Mesopotamia is referred to as the ‘lowlands” in contrast to the “highlands” of the
Iranian Plateau, both have a considerable diversity of climate and environment.
In the first half of the third millennium, Mesopotamia consisted of independent
city-states each dominating a hinterland of towns and villages. Internal competition
between independent city-states often resulted in warfare while foreign campaigns
against the Elamites offered the promise of wealth and prestige within their homeland.
Initially “Sumer” and “Elam” were neither “nations” nor “states.” Elam consisted of a
loosely, and poorly understood, confederation of distinctive cultures and tribes inhab-
iting the Zagros Mountains and beyond. Whether it be Sumer or Elam, integration
never fully replaced fragmentation. Elam designated the Iranian highlands and never
referred specifically to a city, that is, Susa or a region Khuzistan (Susiana). Dynastic
transformations negated issues of decline and fall. Piotr Michalowski ( 2008 : 112 – 113 )
is a good guide to Elam’s definition:
In the language of third- and second-millennium Mesopotamian inscriptions and
literary texts, Elam seems to refer to the southeastern half of the highlands (Zagros
Mountains) bordering on Mesopotamia, while Subir covers the northeastern part.
This is a very general notion and cannot be pinpointed on the map... In all these
instances, Elam is a general geographical term and does not refer to a political entity... It may be that most people in the general area that Mesopotamians referred to
as Elam spoke versions of the language we call Elamite, but at the same time it is
likely that the general area of Subir was home to a variety of tongues, including
Gutian and Lulubean, not to mention Semitic... by Old Babylonian times (mid
second millennium) the semantic scope of Elam had changed: it was now a political
as well as geographical term and it included Susiana.
Throughout the third millennium, hostility and warfare was the leitmotifthat char-
acterized the relations between Sumer and Elam. This would have had a debilitating
impact on overland trade crossing the Iranian Plateau. Hostile relations may explain
why there is more evidence for maritime trade uniting the Indus Civilization,
Mesopotamia, and the Arabian Peninsula than the more restricted overland trade
between these regions and the Iranian Plateau (Lamberg-Karlovsky 1996 : 73 – 108 ;
Possehl 2002 : 215 – 236 ). The evidence, or “cause” for the hostility between Sumer and
Elam must be sought in the culturaldivide that separated the two. Their political
organization (city-state vs. tribe), their subsistence pattern (agricultural villages vs.
pastoral nomadism), and their environment (alluvial floodplain vs. mountain high-
lands) offered distinctions with real difference. The cultural boundary that separated
the two can be traced back to the sixth millennium (Oates and Oates 1976 ; Mortensen
1974 ). Pastoral nomadism was a dominant subsistence pattern in western Iran already
in the sixth millennium. The presence of pastoral nomads in the sixth millennium is
demonstrated archaeologically at Tepe Tula’i in northern Khuzistan and at Hakalan
and Parchineh in Luristan (Hole 2004 ; van den Berghe 1987 ).
By the late third millennium, archaeological cultures are complemented by histori-
cal texts that refer to the Guti, Lululubi, Simurrum, Shimashki, Harashi, Tukrish,
Marhasi, Anshan, Hurti, Kimash, and Aratta as inhabiting the Zagros and beyond. The
geographical positioning of these groups and their relations to Mesopotamia is a
constant theme within the archaeological and textual literature (for a comprehensive
–– Iran and its neighbors ––