Temple households

For we are no more strangers and foreigners but fellouxitizens with the Saints, and of the Household of God. In Whom all the building, fitly framed together groweth into a holy temple in the Lord.. . . Except the Lord build the house they labour in vain that build it.1... 

Moreover, as Frangipane notes (2001 322), in earlier periods stamp seals were clearly employed by households. In small- and large-scale events, in ones that celebrated the community, as well as ones that were more exclusionary in nature, it was important that contributions and participation were recognized the goods provided would have been sealed and their sealings duly noted. This, then, would be exactly parallel to the quantities of cretulae and their disposition at Arslantepe in the slightly later period if the temples there are, as I propose, ancestor houses. The contents of the vessels in place in the temple cellae, clearly in use in the performance of rituals, and in the storerooms, which are insufficient for any sort of redistributive system, were provided for specific occasions... 

Yet there is a parallel but ultimately opposing force in operation, and that is the maintenance of cohesion within fragmented households through ancestor practices. It is the function of integration that is parallel to the role the temple plays in the expansion, but in this locus it emphasizes the part - the household - rather than the whole - the city (cf. Crawford 2002 47). The outcome of this will be discussed in Chapter 3. For now, and at long last, the journey returns, and ends, at Arslantepe where this chapter began (although not yet with its tomb). 

At the same time, the temple institutions of fourth-millennium Mesopotamia did not operate alone, nor were they autonomous, even in the south (Pollock 1999 101). Rather, they accompanied the households that established branches of themselves in the colonies of the Middle Euphrates and elsewhere. The term colony remains appropriate whereas colonialism does not, because these centers remained attached to the home city - that was their very purpose. And it is evidenced by the inescapable fact that, over a period of several centuries, styles in material culture did not diverge between the various points in the system (Stein 1999a 21) changes over time tracked between south, north, and east. This would suggest not just continued interaction but continued identification of one community with another, southern bases and northern offshoots, maintained by conscious effort. The flow of contact was not merely bidirectional, however, and relationships of power were not analogous to parent/child. Both constituted a complex network that enmeshed members of the extended family located in residences in the south, in the north, in the east, and in whatever pasture the concatenation of current conditions rendered available. 

The first consequence is that, rather than as a reflection of an actual sociopolitical situation, the material record should be read as the result of practices intimately related to contesting ideas, actual situations, and desired situations -in all domains of life. A surprising proportion of those practices are constituted by ritual, religious and otherwise. As delineated above, it was the practices of differentiation and integration that, while maintaining connections between households spread over differing subsistence practices in the fourth millennium, led to the definition of sociopolitical entities based in individual and self-contained ancestral groups in the early third millennium. Ancestors and temples structured sociopolitical relations between members of the polity then, and continued to stretch those relations across various forms of spatial dispersal in the later third and early second millennium. 

Household and Family in Early Mesopotamia. In State and Temple Economy in the Ancient Near East, edited by E. Lipinski, 1 -97. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 5-6. Louvain Peeters. 

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