T h e A m e r i c a n U n i v e r s i t y o f R o m e HSM Survey of Western Civilization I Session 3 The International Bronze Age and its Aftermath. An early process of globalization? The birth of real and active International Relations

Following up on Adams (Slide 9, module 2) Robert McC. Adams's Heartland of Cities (1981), base on surveys of the plains of Iran and Iraq… Studies archaeological evidence of Mesopotamia within its ecological and historical context. His analysis focuses on how successive political entities of Mesopotamia accommodated themselves to their economic and demographic environment. In his search for causes, he notes that the same landscape that produced these cities ultimately witnessed their destruction. Thus, we proposes that patterns of urbanization and economic development "were not generated by any unique propensities of the landscape, and that we must look instead to the human forces that were harnessed in the building of the cities themselves" (1981: 252).”

Adams sees environmental factors as important. While rejecting Wittfogel's major premise that irrigation is the primary cause of cultural complexity, he nonetheless states: In the largest sense, Mesopotamian cities can be viewed as an adaptation to [the] perennial problem of periodic, unpredictable shortages. They provided concentration points for the storage of surpluses, necessarily soon walled to assure their defensibility. The initial distribution of smaller communities around them suggests primarily localized exploitation of land, with much of the producing population being persuaded or compelled to take up residence within individual walled centers rather than remaining in villages closer to their fields.

This tendency to conglomerate had technological reasons, but could hardly have been brought about without the development of powerful new means for unifying what originally were socially and culturally heterogeneous groups. Adams counts irrigation management as just one major stimulus to Mesopotamian developments…as risk-reduction strategies to buffer against crop disease, droughts, floods, locusts, salinization, and armed attack... In contrast to Wright and Johnson's stress on information flow and decision making, Adams suggests "that the primary basis for [political-economic] organization was... religious allegiance to deities or cults identified with particular localities, political superordination resting ultimately on the possibility of military coercion, or a fluid mixture of both" (1981: 78).

Another multivariant theory: Redman’s functionalist theory of State origins environmental variables + sociological conditions Taken from Wenke 1984)

Algaze (1993) and the power of commercial networks… The rise of Sumerian civilization in southern Iraq in the Uruk period, sometime in the second half of the fourth millennium B.C., presents us with a clear instance of the close relationship between access to resources not locally available and emergent social complexity. Save for the products of irrigated agriculture and animal husbandry, the alluvial lowlands of Iraq are devoid of almost all the commodities required to sustain complex societies, such as timber and wood products, precious and base metals, and utilitarian and exotic stones. The needed resources were available only in areas at the periphery of southern Mesopotamia, principally in the highlands of Iran and Anatolia.

Algaze (1993) Throughout the millennia these commodities were obtained by diverse means ranging from trade to tribute and plunder-the specifics varying from area to area, depending on the balance of force between contemporary societies at any given time. Presently available evidence indicates that in the later part of the Uruk period resources essential for rapidly developing southern Mesopotamian polities were procured, in part, through a complex network of outposts at selected locations across the high plains of northern Mesopotamia, northern Syria, and southeastern Anatolia (thereafter Syro-Mesopotamia) and the Zagros and Taurus highlands of Iran and Anatolia.

The relationship among the city-states of Mesopotamia Networks of states. Among simple states these networks seem to be regulated by competition and alliance, as was briefly noted for chiefdoms. A difference is that developing state networks are periodically centralized into a single political unit incorporating most previously existing polities. Such polities, which may be termed "empires“.

Empire Sinopoli (1994): a territorially expansive and incorporative kind of state, involving relationships in which one state exercises control over other sociopolitical entities (e.g. states, chiefdoms, non-stratified societies), and of imperialism as the process of creating and maintaining empires. The diverse polities and communities that constitute an empire typically retain some degree of autonomy-…- and centrally-defined cultural identity, and in some dimensions of political and economic decision making. Most authors also share a conception of various kinds of empires distinguished by differing degrees of political and/or economic control, viewed either as discrete types or as variations along a continuum from weakly integrated to more highly centralized polities… (…from weakly to tightly integrated, or from “hegemonic” to “territorial”)

Q of chapter 2. What impact did Indo-European-speaking peoples have on the patterns of Near Eastern life? In what ways did New Kingdom Egypt differ from the Old and Middle Kingdoms?. What were the principal features of the Late Bronze Age international system?. How similar was Mycenaean culture to Minoan culture?. Why did Phoenician cities prosper during the Early Iron Age?. What were the foundations of Assyrian imperial power?. In what ways did the Persian empire differ from its Near East predecessors? How would you account for those differences?. What developments marked the Hebrew transition from polytheism to monotheism?\

Q of chapter 2 What impact did Indo-European-speaking peoples have on the patterns of Near Eastern life? In what ways did New Kingdom Egypt differ from the Old and Middle Kingdoms? What were the principal features of the Late Bronze Age international system? How similar was Mycenaean culture to Minoan culture? Why did Phoenician cities prosper during the Early Iron Age? What were the foundations of Assyrian imperial power? In what ways did the Persian empire differ from its Near East predecessors? How would you account for those differences? What developments marked the Hebrew transition from polytheism to monotheism?