The Earliest Bronze Age in Southwest Asia (3100-2700 BC)

A. " The First Internationalism " or the " First Dark Age " ? Half a century ago, Chicago Egyptologist Helene Kantor (1952) assembled some surprising observations on items traded into Egypt just as the first pharaohs were uniting the Nile Valley and the Delta into a single state at the end of the fourth millennium BC. Not only were some items, such as the cylinder seals being used by government officials, inspired by forms developed in the distant Tigris-Euphrates Valley, but some items of elite display were made of materials, in particular the semi-precious blue stone lapis lazuli, which came from 4500 kilometers away in the northern Hindu Kush. Subsequent studies of ancient lapis occurrences (cf. Hermann 1968) have revealed no Eurasian sources east of what is today Afghanistan. What kind of human processes linked this vast area together? Robert Braidwood (1960) assembled evidence of other exchanges and contrasted this phenomenon with a better known later period of international contact during the Late Bronze Age during the later second millennium BC and termed this the time of the " real First Internationalism ". This paper assembles evidence of this early " interaction sphere " (Caldwell 1968) available today with the intention of modeling the operation of this early network of political-economic formations. It is intended to document certain key phenomena: where possible the age, geographical extent, settlement structure, basic social units, political organization, subsistence production, and long-range trade involvements of every region. Thanks to new excavations, new methods of absolute dating, quantitative information on archaeologically documented settlement networks and traded items, improved understandings of the first written administrative archives and political traditions, and many new publications, we can define this network more precisely than was possible two decades ago, in the last major synthesis of the period (Finkbeiner and Röllig eds. 1986). One important datum point that was only becoming clear two decades ago, is the extraordinary expansion of Late Uruk communities from Lower Mesopotamia documented by the pioneering work of Guillermo Algaze (1993). First about 3600 BC southern Iran is drawn into close relations with Mesopotamia, then about 3400 B.C. Upper Mesopotamia is similarly occupied or dominated. Algaze's work has generated much research and discussion (Stein 1999, Rothman ed. 2001, and Butterlin 2003). In fact, the Uruk archaeological record is variable in quality, and under the best of circumstances it is difficult for archaeologists to differentiate 'migration', 'trade', …