The Rise of the Highland Elamite State in Southwestern Iran

Abstract

Archaeological and historical reconstructions and interpretations of the origins and development of early state organizations and nomadic‐sedentary relations have been viewed primarily from the perspective of sedentary farmers and urban centers. Implicit in such models are assumptions of asymmetric power relationships in which nomads are viewed as not only dependent on settled farmers but also encapsulated within the sphere of urban civilizations. This unidirectional view of political economy also derives from an overdependence on the skewed and biased ancient literature and some twentieth century ethnographic views of nomads in relation to powerful nation‐states. This paper offers a series of alternative inferences that are based on well‐known archaeological data, as well as a few recent lines of evidence, and a review of relevant archaeological evidence for the existence of social hierarchy and stratification in prehistoric pastoral nomadism in southwestern Iran. In addition, we discuss how vertical mobile pastoralism in the region could have developed independent of settled farmers and how the events that developed in highland Iran resulted in the peculiar characters and features of what we know as Elamite civilization.