politicsoffoodinearlymesopotamiancentralized … · were also used for cooking and other food...

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The emergence of early state and ur-ban societies in Mesopotamia has beenprimarily studied in terms of large-scalepolitical, social, economic, and ideolog-ical transformations that went hand-in-hand with the decisions of newly mint-ed leaders. Recent perspectives in ar-chaeology, based in practice theories aswell as Alltagsgeschichte, call into questionthese top-down approaches and pointinstead to the central importance ofchanging rhythms and practices of dailylife. Far from constituting a uniform andpredictable backdrop to what are per-ceived as the important questions of stategrowth and management, urban devel-opment, or colonial expansion, thesmall-scale, unspectacular, and contin-gent actions of the everyday have a pro-found part to play in the writing of long-term histories. Not the least of this is thepotential to reclaim a place in history for

those who were not history’s “winners”(D’Anna, Guarino, this volume). A focuson the daily and the small scale is notmeant as a substitute for research that ad-dresses the grand scale. Rather, it high-lights the necessity of examining the re-lationship between the spectacular andthe ordinary, between the overarchingprocesses and the small-scale actions anddecisions of people going about theirdaily lives.

My focus in this paper is on food-re-lated practices. The realm of food anddrink connects the level of global politicsand economic decisions to the local andintimate spheres of life, the top-down tothe bottom-up. Food is an importantbasis of state power in emerging central-ized societies (Frangipane 2010) as wellas being a pivotal element in the mi-cropolitics of everyday life (Dietler1996). Food is something people fight

XXXIV, 2012: 153-168ORIGINI

ABSTRACT – My focus in this paper is on the place of commensality in the small-scale of everyday lifeas well as in long-term history during the Uruk period (4th millennium BCE) in southern Mesopotamiaand neighboring lowland southwestern Iran. I use the term commensality in a broad sense to includethe social contexts of eating and drinking, the foods and beverages consumed, and the labor and knowl-edge that went into their preparation.In recent years scholars in a variety of historical and social science disciplines have drawn attention tothe fundamental role of mundane, unspectacular, and routine practices in constituting history. Food-related practices are one of the most central elements of daily life, in which the interplay of the ordi-nary and extraordinary, the routine and the unusual can be fruitfully studied. I examine the contextsof commensality; where and how food and drink were prepared; and discuss the largely neglected is-sue of hunger.

KEYWORDS – food; hunger; commensality; Uruk-period Mesopotamia

POLITICS OF FOOD IN EARLY MESOPOTAMIAN CENTRALIZED

SOCIETIES

Susan Pollock

RIV ORIGINI 2012 DEF_RIV ORIGINI 2 29/01/13 11.21 Pagina 153

for and fight over. It is tied to therhythms of everyday life and to the waysin which we interact with each other, asnumerous historical and ethnographicstudies have shown (see, for example,Aguilar-Rodríguez 2011; Wise 2011).Practices centering around food con-tribute to the shaping of new subjectivi-ties, precisely because they enter people’slives at the level of day-to-day routines:in the social contexts of eating together,in terms of what was eaten and drunk,and how it was prepared (Pollock ed.2012a; Pollock in press b).In some respects, the study of food has

deep roots in the scholarship on earlyMesopotamian states and urban soci-eties, as scholars have long been con-cerned with ecological conditions andtheir implications for food production,with agricultural/productive capacityand the need for tribute (Adams 1966,1981; Johnson 1987; Nissen 1988;Wright 1998; Pollock 2001). For themost part, however, these topics havebeen treated as a relatively uniform back-ground against which political leaderstook decisions and to which producersreacted. What was eaten and drunk, howand by whom it was prepared, and thesocial contexts in which consumptiontook place have received much less at-tention (but see Bottéro 2004 [2002]). Anotable exception has been the interest inbeer production, drawing especially onstudies of the proto-cuneiform texts,which contain considerable detail on thetypes and amount of ingredients re-quired to produced specific kinds andquantities of beer as well as the disburse-ment of the finished products (Nissen etal. 1990: 66-75; Damerow 2011). In my research on food and food-re-

lated practices, I take as my focal point

commensality, a concept that places thesocial contexts of eating and drinking,together with the kinds of foods anddrinks consumed, at the center of inves-tigation (Simmel 1957 [1910]; Douglas1975; Elias 1977; Mintz 1996; Derrida2007 [1997]; Sutton 2001; Därmann,Lemke eds. 2008; Pollock 2012b). Astudy of commensality draws attentionto the social and political relationshipsthat are built, sustained, altered, andbroken down through the ways in whichfood is shared, apportioned, consumed,and discarded – as well as the contexts inwhich it is not shared, in which food in-equalities are constructed, based on gen-der, social or economic position, and onshortages that may be environmentallyrelated but also constructed politicallyand socially. Behind consumption liethe labor, knowledge, and socioeco-nomic relations that go into the prepa-ration of beverages and meals: the waysin which plant and animal products areprocessed and prepared in order to turnthem into food and drink; how they aregathered, stored, and allocated; and howthese practices are interwoven with de-mands for tribute, the restructuring ofproduction, and the ways in whichwomen and men balanced time devotedto different activities, including foodpreparation and consumption (e.g.Brumfiel 1991). Archaeological examinations of com-

mensality have focused heavily on feasts(Dietler 1996; Dietler, Hayden eds.2001; Bray ed. 2003; Jones 2007; Twiss2008). However, more comprehensiveunderstandings of the place of commen-sality in daily life demand that we pay at-tention to the everyday and the humbleworker as much as to the festive occasionand the luxurious meals of the elite (Pol-

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lock in press b; cf. Bottéro 2004 [2002]for a near exclusive focus on the latter).In this paper I examine several facets

of commensality in the Uruk period inthe southern Mesopotamian lowlandsand neighboring southwestern Iran1.Due to the constraints imposed by theavailable data, I will concentrate princi-pally on the later part of the Uruk peri-od. I begin by considering the contexts ofcommensality and then turn to ques-tions of where and how food and drinkwere prepared. I will argue that therewere connections between specific kindsof beverages and foods and the ways theywere prepared on the one hand and thecontexts in which they were consumedon the other. Finally, I will consider anelement that has been almost entirelymissing from archaeological discussionsof the Uruk period – and many otherhistorical contexts – that of hunger. Itsabsence in most archaeological studiescontributes to a romanticized picture ofthe past, in which we reproduce our owncontemporary reality – well stocked su-permarket shelves and the money need-ed to purchase as much food as we want– in the ways we think about the past.

CONTEXTS OF COMMENSALITY

At least two distinct contexts of com-mensality can be recognized in Uruk-period southern Mesopotamia: house-based2 and institutional commensality.

The former is an inheritance of preced-ing Ubaid (6th-5th millennia BCE) tra-ditions, in which the locations of fire-places, cooking pots, grinding equip-ment, and ceramics used for serving andeating indicate that the spacious centralhalls of many Ubaid houses were placeswhere people ate together as well as en-gaged in some aspects of food prepara-tion (Pollock 2010; Kennedy 2012; seealso Forest 1987a) (fig. 1). Sometimesthe side rooms just off the central hallwere also used for cooking and otherfood preparation activities. House-basedcommensality presumably involved inthe first instance those living in the

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1 My work on this theme is part of a research project funded through TOPOI. It includes a compre-hensive study of pottery vessels and their uses, which is the subject of Carolin Jauß’s PhD research.

2 There are good reasons to be cautious about equating a building – a house in this case – with a house-hold in the sense of a discrete socioeconomic and reproductive unit. For this reason, I use the term “house-based” rather than the more familiar “household-based” commensality. See in this regard Lévi-Strauss’s“house societies” as recently discussed in archaeology by Gillespie (2000) among others.

Fig. 1 – A well preserved Ubaid-period house fromTell Madhhur. The central hall (labeled number 7)was used for food preparation (but not necessarilycooking) and consumption. Cooking took place inthe side rooms 6, 11, 13, and 17 (plan after Roaf1989: fig.1).


house, but it may also have includedguests.The second context of commensality,

that associated with major institutions,appears to be new in Uruk times, or atleast novel in the specific form in whichit is attested by the later Uruk period.This is the sphere of rations and alloca-tions of food and drink in the frameworkof labor performed for institutions. Inthis context workers received foodand/or drink disbursed to them as ‘com-pensation’ for their work. The appear-ance of the ubiquitous beveled rim bowlin Uruk times is widely understood as aconcrete indicator of these institutionalallocations to workers. What was dis-tributed in the bowls remains highly de-bated; how and where the contents wereconsumed has been largely unexamined,but I have argued that it was likely some-thing that was immediately consumed(Pollock 2003: 31; see also Bernbeck2009; Pollock 2012). I will come back tothe beveled rim bowls, rations, and re-lated allocations later in the paper.Other spheres of commensality are less

clearly documented in the archaeologicaland textual record but can nonetheless bepostulated to have existed. Whereas inthe Ubaid-period temples at Eridu an ar-ray of unusual pottery vessels with elab-orate decoration is attested, presumablyused in cultic offerings of food and drink(Safar et al. 1981: 154-160), there is lit-tle in the way of elaborate ceramics fromthe Uruk period that could have played acomparable role, although elaboratelycarved stone vessels (Winter 2007: 123;

Lindemeyer, Martin 1993) may have tak-en on this role to some extent. Elaborate,diacritical feasting, a prominent themedepicted in imagery and in burial con-texts in subsequent Early Dynastic times,is only indirectly visible in Uruk materi-al remains, as I will discuss later.

HOW AND WHERE WERE FOOD ANDDRINK PREPARED?

To begin to try to identify the loca-tions of food preparation and the ways inwhich it was conducted, an examinationof fire installations is a useful place tostart. Hearths were present in manyhouses, as far as the constraints of avail-able evidence allow us to say3. These aremostly relatively small (generally nomore than 0.7 m in diameter) and in-formal in their construction, consistingoften of little more than an ashy depres-sion, occasionally lined with bricks (Le-Brun 1978; Wright ed. 1981; Wright1985; Delougaz et al. 1996; Alizadeh2008). Fireplaces are also typical of ma-jor public buildings, including many ofthose in the Eanna precinct at Uruk(Lenzen 1974: 119-120) as well as the“protoliterate” Sin Temples at Khafajah(Delougaz, Lloyd 1942: 6-40). In non-domestic buildings these vary from cir-cular hearths of approximately one me-ter diameter to round or occasionallyrectangular fireplaces with ramp-like ex-tensions (“pan-shaped”) that typicallyrange from more than one meter up totwo meters in diameter. Overall, the fire-

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3 The limited excavations of residential structures in southern Mesopotamia makes it difficult to basetoo much on that evidence alone. In southwestern Iran small areas of domestic architecture were exposedat several sites, including Chogha Mish, Susa, and Farukhabad.


places associated with non-domesticbuildings tend to be larger than those inresidential buildings, as one would ex-pect if they were meant to be used to pre-pare food for a larger group of people.Fire installations may, of course, haveprovided warmth and light as well as oreven instead of being used for foodpreparation.In contrast to the frequency of

hearths, ovens are quite rare4, a rathersurprising observation given the com-mon assumption that bread was an im-portant staple from early on (Millard1988; Chazan, Lehner 1990; Bottéro2004: 47-51, see also Englund 2001: 32,GUG2a). There are several ways to ex-plain this situation. Bread ovens mayhave been clustered in locations away

from the main residential areas andthereby not be encountered in excava-tions. Bread may have been baked overopen fires, or, alternatively, some of thefire installations reported as (pottery)kilns in the literature may rather havebeen used as ovens for baking and/orroasting; the limited detail published onmost fire installations makes it often dif-ficult to assess their use. Visual imagery from the later Uruk

period, primarily in the form of sealsand sealings, is unique in Mesopotamianhistory in terms of the frequency withwhich scenes of work are depicted. Theseincluded numerous depictions of pro-cessing and storage of plant and animalproducts, including filling of silos, tend-ing animals, preparing something in and

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4 This is in contrast to the more frequent occurrence of (pottery) kilns.

Fig. 2 – Work scenes on Late Uruk seals (after Amiet 1980: pl. 16, no. 268; LeBrun, Vallat 1978: fig. 6,no.11; Delougaz, Kantor 1996: pl. 149B, 152F).


with vessels, as well as textile production(see, for example, Amiet 1980: pl. 15-16,18-21[fig. 2]). There is a notable ab-sence of portrayals of cooking, roasting,or baking.The pictorial emphasis on processing

and storing rather than cooking, roasting,or baking corresponds well to the testi-mony of the proto-cuneiform texts. Inthe so-called “Vessels List”, vessels arerepresented first and foremost as con-tainers for processing or storing ingredi-ents, but not necessarily for cooking orbaking (Englund, Nissen 1993: 31-32;Englund 1998: 95-98). Different shapesand attributes, such as the presence or ab-sence of a spout or a handle, indicatecontents, especially varieties of beer andanimal fats. Based on the context inwhich they have been recovered, it is gen-erally assumed that the proto-cuneiformtexts record transactions that took placein large institutional contexts. The em-phasis on beer and beer brewing, with atleast nine different types represented,goes hand-in-hand with archaeobotanicalevidence, which shows an increasingdominance of barley among the cropsraised in southern sites (and, to a lesserdegree, in northern Mesopotamian set-tlements). Barley was a major ingredientin beer, although it was also used forbread and for animal fodder. In additionto beer, bread, and dairy products (fats,including clarified butter, and cheeses),the proto-cuneiform texts mention suchfoods as soups or stews and porridges(Englund 1998: 94-98, 181-204). A final source of evidence regarding

food preparation comes from the vessels

themselves. In Uruk times these wereprincipally ceramics. Uruk pottery as-semblages are characterized by a prolif-eration of new vessel shapes (fig. 3), pre-sumably designed for specialized pur-poses, in comparison to the much morelimited repertoire in Ubaid times. De-spite the wide variety of shapes, only avery restricted set of ceramic containerswas used in direct association with fire,judging by the occurrence of sooting orinterior carbonization5. The most fre-quently reported forms with signs of useas cooking vessels are the so-called strap-or rope-handled jars, characterized bysquat bodies, low necks, and either flat orrounded bases, and jars with round, of-ten everted rims, and somewhat elongat-ed globular bodies. The squat jars withhandles tend to be relatively small. FromChogha Mish, Jauß reports that vesselswith sooting traces reach a maximumsize of nine liters, but many hold oneliter or less; the round-rimmed jars with-out handles are larger, up to 14 liters incapacity. The different shapes displaydistinct sooting traces and interior car-bonization, indicating that they wereplaced differently and perhaps also han-dled in distinct ways in relation to thesource of the fire (D’Anna, Jauß n.d.).The small size of most cooking pots im-plies that limited quantities of food werecooked at one time (see, for Susa, Le-Brun 1978: fig. 28). The frequency ofcooking vessels, however, may in somecontexts, be quite high. This is the caseat the small village site of Sharafabad,where excavation of a large, trash-filledpit yielded a relatively high density of

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5 I would to thank Carolin Jauß for discussing her on-going work on the cooking vessels with me andfor her and M. Bianca D’Anna’s permission to cite their as-yet unpublished paper on the subject.


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Fig. 3 – Array of Uruk vessel forms; scales approximate (after Weiss and Young 1975: fig. 1a; Le Brun 1978:fig. 32(15), 34(8); Boese 1995: Abb. 6e, 21f; Delougaz et al. 1996: pl. 83P, 90G, 95G,N).


cooking jars with fire clouding andcharred cooking debris (Wright et al.1980: 272-273, Tab. 1). Nonetheless,the overwhelming majority of Uruk ce-ramic vessels at Sharafabad and elsewheredoes not show signs of having been usedin direct contact with fire.The implications of the ceramic evi-

dence confirm the picture drawn fromthe texts and imagery, namely that mostvessels were used for storage, transport,and preparation of food but not over afire. On the basis of this evidence Iwould suggest that we must consider thepossibility that only a limited range offoods was cooked; instead, the testimonyof the texts and imagery points to thepossibility that the emphasis in institu-tional contexts was on brewing beer(Damerow 2011) and probably bakingbread as well as to a more limited extenton fermenting, drying (fish, cheese – seeEnglund 1998: 128-142; Brunke 2011:169), and preparations for storage thatsometimes involved heat (dairy prod-ucts, including clarified butter – seeD’Anna, Jauß n.d.). Cooked foods, suchas soups, stews, or porridges, were incontrast more closely associated withfood prepared and consumed “at home.”Notably, presentations of offerings todeities, mentioned in texts dating to themid-3rd millennium, list bread and beer,but otherwise primarily foods in un-cooked and semi- or unprepared forms –fruits, milk, oil, flour, and live animals(Beld 2002: 108-129).

COMMENSAL CONTEXTS, ONCE AGAIN

For many people in Uruk times theconsumption of food and drink in insti-tutional contexts involved the receipt of

rations and/or allocations of food ordrink in compensation for labor per-formed. Ration distribution has oftenbeen associated with the ubiquitousUruk vessel form, the beveled rim bowl.A huge literature has been devoted to thequestion of whether beveled rim bowlswere indeed ration vessels and what theircontents were, and these arguments donot need to be repeated in detail here(Nissen 1970; Johnson 1973; Beale1978; Forest 1987b; Millard 1988;Chazan, Lehner 1990; Goulder 2010). Ibegin, however, with the widely accept-ed interpretation of them as connected,in one way or another, to the institu-tional distribution of food/drink in re-turn for labor performed. That they wereput to a variety of secondary usages isclear but need not concern us furtherhere.The distributional contexts as well as

the open and often asymmetrical mor-phology of beveled rim bowls suggestthat their contents were something thatusually was consumed on the spot ratherthan transported to another location forprocessing or consumption. The con-tents did not require direct contact be-tween the vessels and fire, as there are vir-tually no indications of sooting or inter-nal carbonization on beveled rim bowls.Moreover, the bowls do not make sensein terms of a simple analogy to rationsthat are known from later, especially 3rd

millennium texts, which consist of goodsthat were distributed on a monthly basis.The volumes of the bowls – typically lessthan one liter – are much too small forthat purpose. Rather, I have suggestedelsewhere that they were probably usedto distribute food and/or drink to beconsumed at the point of distribution aspart of the provisioning of workers la-

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boring for institutions (Pollock 2003:29-31).In recent years several scholars have

proposed that beveled rim bowls wereused as forms for preparing bread (Mil-lard 1988; Chazan, Lehner 1990; Goul-der 2010). This suggestion conformswith the mentions of bread in the proto-cuneiform texts, but it begs the questionof where the large bread ovens are to befound. Furthermore, barley does notlend itself well to the production of leav-ened bread (Lyons, D’Andrea 2003:524), which would presumably be thetype to be baked in molds such asbeveled rim bowls. While wheat was cul-tivated, it seems to have been far less fre-quently grown than barley, making it anunlikely candidate to be the primary in-gredient in the food prepared and dis-tributed by major institutions. An alter-native worth considering is that thebeveled rim bowls were used to distrib-ute beer to workers (Bernbeck 2009; Pol-lock in press b). Beer is commonly mentioned in the

proto-cuneiform texts, and it seems tohave played a substantial role in the late4th millennium political economy(Damerow 2011). The texts do not,however, enlighten us as to the contextsfor which beer was brewed and in whichit was consumed. Given the quantitiesproduced and the need for liquid suste-nance during intense physical labor in ahot and dry environment, it seems rea-sonable that the beveled rim bowls wereused to distribute something in a liquidor semi-liquid form, possibly a beer. Beerwould have provided a nutritious bever-age that did not require cooking andhence obviated the need for the largequantities of fuel necessary to cook sub-stantial amounts of food or bake bread.

The proto-cuneiform sign for ration al-location, GU7, has generally been asso-ciated with eating rather than drinking,due to its meaning in later periods (butsee Bernbeck 2009). However, in theearly texts it seems to have had a moregeneric meaning of consumption that isnot necessarily specific to eating, and itoccurs relatively frequently in texts withthe sign for beer (a CDLI search yields15 texts; Englund, pers. comm.). If cor-rect, this would mean that what was dis-tributed to workers, apparently in mas-sive quantities at least in the aggregate,was not cooked food (such as a porridge)or baked bread, but rather a beverageprepared by sprouting and drying, grind-ing and fermenting of grain. Given the indications that more and

more people were engaged in tribute la-bor connected to state institutions overthe course of the Uruk period (Johnson1987; Nissen 1988: 83-85; Pollock2001), people would have been increas-ingly confronted with a commensal en-vironment that differed markedly from afamiliar and familial domestic setting.Even if the content of what was con-sumed was not new, the frequency andthe social context of its consumptionmost likely were: instead of eating withfamily or other co-residents, an ever larg-er portion of meals were eaten/drunk to-gether with others who were linked in analienated work environment (Pollock inpress). These occasions were clearly dis-tinguished from “ordinary” mealsthrough what was consumed and how itwas prepared, as well as by the socialcontext in which the consumption tookplace. The fact that beveled rim bowls,minimally reused if at all by issuing in-stitutions, are present in a host of othercontexts including domestic ones, sug-

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gests that certain elements of institu-tionally based commensality found theirway into the domestic sphere. These el-ements may have included certain typesof food or drink, thereby altering, even ifonly incrementally, facets of house-basedcommensal practices. Regardless of what the beveled rim

bowls held, significant proportions offood consumption for increasing por-tions of the populace took place in insti-tutional contexts rather than in those ofhost and guest relations or among co-res-idential kin. A graphic illustration ofwhat this may have meant comes fromChogha Mish, where in a variety of con-texts beveled rim bowls were found linedup, upside down, in rows, in some caseson shelves (Delougaz et al. 1996: pl. 15A-C). They appear to be laid out so thatthey could have been quickly filled andhanded out, in an assembly-line or cafe-teria-like fashion. In another exampleWright has suggested that beveled rimbowls discarded in a pit within a wellmaintained building at Susa derive frommeals eaten on the job by workers whowere repairing the building, who thendiscarded the waste in the pit they haddug to obtain clean sediments (Wright1998: 186-188). Such ways of servingand consumption in the company ofother workers hint at the likelihood thatfood/drink distribution contributed tothe forging of new kinds of social linksand relations, related to class and possi-bly to single-gender work groups, and atthe same time potentially weakening oldones. Institutionally based ration distribu-

tions and food allocations followed a de-cidedly instrumental logic, in which thecalculation of quantities of ingredientsand amounts disbursed played a central

role (see discussions of bookkeeping inEnglund 1998). Portions were individualand carefully measured, rather than mak-ing use of communal serving dishesaround which people could gather andout of which they could serve them-selves. In contrast, communal consump-tion would have been possible using thelarger bowls characteristic of the earlierUruk period or the large casseroles andhammerhead bowls found in northernMesopotamia (e.g., Pollock, Coursey1995; Pearce 2008). The emphasis onsmall, often individual-sized servings inUruk ceramic assemblages is also evidentin the relatively modest quantities thatcould have been cooked in the strap-handled jars, in comparison to the muchlarger cooking pots used in contempo-rary northern contexts (D’Anna 2011;D’Anna, Jauß n.d.). This represents adeliberate turning away from an ethics ofsharing as implied in large, collective ves-sels and toward a developing habitus ofindividualization and reduction of foodto a matter of sheer survival (Bernbeck2009; Bernbeck, Costello 2011: 680-681). All in all, then, we see marked changes

in the context of commensality in theUruk period, with the emergence of aninstitutional (‘public’) sphere in whichincreasing numbers of people spent in-creasing amounts of time. What wasconsumed as well as with whom and un-der what circumstances differed marked-ly from house-based commensality. Theaccent on effectivity in preparing andserving food/drink in institutional con-texts changed the meaning of commen-sality in ways that impacted people’s livesfar more profoundly than the simplequestion of where one ate a meal in themidst of the workday would suggest at

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first glance (cf. Gabaccia, Pilcher 2011).These changes represented profound in-terventions in the fabric of everyday life,which contributed in essential ways tothe emergence of class society (Zagarell1986): new kinds of social relations wereconstructed at the expense of kin ties,based on the social contexts in whichpeople typically ate: it was in these con-texts that “community” was fundamen-tally formed, maintained, and reinforcedthrough the act of “sharing a meal” andengaging in the banal talk that accom-panies it (Simmel 1957).

Feasting, abundance, and hungerIn marked contrast to the Early Dy-

nastic period, when elaborate feasts areportrayed in so-called banquet scenes onseals and plaques and in which feastingremains are regularly found in graves inthe form of ceramic, stone, and metalvessels, there is little visual or other directevidence of elite feasting in Uruk times.The typical Early Dynastic banquet for-mat is only occasionally found on Urukseals6. Instead, on Uruk objects visualemphasis is placed primarily on depic-tions of the preparations and deliveriesfor feasts (for example, on the Uruk Vase:Winter 2007: 125-129), and on thework involved in food processing andstorage. In other words, what was high-lighted through visual representationswere the labor and products that wentinto feasts and ritual offerings, as well asthe production and storage of food forredistributions in the form of rations andrelated disbursements, rather than theoutcome of that labor. By not portraying

food consumption and the contexts inwhich it took place – especially elaboratefeasts in which the elite were clearly dis-tinguished from the masses – there wasa reduction of emphasis on those com-mensal practices that served to separateand distinguish people and instead animplicit statement of commonality (Pol-lock 2003).Although feasting played at best a mi-

nor role in visual media in Uruk times,an important motif, both in images andin texts, was abundance. As persuasivelyargued by Winter (2007), leaders of ear-ly Mesopotamian states drew close asso-ciations between abundance in the nat-ural world – food, water, fertility – andtheir qualities as rulers. These were, inturn, understood as closely linked to hu-mans’ relations to the deities as the ulti-mate providers of abundance. Proces-sions of people bringing votive offeringshighlight the place of abundance in theconnections between the world of mor-tals and that of the deities. The Uruk po-litical elite apparently wished to showthemselves as great providers rather thandistinguishing themselves from othersthrough elaborate feasts. This does not,of course, mean that there were in reali-ty no feasts restricted to elite segments ofUruk society. Perhaps such feasts wereless exclusive than in later periods, orthe elaborate protocol that seemingly ac-companied Early Dynastic feasting wasnot yet so rigidly set as to require regular“reminders” of how participants weresupposed to behave. What was likelynew in Uruk times – the crass social andeconomic distinctions among people –

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6 The exceptions include a sealing from Sharafabad (Wright et al. 1980: fig. 6(9)) and possibly a scenefrom Chogha Mish (Delougaz et al. 1996: pl. 155 A).


was perhaps too risky to display in an“in-the-face” manner, whereas by themid-third millennium a starkly class-based society may have come to be felt asso “natural” that there was little danger inemphasizing it through material displays.Up to this point I, like so many other

modern-day researchers, have taken animplicit stance in which food and drinkare assumed to be ever-present. But whatabout the flip side of abundance –hunger? Although archaeologists havecalculated agricultural productivity as away to determine how much land a com-munity would need in order to feed itsmembers, we have much less often ad-dressed directly the question of howmany people were hungry, and how of-ten. This is not just a matter of “forces ofnature.” There is every reason to pose thequestion of the extent to which hungerwas a result of political economic deci-sions, in which strategies to extract trib-ute as well as the ability to demonstrateabundance came at the expense of thewell-being of some segments of the pop-ulace. More concretely, if beveled rimbowls supplied the daily allocation offood or drink to a labor force, it is verylikely that many people were hungry “onthe job.” By the sheer fact of standardiz-ing disbursements, physiological differ-ences among people were largely ig-nored, ensuring that some people wouldhave been hungry. Similarly, by con-structing a system in which food alloca-tions were kept to an effective minimum,any further shortages – the results ofpoor harvests or distributional problems– would have been enough to tip the bal-ance to a condition of hunger. What

might be cynically referred to as a“democracy of the stomach”7 was anoth-er dimension of a political economic sys-tem that was predicated on conformityachieved through disciplining the body,in this case via the stomach.Although hunger has received little

attention in the scholarly literature, afew mentions that draw on 3rd millenni-um texts point directly in this direction.In the texts from the emunusa (“house ofthe lady”) in the late Early Dynastic city-state of Lagash, there are mentions ofshortages of grain shortly before the NewYear’s festival (Beld 2002: 121). From theUr III period, at the end of the 3rd mil-lennium, Gomi (1984) documents thelikelihood of famine on the basis of themarked increase in the price of grain atUr, and Janssen (1991) discusses a case inwhich the family of a nadītum fails toprovide for her. These are little morethan occasional hints, but they demon-strate the importance of posing ques-tions about hunger and famine as muchas those about feasting.

CONCLUSION

Far from being a set of conservativepractices that form a uniform backdropto “real” societal transformations, com-mensality and the labor and knowledgethat underpin it are fundamental anddynamic elements of social, political, andeconomic change. The extent to whichfood-related practices were deliberatelyand cynically altered, on the one ex-treme, or gradually modified in responseto demands in other spheres of life, on

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7 I owe this turn of phrase to Reinhard Bernbeck.


the other hand, is a question that cannotat present be definitively answered forthe Uruk period. Nonetheless, the pro-found consequences of changing con-texts of commensality, together with thekinds of foods and/or drink consumed,are clear. I have suggested that cookedfood may have been “marked” as some-thing specific to meals “at home” or spe-cial festive occasions, as opposed to thatwhich workers consumed in the courseof labor performed for major institutions(cf. Hastorf 2012). The latter form ofconsumption seems, however, to havemade its way increasingly into daily lifebeyond the institutional workplace, asshown by the widespread distribution ofbeveled rim bowls. Quite likely hunger

was an ever-present threat that also be-came a way to discipline an emergingworkforce whose members no longercontrolled either their own labor or thefood they ate.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS – I would like to thank Mar-cella Frangipane for the invitation to participate inthe conference celebrating 50 years of archaeolog-ical work at Arslantepe. Reinhard Bernbeck, MariaBianca D’Anna, and Carolin Jauß read and/or dis-cussed this paper with me, and I thank them formany critical and creative comments. I would alsolike to acknowledge the financial and intellectualsupport of the Excellence Cluster TOPOI inBerlin.

Susan PollockInstitut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie

Freie Universität Berlinemail: [email protected]

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politicsoffoodinearlymesopotamiancentralized … · were also used for cooking and other food...

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