Early Near Eastern Cultures

The city states of Sumer formed one of the first great civilisations in human history (see feature link). This Near Eastern civilisation emerged a little way ahead of that of Africa's ancient Egypt, and up to a millennium before that of the Indus Valley culture.

Southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and the western edge of Iran) was subjected to permanent settlement during the Pottery Neolithic, with a series of city states being formed by the late fourth millennium BC. By this time neighbouring regions were emerging as population centres in their own right. One of those, Elam, was located to the east of Sumer, with its own selection of city states at its core.

This region was located on an alluvial plan below the Zagros mountains, and its remoteness meant that it took some time for it to assimilate Sumer's groundbreaking social, agricultural, and administrative inventions. Culturally, Elamite states achieved less than their more advanced neighbours, and imported much of what they needed.

To the east of Elam was a series of small cities and regional states which emerged about the same time as did Elam. These stretched across the Iranian plateau which reached towards the modern Pakistan border, and northwards into central Iran. They also connected with similar advanced settlements on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea, such as at Tepe Hissar, and others which emerged to the north-east of that, such as those of the Oxus civilisation (or BMAC).

The Helmand culture is a recently-proposed designation for a series of settlements in what are now eastern Iran and western-to-eastern Afghanistan. The range for these settlements extends southwards from Kopet Dagh piedmont to the Helmand centres and the Quetta valley. A city-building culture emerged here in the third millennium BC, with trading links to cities of the Jiroft culture to its west.

Full acceptance of this cultural designation is ongoing at the time of writing, and the dates are still somewhat flexible due to a lack of firm information (as is also the case for the start of the neighbouring Jiroft culture). The nature of trade links also seems sporadic at times, and requires further investigation.

Sir Aurel Stein, famous for his archaeological work in surveying large swathes of Central Asia and the Near East, slipped into Persia at the end of 1915 to discover the first hints of eastern Iran's lost cities. He traversed what he described as 'a big stretch of gravel and sandy desert' and encountered 'the usual... robber bands from across the Afghan border, without any exciting incident'.

What he did find was 'the most surprising prehistoric site' on the eastern edge of the barren and unbearably hot Dasht-e Lut desert. This was Shahr-e Sokhta, one of the key sites for this region, now located on Iran's eastern border with Afghanistan. It serves as the westernmost marker point of the Helmand, while Mundigak in Kandahar can be seen as its easternmost marker point.

It took another half a century - 1967 - before Maurizio Tosi and his team were able to penetrate a thick salt crust at Shahr-e Sokhta to discovered a metropolis which rivalled those of the first great urban centres in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. A vast graveyard occupies the south-western area, containing between twenty-five and forty thousand burials. This city thrived between about 3300-2800 BC.

Each of the main two centres - Shahr-e Sokhta and Mundigak - had their own cluster of pottery production hubs. For the former this was at Tepe Dash and the Rud-i Biyaban 2 archaeological site which both sit to the city's south, while Deh Morasi Ghundai and Said Qala Tepe served Mundigak, both being located to its south-east.

However, 'Proto-Elamite' communities which played a part in the initial rise of civilisation in Elam and the Iranian plateau seem to have exhausted their roles, economic potential, and prestige soon after 2800 BC. In some places centralised urban life came to a temporary end, both there in Elam and farther east.

At the same time, major cities such as those at Shahdad, Konar Sandal, and Shahr-e Sokhta reached their maximum size, suggesting a kind of absorption of all available resources to the detriment of everywhere else at a time at which such resources were still somewhat limited. Even so, Shahr-e Sokhta itself was seemingly hit by a downturn between about 2800-2600 BC.

Ultimately the entire overall region suffered a much greater downturn around 2000 BC, largely linked to a climate dry spell and, in Sumer, the additional problem of over-exploitation of the available resources. It seems that the local tendency towards greater nucleation while earlier cultural interconnections disintegrated eventually served to form part of this greater regional decline which also ended Sumerian civilisation.

All settlements at this time tended to reduce in size, during which they underwent a severe localisation process which apparently resulted in the growth of isolated polities. In Sumer this took the form of larger individual states and weaker cities - Isin, Larsa, and Babylon in the former case - but in the east the story is far less clear.

Near East Kingdoms

Early Cultures

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