We have now seen the progressive growth of Near Eastern states and their history in the course of three millennia (3500—500 bc), from the Urban Revolution to the Achaemenid empire. In this long process, individual villages and transhumant groups gradually became part of larger local systems (or city-states) featuring one city as the main centre of a mainly agro-pastoral hinterland. With time, states turned into regional entities, ruling over several areas and cities. Sometimes, they even became ‘nation’ states, namely, states where political and ethnical identities coincided. Finally, towards the end of this long process, some states grew even larger, becoming the centres of ‘universal’ empires.
This political growth was not part of a single and homogeneous transition. Some areas clearly experienced a process of unification early on, while others kept their internal political divisions for a longer period of time. Similarly, some phases saw the early formation of pseudo-imperialistic entities, while others experienced a marked tendency towards fragmentation. Broadly speaking, the average size of political formations undoubtedly experienced a progressive growth. Conversely, the number of independent states within the Near East gradually decreased. However, the moment in which a single political entity managed to control the Near East as a whole, and even crossed its boundaries, evidently marks the end of this book. This is mainly due to the fact that this book’s perspective is far too narrow to deal with the development of larger territorial states. If the development of the Persian empire and the Hellenistic period had been included in this volume, it would have been necessary to not only consider their Near Eastern premises, but also their Aegean, Mediterranean, Egyptian, Iranian, Central Asian and Indian ones. In other words, with these phases, the point of view becomes so broad as to require an entirely different approach and methodology.
There are several reasons why this progressive geopolitical growth took place. The first factor, linked to technological developments, was the marked increase of opportunities across a variety of sectors in terms of knowledge, communication and transport (of people and goods). Moreover, there was the increased mobility of caravans and troops. A state was essentially based on the management of a series of movements (of men, messages and goods). Therefore, technological developments allowed the establishment of the optimal dimension of these interactions for each state. This factor, however, was relatively modest in size. After all, between the Akkadian and Neo-Assyrian period, geographic knowledge, techniques for communication and means of transport did not change very much. Only the beginning (in the Urban Revolution) and the end (in the Persian empire) of this period really show the remarkable developmental ‘jump’ accomplished in the span of three millennia. These two moments therefore mark the beginning and end of a moderate, yet consistent, growth.
A far more influential factor was state administration, a sector that is closely linked to the degree of socio-economic complexity of a state. Initially, the administration was focused on the simple partition of food produced or harvested by an enlarged family, and the responsibilities of each individual member in case of external dangers. Therefore, villages and transhumant groups were still able to cope on their own. However, at one point it became necessary to establish and regulate quotas to be given to each individual, developing a system based on a social and spatial division of labour. Consequently, the ‘county’ or ‘region’ became the smallest unit of a state, characterised by a city acting as the centre of specialist labour and leadership, and a network of villages acting as agricultural centres. Later on, when a state’s identity gradually began to include linguistic and religious elements, these entities became ‘nation’ states. Therefore, it can be said that each political development in a state’s ideology and administration brought, or could have brought, territorial expansion.
In this expansion, conceived as a progressive acquisition by social units of increasingly more complex functions, the most basic units continued to maintain their original size. On the one hand, this led to the progressive movement of formerly important roles outside a state’s sphere of direct control, which were left in the hands of smaller, relatively apolitical, groups (social classes, specialised groups, or families). On the other hand, this situation led to a type of structure similar to the one of ‘Chinese boxes’, where the larger and politically unifying ‘box’ contains a series of smaller ‘boxes’. From a structural point of view, this series of ‘boxes’ mirrors the varying influence of these functions. From a historical point of view, these ‘boxes’ mark the stages that led to the formation of the largest political entities in the Near East. Therefore, the main political formation of the Neolithic period, namely, the village, survived as part of larger local, regional and imperial states. However, the village essentially maintained the same responsibilities. At the beginning, the functions performed by the village seemed the only and most fundamental ones. Later on, these same responsibilities became largely secondary, strictly local and politically irrelevant. The same can be said for the city. Following a period in which the city acted as the ultimate centre of political power, it subsequently became a local branch of a larger state. At the same time, the city maintained its characteristic decisional and administrative competences. Finally, the same process affected regions, defined through geographic boundaries or common ethno-linguistic or cultural features. These regions, then, became provinces or satrapies of larger empires, without losing their size or competences.
The increased complexity of these historical and political developments led to the growth of their population and production base. The two main indicators of this phenomenon are the size of the population and the overall production levels. Unfortunately, we lack a systematic and extensive collection of data on this matter (both in terms of time and space). However, one still gets the impression that long-term growth of population and production levels in the Near East appeared alongside several fluctuations. These fluctuations were characterised by sudden rises and declines, whose scale significantly affected the overall process of growth. Naturally, short-term fluctuations were linked to occasional factors, while long-term growth was centred on fundamental changes in modes of production. These changes ensured a drastic surge in production and survival rates. The marked demographic and production growth of the Urban Revolution led to the almost tenfold growth of the levels attested for the Neolithic period. However, the phase covered in this book substantially constitutes a period of stasis or, more accurately, an alternation between evolution and crisis, which did not bring about sudden or drastic changes in production levels. This fact shows that the period between 3500 and 500 bc constitutes a phase marked by a single fundamental mode of production. In this regard, intermediate fluctuations cannot be ignored and are particularly visible in major centres. This indicates that they were the result of waves of ‘urbanisation’ (first in the Uruk period, then the Early Bronze Age, the Middle and Late Bronze Age, and, lastly, in the Iron II period), separated by phases of demographic and documentary decline (the so-called ‘dark ages’).
The end of this long journey (roughly covering the third quarter of the first millennium bc) shows again a remarkable development, not just within the Near East, but also outside of it. Once again, this sudden change remains difficult to quantify, but one can assume that its population and production levels tripled. Unlike previous, largely local, and temporary developments, this surge led to the establishment of new production and demographic levels. The latter would remain the same throughout the Classical period, Late Antiquity and the Medieval period, until the appearance of new developments. Therefore, the choice of 500 bc as the moment to end this volume can also be justified from this point of view, being a visible mark of a historical and structural change that was not momentary, but would last for the following centuries.
The geopolitical growth of states also led to the expansion of the Near Eastern borders. For three millennia, the Near East remained a sort of urbanised island. It was characterised by a concentration of people and production processes in their centres, and surrounded by a more primitive and less inhabited periphery. When the above-mentioned processes began to affect the periphery as well, the nature of borders in the Near East began to change. In other words, the edge of the Near East ceased to separate inhabited areas from deserted ones, or an organised world from a chaotic one, or settled areas from regions simply rich in natural resources. Borders began to separate different inhabited areas structured in a variety of ways.
From a Western (largely Eurocentric) perspective, one of the most powerful images of the Near East in the Pre-Classical period is that of a centre of technological and administrative innovation, which eventually spread to the west, stimulating the growth of the European periphery. After 500 bc, however, this image is replaced by the contraposition between East and West. In fact, in the meantime, the West reached a position able to oppose the former centrality and privileged stance of the Near East. Naturally, apart from this opposition between Europe and the Near East, there were new frontiers that developed around the same time: the frontier between the Iranian and Chinese world, which affected Central Asia; the frontier between the Near East and India; and the southern border of the Classical World, Christianity, and then Islam, in Africa. However, these other areas did not affect the Western world as much. On the contrary, the opposition between East and West would continue to hold a discriminative value and a place of absolute importance in the European tradition.
It is certain that the ideas of ‘ex Oriente lux’ (literally, ‘light from the East’) and of the cultural rivalry between the East and the West are based on Eurocentric and misleading simplifications, or even bona fide falsifications of the evidence. The same can be said of the so-called leitmotif of world history, which sees the progressive movement from the east to the west of the centre of civilisation (from the Near East to Greece, then Rome, then Western Europe). All these stereotypes do not fit within a balanced and exhaustive evaluation of the evidence. The concept of ‘border’ itself is largely subjective, since it is based on the establishment of an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, of an ‘us’ and ‘them’. Consequently, the resulting historical images based on these oppositions are inevitably biased. However, an awareness of the subjective bias of these images allows these Eurocentric simplifications to provide a certain degree of insightful self-analysis. From an objective and simplified point of view, then, the direct heir of the civilisations of the Ancient Near East is the Hellenistic world, then the Christian East, the Iranian empires, and Islam. From a purely Eurocentric perspective, it is highly significant that this book ends when the Near East ‘passed the baton’ over to Greece and the Mediterranean world.
World History
