Sources

What makes the study of ancient Mesopotamia distinctive from that of other early complex societies is the variety and detail of the sources that can be brought to bear on any one problem. The desert environment has preserved details of ancient settlement that are almost unparalleled elsewhere, a circumstance exploited by archaeologists who have conducted broad site surveys in the area. Excavations have also been extensive, but have tended to focus on the large, heavily stratified cities, although some small sites have also been investigated. The use of mud-brick as a construction material at these sites has provided archaeologists with extensive architectural remains, complete with objects and trash deposits. Included in these remains are cuneiform tablets, often found in archives within the buildings where they were used. These include details of administrative activities as well as more private documents like contracts and letters.

The broad survey data provide an overview of the ebb and flow of human settlement in the southern Mesopotamian plain (Adams 1981). The pattern of urban growth and decay is seen as the result of a complex interplay between environmental factors - shifting watercourses, salinization of land - and human factors in the ebb and flow of political relations. However, in the process of documenting changes in individual settlements and settled areas over time, this work also provides a sense of the long duration of Mesopotamian history, an understanding of how the exigencies of life on the southern plain shaped both settlement and society in much the same way over the millennia. The focus of the data collected by these surveys is not on individual houses or even cities, but on the city-states - the networks of settlements of varying sizes, tied together by political and economic ties and a complex irrigation system.

Nevertheless, the survey data are not without flaw. Because of the difficulty of precisely dating a site based only on pottery found on the surface, surveys provide no more than a broad outline of changing patterns of settlement. As a result, for example, two periods which are seen by Assyriologists and archaeologists alike as radically different - the Ur III and Isin-Larsa periods - are grouped together in the survey data (Adams 1981: 163, figure 31).

Excavation has yielded detailed evidence of daily life in both public and private structures. Archaeological excavations have been undertaken in southern Mesopotamia for over a century, and although the focus of many of the early excavators and even some modern ones was on narrow issues of chronology, the question of the nature of urbanism in Mesopotamia was the focus of the most extensive projects conducted in the 1920s and 1930s at Ur and in the Diyala River region. These projects were conducted at a time when huge areas could be cleared through the use of mass labor, providing us with broad expanses of both domestic housing and public architecture. Although in more recent times excavation methods have emphasized indepth recording and less broad clearance, we do have newer data on site organization.

Textual data provide the details of life on the southern Mesopotamian plain. These data give a picture that is almost antithetical to the results of settlement surveys. All cuneiform texts derive from archaeological contexts, whether they were excavated by archaeologists or looters. They therefore tend to reflect the concerns of the urban population since most excavations have focused on large sites. Also, writing penetrated further into society at some times than in others. By and large the third and early second millennia saw a general increase of those aspects of society that were recorded, moving from archives that reflect the concerns of large institutions to groups of texts which included the interests of private citizens. It would be a mistake, however, to see the pattern as simply one where new types of written documents are consistently added to the corpus. Instead, the use of writing was in some ways reestablished following each period of collapse, so texts were often written in somewhat different ways in each period, following newly developed traditions or genres, sometimes leading those who study them to assume that society itself had changed radically, rather than what was recorded and how it was recorded.

For those interested in Mesopotamian urbanism, the 1970s and 1980s saw a move toward examining private documents organized not by genre but by site - and in some instances relating those documents to the archaeological record. Postgate (1992) and Sasson (1995) have succeeded in replacing the old emphasis on a hierarchical temple-centered society with a more nuanced approach, stressing the flexibility of Mesopotamian social institutions, its entrepreneurial character, and the interplay between hierarchy and social complexity which characterized its political relations.

It is this kind of integration that I hope to achieve in this chapter, one where the textual, artifactual, architectural, and survey data can be brought together to provide a consistent picture of life in ancient Mesopotamia. I will fill in the gaps in our sources by looking at models derived from more recent and better attested societies. A comparison of our information from Mesopotamia with that of more recent Islamic society shows extraordinary similarities in house plans, building materials, agricultural practices, and even patterns of marriage, inheritance, and residence. We can also use ethnographic data from southern Iraq itself to inform us on the ecological constraints within which Mesopotamian society operated, and to fill in the details about rural farmers, nomads, and marsh dwellers whose activities have defied archaeological detection.