Urbanization and land ownership in the ancient Near East.

Urbanization and land ownership in the ancient Near East. MICHAEL HUDSON & BARUCH A. LEVlNE (ed.). Urbanization and landownership in the ancient Near East. (Peabody Museum The Peabody Museum can refer to several museums founded by or dedicated to George Peabody: George Peabody House Museum at his birthplace in Peabody, Massachusetts Peabody Leather Museum in Peabody, Massachusetts Bulletin 7). 495pages, figures, tables. 1999. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Harvard University,mainly at Cambridge, Mass., including Harvard College, the oldest American college.Harvard CollegeHarvard College, originally for men, was founded in 1636 with a grant from the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. ,Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology ethnology(ĕthnŏl`əjē), scientific study of the origin and functioning of human cultures. It is usually considered one of the major branches of cultural anthropology, the other two being anthropological archaeology and ; 0-87365-957-0 paperback$35. This is Volume II in a series sponsored by the Institute for theStudy of Long-term Economic Trends and the International ScholarsConference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies: A Colloquium col��lo��qui��um?n. pl. col��lo��qui��ums or col��lo��qui��a1. An informal meeting for the exchange of views.2. An academic seminar on a broad field of study, usually led by a different lecturer at each meeting. held at NewYork University New York University,mainly in New York City; coeducational; chartered 1831, opened 1832 as the Univ. of the City of New York, renamed 1896. It comprises 13 schools and colleges, maintaining 4 main centers (including the Medical Center) in the city, as well as the , November 1996, and the Oriental Institute Oriental Institute is a name given to a number of institutions of higher education throughout the world that are engaged in the study of Asian culture, languages and history. , StPetersburg, Russia, May 1997. As the bibliographical description indicates, the volume has arather complicated ancestry, not only going back to two geographicallyand chronologically separated halves of a colloquium, but also involvingparticipants from very different academic backgrounds. In Part I we finda proponent of Palaeolithic recording systems (Marshack), anEgyptologist (Goelet) and an economic historian (Hudson). Part III islargely devoted to cuneiformists dealing with the textual corpus withwhich each is most familiar (Van de Mieroop, Steinkeller, Zaccagnini,Kozyreva, Dandamayev and Wunsch), and in between we have a sectioncalled `The archaeology of Mesopotamian cities' with contributionsby Lamberg-Karlovsky, Elizabeth Stone and Buccellati. The editors havespread their net laudably wide in bringing such diverse constituenciesbetween two covers, but one may wonder to what extent each side hasprofited. There remains something in the way of a gulf, and reading thediscussion sections it does not sound as if there was much meeting ofminds across the divide. In general the contributions in Part III arelevel-headed accounts of aspects of city life or land tenure land tenure:see tenure, in law. whichshould prove useful to their immediate colleagues and to those fromoutside the cuneiform cuneiform(kynē`ĭfôrm)[Lat.,=wedge-shaped], system of writing developed before the last centuries of the 4th millennium B.C. world. Being based on the textual output of asociety, they are describing aspects of it which would have beenrecognizable to members of the society themselves (even if liable tocorrection). By contrast, one suspects that the descriptions offered bythose coming from outside the field would have been met by blank stares.Perhaps this is always the case with `long-range' anthropologicalexplanation, but the distance between the two approaches only seems tobe bridged in a few of the contributions. Perhaps if discussion had concentrated on either urbanization orland ownership some of the issues could have been addressed moresystematically, but at least we are reminded exactly how far we are fromresolving some of the basic questions to do with the formation of urbansocieties in Mesopotamia. This volume should goad the traditionalhistorian into defending or discarding tacit assumptions, and force thegeneralist into confronting some uncomfortable detail. The seeds of sucha debate about the genesis of cities are lurking in some of the papers,although not worked through. The points at issue revolve round thetemple and the village. Hudson takes issue with Childe's concept ofcities `as developing automatically as a by-product of growing density,specialization of labor, and the social stratification Noun 1. social stratification - the condition of being arranged in social strata or classes within a groupstratificationcondition - a mode of being or form of existence of a person or thing; "the human condition" that came withmanagerial class' (p. 126), and concludes that all his urbancharacteristics `turn out to be grounded in preurban ritual activities,... above all those associated with Bronze Age temples' (p. 133).Quite how he views the rise of the Mesopotamian city escapes me, but heis able to conclude that `Mesopotamian temples and palace [sic] wereeconomic producers in an epoch when production had not yet passed intoprivate hands' (p. 145) and that temples `were created to solve themost pressing economic problem of their time -- to undertake thecommercial enterprise aimed at securing foreign raw materials' (pp.145-6). Although they certainly did partake in this enterprise, thisseems rather an overstatement o��ver��state?tr.v. o��ver��stat��ed, o��ver��stat��ing, o��ver��statesTo state in exaggerated terms. See Synonyms at exaggerate.o , and takes no account of the plentifulevidence that the temples were integral to each urban community bothideologically and materially. Furthermore, villages had temples too; howfar back in time is of course an interesting question which archaeologyhas yet to answer. Lamberg-Karlovksy views the origins of urbanization ratherdifferently when he points out that most of the features currently citedas marking the Uruk transition to statehood state��hood?n.The status of being a state, especially of the United States, rather than being a territory or dependency. were already present inearlier periods, in the context of large autonomous households. He seemsto concur with Renger (who was present in St Petersburg) that in southMesopotamia such households developed into `institutionalhouseholds', which gained a competitive edge via the consolidationof land holdings compounded by the constraints of irrigation irrigation,in agriculture, artificial watering of the land. Although used chiefly in regions with annual rainfall of less than 20 in. (51 cm), it is also used in wetter areas to grow certain crops, e.g., rice. management(pp. 187-8), but he firmly rejects the idea that there was earlier a`village community' in which the village held land communally (p.189). He therefore downplays the importance of both the village and thetemple in the formation and constitution of the city, but accepts atleast some element of the Wittfogel theory which holds that the need forsupralocal administration of the irrigation regime led to new politicalstructures. The concept of communal ownership of land, which featured large inDiakonoff's seminal revision of accepted dogma on the structure ofearly Sumer, is central to Steinkeller's contribution on3rd-millennium land-tenure. This makes an emphatic statement which turnsthe clock back to the 1920s, when Deimel and Anna Schneider developedthe theory which generated the potent image of the early Sumerian cityas a temple-state. `The ownership of arable land was an exclusiveprerogative of the gods ... effectively controlled by the ... office ofthe ensik and the managerial organizations of temple estates' (p.294). It is important to emphasize that, on the one hand, this appliesonly to the southern part of the south Mesopotamian plain, withdifferent conditions acknowledged to exist further north, and on theother hand that it runs counter to the current of recent opinion. LikeLamberg-Karlovksy, Steinkeller broadly subscribes to Wittfogel'senvironmental determinism, seeing the constraints of irrigationagriculture in the southern plain as discriminating critically in favourof a highly managed society. The requirement for communal joint actionin the administration of the countryside (water+land) is seen asexplanation for collective ownership, and as the precondition forcreation of surpluses sufficient to foster the complex urban society.Like Diakonoff, he does not sufficiently distinguish between communalcontrols and communal ownership, but while accepting his position thatthere was communal land-holding, he maintains that it was incorporatedwithin the temple sector, rather than a parallel secular sector. This islargely an argumentum ar��gu��men��tum?n. pl. ar��gu��men��ta LogicAn argument, demonstration, or appeal to reason.[Latin arg e silentio, and will no doubt be the subject ofcontinuing debate. It does seem likely that the need to organize society at villagelevel played a formative role, and this may go back even beforeurbanization. Both the ideologically central role of the temple in thecity, and the secular traditions of civil administration via assemblycould have derived from the same mechanisms at village level. It remainsto be established whether Mesopotamian villages in historical timesborrowed mechanisms developed in cities, or whether they retainedage-old traditions and the borrowing went in the other direction. Myview is that within each settlement enclave the need for collaborativemechanisms originated in the agricultural regime, and they are thereforeat least as likely to have arisen out there in the countryside. To thisextent I would concur with Steinkeller's vision, but I am far fromconvinced that they were all subsumed within a monolithic templeadministration. There is thus a range of widely divergent opinions on thesefundamental issues, and this review can only hint at their complexities.If I have concentrated on them, I should conclude by underlining thatthere is much more that is good, and less controversial, in this volume,to which those who engage with the broader issues should have recourseas the debate continues. J.N. POSTGATE Faculty of Oriental Studies University of Cambridge