Wool and staple finance in Syria and Mesopotamia

Models for the emergence of social complexity in the ancient Near East necessarily place human use of domesticated plants and animals at the centre. New research continues to refine regional and site-specific sequences that will revise models further. Some dynamics, however, may be outlined in a generalized way for Syria and Mesopotamia.

After 5000 bce, larger herds of sheep and goats were moved across increasingly specialized and territorialized agricultural landscapes associated with growing settlements in Syria, northern and then southern Mesopotamia (Stein Reference Stein, Carter and Philip2010). Land claims by economic entities such as kinship groups and ‘tribes’ partitioned landscapes and necessitated new concepts of tenure and ownership.

Specialization within and between communities also created new categories of ‘farmers’ and ‘herders’, as well as new communal forms of political organization and leadership to coordinate and adjudicate relationships. Most communities hedged their economies with both farming and herding in various mixtures. But some locations such as steppe regions favoured herding, that led very much later to the development of pastoralism (Arbuckle & Hammer Reference Arbuckle and Hammer2019).

The need to coordinate activities of farming and herding also intensified the need for managerial specialists. Herds degrading agricultural lands and increasing soil loss—and conversely, fertilizing and compacting soil—were impetuses for managerial innovations. So, too, was the problem of directing perishable agricultural surpluses and non-perishable wool surpluses.

The temporal and spatial dimensions of increasingly interrelated herding and farming also reshaped cognitive landscapes as new categories emerged with names for things, concepts and numbers. This instantiated ‘Neolithization’, which had previously reorganized the world into ‘human’ and ‘natural’ components and imagined expanded human control over nature (Cauvin Reference Cauvin and Watkins2000). It created new words and cognitive categories for property, ownership and territorialism, as well as for built space and the natural and human worlds (Mithen Reference Mithen2019).

All these factors in turn created pressures for more complex information and security technologies—writing and sealing. Textile remains help chart the emergence of these technologies. For example, the appearance of clay stamp seals at Neolithic Ulucak in contexts with textile tools such as loom weights, bone needles and spindle whorls suggests the stamps were used ‘ritually’ to decorate fabric and possibly other surfaces (Çilingiroğlu Reference Çilingiroğlu2009; Skeates Reference Skeates2007). Much later cordage impressions on sealings such as at Tell Brak demonstrate the shift from hair to wool during the fourth millennium (McMahon Reference McMahon, Altaweel and Hritz2021). Managerial specialists then claimed a share of surpluses or became dependents of emerging institutions.

As the vast territories of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium were colonized in the millennia after c. 5000 bce, a hierarchy of settled communities emerged based on irrigation agriculture and herding of cattle and sheep-goats, connected by waterways and sustained by wetlands and marshes. Similar processes took place in northern Mesopotamia, at different rates and scales, utilizing a different mix of the same resources; cattle and sheep-goat herding, secondary animal products, and rainfall rather than irrigation agriculture (Marchetti et al. Reference Marchetti, Al-Hussainy, Benati, Luglio, Scazzosi, Valeri and Zaina2019; McMahon Reference McMahon2020; Pournelle & Algaze Reference Pournelle, Algaze, Crawford, McMahon and Postgate2014).

New categories of wealth, territory, ownership and social status were created as more land gradually came under the control of urban sites and presumably urban elites, the nascent ‘Great Estates’ of palaces, temples and family corporations, evidence for which remains vague but tantalizing before the third millennium. The gradual construction of an engineered landscape in the alluvium, building artificial irrigation systems off the slowly shifting macrostructures of the Tigris and Euphrates and their channels, created more pressure to control land and labour. Over time, the processes of partitioning and controlling the physical and social landscapes also created friction between communities, advantaging those with locational, organizational and conflict capabilities.

Conflict looms large in the urbanization process and later in the emergence of political leadership. One aspect of this is conflict between institutionally organized sheep herding and independent communities practising a mixture of agriculture and herding on common land. The analogy of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain is unexpectedly useful, since various methods of enclosing land and assuming ownership are richly documented. These included acquiring control through the systematic and piecemeal consent of owners or leaders acting in the name of groups; with encroachments such as squatting; classification of lands as non-productive ‘wastes’; and various forms of political and legal manipulations, such as thousands of parliamentary acts. At their extreme, the ‘clearances’ involved direct violence and expulsions that removed entire communities to cities or far beyond, as emigrants or indentured servants in various colonies (Mingay Reference Mingay1997).

Active and passive resistance were widespread, but the process was effectively completed in less than 200 years. In Scotland, industrial-scale sheep raising and wool production was instituted, which helped underpin a new national economy based on trade and a new ruling class. The surrounding historiography, usually produced by urban writers, often emphasized how more ‘rational’ production was beneficially organized in regions occupied by ‘anarchic’ or ‘primitive’ populations (Richards Reference Richards2007). Wool products famously became a symbol of the colonized and reinvented notions of group and ‘national identity’ (Cheape Reference Cheape and Brown2010).

Pre-industrial production of wool in Syria and Mesopotamia had similar effects in terms of the transformation of land, played out over a vastly longer time frame. The socio-spatial changes of ‘urbanization’ entailed creation of the ‘countryside’ and the gradual depopulation of lands surrounding centrally located site hierarchies focused on cities that became ever larger. Surrounding areas were more ‘rationally’ organized with irrigation agriculture and herding in mind. These difficult-to-map processes of urban agglomeration and densification, and especially rural reorganization, lasted from the fifth into the mid-third millennia, when a process of ‘ruralization’ began with the growth in the number of smaller settlements (Marchetti et al. Reference Marchetti, Al-Hussainy, Benati, Luglio, Scazzosi, Valeri and Zaina2019, 222–4, figs. 10, 11).

Power clearly accumulated in cities. In addition to the growth of urban institutions, most notably temples, documented social phenomena include institutional violence, such as warfare, slavery, dependency, control technologies, new concepts of ownership and management, including rationing, taxation and corveé, new categories of labour and social relations, such as an increase in craft and occupational specialization, changes in gender roles, sumptuary behaviour, and a decrease in local self-governance (Steinkeller Reference Steinkeller, Steinkeller and Hudson2015).

These variables played out in varying trajectories toward state formation in southern Mesopotamia, northern Mesopotamia and the upper Euphrates valley (Frangipane Reference Frangipane2018). Wool production was key, along with cereals. This was the real ‘Fibre Revolution’.

The growth of sheep and goat herding created opportunities for both urbanism and staple finance by emergent institutions. In staple finance systems, authorities mobilize wealth from subordinates in the form of commodities, utilitarian goods and attendant labour in order to finance projects such as monumental construction, ritual activities, or warfare (D'Altroy & Earle Reference D'Altroy and Earle1985). Classic discussions focus on the evolutionary implications of staple finance as indicative of higher levels of organization on the path toward state-level systems.

But defining staple finance as opposed to wealth finance systems and distinguishing them archaeologically is difficult. Classic discussions see staple goods as ‘obligatory payments in kind to the state of subsistence goods such as grains, livestock, and clothing’, that is, wealth that is immediately deployable, storable and movable, and ultimately convertible but often subject to logistical constraints. But D'Altroy and Earle see wealth finance as comprising ‘the manufacture and procurement of special products (valuables, primitive money, and currency)’. Such goods are more easily portable but must be understood as valuable within shared regimes of value in order to be convertible (D'Altroy & Earle Reference D'Altroy and Earle1985, 188). A processed animal product like wool is therefore a good that moves from one category to another, a vehicle that is wealth in itself and convertible into other, more typical wealth items, such as precious metals.

This ambiguity extends further, since animals have other primary and secondary product characteristics that are by definition movable and convertible (such as assignable labour) within a market- or exchange-based economy. Animals also have broad sorts of symbolic values that are often widely shared across cultures. In this latter sense, animals are ‘complex capital’ which are useful for ‘strategic ambiguation’ by emerging elites, what Grossman and Paulette (Reference Grossman and Paulette2020, 1–3) call ‘wealth on the hoof’. This concept unites a varieties of processes or regimes: symbolic capital, the living representation of successful and ongoing accumulation and thus economic power; the conversion of staple goods into wealth goods; and assertion of abstract connections with mythological realms embodied by animal deities. This latter space is malleable and connects the quotidian with the transcendental and participation alone is itself a form of wealth.

The evidence for large-scale wool production by the Uruk period is clear. Algaze points to wool's particular advantages, namely thermal properties, ability to be dyed and thus used for visual expression and style, economies of scale unachievable with flax and linen, resulting reorganization of the agricultural landscape, and substantial labour availability for herding and weaving (Algaze Reference Algaze2008, 77–92).

During the Bronze Age and before, sheep were plucked by hand, a method called ‘rooing’, in which the entire fleece is peeled intact from the moulting animal. It has been estimated that an individual could pluck approximately 10–12 small sheep per day (Andersson Strand Reference Andersson Strand2012, 30; Potts Reference Potts1997, 92–3; Waetzoldt Reference Waetzoldt1972, 14–17; Wright Reference Wright and Crawford2013, 402–3). The wool was then processed and spun.

Late Uruk period textual evidence documents only parts of the cycle from herding to plucking to garment production (Bauer et al. Reference Bauer, Englund and Krebernik1998, 152). But it is clear that there were dedicated personnel, including dependent females, facilities under the supervision of administrators, and that wool was a key commodity that was controlled and rationed (Charvát Reference Charvát and Vacín2011).

By the third millennium, state-controlled herds dominated the landscape around southern Mesopotamian sites. In northern Mesopotamia, the state and related elites controlled herds while the movements of nomadic herds were integrated into the local animal economies. Along with management of cereal storage (Casadei Reference Casadei, D'Andrea, Micale, Nadali, Pizzimenti and Vacca2019; Paulette Reference Paulette, Manzanilla and Rothman2016), sheep and goats acted as real and symbolic sources of capital for emergent elites, anxious to project their domination, and the keystone of an expanding economy of exchangeable and convertible commodities (Grossman & Paulette Reference Grossman and Paulette2020). The quantities of wool produced were often immense: at the site of Ur during the Ur III period, texts record the delivery of 8000 talents of wool—some 240,000 kg—which required approximately 320,000 sheep (Sallaberger Reference Sallaberger, Breniquet and Michel2014).

Staple finance systems based on large-scale sheep herding and wool production were thus key economic components in third-millennium bce Syria and Mesopotamia (Breniquet Reference Breniquet, Breniquet and Michel2014). Fink (Reference Fink, Droß-Krüpe and Nosch2016) argues further that wool was a strategic and political commodity for third-millennium southern Mesopotamian states faced with the choice of acquiring foreign goods through warfare or through export of local commodities. High-value, non-perishable commodities such as woven textiles were more easily exported than bulk commodities such as grain or fish. The high exchange rates between wool and copper received by Akkadian traders in Dilmun show that wool was a highly desirable export commodity (Fink Reference Fink, Droß-Krüpe and Nosch2016).

The appearance of linen in elite burial contexts in Mesopotamia and the Gulf, including tombs at Ur and Tell Abraq, suggests it was an elite product (Reade & Potts Reference Reade and Potts1993). Ebla texts also indicate linen items were distributed by the royal establishment, most frequently to itself and members of the court (Biga Reference Biga, Michel and Nosch2010). Less surprisingly, linen forms an important part of late fourth- and third-millennium funerary assemblages in Egypt (Jones Reference Jones, Michel and Nosch2010).

Dramatic drops in wool prices attested from the Sargonic to Ur III periods were due in part to competition from other regions (Foster Reference Foster, Breniquet and Michel2014). Even so, Fink (Reference Fink, Droß-Krüpe and Nosch2016, 90) observes that unlike contemporary commodity export-dependent societies, Mesopotamia was not caught in a ‘resource trap’, since wool was renewable and the larger economy was open to innovation. That said, dependence on single commodities like wool, subject to climate and market fluctuations, was more problematic in rainfall agriculture areas such as Ebla than in southern Mesopotamian cities.

The third-millennium southern Levant in the political economy of the Near East

Urbanization in the Early Bronze Age southern Levant (c. 3700–2000 bce) has been discussed many times (e.g. Greenberg Reference Greenberg2019; Joffe Reference Joffe1993). Most studies emphasize Mediterranean crops such as grapes and olives as commodities employed by emergent small-scale elites who competed for land and labour. Small-scale urbanism, or perhaps better, a walled town culture, developed craft specialization including in ceramics and chipped-stone industries, ’palaces’ and ‘temples’ of various scales, and massive fortification systems by the middle of the EB I period.

In contrast, urbanism in the central and northern Levant emerged during the first centuries of the third millennium in a process more closely related to Mesopotamian-influenced societies in the upper Euphrates, inland Syria, and both northern and southern Mesopotamia. Southern Levantine sites reached their peak of size and complexity at the beginning of the Early Bronze III, c. 2900, and then began to recede (Greenberg Reference Greenberg and Höflmayer2017), just as the northern and central Levant were taking off (Wilkinson et al. Reference Wilkinson, Philip and Bradbury2014). Some features were shared between the three regions of the Levant but others not. Most notably the influence of the Ebla chora and emerging traditions of numeracy and literacy do not extend to the southern Levant. These third-millennium relationships are much debated (see Adams Reference Adams and Höflmayer2014; D'Andrea Reference D'Andrea, Bietak and Prell2021; Vacca & D'Andrea Reference Vacca, D'Andrea and Richard2020).

This discussion argues a minimalist view. One reason is the much earlier start to urbanism in the south, in tandem with Egypt, which created a unique series of local traditions and adaptations. Equally important are the environmental and scalar contrasts between the southern Levant and other regions, constraints that shaped agro-pastoral economies, risk and abatement strategies which underpinned socio-political development (see Wilkinson et al. Reference Wilkinson, Philip and Bradbury2014, 50–54). A third reason is the deep social and economic integration between settled and arid zones, relationships that stretched far into the Sinai and Arabian Peninsulas. For these reasons the southern Levant stands apart and should be considered separately as a region with a distinct and contrasting trajectory.

Large walled sites with specialized institutions developed by 3500 bce. Relations with Egypt are evident in the later fourth millennium with economic relations and a short-lived network of Egyptian settlements, outposts and enclaves, and in the first half of the third millennium with brief Egyptian campaigns and possibly diplomatic gift exchanges. Walled sites, however, rapidly evaporated after c. 2700–2500 bce and were followed by a long period of town and village settlements during the EB IV.

Studies of the Early Bronze Age economy have centred on Mediterranean crops, along with ceramic production: the role of textiles remains completely unexplored. There are no fibre remains of wool until the Middle Bronze Age (Shamir Reference Shamir2015). By the fourth millennium, Mesopotamian and Syrian wool was being harvested by plucking, and it is unclear why this was not done in the southern Levant.

There is limited secondary evidence for textile production. There is only a small number of clay loom-weights in Early Bronze Age contexts (Boertien Reference Boertien2013, 104, 227; Spinazzi-Lucchesi Reference Spinazzi-Lucchesi2018, 68–71) and a somewhat larger number of perforated stone rings and ceramic disks with uncertain association with weaving. These may have been loom-weights or simply spindle whorls (Rosenberg & Greenberg Reference Rosenberg, Greenberg and Greenberg2014, 200–202). Basalt examples were products of specialized production and trade networks and may have been prestige items (Levy Reference Levy2020, 121; Savage Reference Savage and Chesson2011). The relatively small numbers of items reflect experimentation or perhaps small-scale production of wool or hair. In contrast, the number of second-millennium clay loom-weights is very large.

One obvious constraint on wool production is that southern Levant environments could not sustain herds as in Syria and Mesopotamia. For example, until the twenty-first century the area adjacent to the large EB centre of Tell Yarmouth contained approximately 2000 sheep and goats. Researchers estimated that the maximum carrying capacity of the region was only 30 per cent higher (Eitan Reference Eitan2011, 73).

The southern Levant was also subject to especially severe fluctuations in herd sizes. Early twentieth-century data indicate that in years of severe drought up to 90 per cent of an individual's or village's livestock could be lost. Sheep and goat enumerations are suspect due to endemic under-reporting as a means of tax avoidance, but usefully indicate changing scales of herding. For example, in 1926, 290,854 sheep and 571,289 goats were counted in the entirety of Palestine. In 1934 this dropped to 157,235 sheep and 307,316 goats (El-Eini Reference El-Eini2004, 226, table 26; cf. Hazell et al. Reference Hazell, Oram, Chaherli and Lofgren2003). In contrast, during the Ur III period, there were at least 320,000 sheep associated with the city of Ur alone (Sallaberger Reference Sallaberger, Breniquet and Michel2014).

Ebla's wool production was similarly large. Leading families oversaw immense herds, totalling in the hundreds of thousands of sheep, requiring an estimated grazing area of 34,000 sq. km (Wilkinson et al. Reference Wilkinson, Philip and Bradbury2014, 58), and as members of the court, contributed wool to the palace (Biga Reference Biga, Michel and Nosch2010). Wool was stored by the royal establishment and processed into hundreds of different types of items by dependent craftspeople such as weavers and dyers. These products, such as bolts of cloth and garments, were distributed to craftspeople, clients and specialists, merchants, soldiers, priests and temples, as funerary, wedding and birth presents, and as diplomatic gifts.Footnote ¹

As in both Syria and Egypt, linen was produced in the EB southern Levant for mortuary purposes, but it was not exported (Joffe Reference Joffe2022). Sheep and goats were raised for primary and secondary products, including skins and sheepskins, but wool was not a source of staple finance for elites. This raises the question of staple finance and the economic bases of complex societies in the third-millennium southern Levant.

Staple finance and social organization in the southern Levant

If wool was not a staple finance commodity in the southern Levant, what was? Several sites with large-scale silos suitable for grain storage have been noted in the later EB I (c. 3500–3000 bce) such as ‘En Esur Area M (Elad et al. Reference Elad, Paz and Shalem2018) and Amaziya (Milevski et al. Reference Milevski, Braun, Varga, Israel, Manzanilla and Rothman2016). These are more plausibly interpreted as individual or communal facilities rather than centrally administered by regional or site-wide elites (Golani & Yannai Reference Golani and Yannai2016; Milevski et al. Reference Milevski, Braun, Varga, Israel, Manzanilla and Rothman2016). No sites have evidence of controlled access or accounting procedures and all are devoted to grain storage rather than dry goods or containers such as jars, baskets, or bundles.Footnote ²

These storage facilities are roughly contemporary with other institutional structures, namely the enormous EB I Temple at Megiddo, smaller temples at Jericho, Arad and elsewhere, and a number of communal buildings used for both storage and community activities, including rituals, at Beth Shean, ‘Ai, Bâb Edh-Dhrâ and Tell el-Far'ah North. With the exception of the Megiddo temple (Sapir-Hen et al. Reference Sapir-Hen, Fulton, Adams and Finkelstein2022), these structures, too, have no evidence for extensive social storage or animal consumption, or for administrative procedures such as controlled access or accounting (Adams et al. Reference Adams, Finkelstein and Ussishkin2014; Genz Reference Genz, Bolger and Maguire2010; Mazar & Rotem Reference Mazar and Rotem2009; Sala Reference Sala2008).

Similarly, there is little evidence for EB systems of weights, as opposed to standardized volumes associated with vessels and linear measurements used in construction (Ascalone Reference Ascalone, Alberti, Ascalone and Peyronel2006; Reference Ascalone and Nigro2012; de Miroschedji Reference de Miroschedji and Wolff2001; Genz Reference Genz2011; Massa & Palmisano Reference Massa and Palmisano2018; Rahmstorf Reference Rahmstorf, Alberti, Ascalone and Peyronel2006). Measurement and associated architectural expression appear based on spatial templates rather than numerical calculation.

The lack of weights in particular would have limited the ability to exchange and convert values with reference to emerging interregional and intercultural standards based on precious metals (Marfoe Reference Marfoe, Rowlands, Larsen and Kristiansen1987, 33; Milevski Reference Milevski2011, 235–6). By the mid-third millennium these networks stretched from the Euphrates to the Aegean and included shared styles of elite drinking vessels, decorative bone and ivory items, precious metals and semi-precious stones. Except for a few specific items, such as carved bone and ivory bull heads and tubes, southern Levant appears to have been largely excluded from this early or incipient phase of ‘globalization’ (Mazzoni Reference Mazzoni and Richard2020; Peyronel Reference Peyronel2018; Peyronel & Vacca Reference Peyronel, Vacca, Michel, Kryszat and Kulakoğlu2021; Zarzecki-Peleg Reference Zarzecki-Peleg1993).

But despite the lack of luxury goods, the EB II–III (c. 3000–2500 bce) ‘palaces’, ‘temples’ and other structures demonstrate means of mobilizing labour and moving commodities to support nascent or presumptive elites. This was done without large-scale production of wool or other durable goods, but rather with the procurement, storage and redistribution of oil, wine and grain, and possibly animals (Fig. 1).

Figure 1.

Map of Early Bronze Age sites. (After de Miroschedji Reference de Miroschedji and Richard2020, fig. 9.4. Used by permission of Pierre de Miroschedji.)

The nature of elites associated with these facilities remains obscure, with only Tell Yarmouth and Megiddo having plausible claim for ‘royal’ establishments, as opposed to ‘elite residences’ (de Miroschedji Reference de Miroschedji and Richard2020). Food provisioning and feasting were the central concepts, not centralized redistribution.

Tell Yarmouth is the paramount example, with storerooms containing over 150 pithoi (de Miroschedji Reference de Miroschedji, Maeir and de Miroschedji2006). At Khirbet al-Batrawy the ‘palace’ had one storeroom contained over 20 pithoi (Nigro Reference Nigro2013), while the ‘pantry’ at the Tell es-Saidieyh ‘palace’ had well-preserved remains of a variety of foodstuff and associated ‘table settings’ (Cartwright Reference Cartwright2002; Tubb et al. Reference Tubb, Dorrell and Cobbing1997). At Beth Yerah—the only site in the southern Levant plausibly deemed ‘urban’ and whose political organization remains especially unclear—the famous ‘Circles Building’ may briefly have contained silos capable of holding at least 1700 tons of grain (de Miroschedji Reference de Miroschedji2003; Mazar Reference Mazar and Wolff2001; cf. Greenberg et al. Reference Greenberg, Ashkenazi and Berger2017) (Figs 2 & 3).

Figure 2.

Tel Yarmouth B1 Palace. (After de Miroschedji Reference de Miroschedji and Richard2020, fig. 9.10. Used by permission of Pierre de Miroschedji.)

Figure 3.

Beth Yerah Circles Building. (Reconstruction by Dov Porotsky, the Tel Bet Yerah Project. Used by permission of Raphael Greenberg.)

In all these, and in the many EB I–III sites with fortification walls, local production of cash crops was applied locally for the generation of different sorts of social power, with limited storage and convertibility into other forms of wealth besides labour (Genz Reference Genz2003; Shalev Reference Shalev2018). Crops were seasonal, perishable and could only be stored for a limited time and transported across a restricted geographic range. In turn, wealth could only be directed into limited types of projects such as site fortifications, which acted as displays and occasionally as defensive systems (Ashkenazi Reference Ashkenazi2020; Paz Reference Paz2011), and very limited sumptuary items.

EB fortified sites were thus centres for patrimonial elites who had reciprocal obligations with rural populations. Highly local politics and elite competitiveness created the need for community-level signalling and other services, such as the creation of redoubts. In return for labour, communities were rewarded with commodities that had been previously extracted (cf. Greenberg Reference Greenberg and Höflmayer2017, 46–8). In this scenario, little formal management was necessary beyond face-to-face relationships between elites and non-elites, effected without administrative technologies such as seals.

Feasting is difficult to document, but is reflected in the changing composition of EB ceramic assemblages, for example the rapid increase of drinking forms such as cups in the EB I and the presence of larger presentation shapes such as platters in the EB II–III. Given that platters emerge in the late EB I, their appearance in central and northern Levantine contexts may be a rare example of south-to-north diffusion (Joffe Reference Joffe, Shai, Chadwick, Hitchcock, Dagan, McKinney and Uziel2018; cf. Vacca & D'Andrea Reference Vacca, D'Andrea and Richard2020, 134–7). It is worth noting again, however, that later drinking vessels such as depas and tankards that become part of a unified elite culture from the Euphrates to the Aegean are absent in the southern Levant.

Traditional explanations that exports of Mediterranean crops to Egypt substantially underpinned ‘urban’ and elite economies in the southern Levant, a consensus view for decades, should be discarded (Joffe Reference Joffe1993, 82–3; Stager Reference Stager and Tubb1985). Recent analyses demonstrate that wine and oil were being exported from the central, not the southern Levant in the early–mid third millennium (Genz et al. Reference Genz, Riehl, Çakırlar, Slim and Damick2016; Jean & Badreshany Reference Jean and Badreshany2023). A wide area of the central and northern Levant shared a ‘combed ware’ ceramic culture focused on vessels made from shale-rich and later calcareous fabrics, suggesting an integrated economy where agricultural products circulated in identifiable vessels, some of which were sealed as ‘brand indicators’ (Badreshany et al. Reference Badreshany, Philip and Kennedy2020, 190). These networks extended into the northernmost regions of the southern Levant.

The organization of EB II–III central Levantine sites including Byblos, Tell Arqa, Tell Fadous Kfarabida and Tell Koubba remains difficult to discern but all share forms of planned ‘ritual monumentality’ including temples (de Vreeze & Badreshany Reference de Vreeze and Badreshany2023). There is also extensive evidence for sealing, inter-site specialization, and, at least at Tell Fadous Kfarabida, archaeozoological evidence for wool production but few tools for spinning or weaving (Genz Reference Genz2016). Stronger links to Egypt and inland Syria and to international systems more than compensated for whatever lack of wool there may have been as a staple finance good.

In the southern Levant enormous EB I sites such as ‘En Esur (Paz & Elad Reference Paz, Elad, Steibel, Ben-Ami, Gorzalczany, Tepper and Koch2022) also emerged outside the area of direct Egyptian contacts in the fourth millennium, suggesting that early exports to Egypt had only a modest impact on elites and economics. Wine and oil production in EB II–III was primarily for local consumption and political economics (Milevski Reference Milevski2011, table 7; cf. Stager Reference Stager and Tubb1985).

One other source of wealth existed in the EB: copper. Two phases of copper production in the Negev across EB II–III and EB IV bce link southern Levantine networks to Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom Egypt, first via the town of Arad and then via Negev highland sites (Ben-Yosef et al. Reference Ben-Yosef, Gidding, Tauxe, Davidovich, Najjar and Levy2016; Finkelstein et al. Reference Finkelstein, Adams, Dunseth and Shahack-Gross2018; Yamafuji Reference Yamafuji2023).

In neither phase, however, was copper distributed widely from production sites to sites in the southern Levant itself. Most copper objects are small and prosaic with little evidence for centralized distribution. A hoard of copper axes appear to have been specially produced symbols of power in the palace at Khirbet al-Batraway (Medeghini et al. Reference Medeghini, Fabrizi, De Vito, Mignardi, Nigro and Gallo2016; Nigro Reference Nigro, Rosińska-Balik, Ochał-Czarnowicz, Czarnowicz and Dębowska-Ludwin2015). Similar hoards were found at Tell el-Hesi and Pella in prosaic contexts (Montanari Reference Montanari2018) and most EB sites appear predictably stripped of valuable metals. Copper may have been circulated by locally elites through patronage mechanisms, but at low levels. The role of copper as a staple finance good thus appears unlikely.

Isotopic evidence dating to EB III also indicates that Egyptian animals including donkeys and ovicaprines were moved to the southern Levant (Arnold et al. Reference Arnold, Hartman, Greenfield, Shai, Babcock and Maeir2016; Greenfield et al. Reference Greenfield, Greenfield, Arnold, Shai, Albaz and Maeir2020), while Egyptian reliefs suggest cattle from the southern Levant were moved to Egypt (Sowada Reference Sowada2018). The organization and scale of this trade is unclear, but the significance of donkeys as valued means of transportation ritually disposed of at the end of their use life implies considerable significance.

Animal bones at Tell es-Safi, however, show that most sheep and goats were raised in the immediate area of the city and were not imported from a distance (Arnold et al. Reference Arnold, Greenfield, Hartman, Greenfield, Shai, Carter-McGee and Maeir2018; Greenfield et al. Reference Greenfield, Greenfield, Arnold, Shai, Albaz and Maeir2020). The discovery of anthropogenic soils in close proximity suggests intensive exploitation of Tell Yarmouth's surroundings. Overall subsistence was a local affair (Ackermann et al. Reference Ackermann, Paz and Avni2017) and there is no evidence the southern Levant export economy included textiles.

In return, the Egyptian goods received in the southern Levant throughout the Early Bronze Age were mostly random items gifted to local rulers. No meaningful quantities of high-value imported Egyptian commodities such as gold have been identified rather than reused palettes, stone vessels and beads (Sowada Reference Sowada2009, 91–127). This is in contrast to the northern Levant where inscribed Egyptian materials were more common.

International contacts were specialized and limited, and during the EB II and early EB III surpluses were deployed to architectural displays and feasting. Another measure of the limited power of EB southern Levantine elites is the comparative lack of mortuary display; there are no hypogea, tumuli, or significant disposal of wealth (including humans, equids, and dogs), as was common in mid-third-millennium Syria and Mesopotamia (Baadsgaard et al. Reference Baadsgaard, Monge, Cox and Zettler2011; Wygnańska Reference Wygnańska2017). Outside of Bab edh-Dhra and Jericho there is puzzlingly little evidence for EB II–III burials at all (Ilan Reference Ilan2002).

The lack of wealth removed from circulation in burials reflects the economy as a whole. The complex fiscal and finance systems documented at Ebla (Benati & Bonechi Reference Benati, Bonechi, Mynářová and Alivernini2020), with revenue, rents, tributes and fees, including from commodities passing through its territory, a carefully measured system of land ownership, and a complex structure of designated and enumerated elites and dependents, are difficult to perceive at any point in the Bronze Age southern Levant. Whatever systems existed did so without writing, at least during the third millennium.

Wool: economy, symbolism and cognition in the southern Levant

Despite the obvious ease of acquiring fleeces through rooing, there is no significant wool weaving in the Chalcolithic or Early Bronze Age southern Levant. Instead, it appears leather and sheepskins were worn, products of an integrated animal economy that emphasized meat and other secondary products (Joffe Reference Joffe2022).

During the fourth and third millennia bce there are no material remains suggestive of industrial-scale weaving, such as specialized buildings, or for such activities being attached to or controlled by emerging institutions, namely EB I–II temples, EB I–II communal buildings, or EB III palaces (de Miroschedji Reference de Miroschedji, Bietak, Matthiae and Prell2019).

There are no signs that a wool industry was ideologically or iconographically encoded into material culture. Only a single seal is comparable to the southern Mesopotamian ‘pigtailed women’ weaving scene seals (Ben-Tor Reference Ben-Tor, Ganor, Kreimerman, Streit and Mumcuoglu2016; Breniquet Reference Breniquet, Michel and Nosch2010; Dittmann Reference Dittmann, Mollenbeck, Kleber and Neumann2018; Vila & Helmer Reference Vila, Helmer, Breniquet and Michel2014; cf. Kelley Reference Kelley2018, 71–3). Moreover, there are no weaving or craft scenes (or contest, banquet, or master of animal scenes), which are common on contemporary Syrian and Mesopotamian seals (cf. Tumolo Reference Tumolo2019a, 44).

In contrast, animal imagery on EB seals emphasized processions of wild animals with magical associations and bovines representing wealth displays (de Miroschedji Reference de Miroschedji, Heltzer, Segal and Kaufman1993), but not sheep. An impression from ‘En Esur depicting an orant figure next to a bovine conveniently joins both categories of wealth and ceremony (Paz et al. Reference Paz, Elad, Milevski and Getzov2018, 290, fig. 2d) (Figs 4 & 5). Scenes of lions and goats juxtapose the wild and tamed worlds (Thalmann Reference Thalmann2013), while ceremonial scenes of individuals holding hands, variously interpreted as religious dances or ‘sacred weddings’, provide a human context for animal scenes of magic and wealth (Paz Reference Paz2017; Paz et al. Reference Paz, Milevski and Getzov2013). Both scenes are also present in the central and northern Levant (Tumolo Reference Tumolo2022: 72–4).

Figure 4.

Seal impressions from Mizpe Zevulun. Scale 2:1. (After Joffe Reference Joffe and Wolff2001, fig. 19.2.)

Figure 5.

‘En Esur seal impression depicting an animal and orant figure. (Used by permission of Yitzhak Paz. Photograph: Clara Amit, after Paz et al. Reference Paz, Elad, Milevski and Getzov2018, fig. 2d.)

But outside the EB I Egyptian enclave, there are no bullae recording individual transactions. Seals were not used as security technologies to control access to facilities or stores, or as part of an accounting system for incoming or outgoing commodities. Instead, the bodies of storage vessels are sealed, a branding practice partially consistent with contemporary Syria and the central and northern Levant including Ebla and Hama (Genz & Ahrens Reference Genz and Ahrens2021; Matthews Reference Matthews1996; Mazzoni Reference Mazzoni1992; Tumolo Reference Tumolo2022).Footnote ³

Overall, southern Levantine symbolism—heraldic, cultic (de Miroschedji Reference de Miroschedji2011; Paz Reference Paz2017), geometric, and naturalistic—was restricted to seals carried as personal totems, sealings on special function vessels (Thalmann Reference Thalmann2013) as ‘brand indicators’ or manufacturer's marks (Badreshany et al. Reference Badreshany, Philip and Kennedy2020), and potmarks (Mazzoni Reference Mazzoni, Jasink, Weingarten and Ferrara2017). Representative seals presented stock narratives and associations with little semantic or temporal content and offered few opportunities to transmit information to viewers.

EB figurines are also predominantly bovines or donkeys, representations of agricultural wealth and trade made at the household or village level (Milevski & Kolska Horwitz Reference Milevski, Kolska Horwitz, Kowner, Bar-Oz, Biran, Shahar and Shelach-Lavi2019). More elaborate ivory bull's heads are notable prestige objects during EB II–III but in very small numbers (Al Ajlouny et al. Reference Al Ajlouny, Douglas, Khrisat and Mayyas2012; Paz Reference Paz and Greenberg2014; Tumolo Reference Tumolo, D'Andrea, Micale, Nadali, Pizzimenti and Vacca2019b). In contrast, sheep (and flax, juxtaposed with date palms) as well as bulls are found on many examples of Mesopotamian art such as the Warka Vase, and the ‘peace’ side of the Uruk Standard, encoding the concept of divinely provided abundance (Miller et al. Reference Miller, Jones and Pittman2016; Winter Reference Winter and Stone2007). Even abstracted shapes in jewellery may represent roped sheep (Miller Reference Miller2013).

Finally, there are no written records in the southern Levant. The appearance of EB potmarks has been suggested to represent the beginning of a rudimentary system for quantitative notation, but this has been disputed (Genz Reference Genz2001; Greenfield et al. Reference Greenfield, Shai, Maeir, Stucky, Kaelin and Mathys2016; Helms Reference Helms1987; Moreno García Reference Moreno García2016). Without the need to record labour and products associated with textiles and managed cereal production—high-volume and high-frequency transactions with long storage horizons—the pathway toward writing in the southern Levant was dramatically slower than in Syria and Mesopotamia.

The lack of a system of economic sealing in the late prehistoric southern Levant is especially puzzling given the evidence for an early abortive local tradition of seals, tokens and bullae found at PPNB Munhata, Pottery Neolithic Sha'ar HaGolan and Ha-Gosherim, and Early Chalcolithic Tel Tsaf (Freikman & Garfinkel Reference Freikman and Garfinkel2017). Late Chalcolithic seals exist in small numbers but do not form a coherent corpus in terms of motifs or usage. They appear talismanic (Fig. 6).Footnote ⁴ Southern Levantine practices contrast sharply not only with Mesopotamia and with the complex fourth-millennium administration systems of seals, cretulae, and bullae in the Upper Euphrates, epitomized by palatial Arslantepe (Frangipane Reference Frangipane2016).

Figure 6.

Ghassul seals. (A) Mallon et al. Reference Mallon, Koeppel and Neuville1934, fig. 28.1; (B) Bourke et al. Reference Bourke, Lovell, Sparks, Seaton, Mairs and Meadows2000, 71, 73, fig. 23:1. Used by permission of Stephen Bourke.

Southern Levant remained non-literate despite direct exposure to Egyptian writing systems at sites such as ‘En Besor and Nahal Tillah (Shulman Reference Shulman and Gophna1995). Later, as Ebla was adapting cuneiform for its West Semitic dialect and recording transactions in enormous detail, the southern Levant remained uninterested, or even unable, in recording individual transactions.

It is possible that some form of writing was done on perishable materials, such as on skins, but no evidence currently exists. No evidence exists for non-writing accounting systems such as quipu or tally sticks, although a drilled Chalcolithic bone figurine has been suggested as an unspecified mnemonic device (Levy & Golden Reference Levy and Golden1996). The southern Levant's lack of writing and numeracy, and generalized sense of seasonality and calendrics, has important implications for language, cognition and categorization (Overmann Reference Overmann, Overmann and Coolidge2019).

The EB southern Levant could not record complex economic transactions such as land sales, loans and marriage contracts. Long-distance diplomatic and economic contacts similarly relied on memory and orality. The lack of evidence for calendrics (Greet Reference Greet2021; Polcaro Reference Polcaro, Feliu, Llop, Millet Albá and Sanmartín2013) or mensuration meant that agricultural space could not be accurately charted, seasons predicted or planned, and surpluses and dispersals precisely recorded (cf. Sallaberger Reference Sallaberger, Shibata and Yamada2021). Older systems that relied on landmarks and natural signs such as lunar and solar cycles, recalled through rituals such as solstice or moon-naming ceremonies, or even more broadly with animal or bird migrations, sufficed, as did supporting ideologies and behaviours that sought to sustain productivity through supernatural intervention.

Similarly, without writing, neurofunctional abilities to conceptualize words as discrete signifiers, in contrast to faces, objects or descriptions, may not have developed. Without instantiation created by recording systems, cognition associated with numbers was also limited; ambiguity and fluidity remained (Overmann Reference Overmann2022). Writing, when encountered, may even have been viewed as unnatural. And without language being centralized by bureaucrats, various linguistic communities retained far greater autonomy in dialectic and conceptual terms. The nature of things remained expansive, unconstrained and fluid.

In the absence of writing, cultural and political memory and politics as a whole were similarly moored by orality, ritual and supporting objects rather than fixed accounts. In a sense, performativity prevailed over precision. Performance as a means of maintaining balances between real and liminal realms, including the construction of time, was the basis of Chalcolithic culture. How EB patrimonial society managed its internal politics and external relations with more complex entities this way is unclear.