THE ENVIRONMENT OF CITY-STATES

Contemporary written documents and settlement pattern studies indicate that the third-millennium cities in northern Mesopotamia belonged to independent city-state polities in their respective regions, embedded in turn within a larger interregional network of political, diplomatic, and economic interactions. Indirect historical references from the contemporary site of Ebla (modern Tell Mardikh) reflect the interregional political landscape to which Titris most likely belonged. Although cuneiform tablets have also been unearthed in other contemporary, or slightly later sites such as Tell Beydar and Tell Brak, it is only the political documents of Ebla that provide signiicant information on the nature of the sociopolitical interactions between major cities in northern Mesopotamia and its environs around 2300 BC. The most useful Ebla documents for understanding the nature of the interstate politics in the region deal with diplomatic alliances (e. g., "Hamazi Letter"), wars (e. g., "Enna-Dagan Letter"), and treaties

(e. g., "Treaty with 'Abarsal'") (Pettinato 1981:95-109). These clearly indicate that at this time, a small number of powerful and centralized kingdoms - including Ebla itself - dominated smaller, subject communities within their spheres of influence (Pettinato 1981, 1991). In this interregional city-state system, their respective capital cities were in constant contact with each other for various political and economic matters.

The picture of the international political landscape reconstructed from the Ebla texts is in accordance with Wilkinson's observations based on site survey results for mid-third millennium northern Mesopotamia. Wilkinson (2003:123, 125) characterizes this region as "landscapes of tells" in which "the system of nucleated tell-based settlement existed within a variegated and patchy landscape comprising intensive cultivation around settlements with zones of pasture beyond." During the period under consideration, the northern cities were the focal points of large population agglomeration, and the maximum occupation area of these northern sites, except for Tell Taya and possibly Tell Brak, was about 100 ha. Sustaining the growth of these urban sites were smaller, neighboring villages and their immediate rural hinterlands that provided agricultural products to their regional centers (Wilkinson 1994). After thriving for several centuries, most of these cities declined toward the end of the millennium, in some cases being abandoned altogether.1