The Sebittu Project

The first cities emerged in Mesopotamia during the late 4th millennium BC and subsequently the idea of ‘the city’ spread widely during the Early Bronze Age (3rd millennium BC). During the Bronze and Iron Ages, a greater percentage of the population of ancient southwest Asia moved into the cities that became focal points of political, military, economic, and religious power. The Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe referred to this transition as the ‘urban revolution’. For nearly two centuries, archaeologists working in the Early Bronze Age and later periods have concentrated their efforts on the excavation and exploration of cities, and the efforts are the framework of our archaeological and historical understanding of the urban periods. However, the rise of cities also resulted in another revolution that has seen much less focused attention, which one might call the ‘rural revolution’. Cities dotted across the ancient landscape transformed a landscape that for at least eight thousand years prior had been populated by small towns, villages, and hamlets. The concept of ‘rural’ only exists in opposition to that of ‘urban’; what came before cities was a complex landscape of variegated resources, climates, and peoples, but without the extreme stratification and population concentrations ushered in by Professor Childe’s urban revolution. The goal of the Sebittu Project is to explore in detail one small region of this rural landscape and document the non-urban lifeways of the inhabitants in the villages, hamlets, and farmsteads of the Middle Iron Age (c. 900-600 BC).