Crawford - The Sumerian World

Most of the discussion here focuses on developments during the third millennium BC, when many parts of western Syria and the middle Euphrates experienced urban growth and contacts with the Sumerian city-states of southern Mesopotamia (). This period is the Early Bronze Age, which has been divided up into several sub-periods: EB I, II, III and IV. Absolute dates for these sub-periods, obtained from radio-carbon determinations, correlations between well-formulated pottery sequences and their correspondences to reliably dated artefacts, still require considerable refinement. Moreover, the sequences of western Syria and the middle Euphrates Valley require additional work to be properly synchronised with one another. For the present, rough dates for each phase or phases are presented here. EB I is generally thought to begin c .32003100 BC, but its end-date is uncertain and has consequently been lumped together with EB II. The end of EB II is fixed c .2600 BC for the middle Euphrates and c. 2700 BC for Western Syria (roughly speaking Early Dynastic IIIa in Sumer). The dating has been largely influenced by the appearance of the unique Red-Black Burnished Ware (RBBW, known also as Early Transcaucasian Ware and Khirbet Kerak Ware) since it was a major diagnostic trait among the ceramic assemblages of western Syria. Although traditional arguments have tended to place the appearance of RBBW at the beginning of the Southern Levants EB III, around c .2700 BC, more recent studies have suggested that it may have appeared as early as the end of the fourth millennium and become widespread in the Amuq plains by 2800 BC (Philip and Millard 2000: 280; Mazzoni 2002: 71). We hesitate to push western Syrias EB III back to an early date on the basis of this type of artefact alone, and so for the moment, we continue to assign western Syrias EB III to around 2700 BC, until a greater understanding of chronological developments for this elusive period has been achieved.