Obedient Bellies and the Coming of Urbanization in Fourth Millennium Mesopotamia

Hunger has always been a persistent trauma of mankind in every age. As a matter of fact, “hunger” which according to Seth Richardson can be defined as the "routine and everyday sub-nutrition, less than a famine and more than a temporary inconvenience" is “one of the most powerful, pervasive and (arguably) emotive words in our historical vocabulary” (Richardson, 2016; Murton, 1988). Food has been the only way to satiate the mass cry and is overlooked by social and economic historians and/or archaeologists as a potent medium to understand an interdependent mass psychology. We seldom try to study food at the onset of “egalitarian” urbanism where the exchange of autonomy for food security was established as a feature of community life. The State's simulation for food security was rather a rational choice, through which their political claims were effected and they used those claims to create and maintain a structure of dependency in the mass afflicted with the trauma of food insecurity viz. hunger. This paper tries to investigate if the trauma of food insecurity played a decisive role besides other “pull factors” in the birth of urbanization and its manifold enterprises in Southern Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium BCE.