Crops and livestock

The Near East has the seminal role in the history of agriculture, witnessing the first domesticated plants and animals, associated with a sedentary village lifestyle which persists to this day. Although lacking metal and forming pottery by hand, the early farming cultures of northern Iraq and the mountain fringes were not technologically backward, as the quality of their fine painted ceramics, their stone vessels, their flint implements and not least their architecture bears witness. Archaeological research in the last forty years has understandably concentrated on seeking out the earliest phases of these cultures and teasing out the origins of the new strategies for subsistence. Hence much work remains to be done on the nature of the large and probably prosperous later farming communities of Halaf and Ubaid times, when the South Mesopotamian plain was settled – should we say colonized? – and the critical steps toward urban life were taken. Consequently we can say little about possible changes in the agricultural regime in the period between incipient agriculture (say 8000 bc) and the Uruk period some four millennia later. ²⁴¹ In early historical Mesopotamia we are looking at agriculture in another social context, one in which the rural world constantly interacted with the urban, and agricultural strategies were often directed by the urban sector towards its own economic requirements at the expense of the traditional subsistence pattern. We tend to think of the exploitation of animals and plants as being an old-fashioned, unchanging way of life, but in the absence of machines and artificial substances the tractive power of the larger animals (oxen and equids) and the by-products of all of them were important to the technology of the urban sector of the early states, and the exploitation processes are accordingly geared to urban needs.

The hallmark of third-millennium agriculture is the maximization of production. Similar trends can be observed in all societies where an essentially peasant economy is being transformed by the creation and the resulting demands of cities and associated elites, accompanied both by population growth, with the consequent need for increased resources, and by political conditions tending to the exploitation of the rural sector. There are two broad strategies for this, intensification and expansion: the first seeks to get more out of the existing agronomic regime, as for instance by energetic application of fertilizer or more intensive use of the ground by planting more frequently or by mixed crops; the second expands the area of land under agriculture, and will usually involve considerable input of new labour, either by a modification of the existing social structure, or by the introduction of new labour sources. The newly won land will often by its nature require different techniques or strategies. The extraordinary wealth of documentation at our disposal for the third millennium bc is a direct consequence of urban policies of maximization, and 158enables us to see many detailed ways in which this second, managerial, agricultural revolution worked itself out, with consequences which transformed Old World farming in ways we are only beginning to suspect.