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Alis¸ar and Alaca Höyük is the tall and slender stemmed bowl, or “fruitstand,” which is well burnished and sometimes fluted horizontally (Figure 5.13). Pedestalled jars, and cups with one handle and a low carinated belly were also part of the repertoire.
Çadır Höyük, by way of contrast, provides a clearer picture. Several features of the settlement, including a large stone gateway and accompanying enclosure wall, sizeable courtyards and nondomestic buildings (the so-called Burnt House), suggest the community had an administrative system responsible for public works. Concentration of spindle whorls, stone debitage, hearths, and quantities of grain scattered across the courtyards show that these public areas probably served a number of purposes. Ceramics from central Anatolia point to considerable interaction with surrounding regions. Contact with southeastern Europe, for instance, is reflected in dark vessels often black burnished, bearing punctate ornamentation, incised geometric patterns filled with a white paste, and white painted designs. This range is particularly well attested at Büyük Güllücek.73 Then there are influences that may stem from the east. A predilection for black burnished surfaces and the use of small, decorative knobs are known from the Kura-Araxes culture province. Indeed, the interface between central and eastern Anatolia, mentioned some 30 years ago by Ufuk Esin and Güven Arsebük, is a topic that has found favor once again.74 But what distinguishes the Çadır assemblage is the number of highly burnished bowls with an omphalos (concave) base and other vessels decorated with a red painted band, applied after firing.
EARLY BRONZE AGE (ca. 3100–2000 BC)
By the Late Chalcolithic, sites in the Taurus region were part of a more widespread tradition that extended across the northern Syro-Mesopotamian plain to the southern alluvium of Iraq and southwestern Iran. This vast and variegated region was the seedbed for civilization—a new order of life made possible by mixes of human skills, needs, and natural resources. We have seen these factors at play already, as in the case of the spectacular flowerings of the Neolithic period. Yet for all the spectacular achievements of these earliest village communities, they foreshadowed rather than reflected civilization.
It is worth considering for a moment just what it is we are looking for. Although the emergence of civilization represents one of the crucially important episodes in human history, the concept itself is not an easy one to define adequately. Most general definitions of civilization stress that it represents “an advanced stage in human social development” (Oxford English Dictionary). That is without doubt, but we still have to determine how advanced or developed and along what lines. Some have sought to identify the features that distinguish “civilized” soci- eties—monumental buildings, cities, and irrigation have all been suggested, and, as we approach the threshold of literacy, writing has been suggested as a credential too. Although we may think that these attributes are typical of a civilization, those early civilizations that developed outside the Greater Mesopotamian region have shown us that they need not be found together. But what
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these features and others besides have in common is social, political, and economic complexity. They all point to a level of human interaction that offered more diversity and elaboration of experiences than ever before, crystallizing in the third millennium BC.75
Cities, centers, and villages
We should move now to more concrete matters and delineate, however summarily, some of the markers that registered this new order. The concept of civilization is inextricably linked with another phenomenon that emerged in this period—that of the city. Today our image of a city is one of a huge metropolis teeming with millions of residents, mostly strangers to each other, who are engaged in myriad activities a city has to offer. Although an ancient city would be hardly recognizable to us, we are nevertheless talking about the same phenomenon. There are many definitions of a city, ranging from those that give primacy to population size through the complexity of its administrative system, to the specific skills of its residents. Essentially, at its most basic level, an urban center within the context of early civilizations is an entity that provided a number of specialized functions when compared to the greater hinterland. This often meant that the greater proportion of the population of a centre was engaged in activities other than food production. For this reason cities and towns are sometimes viewed as structurally similar and specialized settlements, which are distinguishable largely, and often arbitrarily, on the basis of size.
Certainly, the relative size of an ancient city or town when compared with the overall population of the surrounding area is a characteristic that needs to be considered. In the ancient Near East, a city that served as a provincial centre would normally have had a few thousand inhabitants, although calculating ancient populations sizes is always a notoriously difficult task. Another feature of a city is the number of activities that it can support when compared to a village, for instance. The burgeoning consumer market of an ancient city promoted a focused division of labor, enabling some to free themselves from farming and seek gainful employment in specialized roles such as craftsmen, bureaucrats, and merchants.
Finally, while geographers naturally stress the emergence of new settlement patterns and the centrality of urban centers (“the central place”), one needs to remember that a city is part of a network and therefore very much dependent on neighboring satellite settlements. Whereas the underlying determining force that brought together these dense populations to form cities in southern Mesopotamia appears to have been large-scale irrigation agriculture, in the northern regions rain-fed farming was also practiced. In both regions, communal effort was needed to expand and maintain the fields. Hence determining the function of a city is important. The earliest Near Eastern cities were, above all, the center of a region, and often had administrative, economic, and political roles, providing services such as central storage and manufactured products, as well as law and order. They were also actively engaged in an increasingly organized network of long-distance trade. As such, some cities formed the core of small polities called city-states, which comprised stretches of farmland and interdependent settlements.
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Although changes apparent in settlement patterns and economy are defining criteria, they offer only part of the picture. Another crucial aspect is the nature of central governmental authority, which anthropologists refer as a state level of sociopolitical organization. It is clear that within an urban setting people began to grow apart in terms of power and wealth. Populations gradually became divided into social and economic classes in a stratified society. Status was based less on kinship and social prestige, which was largely ascribed, as in the ranked societies of earlier periods, and more on designated roles in highly specialized bureaucracies in which some groups of people had more access to political office, authority, and wealth than others. These new and powerful bureaucratic institutions controlled much of the decision making and were responsible for the centralization of certain activities such as religious ritual, legalized use of force and the economy. These new leaders were the elites of society and they legitimized their positions and conferred value on institutions they controlled. The construction of monumental temples and palaces was one way they consolidated their standing.
Although civilization can be defined conceptually, its manifestations are by no means uniform. So far we have discussed the social and political organisation of Greater Mesopotamia to which southeastern Anatolia belongs.76 What type of social systems did the rest of Anatolia, north of the Taurus, harbor? The cultural landscape in this region was far more variegated (Figures 5.14 and 5.15), and the transformation processes in the two regions—Mesopotamia and Anatolia—are quite distinct.77 Whereas the various terms and nomenclature for this transitional period confuse matters—“towns,” “town-like settlements,” “city-state,” and “proto-city-state”—Özlem Çevik quite correctly points out that the difference is much more fundamental.
In southeastern Anatolia, we can trace the transformation from villages through towns to the large centers of the first half of the third millennium (Samsat, in the Karababa Basin, ca. 10 ha), and finally cities in the mid-third millennium BC (Titris¸ Höyük, in the Bozova region, ca. 43 ha, and the exceptionally large Kazane Höyük, in the Urfa province, ca. 100 ha). When cities emerged, the regions south of the Taurus established polities based on a four-tiered hierarchy of settlements, whereby the largest (20–43 ha) formed the core in a mutually beneficial network of exchange and support, involving towns (5–15 ha), tertiary centers (2–5 ha), and hamlets (0.1–1.0 ha). The function of each component of these urban conglomerates is not easy to disentangle, such as those of towns like Kurban Höyük and Lidar Höyük, although an extensive potters’ workshop at the latter is suggestive of its primary function.
North of the Taurus Mountains, two broad settlement patterns are apparent, roughly dividing at the Euphrates River. Eastwards, the highlands lacked any form of centralized authority until the first millennium BC, and in the Early Bronze Age their character was entirely rural.78 Small farmsteads, averaging 1–2 ha, are scattered across the rugged terrain to the highest altitudes. In the Upper Euphrates Valley, in the Malatya-Elazıg˘ region, the situation differed. There Nors¸untepe dominated the Altınova Plain in the Early Bronze Age I when it grew to
3.2 ha, only to decrease substantially a few centuries later.79 The Malatya Plain reflects similar circumstances, where Arslantepe expanded to about 4 ha. In central Anatolia, the largest centers
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Figure 5.14 Map of Early Bronze Anatolia showing the main cultural zones
on the plateau were about 10 ha in size. Even though Alis¸ar (28 ha), Acemhöyük (56 ha) and Karahöyük and Kültepe (50 ha) are larger, Çevik quite rightly suggests that their maximum expansion can be reasonably attributed to later developments. The western regions conform to an approximately similar pattern—the largest Early Bronze Age sites such as Troy and Karatas¸ averaged between 5 and 13 hectares, with Beycesultan (30–40 ha) being the exception.
On size and site distribution alone, then, Anatolia appears to have had three types of sociopolitical transformation in the Early Bronze Age: urbanization in the southeastern region whereby large cities controlled their hinterland through a highly organized administrative system; centralization in western and central Anatolia, where the largest sites enjoyed only a loose control of the surrounding area; and a rural landscape in the eastern highlands that harbored villages with no indication of any hierarchy.80
Before we turn to specific regional issues we need to mention one other important development that incorporated much of Anatolia and peaked in the Early Bronze Age III period, namely trade. Across much of southeastern, central, western Anatolia and beyond into the Aegean, we witness the emergence of innovations that are suggestive of an extensive network of interaction.81 We have already made reference to growing central authorities and the changing nature of settlements that now included upper and lower towns, fortification systems, and monumental public buildings. Wheelmade pottery, although manufactured in the southeast for over a
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Figure 5.15 Map of Early Bronze Anatolia showing the main sites
millennium, appears in western Anatolian contexts around the mid-third millennium BC, and thence found its way to the western Aegean. Likewise, distinctive ceramic forms began to circulate across the peninsula: west Anatolian depata, tankards, and cutaway-spouted jugs, for instance, were transported eastwards, whereas “Syrian bottles” and wheelmade plates were exotic tableware items north of the Taurus. Many have argued that the quest for metals drove this new economic system. The acquisition and control of precious metals—gold, silver and
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