A SURVEY OF VILLAGE SETTLEMENTEarly foundations and areasThe earliest settlements in Lower Mesopotamia (c. 6000 BC) already post-dated a
± 3 , 000 -year sequence of farming cultures in the rainfed north, and thus already
benefited from a well-developed toolkit of technologies. In hand were all the major
domestic herd animals, a long menu of cereal strains, and stable control over ceramics
production; the signature adaption for this new alluvial environment was irrigation.
Yet although irrigation was the sine qua nonfor farming in Babylonia, irrigation did
not require state control (the “hydraulic civilization” model), but was also managed
at the level of independent small communities in all periods.^13 The Mesopotamian
alluvium could boast some of the most productive agricultural lands of antiquity,
but with so many braided, natural channels, irrigation did not so much permit
cultivation, as extend and intensify it.
Village settlement gradually extended into the alluvium from the rainfed Zagros
foothills, but also by deliberate origin or transplant^14 into wetland ecosystems in
southernmost Babylonia, where people had originally subsisted by hunting and fishing,
and only later by farming. The intensive agricultural regime of Babylonia helped to
create a local specialization of labor between irrigated and non-irrigated areas. The
north Mesopotamian mode of mixed farming (single producers with both herds and
fields) was never a practical option in the south, where semi-nomadic pastoralism and
sedentary farming were particularized in adjacent micro-climates, undertaken by
neighboring and economically complementary communities. With the productive
cells of pasture and marshland never far away from farming, Babylonia formed a more
chambered and differentiated economic landscape than the north.
There were, nevertheless, identifiable sub-regions of Babylonia: a river-plain in the
north from Sippar as far south as Nippur, with constantly shifting, meandering
channels; a flatter delta plain from Isin to Ur, in which irrigation regimes were more
stable; marshlands spreading out to the southeast of Ur; and an estuarial zone beyond
that. Regional variation also ran east–west: the Euphrates channels shifted more
frequently (with greater consequences for all settlements) than the deeper, lower
Tigris.^15 Along the northwestern edge, Uruk, Kisˇ, and Sippar sat next to a well-
defined desert frontier, a steppeland with few permanent settlements, supporting only
nomadic herders bringing wool and caprids to market. Along the eastern flank across
the Tigris, from the Diyala plain down to the marshlands, cities such as Umma,
Girsu, and Lagasˇ lay along a less severe ecological border, some 15 , 000 square
kilometers of meadowland running up to the Zagros foothills, supporting cattle
pasturage and even limited agriculture. In the very south, one might further distinguish
a “Lagasˇ triangle” and an “Uruk triangle.” The former, delimited by Lagasˇ, Larsa and
Ur, was continuously settled and cultivated, with its individual fields closely contested
and administered; the latter, around Uruk, Larsa, and Ur, featured more open space
and free-standing villages, with a looser degree of central control.^16
How many villages?Some typologies rank settlements according to function or adjacency, but it seems
most useful for present purposes to look at only the smallest sites (hereafter, “villages”),
— The world of Babylonian countrysides —