Early Mesopotamian Urbanism: A New View from the
North
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Ur, Jason A. 2007 Early Mesopotamian urbanism: a new
view from the North. Antiquity 81(313): 585-600.
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Research
Early Mesopotamian urbanism: a new
view from the north
Joan Oates1
, Augusta McMahon2
, Philip Karsgaard3
,
Salam Al Quntar4
& Jason Ur5
For many years, the southern Mesopotamia of Ur and Uruk, ancient Sumer, has been seen as the
origin centre of civilisation and cities: ‘The urban implosion of late-fourth- and early-thirdmillennium
Mesopotamia resulted in a massive population shift into large sites’ said Nissen
in 1988. ‘These new city-states set the pattern for Mesopotamia as the heartland of cities’
(Adams 1981; Yoffee 1998). And for Stone & Zimansky (2005) ‘Remains of the world’s first
cities are the most noteworthy feature of the landscape in southern Iraq’. But at Tell Brak Joan
Oates and her team are turning this model upside down. A long campaign of study, culminating
in the new discoveries from 2006 reported here, show that northern Mesopotamia was far along
the road to urbanism, as seen in monumentality, industrialisation and prestige goods, by the late
fifth millennium BC. The ‘world’s earliest cities’ are as likely to have been in north-eastern Syria
as southern Iraq, and the model of a core from the south developing a periphery in the north is
now ripe for revision.
Keywords: Mesopotamia, Syria, cities, origins of civilisation, tell settlements, urbanism
Early urbanism
Most accounts of the emergence of complex societies and city genesis in the Near East locate
the beginnings of these processes in the alluvial plains of southern Mesopotamia, the iconic
‘Heartland of Cities’. Features peculiar to the south Mesopotamian landscape such as the
agricultural potentials of irrigated and lacustrine environments and the associated logistical
advantages of the closely braided water channels of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have
been thought to provide the south with uniquely suitable habitats for the emergence of
the first cities and the development of ‘pristine’ civilisation (Algaze 2001; 2005; Wilkinson
1994). The corollary is that the dry-farming zone upstream in northern Mesopotamia was
only stimulated into its own ‘secondary’ phase of development after contact initiated by
the southern core. But this idea is now being increasingly challenged, not merely through
1
The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2
3ER, UK (Email: jlo29@cam.ac.uk)
2
Department of Archaeology, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK (Email: amm36@cam.ac.uk)
3
Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Old High School, Infirmary Street, Edinburgh EH1 1LT, UK (Email:
p.d.karsgaard@sms.ed.ac.uk)
4
Department of Archaeology, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK (Email: sa393@cam.ac.uk)
5
Department of Anthropology, Harvard University Peabody Museum, 11 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge MA 02138,
USA (Email: jasonur@fas.harvard.edu)
Received: 11 September 2006; Accepted: 7 November 2006; Revised: 5 December 2006
antiquity 81 (2007): 585–600
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concerns with the underlying core-periphery model and its emphasis on regional asymmetric
interactions, but because of recent and compelling evidence for early northern developments
in social complexity that are not directly tied to the south (Frangipane 2001; Stein 2002).
Early Mesopotamian cities famously survive as tell settlements, which represent the
accumulation of level after level of mud-brick or pis´e construction, cut down, levelled off
and replaced, often over many thousands of years – mud is, of course, the great ‘reusable’
resource. Such longevity is a factor not only of both landscape and the ancient environment
but also, since the Neolithic, the ‘substantial commitment to farming’ (Sherratt 1997). But a
serious problem for the archaeologist wishing to investigate the background to urban growth
in Mesopotamia is that the very situations that encouraged the growth of later cities were
often equally attractive to early villagers; the early phases, however, soon become inaccessible
through the build-up of later levels. At Uruk (Warka), for example, undoubtedly the greatest
of the early cities and the site that has yielded not only the earliest written documents but
also the largest area of late-fourth-millennium public buildings, soundings have failed up
to now to yield pertinent information about the nature of earlier settlement (for a recent
summary see Nissen 2002). Indeed our knowledge of the Neolithic/Chalcolithic background
to such urban complexity comes largely from small farming settlements which, although
they remain less compromised by overlying occupation, are less informative of wider social
and economic developments.
Here we review recent evidence from the north Mesopotamian site of Tell Brak, indicating
its growth as a major settlement apparently well before the emergence of large urban
centres such as Uruk in the southern alluvium. In particular we report the convincing
evidence for monumentality, industrial workshops and prestige goods that has emerged from
the latest excavations of fifth/fourth-millennium BC levels. We show that these northern
developments, while particularly well attested at Brak, are indicated also by evidence from
across northern Mesopotamia, for example at sites like Hamoukar, Tepe Gawra and Qalinj
Agha, and at Arslantepe in south-eastern Turkey (Gibson et al. 2002; Rothman 2002; Hijara
1973; Frangipane 2001). The implications are that northern Mesopotamia was already a
land of cities long before the appearance of colonies in the later fourth millennium BC.
Tell Brak
The importance of Tell Brak derives in part from its controlling position on one of the
major routes from the Tigris Valley northwards to metal-rich Anatolia and westward to
the Euphrates and the Mediterranean (Figure 1, centre). This route ran through the pass
at the western end of Jebel Sinjar directly to the river crossings at Brak. Tell Hamoukar,
another important fifth/fourth-millennium BC site referred to more than once in this paper,
sits astride the eastern route around this massive mountain (Figure 1, right). Both sites are
well situated to benefit from the rich agricultural potential of their surroundings as well as
areas suitable for nomadic pastoralists. Brak was selected for excavation in 1976 owing to
the accessibility of its third-millennium BC remains, at that time a period little known in
northern Mesopotamia.
The main tell at Brak is one of the largest in northern Mesopotamia, occupying over
40ha and rising to a height of over 40m, comparable in area to the mound of Quyunjik
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Figure 1. Map of the Khabur region, North-east Syria (D. Oates), with inset showing location.
(the citadel of Nineveh) but twice as high. Despite its impressive size, the tell constitutes
only 21 per cent of the settlement complex which includes also an outer town, with a
corona of smaller mounded areas and widespread evidence of occupation over a total of
almost 300ha (Figure 2; see also Ur et al. in press). Unfortunately much of this area has
been heavily destroyed by extensive quarry pits from which soil was extracted for ancient
building purposes, by ancient and modern ploughing (Wilkinson et al. 2001) and by modern
construction.
It was not our original intention to excavate fourth-millennium BC levels, recognising
that these would be buried beneath the great depth of the third-millennium city which our
excavations have now established as one of the largest urban centres in the north (D. Oates
et al. 2001). Reasonably accessible fourth-millennium levels have been identified, however,
in several parts of the site. It is the most recent of these excavations in Area TW, near the
northern entrance to the ancient city, that forms the focus of this paper (Figure 3). Here
our work has revealed monumental structures associated with organised craft activity, the
manufacture of prestige goods, bureaucratic paraphernalia and evidence for the organisation
and provisioning of labour beyond household levels, all dating from the late fifth and the
early fourth millennia BC. Reinforcing this impression is the contemporary evidence for
extended ‘suburban’ settlement, discussed below. (Summaries of the later fourth-millennium
excavations can be found in Oates 2002; 2005).
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Figure 2. Tell Brak and its suburbs, showing known extent of late fifth (ENU = LC2) and first half of fourth millennium BC
(MNU = LC3) occupation. (TW, CH, UA = site codes of excavations; ENU = Early Northern Uruk (LC2), c. 4200-3900
BC; MNU = Middle Northern Uruk (LC3), c. 3900-3600 BC).
Area TW: the excavated evidence
The Monumental Level 20 building
The earliest and almost certainly the largest of the recently excavated non-residential
buildings was identified some 11m below the surface of the tell in what is now designated
TW Level 20 (Figure 4). Here, in the south-east corner of the excavations, the then 10 × 20m
trench literally cut across the north-west corner of a clearly important building of totally
unknown type (Oates & Oates 1997). This small corner contained a massive entrance
with towers on either side and an enormous doorsill consisting of a single piece of basalt,
1.85 × 1.52m in area and 29cm thick, a type of stone not native to the open steppe in which
Tell Brak is situated. The red mud-brick walls of this monumental structure were 1.85m
thick, and still stand to a height of 1.5m. Of the plan itself, our original trench revealed only
the very small corners of two apparently empty rooms. No contemporary parallel exists for
a building of this type and scale but, regrettably, four further seasons devoted to opening a
larger area revealed no more than further parts of the same two rooms.
Although both rooms proved empty, we were able to establish a number of unusual
features of the construction: first, that the walls were not set in foundation trenches, a
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Joan Oates et al.
Figure 3. Area TW from the west; the lowest level excavated up to now lies still some 15m above modern plain level, this
depth representing occupation dating to the earlier fifth and sixth millennia. The visible section spans the late fifth, the whole
of the fourth and the very early third millennia BC.
common practice in the erection of monumental buildings, but that the whole building was
built on a carefully constructed platform of large cobbles and clean red clay to a depth of
over 80cm, a very unusual procedure and a rare example of the use of stone foundations
at Brak. To the north of the building was a large open area, the surface of which had been
covered with white lime (waterproof) plaster, beneath which at the entrance itself was very
carefully laid wooden underflooring, another unusual feature. The outer courtyard area had
been replastered at least three times, while the building itself was rebuilt at least once.
Outside the entrance were two small rooms, possibly guardrooms (Figure 4, room 3),
while along the north front of the main structure further small rooms had been added
(Figure 4; nos. 4, 5). They too were empty. They might have served as small suq-like ‘shops’,
or perhaps as storage areas for goods passing in and out of the building, or have been related
to the administration taking place within it. It is tempting (if anachronistic) to suggest
that they may have been the ancient equivalent of the series of desks one finds outside
government offices in the Near East today, where scribes and other clerks provide services
for the benefit of those having business within. Whatever its formal function, the building is
the earliest Mesopotamian example of a genuinely secular monumental building – certainly
the plan bears no relationship to the religious plan widely attested throughout Mesopotamia
and found slightly later at Brak in the well-known Eye Temple.
Radiocarbon determinations and pottery from a contemporary building to the west date
the basalt-threshold building unequivocally to the late fifth millennium BC, the Early
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Figure 4. The eastern part of Area TW at Level 20 (late fifth millennium BC), showing the basalt-threshold building and,
to the north, the corner of a Level 18b ritual building (not discussed in the text); rooms 7-11 constitute the eastern part of the
western Level 20 building, excavated in 2006.
Northern Uruk period or ENU.1
Its position, near what we believe was the north gate of
the city, suggests a possible economic function, a view strengthened by evidence from new
buildings excavated between March and May 2006.
The western Level 20 building
The second Level 20 building (Figure 4, rooms 7, 8 and westwards) was built on a smaller
and apparently more domestic scale than its neighbour to the east, but revealed a remarkable
intensity and variability of craft activity. The rooms contained large numbers of basalt
pounders and grinding stones, beautifully made stone and bone tools, many clay spindle
whorls, carefully polished stone palettes, delicate obsidian blades, neatly ground obsidian
discs, large quantities of mother-of-pearl inlay cut from local mollusc shells, together with
extensive evidence for flint-working including an unusually long brown flint blade (Figure 5).
1
Conventional periods cited in this report are ENU, Early Northern Uruk (LC2) c. 4400-3900 BC, and MNU,
Middle Northern Uruk (LC3) c. 3900-3600 BC.
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Joan Oates et al.
Several large ovens lay within the rooms of the building which were also furnished with
plastered basins and bins. Of especial interest was the large number of clay seal impressions,
including door sealings indicating ‘official’ locking. The overall impression is of an ‘industrial’
building associated with a possibly open working area to the north. A sherd-paved street ran
along its western side in the direction of the north gate; the entrance itself, together with
the rest of the building, lie unfortunately beneath the unexcavated area of the high tell to
the south.
The ‘red libn building’ (TW Level 19)
In Levels 19 and 18, two buildings overlay the western Level 20 building just described.
The Level 19 building, discovered in 2006 (Figure 6), had massive red mud-brick walls and
many ovens that were undoubtedly ‘industrial’. Three distinct floors were identified, with
much in situ material, suggesting a relatively long period of use. Of particular interest was
the fact that the pottery included both early versions of MNU (LC3) types while other forms
were closer to the ENU (LC2) repertoire well-known from Tepe Gawra (Tobler 1950) and
TW Levels 20-22 and earlier at Tell Brak. Thus the pottery of Level 19 appears to represent
a phase transitional between Early Northern and Middle Northern Uruk. Among the new
types were very large open bowls, small bowls with incised craftsman’s marks suggestive of
later pictographs (Figure 7) and a new type of mass-produced bowl, unlike the moulded
‘wide flower pots’ characteristic of ENU levels.
Other finds consisted of very large quantities of raw materials, great piles of very beautiful
raw flint and obsidian, for example, together with both d´ebitage and finely worked pieces,
also a great variety of coloured stones (including jasper, marble, serpentine and various
diorites) used for the manufacture of beads, polished celts and other stone objects. Much
raw bitumen was also present, including a single large piece weighing just under 1kg. There
were large deposits of clay spindle whorls; these and the high percentage of sheep/goat faunal
remains not only here but also in later fourth-millennium levels emphasise the importance
of wool and presumably weaving at the site. Also found were quantities of river molluscs
from which mother-of-pearl inlays were cut. With the exception of the latter, most of the
raw materials had been brought from considerable distances, and without the benefit of
donkey transport for which there is as yet no evidence in the Khabur region.
The most extraordinary find was a unique, obsidian and white marble ‘chalice’ (Figure 8).
The cup itself was made from a large obsidian core, the interior of which had been
ground out in order to form a deeply-hollowed drinking vessel; the base had also
been hollowed to provide a smooth cup-like depression in which the obsidian could
be inserted. The two stone pieces were held together by bitumen, both within the
hollowed base and encasing the two parts of the vessel as visible in the photograph. The
upper rim had been slightly ground and a narrow covering of bitumen added, within
which was a neat groove for the insertion of some other material, presumably something
valuable such as gold, since this had been removed before the vessel itself was placed
in the bin in which it was found. The stark contrast between this vessel and the massproduced
bowls found throughout these levels suggests a differentiation in practices of
consumption, involving, on the one hand, unique and highly visible artefacts such as the
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Figure 5. Objects from the new Level 20 ‘industrial’ building (Area TW, western part of trench). Left to right: three
mother-of-pearl inlays cut from local mollusc shells; three ground obsidian discs; two obsidian blades. Below: an unusually
long, brown flint blade (length 26cm).
Figure 6. TW Level 19 ‘red libn [mud-brick] industrial building’, view from the east (c. 4000 BC).
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Joan Oates et al.
Figure 7. Small bowls from Level 19 building, a number of
which bore similar ‘pictographs’.
chalice and, on the other, a great
number of crude, undecorated massproduced
types. Such differences, involving
aesthetic standards exclusive to only a
small proportion of the population, suggest
increasing social stratification (Wengrow
2002).
Among the most interesting finds
from these workshop rooms was a large
collection of stamp sealings, including
those illustrated in Figures 9 and 10. A pile
of over 50 ‘sling bullets’ was found in the
corner of the NE room, having been stored
there in a sack or other perishable container
almost certainly as raw material for such
sealings (these ‘sling bullets’, at least, were
not ‘warring weapons’, as has recently been suggested). The concept of ‘importance’ is
implied also by the presence in the same building of a beautiful, indeed unusual, lion
stamp sealing, a motif rarely found on early seals and certainly, in later periods, a symbol
of ‘kingship’ (Figure 9), suggesting that the building was controlled by or on behalf of a
very senior official. Perhaps even more significant in this context is the presence of a seal
impression depicting a lion caught in a net (Figure 10). Not only is the ruler himself a lion,
metaphorically speaking, but greater than lions in being able to organise their capture, in
later periods a strictly royal prerogative.
The use of seals to signify ownership or control was in later periods a major facet of
south Mesopotamian administration, appearing at Uruk hand in hand with ‘numerical
tablets’ and the pictographic script (c. 3400 BC). Yet this important administrative practice
had its origins in central and northern Mesopotamia as early as 7000 BC (Akkermans &
Duistermaat 1997; also Ferioli et al. 1994; Oates 1996) and by the Late ‘Ubaid period
had become a well-developed practice on northern sites, unrepresented in the south (e.g.
Tepe Gawra; and Deˇgirmentepe in south-eastern Turkey, Esin 1994). By the end of the
fifth millennium the evidence suggests a complex hierarchy of authority at Brak, while at
the contemporary, 1ha site of Gawra, glyptic evidence suggests contrasting, residence-based
‘cottage-industries’ (Rothman 2002) as opposed to Brak’s more centralised production.
At Brak the majority of sealings from the recent excavations bear single stamp seal
impressions, often 2 or 3 impressions of the same seal if the surviving fragment is large
(they are always broken when found). There are also at least two instances of sealings
bearing impressions of more than one seal (Figure 10). Such double sealing suggests
either two distinct levels of administration or two equal but different types of official,
in either case evidence for substantial organisational complexity. Interestingly, the need
for signatures of more than one responsible official is a practice that persists still in the
Near East today. Also from an NMU context at Brak are two small pictographic ‘dockets’
of a type that appears to precede the more stylised pictographs of Warka (Oates 2005:
Figure 16).
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Figure 8. Obsidian and white marble chalice, height =
16cm (from Level 19 building, c. 4000 BC).
The ‘feasting hall’, Level 18
Figure 9. Lion sealing from ‘red libn industrial building’
(TW Level 19).
Figure 10. Large jar sealing, Level 19 building, bearing
the impressions of two different ‘lion seals’, one of lions tˆetebˆeche,
the other, lozenge-shaped, depicting a lion killing a
small mammal.
Overlying these buildings, in Level 18a, was another unique building of early MNU
attribution, a formal tripartite structure with niched decoration of a type often associated
with ‘ritual’ buildings (Figure 11; see Emberling & McDonald 2003; Oates 2005: 18-21).
Despite its apparently ‘ritual’ plan, this building was clearly not a temple, at least not in
the usual sense of the word. Its northern courtyard contained a number of ovens, rebuilt or
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Joan Oates et al.
Figure 11. Plan of TW Level 18 ‘feasting hall’ (early fourth millennium BC).
replaced throughout its long use. These were large, but, in contrast to those of Level 19,
intended for the cooking of food on a large scale. The faunal remains indicate the baking
or grilling of large quantities of meat, served, it would appear, on the mass-produced plates
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which formed a large portion of the surviving pottery – perhaps a pre-echo of the throwaway
‘paper plate’ (Oates & Oates 1993: Figure 54: 66 & description; Weber 2003). Entered
from a later version of the sherd-paved street, it remains unclear whether the building was
designed as a form of ‘feasting hall’ (see Helwing 2003) or whether its purpose was to
serve some nearby formal institution. Its association with the north gate also suggests the
possibility of a guesthouse or ‘travellers rest’.
Such a hall hints at the ways in which the provisioning of people had gone beyond that
of a single household, since its large ovens and ubiquitous mass-produced plates suggest
patterns of consumption well beyond that of familial households. Also relevant to levels of
‘organisation’ are the often moulded, mass-produced bowls already referred to, predecessors
of the well-known bevelled-rim ‘ration bowls’ of the Late Uruk period. For the moment at
least, evidence for the earlier forms comes, again, largely from the north, and is suggestive
of the large units of labour that would have been required not only for on-site production
and the construction of the monumental buildings themselves, but also the cultivation of
sufficient land to have fed the increasing number of non-agricultural administrators and
craftsmen. Monumental buildings also require very large amounts of straw and water for the
enormous quantities of mud-brick and plaster necessary for their construction (D. Oates
1990: 389-90). Certainly the large fifth-millennium buildings for which we have evidence
at Brak would have required considerable investment of time, materials and labour not only
for their construction but for their operation and maintenance. It has been suggested that
the very large number inscribed on a Brak ‘numerical tablet’ of clear NMU date (perhaps
to be read ‘3600’, Oates 2002: Figure 6), reflects the keeping of records for just such labour
requirements. Certainly the control of manpower was a major preoccupation of the earliest
written texts.
In Area CH, some 300m south of TW, a sequence of monumental structures has also
been identified, dating from at least as early as the end of the ‘Ubaid period (c. 4400 BC).
Indeed a major ‘boundary wall’, which in the third millennium marked the eastern limit
of the Naram-Sin ‘Palace’ (c. 2250 BC, see D. Oates et al. 2001: Figure 26), had remained
in approximately the same position from at least as early as the fifth millennium. Such
evidence suggests that the area beneath the ‘Palace’, situated between this boundary wall
and the western limits of the much earlier Eye Temple, had persisted as ‘monumental’ or
even ‘sacred’ space for over two millennia. The Eye Temple itself, excavated (and mis-dated)
by Mallowan in the 1930s (Mallowan 1947), adds significantly to the Area TW evidence
for early indigenous complexity and ‘monumentality’ at Brak (Oates & Oates 2002). The
foundations of an early-fourth-millennium version of this structure are the source of the
thousands of small alabaster ‘eye idols’ that give this building its name, together with large
numbers of stone stamp amulets and early sculpture; examples of the amulets and eye idols
have now been found at Tell Hamoukar, an important late-fifth/fourth-millennium site to
the east of Brak (Reichel 2002).
The evidence for social and economic complexity from Areas TW, CH and the Eye Temple
are far from isolated phenomena at Brak. In relatively restricted soundings on the north-west
flank of the site, for example, Roger Matthews (2003: Figure 3.9) identified in 1996 an
impressive mud-brick wall some 2m thick, dated to the late fifth millennium ENU phase
(Area HS). This was, if not a city wall per se, at the least a wall defining some large compound.
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Suburban Brak in the late fifth and early fourth millennia
Beyond the outer limits of the high tell itself lies its ‘suburban’ area, an extensive zone
of low-mounded and generally heavily ploughed settlement covering just under 300ha.
Intensive systematic sherd collection in this area has revealed shifting patterns of settlement
from the sixth millennium through the Islamic periods. Of particular relevance to recent
fourth/fifth-millennium excavation at Brak, and early Near Eastern urbanism in general,
are the outer town distributions of sherds of the ENU and MNU periods (illustrated in
Figure 2). The area of late-fifth-millennium ENU settlement on the tell itself, as revealed by
the excavations up to now, covers a minimum of 30ha, while the suburban survey showed
isolated clusters of settlement in the outer town, all at least 300m from the high mound.
Each of seven clusters covered from 1.5 to 5ha. In total, ENU settlement occupied at least
50ha and probably more, given our conservative estimate of occupation on the high tell.
While most settlements of this date are small villages, Brak must be placed with the even
larger, low-density, 300ha settled area at Khirbet al-Fakhar, the outer suburbs of Hamoukar
(Ur 2002). Although they are unlikely all to have been contemporaneous (Dewar 1991),
these spatially extensive northern Mesopotamian settlements are now forcing a reassessment
of the current Uruk-centric model of urban origins (Ur et al. in press). Brak, Gawra and
Hamoukar are also closely linked in the production of virtually identical pottery over an
area of some 300km. This includes ‘channel-rim’ vessels which seem to have served some
‘distilling’ function and the presence of an ‘elite’ ceramic, for which there is production
evidence in the form of kiln wasters at both Brak and Gawra. This very distinctive pottery
type occurs also in south-eastern Turkey (Oates & Oates 2004: 182).
In the subsequent MNU period (c. 3900-3600 BC) the high mound at Tell Brak remained
fully settled while occupation in the outer town intensified. At the same time the outer,
isolated clusters of ENU settlement appear to have grown together to form larger and
more continuous areas of settlement. In addition to the high mound, these outer settled
zones covered at least 100ha, creating a minimum total settled area of over 130ha. Again,
these figures are conservative. The cluster immediately to the south of the high mound,
for example, probably extended north to the Eye Temple, but this area is now covered by
substantial remains of the third-millennium lower town together with eroded outwash from
Brak’s central gully.
Sherds of the Late Uruk phase (3400-3200 BC), the period when the high tell at Brak
and a number of other northern settlements appear to have been colonised by southern
Mesopotamians, are found in low density around the lower town but cluster in particular
on a small rise south-west of the main mound and also to the south-east. It remains
difficult to establish certain contemporaneity between the local and intrusive southern
areas of settlement, but it might be tentatively proposed that these outer settlements were
merchants’ colonies of a type similar to the Old Assyrian k¯arum which were also established
among large indigenous populations.
Conclusions
The world’s earliest urban societies are widely thought to have originated in fourthmillennium
BC southern Mesopotamia. Recent research at Brak and other north
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Mesopotamian sites, however, reveals a level of nascent social and economic complexity
together with proto-urban growth up to 1000 years earlier. For the moment, Brak remains
unique in three respects – the size of its fifth- and early-fourth-millennia areas of settlement,
the range and types of contemporary ‘public’ buildings and the accompanying, long sequence
of well-stratified archaeological materials from this most crucial period in the growth of
complex urban society, a phase that has recently been referred to as already representing a
‘state-level’ (Gibson & Maktash 2000: 477). As yet, no other large site, indeed no other
Near Eastern site, has yielded comparable evidence, though such may ultimately be found
at Hamoukar where the apparent spatial extent of the outer ENU settlement covers an
area even larger than that at Brak. This is not to argue that such developments will never
be discovered in southern Mesopotamia, only that there exists a wider picture, far more
complex than had previously been realised.
The discovery in 2006 of large workshops with an extraordinary array of non-local raw
materials promises further evidence of complexity in earlier levels below. Certainly we have
yet to reach the earliest phases of such social and economic innovation. Indeed current
evidence suggests that the initial stimulus may originate in the underlying ‘Ubaid period,
itself currently subject to ‘north-south’ debate and, to judge from Area CH and out-of
context evidence, undoubtedly well-represented at Brak. The 2006 results also help to make
sense of the unparalleled grave goods from an approximately contemporary cemetery at the
very small site of Tepe Gawra in north-eastern Iraq, which included gold studs and rosettes,
an electrum wolf’s head and complete vessels of ground obsidian (Tobler 1950), symbols of
an elite that up to now has been ill-represented in the archaeological record. Unfortunately,
the Brak cemetery continues to elude us. Indeed the negative evidence of the intensive
‘suburban’ survey suggests that it may lie well beyond the settlement boundary. In writing of
the development of complex society in southern Mesopotamia Gil Stein (1994) emphasised
the importance of small scale, irrigation-based ‘Ubaid polities using ‘inclusive ideologies
emphasizing group membership through a strategy of ritually mobilized staple finance’. This is
in contrast with areas where ‘wealth distribution’, not so far visible in the southern evidence,
played a crucial role. Our work at Brak suggests a complex combination of both strategies.
The location of Brak within later Assyria’s most dependable ‘granary’ and a wool-rich
steppe, together with the 2006 evidence for accumulation of ‘status raw materials’ and the
unique ‘chalice’ itself, suggest that developing complexity in the north involved both ‘staple
finance’, though here not apparently ‘ritually’ mobilised, together with a considerable degree
of ‘wealth distribution’ seen in the elite grave goods at Gawra and in their ‘institutional’
manufacture at Brak.
We must admit to some difficulty in defining more precisely our use of the term ‘urban’.
Certainly definitions of urbanism that remain applicable cross-culturally present problems.
Childe’s 1950s list remains influential despite the many cases which seem differentiated in
some way from those around them but which fail in some or all of Childe’s categories. Recent
work seems to accept urbanism as a more fuzzy concept, characterised by a cluster of variables
that are best considered along axes of degree rather than simple presence or absence. What is
clear from our evidence is the differentiation of a site like Brak from those in its hinterland
(now subject to a wider survey, Oates 2005: 28-35). Moreover, in terms of a significant
number of Brak’s residents, their ‘activities, roles, practices, experiences, identities and attitudes’
598
Research
Joan Oates et al.
(Cowgill 2004: 526) do differ significantly from those of other, smaller sites in the region.
The evidence presented here for monumental and specialised buildings, non-residential craft
activity, administrative practices and, not least, its great spatial extent, surely qualifies Brak
as ‘urban’ if that term is to have any meaning. Certainly the trajectories of urban growth
based on the intensive surface collection in the outer town show that alongside the emerging
manifestations of social complexity revealed by the excavations, Brak was attaining a spatial,
and presumably also demographic, scale previously unsuspected for ‘backward’ northern
Mesopotamia, and apparently centuries before such developments appeared in the south or
elsewhere in the Near East.
Acknowledgements
We would like especially to thank our colleagues in the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums,
Damascus, currently Drs Bassam Jamous and Michel Al-Maqdissi, for their friendly help, encouragement
and support through the many years of the Brak project, and to thank the various institutions that have
supported the work reported here: the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research, Cambridge, the British Academy and the National Geographic Committee for Research
and Exploration. Field work at Tell Brak was under the overall direction of the late Professor David Oates from
1976-2004, and Dr Joan Oates (2004- ) who has been responsible for the Area TW excavations since 1991.
Contributing TW site supervisors have been Dr Alan Lupton (1991-93; Dr Twigs Way and Dr Geoff Emberling
(1997), the late Dr Sam Eames (2000), David Thomas (2001), Philip Karsgaard (2002-06), Salam Al Quntar
(2004-06); Professsor Henry Wright has acted as Field Director for the ‘sustaining area survey’ while the
‘suburban survey’ was carried out by Dr Jason Ur and Philip Karsgaard, with the assistance of Tim Skuldbøl; our
very helpful Syrian Representatives include Abd el Messih Baghdo (1998), now Director of the Hasake office;
Heitham Hassan (1991), Ibrahim Murad (1992-3, 2001-2), Hussein Yusuf (2000), Salam Al Quntar (2004,
2006) and Eyad Ganem (survey 2002-3, 2005). Dr Geoff Emberling was Field Director 1998-2002 with Helen
McDonald 2000-2004; the current Field Director is Dr Augusta McMahon.
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