THE first urban settlements in the Middle East were thought to have been
built by the Sumerian civilisation of southern Mesopotamia more than 5000 years
ago. Now, it seems, another civilisation was enjoying city life around the same
time, according to finds in north-eastern Syria.
Clemens Reichel, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago鈥檚 Oriental
Institute, says there are signs of urban activity at a site in Syria called Tell
Hamoukar between 4000 and 3700 BC. This means the settlement was built around
the same time as some of the original Sumerian city-states such as Uruk, in what
is now southern Iraq.
Archaeologists used to believe that urban living spread when the Sumerians
expanded their territory during the Late Uruk period, from about 3500 to 3100
BC. But recent digs at sites in northern Syria and south-eastern Turkey,
including Tell Hamoukar, suggest that complex societies existed before the
arrival of the Sumerians.
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The size of Tell Hamoukar indicates that it was more than a farming
settlement. Its early levels are spread over about 15 hectares, which Reichel
estimates could have housed a thousand people. The Syrian-American team
excavating the site found local pottery in the early levels, and also some
telltale urban features. 鈥淲e have huge ovens,鈥� says Reichel, which look like
they were used for industrial-scale baking.
Excavators also have found remains of a three-metre city wall and about a
hundred stamp seals, including an early depiction of a leopard. They believe the
seals were used by early administrators, who pressed them into clay to mark
packages in what Reichel calls 鈥渙ne of the earliest means of bureaucratic
control that we know鈥�. Only later, after 3000 BC, did Uruk pottery appear, and
the city grow to cover around 100 hectares.
The discovery is a sign that early states developed 鈥渂efore writing was
invented and before the appearance of several other criteria that we think of as
marking civilisation,鈥� says McGuire Gibson also of Chicago, who is co-director
of the research team.
鈥淐learly it鈥檚 a very important site in both the fourth and the third
millennium,鈥� says Richard Zettler, an expert in the Bronze Age Middle East at
the University of Pennsylvania. But he is sceptical that Hamoukar was completely
independent of Uruk. 鈥淚鈥檓 looking forward to what they come up with next
蝉别补蝉辞苍.鈥�
