The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (43 page)

Craft Specialization and Exchanges of Luxury Pottery

Some of the pottery made during this period was elegant enough to compare with Panama’s Coclé trade wares. From at least 7,300 to 7,000 years ago this pottery, named “Samarran ware,” was distributed over much of Northern Mesopotamia. Samarran potters were the first in Mesopotamia to sign their work with “potters’ marks,” small painted symbols that identified the maker of the vessel. Many Samarran potters’ marks have been found, but we do not know whether they referred to individual potters, lineages of potters, or entire communities.

FIGURE 37.
   This four-inch alabaster statuette was found with a burial at Tell es-Sawwan. Supplied with asphalt hair, shell-inlaid eyes, and a necklace of turquoise beads, it probably depicts an elite ancestor. The fact that this valuable statuette was buried with a child increases the likelihood that es-Sawwan society featured hereditary rank.

Despite the obvious expertise of the Samarran potters, between 7,000 and 6,500 years ago their products were gradually replaced by an elegant new bichrome and polychrome painting style. Called “Halaf ware,” after an important site in Syria, this style of painting eventually spread over Northern Mesopotamia.

Archaeological sites with Halaf pottery supply us with three different lines of evidence for social inequality. First, they increase our sample of children buried with sumptuary goods. Second, they suggest that some large villages may have had authority over a group of smaller satellite communities. And finally, they provide us with evidence for long-distance exchanges of gifts between elite families, such as those of the Tlingit and Haida.

Halaf burial practices were more complex than those of Samarran societies, implying a greater range of social statuses. Archaeologists have identified “ordinary” graves, special cremations, the reburial of certain people’s skulls in finely painted bowls, and a number of shaft-and-chamber tombs that were reserved, we suspect, for individuals of high rank.

Archaeologists Nikolai Merpert and Rauf Munchaev found a number of Halaf burials at Yarim Tepe I and II, a pair of ancient villages in the region west of Hassuna. The variety of burials was as follows:

  1. “Ordinary graves” (for example, in Levels 8 and 9 at Yarim Tepe II) contained adults and children laid out full length. A few of these burials had a stone cup or pottery vessel with them, but most were buried with little or nothing.

  2. After its abandonment, Yarim Tepe I was used as a cemetery for individuals buried in formal chambers. These burials were often so tightly flexed that one suspects they were wrapped in bundles. They were accompanied by pottery and alabaster vessels, polished pins and axes of iron ore, stone pendants, or beads of seashell or stone. While most of the burials were those of adults, Burial 56 was a four-year-old child buried with a stone macehead—an object which, if found with an adult, would have been considered a status symbol.
   Burial 60 was an adult accompanied by the skull of a very large bull, vessels of pottery and alabaster, an iron-ore pin, and about 200 astragali, or tarsal bones, from gazelles. The astragali may have been some kind of kit for divination or casting lots, a prehistoric forerunner of modern dice.

  3. Levels 7 through 9 of Yarim Tepe II produced the bulk of the special cremation burials. Perhaps the most revealing was a series of cremated children with sumptuary goods. Burial 40 consisted of the charred remains of a youth 10 to 13 years of age, found in an oval crematorium. After cremation his remains had been placed in a painted Halaf vessel, along with a necklace of 20 polished obsidian beads. Also in the pit were smashed and burned pots, stone vessels, more beads from possible necklaces, and a seal drilled for suspension. The significance of the drilled seal will become clear during our discussion of the site of Arpachiyah.
   Burial 43 consisted of the remains of a cremated ten-year-old child, placed inside a painted Halaf vessel and buried under the floor of a tholos. The crematorium itself, found nearby, included an alabaster goblet with a pedestal base, an alabaster bowl, and three ceramic vessels (
Figure 38
).
   Once again, it seems unlikely that either of these children had achieved enough in his lifetime to deserve such labor-intensive offerings. Each alabaster vessel had to be cut and polished from a block of stone as hard as marble. The craftsmanship involved makes it likely that Burials 40 and 43 were the children of highly ranked families.

  4. Finally, in Level 9 of Yarim Tepe II, there were several burials of isolated human crania. One of these (Burial 56) consisted of three crania, two from adults and one from a youth. We do not know why certain people’s skulls were treated this way, but the behavior is consistent with the Near East’s long history of curating skulls.

While we do not know the details of Yarim Tepe society, the variety of ways in which these two villages treated their dead, including infants and children, suggests a level of inequality like that of early rank societies elsewhere in the world. In addition, the figurines of Yarim Tepe II reveal that some women were tattooed with the same motifs seen on Halaf pottery. In many rank societies this would be a sign of prestige.

There is circumstantial evidence that the authority of prominent Halaf leaders extended beyond their home villages. In the region east and west of the modern city of Mosul, archaeologist Ismail Hijara found numerous cases in which a large (20-acre) Halaf village was surrounded by smaller (two-to-seven acre) communities that may have been subordinate to it.

FIGURE 38.
   Sumptuary goods from the cremation burials of elite children at Yarim Tepe II, Iraq. The necklace of polished obsidian beads was found with a cremated child 10 to 13 years old. The alabaster goblet and bowl were found with a cremated child roughly 10 years old. Such special treatment of children suggests inherited rank.

Archaeologist Patty Jo Watson suspects that this “center-versus-hinterland” pattern may have characterized much of the region using Halaf pottery. At a minimum that region extended for more than 400 miles, from the Euphrates River on the west, past its Balikh and Khabur tributaries in Syria, past the Tigris River in Iraq, and east into the Zagros Mountains. This vast region consisted of farming areas with good alluvial soil, alternating with areas suitable only for grazing sheep and goats.

Long-Distance Elite Exchange

In an effort to learn how all these widespread Halaf societies might have interacted with each other, Watson collaborated with archaeologist Steven LeBlanc. Their study took advantage of the extraordinary repertoire of motifs on Halaf pottery, painted in up to three colors. Watson and LeBlanc suspected that the more closely any two Halaf villages interacted, the more motifs their pottery was likely to share.

LeBlanc selected seven Halaf villages from Syria, Turkey, and Iraq, sites where archaeological excavations had produced thousands of pottery fragments bearing painted motifs. For each pair of villages LeBlanc quantified the degree of sharing of motifs, using a statistical measure of similarity. He then compared this degree of similarity to the distance between each pair of villages.

LeBlanc would not have been surprised to find that the closer any two villages lay to each other, the more motifs they shared. That is not, however, what his results showed. The strongest similarities were found between the largest Halaf villages in LeBlanc’s sample, those that were most likely to have been the social and political centers of their regions. For example, the very strongest similarities were (1) between Tell Turlu on the Euphrates and Tell Halaf on the Khabur River and (2) between Tell Halaf on the Khabur and the site of Arpachiyah, just east of the Tigris. The distances between each of these pairs of large villages were on the order of 120 to 170 miles. In contrast, the similarities between Arpachiyah and the smaller village of Banahilk (only 75 miles away) were much weaker.

In other words, exchanges among the largest Halaf villages were stronger than expected, especially given the intervening distances. This situation was similar to that described for chiefly centers in Panama, where young men of high rank established long-distance trading partnerships with Colombian elites before they became chiefs. It is possible that Halaf chiefs exchanged both brides and sumptuary goods, with skilled potters forming part of the chief’s retinue. Watson has suggested that the largest Halaf villages were probably “chiefly centers, i.e., places of residence of local strongmen or chiefs.”

We can compare the spread of Halaf polychrome pottery to that of Coclé polychrome, Tlingit and Haida crests, Quimbaya goldwork, and the Mexican vessels carved with Earth and Sky motifs. All these products of expertise spread rapidly once they had become appropriate gifts for chiefly families. The Halaf case is especially interesting because it may have involved not only the leaders of sedentary agricultural societies but also the leaders of pastoral societies who occupied the grazing lands between river floodplains.

Halaf Public Buildings

Societies using Halaf pottery built a variety of public buildings. Some of these buildings were for ritual, some probably had secular functions, and some remain enigmatic even to the archaeologists who excavated them.

At Tell Aswad, on a Syrian tributary of the Euphrates, archaeologist Max Mallowan discovered a multiroom building 20 feet by 17 feet in extent; he considered it to be a Halaf temple. At the village of Yarim Tepe II, already described, Merpert and Munchaev discovered a clay-walled Halaf building more than 28 by 14 feet in size. This structure contained none of the domestic debris of a residence and looks like a temple.

An early, 22-room complex in Level 6 of Yarim Tepe II, however, seemed to be a secular public building. This building was laid out in the form of a cross. At its center stood a tholos more than eight feet in diameter, divided into four compartments. The walls of the tholos appear originally to have been lined with alabaster slabs. Merpert and Munchaev suspect that this building may have been a large public storehouse, placed in the very center of the village.

The Halaf tholoi from Yarim Tepe II showed considerable diversity. Tholos 67, the largest, was more than 17 feet in diameter; Merpert and Munchaev considered it a ritual building because it had an offering buried beneath its floor. Some of the smaller tholoi, however, seem to have been used for the storage of household items. Too much use of the term
tholos,
therefore, obscures the fact that not all of these circular structures were built for the same purpose.

Arpachiyah: A Possible Halaf Chiefly Center

One of the Halaf sites chosen for LeBlanc’s study was Arpachiyah, a multilayered
tell,
or archaeological mound, not far from Mosul. Arpachiyah has been the scene of repeated excavation, including the work of Max Mallowan in the 1930s and Ismail Hijara in the 1970s.

Arpachiyah was a village of mud-walled houses, tholoi, granaries with traces of wheat and barley, domed ovens, and pottery kilns. It also had long, narrow streets up to four feet wide. These streets were paved with local river cobbles, laid over thick layers of broken pottery in order to improve drainage.

At one point in its occupation Arpachiyah built a special group of tholoi, walled off from the rest of the village. The tholoi in this segregated area were more complex than the circular ones built at Yarim Tepe. They were keyhole-shaped, with an igloo-like entrance that led to the circular chamber (
Figure 39
). Hijara believed that the entire enclosure, built 7,000 years ago, had been dedicated to ritual.

In a later level at Arpachiyah, occupied during the peak popularity of Halaf polychrome pottery, Mallowan discovered what was almost certainly the residence of a highly ranked family. The dozen or so surviving rooms included a long, narrow court, a number of rectangular living or sleeping rooms, and at least four storage units. This house contained an exquisite collection of bichrome and polychrome pottery; stone vessels; black steatite amulets; figurines; beads of limestone, quartz, and marine shell; pigment-grinding palettes; painters’ mixing-and-pouring bowls; and a number of stone seals perforated as pendants. One room of the house was filled with blades and flakes from the chipping of imported Turkish obsidian.