Ancient Mesopotamia (original) (raw)
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WOMEN IN ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA CIRCA 4000 B
People in the ancient Mesopotamian region are given credit for the foundations of our Western law codes, religious rituals, astronomy, mathematics, literature, and writing. Even the calendar and wheel are technologies that these people are given recognition for introducing. Whether all these ideas originated with the civilization that grew up in the lowlands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, (Mesopotamia is Greek for the land between the rivers) scholars are continually debating. Ongoing archaeological work in this region and other areas of the world is uncovering fascinating facts regarding our ancient ancestors. As more evidence is being uncovered, it appears that the advent of civilization, whereby people settled into specific structures of government, agriculture, and religious festivals and beliefs, keeps getting older. Many other parts of the world are now vying for the honor of being the oldest site for the beginning of civilization. Until there are more consensuses on another place, ancient Mesopotamia will retain its honored number one place. What did the land and society look like around 4000-3500 b.c.e. when the number of people increased significantly enough to become an urban society and civilization? The people who came into the region came as farmers, because of the rich alluvial soil created by the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, did not find it an easy place to civilize like ancient Egypt because the flooding was unpredictable. This region received no rainfall for eight months of the year, and then came torrential spring showers that produced flooding of such magnitude that irrigation with canals was essential. Especially conducive to farming, the soil was neither rocky nor tree-laden. Cooperation and leadership were needed to harness the rivers and build canals, which then allowed the people to produce enough excess crops to sell. This allowed some of the farmers to venture into the production of goods that could be exchanged for food, and so the artisan crafts developed. This area is now in southern Iraq, and many of the marsh inhabitants of this region still live in almost identical housing and fish from almost identical boats. They tend their crops and flocks just like in ancient times. Over time this area developed into the modern countries of Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. The sources available to us for reconstructing the lives of women in these ancient times are few in number, but lengthy in size. There are two famous works from these early centuries. One, The Epic of Gilgamesh, can give us some descriptive details on women, and the other, The Code of Hammurabi, can give us quite a lot of prescriptive passages regarding women's legal standing. More law codes from later periods of history also give us additional information, including the Middle Assyrian Laws, from the fifteenth to the eleventh centuries b.c.e. More than twenty thousand clay tablets with writings on them have been uncovered, mainly from the city-state of Mari, but only recently have historians been analyzing them for women's history. Included in these extant tablets are business dealings, poetry, songs, and laments. Scholars refer to this oldest civilized area as Sumer, which was inhabited beginning around 4000 b.c.e. Over time, a city-state form of government was developed into twelve independent kingdoms covering an area the size of the state of Massachusetts. Uruk, Lagash, and Ur were some of their important cities ruled by a theocracy. Their priest/king led the army, administered the economy, served as judge, and was the intermediary between the people and their deities. Because there were no natural barriers as in ancient Egypt, quarrels over water rights and land led to the desire for conquest, making war endemic. The world's first woman ruler came from the city-state of Kish. She was Kubaba, circa 2450 b.c.e. Apparently she started out as a tavern keeper. Many royal women helped legitimize the king's succession to the throne, a practice found all over the world throughout history. Not only rulers, but their spouses were included in the records. Some queens had their own independent courts complete with ministers.
Studying the Development of Complex Society: Mesopotamia in the Late Fifth and Fourth Millennia BC
Journal of Archaeological Research, 2004
Inca specialist D'Altroy (2001, Uruk Mesopatamia and Its Neighbours: Cross-Cultural Interactions in the Era of State Formation, School of American Research, Santa Fe, NM, p. 445) has written, “Uruk Mesopotamia has stood as the model for the study of the rise of the state for several decades.” Work on this problem of the origin of complexity has remained one of the foci of scholarly research even these several decades after the completion of many of the classic and key studies of Uruk culture and its neighbors in adjoining areas. At the same time, the questions asked, the size and richness of the empirical record, and the interpretations of various scholars have undergone significant change. These changes parallel scholarly trends in studies of similar phenomena in other areas of the world. This article reviews key questions that are currently being asked about societal complexity with a primary focus on the cultures and societies of late fifth and fourth millennia BC Mesopotamia. In doing so, new perspectives and interpretations on perhaps the earliest complex societies are synthesized and assessed.
All righs reserved. No pan of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmicted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, witiout the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 978-I -5987 4-223 -7 hardcover ISBN 978-1 -5 987 4-22+-4 paperback Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: Archaeology and women / Sue Hamilton, Rurh D. whitehouse, Karherine I. wright, editors. p.cm.-(Publications of the Institute of Archaeology, universiry college, London) lncludes biographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-l-59874-223-7 Qtard,cover : alk. paper) ISBN-I0: l-5987 4-223-X (hardcover : alk. paper)
Tag un g e n d e s L a nd e s m u s eum s f ür Vo r g e s c hi c h T e h a L L e • B a nd 13 • 2016 Summary After briefly considering the various forms and degrees of social differentiation that may be included in a generic concept of »inequality«, the type of »unequal social relations« will be outlined. The paper focuses on the potential of certain social differences to evolve into real socioeconomic disparities and forms of permanent political authority, looking both at some specific types of social conditions which lie at the root of those inequalities and at the different conditions and requirements of subsistence economies in different environments. The next step is an attempt to analyse the nature of the first unequal and hierarchical social relations in Middle Eastern societies by identifying their economic and/or political bases, with particular reference to the Mesopotamian and peri-Mesopotamian world in the 4 th millennium BC. This region shows very interesting examples of the transformation from ranked to truly hierarchical societies, based on a growing centralisation of primary resources and labour, and also offers relevant data for the study of the dynamics of change that led to the formation of early state societies. The paper analyses the historical roots of the changes that occurred in southern Mesopotamia, from forms of hierarchical kinship ties, recognisable in the Ubaid period (5 th millennium BC), to the establishment of unequal economic and politi cal relations in the Late Uruk phases. Such changes resulted in the formation of strong centralised power systems. Since inequality involves subordinate relations, it goes hand in hand with the rise of »power« and differentiated access to resources; a process which also took place in other regions in northern Mesopotamia and southeastern Anatolia, which are comparatively analysed. Finally, the case of Arslantepe, in the Upper Euphrates region, is presented in detail, as a meaningful example of the transition from prestige to power and from the use of reli-gious/ideological consensus in public ceremonial practices to the exercise of power in more secular and direct forms, seen here in a very precocious example of a fully fledged palace dated to the end of the 4 th millennium BC. This transition is seen as a crucial stage in the rise of the state and the consolidation of unequal socio-political and economic relations. But the centralised system at Arslantepe, albeit very powerful , probably did not have the solid foundation for a differentiated and hierarchical system of social and economic relations that only an urban society can guarantee. It therefore collapsed as soon as it was born.