Uncovering Civilization's Roots

by Andrew Lawler

BAHRA, KUWAIT—Camels are picking at scrub in the desert here, while archaeologist Piotr Bielinski puzzles over the jumbled remains of a 7000-year-old village in this desolate spot. Although the skyscrapers of Kuwait City form a distant backdrop 40 kilometers away, today there is little here to draw people. This site is a long walk to the Persian Gulf, has no obvious water source, and seems to lack valuable resources. In summer, the surrounding desert is a furnace, while bitter winter winds blow unimpeded from neighboring Iraq. But long ago, some 100 people created a tidy and prosperous settlement here, and the remains of their village may provide clues to the subsequent emergence of the world's first cities.

Why settle here? The riddle confronting University of Warsaw scientist Bielinski is part of an ambitious attempt to explain how humans made the momentous leap from village life to urban sprawl. That transformation first happened in Mesopotamia sometime during the 4th millennium B.C.E. in what archaeologists call the Uruk phase, named after a southern Iraq metropolis some 300 kilometers north of Bahra. But recent excavations in Kuwait, Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia provide mounting evidence that the origin of the urban revolution is to be found in the prior era, called the Ubaid, which began around 5500 B.C.E and lasted until about 4000 B.C.E. (see timeline, p. 792). Piecing together how and where that mysterious culture began, spread, and evolved “is a particularly hot topic right now,” says Harvard University archaeologist Jason Ur. Adds University of Chicago archaeologist Gil Stein: “This is the earliest complex society in the world. If you want to understand the roots of the urban revolution, you have to look at the Ubaid.”

At Bahra, archaeologists have found the oldest permanent settlement south of Mesopotamia. The finds come on the heels of a joint U.S.-Syrian discovery of a surprisingly large and sophisticated Ubaid town on the northern fringe of the Mesopotamian plain. Data from both sites contradict the old assumption that Ubaid culture was spread by precocious southern Mesopotamians who colonized their more primitive neighbors—a harbinger of the militaristic Mesopotamian empires to come. Instead, these and a handful of other sites suggest that a loose network of local peoples from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf helped shape a way of life that eventually spawned cities.

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