The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [74]
The ur-city
So Ubaid Mesopotamia, by exporting grain and cloth, drew its neighbours into exporting timber and later metal. The Ubaids must have become rich enough to support chiefs and priests. Inevitably, these had ideas above their stations, for when, after 6,000 years ago, the Ubaid culture disappeared, it was replaced by something that looks much more like an empire – the ‘Uruk expansion’. Uruk was a large city, probably the first the world had ever seen, housing more than 50,000 people within its six miles of wall (King Gilgamesh may have built the wall – having plundered his trading partners’ lands and earned their enmity). All the signs are that Uruk, its agriculture made prosperous by sophisticated irrigation canals, had in the words of the archaeologist Gil Stein ‘developed centralized institutions to mobilize surplus labour and goods from the hinterlands in a meticulously administered political economy’. To put it more succinctly, a class of middlemen, of trade intermediaries, had emerged for the first time. These were people who lived not by production, nor by plunder and tribute, but by deals alone. Like traders ever since, they gathered as tightly together as possible to maximise information flow and minimise costs. Trade with the hills continued, but increasingly it came to look like tribute as Uruk merchants’ dwellings, complete with distinctive central halls, niched-façade temples and peculiar forms of pottery and stone tool, were plonked amid the rural settlements of trading partners in the hills. A cooperative trade network seems to have turned into something much more like colonialism. Tax and even slavery soon began to rear their ugly heads. Thus was set the pattern that would endure for the next 6,000 years – merchants make wealth; chiefs nationalise it.
The story of Ubaid and Uruk is familiar and modern. You can imagine the Ubaid merchants displaying their cloths and pots and groaning sacks of grain to the wide-eyed peasants of the hills. You can see the Uruk nabobs in their privileged enclaves, surrounded by subservient natives, like the British in India or Chinese in Singapore. It is with a start that you recall this is still essentially the Stone Age. Only towards the end of the Ubaid period is copper being smelted, and well into the Uruk times, sickles and knives are still made of stone or clay. Late in the Uruk period clay tablets appear with uniform marks on them meticulously accounting for merchants’ stocks and profits. Those dull records, dug into the surfaces of clay tablets, are the ancestors of writing – accountancy was its first application. The message those tablets tell is that the market came long before the other appurtenances of civilisation. Exchange and trade were well established traditions before the first city, and record keeping may have played a crucial role in allowing cities to emerge full of strangers who could trust each other in transactions. It was the habit of exchange that enabled specialists to appear in Uruk, swelling the city with artisans and craftsmen who never went near the fields. For instance, there seems to have been almost mass production of bevelled-rim bowls that appear to have been disposable. Handed out at communal events like temple constructions, they were undoubtedly made in something like a factory, by workers paid