Ruins Alter Ideas of How Civilization Spread
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: May 23, 2000
In the northeastern corner of Syria, near the Iraqi border and within sight of southern Turkey's Taurus Mountains, archaeologists have begun excavations of an ancient settlement that lay on a major trade route from Nineveh to Aleppo. The ruins from more than 5,500 years ago are telling them that previous ideas about the spread of early civilization were more than likely wrong.
The first trenches cut into the large 500-acre site, Tell Hamoukar, have yielded strong evidence that centrally administered complex societies in northern regions of the Middle East apparently arose simultaneously but independently of the more celebrated city-states of southern Mesopotamia, in what is now southern Iraq. In the conventional view, civilization was thought to begin solely in the south and then move north through trade and colonization.
In an announcement of the new finds, Dr. McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, said, ''We need to reconsider our ideas about the beginnings of civilization, pushing the time further back.''
Other archaeologists familiar with the research agreed in interviews last week that the Tell Hamoukar excavations confirmed and should elaborate on a consensus that has emerged among scholars in the last decade about the role of northern settlements in Syria and Iraq and in southeastern Turkey in the development of civilization. These settlements exhibited many of the attributes of civilization -- monumental architecture, division of labor, social stratification -- apparently before they had any significant contact with people in the lower valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
''It's a very important excavation,'' said Dr. Gil J. Stein, an archaeologist at Northwestern University. ''It fits in really nicely with a picture that's been emerging, based on several other excavation sites.''
Even Dr. Guillermo Algaze, an archaeologist at the University of California at San Diego, who had argued for a south-to-north transplantation of early civilization, said that he now generally agreed with the new interpretation. ''I've been eating a lot of crow lately,'' he said.
Excavations at Tell Hamoukar were started last summer by a joint expedition of the Oriental Institute and the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities. Work will resume next month and will probably continue for many years. The site promises an abundance of artifacts, archaeologists said, not only because of its large size but also because most of the material seems to be close to the surface.
Digging into the oldest layer of ruins uncovered so far, archaeologists found traces of people living in villages at the site as early as 4000 B.C. Within 300 years, the settlement had grown into a prosperous town of at least 32 acres with ample evidence of a well-organized society of the kind associated with the early stages of civilization.
For one thing, Dr. Gibson said, the town appeared to be enclosed by a defensive wall 10 feet high and 13 feet wide. Such walls came with civilization.
Inside the walls the archaeologists dug up the remains of fine pottery and several large ovens, shaped like igloos, evidence of food preparation on an institutional scale. The same areas held pieces of large cooking pots and animal bones and traces of wheat, barley and oats for what must have been a bakery and also probably a brewery.
''Preparing bread and food on such a scale is evidence of a society in which somebody is organizing people and resources,'' Dr. Gibson said. ''You are building up a hierarchy, a social structure that's a mark of civilization.''
Some of the most telling evidence for an organized, stratified society, archaeologists said, were the seals the people probably used to mark containers of food and other goods. Some of the seals are small, with only simple incisions or cross-hatching. Others are larger, presumably for higher officials to stamp more valuable goods. One of these stamping seals was in the form of a leopard with 13 spots, and others were in the shape of deer, bears and ducks.
''We would propose that the larger, more elaborate seals with figurative scenes were held only by the few people who had greater authority, while the smaller, simply incised seals were used by many more people with less authority,'' Dr. Gibson said. ''The difference would be something like the signature of the regional director of customs of Chicago compared to the rubber stamps that say only 'U.S. Customs.' ''
In southern Mesopotamia at this time, an expanding population and increased food production from irrigation were changing the social landscape even more drastically. Economies were being run by increasingly centralized leadership. Agricultural villages grew into urban centers, some of which were in time ruled by local kings. This became known to scholars as the Uruk period, after one of the more prominent of these southern city-states, more than 400 miles south of Tell Hamoukar, and it was the period that established Mesopotamia as ''the cradle of civilization.''