A new study has found dozens of clay bowls that may be evidence of one of the world’s oldest government institutions. The bowls, excavated at an early archaeological site in Iraq, are believed to have held tasty food offered in exchange for labor in ancient Mesopotamia.
But the site was eventually abandoned, which could indicate that locals rejected centralized power, though the researchers aren’t certain whether that was the case. After this early government fell, it took another 1,500 years for any centralized governing authority to return to the region, the authors wrote in the study.
The researchers made the discovery at Shakhi Kora, an archaeological site southwest of Kalar in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where there are remains of a settlement that is believed to date back to the fifth millennium B.C.
“Our excavations at Shakhi Kora provide a unique, new regional window into the development and eventual rejection of some of the earliest experiments with centralized and perhaps state-like organizations,” Claudia Glatz, an archaeologist at the University of Glasgow, said in a statement.
Glatz has led excavations at the site since 2019 and is the lead author of the new study, which was published Wednesday (Dec. 4) in the journal Antiquity.
Uruk Expansion
The excavations by Glatz and his colleagues have revealed structures spanning several centuries at Shakhi Kora, while pottery fragments and other cultural objects indicate a progression from early local traditions of the farming people living there to the later dominance of the traditions of Uruk, the early city of southern Mesopotamia, more than 220 miles (355 kilometers) to the south. (According to archaeologists, the “Uruk period” is the earliest phase of Sumerian civilization, which lasted between 4000 and 3100 B.C.)
Similar advances have been observed at other sites in ancient Mesopotamia, and some archaeologists have suggested that these are signs of “Uruk expansion,” in which Uruk’s innovations — including urbanization, interregional trade, and early writing — were introduced to more distant regions by people who traveled there.
In particular, excavations at Shakhi Kora have yielded a large number of distinctive pottery bowls, called beveled-rim bowls. The team thinks these bowls were used to supply food in exchange for labor — an early form of centralized authority, perhaps of the kind that led to the development of the ancient Mesopotamian city-states.
Analysis of the residue inside some of the bowls shows that many of them were used to serve meat, possibly in the form of broth or stew, which suggests that herds of sheep and goats were kept near the ancient settlement for this purpose.
The researchers believe this shows that people traveled to Shakhi Kora to perform labor on behalf of “institutional families”; and the excavations revealed that at least one domestic building had pillars and drainage systems, evidence of southern Mesopotamian influence. But the excavations also show that the site was abandoned at the end of the fourth millennium B.C. without any signs of violence or environmental pressure.
The researchers believe this indicates that local people rejected the idea of a centralized system of authority and returned to their family farms. “This confirms that top-to-bottom, hierarchical forms of government were not inevitable in the development of early complex societies,” Glatz said. “Local communities found ways to resist and reject the tendencies of centralized power.” Early society
Susan Pollock, an archaeologist at the Free University of Berlin and an expert on the development of early states in Mesopotamia who was not involved in the new study, said “hundreds” of people probably gathered at Shakhi Kora to perform labor at any given time.
Other excavations indicate that there were many small settlements in the region at the time, suggesting that people there did not tend to live in centralized locations and that the expected trend toward urbanization “was not working,” she said. But further research was needed to establish whether this was a sign of a deliberate rejection of centralized authority or another reason for the collapse of larger settlements, Pollock told Live Science.