The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIV: Fall and Revival

 

Iron Age sheep shears, found at Flag Fen

First, a housekeeping note: There was a hitch in my techblogging process at terms' end in April, resulting in my having to return all my materials and recall them, which I have done this week. Or, rather, two hitches, as my summer holidays and stat days were all heaped up and pushed to the end of August, leaving me off from the 14th to the 31st, or possibly the 2nd of September, although I am not counting on  having the first Sunday of September off work. I currently intend to get caught up on the postblogging from the 14th to the 21st and then leave for my summer road trip, unless the province is on fire by then. 

Meanwhile, the icy hand of mortality, in the form of knee pain that started on my trip to Kamloops and which was exacerbated by having to run around the store for days on end covering for other peoples' vacations has reminded me that I Would Run Away to the Air, Plantation of the Atlantic, and Sacred Spring aren't writing themselves. Of the three I have no manuscript material for Sacred Spring apart from blog posts, and while I am hardly satisfied by the first two projects, Plantation is steadily progressing in  my off-blog writing time and I have decades of investment in I Would Run Away, so Sacred Spring deserves a bit more attention here. 

The two core themes of the Early Iron Age Revival of the State are the transformation of the quotidian economy by iron tools; and the urban sanctuary, the socioeconomic mechanism that emerged to manage this new economy. Most of what was done with iron tools was not precisely new, and the urban sanctuary spread west, rather than being innovated in place. There is, however, an area where quantity has a quality all of its own.

Before I talk about that, however, here is some tangential animal care with manual steel tools which might be manipulative, but is very cute. This is not something you expect anyone to be able to do with stone or even bronze tools. 

The point of the conversation, however, is wool production. If Google is to be trusted, a cashmere goat yields 4oz of fibre by combing, as demonstrated below, as compared with 4.5kg of wool produced by shearing. The demonstration video below is improbably quick. The shearer is very experienced, and, as the lead comment says, this is a very lucky sheep to come away with no cuts. That may explain why it is so docile.  

In looking at Bronze Age textile production, we are in the odd position of having administrative and logistical documents while struggling with the politics. At the ancient Syrian site of Ebla, the decision to put a royal acropolis at the summit of a monumental 72 step staircase perhaps understandably left the records room of a 23rd Century royal palace undisturbed over the centuries. In 1974--5, Paolo Matthaie and his team discovered the trove of 1800 complete tablets and 4700 fragments in situ, most forming an administrative record, although an attached reading hall had a collectin of "ritual and literary texts, including pedagogical texts" for training young scribes. It is mainly from these that scholars have reconstructed Eblaite, an East Semitic language with West Semitic elements sharing areal features with Hurrian, which I mention in my ongoing, no doubt completely quixotic attempt to problematise the extinction of Urartu-Hurrian. 

The Ebla documents may be compared with the more diffuse but still extensive collections of documents associated with the Ur III state, which, apart from hosting the "Sumerian Renaissance," has been so informative as to tempt scholars with the thought that we might be in a position to reconstruct a Middle Bronze Age (2112BCE--2004BCE) economy. In both places and eras, sheep and textiles are critically important, although to an interesting degree, available documents push sheep, rather than wool, forward in the Ur III era.  This is a bit dismissive of the UR III documentary record, and specifically that of the last four of its five kings, beginning with Shulgi and coming to an end before the close of the reign of Ibbi-Su[e]n. This period provides about a third of the world's entire corpus of cuneiform texts, about 400,000 documents. However, reading those tablets is an ongoing process and the Ur III corpus is a particular challenge because it is very largely administrative. 

Exactly why the  century of the Ur III period dominates the cuneiform record remains unclear. If I, personally, had to plump for an explanation it would be that it is an accident of preservation, that later eras made heavier use of more ephemeral media such as writing boards, although there are obvious problems with such an explanation. However, the most influential explanation is the "Hayekian" one, according to which Ur III is history's first (abundantly) recorded totalitarian state, and the records are the legacy of an attempt at total social control, much like mid-Twentieth Century planned economies. The Lamentation for Ur thus shows that socialism is wrong, neo-Liberalism, etc., thank you ancient history for your uncanny ability to remain relevant! This programme, about which I am just the tiniest bit skeptical, then proceeds from Shulgi's undoubted decision to present himself as a god to ongoing arguments about whether the state, temple complexes, or individuals "owned" the land and the various Ur III economic complexes represented in our documents. God-Kings, it turns out, are bad, especially when they built monumental religious complexes like the First Ziggurat of Ur, which might perhaps be the Bible's Tower of Babel and thus quite the demonstration of God's opinion of such turns in human affairs as well as some kind of ongoing metaphor for the role of language in empire. 

The Wiki cuts through this obsolete discourse to present Ur III as a "patrimonial" state built on an idealised hierarchy of households, leading to a simply delightful conversation about whether the "Ur-DUN" of the "Household of Ur-DUN" was a royal appointee to a profitable prebend, or a local grandee, perhaps a member of the old Girsu-Lagal royal house, enjoying traditional family property re-oriented towards the needs of the Ur III state.  

This all perhaps needlessly gets in the way of understanding an eight year documentary series from which we reconstruct the history of an institution focussed not on wool production, but on a stockyard. Ur-DUN'S enterprise was certainly folded into the Ur III state. The fundamental basis of Shulgi's system was the bala-tax, which outlying regions paid in the form of various raw gods, in particular and of relevance in this case, livestock. The bala tax was paid by different provinces in a monthly rotation, which presumably means that, say, Kish sent sheep to Girsu, and thus to Ur-DUN's fattening pens, in some months, and received Girsu's surplus barley, which also went to the fattening pens, in other months. It is not how I'd run an economy, but it kept the "Woodshed" sheep-pen operating for twenty-seven years, steadily receiving bala-taxation sheep and dispensing small numbers of them on a regular basis to recipients, particularly temples, for cult purposes. 

The sheep in question were normally "plucked,"although some retained wool, perhaps in part because some kinds of cult required receiving an "unplucked" sheep, whose wool would then be incorporated into the ritual. Hides were a particularly important output of the Woodshed, but were sent on to specialty processors rapidly and with little comment in the records. Obtaining and paying for different kinds of fodder was, in contrast, an ongoing issue. 

It has been elsewhere established that the barley market collapsed under Ibn-Shun, with the price of a gur of barley falling rapidly from a standardised 18 gur to the shekel to a one-to-one ratio. Since this was not a generalised agricultural crisis (fodder buyers in this time well after the period of the Ur-DUN records switched to reeds and "plant oil"), it probably reflects some kind of monetary problem and either led to, or was caused by, the collapse of the bala system, and, in short order, the collapse of the Ur III state, to Ibbi-Sun being led away in a halter to a resurgent Susa, and the Lamentation for Ur. I take "reeds and 'plant oil'" to be flax and hemp, so perhaps farmers switched out of barley because of the collapse of the price structure. Ur-DUN's fish ponds were an important part of the operation and were highly compatible with a retting operation.  There is some interesting evidence that the late Ur III state switched away from the stockyard economy to dealing directly with shepherds, which perhaps puts a different spin on the abrupt incursion of the Amorite "shepherd-kings." (And their West Semitic language.) 

In any case, the "weaving mill" in Ur-DUN's operation was a small affair employing perhaps little more than sixty women. In a discussion of data from the Early Dynastic period, Amanda Podanyi cites statistics that indicate that a twenty-person textile team might take as much as a week-and-a-half to produce enough thread to make a single bedsheet, so we get some sense of just how scarce and valuable wool and vegetable textiles were in this period. King Gudea of Lagash, who turns up in the immediate pre-UR III in votive status wearing some kind of toga precursor, might be the first Iraqi king presented as wearing upper body wear, surely a blessing to an aging monarch. I have done nothing in this discussion to motivate a discussion of raw material availability as a production bottleneck comparable to final processing, but perhaps a shortage of wool was holding back the adoption of more highlly capitalised processing methods or organisations. 

It seems likely that those hides slipping out the back door of the Woodshed are key to the story of this society's fabric production and consumption requirements and we get a better sense of why the production of sheep, as opposed to wool, was at the heart of the industry. As much as the Amorites, "whose kings lived in tents," are construed as primitive the pastoral halo that surrounded the settled economies of the Middle East could not really take off until demand for wool reached a much higher level --something that, paradoxically, must have been preceded by a collapse in the demand for sheep, and the development of a new technological praxis for wool production. I guess that I am still looking for a driving mechanism that isn't iron. and so back to the top of the post and that heart-warming farrier. Next time I'm on about the Sacred Spring (and hopefully it will be awhile as I will not deny the self-indulgent character of these posts), a long overdue look at Robert F. Drews' notion that the Early Iron Age was the first age of equestrianship.