At the Origins of Politics

Giorgio Buccellati is Research Professor in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and in the Department of History at UCLA. He founded the Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, of which he served as first director from 1973 until 1983 and where he is now Director of the Mesopotamian Lab. He is currently Director of IIMAS - The International Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies. With his wife Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati he received the Balzan Prize in 2021.

Part I: The Great Transformations 50,000 – 3,500 B. C.; 1. The coming into being of society; 2. The invention of territory; 3. Control over nature; 4. The reification of the word; Part II: The Axle of Power 3,500 - 2,300 B. C.; 5. Threshold to history; 6. The nuclear territorial states; 7. The expanded territorial states; 8. Impulses beyond the territorial base; Part III: The Explosion of Boundaries 2,300 - 2,100 B. C.; 9. A quantum leap: the imperial experiment; 10. The invention of the rivers; 11. The invention of the steppe; 12. A premature experiment; Part IV: The Restructuring on a Regional Basis 2,100 - 1,600 B. C.; 13. "Mesopotamia" and its regions; 14. Hegemony and balances; 15. Political strategies; 16. Alternatives to the territorial state; Part V: The World as a City 1,600 - 1,100 B. C.; 17. International equilibrium; 18. The two Lands of the Four River Banks; 19. Local autonomies; 20. New modalities; Part VI: The Extreme Limits of Territoriality 1100-500 B. C.; 21. From a universe of cities to the universal city; 22. The restructuring of the parts; 23. Imperial Ideology; 24. The consolidation of the epigons; 25. The state as it unfolds; 26. Encounters.