Chapter Four States of Mind: Approaching Complexity in Ancient Mesopotamia

Chapter Four

States of mind Approaching complexity

The complexity of complexity

On the subject of the origin of primary states, in nineteen seventy-seven Henry Wright wrote: 'It is a fundamental problem which, though it cannot have an ultimate solution, serves as a measure against which to evaluate the effectiveness of new perspectives and new methods.' Within the arena of ancient Mesopotamia there is an unrivalled diachronic wealth of archaeological material with which to address issues pertaining to the development of complex societies. As with the previous chapter's topic, the subject of complexity in ancient Mesopotamia is such a large and diverse field that we can do no more than sample some of the major issues here. Through the millennia of later prehistory and all recorded history, and within the limits of the available, often patchy evidence, we can witness the rise, flux and fall of society after society. Attestations of some degree of complexity appear very early on in the archaeological record of Mesopotamia. As we have seen in the previous chapter, there are credible indications of social and cultic complexity of some sophistication even as early as the first sedentary settlements of human groups in the earliest centuries of the Holocene, at sites such as Hallan Çemi and Göbekli Höyük on the northern fringes of Mesopotamia. We can consider the growth of social complexity in later millennia by studying the material remains of a host of societies that developed within the context of the Mesopotamian past, culminating in the appearance of social and political entities known as states and empires. Empires and their archaeological study will be the subject of the following chapter. For now our main concern is with approaches to the study of complex societies of the later prehistory of Mesopotamia, in particular those of the fifth and fourth millennia before Christ. The socio-political entities of Mesopotamia in these critical centuries have been characterised in a range of ways, but most observers would agree that we are here concerned with complex chiefdoms and states, at least. In terms of basic approach to these entities we here agree with Earle that 'the fundamental dynamics of chiefdoms are essentially the same as those of states.'

As archaeologists, how do we approach these highly various and idiosyncratic entities? Does each ancient state or complex society need to be approached and apprehended solely on its own terms, each of its elements studied, described and analysed in an attempt at its particular history, or are there principles and themes underlying the generation, maintenance, death and regeneration of societies that we can approach by means of the archaeological record? Perhaps we need to begin by defining social complexity, a much-used phrase in archaeology. There are no fixed rules or universally agreed criteria to such an end, but some possible areas of general agreement are proffered below. While we may concur with the statement that 'For less well known states, where texts are absent, perhaps the best definition is the most general and simple, so as to encompass marked historical variability,' even for those states that do have textual sources considerable flexibility in approach is certainly needed.

Recent studies have laid emphasis on power, control and authority as useful analytical concepts in approaches to past complex societies. In view of an increasing emphasis on the role of 'society,' even within Palaeolithic communities, the fundamental dynamics of communities of humans can perhaps be approached by means of certain basic concepts rooted in the nature of all human interaction. In all cases we are concerned with approaching the issue of how groups of human beings address the challenges and opportunities generated by living together in close proximity with variable access to resources of material and non-material type. By 'resources' is meant anything from daily bread to holy blessings, and from precious metals to political charisma. The scale and spectacular material residues of the complex states and empires of late prehistory and early history should not lead us into a belief that pre-state human communities lacked structuring principles founded in issues of power, control and differential access to commodities. Nevertheless, there is a world of difference between a hunter-gatherer band of twenty-five to thirty individuals who might occasionally promote an individual to act as a leader under specific circumstances, on the one hand, and an urban polity of twenty thousand individuals or more whose control extends over thousands of square kilometres and whose social structure is formalised and hierarchical, on the other. But what is the nature of those differences, and how do we locate, identify and study them in the archaeological record?

Let us begin by defining some anthropological characteristics of complex societies, as broadly defined. Amongst the many studies in recent decades of chiefdoms and states, most include at least some of the following elements in their definitions of societal complexity.