Dawn of the city: excavations prompt a revolution in thinking about the earliest cities

Science News,  Feb 9, 2008  by Bruce Bower

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A massive earthen mound rises majestically and rather mysteriously above agricultural fields in northeastern Syria. From a distance, the more than 130-foot-tall protrusion looks like a jagged set of desolate hills. But up close, broken pottery from a time long past litters the mound's surface. The widespread debris vividly testifies to the large number of people, perhaps as many as 10,000, who once congregated on and around this raised ground.

Known as Tell Brak, the mound and its surrounding fields contain the remnants of the world's oldest known city. The word tell refers to an ancient Near Eastern settlement consisting of numerous layers of mud-brick construction. Generation after generation of residents cut down, leveled, and replaced each layer with new buildings, eventually creating an enormous mound.

At the city of Brak, the first tell layers were built more than 6,000 years ago. At that time, the settlement emerged as an urban center with massive public structures, mass-produced crafts and daily goods, and specially made prestige items for socially elite citizens.

Surprisingly, the evidence for Brak's rise as a major city predates, by as many as 1,000 years, evidence for comparable urban centers hundreds of miles to the south, in what's now southern Iraq. Like those southern cities, Brak lay between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the ancient land of Mesopotamia. But scholars have long assumed that southern Mesopotamia's fertile crescent, blessed with rich soil and copious water, represented the "cradle of civilization:' In the traditional scenario, fast-growing southern cities established colonies that led to a civilization of the north. Southern immigrants sought timber, metal, and other resources that were absent in their homeland.

Excavations at Tell Brak and at the nearby remains of a comparably ancient city, Hamoukar, may turn that model on its head. New discoveries indicate that the world's first cities either arose in northern Mesopotamia or developed independently and at roughly the same time in the region's northern and southern sectors. The idea that urbanites radiated out of the south and triggered the construction of major northern settlements now rests on shaky ground.

"As yet, no other large site, indeed no other Near Eastern site, has yielded evidence of early urban growth comparable to that at Tell Brak," says archaeologist Augusta McMahon of the University of Cambridge in England. McMahon directs excavations at the Syrian site.

Researchers have also discovered dramatic signs of ancient warfare at Brak and Hamoukar. Further analysis of these discoveries may illuminate the nature of contacts and conflict between northern and southern Mesopotamians.

"Excavations at Brak and Hamoukar are the biggest thing to happen in Mesopotamian research in a long time," comments archaeologist Guillermo Algaze of the University of California, San Diego.

URBAN SPRAWL Excavations at Tell Brak started modestly enough about 70 years ago. Archaeologist Max Mallowan, husband of author Agatha Christie, led a team that uncovered the ruins of a religious temple. Thousands of small stone idols depicting eyes littered its floor. The investigators dubbed the poorly dated structure the Eye Temple.

A husband-and-wife team from Cambridge, David Oates and Joan Oates, initiated a new series of Tell Brak excavations in 1976. At the time, they suspected that the site held remnants of urban development from perhaps as early as 5,000 years ago, when, evidence suggested, the Eye Temple had been built.

But as years of field work accumulated, unexpectedly deep tell levels came to light. By 2006, the investigators realized that they were digging into something special. Sediment from 6,000 years ago or more, when the earliest known southern Mesopotamian cities had not yet been built, started to surrender the remains of huge public buildings.

In the September 2007 Antiquity, McMahon, Joan Oates, and their colleagues describe these discoveries. (David Oates is now deceased.)

The oldest structure found so far, dating to about 6,400 years ago, featured a massive entrance framed by two towers and an enormous doorsill made of a single piece of basalt. Excavations revealed parts of two large rooms inside, a group of small rooms near the front, and a pair of guard rooms just outside the entrance. Despite its size, it was likely not a temple, but rather an administrative center, MeMahon says. With a central room and several satellite areas, its layout is not that of a standard Mesopotamian temple.

"Whatever its formal functions, this is the earliest Mesopotamian example of a genuinely secular monumental building," McMahon says.

A second ancient structure, with red mud-brick walls surrounding three floors, housed potters and other artisans. These workers had access to several large, clay ovens inside the building.

Pottery finds include large, open bowls, small bowls with incised craftsman's marks, and a basic type of mass-produced bowl.