Mesopotamian cities did not exist in a vacuum; the rural hinterland was replete with settlements varying in size from small towns to hamlets, farmsteads, reed hut settlements, and nomadic tents. Our difficulty is that most of these have remained unexcavated, and some of the smallest settlements - including all where reed huts or tents rather than mud-brick houses dominated - could not be identified in the regional surveys. Nevertheless, two early second millennium village-sized sites, both less than 2 hectares or 5 acres in size, have been largely excavated, providing a model of what such small communities might have looked like. Tell Harmal and Haradum were surrounded by walls, both had administrative buildings, temples, and workshop areas, and both had houses containing tablets indicating both literacy and the same kinds of economic concerns as contemporary urban residents (Baqir 1946, 1959; Kepinski-Lecomte 1992). Their house patterns differed slightly in that they lacked both the rare very large houses and the very small houses found in urban districts. While this might suggest less difference in wealth in these small communities, a comparison of object classes from Haradum and Mashkan-shapir shows that the only types of objects found in the big site and absent in the small one are the inscribed nails and cylinders that testify to royal building projects at Mashkan-shapir. Thus these small mud-brick communities, with populations of fewer than 500 people, nevertheless look more like cities writ small than like a completely different kind of settlement.
This does not mean, of course, that true rural settlements did not exist, but simply that we have yet to find a way to identify them. Steinkeller’s (n. d.) analysis of the countryside around Umma references numerous tiny settlements, probably made up of no more than a single family, associated with threshing floors and their silos. These sites were both too small and probably too ephemeral to be identified today. Also present were temples of various sizes, rural estates including palaces, the encampments of nomads, and the reed huts of the marsh dwellers. All of the evidence suggests that it is a mistake to assume that rural Mesopotamia was fundamentally different from the cities. Data from Haradum and Tell Harmal indicate that the inhabitants of these two tiny villages were as wealthy, literate, and sophisticated as their urban counterparts, and the same was probably true of most of those known only from textual records. The mobility characteristic of Mesopotamia, both vertical between the rich and poor and horizontal between ways of life, would not have been possible had there not been a fundamental similarity in social structure.
In sum, just as the population of Mesopotamian cities seems to have been very agrarian, with well over 50 percent of the population making their living through agriculture, so was the rural sector very urban. I close with the suggestion that Mesopotamian households and the neighborhoods or villages that they formed were the real building blocks of society, but it was the ability of the urban centers to provide both a larger political arena and an efficient resource base that led to their popularity. Such a view is significantly different from the temple - and palace-focused approach typical of scholarship half a century ago.
World History
