Book excerpt: The mid-third millennium is marked by unprecedented urban growth from Egypt and the Levantine coast to the Iranian plateau and the Indus valley. Although urbanization in the southern Mesopotamian alluvium is reasonably well understood, details of the emergence of cities in other regions remain sketchy. When did cities first appear on the dry-farming plains of Syria and Mesopotamia and what accounts for their development? How might northern urbanization be a response to or in what ways might urbanization in the two regions reflect independent social and economic processes? Recent excavations provide new data that force reconsideration of ancient urbanization within the dry-farming zone along the interior of the Zagros-Taurus arc in Syria and Iraq. The essays in this volume, which grew out of a symposium hosted by the American Schools of Oriental Research in Chicago in December 1984, specifically treat third-millennium urbanization in the dry-farming zones of Syria and Iraq. The contrast of north and south informs each essay, and this focus points to additional issues and problems likely to dominate future archaeological research agendas.