at the command of Uruk urban elites (Englund 2009 ). Later historical parallels allow
us to easily imagine the deployment captives as part of the workforce used to build the
monumental structures that stood as a testament to power at the very center of Uruk
cities. Uruk iconography depicting siege scenes and bound prisoners (e.g., Boehmer
1999 : pls 11 – 27 ), while amenable to varying interpretations, provide us with multiple
representations that can also be reasonably interpreted as depicting the taking of cap-
tives that would later swell the ranks of laborers tracked by Uruk scribes. To understand
how and where many of those individuals may have been acquired, we must now turn
to an examination of the so-called Uruk Expansion.THE URUK EXPANSION: THE WORLD’S FIRST
COLONIAL INTRUSION
No aspect pertaining to the origins of Mesopotamian civilization has garnered more
attention in the past few decades than the expansion of Uruk polities into a variety of
geographical and cultural areas across the periphery of alluvial Mesopotamia. This
expansion took a variety of forms in different areas, depending no doubt on distance
away from the alluvium, ease of transport, and the varying nature of preexisting
societies in the intruded areas. Though it has been the subject of considerable recent
discussion (Algaze 1993 , 2001 a, 2001 b, 2005 : 128 – 155 ; Postgate 2002 ; Potts 2004 ;
Rothman 2001 ; Stein 1999 , 2005 ; see also chapters by Cooper and Lamberg-Karlovsky
in this volume), it is still necessary to address here the broad outlines of the Uruk
Expansion because of what they reveal about the nature of Uruk societies and their
evolving capabilities through the Uruk period.
Vastly oversimplifying, the Uruk Expansion can be heuristically divided into two
components, which may have partly overlapped, both chronologically and causally.
The first and possibly earliest phase of the expansion took place as Uruk populations
colonized the neighboring Susiana plain of Khuzestan, in southwestern Iran, where
indigenous populations (Terminal Susa A) had previously been in decline (Wright and
Johnson 1975 ). This expansion may be discerned in the introduction of a full
complement of Uruk material and ideological culture across the Susiana Plain (Algaze
1993 : fig. 3 ), where it is found in sites both large and small suggesting that the whole
region was taken over by the intruding populations.^10 Given existing gaps in our
understanding of the earlier part of the Uruk period, little can be said about when
exactly this colonial intrusion got underway, how long it took, or how many alluvial
polities participated in the initial push. What is clear is that ceramics and glyptic of
Middle Uruk type, dated sometime between 3700 / 3600 and 3500 / 3400 BC, provide a
terminus ante quemfor the start of the intrusion and that its end result was the division
of the Susiana into two competing Uruk polities (Wright and Johnson 1975 ; Johnson
1987 ), centered respectively at Susa and Chogha Mish. Culturally, though probably not
politically, Susiana had become, in effect, part and parcel of Uruk Mesopotamia.
At about the same time that this was taking place in Susiana, some Uruk polities,
possibly in reaction to events in Susiana, appear to have initiated systematic contacts
with societies situated at their north and northeastern periphery. These contacts were
particularly intense in the high rolling plains of Upper Mesopotamia stretching
between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers – an area that in the earlier half of the fourth
millennium was well under way to developing its own traditions of urbanism and social
–– Guillermo Algaze ––