Corridors and colonies: comparing fourth-third millennia BC interactions in southeast Anatolia and the Levant

Abstract

This chapter concerns the interactions of several east Mediterranean regions with their southern and northern neighbors during the formative period of literate civilization in the Near East, between the mid-fourth and mid-third millennia BC. These regions such as the Anatolian Euphrates valley, the northwest Levant, and the southern Levant, reside at the edges of the core regions of political and cultural innovation during this period of time. During the late fourth millennium BC, all of them came into early contact with one of the core cultures, Uruk Mesopotamia or Egypt, and all were affected, during the early third millennium BC, by the spread of the Kura-Araks cultural tradition, generally thought to have originated in the southern Caucasus and eastern Anatolia during the second half of the fourth millennium BC. Representing the southwestern extremity of the Kura-Araks cultural province, the southern Levant exhibits a chronologically truncated and culturally distant expression of the features described in more northerly regions.