The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (45 page)

Speiser excavated about half of the Level XII village, uncovering at least 103 rooms. Most of these rooms belonged to eight large room complexes with courtyards, living or sleeping rooms, ovens, and storage rooms.

The area south and east of the curving street was the most interesting neighborhood. Its layout suggested a degree of village planning. Originally this neighborhood had been bisected by a street running southeast to northwest. At the northwest end of the street lay the largest and most elaborate residence. From here the street turned west, entering an open plaza more than 25 feet on a side.

Let us look now at the largest residence, the one bordering the open plaza. It had originally been 40 feet on a side and symmetrical, but later additions had compromised its symmetry. Its inner court (called the White Room because of its heavy coating of plaster) covered 576 square feet and had two doors opening onto the plaza. This court was flanked by rooms of different sizes that, according to Tobler, had definitely been used as living quarters. Included were a kitchen with a corner oven, some spacious living or sleeping rooms, and a series of small storage units. We would reconstruct this as the residence of an elite extended family, made up of perhaps 13 to 19 persons.

The second largest residence, only 20 feet farther down the northwest-southeast street, had a similar ground plan. Its interior court (called Room 26) covered more than 330 square feet and was flanked by rooms for living, sleeping, cooking, and storage. Tobler described this building as the dwelling for an “eminent member” of the village.

In spite of its defenses the Level XII village was successfully raided and partially burned, with at least four victims left unburied in the ruins. Significantly, the building hit hardest was the one with the White Room. The whole northern end was burned, its floor covered with ash and charred refuse to a depth of 15 inches. A baby and a child 12 to 14 years old had died in this residence. Two more youths lay unburied near a curving street leading to the watchtower. One of the latter, also a child 12 to 14 years old, is said to have had a stone “perhaps thrown from a sling” still resting between his or her shoulder blades. Following this raid, Tepe Gawra seems to have been abandoned for at least a century.

FIGURE 42.
   In spite of its defensible setting, its restricted access route, and its guard room, the Level XII village at Tepe Gawra was attacked, burned, and abandoned, with unburied corpses left behind. The residences of the two most important families are shown in gray. (The White Room covered 576 square feet.)

As was the case with many of the tribal or chiefly societies we have examined, the enemies of the Gawra XII village seem to have regarded youngsters as fair game. In such societies raids are often sneak attacks, and women and children are frequent casualties. Attacks may be timed to occur when adult men are away from the village, perhaps working in their fields or tending their flocks. Villages whose men are periodically absent may respond by building watchtowers, allowing those left behind a clear view of approaching strangers. Gawra had such a tower.

When rank societies are attacked, the primary target of the raid may be either (1) a prominent temple or (2) the house of a community leader. Truly powerful rank societies may force their victims into a position of subordination. Less powerful rank societies may be content to chase off defenders, do a little killing and burning, and then leave. Given Gawra’s apparent abandonment, with some victims left unburied in the ruins, we suspect that the bulk of the Level XII population fled, moved in with their allies, and never returned.

The Nature of Early Rank Society in Northern Mesopotamia

All three of Irving Goldman’s sources of power were developed in Northern Mesopotamia. There were buildings infused with sacred life force: household shrines, tholoi for descent groups, and a temple for the whole community. Expertise was evident in the polychrome bowls with potters’ marks, polished marble and alabaster vessels, and architectural brickwork designed with scale models. The frequency of defensive ditches, walls, watchtowers, sling missiles, and burned buildings also makes it likely that prowess in raiding and defense was appreciated.

Some degree of hereditary rank is implied by the burial of infants and children with alabaster goblets and statuettes, multiple necklaces of exotic raw materials, and gifts of craft goods between elite families. The inclusion of maceheads and seal pendants with children may mean that some village officials sought to pass on their positions to their offspring.

Finally, there is evidence for secular public buildings. The latter may have included places for public assembly or the corporate storage of grain. The fact that there were persons who had the responsibility of sealing up shipments of trade goods suggests the germ of a bureaucracy. In other words, despite considerable evidence for privileged families who lived in large houses, who patronized craftsmen, and who buried their children with sumptuary goods, there are also hints that many members of society shared in the available power rather than having it concentrated in the hands of a single family like the great Angs of the Konyak Naga.

SOUTHERN MESOPOTAMIA

There is no clear-cut border between Northern and Southern Mesopotamia; the land simply becomes more arid as one travels south of Mosul. Rainfall at Baghdad averages five inches a year. Farther south, on the great alluvial plain between the lower Tigris and Euphrates, it can be drier still.

Despite its bleak appearance, Southern Mesopotamia was home to countless early villages. Their crops had two primary sources of water. Some fields could be irrigated by streams emerging from the Zagros Mountains and flowing west toward the Tigris. Other villages, including some of the largest, could draw water from the lower Euphrates. The lower Tigris, for the most part, was too deeply incised in its floodplain to provide water for the gravity-driven canals of that era.

The Euphrates begins in the snowcapped mountains of Turkey. Its flow is swelled by Syrian rivers such as the Balikh and Khabur. These are its last significant tributaries. Once it leaves Syria and enters Iraq, the Euphrates is carrying virtually all the water it will ever get. Despite this fact, the volume of water in the Euphrates is so great that for most of its southern course its flow is higher than the surrounding plain, held in check only by its natural levees. It begins to create its delta more than 350 miles from the Persian Gulf, near the modern Iraqi city of Hit.

For the prehistoric farmers of Southern Mesopotamia, the challenge was as follows. The great river was at its lowest level in September and October, held steady in November, began to rise in December, and reached flood stage in April or May. The difference between low water and high water at Hit was impressive. The Euphrates’ flow was barely 8,830 cubic feet per second in September, but by May the flow had surged to more than 64,000 cubic feet. The problem was that, by May, the barley so crucial to Southern Mesopotamia had already been harvested. It was back in October that the water was needed.

The strategy for Southern Mesopotamian farmers, therefore, was to breach the levees of the Euphrates with flint hoes and fill their canals in October. Early villages in the south have produced hundreds of hoe blades showing the polish caused by alluvial soil. Since the lower Euphrates lies far from most flint outcrops, these hoe blades had to be made from imported Zagros Mountain flint.

The flint blades used to make sickles for harvesting were just as hard to come by. To overcome this problem Southern Mesopotamian villagers came up with a new type of sickle, made of overfired pottery clay. Overfiring vitrified the clay, producing a sickle as sharp as glass and just as fragile; its blade eventually broke in the field.

Since ancient sickle fragments can still be found on the surface of the alluvium, archaeologist Henry Wright set out to calculate how large an area could be cultivated by a village occupied 6,000 years ago. He discovered that pieces of clay sickle could be found up to three miles from the nearest ‘Ubaid village.

Archaeologists also find impressive numbers of cattle bones in the refuse of ‘Ubaid villages. Their abundance raises the possibility that oxen had now been harnessed to wooden plows, allowing families to cultivate larger tracts of land.

As the Euphrates of that era approached its confluence with the Tigris, it became a braided river, sometimes following a single course and sometimes dividing into multiple channels. Its floodwaters turned natural depressions into marshes filled with reeds, canes, sedges, cattails, and rushes. The main channel of the river, more than 600 feet wide in places, was periodically entered by ocean fish such as mullet, anchovy, sea bream, and even shark. The people of ‘Ubaid times not only harvested these fish by boat, but they had also begun to sail into the Persian Gulf to trade with people of the Arabian and Iranian coasts.

Just as many Apa Tani families focused on wet-rice cultivation, some communities of the lower Euphrates appear to have concentrated on irrigated barley, obtaining the other commodities they wanted from their neighbors. Let the people of the Zagros Mountains raise most of the goats and the rain-fed, upland wheat. Let the people on the steppe land west of the Euphrates raise most of the sheep. The villagers of the lower Euphrates would use sunlight and irrigation to produce the greatest barley surplus the world had so far seen.

The Temples of Eridu

The Eridu depression is a 20-mile-wide alluvial basin. It lies southwest of the Euphrates River, close to the ruins of Ur of the Chaldees. Long, long ago the depression may have been a marshy basin, closer to the shore of the Persian Gulf than it is today. Towering above the depression is the archaeological mound of Tell Abu Shahrain.

The upper 30 or 40 feet of the mound comprise the ruins of a
ziggurat,
or stepped temple pyramid, belonging to the ancient Mesopotamian city of Eridu. This ziggurat was either built or restored between 2112 and 2094
B.C.
by Ur-Nammu, a king of the Third Royal Dynasty of Ur.

When archaeologists Fuad Safar and Seton Lloyd arrived at Tell Abu Shahrain in 1946, they knew they were standing on the ruins of ancient Eridu. Nothing, however, prepared them for the extraordinary sequence of prehistoric communities that lay beneath the southern corner of the ziggurat. Safar proceeded to dig down more than 40 feet, through at least 19 superimposed villages, until he had reached the sand dune on which the first arrivals had settled. In the course of his amazing descent through the mound he discovered traces of no fewer than 17 temples, built virtually one upon another for nearly 2,000 years.

Safar numbered these temples from the top down, in the order in which they were found. The oldest, Temple 17, was a one-room structure of mud-brick, roughly nine feet on a side. It may have been built more than 7,000 years ago, at a time when Samarran pottery was still popular in Northern Mesopotamia. The Samarran painting style, however, was not used at Eridu. Instead, Southern Mesopotamia had its own painting style and perhaps its own ethnic identity. Archaeologist Joan Oates has referred to the pottery of this period as ‘Ubaid 1 because, in her view, it was an early precursor of the ‘Ubaid style seen later in the region.

The oldest temple at Eridu for which Safar recovered a complete ground plan was Temple 16. It consisted of a rectangular one-room building, seven by ten feet in extent, with an additional alcove more than three feet on a side (
Figure 43, top
). The main room had a clay podium for the placement of offerings, and the alcove had a clay altar. The podium, when first found, was still covered with ashes from burnt offerings.

Next in the sequence was Temple 15, larger than Temple 16 but not nearly as well preserved. It may once have measured 24 by 27 feet.

FIGURE 43.
   The site of Eridu in southern Iraq has produced the longest sequence of prehistoric temples known from Mesopotamia. Above we see Temple 16, one of the earliest, which measured seven by ten feet. Below we see Temple 7, contemporary with the North Temple from Level XIII at Tepe Gawra, which measured 65 by 49 feet.