By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Why hunter-gatherer societies were more complex than we previously imagined, and civilization did not start the places like Greece

As we have seen earlier, despite the fantasies of earlier writers about Archeology in Mesopotamia, it is notoriously hard to find palaces in the usual sense of the word. In the Late Uruk period, "palace" is termed because it is large and has a different plan than temples. In the Early Dynastic, the "palaces" were designated because their shapes were not temple-like. In the Third Dynasty of Ur, there were temples and ziggurats at the end of the third millennium BC, and we have a list of kings, but where is the palace?

There was a Ciutadella for public ceremonies, but there are only arguments about the existence of a royal residence. In Mesopotamia, temples are built and re-built on sacred land. On the other hand, palaces are personal residences and administrative seats of rulers who build them in places distant from the palaces of former kings or historical venues of state ceremonies. Indus Valley city-states look different from Mesopotamian city-states. They were ruled differently and seemed to have different rules about how power was exhibited. Their development and collapse were also different from what they were in Mesopotamia.

No state evolved without the potential to produce large and regular surpluses that could be stored for years. Base camps of hunter-gatherers were transformed into relatively long-lasting villages that subsisted on the emerging plenty and eventually on domesticated plants and animals. Village agriculture narrowed the choices of resources and led to population growth. Given the specific biological changes in humans that prevailed towards the end of the Pleistocene, there was a gradual development, both in the term's demographic and social sense, that was irreversible. The growth processes were not characterized by stable systems whose limitations had to be overcome but by the constant change in unstable post-Pleistocene societies.

We have elaborated this growth model by noting that the earliest villages in Mesopotamia persisted as modest villages for thousands of years, while social roles and identities changed significantly. From the environment of village life, the circulation of goods and marital partners led to institutionalized interconnections among unrelated people and the formation of interaction spheres. Codes of communication and symbols of shared beliefs allowed and expressed new aspects of cultural identity among villagers. Specific individuals, nascent elites, began to access the technology of symbol manufacture and the means of communication and communication venues such as feasts and ceremonies. Control over these symbols and esoteric knowledge became a domain of power in these early villages.

The earliest states appeared in the Old and New World approximately four to five thousand years after the first settled villages that depended on agriculture. Agricultural villages were the necessary but not sufficient conditions for the evolution of the earliest states. Towards the end of the Pleistocene period, which was very cold and dry, Upper Paleolithic hunters and gatherers had invented new technologies that allowed them to expand their subsistence strategies and establish campsites. In the cycles of amelioration of the harsh climatic conditions at the beginning of the Holocene in Mesopotamia, following 10,000 BC,' natural resources for people flourished, and bands of people, probably extended families, founded longer-lasting settlements. These settlements subsisted on the extensive stands of grasses and other local resources.

Some of these earliest village sites in the 9000's and 8000's BC, like Abu Hureyra 1 (the early occupation) in Syria and Hallan Çemi in Anatolia, were pre-agricultural villages, were by no means small (Abu Hureyra was about ten hectares in size). At Hallan Çemi, considerable feasting and ceremony occurred - celebrations of residence, as it were. Nemrik, Qermez Dere (both in northern Iraq), and Abu Hureyrâ and Mureybit (both in Syria), in the later 8000's and 7000s, were villages in which plants and animals were domesticated after the sites were founded. Domestication occurred not to relieve hunger but as a process whereby humans increasingly selected, as part of collection, processing, and reseeding activities, certain genetically recessive traits in the grasses, such as hardiness of plant stems and seeds, at the expense of dominant features that allowed stands of grains to reproduce effectively without human intervention. The seeds from recessive phenotype plants were quickly collected, then; stored and subsequently planted; fields had to be weeded to keep out the dominant forms. People also selected smaller and gentler animals, had more wool, or possessed other traits that made them useful to sedentary people, who protected them from wild competitors. Some early villages were impressive features in the landscape. At the site of Göbekli Tepe, megaliths and pillars were erected, some weighing about 50 tons, indicating the labor of many people, more than could have existed in any village. Furthermore, there seem to be no domestic quarters at Göbekli Tepe, and the entire site "served a mainly ritual function" for those in this region, settled people, and mobile ones alike.

Thus, it appears that in the 7000's and early 6000's people founded villages in new niches, both in the natural habitat zone of wild plants and animals and increasingly to the south along the Mesopotamian plain and away from the region that was the scene of the first villages.

 

In fact, Göbekli Tepe is not the only such place. During the 1970s, the Taljanky(1) and Nebelivka, or Nebelovka, located in Ukraine, are the site of an ancient mega-settlement dating to 4000 BC belonging to the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture(Romanian: Cultura Cucuteni and Ukrainian: Трипільська культура), also known as the Tripolye culture (Russian: Трипольская культура), is a Neolithic–Eneolithic archaeological culture (c. 5500 to 2750 BCE) of Eastern Europe. 

 

It extended from the Carpathian Mountains to the Dniester and Dnieper regions, centered on modern-day Moldova and covering substantial parts of western Ukraine and northeastern Romania.

 

A millennium and a half after Göbekli Tepe, once called Asia Minor now Anatolia, about 8,000 people  settled in Catalhöyiik. No longer living as hunter-gatherers, as did the people surrounding Göbekli Tepe, the Catalhöyiik people grew wheat, barley, lentils, and peas, and they herded sheep and goats. A group of larger figures, made of clay, were found in a single building and dated to around 7,500 years ago. A fat woman seated in a chair; between her feet protrudes a small human head, presumably a child to whom she has just given birth; the arms of the chair are formed by two large standing cats, whose tails curve up over her shoulders; her hands rest on their heads. It should be empesised however that both sexes are shown in the of Catalhöyiiki including sites like Nevalli Cöri in the same region. Anthropologists believe that  the female figures are  meant to be deities in a way that the male figures are not.  But wathever the final evidence will proof the following item dating from six thousand years BC, is from long before Laws of Solon (d. 558 BCE):

 

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