The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (42 page)

How might an archaeologist detect this kind of society? One might rely on sumptuary goods to recognize the burial of a chief, but what about the burial of an aristocratic council member? Trophy heads and hands might be recognized by archaeologists, but what about ransomed captives? Without written texts, would we know that some land was private?

As it happens, these are not just rhetorical questions. We know that one of the world’s first civilizations shared some institutions with the Apa Tani. That civilization has been described by one of its leading experts as an oligarchy. It had a council of elders. It had a hereditary aristocracy, commoners with access to land, commoners with no access to land, and slaves. Some of its craft specialties were considered more prestigious than others. This civilization had private land, public land, and land allotted to temples. Slaves might be debtors or war captives and could earn their freedom.

The creators of that civilization were the Sumerians of Southern Mesopotamia, and we know all these things about them because they had writing. The earlier societies out of which Sumerian civilization developed, however, did not have writing. As we will see in the chapter that follows, discovering the institutions of those earlier societies is a task that pushes archaeologists to the limits of their interpretive skills.

FOURTEEN

Temples and Inequality in Early Mesopotamia

Temples, as we have seen, went on to replace men’s houses in several parts of the New World. In the cases we have examined, the transition was accompanied by evidence for hereditary inequality. This fact does not surprise us because we have seen that as chiefly elites emerge, they begin to dedicate buildings to the highest celestial spirits in their cosmos.

Now we must search for a comparable transition in the Old World. We have chosen Mesopotamia because its societies were among the first to replace the small ritual house with the temple. Beginning 8,700 years ago with the Terrazzo Building at Çayönü, Turkey, villages of the Tigris-Euphrates drainage built increasingly temple-like structures. For centuries, some early temples coexisted with circular buildings that look like men’s houses or clan houses. Finally, between 6,500 and 6,000 years ago, the temples stood alone.

Finding examples of early temples in Mesopotamia is not difficult. The difficulty lies in determining whether the society building the temple also shows signs of hereditary inequality. It will soon become clear why we chose to discuss Tikopia and the Apa Tani before taking on the archaeology of Mesopotamia. Those two societies have prepared us for the fact that some kinds of inequality can be hard to detect archaeologically.

In addition to the overall difficulty of detecting rank, we see differences between Northern and Southern Mesopotamia. A number of ancient villages in Northern Mesopotamia provide us with clues to social inequality, such as elite children buried with sumptuary goods, long-distance exchanges of polychrome pottery among elite families, the clustering of satellite hamlets around chiefly villages, and the burning of elite residences in raids. For Southern Mesopotamia, the evidence for rank is more subtle.

NORTHERN MESOPOTAMIA

The key to Northern Mesopotamian agriculture is the Syrian Saddle, a gap in the Lebanon-Judean mountains that allows winter storms from the Mediterranean to travel east as far as Iraq. As these moisture-laden winds reach the Zagros Mountains, they rise, cool, and rain.

It was this rain that provided one of the key differences between Northern and Southern Mesopotamia. Most areas with rainfall exceeding 12 inches a year can grow cereals without irrigation. Most areas receiving less than 12 inches are required to irrigate. All of Mesopotamia raised wheat, barley, sheep, and goats, but the emphasis was different. Prehistoric villages in the rainier north made greater use of wheat and goats. Prehistoric villages in the hotter, drier south made greater use of barley and sheep. Barley is more tolerant of heat and salinity than wheat. Sheep have an ability to pant, not shared by goats, which allows them to dissipate heat.

Several of the ancient villages considered here lie near the modern city of Mosul, on the Tigris River in northern Iraq. Mosul itself receives 15 inches of rain. The rainiest months are December to March, making winter wheat a favored crop. In days of old it was said that Mosul had three colors: green, bronze, and buff. The green from winter rains lasted until May and then yielded to the bronze of ripening wheat. Summer and fall baked the region to a dusty buff.

The Growth of Extended Households

Roughly 7,500 years ago, villages in the Mosul plain grew wheat, barley, lentils, and peas for food; raised flax to make linen cloth; and herded sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs. These tasks required a division of labor beyond that of the nuclear family. Married sons increasingly remained in the households of their fathers instead of founding their own homes. This created extended families of 15 to 20 persons, capable of dealing with the multitasking of a farming-herding economy. Such families built lots of storage rooms, increasing the privatization of storage we saw at earlier sites such as Çayönü.

The village of Hassuna, 20 miles south of Mosul, exemplifies the transition from single-family to multifamily homes. The earliest mud-brick houses at Hassuna were nuclear family homes of three to five rooms. Somewhat later, the builders began to group these houses around a court or patio. Roughly 7,300 years ago, Hassuna was building irregular complexes of 15 to 20 rooms, flanking two sides of an open court. Often one part of the complex looked more planned than the rest, as if it were the original nucleus to which later rooms were added by accretion. Finally, some 7,000 years ago, there were residential compounds of 15 to 20 rooms whose layout was designed from the outset to accommodate an extended family (
Figure 35
).

These later residences were composed of three relatively standardized units: courtyards or patios averaging 156 square feet, working or sleeping rooms averaging 108 square feet, and storage rooms averaging 21 square feet. Houses often had several kitchens. These multiple kitchens provide evidence that more than one married couple occupied the house, with each wife maintaining her own hearth.

FIGURE 35.
   Some 7,200 years ago the village of Tell Hassuna in Northern Mesopotamia was building houses for extended families of 12 to 20 people. These families had multiple kitchens and privatized storage bins, holding thousands of pounds of cereal grains. The house on the left is from the village of Level IV; the house on the right is from Level V. Families this large were able to advance socially by building up capital in the form of wheat, barley, sheep, and goats. The patios in their houses averaged 156 square feet, while the working or sleeping rooms averaged 100 square feet.

According to excavators Seton Lloyd and Fuad Safar, some levels at Hassuna also featured ritual buildings of an unusual type: circular, with a domed roof. Near Eastern archaeologists refer to these buildings with a borrowed Greek term,
tholos
(plural,
tholoi
), despite the fact that they had no connection to the ancient Greek burial chamber of the same name.

There were hints of still larger social units at Choga Mami, a village occupied between 7,300 and 7,000 years ago. Choga Mami lay in the piedmont east of the Tigris River, some 200 miles southeast of Hassuna, and irrigated an alluvial fan created by a small river from the Zagros Mountains. At Choga Mami, excavator Joan Oates found traces of larger, heavily buttressed walls that did not form part of any residence. These thicker walls, she felt, might have allowed a group of related families to separate themselves from the rest of the village. Such walled residential wards imply the presence of larger social segments, such as clans or ancestor-based descent groups.

Evidently Choga Mami also felt the need for defense. At the margins of the village, Oates uncovered what appeared to be a mud-brick watchtower. Any strangers approaching would have been visible from the tower.

Defensive Works and Sumptuary Goods at Tell es-Sawwan

Nowhere during this time period was the need for defense from raiding clearer than at the site of Tell es-Sawwan. Es-Sawwan lay directly on the Tigris River, 100 miles west of Choga Mami and only six miles south of the modern Iraqi city of Samarra. There the Tigris would likely have been 800 feet wide at low water and almost 2,000 feet wide at flood stage. Its course was limited by high conglomerate bluffs. The river was free to meander between these bluffs, leaving areas of floodplain available for growing two irrigated crops a year.

The village of Tell es-Sawwan ran for nearly 750 feet along the east bluff of the Tigris. It also extended back more than 350 feet from the bluff, covering at least six acres. Two dry gullies, spaced roughly 160 feet apart, ran westward through the village on their way to the Tigris. The occupants of Tell es-Sawwan deepened each of these gullies into a defensive ditch and then connected the two with a north-south ditch, cut ten feet into the underlying conglomerate (
Figure 36
).

The center of the village was thus protected on the west by the river bluff and on the north, east, and south by ditches. Just inside the ditch the villagers built a mud-brick wall, so strongly buttressed that it was still standing three feet high when discovered by Iraqi archaeologists. The total height of the barrier presented by the wall plus ditch was at least 13 feet, leaving Tell es-Sawwan well fortified. Debris in the ditches left no doubt that there was a need for defense. Included were large numbers of sling missiles, egg-shaped projectiles made of dense clay.

FIGURE 36.
   The village of Tell es-Sawwan, on the Tigris River near Baghdad, was defended on three sides by ditches and walls and on its remaining side by the bluffs of the river. The distance between its north (left) and south (right) defenses was roughly 160 feet.

The simple handheld sling, consisting of a leather pad attached to two cords, is probably one of the oldest weapons known. Its origins almost certainly go back to the earliest hunters and herders. Even those of us who have no flocks of sheep to guard are familiar with slings, having heard the story of David and Goliath. It is not generally realized, however, how important an article of warfare the sling once was.

According to a study by archaeologist Manfred Korfmann, “in Mesopotamia, in Persia and in Greece and Rome a slinger was considered a match for an archer.” A throw of more than 650 feet was not unusual for slingers of that era, meaning that large numbers of missiles could be launched from a distance. When thrown from only 300 feet away, the missile—coming off the sling at speeds approaching those of a Nolan Ryan fastball—could drop a man in his tracks. The sling missiles of Tell es-Sawwan had been given a streamlined, biconical form that improved their accuracy, velocity, and distance and made them fit more snugly in the leather pad.

Tell es-Sawwan’s enemies may have coveted its prime irrigation location. Its main crops were six-rowed and two-rowed barley, cereals that did well under hot-weather irrigation. The flax grown at es-Sawwan had seeds more than 0.16 inches in length, diagnostic evidence for irrigated flax.

The most interesting houses at Tell es-Sawwan were T-shaped, combining long, narrow corridors and wider, more nearly square rooms. These buildings had anywhere from eight to 16 rooms and averaged more than 700 square feet of floor space. Some rooms seemed to yield domestic tools; others held cereals and agricultural implements; and still others may have been household shrines.

It was, however, the burials below the floors that created the greatest excitement at Tell es-Sawwan. Many contained masterpieces of finely painted pottery, stone bowls, marble or alabaster statuettes, turquoise beads, and items of native copper, dentalium, and mother-of-pearl. Significantly, some of the burials richest in sumptuary goods were those of children (
Figure 37
). Grave 92, for example, contained an infant with three alabaster statuettes (one with eyes of inlaid shell), beads of turquoise and carnelian, and three elegant pottery flasks. Grave 94 belonged to an infant with another alabaster statuette, this one featuring eyes of inlaid shell and its own miniature necklace of stone and asphalt beads. Clearly these children were too young to have earned such sumptuary goods through achievement. Their parents were likely to have been people of rank.