Many scholars consider pastoral nomadism as a late development (e. g., Bobek 1962; Garthwaite 1983; Lattimore 1951; Lees and Bates 1974), and nomads as essentially different and subservient to settled farming communities and urban centers (cribb 1991: 14; Khazanov 1984, among others). For example, William sumner (1986; see also miroschedji 2003) considers the Proto-Elamite period (ca. 3000-2700 B. C.) as representing a tribal nomadic society, an adaptation that in Fars replaced the town/village settled farming economy. As I have argued elsewhere (Alizadeh 2006), specialized mobile pastoralism began much earlier in the fifth millennium B. C., was not limited to the Kur River Basin, and did not replace the farming economy, but the two modes of production were combined. From at least the fifth millennium B. C. on, the lowlands and highlands are to be understood not separately and in isolation, but as parts of an interacting system that successfully combined both regions’ resources, providing a context within which the most durable political system in the ancient Near East, that is, the Elamite state, developed.
As just mentioned, pastoral nomads are usually viewed as being integrated into agrarian societies (Rowton 1973a-b, 1974, 1980; see also Irons 1979: 371; Lattimore 1962: 487; Zagarell 1982: 109), living on the margin of these societies, and dependent on them for their needed grains. Most scholars (e. g., Irons 1979; Khazanov, this volume; Krader 1979; Zagarell 1989: 300) also believe that state formation among the nomads is a secondary process, and that the military superiority of the historically known nomadic tribes was only made possible with the domestication of the horse and camel. Such views of nomads are probably true for the vast steppes of central Asia, eastern Iran, the Negev, Arabia, the steppes of northwestern Mesopotamia and eastern Syria, and the Sahara, for example. But in regions with high population density, fertile alluvial plains, and intermontane valleys, such as lowland Susiana, highland Fars, and, to a lesser degree, Kerman (ancient Marhashi[?]) (Carter and Stolper 1984: 11; Steinkeller 1982, 2007), such views of nomads cannot be supported. In southwestern and south-central Iran, the trajectory of sociopolitical development may have been different.
It is the central theme of this paper that in southwestern and south-central Iran, settled farming villages were fully integrated into the nomadic pastoral economy and that farming villages became direct economic dependencies of the pastoral confederacies.38 Another aim of this paper is to show that in many regions of Iran, separation of mobile pastoralism and settled farming is a false dichotomy and that they are two sides of the same coin (for similar view on the Mesopotamian social landscape, see Adams 1974). Furthermore, I believe that a
Interaction in the Middle East as opposed to Central Asia, see Patai 1951 and Bacon 1954.
ABBAS ALIZADEH
Diachronic analysis of the archaeology and history of southwestern and south-central Iranian plateau suggests the important role of the region’s mobile pastoralists in state formation, and that the history of Elam may be better understood from the perspective of the highland nomads, who acted as the political force behind interactions between Mesopotamia and western Iran.
World History
