Antemortem cranial trauma in ancient Mesopotamia [The final version of this manuscript has been accepted for publication in International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, DOI: 10.1002/oa.2478] Arkadiusz Sołtysiak Department of Bioarchaeology, Institute of Archaeology, University of Warsaw ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, 00-921 Warszawa, Poland Email:
[email protected], phone +48 225522837, fax +48 225522801 Running title: Cranial trauma in Mesopotamia Keywords: injuries; palaeopathology; warfare; early states; Syria; Iraq Abstract: In result of a review of the available literature and some unpublished sources, data on antemortem cranial trauma have been gathered for 25 archaeological sites from Mesopotamia, dated from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic to the Modern period. In total, 31 healed cranial lesions have been noted in 28 out of 1278 individuals, and the general frequency of this condition was 2.2 %. Both males and females were affected, with no clear preference noted, and sharp-force trauma was rare, therefore intra-group violence and accidents were more likely causes of most lesions than military activities. The frequency of antemortem trauma was higher in earlier periods (before the end of the 3rd millennium BCE); the size of lesions increased with time and healed lesions were more common in the northern periphery of Mesopotamia than in the core area. All this may be the consequence of early state formation and the establishment of professional armies which made most farmers and city dwellers less involved in violent conflicts than in other parts of the Near East where the observed frequency of violence-related injuries was much higher than in Mesopotamia.
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Introduction Bioarchaeological evidence of violence has been noted at many sites all over the world (cf. Walker, 2001; Jackes, 2004). Among several skeletal indicators of violence, some (e.g., so-called ‘parry fractures’ of the ulna) are ambiguous (Judd, 2004), while others (e.g., projectiles embedded into bone) are unequivocal, but very rare (Jurmain et al., 2009; cf. Khudaverdyan, 2014 for an example). Cranial trauma may be the result of some accidents, but in adults in most cases it is attributed to inter-personal violence (Hussain et al., 1994; cf. Judd, 2006) and therefore it is a safer indicator of violence than post-cranial injuries, except when sharp force trauma is noted. As the differentiation between perimortem injuries and postmortem damage is problematic (Cappella et al., 2014), antemortem cranial trauma is the most reliable choice for research on the pattern of violence in past human groups. Previous research on violence-related injuries in Mesopotamia (Rathbun, 1984) suggested that they were less frequent in this region than in Iran, which is quite surprising taking into account the vast historical evidence of military actions at least since the mid-3rd millennium BCE (cf. Wrightson, 2012). As during last two decades the number of published reports on human remains from Mesopotamia has considerably increased, it is possible to gather a sample which is large enough for at least a rough estimation of the frequency of violence-related injuries in various periods in Mesopotamia. Such a diachronic analysis may contribute to the discussion about the history of violence in the region where agriculture was invented, the first large cities emerged in the late 5th millennium, and writing was introduced as early as in the last quarter of the 4th millennium BCE (see Table 1 for chronology) (Nissen, 1990; Ur, 2010). The relative abundance of written sources would make the interpretation of bioarchaeological data easier, but this advantage is accompanied by a relative underdevelopment of research on human remains in Mesopotamia. This is the consequence of several factors, such as the long lasting orientation of Mesopotamian archaeology towards monumental architecture and urban planning, and modern political instability that made most collections of human remains from the region unavailable for research, as they were stored in local museums or excavation houses, or simply reburied, sometimes only after very superficial study (Sołtysiak, 2006). For that reason, the present research is based on the literature review, even if it makes the results more susceptible to various sources of bias. There were many sources for the history of violence in Mesopotamia, although most of them focused on military conflicts that were sometimes described in detail. In particular, the NeoAssyrian Empire was notorious for its aggressive policy that was more the rule than the exception in the history of Mesopotamia, at least since the Early Bronze Age. On the other hand, for the early periods (until the end of the 5th millennium BCE) no clear archaeological evidence of conflicts was found and some authors think that the level of inter-group violence was low before the establishment of the earliest large urban centres in the course of the 4th millennium BCE (Stein, 1994; Otterbein, 2011). Violence was a tool of social and political control in early states and then the risk of violence-related injuries may have became lower in some parts of the society, but higher in others, especially in professional soldiers (cf. North et al., 2013). The process of state formation was not uniform in the whole of Mesopotamia and differed between the irrigated areas of the southern alluvium of the Euphrates where the concentration of power in the urban centres was advanced as early as in middle 4th millennium BCE (Algaze, 2008), and the dry farming areas of the north, where this process was slower and interactions between farmers and herders made social control more complicated (Wilkinson, 2009). The northern and eastern 2
peripheries of Mesopotamia where lowlanders interacted with highlanders were obviously the areas least controlled by any state administration, and it may be expected that the pattern of violence in these areas were less predictable. Because the temporal and spatial coverage of the present paper is broad, only the most general questions are addressed here. First, available data (distribution of injuries, sex ratios) will be used to assess the importance of warfare as the cause of cranial trauma. Second, the analysis of the temporal trends and distribution of trauma in various parts of Mesopotamia may allow some insight into the relation between violence, state formation and economy.
Material and methods More than a hundred reports on human remains from various Mesopotamian sites have been published so far (cf. Sołtysiak, 2006), but not all of them contain discussion of trauma. It was possible to gather data only on 38 temporal samples from 25 archaeological sites representing all parts of Mesopotamia (see Figure 1 and Table 2 for details of chronology and spatial distribution). Only samples with at least eight preserved crania (an arbitrarily chosen number) were taken into account in analyses of between-group differences in frequencies, to exclude a long series of sometimes obscure reports on a smaller number of skeletons with no information available about cranial trauma. Actually only one traumatic lesion was noted in a sample with a number of crania below eight, and this single case from Hassek Höyük has been included in the analyses of the cranial trauma patterns. Only reports authored by trained osteologists were taken into account, and the archaeological reports were used only for estimation of numbers of the preserved crania. Most skeletons included in the database were found at plain cemeteries or in intramural burials. From the Chalcolithic to the Iron Age, some dead bodies were buried in the settlement areas, under floors or between houses, and although extramural cemeteries also existed, they have been rarely excavated by the archaeologists (Stone, 1991). On the other hand, many ancient archaeological sites were re-used as plain cemeteries in later periods, and most human remains dated to the Roman, Sasanian and Islamic periods have been unearthed during excavations at more ancient sites. Therefore, most skeletons from Mesopotamia included in the present study represented local populations of farmers, pastoralists and city dwellers. Only the sample from Tell Majnuna differs in this respect. This was a midden mound located close to Tell Brak, containing several clusters of commingled human remains that reflected at least two episodes of increased mortality (Sołtysiak, 2010; McMahon et al., 2011). The samples from Titriş Höyük (Erdal, 2012) and Tell Arbid (Sołtysiak and Koliński, 2011) included not only regular burials, but also multiple secondary deposits of human remains in domestic contexts. Often the total number of crania and their preservation were not stated explicitly in published reports, and only the total number of individuals was available, but in almost all cases it was possible to estimate the number of preserved cranial vaults using drawings of graves, preservation charts, or number of crania, for which sex was assessed using cranial characteristics, any measurements of the cranial vault were taken and any non-metric traits (i.e., sutural bones and parietal foramen) were scored. The quality of this estimation cannot be directly assessed, and some fairly complete but fragmented crania may not have been counted. It is then more likely that the percentage frequencies of cranial trauma are somewhat overestimated, and it must be taken into account when these data are compared with samples studied in a more systematic way. Only for Tell Sheh Hamad was it not possible to estimate the number of crania in any way and the total number of individuals was used. However, this sample is so large and the number of traumatic lesions so low that the underestimation of cranial trauma prevalence at this site should not be crucial in the 3
present analysis. For 14 per 38 temporal samples that were studied by the present author, only crania with preservation rates of the vault above c. 75 % were included. The frequencies of antemortem cranial trauma were calculated only for adult and adolescent individuals (15 years old or more). More precise age-at-death estimation was sometimes available, but again, due to different protocols, any between-site comparison may be not reliable. In most cases, sex was also assessed, but sometimes this assessment was based on cranial morphology, and therefore may be problematic, as available protocols were not adapted to the Near Eastern populations (see discussion in Sołtysiak, 2010). Therefore, research on sex differences in the pattern of cranial trauma may be also affected by bias in available data. In virtually all available samples no differential diagnosis of cranial trauma was applied, although antemortem injuries may be mistaken for healed trephinations, parietal thinning (especially if only one side is preserved) and lesions related to several diseases, such as, e.g., syphilis (cf. Ortner, 2003). The diagnosis is even more complicated by the fact that some trephinations may have been performed to remove fragments of bone after a violence-related injury. However, trephination involves usually much larger areas than traumatic injuries, and in many cases the shape of the trephination hole is more regular. If occasionally trephination was mistaken for injuries by the authors of the reports analysed here, it may again lead to the overestimation of the cranial trauma frequency. Some cases of cranial trauma were described in a detailed way including metric measurements and photographs, while others were only mentioned, occasionally even with no specification of side or bone involved. However, if possible, data on location, shape and size of lesions were gathered. For better clarity, the shape was defined as linear, oval (incl. circular), rectangular and irregular (incl. one Y-shaped lesion from Tell Majnuna). As precise location is not specified in many cases, no figure showing distribution of lesions was drawn. The differences in the size of cranial trauma between temporal subsets were tested using nonparametric Mann-Whitney U-test and the 2×2 contingency tables were analysed with the Fisher exact test (STATISTICA by StatSoft, v. 10). Tell Majnuna was excluded from some analyses, as human remains at this site were retrieved from a peculiar context.
Results In total, 31 antemortem cranial lesions have been noted in 28 per 1278 individuals (32 lesions and 29 individuals with Hassek Höyük included), and therefore the general frequency of this condition was 2.2 % (Table 2). Among 22 individuals with sex assessment, 16 were males and six were females, but this insignificant (Fisher exact test, p=0.22) difference may be biased (see above). There was a small difference between right and left side (10 versus 15 accordingly, also nonsignificant), and the left side was more frequently targeted in females than in males and in later periods (including the EBA). Parietal and frontal bones were most commonly and almost equally affected (13 and 14 cases accordingly) and only two lesions have been noted in occipital and one in sphenoid bone (Table 3). No trauma to the face was observed, but this may be related to the generally low preservation rate of this part of the skull. Most lesions are oval or irregular in shape, and there are only four linear lesions indicating sharpforce trauma, three per four in the 4th and 3th millennium samples. Size measurements (breadth × width or the square diameter of circular injuries) are available for 13 non-linear lesions and there is quite a clear tendency towards larger lesions in later periods: the difference between the Neolithic 4
and Chalcolithic (Zawi Chemi and Tell Majnuna; n=9, mean 107, median 100 mm2) and all later samples (n=6, mean 316, median 312 mm2) is statistically significant (Mann-Whitney U-test, U=7, Z=2.30, p=0.022). When the dataset is split into six chronological units, the Neolithic/Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age differ from the later periods by a higher frequency of healed cranial trauma, even if the sample from Tell Majnuna has been excluded. For the two earliest subsets, this frequency is above 4%, while for the four later periods it varies from 0% to 2.5% (Figure 2). The sample may be biased in many ways and the overall frequency of cranial trauma is low, therefore the statistical testing of this difference is risky, but it may be noted that the Fisher exact test (with Tell Majnuna excluded and two pooled chronological subsets, one including Neolithic/Chalcolithic and EBA, the second grouping all later periods) produces p=0.0002. Some differences between the four parts of Mesopotamia may be observed as well (Figure 3). The frequency of antemortem cranial trauma was low in the core areas, including the southern alluvium with the Hamrin region, middle Euphrates and Tigris valleys and the dry farming zone in the Habur and Balikh drainages (all less than 2%, even if Tell Majnuna is included), and much higher in the highland zone along the northern limits of Mesopotamia, from the upper Euphrates, through the upper Tigris to the Shahrizor plain (above 5%). This difference between the broadly defined core and northern peripheries is also statistically significant (Fisher exact test, p=0.0001, Tell Majnuna excluded).
Discussion and conclusion If we read the historical sources from Mesopotamia featuring many records of bloody military conflicts (van de Mieroop, 2007) and also some evidence of violence in daily life (Bonneterre, 1995), the results of the present research seem confusing, as a higher frequency of violence-related injuries may be expected. There is also lack of clear indicators that the antemortem cranial trauma observed at all these sites was the consequence of warfare. Some surplus of male individuals is not statistically significant. Also absent is the side preference that would be expected, as the right hand is preferred in combat by most fighters (Boylston, 2000). The very low number of linear injuries, especially in the MBA and later when swords and metal axes became more popular (Gernez, 2007), is another aspect of negative evidence. If a conservative approach is applied, the pattern of trauma at Mesopotamian sites (also at Tell Majnuna) suggests that accidents or intra-group violence rather than organized military violence are the cause of most lesions in the sample analysed here. The difference in the frequency of antemortem cranial trauma between the Neolithic/Chalcolithic/EBA and the later periods is quite evident, and it might suggest the general decrease in the rate of violence. However, the relatively higher frequency of cranial trauma in the early periods is caused mainly by the inclusion of skeletons from three sites: Zawi Chemi, Tell Majnuna and Titriş Höyük. The case of Zawi Chemi is not clear, but for Tell Majnuna and Titriş Höyük the increase in the level of violence has been associated with social and possibly environmental factors. The midden at Tell Majnuna represented the period of early urbanization when a large population was more vulnerable to short-term climatic fluctuations and the high level of social stress may have caused both high frequency of cranial trauma and the events of increased mortality attested by clusters of human remains (Sołtysiak, 2010, 2015). Most skeletons with cranial trauma from Titriş Höyük were found in the Late EBA strata that were contemporary with the rise and fall of the Akkadian Empire (Erdal, 2012). This historical event has also been linked by some authors with a major Holocene climatic change (cf. discussion in Cullen et al., 2000), and even if the impact of this environmental background is overestimated, the social upheaval in that time is 5
still attested by several historical sources (van de Mieroop, 2007). On the other hand, shorter or longer periods of troubles were also noted during the 2nd millennium BCE and later (van de Mieroop, 2007); therefore the low frequency of cranial trauma in the regular cemeteries dating to the later periods may be more related to the centralization of violence than to the lack of conflicts. As we know from historical sources, at least since the MBA the army consisted of professional core formations and the conscript army based on a system known as ilku, in which the king granted a field for plant cultivation and requested in return military service on demand (Postgate, 2000). It is not known where the veterans were buried, but the observed low frequency of cranial trauma at most excavated cemeteries seems to suggest that either they were buried outside the settlements or the ilku system was a marginal source of recruits. The lower frequency of cranial trauma in later periods is accompanied by higher average size of lesions. Stone missiles usually affect a larger area than hand weapons (Bhootra and Bhana, 2004), and therefore this change may be the consequence of the wider use of sling-stones attested in the Mesopotamian weaponry (Malbran-Labat, 1982; Eichler, 1983). Another interesting result is the higher frequency of cranial trauma in the northern periphery than in the core areas of Mesopotamia, i.e., the southern alluvium and the dry farming zone in the north. This border between the Mesopotamian lowland and the highlands of Anatolia and Iran was not only an area of frequent military conflicts, but the state administration also did not operate in this marginal region as effectively as in the heartland of Mesopotamian civilization (cf. Bedford, 2010). All this discussion creates the impression that the risk of receiving a blow to a head was very low in Mesopotamian populations irrespective of the historical evidence of military conflicts, and much lower than in other parts of the Near East such as the Levant (Cohen et al., 2014; Gasparetti and Sheridan, 2013), Anatolia (Erdal and Erdal, 2012), Armenia (Khudaverdyan 2010, 2014) and Iran (Rathbun, 1984) (Table 4). However, this is the study of survivors, and it does not necessarily mean that the general level of violence was lower in Mesopotamia than elsewhere. It may rather reflect the fact that professional armies and organized violence arose in this area much earlier than elsewhere and the ordinary farmers (except the ilku leaseholders) and city dwellers, buried at local cemeteries, were no longer involved in military conflicts to the same degree as inhabitants of less civilized areas and, on the other hand, their social conflicts were moderated by the state administration. This explanation is supported by observed difference in the frequency of cranial trauma between the various parts of Mesopotamia: in the core irrigation and dry farming area it is constantly low and clearly higher only in the northern periphery, at the foothills of Taurus, Tur Abdin and the Zagros Mountains, where the states of the core area entered into conflicts with surrounding peoples and also the intra-group conflicts were not so effectively moderated by the state. Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Rafał Fetner for unpublished data from Bakr Awa and to the anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on the early version of the manuscript. Recent research on human remains from Tell Majnuna is financed by the National Science Centre (Poland), grant No. 2013/10/M/HS3/00554.
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Tables Table 1: Simplified chronology of Mesopotamia. 10000-8700 BCE Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) 8700-6800 BCE Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) 6800-5500 BCE Late Neolithic (LN) 5500-3200 BCE Chalcolithic 3200-2100 BCE Early Bronze Age (EBA) 2100-1500 BCE Middle Bronze Age (MBA) 1500-1200 BCE Late Bronze Age (LBA) 1200-550 BCE Iron Age (IA) (Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian Period) 550 BCE – 200 CE Classical Antiquity (Achaemenian, Hellenistic, Parthian/Roman Period) 200-650 CE Late Antiquity (Sasanian Period) 650-1500 CE Islamic (Umayyad, Abbasid, Ilkhanid, Jalayirid, Turkoman) Period since 1500 CE Modern (Safavid and Ottoman) Period
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Table 2: Frequencies of healed cranial injuries in adult and adolescent individuals at Mesopotamian sites. Site
Dating
Region
N1
References
Zawi Chemi
Pre-Pottery Neolithic A
Upper Tigris
Abu Hureyra
Pre-Pottery Neolithic A
Middle Euphrates
37
0 Molleson, 2000
Nemrik 9
Pre-Pottery Neolithic A/B
Upper Tigris
28
0 Sołtysiak et al., 2015
Late Chalcolithic
Hamrin
8
Late Chalcolithic
Habur
65
Early Bronze Age
Upper Euphrates
2
Titriş Höyük
Early Bronze Age
Upper Euphrates
15
1 Erdal, 2012
Tell Chuera
Early Bronze Age
Balikh
9
2 Wahl, 2010
Tell Mohammed ʼArab
Early Bronze Age
Upper Tigris
8
0 Bolt, 1991
Tell Barri
Early Bronze Age
Habur
10
0 Sołtysiak, in print
Tell Ingharra
Early Bronze Age
Lower Euphrates
31
0 Rathbun, 1975
Titriş Höyük
Late Early Bronze Age
Upper Euphrates
51
4 Erdal, 2012
Bakr Awa
Early/Middle Bronze Age
Shahrizor
12
0 Fetner, 2014
Tell Arbid P
Middle Bronze Age
Habur
23
0 Sołtysiak and Koliński, 2011
Tell Barri
Middle Bronze Age
Habur
9
Tell Yelkhi
Middle Bronze Age
Hamrin
31
0 Doro Garetto et al., 2007
Tell Masaikh
Middle Bronze Age
Middle Euphrates
14
0 Sołtysiak, unpublished data
Tell Ashara
Middle Bronze Age
Middle Euphrates
44
0 Sołtysiak, unpublished data
Tell Yelkhi
Late Bronze Age
Hamrin
12
1 Doro Garetto et al., 2007
Halawa
Late Bronze Age
Middle Euphrates
15
0 Orthmann et al., 1981
Tell Mohammed ʼArab
Late Bronze Age
Upper Tigris
20
2 Bolt, 1991
Tell Chuera
Late Bronze Age/Iron Age
Balikh
9
0 Wahl, 2010
Tall Knedig
Iron Age
Habur
25
Tell Barri
Neo-Assyrian period
Habur
8
0 Sołtysiak, in print
Ashur
Neo-Assyrian period
Middle Tigris
8
0 Sołtysiak, 2015
Warka
Neo-Babylonian period
Lower Euphrates
10
0 Wittwer-Backofen, 1983
Tell Ingharra
Neo-Babylonian period
Lower Euphrates
10
0 Rathbun, 1975
Tell Barri
Achaemenian period
Habur
9
Roman period
Habur
11 539
Tell Yelkhi
3
Tell Majnuna Hassek Höyük
4
Tall Knedig Tell Sheh Hamad
5
9
n2
4 Ferembach, 1970; Agelarakis, 1993
0 Doro Garetto et al., 2007 9 Sołtysiak, 2010 1 Parsche and Ziegelmayer, 1992
0 Sołtysiak, in print
0 Wittwer-Backofen, 2005
0 Sołtysiak, in print 0 Wittwer-Backofen, 2005
Roman period
Habur
Yorgan Tepe
Sasanian period
Middle Tigris
25
0 Ehrich, 1939
Tell Mohammed ʼArab
Sasanian period
Upper Tigris
17
0 Bolt, 1991
Meskene Qadima
Late Roman period
Middle Euphrates
10
1 Krafeld-Daugherty, 2010
Tell Masaikh
Late Roman period
Middle Euphrates
20
0 Sołtysiak, unpublished data
Bakr Awa
Islamic period
Shahrizor
11
1 Fetner, 2011, 2014
Išan al-Bahriyat
Islamic period
Lower Euphrates
19
1 Ziegelmayer, 1981, 1987, 1992
Tell Masaikh
Islamic period
Middle Euphrates
69
0 Sołtysiak, unpublished data
Tell Ashara
Islamic period
Middle Euphrates
11
0 Sołtysiak, unpublished data
Tell Ashara
Modern period
Middle Euphrates
14
0 Sołtysiak, unpublished data
TOTAL (N40 years
?
adult
M
adult
Table 4: Frequencies of antemortem cranial trauma in Mesopotamia, as compared to other parts of the Near East. Region Mesopotamia Anatolia
1
Chronology
N
Freq.
Reference
PPNA to Modern period
1278
2.2% this study
Early Bronze Age
1067
9.1% Erdal and Erdal, 2012
Southern Levant2
Chalcolithic to Modern period
783 25.1% Cohen et al., 2014
Bab edh-Dhra, Jordan
Early Bronze Age
130 22.3% Gasperetti and Sheridan, 2013
Bronze Age and Iron Age
122 31.1% Khudaverdyan, 2014
Armenia 1 2
2
Titriş Höyük not included. Perimortem trauma is also included here.
12
Figures
Figure 1: Map of Mesopotamia showing location of sites mentioned in the paper.
13
Figure 2: Percentage frequency of healed cranial trauma in various periods. Light grey bar for the Neolithic and Chalcolithic shows the frequency when the mass burials at Tell Majnuna are included.
Figure 3: Percentage frequency of healed cranial trauma in four regions of Mesopotamia. Light grey bar for the Habur/Balikh region shows the frequency when the mass burials at Tell Majnuna are included.
14
