Lied (Chanson) by Wassily Kandinsky (date: 1906)
A history of conceptual failure and success
In the short land mass between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, in the long period between 12,000 BC and 2000 BC, there emerged two ‘great organisations’. Leo Oppenheim used the term “the great organisations” in a 1977 book to distinguish between the royal household and “a community of persons of equal status bound together by a consciousness of belonging, realised by directing their communal affairs by means of an assembly”. This often quoted statement unleashed another of the ‘great debates’ about how to conceptualise the societies and power holders of ancient Mesopotamia. My contribution to the debates is to suggest a more accurate conceptual and historical distinction between private household and public or social estate as the two governing cores of a new Type 4 administered society.
The underlying archeological evidence is barely sufficient. Holistic inferences about purposes of stru…