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In our last episode on Mesopotamia, we talked about the northern cities of Mari and Ebla.

In addition to trade, agriculture, and fighting each other, these cities had one more preoccupation,

maintaining massive herds of sheep for wool production.

In the first half of the third millennium,

Mari and Ebla, along with other major northern cities like Urquash and Noir,

sponsored the development of settler communities all throughout the broad,

semi-productive step zone between the Upper Euphrates and the Anatolian foothills.

These communities relied on subsistence agriculture and devoted their energies and most of their land to pasturing large herds of sheep.

Aaron A. Burke defines a zone of uncertainty, stretching from the Zagros' foothills across

northern Mesopotamia and Syria and down into Canaan, which he creatively christened the

fragile crescent. The unifying trade across this zone was the precarious potential for farming and

herding at the limits of rain-fed agriculture, which was most definitely the case in northern Syria.

But since the climate at the time was particularly propitious, and the commodities generated

mainly sheep's wool, greatly in demand,

these settler communities thrived, selling wool to their mother cities, who'd then traded on to

...