City and countryside

While its true singularity may lie deeper in the complexity of social organization, the two most striking characteristics of early Mesopotamia are its literacy and its urbanization. Just as we need to appreciate the nature of the written record to use its messages, we must be aware that all our documentary and archaeological evidence derives from the city, and so be conscious of the inherent biases which result from this. Perhaps we would in any case have chosen to approach Mesopotamian civilization through its cities, since it is there that everything most special to it is concentrated, but in fact we have no choice. Although we have some insights into the rural scene, this is only by courtesy of documents which were themselves generated within the city. It is only those aspects of the countryside with which the city-dweller was involved that the texts will illumine, and at present the only archaeological evidence is the distribution of settlements. Fortunately there was a very close relationship between the early cities and their hinterland, so that the texts are more informative than we might expect. The links fall into legal relationships, the contractual bonds between landlord and tenant, palace and dependant, recruiting officer and recruit, and the political movements exposed by state correspondence from Mari and elsewhere, from which great shafts of light have transformed our picture of the nomads in the ancient Near East.