regimes elevated agro-pastoral productivity to an unprecedented scale in antiquity. In
contrast, all areas of western Syria depended principally on rain-fed agriculture, and
several regions, particularly the Syrian steppe lands and the southern section of the
middle Euphrates River Valley, received less than adequate precipitation, frequently
making dry farming precarious (Wilkinson 1994 : 499 – 500 , 2004 : 41 ; Stein 2004 :
62 – 63 ). It might be this factor, along with the fact that several regions were constrained
by topographical features that prevented the cultivation of wide tracts of land, that
accounts in part for the smaller growth of Syrian urban settlements when compared
to the cities of Sumer. At the same time, Syria’s variety of subsistence pursuits, which
combined agricultural activities with pastoralism, not to mention the continuation of
small-scale hunting in some areas, gave the regions some economic flexibility, and
ensured a reliable flow of sustenance in the face of environmental uncertainties
(Cooper 2006 : 44 – 45 , 270 – 271 ). The activity of trade in various raw materials,
especially textiles, metals and timber, conveyed up and down the Euphrates River, as
well as along east–west overland routes that connected the Euphrates with trading
partners to the west in the direction of Aleppo, the Idlib Plain, the Orontes Valley and
the profitable ports on the Mediterranean Sea, further ensured ongoing economic
success for some communities and was probably a factor that contributed to their
moderate urban development during the third millennium BC.
CHRONOLOGY
Most of the discussion here focuses on developments during the third millennium BC,
when many parts of western Syria and the middle Euphrates experienced urban
growth and contacts with the Sumerian city-states of southern Mesopotamia (Figure
25. 2 ). This period is the Early Bronze Age, which has been divided up into several sub-
periods: EB I, II, III and IV. Absolute dates for these sub-periods, obtained from
radio-carbon determinations, correlations between well-formulated pottery sequences
and their correspondences to reliably dated artefacts, still require considerable
refinement. Moreover, the sequences of western Syria and the middle Euphrates
Valley require additional work to be properly synchronised with one another. For the
present, rough dates for each phase or phases are presented here. EB I is generally
thought to begin c. 3200 – 3100 BC, but its end-date is uncertain and has consequently
been lumped together with EB II. The end of EB II is fixed c. 2600 BCfor the middle
Euphrates and c. 2700 BCfor Western Syria (roughly speaking Early Dynastic IIIa in
Sumer). The dating has been largely influenced by the appearance of the unique Red-
Black Burnished Ware (RBBW, known also as Early Transcaucasian Ware and Khirbet
Kerak Ware) since it was a major diagnostic trait among the ceramic assemblages of
western Syria. Although traditional arguments have tended to place the appearance of
RBBW at the beginning of the Southern Levant’s EB III, around c. 2700 BC, more
recent studies have suggested that it may have appeared as early as the end of the
fourth millennium and become widespread in the Amuq plains by 2800 BC(Philip
and Millard 2000 : 280 ; Mazzoni 2002 : 71 ). We hesitate to push western Syria’s EB III
back to an early date on the basis of this type of artefact alone, and so for the moment,
we continue to assign western Syria’s EB III to around 2700 BC, until a greater
understanding of chronological developments for this elusive period has been
achieved.
–– Lisa Cooper ––