Giorgio Buccellati

     “Urban revolution and state formation are two Janus-like faces of a single phenomenon that looms large in any discussion of early Syro-Mesopotamian history” (p. 481). This started sentence embraces the whole topic of this contribution: how people changed themselves and their minds from the prehistorical time, through the Neolithic and urban revolutions, until the shaping of the first states and empires.
     During this long-spanned period, human beings had to face many 'thought breaks' (and subsequent realignments), well-described in seven sections.
     Sections 1 presents the perceptual fragmentation and the distancing from nature; section 2 deals with a perceptual realignment related to the birth of the role of '(personal) function'; section 3 shapes a breaking of face-to-face barriers, characterized by the association of people in cities; section 4 investigates a wider sphere connected to the fragmentation and the realignment of human groups (spread in different cities) in a unique state; section 5 underlines the role of the organization of a state food production guaranteed only by a fragmentation and realignment of this production towards a pivotal 'industrialization'; section 6 further explains how, when the economical complexity grows, fragmentation and realignment of memory (i.e., the need for accountability, related to storage and redistribution activities) led to the development of writing systems; section 7 sketches a conclusion connected to the perception of modern history on 'dead' civilizations: despite the time distance and the historical breakage, moderns can afford a comprehension of ancient human beings basing on “a cultural imprint of perception” which allows us, “inferentially, [to] assess how the ancients assessed, in turn, their own environment, their history, their institutions” (p. 492).
[About the last topic, cf. also Buccellati 2014 (mostly chapter 5)].

[M. De Pietri – November 2019]