Maisels C.K. The Emergence of Civilization: From Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture, Cities and the State of the Near East

Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. — 388 p. — ISBN: 0-203-45064-7.The Emergence of Civilisation is a major contribution to our understanding of the development of urban culture and social stratification in the Near Eastern region. Charles Maisels argues that our present assumptions about state formation, based on nineteenth century speculations, are wrong. His investigation illuminates the changes in scale, complexity and hierarchy which accompany the development of civilisation. The book draws conclusions about the dynamics of social change and the processes of social evolution in general, applying those concepts to the rise of Greece and Rome, and to the collapse of the classical Mediterranean world.The disciplines of archaeology and anthropology.
Social evolution and anthropology.
Social science and archaeology.
The premisses of social succession.
The relationship of demography and technology to social structure.
Is population pressure an historical constant?
Is agriculture the outcome of technological discoveries?
Mutation and succession.
The ecology of the Zagrosian Arc.
Physical geography.
Neothermal conditions.
The advent of Homo sapiens sapiens.
Post-glacial conditions in the Near East.
The cereal revolution.
Cereals as the basis of a self-amplifying system.
The origin and growth of villages.
The Levant.
Tell Mureybet.
The Zagros.
Khuzistan.
The crystallization of the village as a type.
Demography in the Pristine Neolithic.
The heartland of cities.
Periodization and the beginnings of history.
City genesis.
Jemdet Nasr to Dynastic periods.
Subordination and theories of stratification.
The institutions of urbanism.
Ecology and oikos.
Corporate citizenship.
Ensí and lugal as heads of state.
Monarchic initiatives.
Monarchy to proto-empire.
The norms of rulership.
Organization of the economy.
Grain productivity and its stability.
The Old Babylonian period and the end of the ration system.
Theories of the state.
Evolutionary underpinning to theories of the state.
Models of state formation.
Relations of production and the advent of the state in Mesopotamia.
From status to state.
Status as the prerequisite of all social roles and offices.
Intrinsic sources of rank.
Loci of authority in the conditions of reproduction.
The ‘Asiatic’ mode of stratification by conical clans.
Divergent Neolithics.
Modeling societies: modes of production.
The Asiatic mode.
Ideology and political economy of the Mesopotamian state.
Order and law.
The political terrain.
Summary and overview.