153
The emergence of early state and urban
societies in Mesopotamia has been
primarily studied in terms of large-scale
political, social, economic, and ideological
transformations that went hand-inhand
with the decisions of newly minted
leaders. Recent perspectives in archaeology,
based in practice theories as
well as Alltagsgeschichte, call into question
these top-down approaches and point
instead to the central importance of
changing rhythms and practices of daily
life. Far from constituting a uniform and
predictable backdrop to what are perceived
as the important questions of state
growth and management, urban development,
or colonial expansion, the
small-scale, unspectacular, and contingent
actions of the everyday have a profound
part to play in the writing of longterm
histories. Not the least of this is the
potential to reclaim a place in history for
those who were not history’s “winners”
(D’Anna, Guarino, this volume). A focus
on the daily and the small scale is not
meant as a substitute for research that addresses
the grand scale. Rather, it highlights
the necessity of examining the relationship
between the spectacular and
the ordinary, between the overarching
processes and the small-scale actions and
decisions of people going about their
daily lives.
My focus in this paper is on food-related
practices. The realm of food and
drink connects the level of global politics
and economic decisions to the local and
intimate spheres of life, the top-down to
the bottom-up. Food is an important
basis of state power in emerging centralized
societies (Frangipane 2010) as well
as being a pivotal element in the micropolitics
of everyday life (Dietler
1996). Food is something people fight
XXXIV, 2012: 153-168ORIGINI
ABSTRACT – My focus in this paper is on the place of commensality in the small-scale of everyday life
as well as in long-term history during the Uruk period (4th
millennium BCE) in southern Mesopotamia
and neighboring lowland southwestern Iran. I use the term commensality in a broad sense to include
the social contexts of eating and drinking, the foods and beverages consumed, and the labor and knowledge
that went into their preparation.
In recent years scholars in a variety of historical and social science disciplines have drawn attention to
the fundamental role of mundane, unspectacular, and routine practices in constituting history. Foodrelated
practices are one of the most central elements of daily life, in which the interplay of the ordinary
and extraordinary, the routine and the unusual can be fruitfully studied. I examine the contexts
of commensality; where and how food and drink were prepared; and discuss the largely neglected issue
of hunger.
KEYWORDS – food; hunger; commensality; Uruk-period Mesopotamia
POLITICS OF FOOD IN EARLY MESOPOTAMIAN CENTRALIZED
SOCIETIES
Susan Pollock
RIV ORIGINI 2012 DEF_RIV ORIGINI 2 29/01/13 11.21 Pagina 153
for and fight over. It is tied to the
rhythms of everyday life and to the ways
in which we interact with each other, as
numerous historical and ethnographic
studies have shown (see, for example,
Aguilar-Rodríguez 2011; Wise 2011).
Practices centering around food contribute
to the shaping of new subjectivities,
precisely because they enter people’s
lives at the level of day-to-day routines:
in the social contexts of eating together,
in terms of what was eaten and drunk,
and how it was prepared (Pollock ed.
2012a; Pollock in press b).
In some respects, the study of food has
deep roots in the scholarship on early
Mesopotamian states and urban societies,
as scholars have long been concerned
with ecological conditions and
their implications for food production,
with agricultural/productive capacity
and the need for tribute (Adams 1966,
1981; Johnson 1987; Nissen 1988;
Wright 1998; Pollock 2001). For the
most part, however, these topics have
been treated as a relatively uniform background
against which political leaders
took decisions and to which producers
reacted. What was eaten and drunk, how
and by whom it was prepared, and the
social contexts in which consumption
took place have received much less attention
(but see Bottéro 2004 [2002]). A
notable exception has been the interest in
beer production, drawing especially on
studies of the proto-cuneiform texts,
which contain considerable detail on the
types and amount of ingredients required
to produced specific kinds and
quantities of beer as well as the disbursement
of the finished products (Nissen et
al. 1990: 66-75; Damerow 2011).
In my research on food and food-related
practices, I take as my focal point
commensality, a concept that places the
social contexts of eating and drinking,
together with the kinds of foods and
drinks consumed, at the center of investigation
(Simmel 1957 [1910]; Douglas
1975; Elias 1977; Mintz 1996; Derrida
2007 [1997]; Sutton 2001; Därmann,
Lemke eds. 2008; Pollock 2012b). A
study of commensality draws attention
to the social and political relationships
that are built, sustained, altered, and
broken down through the ways in which
food is shared, apportioned, consumed,
and discarded – as well as the contexts in
which it is not shared, in which food inequalities
are constructed, based on gender,
social or economic position, and on
shortages that may be environmentally
related but also constructed politically
and socially. Behind consumption lie
the labor, knowledge, and socioeconomic
relations that go into the preparation
of beverages and meals: the ways
in which plant and animal products are
processed and prepared in order to turn
them into food and drink; how they are
gathered, stored, and allocated; and how
these practices are interwoven with demands
for tribute, the restructuring of
production, and the ways in which
women and men balanced time devoted
to different activities, including food
preparation and consumption (e.g.
Brumfiel 1991).
Archaeological examinations of commensality
have focused heavily on feasts
(Dietler 1996; Dietler, Hayden eds.
2001; Bray ed. 2003; Jones 2007; Twiss
2008). However, more comprehensive
understandings of the place of commensality
in daily life demand that we pay attention
to the everyday and the humble
worker as much as to the festive occasion
and the luxurious meals of the elite (Pol-
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Pollock
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lock in press b; cf. Bottéro 2004 [2002]
for a near exclusive focus on the latter).
In this paper I examine several facets
of commensality in the Uruk period in
the southern Mesopotamian lowlands
and neighboring southwestern Iran1
.
Due to the constraints imposed by the
available data, I will concentrate principally
on the later part of the Uruk period.
I begin by considering the contexts of
commensality and then turn to questions
of where and how food and drink
were prepared. I will argue that there
were connections between specific kinds
of beverages and foods and the ways they
were prepared on the one hand and the
contexts in which they were consumed
on the other. Finally, I will consider an
element that has been almost entirely
missing from archaeological discussions
of the Uruk period – and many other
historical contexts – that of hunger. Its
absence in most archaeological studies
contributes to a romanticized picture of
the past, in which we reproduce our own
contemporary reality – well stocked supermarket
shelves and the money needed
to purchase as much food as we want
– in the ways we think about the past.
CONTEXTS OF COMMENSALITY
At least two distinct contexts of commensality
can be recognized in Urukperiod
southern Mesopotamia: housebased2
and institutional commensality.
The former is an inheritance of preceding
Ubaid (6th-5th millennia BCE) traditions,
in which the locations of fireplaces,
cooking pots, grinding equipment,
and ceramics used for serving and
eating indicate that the spacious central
halls of many Ubaid houses were places
where people ate together as well as engaged
in some aspects of food preparation
(Pollock 2010; Kennedy 2012; see
also Forest 1987a) (fig. 1). Sometimes
the side rooms just off the central hall
were also used for cooking and other
food preparation activities. House-based
commensality presumably involved in
the first instance those living in the
155
Politics of food in early Mesopotamian centralized societies
1 My work on this theme is part of a research project funded through TOPOI. It includes a comprehensive
study of pottery vessels and their uses, which is the subject of Carolin Jauß’s PhD research.
2
There are good reasons to be cautious about equating a building – a house in this case – with a household
in the sense of a discrete socioeconomic and reproductive unit. For this reason, I use the term “housebased”
rather than the more familiar “household-based” commensality. See in this regard Lévi-Strauss’s
“house societies” as recently discussed in archaeology by Gillespie (2000) among others.
Fig. 1 – A well preserved Ubaid-period house from
Tell Madhhur. The central hall (labeled number 7)
was used for food preparation (but not necessarily
cooking) and consumption. Cooking took place in
the side rooms 6, 11, 13, and 17 (plan after Roaf
1989: fig.1).
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house, but it may also have included
guests.
The second context of commensality,
that associated with major institutions,
appears to be new in Uruk times, or at
least novel in the specific form in which
it is attested by the later Uruk period.
This is the sphere of rations and allocations
of food and drink in the framework
of labor performed for institutions. In
this context workers received food
and/or drink disbursed to them as ‘compensation’
for their work. The appearance
of the ubiquitous beveled rim bowl
in Uruk times is widely understood as a
concrete indicator of these institutional
allocations to workers. What was distributed
in the bowls remains highly debated;
how and where the contents were
consumed has been largely unexamined,
but I have argued that it was likely something
that was immediately consumed
(Pollock 2003: 31; see also Bernbeck
2009; Pollock 2012). I will come back to
the beveled rim bowls, rations, and related
allocations later in the paper.
Other spheres of commensality are less
clearly documented in the archaeological
and textual record but can nonetheless be
postulated to have existed. Whereas in
the Ubaid-period temples at Eridu an array
of unusual pottery vessels with elaborate
decoration is attested, presumably
used in cultic offerings of food and drink
(Safar et al. 1981: 154-160), there is little
in the way of elaborate ceramics from
the Uruk period that could have played a
comparable role, although elaborately
carved stone vessels (Winter 2007: 123;
Lindemeyer, Martin 1993) may have taken
on this role to some extent. Elaborate,
diacritical feasting, a prominent theme
depicted in imagery and in burial contexts
in subsequent Early Dynastic times,
is only indirectly visible in Uruk material
remains, as I will discuss later.
HOW AND WHERE WERE FOOD AND
DRINK PREPARED?
To begin to try to identify the locations
of food preparation and the ways in
which it was conducted, an examination
of fire installations is a useful place to
start. Hearths were present in many
houses, as far as the constraints of available
evidence allow us to say3
. These are
mostly relatively small (generally no
more than 0.7 m in diameter) and informal
in their construction, consisting
often of little more than an ashy depression,
occasionally lined with bricks (LeBrun
1978; Wright ed. 1981; Wright
1985; Delougaz et al. 1996; Alizadeh
2008). Fireplaces are also typical of major
public buildings, including many of
those in the Eanna precinct at Uruk
(Lenzen 1974: 119-120) as well as the
“protoliterate” Sin Temples at Khafajah
(Delougaz, Lloyd 1942: 6-40). In nondomestic
buildings these vary from circular
hearths of approximately one meter
diameter to round or occasionally
rectangular fireplaces with ramp-like extensions
(“pan-shaped”) that typically
range from more than one meter up to
two meters in diameter. Overall, the fire-
156
Pollock
3
The limited excavations of residential structures in southern Mesopotamia makes it difficult to base
too much on that evidence alone. In southwestern Iran small areas of domestic architecture were exposed
at several sites, including Chogha Mish, Susa, and Farukhabad.
RIV ORIGINI 2012 DEF_RIV ORIGINI 2 25/01/13 15.28 Pagina 156
places associated with non-domestic
buildings tend to be larger than those in
residential buildings, as one would expect
if they were meant to be used to prepare
food for a larger group of people.
Fire installations may, of course, have
provided warmth and light as well as or
even instead of being used for food
preparation.
In contrast to the frequency of
hearths, ovens are quite rare4
, a rather
surprising observation given the common
assumption that bread was an important
staple from early on (Millard
1988; Chazan, Lehner 1990; Bottéro
2004: 47-51, see also Englund 2001: 32,
GUG2a). There are several ways to explain
this situation. Bread ovens may
have been clustered in locations away
from the main residential areas and
thereby not be encountered in excavations.
Bread may have been baked over
open fires, or, alternatively, some of the
fire installations reported as (pottery)
kilns in the literature may rather have
been used as ovens for baking and/or
roasting; the limited detail published on
most fire installations makes it often difficult
to assess their use.
Visual imagery from the later Uruk
period, primarily in the form of seals
and sealings, is unique in Mesopotamian
history in terms of the frequency with
which scenes of work are depicted. These
included numerous depictions of processing
and storage of plant and animal
products, including filling of silos, tending
animals, preparing something in and
157
Politics of food in early Mesopotamian centralized societies
4 This is in contrast to the more frequent occurrence of (pottery) kilns.
Fig. 2 – Work scenes on Late Uruk seals (after Amiet 1980: pl. 16, no. 268; LeBrun, Vallat 1978: fig. 6,
no.11; Delougaz, Kantor 1996: pl. 149B, 152F).
RIV ORIGINI 2012 DEF_RIV ORIGINI 2 25/01/13 15.28 Pagina 157
with vessels, as well as textile production
(see, for example, Amiet 1980: pl. 15-16,
18-21[fig. 2]). There is a notable absence
of portrayals of cooking, roasting,
or baking.
The pictorial emphasis on processing
and storing rather than cooking, roasting,
or baking corresponds well to the testimony
of the proto-cuneiform texts. In
the so-called “Vessels List”, vessels are
represented first and foremost as containers
for processing or storing ingredients,
but not necessarily for cooking or
baking (Englund, Nissen 1993: 31-32;
Englund 1998: 95-98). Different shapes
and attributes, such as the presence or absence
of a spout or a handle, indicate
contents, especially varieties of beer and
animal fats. Based on the context in
which they have been recovered, it is generally
assumed that the proto-cuneiform
texts record transactions that took place
in large institutional contexts. The emphasis
on beer and beer brewing, with at
least nine different types represented,
goes hand-in-hand with archaeobotanical
evidence, which shows an increasing
dominance of barley among the crops
raised in southern sites (and, to a lesser
degree, in northern Mesopotamian settlements).
Barley was a major ingredient
in beer, although it was also used for
bread and for animal fodder. In addition
to beer, bread, and dairy products (fats,
including clarified butter, and cheeses),
the proto-cuneiform texts mention such
foods as soups or stews and porridges
(Englund 1998: 94-98, 181-204).
A final source of evidence regarding
food preparation comes from the vessels
themselves. In Uruk times these were
principally ceramics. Uruk pottery assemblages
are characterized by a proliferation
of new vessel shapes (fig. 3), presumably
designed for specialized purposes,
in comparison to the much more
limited repertoire in Ubaid times. Despite
the wide variety of shapes, only a
very restricted set of ceramic containers
was used in direct association with fire,
judging by the occurrence of sooting or
interior carbonization5
. The most frequently
reported forms with signs of use
as cooking vessels are the so-called strapor
rope-handled jars, characterized by
squat bodies, low necks, and either flat or
rounded bases, and jars with round, often
everted rims, and somewhat elongated
globular bodies. The squat jars with
handles tend to be relatively small. From
Chogha Mish, Jauß reports that vessels
with sooting traces reach a maximum
size of nine liters, but many hold one
liter or less; the round-rimmed jars without
handles are larger, up to 14 liters in
capacity. The different shapes display
distinct sooting traces and interior carbonization,
indicating that they were
placed differently and perhaps also handled
in distinct ways in relation to the
source of the fire (D’Anna, Jauß n.d.).
The small size of most cooking pots implies
that limited quantities of food were
cooked at one time (see, for Susa, LeBrun
1978: fig. 28). The frequency of
cooking vessels, however, may in some
contexts, be quite high. This is the case
at the small village site of Sharafabad,
where excavation of a large, trash-filled
pit yielded a relatively high density of
158
Pollock
5
I would to thank Carolin Jauß for discussing her on-going work on the cooking vessels with me and
for her and M. Bianca D’Anna’s permission to cite their as-yet unpublished paper on the subject.
RIV ORIGINI 2012 DEF_RIV ORIGINI 2 25/01/13 15.28 Pagina 158
159
Politics of food in early Mesopotamian centralized societies
Fig. 3 – Array of Uruk vessel forms; scales approximate (after Weiss and Young 1975: fig. 1a; Le Brun 1978:
fig. 32(15), 34(8); Boese 1995: Abb. 6e, 21f; Delougaz et al. 1996: pl. 83P, 90G, 95G,N).
RIV ORIGINI 2012 DEF_RIV ORIGINI 2 25/01/13 15.28 Pagina 159
cooking jars with fire clouding and
charred cooking debris (Wright et al.
1980: 272-273, Tab. 1). Nonetheless,
the overwhelming majority of Uruk ceramic
vessels at Sharafabad and elsewhere
does not show signs of having been used
in direct contact with fire.
The implications of the ceramic evidence
confirm the picture drawn from
the texts and imagery, namely that most
vessels were used for storage, transport,
and preparation of food but not over a
fire. On the basis of this evidence I
would suggest that we must consider the
possibility that only a limited range of
foods was cooked; instead, the testimony
of the texts and imagery points to the
possibility that the emphasis in institutional
contexts was on brewing beer
(Damerow 2011) and probably baking
bread as well as to a more limited extent
on fermenting, drying (fish, cheese – see
Englund 1998: 128-142; Brunke 2011:
169), and preparations for storage that
sometimes involved heat (dairy products,
including clarified butter – see
D’Anna, Jauß n.d.). Cooked foods, such
as soups, stews, or porridges, were in
contrast more closely associated with
food prepared and consumed “at home.”
Notably, presentations of offerings to
deities, mentioned in texts dating to the
mid-3rd
millennium, list bread and beer,
but otherwise primarily foods in uncooked
and semi- or unprepared forms –
fruits, milk, oil, flour, and live animals
(Beld 2002: 108-129).
COMMENSAL CONTEXTS, ONCE AGAIN
For many people in Uruk times the
consumption of food and drink in institutional
contexts involved the receipt of
rations and/or allocations of food or
drink in compensation for labor performed.
Ration distribution has often
been associated with the ubiquitous
Uruk vessel form, the beveled rim bowl.
A huge literature has been devoted to the
question of whether beveled rim bowls
were indeed ration vessels and what their
contents were, and these arguments do
not need to be repeated in detail here
(Nissen 1970; Johnson 1973; Beale
1978; Forest 1987b; Millard 1988;
Chazan, Lehner 1990; Goulder 2010). I
begin, however, with the widely accepted
interpretation of them as connected,
in one way or another, to the institutional
distribution of food/drink in return
for labor performed. That they were
put to a variety of secondary usages is
clear but need not concern us further
here.
The distributional contexts as well as
the open and often asymmetrical morphology
of beveled rim bowls suggest
that their contents were something that
usually was consumed on the spot rather
than transported to another location for
processing or consumption. The contents
did not require direct contact between
the vessels and fire, as there are virtually
no indications of sooting or internal
carbonization on beveled rim bowls.
Moreover, the bowls do not make sense
in terms of a simple analogy to rations
that are known from later, especially 3rd
millennium texts, which consist of goods
that were distributed on a monthly basis.
The volumes of the bowls – typically less
than one liter – are much too small for
that purpose. Rather, I have suggested
elsewhere that they were probably used
to distribute food and/or drink to be
consumed at the point of distribution as
part of the provisioning of workers la-
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Pollock
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boring for institutions (Pollock 2003:
29-31).
In recent years several scholars have
proposed that beveled rim bowls were
used as forms for preparing bread (Millard
1988; Chazan, Lehner 1990; Goulder
2010). This suggestion conforms
with the mentions of bread in the protocuneiform
texts, but it begs the question
of where the large bread ovens are to be
found. Furthermore, barley does not
lend itself well to the production of leavened
bread (Lyons, D’Andrea 2003:
524), which would presumably be the
type to be baked in molds such as
beveled rim bowls. While wheat was cultivated,
it seems to have been far less frequently
grown than barley, making it an
unlikely candidate to be the primary ingredient
in the food prepared and distributed
by major institutions. An alternative
worth considering is that the
beveled rim bowls were used to distribute
beer to workers (Bernbeck 2009; Pollock
in press b).
Beer is commonly mentioned in the
proto-cuneiform texts, and it seems to
have played a substantial role in the late
4th
millennium political economy
(Damerow 2011). The texts do not,
however, enlighten us as to the contexts
for which beer was brewed and in which
it was consumed. Given the quantities
produced and the need for liquid sustenance
during intense physical labor in a
hot and dry environment, it seems reasonable
that the beveled rim bowls were
used to distribute something in a liquid
or semi-liquid form, possibly a beer. Beer
would have provided a nutritious beverage
that did not require cooking and
hence obviated the need for the large
quantities of fuel necessary to cook substantial
amounts of food or bake bread.
The proto-cuneiform sign for ration allocation,
GU7, has generally been associated
with eating rather than drinking,
due to its meaning in later periods (but
see Bernbeck 2009). However, in the
early texts it seems to have had a more
generic meaning of consumption that is
not necessarily specific to eating, and it
occurs relatively frequently in texts with
the sign for beer (a CDLI search yields
15 texts; Englund, pers. comm.). If correct,
this would mean that what was distributed
to workers, apparently in massive
quantities at least in the aggregate,
was not cooked food (such as a porridge)
or baked bread, but rather a beverage
prepared by sprouting and drying, grinding
and fermenting of grain.
Given the indications that more and
more people were engaged in tribute labor
connected to state institutions over
the course of the Uruk period (Johnson
1987; Nissen 1988: 83-85; Pollock
2001), people would have been increasingly
confronted with a commensal environment
that differed markedly from a
familiar and familial domestic setting.
Even if the content of what was consumed
was not new, the frequency and
the social context of its consumption
most likely were: instead of eating with
family or other co-residents, an ever larger
portion of meals were eaten/drunk together
with others who were linked in an
alienated work environment (Pollock in
press). These occasions were clearly distinguished
from “ordinary” meals
through what was consumed and how it
was prepared, as well as by the social
context in which the consumption took
place. The fact that beveled rim bowls,
minimally reused if at all by issuing institutions,
are present in a host of other
contexts including domestic ones, sug-
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Politics of food in early Mesopotamian centralized societies
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gests that certain elements of institutionally
based commensality found their
way into the domestic sphere. These elements
may have included certain types
of food or drink, thereby altering, even if
only incrementally, facets of house-based
commensal practices.
Regardless of what the beveled rim
bowls held, significant proportions of
food consumption for increasing portions
of the populace took place in institutional
contexts rather than in those of
host and guest relations or among co-residential
kin. A graphic illustration of
what this may have meant comes from
Chogha Mish, where in a variety of contexts
beveled rim bowls were found lined
up, upside down, in rows, in some cases
on shelves (Delougaz et al. 1996: pl. 15
A-C). They appear to be laid out so that
they could have been quickly filled and
handed out, in an assembly-line or cafeteria-like
fashion. In another example
Wright has suggested that beveled rim
bowls discarded in a pit within a well
maintained building at Susa derive from
meals eaten on the job by workers who
were repairing the building, who then
discarded the waste in the pit they had
dug to obtain clean sediments (Wright
1998: 186-188). Such ways of serving
and consumption in the company of
other workers hint at the likelihood that
food/drink distribution contributed to
the forging of new kinds of social links
and relations, related to class and possibly
to single-gender work groups, and at
the same time potentially weakening old
ones.
Institutionally based ration distributions
and food allocations followed a decidedly
instrumental logic, in which the
calculation of quantities of ingredients
and amounts disbursed played a central
role (see discussions of bookkeeping in
Englund 1998). Portions were individual
and carefully measured, rather than making
use of communal serving dishes
around which people could gather and
out of which they could serve themselves.
In contrast, communal consumption
would have been possible using the
larger bowls characteristic of the earlier
Uruk period or the large casseroles and
hammerhead bowls found in northern
Mesopotamia (e.g., Pollock, Coursey
1995; Pearce 2008). The emphasis on
small, often individual-sized servings in
Uruk ceramic assemblages is also evident
in the relatively modest quantities that
could have been cooked in the straphandled
jars, in comparison to the much
larger cooking pots used in contemporary
northern contexts (D’Anna 2011;
D’Anna, Jauß n.d.). This represents a
deliberate turning away from an ethics of
sharing as implied in large, collective vessels
and toward a developing habitus of
individualization and reduction of food
to a matter of sheer survival (Bernbeck
2009; Bernbeck, Costello 2011: 680-
681).
All in all, then, we see marked changes
in the context of commensality in the
Uruk period, with the emergence of an
institutional (‘public’) sphere in which
increasing numbers of people spent increasing
amounts of time. What was
consumed as well as with whom and under
what circumstances differed markedly
from house-based commensality. The
accent on effectivity in preparing and
serving food/drink in institutional contexts
changed the meaning of commensality
in ways that impacted people’s lives
far more profoundly than the simple
question of where one ate a meal in the
midst of the workday would suggest at
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first glance (cf. Gabaccia, Pilcher 2011).
These changes represented profound interventions
in the fabric of everyday life,
which contributed in essential ways to
the emergence of class society (Zagarell
1986): new kinds of social relations were
constructed at the expense of kin ties,
based on the social contexts in which
people typically ate: it was in these contexts
that “community” was fundamentally
formed, maintained, and reinforced
through the act of “sharing a meal” and
engaging in the banal talk that accompanies
it (Simmel 1957).
Feasting, abundance, and hunger
In marked contrast to the Early Dynastic
period, when elaborate feasts are
portrayed in so-called banquet scenes on
seals and plaques and in which feasting
remains are regularly found in graves in
the form of ceramic, stone, and metal
vessels, there is little visual or other direct
evidence of elite feasting in Uruk times.
The typical Early Dynastic banquet format
is only occasionally found on Uruk
seals6
. Instead, on Uruk objects visual
emphasis is placed primarily on depictions
of the preparations and deliveries
for feasts (for example, on the Uruk Vase:
Winter 2007: 125-129), and on the
work involved in food processing and
storage. In other words, what was highlighted
through visual representations
were the labor and products that went
into feasts and ritual offerings, as well as
the production and storage of food for
redistributions in the form of rations and
related disbursements, rather than the
outcome of that labor. By not portraying
food consumption and the contexts in
which it took place – especially elaborate
feasts in which the elite were clearly distinguished
from the masses – there was
a reduction of emphasis on those commensal
practices that served to separate
and distinguish people and instead an
implicit statement of commonality (Pollock
2003).
Although feasting played at best a minor
role in visual media in Uruk times,
an important motif, both in images and
in texts, was abundance. As persuasively
argued by Winter (2007), leaders of early
Mesopotamian states drew close associations
between abundance in the natural
world – food, water, fertility – and
their qualities as rulers. These were, in
turn, understood as closely linked to humans’
relations to the deities as the ultimate
providers of abundance. Processions
of people bringing votive offerings
highlight the place of abundance in the
connections between the world of mortals
and that of the deities. The Uruk political
elite apparently wished to show
themselves as great providers rather than
distinguishing themselves from others
through elaborate feasts. This does not,
of course, mean that there were in reality
no feasts restricted to elite segments of
Uruk society. Perhaps such feasts were
less exclusive than in later periods, or
the elaborate protocol that seemingly accompanied
Early Dynastic feasting was
not yet so rigidly set as to require regular
“reminders” of how participants were
supposed to behave. What was likely
new in Uruk times – the crass social and
economic distinctions among people –
163
Politics of food in early Mesopotamian centralized societies
6
The exceptions include a sealing from Sharafabad (Wright et al. 1980: fig. 6(9)) and possibly a scene
from Chogha Mish (Delougaz et al. 1996: pl. 155 A).
RIV ORIGINI 2012 DEF_RIV ORIGINI 2 25/01/13 15.28 Pagina 163
was perhaps too risky to display in an
“in-the-face” manner, whereas by the
mid-third millennium a starkly classbased
society may have come to be felt as
so “natural” that there was little danger in
emphasizing it through material displays.
Up to this point I, like so many other
modern-day researchers, have taken an
implicit stance in which food and drink
are assumed to be ever-present. But what
about the flip side of abundance –
hunger? Although archaeologists have
calculated agricultural productivity as a
way to determine how much land a community
would need in order to feed its
members, we have much less often addressed
directly the question of how
many people were hungry, and how often.
This is not just a matter of “forces of
nature.” There is every reason to pose the
question of the extent to which hunger
was a result of political economic decisions,
in which strategies to extract tribute
as well as the ability to demonstrate
abundance came at the expense of the
well-being of some segments of the populace.
More concretely, if beveled rim
bowls supplied the daily allocation of
food or drink to a labor force, it is very
likely that many people were hungry “on
the job.” By the sheer fact of standardizing
disbursements, physiological differences
among people were largely ignored,
ensuring that some people would
have been hungry. Similarly, by constructing
a system in which food allocations
were kept to an effective minimum,
any further shortages – the results of
poor harvests or distributional problems
– would have been enough to tip the balance
to a condition of hunger. What
might be cynically referred to as a
“democracy of the stomach”7
was another
dimension of a political economic system
that was predicated on conformity
achieved through disciplining the body,
in this case via the stomach.
Although hunger has received little
attention in the scholarly literature, a
few mentions that draw on 3rd
millennium
texts point directly in this direction.
In the texts from the emunusa (“house of
the lady”) in the late Early Dynastic citystate
of Lagash, there are mentions of
shortages of grain shortly before the New
Year’s festival (Beld 2002: 121). From the
Ur III period, at the end of the 3rd
millennium,
Gomi (1984) documents the
likelihood of famine on the basis of the
marked increase in the price of grain at
Ur, and Janssen (1991) discusses a case in
which the family of a nadītum fails to
provide for her. These are little more
than occasional hints, but they demonstrate
the importance of posing questions
about hunger and famine as much
as those about feasting.
CONCLUSION
Far from being a set of conservative
practices that form a uniform backdrop
to “real” societal transformations, commensality
and the labor and knowledge
that underpin it are fundamental and
dynamic elements of social, political, and
economic change. The extent to which
food-related practices were deliberately
and cynically altered, on the one extreme,
or gradually modified in response
to demands in other spheres of life, on
164
Pollock
7
I owe this turn of phrase to Reinhard Bernbeck.
RIV ORIGINI 2012 DEF_RIV ORIGINI 2 25/01/13 15.28 Pagina 164
the other hand, is a question that cannot
at present be definitively answered for
the Uruk period. Nonetheless, the profound
consequences of changing contexts
of commensality, together with the
kinds of foods and/or drink consumed,
are clear. I have suggested that cooked
food may have been “marked” as something
specific to meals “at home” or special
festive occasions, as opposed to that
which workers consumed in the course
of labor performed for major institutions
(cf. Hastorf 2012). The latter form of
consumption seems, however, to have
made its way increasingly into daily life
beyond the institutional workplace, as
shown by the widespread distribution of
beveled rim bowls. Quite likely hunger
was an ever-present threat that also became
a way to discipline an emerging
workforce whose members no longer
controlled either their own labor or the
food they ate.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS – I would like to thank Marcella
Frangipane for the invitation to participate in
the conference celebrating 50 years of archaeological
work at Arslantepe. Reinhard Bernbeck, Maria
Bianca D’Anna, and Carolin Jauß read and/or discussed
this paper with me, and I thank them for
many critical and creative comments. I would also
like to acknowledge the financial and intellectual
support of the Excellence Cluster TOPOI in
Berlin.
Susan Pollock
Institut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie
Freie Universität Berlin
email: spollock@zedat.fu-berlin.de
165
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