Travel and the Making of North Mesopotamian Polities

The emergence of political complexity in northern Mesopotamia ca. 2600 b.c. constituted an important cultural revolution which transformed how people within nascent states understood their communities. This study explores the relationship between inclusive and exclusive political strategies and free and limited access to a range of political and ritual spaces in cities and the countryside. First, it considers how the spatial organization of new cities constructed a particular type of political authority. Second, it reanalyzes several cultic monuments in light of the Ebla texts and Syrian ritual scenes and suggests that they formed pilgrimage networks that were interconnected with the economic and political systems of emerging states. Movement through newly created political landscapes was thus critical to the development of a cognitive schema that made sense of these polities

On the Edge of Empire: 2008 and 2009 Excavations at Oğlanqala, Azerbaijan

The nature of political complexity in the Caucasus has emerged as a significant research question in Near Eastern archaeology. Until recently, archaeological developments in Azerbaijan have been left out of this discussion. Two seasons of survey and excavation undertaken by the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences and the University of Pennsylvania at the Iron Age site of Oğlanqala in the Naxçıvan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan have begun to clarify the local origins of an Iron Age polity and its relationship to major Near Eastern empires, including Urartu, Achaemenid Persia, and Parthia. Situated in the northern half of the fertile Şərur Plain, Oğlanqala was in a position to control a pass through the Dərələyəz Mountains as well as the agricultural land of the plain. Indeed, in the Iron Age, the Şərur Plain was a complex landscape dominated by Oğlanqala but including at least six other fortresses and many cemeteries. The 2008 survey revealed that Oğlanqala was founded in the Early Iron Age and has extensive Middle and Late Iron Age material. Excavations in 2008 and 2009 in the citadel and domestic buildings uncovered architectural and ceramic differences from contemporaneous Urartian, Achaemenid, and classical sites, while also revealing evidence for interaction among them

Revising the Contours of History at Tell Leilan

Northern Mesopotamia’s low grain yield costs and high land transport costs were fundamental forces behind early state growth in the fifth-fourth millennia BC (Weiss1983, 1986, 1997). That development, as well as the southern Mesopotamian Uruk colonization in northern Mesopotamia, was terminated by the 5.2 ka BP abrupt climate change that persisted for two centuries (Weiss 2001). In its wake, northern Mesopotamia underwent the Ninevite 5 experience: four hundred years of reduced settlement size,limited political consolidation, and abridged contact with southern Mesopotamia (Weiss and Rova eds. 2002). In the Leilan IIId period, ca. 2600-2400 BC, at the end of the Ninevite 5 period, Leilan suddenly grew from village to city size, 90 hectares, and its politico-economic organization was transformed into a state apparatus (Weiss 1990). The reasons for this secondary state development are still unclear, but seems to have occurred synchronously across northern Mesopotamia and induced, briefly, the emulation of southern Mesopotamian administrative iconography (Weiss 1990)

In The Beginning: world History from Human Evolution to the First States

This engaging and accessible volume draws on the most recent historical archeological scholarship to tell the stories of human evolution, gathering and hunting societies, and the distinct breakthroughs that led to the emergence of the earliest cities, states, and civilizations. Highlighting both the separate paths and the intersecting journeys of diverse human communities, In the Beginning provides the essential but often neglected foundation on which all subsequent historical development was constructed.https://scholar.dominican.edu/cynthia-stokes-brown-books-personal-research/1076/thumbnail.jp

Tell Leilan Akkadian Imperialization, Collapse and Short-Lived Reoccupation Defined by High-Resolution Radiocarbon Dating

The article aims at reconstructing the Akkadian imperialisation at Tell Leilan, North-eastern Syria, presenting new data from excavations of the settlement's acropolis. High resolution C14 dates provide a strong chronological framework for the historical processes detected