Adams and Nissen 1972, 227–28). The dunes obscuring these sites have now cleared the Umma-Aqarib region.

7.I am grateful to Douglas White for helping me understand the principles underlying power-law growth patterns and their applicability to the study of urban settlement systems.

8.Jennifer Pournelle (2003b, 155) proposes a further possibility, which, again, does not preclude any of the preceding explanations. She suggests that the absence of sites in the Abu Salabikh/Tell al-Hayyad arc may be due in part to decreased wind erosion in this area (hampering site recognition), as opposed to areas directly north and south of the arc.

9.Although this statement may have to be revised once systematic surveys are extended to the Umma and Lagash areas of the Tigris.

10.In this light, the fact that the overwhelming amount of evidence we possess for the development of early Mesopotamian writing during the Uruk period (a communication technology par excellence) happens to come from Warka may well not be accidental. See chapter 8, below, for a fuller discussion of the role of writing and related technologies on the evolution of early Sumerian civilization.

Chapter Eight

1.See Desrochers (2001a, 2001b) for a discussion of the role of geographical proximity as a spur for innovation.

2.This principle represents a transposition to the dynamics of human communication of an idea of Robert Metcalfe (one of the inventors of the Ethernet) about the nature of computer-based communication networks. He argued that the aggregate value of a network (i.e., usefulness in creating and disseminating information) is proportional to the square of the number of its users (Krugman n.d.).

For illustrative purposes, if we presume that something like Metcalfe’s Law can be used to model what would happen in human societies as physical propinquity increased the likelihood of communication, a doubling of a population from, say, 5,000 to 10,000 people would increase the number of possible interactions within that population from 25 to 100 million and a further doubling of the population to 20,000 people would yield 400 million possible interactions.

3.For illustrative purposes, quadratic growth means that a squaring of an initial population of, say, 10 people would result in a total of 10,000,000,000,000,000 possible interactions—although, to be sure, the number of actual interactions at any one time is likely to be many, many times smaller than the theoretical quadratic maximum. I am grateful to Douglas White for explaining to me the principles underlying power-law growth patterns.

4.I am grateful to Joyce Marcus (personal communication, 2006) for bringing this citation to my attention. See also Marcus (1996).

5.The advantages of societies possessing fully developed writing systems over those lacking them are summarized by Lévi-Strauss (1964, 291) in a passage so eloquent that it deserves to be cited in full:

Writing is a strange thing. It would seem as if its appearance could not have failed to wreak profound changes in the living conditions of our race, and that these transformations must have been above all intellectual in character. Once men know how to write, they are enormously more able to keep in being a large body of knowledge. Writing might, that is to say, be regarded as a form of artificial memory, whose development should be accompanied by a deeper knowledge of the past and therefore by a greater ability to organize the present and the future. Of all the criteria by which people habitually distinguish civilization from barbarism, this should be the one most worth retaining: certain peoples write and others do not. The first group can accumulate a body of knowledge that helps it move ever faster towards the goal that it has assigned to itself; the second group is confined within limits that the memory of individuals can never hope to extend, and it must remain a prisoner of a history worked out from day to day, with neither a clear knowledge of its own origins nor a consecutive idea of what its future should be.

6. The faunal remains from Hacınebi are uninformative on this point, as there were so few equid bones overall that no attempt was made to differentiate between wild (E. hemionus) and domestic (E. asinus) animals (Bigelow 1999, table 1).

Chapter Nine

1. The development of the Harappan civilization, centered on several large and roughly equidistant urban sites along the Indus and Hakra rivers of modern Pakistan, may well follow an evolutionary pathway similar to that described here. However, the nature of the political structures that characterized these cities, and the territorial boundaries between them, are widely debated among Indus specialists.