Structure and Dynamics (On the Economic Geography of Gilgamesh)
Due to circumstances which I am at a loss to explain, I find myself on
the editorial
board of a new, open access, peer-reviewed journal, Structure and Dynamics:
eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences. I am really happy
to report that Volume 1,
Issue 1 is now live, though I believe there are still some papers which are
being processed for this issue, and the next two issues of volume 1 should
follow shortly. While they are all good papers (seriously!), I will,
somewhat arbitrarily and unfairly, single out one of them for special mention,
on the grounds of popular appeal:
- Guillermo Algaze, "The Sumerian Takeoff"
- Economic geographers correctly note that regional variations in economic
activity and population agglomeration are always the result of self-reinforcing
processes of resource production, accumulation, exchange, and innovation. This
article proposes that essentially similar forces account for the emergence of
the world's earliest cities in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers (Southern Mesopotamia), sometime during the second half of the
fourth millennium BC.
- That emergence of early cities in the southern Mesopotamian alluvium must
be understood in terms of the unique ecological conditions that existed across
the region during the fourth millennium, and the enduring geographical
framework of the area, which allowed for the efficient movement of commodities
via water transport and facilitated interaction between diverse social units
alongside natural and artificial river channels. These conditions promoted
evolving long-term trade patterns that, inadvertently, differentially favored
the development of polities in the southern Mesopotamian alluvium over
contemporary societies in neighboring regions.
- More specifically, my contention is that by the final quarter of the fourth
millennium the social and economic multiplier effects of trade patterns that
had been in place for centuries — if not millennia — had brought
about substantial increases in population agglomeration throughout the southern
alluvial lowlands. Concurrent with these increases, and partly as a result of
them, important socio-economic innovations started to appear in the
increasingly urbanized polities of southern Mesopotamia that were unachievable
in other areas of the Ancient Near East where urban grids of comparable scale
and complexity did not exist at the time. Most salient among these innovations
were (1) new forms of labor organization delivering economies of scale in the
production of subsistence and industrial commodities to southern societies, and
(2) the creation of new forms of record keeping in southern cities that were
much more capable of conveying information across time and space than the
simpler reckoning systems used by contemporary polities elsewhere. These
innovations furnished southern Mesopotamian polities of the fourth millennium
with what turned out to be their most important competitive advantage over
neighboring societies. More than any other factor, they help explain why
complex regionally organized city-states emerged earlier in southern Iraq than
elsewhere in the Near East, or the world.
There is much more good stuff in this issue, though, and more to come soon.
If you're work falls within the aims and scope
of SDEAS, I strongly encourage you to submit.
Linkage;
Writing for Antiquity
Posted at September 28, 2005 17:50 | permanent link