CHAPTER EIGHT

THE ORGANISATION OF A SUMERIAN

TOWN: THE PHYSICAL REMAINS OF

ANCIENT SOCIAL SYSTEMS



Elizabeth C. Stone

T

his chapter looks not at the details of the archaeological data from the Sumerian

period, but rather on how cities, towns, and villages were put together and what

the spatial organization of settlements tells about Sumerian society writ large. Space is

important. When major political and religious centers–palaces and temples–are located

next to each other in the middle of a settlement, this indicates a concentration of both

religious and political power; but when they are located in quite different parts of town,

it suggests that they each have their own spheres of influence. In a similar fashion, these

days it is possible to use Google Earth to identify where the rich and poor live in most

modern cities–the houses of the poor are simply smaller and more crowded than those

of the rich. These differences are diagnostic of modern societies where variations in

wealth and status are reinforced by the spatial segregation of neighborhoods. However,

if no differences can be perceived between the house sizes in different parts of a settle-

ment, this indicates that principles other than the social segregation of classes is at

work. Finally, the degree of similarity and dissimilarity between the organization of

large urban centers and smaller towns and villages reflect the presence or absence of dif-

ferences in wealth and occupation between those living in settlements of different sizes.

This chapter, therefore, will focus on the locations of Sumerian temples and palaces,

the organization of the residential neighborhoods, the role played by city walls, canals,

harbors and the like to link or separate people and institutions, and will provide a

comparison between these features in the major cities with those in the smaller settle-

ments that surround them.

There are, however, problems to be overcome. One is how one assigns a function

to public buildings, especially those of a residential nature. Since the relative location

of centers of religion and secular power are crucial for understanding the political

dynamics within the city, it is important that one distinguish between a large residence

designed to house a king as opposed to one occupied by a high priest, but this is not

always easy. The second issue is that almost all of our evidence for the organization

of Sumerian settlements comes from the middle of the third millennium, the later

Early Dynastic, with more ambiguous data on earlier periods. We also have almost no

relevant data from the latter part of the third millennium, the Akkadian and Ur III

periods, but similarities in the organization of urban space between mid-third

millennium settlements and those dating to the early second millennium suggest that