Monday, January 24, 2011

Mario Liverani looks at the origin of the city of Uruk in his book Uruk: The First City. Liverani draws upon the ideas of previous historians, archeologists, etc to explain the forces behind the creation of the city of Uruk. For example, he draws upon archeologist Vere Gordon Childe’s concept of the “urban revolution,” where a society is first able to produce a surplus, and then to use that surplus for the construction of infrastructure and to support specialists and administrators. However, Liverani modifies this idea of the urban revolution to make it specific to Uruk in Mesopotamia. He places great importance on technological advances in the farming sector (such as irrigation and plowing) and he argues that the temple supported the revolution, by “providing an ideological cover for the painful extraction of the surpluses from consumption by its producers, and for their destination to communal use” (Liverani 7). This concept of the emergence of a city based on Liverani’s ideas is intriguing; personally I would think that personal gains would have played a role, but he does not mention any actors in Uruk who would gain power with the creation of a city.

For example, only when the agricultural surplus hit a certain threshold, reconstruction of socio-political relations started to take place. The existence of a centralized administration came out of necessity, rather than want for power. Furthermore, Liverani explains that the system that arose in Uruk was actually “incompatible with chiefdom” (Liverani 21). Liverani describes the Uruk community in a way that makes them seem like a utopia. For example, Liverani explains how in Uruk the surplus was used for social purposes and that consumption was communal, versus how if a chief was in power the surplus would be used to base his prestige and the prestige of his own clan off of. Also, he says that these communal forms of consumption “provided the basis for social cohesion and the sublimation of socioeconomic disparity” (Liverani 22). Liverani describes the culture of Uruk as being egalitarian and lacking social inequality. In support of this, he cites the mass produced pottery that “lack[ed] lively characteristics and decorations” as well as the lack of variation in the sizes of houses (Liverani 22).

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