ABSTRACT
This paper presents an overview of the development of complex and hierarchical societies in ancient south-western Asia from a comparative world-systems perspective, and presents an analysis of the timing of urban and empire growth/decline cycles in Mesopotamia and Egypt to test the hypotheses that these two regions may have experienced waves of development synchronously. We also discuss how climate change may have influenced the patterns of development. In a nutshell, our argument is that there have been systemic relations among different peoples since at least the first human settlements by the Natufians some 12,000 years ago (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). The developmental logic of these intersocietal systems has changed over time as new techniques of power and institutions have emerged, but there are also broad continuities and similar patterns over millennia as world-systems became larger. This chapter utilizes the conceptual apparatus of the comparative world-systems perspective to examine the patterns of development in prehistoric and ancient western Asia. Thus, we speak of strong core polities and weaker and dependent peripheral societies, as well as societies in the middle, which we call semi-peripheral. And we bound systems by using interaction networks in which important, two-way and regular interaction links peoples with different cultures. This network approach to bounding world-systems is explicated in Chase-Dunn and Jorgenson (2003).
