"heroic societies" begin to emerge "on the margins of bureaucratically ordered cities" (around 3300 BC or "a few generations" after?)
"warrior aristocracies" with "a new aesthetics of personal combat and killing" (310) ... aristocracies populated by "numerous heroic figures competing fiercely with one another for retainers and slaves" instead of developing a "centralized authority"
see, for instance, Arslantepe (near Uruk), which erects a private structure that excavators refer to as the world's "earliest known palace"
"there is a [...] pattern of heroic burials, indicating in turn an emerging cultural emphasis on feasting, drinking, the beauty and fame of the individual male warrior. And it appears time and again around the fringes of urban life"
However, "all such groups explicitly resisted features of nearby urban civilizations: above all, writing, for which they tended to substitute poets or priests who engaged in rote memorization or elaborate techniques of oral composition. Inside their own societies, at least, they also rejected commerce"
see the work of Hector Munro Chadwick (The Heroic Age)