ABSTRACT
Ancient Mesopotamian civilization emerged in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers in what is today southern Iraq in the fourth millennium BC, and it endured in recognizable form for well over three millennia until Alexander the Great and his armies breached the gates of Babylon in 331 BC. Of this millennia-long history, no time span is more fundamental for our understanding of Mesopotamian civilization than the Uruk period, spanning the better part of the fourth millennium BC. This is by no means a new idea. In the cultural realm, for instance, the art historians H. Frankfort (1958) and Helene Kantor (1984) many years ago already noted the multiple ways in which the iconographic repertoire of Uruk times set the conventions that would guide artistic representation in Mesopotamia until the demise of the neoAssyrian and neo-Babylonian empires in the first millennium BC. Similarly, Mario Liverani has recently pointed out that the conventions of scribal administration that emerged at the end of the Uruk period and are reflected in the so-called Archaic Texts, in effect, also set the framework for how Mesopotamian urban scribes would continue to comprehend, categorize, and record their world until the end of the cuneiform tradition millennia later – save for minor improvements and adjustments (Liverani and Heimpel 1995: 134).
