Excavations and texts found in the alluvium plain of southern Mesopotamia have led to models for cities and society that deeply influenced research made later in other areas of mesopotamia. In these models, cities evolved from villages and are large, mostly irregular, fortified settlements made of the (haphazard) aggregation of houses, workshops, temples, shrines, and palaces built over many centuries (stone 2007), while society was based on sedentarism and irrigated agriculture. Texts show that at some point these sedentary peoples came into conflict with nomads, usually labeled as Amorites, coming from the northwest, who finally took over at the very beginning of the second millennium.1
With this model in mind, it is not very surprising that archaeological work done later on in northern syria, especially on the main mounds, was interpreted in the same way: major settlements are also considered there as cities with large populations ruled by kings, the major economic activity is said to be agriculture, eventually improved by irrigation canals, and society is considered to be mostly sedentary.
But northern mesopotamia and central syria differ greatly from southern mesopotamia, both in landscape and in climate, and it is possible to distinguish two major geographical
1. An area with sufficient rain for dry agriculture, above the isohyet of 300 mm rainfall, and where many tells are still visible; it is situated mainly in the west and northeast,41 42 43 at the foot of the mountains.
2. A semi-arid zone under the isohyet of 300 mm rainfall, not suitable for agriculture without serious risks and with much fewer traces of settlement; it is situated mainly in the center, but includes also part (southwest) of the upper Khabur (fig. 10.1).
Curiously, it is in this semi-arid zone that flow most of the perennial rivers — the Euphrates, the Balikh, and the Khabur. Along these narrow ribbons of water, irrigation is possible in small areas but in very restricted conditions; therefore, it is not possible to compare them with the alluvial southern plain. most of this territory is otherwise just a huge steppe
1 semitic/Amorite names are mentioned in very early texts from the third millennium, see for instance sollberger and Kupper 1971: 60, n. 2, about the added name “Lumma” to E’annatum, third king of the Lagash Dynasty, and about his nephew’s and grandmother’s names. This has recently been first reasserted by marchesi (2006: 1-28), who linked
BERTILLE LYONNET
Incised by temporary wadis, the home of wild onagers and gazelles, but also an excellent pastureland for sheep and goats at certain periods of the year.
Obviously, the way of life that developed in this semi-arid zone is not necessarily the same as in southern Mesopotamia. In fact, the predominance of nomads and/or pastoralists in this area has long been evidenced in texts and sources from the third millennium until present times (Lyonnet 2001). These more or less mobile groups were first seen by the epigraphers as constant opponents (Rowton 1973; Kupper 1982), or at best as the main basis for the wealth of the cities because of their flocks, until it was discovered that the kings themselves belonged to the same nomadic tribes (charpin and Durand 1986), and that nomadism and pastoralism had played a far more important role in the local societies than previously supposed (Durand 2004).
As do many ethnographic studies, these texts show several degrees of mobility and constant change of status and kinships within these groups, including moments of full sedenta-rism until they returned to mobile life again. many reasons for these constant changes can be advanced, either political, economic, and/or climatic, and it is not easy to trace them in the absence of precise textual data. many of these tribes, or at least part of them, spent/spend some months close to wadis or rivers during the winter where they dealt/deal with the plowing of the fields and small irrigation work to grow cereals, both for themselves and for their herds (Yedid 1984; D’hont 1994).
Though all this is known, nomads or pastoralists are most of the time still considered in an extreme way — totally illiterate tent dwellers dealing exclusively with animal husbandry — so that any new text or inscription, architectural, or agricultural feature has to be the hallmark of sedentary people without any connections to nomads except for fighting or eventually controlling them. Rare are those like F. Hole (1991), A. Porter (2002, 2004), or myself (Lyonnet 1998, 2001, 2004) who see traces of these mobile groups in the ruins they excavate in northern Mesopotamia or in the new documents they find.
On the basis of the results from a survey, I had pointed out a repeated cultural fracture at different periods along a line placed slightly higher up than the 300 mm isohyet (fig. 10.2) and proposed that the area to its southwest was linked to the steppe, and therefore a domain for pastoralists and/or nomads (Lyonnet 1996). Concerning the third millennium, this led me to understand the contemporary villages and Kranzhugel (or “round cities”) of this semi-arid zone as due to semi-mobile pastoralists (Lyonnet 1998, 2004). In my proposal, these people are considered as integrated into a complex socioeconomic system and would have moved seasonally from the best suited areas for the cultivation of barley (mostly the river valleys) to the steppe plateau where their flocks could have pastured. In this system, villages are mainly used as storage places with numerous silos,43 and only a few of them offered houses not necessarily used all the year around,44 45 while most of the population — numerous according to the number of cemeteries found in the area (Lyonnet 2004) — probably lived in light shelters or tents, traces of which have not yet been discovered. Finally, the largest circular settlements are considered not as “cities” for a sedentary population, since only a few families could have lived there, but rather as places of gathering for these pastoral groups. They could have been used for different purposes: politics/justice/protection because of the possible residence for the sheikh of the tribe; religious because of temples for rituals; economic because of silos and empty places for the exchange of products.
3 Sites like Tell Khazne, Tell ‘Atij, Tell Raq’ai, Tell Kerma, etc.
One of the main problems raised by many colleagues against this proposal is the size and the plan of some of these round cities, considered far too sophisticated to be due to mobile groups. It is the aim of this article to try to answer this important question.
Recent excavations have brought to light more data on round cities and it is now clear that they appear at two different times during the third millennium, first around 2900 B. C. in northern Mesopotamia and again around 2400 B. C. in central syria,45 and that they lasted for some centuries. reconsidering three of these sites at different periods, mari at the time when it was founded and during the first centuries that follow (Ville I, around 2900-2500 B. C.), Beydar at the time of the tablets that were discovered (around 2400 B. C.), and Al-Rawda before its abandonment (near the end of the third millennium), I will try, on the basis of the information given by their main excavators, to argue further for my interpretation: instead of being cities or even capitals conceived by and for a sedentary population, they were founded and inhabited by tribal groups dealing mainly with animal husbandry, part of whom lived most of the time in the surrounding steppe, but who were nevertheless able to produce grain and to build, including eventually some monumental constructions.
Though connected by a long tradition, each of these round cities at these different times of the third millennium presents a different image. This is possibly due to a variation in the mobile/sedentary status of the population at each of these different periods, or to historical events: different issues to explain these differences are raised in the conclusion.
World History
