Asmodea (Visión fantástica), by Francisco Goya (Date: 1823)
The Uruk phenomenon
At its fullest development in the latter part of the 4th millennium Uruk was the administrative and economic center of Southern Mesopotamia. It was a core nucleus complex, the mother polis of a network that was ‘tiered’ by a) relative settlement size, b) a hierarchy of governance functions ranked in accordance with the actual power of authority to elicit obedience, and c) the relative importance of a settlement’s potential in contributing to and maintaining the regional chain of production-consumption.
Uruk’s region was interconnected primarily by economic exchange and a division of labour, and only to a lesser degree by political and military control exercised through administrative outposts. Transport and communication were elements in the calculus of tiered positioning between the core and the stratified peripheral territories.
Guillermo Algaze has suggested terms such as ‘outposts’, ‘enclaves’, ‘clusters…