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2 The Demise and Regeneration of Bronze Age Urban Centers in the Euphrates Valley of Syria Lisa Cooper In the Near East, the end of the third millennium bc was a tumultuous time characterized in many regions by the demise of state society or, at the very least,the increased fragmentation of urban polities that had once controlled large tracts of land and had prospered under stable, productive economies. This demise is observable in southern Mesopotamia,for example,where two great empires fell in succession in the last centuries of the third millennium bc. The house of Akkad, the first imperial power in southern Mesopotamia to consolidate political control over a mosaic of competing city-states and to establish trading opportunities over a vast area of the Near East, came to a dramatic end around 2150 bc (Yoffee 1988a:46–49). The Akkadian empire wasreplacedshortlyafterwardbytheThirdDynastyof Ur,althoughthisstate too,characterizedasitwasbyanextremelycentralizedbureaucracyandoverstretched economy, rapidly crumbled around 2000 bc (Yoffee 1988a:49–50). The once-great capital city of Ur was overrun by foreigners, and the whole empire was thrown into a state of internal chaos and political fragmentation . North of the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain, the region of the Jezireh of Upper Mesopotamia, essentially comprising the Khabur Plains of northeastern Syria and the Sinjar Plain of northern Iraq, also underwent a crisis toward the end of the third millennium bc. Up to this point, the area had been pursuing a regime of agricultural maximization, no doubt precipitated by the growth of large urban settlements. Extensive manuring (evidenced by widespread sherd scatters) and a multitude of linear hollows, which are interpreted as roadways radiating out from settlements to the fields, are believed to reflect the intensity of agricultural production that took place during this period (Wilkinson 1994:492–93). Around 2200 bc, however, the area experienced a dramatic reduction in this intensified dryfarming agricultural regime, about the same time that Akkadian imperial The Euphrates Valley of Syria 19 control in this region began to weaken (Weiss and Courty 1993). While recent archaeological evidence at sites such as Tell Brak and Tell Mozan indicates that some urban settlements in the region survived after this period (Oates et al. 2001:393), an appreciable reduction in the number of occupied sites and a pattern of contracting settlement appear as the prevailing trend in the Jezireh between 2200 and 1900 bc (Peltenburg 2000:164–65; Weiss and Courty 1993:141). This change may have been brought about by a largescale population emigration, in which human groups moved toward southern Mesopotamia via the Euphrates River valley in their quest for reliable food and pasturage (Weiss and Courty 1993:144). Alternatively, it is possible that many of the inhabitants adapted successfully to pastoralism within the region and that such a transformation left sparse remains in the archaeological record (Peltenburg 2000:165). Still other regions of the Near East were affected by collapse at the end of the third millennium bc. In Egypt, this period is marked by the end of the prosperous Old Kingdom and its replacement by the First Intermediate period, a time of political fragmentation and decentralization (E. Morris, chapter 4). In most areas to the west of the Jordan River in Palestine, as early as 2300 bc, the Early Bronze III urban centers were destroyed or abandoned , and the stable productive subsistence system, based on intensified agriculture, industry and trade, ceased to operate (Dever 1989:228; Richard 1987:34). In the Early Bronze IV period that followed, the region experienced a kind of “ruralization,” in which a diversified subsistence economy based on small-scale farming and pastoral nomadism prevailed for several centuries (Palumbo 2001:237). Climate change is frequently posited as an important factor that brought about the widespread collapses that were witnessed in many parts of the Near East and even beyond (Bell 1971; Weiss 1997). However, whether climate change was the principal catalyst by which change was effected or whether it simply exacerbated existing political, social, and economic stresses that urban societies were already experiencing remains uncertain (Dever 1989:232–33; Peltenburg 2000:178–80). Despite the indeterminate nature of the cause of collapse, however, its consequences frequently had pronounced effects. Noteworthy is the considerable length of time that elapsed before areas saw the return of urban societies and a stabilized agricultural economy in some areas. In much of Palestine, for example, nearly four centuries passed before the reestablishment (at the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age) of city-states, characterized by settlement hierarchy, the presence...

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