The development of centralised societies in Greater Mesopotamia and the foundation of economic inequality

After briefly considering the various forms and degrees of social differences that can be included in a generic concept of ‘inequality’, the author first tries to clarify which type of ‘unequal social relations’ she will deal with in this paper. She focuses on the potential of certain social differences to evolve into real socio-economic disparities and forms of permanent political authority, looking at both some specific types of social conditions which are the roots of those inequalities and at different conditions and needs of the subsistence economy in different environments. The following step is an attempt to analyse the nature of the first unequal and hierarchical social relations in Near Eastern societies by identifying their economic and/or political bases, with particular reference to the Mesopotamian and peri-Mesopotamian world in the 4th millennium BCE. This region shows very interesting examples of the transformation from ranked to truly hierarchical societies, based on a growing centralisation of primary resources and labour, and also offers relevant data for the study of the dynamics of change that brought to the formation of Early State societies. The paper analyses the historical roots of the changes occurred in Southern Mesopotamia, from forms of hierarchical kinship ties recognizable in the Ubaid period (5th millennium BCE) to the establishment of unequal economic and political relations in the Late Uruk phases. Such changes resulted in the formation of strong centralised power systems. Since inequality involves subordinate relations, it grows hand in hand with the rise of ‘power’ and differentiated access to resources, and this was what happened also in other regions in Northern Mesopotamia and South-Eastern Anatolia, which are comparatively analysed. The case of Arslantepe, in the Upper Euphrates region, is finally presented in detail as a meaningful example of the growing circuit from prestige to power and from the use of religious/ideological consensus in public ceremonial practices to the exercise of power in more secular and direct forms, in a very precocious example of full-fledged palace dated to the end of the 4th millennium BCE. This change is seen as crucial to mark the rise of the State and to consolidate unequal socio-political and economic relations. But the Arslantepe centralised system, albeit very powerful, probably had not the solid basis that only an urban society can guarantee to a differentiated and hierarchical system of social and economic relations. It therefore collapsed soon as soon it was born.