Early Mesopotamian Urban Societies Were Not States

Summary

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The “early states” of ancient Mesopotamia are factoids and straw men. Mesopotamia appears in textbooks as the prime example of the world’s earliest pristine states, and the flourishing of recent scholarship on the variability of other centralized large polities has often been via the juxtaposition of that variation against new datasets globally. Mesopotamian scholars have, however, been mostly slow to reassess our own centuries of scholarship through the lens of these other datasets. When one does, the Mesopotamian “state” appears as an anachronistic construct, throughout its first three millennia. This contribution begins by drilling down on the definition of “the state.” The definition used here draws on Max Weber and emphasizes patrimonialism and bureaucracy, a specific type of administrative structure, which did not exist in preclassical Mesopotamia. It was patrimonial at all levels, from farmer households to the household of the king; patrimonialism was not just a metaphorical extension of kinship but rather it was the durable indigenous form of kinship in Mesopotamia. Rather than kinship being replaced by the state, kinship evolved into a form capable of managing large societies in the way that scholars often assume is only possible via a state.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives.   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39829.0