The Early History of the Ancient Near East (9000-2000 BC)

by Hans J Nissen

  Figure 10. Tower of the fortifications at Neolithic Jericho. From K. Kenyon, Excavations at Jericho III (Jerusalem, 1981), pl. 7a. Courtesy, British School of Archaeology, Jerusalem.

  Neither the excavations in Jericho itself nor any other evidence point to a development that could have led to this early form of “town,” or that could have progressed any further from this point. In the ensuing period, after a temporal gap, Jericho once again assumed the character of a settlement just like any other, and it is a very long time before we again find settlements exhibiting external characteristics similar to those of early Jericho.

  When they do appear, however, they are coupled with all the characteristics of a real centrality and belong to a line of development that we can trace all the way along through its individual stages. The special development of Jericho and, to a limited extent, also of Çatal Hüyük, in no way therefore changes anything in our general characterization of the period as one of separate open settlements. If Jericho shows anything, it demonstrates how wide the spectrum of possibilities at the beginning of a new phase of development, in this case permanent settlements, can be. However, further development seldom proceeds from the extremes of such a spectrum. Because of special conditions we do not know about, Jericho developed into a special form right on the edge of the spectrum. Hence, further development to higher forms of political organization did not lead via Jericho, Çatal Hüyük, or other similar, but as yet unknown, settlements, but took the very slow way round, via the development of structured relationships between individual settlements and of settlement systems. It will be one theme of the next chapter to describe this course of development.

  At this point one can only urge caution in the face of any assumption that the developments of the period can be adequately characterized by these few examples. Above all, it might appear that all the individual developments are to be seen as preliminary stages in the evolution of the following period. However, the problem is that although our material is sufficient for us to assume that there must have been a great variety of living and settlement forms during this period, we cannot yet adequately describe this variety.

  THREE

  From Isolated Settlement to Town (ca. 6000–3200 B.C.)

  Up to this point there had been more or less constant progress in development throughout the Near East. Toward the end of the period we are now about to deal with, however, considerable differences between individual regions are observable. For example, Susiana now found itself in a preliminary phase of the developmental stage of advanced urban civilization, with centers that stood at the head of multitiered settlement systems. In contrast, other regions, especially the rest of present-day Iran and Anatolia, remained at the level of isolated settlements or at the stage of forming the first centers. Lower Mesopotamia, which was to be an important arena for cultural development in the following period, also remained at the level of isolated settlements, and was still almost completely excluded from the development taking place in the neighboring areas.

  The differentiation between individual regions of the area clearly took place at some time during the period at which we are now going to take a closer look. Besides following the general development from isolated settlements to towns, this chapter therefore has the task of attempting to trace the beginnings of the process of differentiation. It is true that we are restricted at more than one point by the inadequacy of our source material, but the question of why different lines of development should have occurred under what seem to have been the same preconditions is of such general and urgent interest that every opportunity, however incomplete, must be exploited in order to investigate it.

  During the period treated in the previous chapter, methods of food production and the arrangements made for storing food were already highly developed, so that food production already provided a rather less haphazard contribution ensuring a means of subsistence. Development seems to have progressed toward an economic form in which the proportion of food produced had grown steadily. But it would be deceiving ourselves to think that now, at the time of developed permanent settlements, the mixed economy of the earlier period was given up in favor of a form of economy that relied solely on food production.

  On the one hand, investigations of animal and plant remains from a whole series of settlements belonging to the close of the Neolithic period have furnished us with evidence that the proportion of hunted and gathered foodstuffs to produced food continued to be relatively high. In addition we even have an example that contradicts the assumption that the proportion of food produced continued to increase.

  This was found during the excavations at Ali Kosh, a small site on the Deh-Luran plain, one of the small, marginal western plains of the Zagros mountains. On top of a level that already contained a high proportion of the remains of cultivated plants, deposits were found in which the proportion of wild plants had risen again. That point in time after which man could depend exclusively on the production of food as a guarantee of basic subsistence had clearly not yet arrived. There still had to be a possibility of compensating for failures in food production by greater efforts in hunting, fishing, or gathering—at least to a limited extent.

  This is an important observation, insofar as the need to keep open all the options we have mentioned continued to place restrictions on the choice of settlement sites. As before, people were dependent on sites that, as well as being surrounded by sufficient land for cultivation, were also surrounded in very close proximity by the sorts of countryside that afforded opportunities for the acquisition of food by gathering.

  Since techniques of food production had apparently come so close to guaranteeing a livelihood that the probability could be ruled out of all the food necessary having to be acquired by gathering if need be, the hinterland required for a settlement could be smaller than was previously the case. However, the surrounding area needed for a settlement was still so large that there were considerable distances between one settlement and another, and there always had to be a large space left before a new settlement, with all its territorial demands, could be founded on a similarly appropriate site. A basic pattern continued to determine the overall picture in which settlements were set at such a distance that although their inhabitants could of course trade or barter with one another, they did not have to develop forms of daily intercourse that extended beyond their own settlements (fig. 11a).

  A situation that left all options open, tended strongly to stabilization, and took precautions against every possible risk must be designated as stable, even almost ideal. Further development could emphasize only one aspect—at the expense of the others—of this mixed economy at any given time, thus limiting not only the mechanisms for securing subsistence but also the number of options. The motives for a development that abandoned this stability must therefore have been very strong indeed.

  Figure 11. Typology of settlement systems: (a) isolated settlements in narrow valleys; (b) simple settlement system on a small plain; (c) three-tiered and (d) four-tiered settlement systems on larger plains. Author’s original.

  One explanation—which is, however, insufficient—might be that the possibility of guaranteeing basic subsistence through the production of food became more and more of a reality as experience grew. As they learned to cope with the specific problems associated with crop cultivation and animal husbandry, people were better insured against making mistakes and so there was a greater possibility of managing without the security provided by a careful choice of settlement site.

  Growing experience in food production in fact decreased the necessity of obtaining food by hunting, fishing, or gathering, even if this way of procuring food was never completely given up. At a later stage, however, it was not continued from sheer necessity. Even later when the economy was exclusively organized on the basis of food production, texts tell us that a not inconsiderable part of the meat needed by the royal court came from game animals, which were, however, in part kept in preserves.

  With
the acquisition of a certain degree of security, the absolute necessity of having to settle down on sites that offered the safety net of food gathering gradually decreased. Insofar as people wished, it now for the first time became possible to establish settlements at sites that lay outside the favorable areas previously used. We can only suppose that the prospect of finding more extensive areas of arable land, which would permit the establishment of larger, interconnected fields, must have been an incentive for the early settlers. We shall in fact see that in the following period smaller plains were also inhabited, so that the space for settlements was no longer restricted to the valleys and other particularly prominent sites.

  However, the effect of these changes in the area required for a settlement went far beyond mere expansion, for they were the prerequisites for the changes that were now to take place in the settlements themselves and in systems of settlements. To the extent that these small plains greatly exceeded the area of land needed for one settlement, it now became possible for several settlements to grow up within the same ecological unit, and these were now for the first time situated in immediate proximity to one another. Thus we can assume that their subsistence areas may have been contiguous, or at least very close to one another (fig. 11b).

  This proximity could be so much closer because increasing experience in the cultivation of plants, besides creating a greater sense of security, involved another effect—the yield per unit of land was also greater. Gathering produces the lowest yield per unit of land, whereas the highest yield is achieved in areas in which, with the aid of irrigation, two or three harvests per year can be produced. With increasing experience in the art of cultivation, the area necessary to feed one person was thus reduced. This meant that the area of land necessary to feed the population of a settlement became smaller, and with increasing security and more intensive use of the land, settlements could move closer and closer together. This is important insofar as the geographical proximity of settlements is a basic prerequisite for the creation of structured relationships between them, in the sense of the formation of settlement systems.

  Before we turn once again to the theme of the development of settlement systems, we must here address in a more general sense the problem of the division of labor, for which the creation of settlement systems can stand as one subordinate aspect. For the moment, we shall not concern ourselves with the fact that there was already a certain division of labor among the hunters and gatherers and, naturally, among the groups of early settlers, both according to sex and also among members of the same sex. In the period we are now dealing with there was certainly already a further division. If we proceed on the assumption that at first all necessary tasks were carried out within the family unit, the process of a progressive division of labor among the members of a community can be seen as an increasing autonomy in occupations, at first within and then outside the boundaries of the family itself.

  In order to make this more comprehensible, we can undertake a schematic division of occupations according to how frequently they were needed and what level of prior knowledge was required. If we take food production, basic crafts (such as the production of pottery vessels), and specialist crafts (such as the production of valuable jewelry) as the three major fields of activity and plot these occupational groups on a graph, the coordinates of which show how frequently an occupation was used and what level of prior knowledge was required, we obtain a clear picture. We see that the three occupations we have described follow a straight line from, “often used, with limited previous experience” through “little used, with somewhat greater previous experience,” to “very seldom used, with many previous qualifications.” On account of the high degree of prior knowledge necessary, it might be expected that basic and specialist crafts became autonomous earlier than food production occupations that were engaged in very frequently. However, the fact that the occupations in the field of specialist crafts were only very little engaged in can be set against such a development. For these occupations, the total population must have been very large—large enough to provide a minimum number of customers.

  The less frequently an occupation is used, the larger the total population must be before such an occupation can become autonomous, which means that an occupation’s becoming autonomous depends on the size of the inhabited catchment area. Basic crafts can become autonomous in relatively small settlements, whereas the autonomy of specialist occupations presupposes the existence of larger living units. The setting up of larger settlements thus makes possible the autonomy of more specialized occupations. In the process, the number of these autonomous occupations increases with the size of the settlement.

  Because we must assume that from the moment a few fields of occupation become autonomous this has an effect on other related occupations, the creation of such larger settlements, with the character of centers, means that there is also an incentive for the basic handicrafts. From the moment that there are independent potters or smiths, these occupations are presumably carried on less and less in individual households.

  The demand for increased output in these handicrafts can be satisfied in several ways. Either the number of those who practice these occupations independently increases or the occupations themselves or the techniques used in them are changed, with the aim of producing more. One simple way of increasing productivity is to split up a total work process into several small component parts. The number of independent occupations thus becomes greater, but their scope grows smaller. As we shall see, this was clearly the way often followed in the early periods.

  Above all, such a development had one further consequence, because now at least a partial attempt had to be made to reverse the dismantling of occupations by splitting them up into their component parts. It was at this point that supervisors or coordinators became necessary. Here it must be noted that with the growth in settlements, with the creation of centers, and especially with their continued growth, the number of autonomous occupations also continued to increase.

  Any material we can use to verify the line of development I have just described is very limited because, as I have shown above, of all types of finds, only pottery is available in sufficient quantities and with sufficient differentiation. However, even if we limit ourselves to statements about the production process and the organization of work involved, we can still see a coherent picture, which is sketched in the following paragraphs.

  If, in the case of the earliest pottery, we are dealing with products definitely produced in each individual household, we must, at the latest, reckon that the very delicate, finely painted pottery of the so-called Halaf period was produced by specialists. (The period is named after the site where this pottery was found, Tell Halaf in northern Syria.) However, the individually painted vessels from this pottery group, which all took a long time to make, are definitely the work of individuals, who probably carried out each stage of the production process themselves (fig. 12).

  Figure 12. Pottery vessels of the Halaf period, from (a) Tell Halaf (Syria) and (b–f) Tell Arpachiyah (Iraq). After H. Schmidt, Tell Halaf (Berlin, 1943), frontispiece, and M. E. L. Mallowan, “Excavations at Tell Arpachiyah,” Iraq 2 (1935), figs. 62, 64–66, 76.

  At the end of this period, which knew other groups of pottery besides the Halaf pottery, there was a very important innovation, the introduction of a pivoted working surface (also called a “tournette” or, erroneously, “a slow rotating wheel”). The most important distinction between this and the actual potter’s wheel consists in the fact that this rotating work surface only continues to rotate for as long as someone is turning it. Because it does not have any bearings and is only fixed to the earth through a hole bored by its pivot, it was also probably very hard to turn. However, this new device did make certain tasks easier, including the vertical shaping of pots and, most especially, painting. The painter had neither to readjust the vessel nor to move when the opposite side of a pot had to be painted. With the aid of the rotating work surface, the painter c
ould easily bring the surface to be painted round to whatever position he wished.

  However, what had been invented to make work easier soon began to make its impression on the products themselves. The skillful painting of pots in different fields or sections, which had been the usual practice up until then, gradually gave way to simpler styles of painting, which are, on the whole, based on concentric bands round the pots, something now seen as characteristic of the following period, the so-called Ubaid period, named for the site where these pots were found, Tell al-Ubaid in southern Iraq (fig. 13). This new method of decoration arose directly out of the use of the new device, because the concentric bands round the pot were created simply by pressing a color-soaked brush against the rotating pot.

  Somewhat more ambitious patterns could be produced in this way, for, by moving the brush up and down, garlands, wavy lines, or herringbone patterns could very easily be applied. Both the production and the painting of pots could therefore be carried out in a fraction of the time formerly necessary.

  With the advent of this new technical device, this type of painting prevailed generally throughout a large area of the Near East. Under the influence of the new technique, earlier, more localized, types of decoration underwent such uniform change that the impression could easily arise that this “Ubaid horizon” was the external indication of the spread of the “Ubaid” method of painting to the whole of the Near East from one place as a result of a migratory movement.