recorded, will have been secondary to primary agricultural activities in the respective
settlements.”
5. “Material remains and to a substantially lesser extent early texts inform us that such
societies, which may themselves be termed ‘archaic’, operated at a stage well
removed from that of so-called primitive cultures. The mere fact of a centralized
administration, be it local or regional, as well as the quantity of goods and workers
registered in archaic texts document, in our opinion, an at least inchoate form of
class division into a functioning administrative elite and laborers, probably with a
concomitant shift of ownership of in particular productive land to a small group in
the community. This more advanced organization replaced tribal or simply familial
organization in village settings.”
We are left to wonder whether there ever was an Uruk or Proto-Elamite Expansion or
whether there was a wholesale adoption, emulation and assimilation of a social
technology, one that used tablets, incorporated an administrative bureaucracy, with
distinctive styles of cylinder seals, BRBs, and numerical systems. To what extent could
the invention of this social technology, devoted largely to serve the needs of an elite,
be the movement and adoption of concepts and their underlying social structures
rather than the large scale migration of people?
The settlements of the P-E, like those of the Uruk Expansion, did not endure. Their
chronologies differed dramatically. While the Uruk Expansion appears to be a process
that unfolded over the course of millennium, the Proto-Elamite Expansion endured
from 3300 to 2900. The social experiment, cast over the Iranian Plateau, collapsed. As
the Iranian Plateau reverted to its distinctive regional cultures literacy disappeared not
to re-emerge for a millennia. The distinguished art historian Pierre Amiet ( 1993 : 26 ) is
concise: “The proto-Elamite civilization collapsed as from a single blow, without any
previous sign of decadence... the proto-Elamite highlands went over completely to a
nomadism that is imperceptible in the archaeological record, Susa fell back again for
many centuries into the Mesopotamian orbit.” In the next section, we will have more
to say about the role of pastoral nomadism.
CULTURE, ETHNICITY, AND NATION
The history of relations between the peoples of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, and the
Iranian Plateau, the Elamites, is best derived from the written texts of the third
millennium. Referring to place and people with a single term both simplifies and
falsifies. Assyriologists remain uncertain as to the language(s) of the earliest texts. There
is a greater consensus that the earliest texts of southern Mesopotamia are in Sumerian
rather than that the Proto-Elamite texts are Elamite. Sumerian and Elamite are extinct
linguistic families without any modern descendants. We must appreciate that in both
regions there was a mosaic of linguistic representation. In Mesopotamia there was
Sumerian, Semitic, and even Indo-European languages spoken in the north, while the
nature of languages spoken in the Arabian peninsula and on the Iranian Plateau remain
unknown. By the end of the third millennium there is even an inscribed cylinder seal
depicting a translator from the Indus Civilization, with entourage, sitting on the lap
of a Mesopotamian King (Possehl 2002 , for illustration see Lamberg-Karlovsky 1981 :
390 ). Geographic and cultural diversity complemented this linguistic mosaic. Although–– C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky ––