The Rise of the State in the Near East

A seminar on the origins of food production and complex societies in the period from ca. 9000 to 2200 B.C. Topics will include: the first domestication of plants and animals, the earliest village communities in the Levant, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia, and the economic and social transformations accompanying the emergence of urbanized state societies in fourth and third millennia B.C. Mesopotamia.