The Origins of administrative practices and their developments in Greater Mesopotamia. The evidence from Arslantepe

The debate on the origins of administrative practices in the Near East has often overlapped and coincided with the debate on the origins of the State, since the formation of bureaucratic-administrative structures underpinned the political structure of the early centralised societies, and led to a radical, and often irreversible, change in the system of relations. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the origins of “bureaucracy” was considered to be an essential indicator of the presence of the State, in that it revealed the typical ways in which central politics were managed. Quite rightly, the existence of administrative systems was considered to reflect a system of delegated powers vested in individuals and institutions with specific administrative functions, which brought about a historic transformation from being tribal societies, in which the authority of a paramount chief was inalienable and non-transferable and legitimised on the basis of the social and kinship relations on which the structure of the community itself was based, to becoming centralised political societies in which the all-embracing central power could be delegated to individuals who were not necessarily blood-related, and who were bound to the leader by relations of subordination and faithfulness. Contributions from more recent archaeological research in the Near East, which was a ‘primary’ State formation area, has nevertheless shown that the need to ‘administer’ goods arose long before that transformation occurred, from the time of the Early Neolithic communities in Upper Mesopotamia (Jezirah) at the end of the 7th millennium BCE. And it is very interesting to see that even though that need must have arisen in connection with the production of food surpluses, as cropping and livestock raising took root, it was not found in all, but only in certain, types of Neolithic communities. The topics investigated in this paper therefore are: (1) what were the needs, and the contexts, in which controlling the movement of goods, and possibly the need to record them, became necessary; (2) what was the impact on the social and political relations of the groups in which those needs arose and became established. The first administrative systems from the Neolithic of Jezirah and the well-known administrative systems in early state societies of Greater Mesopotamia are analyzed and compared.