In concert with development of the state, about 4000 to 3000 bce, the Near East witnessed an expansion of population and material culture from southern Mesopotamia into northern Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Iranian Zagros Mountains. New sites with purely southern Mesopotamian culture were founded, while at long-occupied sites local traditions were overrun by southern pottery and architecture. These colonies were an essential element of early Mesopotamian complex society, and this phenomenon is one of the most intensively studied aspects of the region. The most popular current model is that these were southern trade colonies, established to ensure continuous and increased access to the resources of the mountainous areas around the lower river plains - timber, stones, and metals. But we are now in the uncomfortable position of knowing far more about the Uruk period at these sites than we do about the contemporary southern Mesopotamian homeland. And the fact that most work on the Mesopotamian state for several decades has necessarily been based in this ‘‘Uruk expansion phenomenon’’ has perhaps meant an overestimation of trade’s importance for that state. It must be emphasized that the Uruk phenomenon was an intensification of an interaction sphere present in the region for millennia.
Initially these sites were viewed as evidence for the south Mesopotamian core exploiting peripheral areas (Algaze 1993). But it is now generally acknowledged that the north exhibited social complexity before the arrival of southern Uruk people and material culture, and the relationship cannot be considered asymmetrical (Algaze 2001b; Stein 2001). The purpose of the southern expansion is still debated between those who see it as motivated by desire to control resources and those who see it as motivated by desire simply to gain access to resources. There was also great variability within the expansion phenomenon, from genuine southern Mesopotamian settlements as at Habuba Kabira in central Syria, through southern outposts embedded within local populations seen at Hacinebi in Turkey, to sites which retained local traditions while borrowing from the south illustrated at Arslan Tepe also in Turkey. Was each colony linked to a different city-state in the south, or did southern cities unite to invest in an array of colonies, or were the colonies’ inhabitants economic migrants, no longer associated with the south at all? Questions about the expansion remain, but it is far more important that we return to ask questions in and of south Iraq.
World History
