CIVILIZATIONS

OF ANCIENT IRAQ

CIVILIZATIONS

OF ANCIENT IRAQ

Benjamin R. Foster

Karen Polinger Foster

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS     Princeton & Oxford

Frontispiece. Tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Yale Babylonian Collection (see figure 22).

Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6

Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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All Rights Reserved

Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2011

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-14997-4

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Foster, Benjamin R. (Benjamin Read)

Civilizations of ancient Iraq / Benjamin R. Foster,

Karen Polinger Foster.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-13722-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Civilization, Assyro-Babylonian. 2. Assyria—Antiquities.

3. Babylonia—Antiquities 4. Babylonia—Social life and

customs. 5. Iraq—History—To 634. I. Foster, Karen

Polinger, 1950. II. Title.

DS7.7.F67 2009

935—dc22 2008048067

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

eISBN: 978-1-400-83287-3

R0

CONTENTS

Illustrations ix

Preface xi

1. IN THE BEGINNING

Of Tigris and Euphrates 1

The First Villages 7

From the Foothills to the Plains 12

2. THE BIRTHPLACE OF CIVILIZATION

The First Cities 15

From City to State 27

Sumerians Abroad 29

Setting Words on Clay 30

The Uruk Phenomenon 33

3. EARLY CITY-STATES

New Polities 35

Ur and the Royal Graves 36

When Kingship Came down from Heaven 39

Shuruppak, City of Wisdom 40

A Tale of Two Cities 42

4. KINGS OF THE FOUR QUARTERS OF THE WORLD

The First Empire 51

Naram-Sin: When Kingship Went up to Heaven 55

A Golden Age of Sumerian Culture 61

Management and Crisis 67

5. THE AGE OF HAMMURABI

The Amorites 71

Rim-Sin, King of Larsa 73

Shamshi-Adad, King of Upper Mesopotamia 74

Hammurabi, King of Babylon 76

Arts of the Table and Bedroom 81

The Epic of Gilgamesh 83

The End of Amorite Rule 85

6. BABYLONIA IN THE FAMILY OF NATIONS

The Kassites 87

Kassite Statecraft and Society 90

The Club of Great Powers 93

Science and Literature 94

The Hurrians 99

The End of Kassite Rule 100

7. THE ASSYRIAN ACHIEVEMENT

The Rise of Assur 105

The Middle Assyrian Empire 109

The Neo-Assyrian Empire 113

Assurnasirpal II and Nimrud 115

Sennacherib and Nineveh 119

The Library of Assurbanipal 123

The Fall of Assyria 126

8. THE GLORY OF BABYLON

The Last Babylonian Empire 129

Nabonidus, King of Babylon 132

Learning and Memory in Babylonia 134

Works and Days 140

The Persian Empire 142

9. MESOPOTAMIA BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Alexander the Great and the Seleucids 147

Antiochus I Soter, King of Asia 149

The Realm and Its Economy 152

The Culture of Hellenistic Babylonia 154

The Rise of Parthia 156

Mithridates I and the Reunification of Iraq 158

Parthian Iraq 160

Roman Armies in Iraq 164

The End of Mesopotamian Civilization 166

10. SASSANIAN IRAQ

The Sassanian Empire and Religious Pluralism 168

By the Waters of Babylon: Judaism in Iraq 173

Christianity in Iraq 176

Sassanian Society, Statecraft, and Economy 178

Arab Settlement in Iraq 180

Sassanian Art 182

Shapur I and Shapur II 184

The Sassanians and Byzantium 187

Prelude to Conquest 189

EPILOGUE DISCOVERY AND DESTRUCTION OF ANCIENT IRAQ

Exploration and Decipherment 191

Archaeology Past and Present 198

The Nation of Iraq and Cultural Heritage 201

The Gulf War and Cultural Destruction 205

The Iraq War and Cultural Devastation 206

Notes 211

Bibliography 231

Index 283

ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps

Map 1. From Rome to the Indus

Map 2. Ancient Iraq

Figures

Frontispiece. Tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Yale Babylonian Collection

Figure 1. Halaf ware bowl from Arpachiyah, Iraq Museum

Figure 2. Cone mosaics from Uruk, Vorderasiatisches Museum

Figure 3. Uruk Head, Iraq Museum

Figure 4. Uruk Vase, Iraq Museum 24,

Figure 5. Drawings of cylinder seal impressions from various sites, periods, and museums

Figure 6. Inlaid harp from Ur, Iraq Museum

Figure 7. Stele of the Vultures from Lagash, Louvre

Figure 8. Statue of Enmetena from Ur, Iraq Museum

Figure 9. Victory Stele of Naram-Sin from Susa, Louvre

Figure 10. Ziggurat at Ur

Figure 11. Law Code of Hammurabi from Susa, Louvre

Figure 12. Molded brick façade from Uruk, Vorderasiatisches Museum

Figure 13. Glass goblet from Tell al-Rimah, Iraq Museum

Figure 14. Tablet and envelope from Kanesh, Yale Babylonian Collection

Figure 15. Relief from the throne room of Assurnasirpal at Nimrud, British Museum

Figure 16. Relief from Court VI of Sennacherib at Nineveh, British Museum

Figure 17. Ivory furniture panel from Nimrud, Iraq Museum

Figure 18. Limestone tablet from Sippar, British Museum

Figure 19. Silver tetradrachm of Antiochus I Soter, private collection

Figure 20. Temple complex, Hatra

Figure 21. Royal bust from Kish, Field Museum of Natural History

Figure 22. Tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Yale Babylonian Collection

PREFACE

Iraq is one of the birthplaces of human civilization. This land saw the first towns and cities, the first states and empires. Here writing was invented, and with it the world’s oldest poetry and prose and the beginnings of mathematics, astronomy, and law. Here too are found pioneering achievements in pyrotechnology, as well as important innovations in art and architecture. From Iraq comes rich documentation for nearly every aspect of human endeavor and activity millennia ago, from the administration of production, surplus, and the environment to religious belief and practice, even haute cuisine recipes and passionate love songs.

This book offers a brief historical and cultural survey of Iraq from earliest times to the Muslim conquest in 637, drawing together political, social, economic, artistic, and intellectual sources, both primary and secondary. The Epilogue offers an introduction to the history of archaeology in this region, set in the broader context of the development of archaeology as a scientific discipline. This section also focuses on the discovery, management, preservation, and destruction of the cultural heritage of Iraq.

The figures not only illustrate significant works of art and architecture in a representative choice of media and subjects, but also afford a basis for understanding cultural property issues in the aftermath of the looting of the Iraq Museum in April 2003 and in view of the ongoing devastation of Iraqi archaeological sites and trafficking in antiquities. The figure captions, taken as a whole, constitute a short essay on these matters, complementing the art-historical discussions in the text.

Some chapters are substantial revisions of work that initially appeared in Iraq Beyond the Headlines: History, Archaeology, and War, co-authored by both of us in 2005 with Patty Gerstenblith, whose publisher, World Scientific, permitted us to reshape the book into its present form.

Over the years, questions posed by students and audiences in our courses and public lectures have greatly contributed to the sharpening of our theses and our selection of material. Portions of the book originated in the McKee-May Academic Lectures in Greenwich, Connecticut, given by Benjamin R. Foster in the winter of 2003 at the invitation of Jennifer Vietor Evans.

The book has also much benefited from discussions with colleagues during several conferences and panels on current issues, among them A Future for Our Past: An International Symposium for Redefining the Concept of Cultural Heritage and Its Protection, held in Istanbul in June 2004; a series of programs entitled Iraq Beyond the Headlines, held at Yale University in April 2003, October 2003, October 2004, and February 2008; Iraq: At the Brink of Civil War? held at Yale University in April 2006; and The Future of the Global Past: An International Symposium on Cultural Property, Antiquities Issues, and Archaeological Ethics, held at Yale University in April 2007.

For references, images, information, thought-provoking comments, and eyewitness accounts, we are particularly grateful to Roger Atwood, Zainab Bahrani, Matthew Bogdanos, Annie Caubet, Dominique Charpin, Dominique Collon, John Darnell, Amira Edan, Joanne Farchakh, Bassam Frangieh, Patty Gerstenblith, Dimitri Gutas, McGuire Gibson, Nawala al-Mutawalli, Susanne Paulus, Gül Pulhan, John Russell, Catherine Sease, Alice Slotsky, Matthew Stolper, Margarete Van Ess, and Donny George Youkhana.

In the production of the illustrations and maps, we thank especially Yale Photographic Services, Peter W. Johnson, and those publishers still holding copyrights on the images reproduced here. Robert Tempio of the Princeton University Press has enthusiastically supported this project from the start.

CIVILIZATIONS

OF ANCIENT IRAQ

1. IN THE BEGINNING

Marduk created wild animals, the living

creatures of the open country.

He created and put in place Tigris and

Euphrates rivers,

He pronounced their names with favor.

Marduk, Creator of the World

Of Tigris and Euphrates

Ancient Iraq is the gift of two rivers. The Euphrates rises on the Anatolian plateau in Turkey, flows southwest into Syria and then turns southeast across Iraq, emptying into the Gulf. Its broad, shallow channel makes it an ideal source for irrigation water, and in many stretches the Euphrates is easily navigable. As the river moves across the southern alluvial plains and approaches the Gulf, it merges with the Tigris, amidst a network of smaller rivers, lakes, and marshes. To a Babylonian poet, the Euphrates seemed a mighty canal, divinely made:

O River, creator of all things,

When the great gods dug your bed,

They set well-being along your banks.¹

The Tigris, though it too rises on the Anatolian plateau, passes through more rugged terrain, at one point disappearing into a natural tunnel. A Sumerian poet mythologized the volcanic origin of the Tigris headlands as an epic battle between a hero-god and a personified, erupting volcano that gashed the earth’s body . . . bathed the sky in blood . . . and till today black cinders are in the fields.² Both rivers flood when the snows melt in the highlands, but the Tigris often does so in violent, destructive onslaughts of water, swelled by its three main tributaries—the Upper and Lower Zab and the Diyala—pouring down from deep gorges in the Zagros Mountains. By contrast, the two principal tributaries of the Euphrates—the Khabur and Balikh, which join it in northeastern Syria—enclose a swath of fine agricultural land known as the Jezira, whose productivity is augmented by sufficient annual rainfall for crops.

Map 1. (left) From Rome to the Indus (after Collon 1995)

Map 2. (above) Ancient Iraq (after Lloyd 1978)

The rivers of Iraq have determined its history in three crucial ways. The Euphrates was an important route of communication with Syria, central Turkey, and the Mediterranean; the Tigris and its tributaries afforded links with eastern Turkey and the Iranian plateau. Above all, both rivers made possible human life on the plains, annually renewing the soil with flood-borne silts and bringing the water that farmers needed to till their fields and herdsmen to sustain their flocks.³

During the Pliocene and early Pleistocene epochs, the earth’s great tectonic plates began shaping the main geographical features of Iraq. As the Arabian and African plates moved slowly northward, they encountered the more intransigent Iranian and Turkish plates and were forced to grind beneath them, resulting in the uplift of the Zagros on Iraq’s eastern border and the Anatolian ranges and plateau on its northern border. Where the Arabian plate thrust under the Iranian plate, subduction pressures also formed the trough of the Gulf and the alluvial plains of Iraq’s river systems. Ongoing tectonic activity accounts for the Middle East’s frequent earthquakes and numerous volcanoes.

Over the eons, Iraq’s major hydrological and environmental changes have been brought about primarily by worldwide cooling and warming trends, which have caused the waters of the Gulf to fall and rise, respectively. At the height of the last Ice Age, the Gulf was a plain through which the ancestral Tigris and Euphrates meandered. As the glaciers melted, the Gulf reached approximately its current level, with temperature fluctuations over the millennia causing repeated advances and retreats of the coastline. Studies of pollen preserved in the sediments of ancient lakes have shed considerable light on the region’s climate and vegetation, from the last glaciation to early historical times. Millennia of dry cold seem to have given way to a warmer, moister period about ten thousand years ago, which in turn ended in renewed desiccation, producing the desert and steppe we recognize as salient features of Iraq’s present landscape. Grazing, agriculture, and the deforestation of the Zagros woodlands have affected the region’s ecosystems as well.⁴

Today, as in historical antiquity, forbidding deserts stretch to the west of the plains of Iraq for hundreds of kilometers. To the east and north, the foothills ascend swiftly to mountains with peaks sharp-tipped as a spear point, as an Assyrian writer put it.⁵ To the south is the Gulf. Small wonder, then, that the people of ancient Iraq thought that the alluvial plains were the center of the inhabited world, ringed by deserts, mountains, and seas. For them, all that lay beyond was foreign and strange, the source of exotic materials and strange beasts, the abode of brutish folk. The farthest reaches the plains dwellers knew were the Upper and Lower Seas, the Mediterranean and the Gulf.⁶

No one knows what the earliest names for the region signify. Kengir or Sumer (biblical Shinar) referred to the southern half of the alluvial plains, while the northern half was called Wari, later Akkad. After about 1700 B.C.E., Sumer and Akkad together constituted what came to be known as Babylonia. A thousand years later, the southern marshes were called the Sealand, later Chaldea. The region north of Baghdad, along the Tigris, was known as Assyria. The word Subir was sometimes used to refer to northern Mesopotamia as a whole.⁷

The modern name Iraq was first regularly used after the Muslim conquest of 637. Though it appears to be an Arabic word, its meaning and etymology are obscure. The various proposals by medieval Arab geographers show only that they were making them up. One of the most widely accepted explanations is that it means arable land along a major river, vaguely corresponding to English alluvium, but this may have been reasoned backwards from the reality of Iraq itself.⁸

The ancient Greek term Mesopotamia, now generally understood to mean Land Between Rivers, has also been used to refer to Iraq, especially by European scholars and twentieth-century colonial administrators. Mesopotamia originally denoted the land enclosed by the big bend of the Middle Euphrates River, east of modern Aleppo in Syria, but it soon came to mean the expanse of plains and uplands between the Tigris and Euphrates, from the Gulf to the Anatolian plateau.⁹ Many writers today use the term Mesopotamia when discussing the region before the Muslim conquest, and Iraq thereafter. Although this may be a convenient historical distinction, others prefer not to separate the pre-Islamic and Islamic past of Iraq. In this book, we use Mesopotamia and Iraq interchangeably.

To visitors from parts of the earth with more temperate climates and more varied scenery, the hot, featureless plains of southern Iraq may seem a place inhospitable to the development of civilization. Nor are there splendid ruins to admire or reflect on, such as might evoke a glorious past. In fact, the only hints on the landscape attesting to the remote antiquity of human habitation are mounds covered with potsherds, broken bricks, and other debris, sometimes lying amongst faint outlines of walls and dwellings, all that remain of once bustling cities and towns, home to a vibrant and long-lived literate culture. This early Victorian traveler’s experience still rings true:

He has left the land where nature is still lovely, where, in his mind’s eye, he can rebuild the temple or the theatre. . . . He is now at a loss to give any form to the rude heaps upon which he is gazing. . . . The scene around is worthy of the ruin he is contemplating; desolation meets desolation; a feeling of awe succeeds to wonder; for there is nothing to relieve the mind, to lead to hope, or to tell of what has gone by.¹⁰

The ancient visitor would have had a very different view, largely because the Tigris and Euphrates, like other restless waterways, are prone to carving out new courses, sometimes shifting their riverbeds by many kilometers. Today in southern Iraq, the Euphrates flows far to the east of its course in historical antiquity, so that what were once riverside or canalside cities, towns, and villages became the rude heaps of remote deserts. As a result, many of the important ancient cities in southern Iraq were left unmolested and uninhabited for thousands of years. Unhampered by modern development, archaeologists have been able to investigate these sites in depth, recovering most of what we know about the history and culture of ancient Iraq. In more recent times, these isolated fields of ruins have fallen easy prey to large-scale looting and destruction. Much of their vast and rich historical record is now lost forever. In the north, where the river channels are more stable, ancient settlements and cities often underlie modern ones, making them more difficult to excavate, but less vulnerable to looters. We return to these matters in the Epilogue.

Still, one may well ask, why was civilization born on these alluvial plains, so far in advance of all other places in the world? There are at once many answers and no answer to this simple question. Intensive archaeological research in Iraq and in neighboring lands has given us numerous responses, and we may draw these proposals and theories together into a narrative that seems reasonable and convincing in its outline, even if specifics remain frustratingly elusive. At the same time, there is no answer, for we often describe events and changes without really knowing how or why they came about, and refer to people about whom we know very little. New discoveries and reinterpretations of old ones give us fascinating evidence to work into the story, but ultimately leave the reader wishing to know more than we can say at present.

The First Villages

Of the many ways to describe human beings of former times and how they lived, one long popular has been with reference to their technology. We may speak of the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) and New Stone Age (Neolithic), implying that people mostly used stone tools, or the Bronze Age, when people mostly used bronze weapons. Or we may focus on religious belief, referring to pagan, Christian, or pre-Islamic societies. In older books, one wrote of races: Oriental and Occidental peoples, the great white race, the Indo-Europeans, the Semites. Since the 1960s, anthropologists and archaeologists have used a more inclusive system referring to modes of subsistence, that is, by what means people obtained the food they needed to survive.¹¹

For almost its entire history, the human race subsisted by hunting game and gathering naturally occurring plants. This mode was so successful and so undemanding as a way of life that it ensured human survival for hundreds of thousands of years. To judge from present-day hunting cultures, hunters need exercise their skill only two or three days out of seven to provide sufficient meat for their community. They kill and collect only what they need to live, and do not reduce their resources for sport or entertainment. Hunter-gatherer populations, moreover, tend to remain fairly stable. They usually have small families; their children, especially girls, mature late; and some groups even abandon infants to control population.¹²

About ten thousand years ago, peoples in the Middle East evolved a radically different subsistence pattern based on agriculture and the management of domesticated animals. Some historians refer to this momentous development as a revolution, thereby implying sweeping change.¹³ But the change was abrupt only in comparison with the manner in which people had interacted with the natural world for all the preceding millennia. We see the transition vividly in Iraq and also, at about the same time, in Iran, Turkey, Syria, Israel, and Palestine.¹⁴ How and why did it occur, and what did it mean for the human race?

Archaeological work in the foothills of the Zagros has shown that people began settling in small villages in areas where certain wild grains, such as barley, and wild animals, such as sheep and goats, occurred naturally and plentifully. Gradually, people came to realize that these resources could be managed by controlling their reproduction to obtain specific desirable traits. This selection process, termed the domestication of plants and animals, caused permanent genetic and associated morphological changes in the species involved. Barley, for example, was selected for preferred strains, such as those with softer husks and larger ears of grain; animals were bred for quality of wool or milk, or for fattiness or yield of meat. Within the village confines, plots were sown and animals penned, though in some seasons the animals might be herded to better, more distant pastures. Although we may now be able to describe in some detail the transition from hunting and gathering to pastoral and village life, we still cannot explain why this occurred when it did.¹⁵

The domestication of plants and animals brought with it substantial changes in social outlook, behavior, and organization. The hunter attacked or trapped, whereas the farmer and herdsman nurtured. The self-narrative of the hunter was aggressive and dramatic, that of the farmer and herdsman reliant and protective. For much of the year, agricultural work was systematic and unrelenting: preparing the soil, sowing, watering, weeding, driving off pests, harvesting, threshing, and storing. This pattern of life brought with it an ethos of working in rhythm with the seasons for family and community, of saving against future want, and of hopeful dependence on uncontrollable forces and events. Agricultural success resulted in larger families, because even small children could be useful in fieldwork and herding. And with earlier physical maturity came steady, even exponential, population growth.¹⁶

In response to agricultural and pastoral needs, new technologies developed for producing such items as ground-stone tools, wooden implements, baskets, and textiles. New materials also appeared, among them obsidian from the volcanic areas of eastern and central Turkey. It is not clear how obsidian, prized for sharp blades, reached the early farming villages of Iraq, whether brought by traders or acquired though expeditions, but its presence attests to well-established, long-distance networks.¹⁷

The most important innovation was pottery. Prior to about 6500 B.C.E., containers had been made of skins, bitumen-coated baskets, gypsum or lime plaster, and stone. The earliest ceramic vessels were lightly fired, but the development of more efficient kilns resulted in the production of nonporous, durable wares adaptable to a wide range of uses.¹⁸ These included the storage, transport, preparation, and cooking of a variety of solids and liquids, from grain and cheese to beer. The discovery of fermentation created beverages that altered mood and behavior; drinking thus acquired social and ritual functions, as Sumerian drinking songs celebrate:

When I make my way around a round of beer,

When I feel grand, when I feel grand,

Drinking beer in a merry mood,

Imbibing fruit of the field in a light-hearted state,

With a joyful heart and a happy inside . . .¹⁹

Because fired clay is a nearly indestructible material, the shapes and decorations of pottery vessels usually afford the best evidence we have for the creativity and aesthetic sensibilities of ancient peoples. In Iraq, as elsewhere, major pottery types are frequently named after the sites at which they were first discovered, or which seem to have been centers of production. The Hassuna ware of the mid-seventh millennium from northern Iraq tends to be decorated with herringbone and other patterns incised with a pointed tool. The Samarra and Halaf wares that followed, from northern and central Iraq, are more finely made, with painted patterns on a buff ground. The interiors of Samarra bowls often feature stylized horned animals circling round, drawn in dark brown with verve and assurance. Halaf pottery of the mid-sixth millennium is the first polychrome ware known, characterized by sophisticated geometric designs in red, black, and white, possibly inspired by textiles. Vessels such as the bowl pictured here (figure 1) were likely made by specialized potters based in certain villages, whereas simpler pots were probably made locally.²⁰

So it was, in this period of change ten thousand years ago, in the foothills of Iraq, that small villages sprang up, their mud-brick houses consisting of a few rooms and an open area, pens for animals and storage bins for foods, the settlements surrounded by an agricultural hinterland extending perhaps several hours’ walk.²¹ So forceful was this new trajectory of human life that in a few places beyond Iraq, such as Çatal Hüyük in central Turkey, good-sized towns appeared, with comparatively large populations and elaborately embellished structures, apparently serving some religious purpose.²² But this was exceptional. Most villages comprised a few dozen houses, all of the same size and plan, suggesting an egalitarian society, with communal as well as individual storage facilities. Perhaps resources of fields and flocks were also managed communally.

Figure 1. Halaf ware bowl from Arpachiyah, diameter 33 cm, Iraq Museum, Baghdad. (Strommenger 1962: pl. II) For most periods of ancient Iraq, pottery provides the chronological framework essential for understanding the successive levels of occupation of a site. During the course of an archaeological excavation, hundreds of thousands of potsherds are collected and recorded. The smallest fragment may be as valuable as an intact vessel for enriching our knowledge of techniques, artistic developments, and interconnections. When the Iraq Museum storerooms were ransacked in April 2003, the excavated pottery and other artifacts awaiting study and final publication were thrown into disorder or stolen.

From the Foothills to the Plains

A second important transition, several thousand years after the development of agriculture, was the movement of farmers and stockbreeders down from the foothills onto the plains of Iraq. No one knows precisely when this occurred, for the earliest lowland settlements may be buried deep in the modern alluvium and thus archaeologically inaccessible. Why move to the plains? One theory is population pressure, but no evidence has been produced from the foothills to suggest that the population had become too large to be sustained there. The important point is that once human beings had mastered agricultural and pastoral skills, they could live in areas where the wild ancestors of the domesticated plants and animals they had come to depend on did not naturally occur. In bringing the new species of plants and animals with them, humans caused permanent changes in the ecology of the plains.²³

In Iraq, the lowlands presented challenges that were not easily met. The dearth of rainfall in the south required irrigation for the cultivation of cereal crops. In principle, irrigation need only be a matter of digging a ditch to bring water to a field. In practice, irrigation involved community participation in the construction and maintenance of a network of ditches, as well as decisions about who was to receive how much water, where, and when. The water situation in southern Iraq was further complicated by the fact that the rivers flood in the early spring, at sowing time, and reach their low point in the hot season, at growing time, when water is most needed. Despite these challenges, people settled first in small villages dispersed across the alluvial plains, especially in the south, then in increasing numbers along natural watercourses, allowing us to trace those now vanished or shifted thanks to patterns of habitation. Furthermore, we can see in the relative sizes of the villages an emerging hierarchy among them.²⁴

The settlement of farmers on the alluvial plains of Iraq was thus a success, the first stage in a story of human activity there that continues to the present day. We need not imagine, of course, that the plains lay empty before people began to till the soil. Huntergatherers had long pursued