Uruk The First City: Intro, Ch1 and Ch2

While reading Mario Liverani’s essay in “Uruk, The First City” I was constantly pondering on who was the targeted audience, if any, and would a general audience be able to clearly comprehend the message Liverani is attempting to convey. Clearly, Liverani expands on the theories of previous scholars, mainly that of Vere Gordon Childe’s and Karl Marx’s and although their theories were formulated in a time before much evidence of the ancient near east was discovered, Liverani leads the reader into why their work can be valid in application to the development of the “First City.” But what has potential to confuse the general audience is his continuation of providing past scholars’ theories that he then proves incorrect. This method leads me to believe that the targeted audience might be geared towards those who have, or who even follow, the theories of Karl Polanyi and Fritz Heichelheim and that they actually know of other scholar’s works and could already be heavily invested in researching such topics.

The second chapter, on the other hand, might be a bit easier to grasp by the general audience. Liverani provides clear archaeological evidence of how social transformation of the area provides apparent understandings of how the Uruk was able to transform into the society they became, with the use of advanced technological tools (such as the plow and irrigation systems). But what may not have been clearly conveyed is how the people that soon became a part of Uruk was able to accept that the temples will be the central authoritative power, which seems to give an unfair advantage to those in control of it. Although Liverani does state that their society was not consisting of social inequality (pg 22) I find it hard to fully accept that workers were fine with providing their surplus of production after their use of physical strength (although not as intense as it was before) to individuals that did not have to work in the fields. Liverani does state “the temples was the only institution that could convince producers to give up substantial parts of their work for the advantage of the community and its administrators, represented by their divine hypostases.” (pg 25) What seems to be expected here is that the audience will not question how exactly the people came to accept that the administrators do in fact represent divine hypostases. I believe this may actually be a huge contributing factor to understanding the instant acceptance of the temples, which may also show that Liverani does assume that the targeted audience will have some prior knowledge about this topic.