This book offers the first detailed comparative study of the seven best-documented early civilizations: ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Shang China, the Aztecs and adjacent peoples in the Valley of Mexico, the Classic Maya, the Inka, and the Yoruba. Unlike previous studies, equal attention is paid to similarities and differences in their sociopolitical organization, economic systems, religion, and culture. Many of this study's findings are surprising and provocative. Agricultural systems, technologies, and economic behaviour turn out to have been far more diverse than was expected. These findings and many others challenge not only current understandings of early civilizations but also the theoretical foundations of modern archaeology and anthropology. The key to understanding early civilizations lies not in their historical connections but in what they can tell us about similarities and differences in human behaviour.

http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam034/2002074052.pdf

Understanding early civilizations : a comparative study

For more than a century, archaeologists have frequently been drawn to understand the human past in broadly evolutionary terms, applying Darwinian thinking to the development of human societies. The unilinear models of human development that often result typically regard the state as the culmination of human progress, the end-point of a journey through intervening stages of bands, tribes and chiefdoms. Neo-evolutionary thinking was especially prevalent from the 1940s onwards, in the work of Julian Steward and others writing on the origins of the state. In the volume reviewed, Norman Yoffee challenges the former dominance of the neo-evolutionary approach, arguing that over the past half century it has stifled rather than stimulated our understanding of early state development.Yoffee contests the idea that states develop through a series of programmatic stages from less complex kinds of society. Instead, he stresses the diversity of the archaic state, drawing heavily on his specialist knowledge (drawn from texts as well as archaeology) of early Mesopotamia. Here we see city-state societies in which heterarchies play a role alongside hierarchies, and in which the varieties of lived experience varied considerably from place to place, even though all may at some level be considered to have been part of a shared Mesopotamian civilization.Yoffee's book is not, however, concerned solely with Mesopotamia; far from it, he draws comparative evidence from Egypt, South and East Asia and Central and South America to demonstrate the diversity and fluidity of the entities he is describing. Few of them conform to models that might be drawn from ethnography, and each state may in many ways be considered unique. Yet in a broader perspective, all states arise through a widespread pattern of change that has taken place in human society since the end of the Pleistocene in which individuals and groups have competed for control of resources.Yoffee concludes that ‘The central myth about the study of the earliest states ... is that there was something that could be called the archaic state, and that all of the earliest states were simply variations on this model’. The methodological alternative is to consider each society (of whatever type) as individual and unique, and constantly in a state of flux. In this review feature we invite a series of archaeologists specializing in the study of early states to address this and other issues raised by this important book. We begin, however, with an opening statement from the author himself.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0959774305000120

Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations , by Norman Yoffee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-81837-0 hardback £45 & US$75; ISBN 0-521-52156-4 paperback £19.99 & US$34.99, 291 pp.

Understanding Early Civilizations

1. Elam: what, when, where? 2. Environment, climate, and resources 3. The immediate precursors of Elam 4. Elam and Awan 5. The dynasty of Shimashki 6. The grand regents of Elam and Susa 7. The kingdom of Susa and Anshan 8. The Neo-Elamite period 9. Elam in the Achaemenid empire 10. Elymais 11. Elam under the Sasanians and beyond 12. Conclusion.

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The Archaeology of Elam: Formation and Transformation of an Ancient Iranian State

THis ARTICLE is a translation of my response to a request from the review Dialectiques for my opinion on two points fundamental to the social sciences, namely, ideology and class. For want of space, I shall merely outline some provisional conclusions that I have reached as briefly and as clearly as possible. I shall be dealing with four topics in turn: (1) the distinction between infrastructure and superstructure; (2) the relationship between the determinant role of the economy in the last analysis and the dominant role of any given superstructure; (3) the ideel2 aspect of social reality and the distinction between ideological and nonideological when dealing with ideel realities; (4) the role of violence and consent in the workings of the power of domination of an order or a class, etc. (can we speak of a paradox of "legitimacy" regarding the emergence of classes and the state?). Before going any farther, I should like to emphasize my debt to the ever-growing-and already immense-body of fresh material being thrown up by anthropological and historical research. As far as history is concerned, I am a mere amateur. My reading has centered mainly on problems of state formation and the transformation of class relations. I am afraid I shall probably disappoint those of my readers who would have liked me to spell out more precisely the connections between my general, abstract positions and this wealth of anthropological material

Infrastructures, Societies, and History'

\"This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria.\" Edward B. Garside, \"New York Times Book Review\" Ancient Mesopotamia the area now called Iraq has received less attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East. Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun. \"To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one of the most valuable books ever written.\" Leonard Cottrell, \"Book Week\" \"Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred years in the field of Assyriological research.\" Samuel Noah Kramer, \"Archaeology\" A. Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of our time, was editor in charge of the \"Assyrian Dictionary\" of the Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.\

Madeleine L. Burke

Papers

Ancient Mesopotamia, Portrait of a Dead Civilization