States of Clay: Integrated Scientific Approaches to Clay Bureaucratic Objects from Early Mesopotamia, 3700-2700 BCE

The world's first system of bureaucratic recording was developed during 3700-2700 BCE by the societies of ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq and NE Syria). In the context of the development of the earliest cities and states, elite groups used sophisticated recording methods to control the production, storage and redistribution of many commodities, including land, crops, animals, people and other resources. Fortunately for the archaeologist and historian, the physical medium employed by these early bureaucrats was clay, which they modelled into three major forms: (1) tokens used in counting, (2) sealings bearing seal impressions, used to secure storage facilities such as pots, baskets and storeroom doors, and (3) tablets bearing seal impressions, number signs and pictographic signs in the so-called proto-cuneiform style. This integrated system of counting, sealing, and writing with clay was so successful that it endured for more than 3000 years as the bureaucratic framework across Mesopotamia and adjacent regions of the ancient Near East.

In the States of Clay project, we propose for the first time to develop and apply an integrated scientific methodology to the full spectrum of clay bureaucratic objects, or CBOs, to maximise their interpretive potential for understanding early urban and state level societies of Mesopotamia. Our focus is on the millennium 3700-2700 BCE, when major sites such as Uruk (often cited as 'the world's first city'), Ur, Jemdet Nasr, Fara, Brak, Nineveh and many others rose to prominence within networks of interregional engagement across Mesopotamia and adjacent regions. While all these centres used CBOs to administer their resources in a range of ways, they each developed divergent patterns of CBO usage through space and time. In this project we propose to articulate these patterns of clay use across a thousand years of urban rise and fall, region by region. In so doing we will address major societal issues, including (1) the significance of gender in use of CBOs, considering new evidence for a major role for females within ancient bureaucracy, (2) the choice and use of clays for specific roles city by city across Mesopotamia, interrogating evidence for mobility of CBOs within and between contemporary settlements, and (3) the associations of CBOs with contextual evidence relating to their use, including within domestic households and within higher status contexts such as temples and palaces.

To address these issues, we will apply a highly innovative methodology, synthesised through a GIS-related database and interpretive Network Analysis, which will maximise the combined potential of a range of scientific approaches to CBOs. We propose to study a total of 6500 CBOs housed principally in the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin and in other museum collections in Germany, Iraq, Holland and the UK. Our methods will comprise: (1) recording of CBO attributes, including archaeological context, seal impression iconography, fingerprints, textual content, and evidence for function; (2) application of high-resolution imaging to CBOs for reconstruction of details such as fingerprints (indicators of age and sex) and fragmentary seal impressions; (3) a range of archaeometric analyses of CBO clays, including portable x-ray fluorescence and destructive analyses of tiny clay fragments from selected CBOs, plus microscopic analysis of micro-fauna and micro-flora within the clays to build up a reference library of clays city by city, region by region; (4) use of Network Analysis through a GIS-database to generate and interpret divergent and shifting patterns of usage of CBOs in spatial and chronological patterns across the study sites and regions, addressing the societal issues articulated in the preceding paragraph.

Finally, the project's results and interpretations will be publicly shared both as Open Access research resources, and as an online exhibition hosted by the German Digital Library.