During sub-phase 2A, the inhabitants of AK9 were not particularly numerous and it has been estimated that there were less than one hundred entities, including women and children. This figure is typical of the Early Bronze Age. If we take into account those people needed for the survival of the community (agricultural workers, shepherds, those who prepared food, gathered wood etc.) and also the sick, handicapped, infants and young children who could not work, it would seem reasonable to suppose that this task fell on only about twenty men who would obviously have represented the entire "workforce" of the village. Therefore, if we apply the parameters suggested by the authors cited above, it would seem that these twenty men would have required about 170 days to make 158,000 bricks and for transport and laying, a further 140 days. To this calculation should also be added idle time, unforeseen events and incidental work which would have influenced the speed of completion of the enterprise . It should also be remembered that, in order to make the bricks, a mixture kneaded in wide ditches where water was canalised (or transported) was necessary. These ditches were dug with the tools at their disposal, mostly made of wood, which they also used to collect the clay and knead the mixture. To this mixture was added straw and hay as a degreasing element. Paleobotanical analysis has shown that these elements are typical of a well-defined climatic period, summer to autumn. This means that the period dedicated to building work was reduced even further. Moreover, the builders had to make a base of glyna in order to create a foundation, prepare the mortar and the protective plaster which would be applied to the wall structure. As a result, taking all this into consideration, the execution of such a demanding task, if carried out purely with the workforce available in the village of A K9 (or its immediate surroundings), would have taken about three to four years, a period during which the economy of the village would have come to a complete stop and the population reduced to basic survival level. Three to four years would have been psychologically onerous as well, taking into account that life expectancy was around thirty.

So why? Is it reasonable to think that a village, up to yesterday purely agricultural and pastoral, suddenly decides to paralyse itself for four years in order to build a fortified city wall? Moreover, why also carry out an "urban" project which involved solutions typical of military architecture when, up to then, villages had, according to Margian tradition, never been fortified? To what end? I think there is some reasonable doubt attached to this whole idea, which must make us try to widen our horizons a little in order to find a plausible explanation. Up to this moment the Mesopotamian, Elamite and Margian city-states had kept a balance of power between each other. One did not seek to prevail over another. None of them had ever considered the destruction of a neighbour, as that would have upset this delicate balance of power. Because of this state of affairs, Sumerian architecture presents no examples of defensive structures, in the real sense of the term, as Schmokel, Chierici, Laroche and Arborio Mella (see bibl.) have demonstrated. Even the primitive settlement of AK9, which contained a probable karû of Mesopotamian type, was not protected up to this time by fortified walls. However, towards 2330 BC, Sargon of Akkad arrived on the scene and destroyed the old equilibrium between the polis in order to create an imperialistic state.

As Jean Daniel Forest writes: 'By