ABSTRACT
On the subject of the origin of primary states, in 1977 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’ (Wright 1977: 379). 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 BC. 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 (1997: 14) that ‘the fundamental dynamics of chiefdoms are essentially the same as those of states’.
