The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (73 page)

The Monumental Building Program at Uruk

The ruins of Uruk have been excavated repeatedly since the 1850s. No city has produced a more spectacular series of early public buildings. In fact, the pace at which the city’s architects worked makes it hard to determine the function of a given building, so often were they torn down and replaced.

Recall that Uruk once consisted of two mounds, Kullaba on the west and Eanna on the east. Hans Nissen considers Kullaba, buried today beneath the remains of later epochs, “the kernel of the whole great settlement of Uruk.”

The oldest recognizable public building on Kullaba was an ‘Ubaid 4 temple, resembling those found at Eridu and Tepe Gawra. This temple stood on a high artificial terrace. During the Uruk period this terrace was continually enlarged and raised, eventually becoming a truncated pyramid more than 30 feet high. The White Temple on its summit was visible from a great distance.

The White Temple measured 72 by 57 feet and had the typical central cella, podium, burnt offerings, rows of smaller rooms, and multiple entrances (
Figure 65
). The temple’s nickname was inspired by the layers of gypsum whitewash that covered its walls. The corners of the White Temple faced the cardinal directions; the building was dedicated by burying a leopard and a lion below its eastern corner.

The sequence of buildings from Eanna, east of Kullaba, was even more complex. According to Nissen, the oldest levels in the Eanna sector included the remains of mud-plastered reed huts. This discovery suggests that prehistoric Uruk, like Eridu, had both neighborhoods of mud-brick houses and neighborhoods of reed buildings.

By the start of the Late Uruk period, Eanna had become the scene of a prolonged and ambitious public building program, set off from the rest of the city by an enclosure wall. If we knew the function of every structure, we would have a better picture of the secular and religious hierarchies of Uruk society. Some examples include the following:

FIGURE 65.
   The variety of public buildings at the city of Uruk was impressive. Here we see a white-plastered temple, a temple covered with colored cone mosaics, a nave-and-apse temple, and a building that may have been a secular place of assembly. The dimensions of these buildings are given in the text.

  1.
Easily recognized temples.
One of the largest of the Eanna structures was Building D. It had the temple layout with which we are now familiar: a cella, flanking rooms, wall niches, and pilasters. Unfortunately, Building D was incomplete when discovered; its original length would have been greater than 175 feet.
   Some distance away lay another temple, within its own separate enclosure. Its walls were of limestone blocks. The floor had been paved with a layer of white gypsum, laid over limestone slabs set in natural asphalt. Similar to other temples, its recessed and pilastered walls were decorated with colored cones.
   These were not, however, the usual pottery cones. They were labor-intensive cones of cut and polished stone, whose colors came from the raw material used: red limestone, black limestone, and white alabaster. The colored cones had been set in gypsum plaster to form mosaic zigzags, chevrons, diamonds, or lozenges. This decoration gave the building its nickname, the Mosaic Temple.

  2.
“Nave-and-apse” temples.
Several of Eanna’s public buildings, while sharing the standard temple’s central cella and rows of smaller rooms, had a different overall shape. Building C is the most complete example. An impressive 175 feet long and 72 feet wide, Building C had the look of two conjoined temples. Two-thirds of the building had its cella oriented northwest-southeast. One-third had its cella running northeast-southwest. Analogous to a cathedral, two-thirds of Building C was a nave and one-third an apse. We wonder if this building’s floor plan might not reflect a small, highly sacred sanctuary reached by a longer, and less highly sacred, ritual space. Everyone in a cathedral is allowed in the nave, but only the priests get to use the apse.
   Building C was not unique. An earlier and larger version, called the Limestone Temple, also had an apselike section whose long axis was at right angles to a longer, navelike section. While this building had been destroyed down to its floor of limestone slabs, the excavators estimate it to have measured at least 247 by 98 feet.

  3.
Colonnaded halls.
Just north of Building C was the Hall of Pillars, a structure from which little but the façade had survived. The entrance to this building was a portico with two rows of columns eight or nine feet in diameter. The columns were made of small bricks, set like the radii of a circle, and had been decorated with red, white, and black cones. This building looks more like an audience hall than a temple.

  4.
Assembly halls.
In the same part of Eanna lay Building E, which looks to us like a secular place of assembly. It consisted of an open court 100 feet wide, flanked by four complexes of large and small rooms that gave it the shape of a plus sign.

The sheer number and variety of Uruk buildings invite us to reconstruct the society that created them, but we need help. That help comes from two sources. The first is a series of sociopolitical terms written on clay tablets of the Late Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods. The second source is information from a later period called the Early Dynastic.

Let us begin with the Early Dynastic period (5,000 to 4,350 years ago). Early Dynastic society was an oligarchy whose rulers shared power with other aristocrats. One power-sharing institution was an Assembly of Elders, analogous to the noble councillors of the Bemba, the 70 aristocratic advisers of the Merina king, or the marika of the Hunza. Another Early Dynastic institution was a Public Assembly, where commoners could air their concerns.

Although not divine, Early Dynastic rulers were supposed to be pious. Their dreams were considered encrypted instructions from their city’s patron deity. That god needed his own temple, and so did the goddess who was his wife or consort. Add a few minor deities and it becomes clear why the cities needed multiple temples.

Let us turn next to the clay tablets of the Late Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods. Because writing was still in an early stage, these tablets are difficult to read. Some of the signs on them, however, can be recognized as prototypes for Early Dynastic terms.

Among the recognizable words are
en,
“lord” or “spiritual leader”;
nun,
“great nobleman”;
ab-ba,
“elder”; and
ukkin,
“assembly.” It sounds as if early versions of an oligarchy, Council of Elders, and Public Assembly may have existed in the Late Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods. Building E and the Hall of Pillars represent the kinds of buildings in which councils and assemblies might have met. Standard temples such as Building D and the Mosaic Temple, as well as “nave-and-apse” temples such as Building D and the Limestone Temple, suggest that various gods and goddesses were honored at Uruk. Thus the best interpretive guide to Late Uruk society, not surprisingly, may be Early Dynastic society.

Offices and Professions in Late Uruk and Jemdet Nasr Society

The vocabulary of the Early Dynastic period reflected both bureaucratic offices and craft specialties. Many of these terms, as Adams points out, were already present on Late Uruk and Jemdet Nasr tablets. Among the bureaucratic terms were
sanga,
“accountant”;
lagar,
“servant/official”;
dub-sar,
“scribe”;
ugula,
“steward”;
sukkal,
“messenger”; and
nubanda,
“overseer.”

Another important term on the early tablets was
dam-gar,
meaning “temple agent in charge of procurement.” It is significant that this term eventually came to mean “merchant,” suggesting that entrepreneurial trade branched off from the more supervised economy of the temple. As we have seen, something similar happened in Egypt.

There are hints that Uruk/Jemdet Nasr society already had a wide range of professions and craft specialties for commoners. Recognizable terms on the clay tablets include
simug,
“smith” or “metal caster,” as well as
simug-gal,
“head smith” or “foreman of the smiths.” The presence of smiths is confirmed by a metal foundry and piles of copper ore in the ruins of Uruk.

Additionally, there are a number of occupational terms in Early Dynastic texts that may be a legacy from earlier times. Benno Landsberger, an expert on Early Dynastic writing, felt that the terms for urban craftsmen such as potters, masons, carpenters, weavers, leatherworkers, launderers, and cooks might fall into this category. For the rural professions he listed fishermen, shepherds, plowmen, gardeners, and “fatteners of oxen.”

The Uruk/Jemdet Nasr tablets also have terms for servants
(zur)
and slaves. The signs for both male and female slaves indicate that they were “from the mountains” (that is, from a foreign land). This fact suggests that, as in so many other societies, slavery in Mesopotamia began with captives from other regions.

STRATIFIED SOCIETIES TO THE NORTH

We have now looked at two cradles of civilization: one in southwest Iran and the other in southern Iraq. Today many archaeologists would argue that there was a third cradle, this one in northern Iraq and adjacent parts of Syria and Turkey.

Between 6,000 and 5,500 years ago, a number of societies in Turkey, eastern Syria, and northern Iraq began to show signs of social stratification, urban life, and administrative bureaucracy. Some of these stirrings in the north took place before the formation of the Late Uruk state in the south and were clearly indigenous developments. One could make the case, in other words, that if left alone the north was on course to develop its own cities and multilevel hierarchies.

As it happens, the north was not left alone. At the start of the Late Uruk period, Southern Mesopotamian societies began to interfere with a number of northern societies. Archaeologist Marcella Frangipane believes that she can recognize four alternative scenarios for this period, which we paraphrase as follows.

  1. Some northern communities continued to develop on their own terms.

  2. Others borrowed individual strategies from Southern Mesopotamia (including accounting practices) but essentially created their own distinctive political centers.

  3. Some northern communities were actual colonies of Southern Mesopotamian people, founded from scratch in formerly unoccupied places.

  4. In some cases people from Southern Mesopotamia directly interfered in the lives of established northern communities. This interference varied from placing a trade enclave in the midst of a settlement to taking over by military force a northern community.

We are struck by how similar these alternatives are to the scenarios we saw in the highlands of Oaxaca. Early Zapotec rulers sent colonists into sparsely occupied valleys, conquered some neighboring regions by military force, and annexed other regions through peaceful alliance. Throughout this process a series of Mixtec rulers, who were already on a course toward monarchy, borrowed individual strategies from the Zapotec but essentially created their own powerful urban centers. The people of Northern Mesopotamia, like the Mixtec, were not the passive recipients of someone else’s civilization. They were part of a chain reaction in which no ruler wanted to be somebody else’s subordinate.

Northern Societies That Marched to the Beat of Their Own Drummer

Tepe Gawra, Levels XI–VIII.
When we last looked at Tepe Gawra, the village of Level XII had been attacked and burned. After a period of abandonment, the summit of the mound was reoccupied. By that time, northern Iraq had entered a period known as the Gawran, or northern Uruk.

An estimated five to seven villages were built, one above the other, at Gawra during this period. We cannot be more precise than that, because some buildings were renovations of preexisting structures. We limit our comments to Levels XI–VIII.

The community of Level XI began as a village of large, extended-family houses, accompanied by a temple 27 feet on a side. At some point the occupants of Level XI began to perceive an external threat. While the commoners arranged their houses so as to present blank walls to the outside world, the community’s elite ordered the construction of a circular stronghold, more than 60 feet in diameter, in the center of the village. Included within the defensive wall were granaries large enough to allow the occupants to survive a siege. The Level XI village had watchtowers, heaps of sling missiles, and mud-brick tombs with sumptuary goods.

Levels X and IX were closely related. Gawra at this time lacked defensive works but had streets, a large, secular public building, and at least one centrally located temple. Many of its estimated 185 to 198 residents were involved in craft activity, or the marking of trade shipments with stamp seals.

In addition to multiple temples, Gawra’s Level VIII had several important secular buildings. One, described by Ann Perkins as a “large vaulted hall,” may have been a place of assembly. Another is reconstructed by Mitchell Rothman as an eight-room warehouse of some kind. In addition to the usual stamp sealings and evidence for craft activity, Gawra seems to have served as a point of transshipment for volcanic glass from sources in Turkey.