Approaching Anshan: Cultural heterogeneity, ritual centralization and the segmentary state in the Bronze Age of southwestern Iran

Shortly after the Délégation scientifique française en Perse was established in 1897, the Assyriologist Vincent Scheil announced that ancient Elam – the name given conventionally to the southwestern part of Iran during the Bronze Age – had consisted of two parts, Susiana and Anshan/Anzan. Subsequent work by Pierre Amiet and François Vallat explored this distinction and the 1973 identification of Tal-e Malyan, on the Marv Dasht plain in central Fars, with the city of Anshan strengthened the notion that Elam’s highland component, rather than the Mesopotamian-dominated lowland site of Susa, was in many respects the key to understanding Elam’s unique nature. Recent research by the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research-University of Sydney Mamasani Expedition, in a series of intermontane valleys lying between Susa and Anshan, is contributing new evidence of cultural development in the land of Anshan during the era of Elamite hegemony. This lecture will examine some of that evidence in light of theoretical discussions of the segmentary state, as defined by Aidan Southall and Georges Balandier, focussing particularly on the notion that segmentary states were culturally heterogeneous and more centralized at the level of ritual than political action. Elam, it will be argued, was a quintessential segmentary state that differred markedly from contemporary, unitary states like the Akkadian empire and the Third Dynasty of Ur.

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