At the Origins of Politics

This volume, now available in English, explores how Mesopotamia’s urban revolution in the late fourth millennium B.C. shaped a new mentality, leading to new forms of social interaction, and to the development of the state, its laws and its religion to consolidate new managerial hierarchies in the region.

How is it that the phenomenon of the state, a society structured along lines of power that frame individuals in a new supra-organism, suddenly came into being during the fourth millennium B.C.? In this book, Buccellati explores the emergence of statehood and power structures in ancient Mesopotamia against the background of the long prehistoric period. It was the arena in which the earliest cities and states were born and that offers us the first and richest documentation of the development of political life in antiquity. This book provides rich documentation of the causes that led to the formation of the territorial state, tracing its evolution from city-states to universal empires from ca 3500 B.C. to 500 B.C. At the same time, it examines the tension between individual rights and supra-personal systems of power during this period and explores new forms of social interaction that coincided with the economic dimension of the urban revolution. This paradigmatic history, newly translated into English for Anglophone readers, offers a key to understanding modern political forms and their transformations.

At the Origins of Politics provides a thorough examination of the development of the state in ancient Mesopotamia, suitable for students, scholars, and researchers working on Near Eastern history and society, and ancient societies and politics more broadly.

Giorgio Buccellati is Research Professor in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and in the Department of History at UCLA. He founded the Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, of which he served as first director from 1973 until 1983 and where he is now Director of the Mesopotamian Lab. He is currently Director of the International Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies (IIMAS). With his wife, Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, he received the Balzan Prize in 2021.