Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History

Antiquity, Sept, 1993 by Norman Yoffee

And how can one imagine oneself among them

I do not know;

It was all so unimaginably different

And all so long ago.

LOUIS MACNEICE Autumn Journal

At first glance, there's not much imagination in Postgate's 'early Mesopotamia'; the commonsensical, British empiricist that Postgate is, coolly assembling the data and calmly and dispassionately drawing logical conclusions from the evidence would not have it otherwise. But no reader of this book will feel cheated that s/he does not know more about Mesopotamia, c. 3000-1500 BC, than s/he did before -- and this will be as true for specialists as for the students for whom the book is intended. And many readers will rightly wonder at the narrative skills of the author and how the Mesopotamian past can be so vividly portrayed in these pages.

Postgate's 'method' is direct: pull together the relevant documentary and material evidence in order to delineate the major social and economic institutions of early Mesopotamia. The result is rewarding, since the copious illustrations and translated texts not only provide a state-of-the-art synthesis of the 'world's earliest urban civilization' (p. xxi); the volume is also filled with original research findings and novel interpretative sketches that cannot be found elsewhere. No scholar's bookshelves and no course on early Mesopotamian history and archaeology can be without this volume.

Is there a central theme to this book, one that is systematically developed and advocated in opposition to others' views? Doesn't imagining the past require a dialogue with the present in which the discourse of analysis is reflexively constituted in the theory-laden analyst? Does Postgate really live and work in Cambridge? Allow me, good Chippindale, to lay out the contents of this remarkable volume, to debate certain points with the author, and to consider how dispassionate an observer of the past he is.

Part One, 'Setting the Scene,' is divided into three chapters on environment, a historical sequence and writing. These chapters set out the geographic realia of deserts and rivers, mountains and natural routes of travel. They show that southern Mesopotamia, the 'heartland of cities,' was not a land barren of natural resources, as in many Mesopotamian histories: early Mesopotamians exploited birds, turtles, fish, sheep, goat, cattle, pigs, onions, cucumber, lettuce, apples, pomegranate, dates, willow, tamarisk, poplar. (Postgate is co-editor of the newish journal Bulletin of Sumerian Agriculture, which provides details of these and other natural resources). One cannot extrapolate from the present despoiled environment of southern Iraq to the Mesopotamian past and one cannot compare Sumerians with Marsh Arabs.

The first dynasties were preceded by small farming villages with modest public architecture and relatively small amounts of social and economic differentiation. While Postgate stresses continuity in the prehistoric sequence -- rightly so, in order to dispute the notion that Sumerians were immigrants into the land -- he unfairly (in my view) underestimates the massive changes in all aspects of Mesopotamian social life at the end of the Uruk period, toward 3000 BC. At that time, massive citystates were formed, and the characteristic elements of sculpture, cylinder-seals and writing in Mesopotamia appeared. His stress on continuity leads Postgate to endorse Schmandt-Besserat's controversial hypothesis that writing is the end product of a slow evolutionary process. The evidence and logic to the contrary, however, is that while the first writing owes much to a variety of preceding symbol and communication systems, writing represented a 'punctuated' change and a new semiotic system. New evidence of early writing in Egypt from W. Kaiser's work at Abydos (Kaiser 1990) also invalidate Postgate's suggestion that the 'idea' of writing spread to Egypt; nor will Indus Valley archaeologists accept that Mesopotamian writing provided the stimulus for the development of the Indus script.

Postgate's outline of political institutions in early Mesopotamia admittedly owes much to Thorkild Jacobsen's pioneering ideas. Thus, Postgate reiterates Jacobsen's notion that a 'Kengir' (Sumerian) amphictyonic league of city-states flourished in the early 3rd millennium BC (see Yoffee 1993). His analysis of seal-impressions decorated with the names of cities as indicating the existence of such a league, however, is not supported by the evidence of pandemic warfare and the lack of any political unification at that time. I further take issue with Postgate's picture of Mesopotamian history as one of 'alternation of strong centralized political control with periods of turmoil'; I return to the point anon. As elsewhere in the volume, this Part One is filled with elegant apercus and excellent illustrations -- original data that allow glimpses of actors, not simply disembodied historical forces in early Mesopotamia.

Part Two, 'Institutions', contains chapters on 'city and countryside', 'household and family', 'temple' and 'palace'. No Mesopotamian history covers these topics in as much depth and with the authority of this volume. Postgate shows that some aspects of life, such as the production of crafts, are illustrated by reference to the material record, while local political authority of assemblies is known from texts. In order to delineate these institutions, the narrative pace quickens. The result is that the character of co-resident extended families, marital and funerary rituals and inheritance practices has an air of timelessness to it and the dynamism of social life is thereby occluded. For example, in the Old Babylonian period, c. 2000--1600 BC, there were many sales of property, including houses under which were 'ancestral tombs'. Presumably the political and economic flux of this period necessitated such sales, which were perhaps local disasters for the unfortunate sellers.