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A COMPANION TO THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO THE ANCIENT WORLD This series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of periods of ancient history, genres of classical literature, and the most important themes in ancient culture. Each volume comprises between twenty-five and forty concise essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialization. The essays are written in a clear, provocative, and lively manner, designed for an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers. AN C I E N T HI S T O R Y

LI T E R AT U R E

Published

A Companion to the Ancient Near East Edited by Daniel C. Snell

A Companion to Latin Literature Edited by Stephen Harrison

A Companion to the Hellenistic World Edited by Andrew Erskine

In preparation

AND

CU LT U R E

In preparation

A Companion to Ancient Epic Edited by John Miles Foley

A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine

A Companion to Greek Tragedy Edited by Justina Gregory

A Companion to the Archaic Greek World Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Hans van Wees

A Companion to Classical Mythology Edited by Ken Dowden

A Companion to the Classical Greek World Edited by Konrad Kinzl A Companion to the Roman Republic Edited by Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx A Companion to the Roman Empire Edited by David Potter

A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography Edited by John Marincola A Companion to Greek Religion Edited by Daniel Ogden A Companion to Greek Rhetoric Edited by Ian Worthington

A Companion to the Roman Army Edited by Paul Erdkamp

A Companion to Roman Rhetoric Edited by William J. Dominik and Jonathan Hall

A Companion to Late Antiquity Edited by Philip Rousseau

A Companion to Classical Tradition Edited by Craig Kallendorf

A Companion to Byzantium Edited by Elizabeth James

A Companion to Roman Religion Edited by Jo¨rg Ru ¨ pke

A COMPANION TO THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST Edited by

Daniel C. Snell

# 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Daniel C. Snell to be identified as the Author of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to the ancient Near East / edited by Daniel C. Snell. p. cm. — (Blackwell companions to the ancient world. Ancient history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-631-23293-1 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Middle East—Civilization—To 622. I. Snell, Daniel C. II. Series. DS57.C56 2005 939’.4—dc22 2004012928 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10 on 12.5pt Galliard by Kolam Information Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall Picture research by Kitty Bocking The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com

Contents

List of Figures

viii

List of Maps

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

xviii

Part I The Shape of the Ancient Near East 1

Historical Overview Mario Liverani

From Sedentism to States, 10, 000–3000 Augusta McMahon

The Age of Empires, 3100–900 Mark Chavalas

World Hegemony, 900–300 Paul-Alain Beaulieu

1 3

BCE

Part II Discourses on Methods

20 34 48

Archaeology and the Ancient Near East: Methods and Limits Marie-Henriette Gates

The Languages of the Ancient Near East Gonzalo Rubio

The Historian’s Task Daniel C. Snell

Contents

Part III Economy and Society

107

The Degradation of the Ancient Near Eastern Environment Carlos E. Cordova

109

Nomadism Through the Ages Jorge Silva Castillo

126

Mesopotamian Cities and Countryside Elizabeth C. Stone

141

Money and Trade Christopher M. Monroe

155

Working David A. Warburton

169

Law and Practice Bruce Wells

183

Social Tensions in the Ancient Near East John F. Robertson

196

Gender Roles in Ancient Egypt Ann Macy Roth

211

Royal Women and the Exercise of Power in the Ancient Near East Sarah C. Melville

Warfare in Ancient Egypt Anthony J. Spalinger

219 229

Part IV Culture

243

Transmission of Knowledge Benjamin R. Foster

245

Literature Tawny L. Holm

253

Ancient Near Eastern Architecture Sally Dunham

266

Mesopotamian Art Marian H. Feldman

281

Ancient Mesopotamian Medicine JoAnn Scurlock

302

Mesopotamian Cosmology Francesca Rochberg

316

Contents

vii

Divine and Non-Divine Kingship Philip Jones

330

How Religion Was Done Gary Beckman

343

Part V Heritage of the Ancient Near East

355

The Invention of the Individual Daniel C. Snell

357

Ethnicity Henri Limet

370

Public versus Private in the Ancient Near East Steven J. Garfinkle

384

Democracy and Freedom Matthew Martin III and Daniel C. Snell

397

Monotheism and Ancient Israelite Religion S. David Sperling

408

The Decipherment of the Ancient Near East Peter T. Daniels

421

Legacies of the Ancient Near East Daniel C. Snell

430

References

434

Index

493

Figures

20.1 20.2 20.3 21.1a and b 21.1c 21.2 21.3 21.4 21.5 21.6 21.7 21.8 21.9 21.10 21.11

Ur. House of the Old Babylonian Period Nimrud. Palace of Assurnasirpal II Tell ‘Ain Dara. Temple

275 277 278

Warka Vase, two views, Late Uruk period Warka Vase, detail Warka Vase, line drawing Seal impression, Lake Uruk period Group of votive statues from Square Temple at Tell Asmar, Early Dynastic period Votive statue of Ur-Nanshe, Early Dynastic period, from Mari Standing statue of Gudea Victory stele of Naram-Sin, Akkadian period, from Susa Stele of Hammurabi, Old Babylonian period, from Susa Detail of upper relief, stele of Hammurabi Siege of Lachish, Neo-Assyrian period, reign of Sennacherib (704–681 B C E ), Nineveh Scenes from a lion hunt, Neo-Assyrian period, reign of Assurbanipal (668–627 B C E ), Nineveh

284 285 286 288 290 291 292 293 295 296 298 300

Maps

0.1 8.1 8.2

The Near East a) Sites; b) prior to 2500, after 2500 Paleoclimatic information: a) vegetation regions; b) the climatic optimum

xvi 110 & 111 113

Notes on Contributors

Paul-Alain Beaulieu is Associate Professor of Assyriology at Harvard University, where he teaches Akkadian language and literature and the history of ancient Mesopotamia. He is the author of The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon 556–539 BC (1989), Legal and Administrative Texts from the Reign of Nabonidus (2000), and The Pantheon of Uruk During the Neo-Babylonian Period (2003), as well as numerous articles on the history, religion, culture, and intellectual life of Mesopotamia in the first millennium B C . He is currently preparing a series of studies on cuneiform archives from Babylonia dated to the time of the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid empires. Gary Beckman is Professor of Mesopotamian and Hittite Studies and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. He previously taught at Yale University, where he also served as Associate Curator of the Babylonian Collection. He has published widely on the religion of Hatti and on Hittite social organization and diplomacy. In addition he has compiled two catalogues of the Old Babylonian cuneiform tablets held by the Yale Babylonian Collection. He is currently Associate Editor of The Journal of the American Oriental Society and of The Journal of Cuneiform Studies. Beckman’s recent research has focused on the reception and adaptation of SyroMesopotamian culture by the Hittites. He is completing an edition of the tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh written in various languages recovered from the site of the Hittite capital. Mark Chavalas is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse. He has written and edited New Horizons in the Study of Ancient Syria with John L. Hayes (1992), Emar: Religion and Culture of a Syrian Town in the Late Bronze Age (1996), and Mesopotamia and the Bible (2002). Carlos E. Cordova is Assistant Professor of Geography at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater. His areas of expertise are geoarchaeology, geomorphology, and palynology. His research focuses on environmental change during the Late Quaternary in the Near East and the Northern Black Sea Region. Recent articles appeared in

Notes on Contributors

Geoarchaeology: An International Journal, The Arab World Geographer, and Physical Geography. He is currently writing a book on the millennial transformation of woodlands, steppes, and deserts in Jordan. Peter T. Daniels is an independent scholar in New York. He has edited The World’s Writing Systems with William Bright (1996) and Phonologies of Asia and Africa with Alan S. Kaye (1997). Sally Dunham, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and Research Affiliate at Yale University. She has worked on archaeological expeditions in Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, and has published articles on the art and archaeology of the Ancient Near East in American and European journals. She is currently involved in excavations at the Bronze Age site of Umm el-Marra in Syria. Marian H. Feldman received her B.A. in Art History from Columbia University and her Ph.D., also in Art History, from Harvard University. She currently teaches Ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Her publications include studies on artistic interconnections between the Ancient Near East, Egypt, and the Aegean, and she has excavated in Turkey and Syria. Benjamin R. Foster, Professor of Assyriology and Curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, focuses his research on Akkadian literature and the social and economic history of Mesopotamia. He is the author of Before the Muses (1993, 1996, 2004), an anthology of translations from Akkadian literature, abridged as From Distant Days (1995), and of the translation The Epic of Gilgamesh (2001). His current research includes a history of oriental scholarship in the United States. Steven J. Garfinkle is Assistant Professor of History at Western Washington University, where he teaches a full range of courses on the Ancient Near East. His current research focuses on the society and economy of Mesopotamia in the late third and early second millennia B C E . He has just completed work on an edition of the Ur III Tablets from the Columbia University Library (with H. Sauren and M. Van De Mieroop), and he is revising a study of entrepreneurs at the end of the third millennium B C E . Marie-Henriette Gates teaches history and archaeology at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. Tawny L. Holm is Assistant Professor of Religion in the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and has edited The Literary Language of the Bible. The Collected Essays of Luis Alonso Scho¨ckel (2000). Philip Jones is a researcher with the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary project. Henri Limet is Professor Emeritus at the University of Lie`ge, Belgium. An authority on Sumerian economic history, his books include Le Travail des Me´taux au pays de Sumer (1960) and L’Anthroponymie sume´rienne (1968).

xii

Notes on Contributors

Mario Liverani is full Professor of the History of the Ancient Near East in the University of Rome. Presently he is Director of the Inter-University Research Centre for Saharan Archaeology and of the Archaeological Mission in the Libyan Sahara, editor of the collection ‘‘Arid Zone Archaeology.’’ He has been a member of various archaeological missions in Syria (Ebla, Terqa, Tell Mozan), in Turkey (Arslantepe, Kurban Hu¨yu¨k), in Yemen (Baraqish), and presently in Libya (Tadrart Acacus). He is author of 15 books or monographs and about 180 articles in specialized journals. Recent monographs include Antico Oriente (1988), Studies in the Annals of Ashurnasirpal II (1992), Uruk: la prima citta` (1998), Le lettere di el-Amarna (1998–99), International Relations in the Ancient Near East (2001), and Otre la Bibbia, a history of Ancient Israel (2004). Edited books include Akkad. The First World Empire (1993) and Neo-Assyrian Geography (1995); Arid Lands in Roman Times and Recent Trends in Reconstructing the History of Ancient Israel are forthcoming. Matthew Martin III took his B.A. in History at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and is a law student at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Augusta McMahon is University Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern History and Archaeology and Fellow of Newnham College, University of Cambridge, England. She has participated in fieldwork in Iraq at Nippur and Nineveh, in Turkey at Hacinebi Tepe, and is currently co-director of excavations at Chagar Bazar in northeastern Syria. Her research focuses on the dynamics of small settlements within territorial states and on the continuity of material culture through political and historical change. Sarah C. Melville is an Assistant Professor of History at Clarkson University, where she teaches courses in ancient medicine, warfare, and culture. Her publications include The Role of Naqia/Zakutu in Sargonid Politics (1999) and an article on the social role of royal women in Assyria. Christopher M. Monroe (Ph.D, M.A., M.I.S.) earned a master’s in nautical archaeology at Texas A&M and participated in the Uluburun excavations and several land excavations in the Near East before finishing his doctorate in Ancient Near Eastern studies at the University of Michigan, where he also earned a master’s in information science. He is currently an Assistant Curator at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City and is publishing his dissertation on the sociology of traders in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean. John F. Robertson, Professor of History at Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, has published several articles on the social and economic role of the temples of ancient Mesopotamia, especially at the city of Nippur, as well as on the role of pastoral nomads in the historiography of ancient southwest Asia. He is also co-author of Perspectives from the Past: Primary Source Readings in Western Civilization (1998). He is working on a publication of administrative records from Nippur from the early Old Babylonian period and a survey of Ancient Near Eastern cultures.

Notes on Contributors

xiii

Francesca Rochberg, Professor of History at the University of California at Riverside, has focused on Babylonian celestial divination and its cultural context, and has written on various aspects of Babylonian astrology and astronomy. Her publications include Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination: The Lunar Eclipse Tablets of Enuma Anu Enlil (1988) and Babylonian Horoscopes (1998). Her forthcoming book is The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (2004). Ann Macy Roth, Associate Professor of Classics at Howard University, Washington, DC, has published Phyles in the Old Kingdom (1991), A Cemetery of Palace Attendants (1993), and has translated Hieroglyphs Without Mystery (1993). She is the director of the Giza Cemetery Project and editor of the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. She writes on Egyptian social history, religion, mortuary archaeology, and tomb rituals and equipment. Gonzalo Rubio is Assistant Professor of Assyriology in the Pennsylvania State University. He works on Sumerian linguistics and literary texts. JoAnn Scurlock received her Ph.D. in Assyriology from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. She is Adjunct Associate Professor of History and Political Science at Elmhurst College, where she teaches courses in Ancient History, Islamic Civilization and Politics, Western Civilization, History of Witchcraft, and History of Healing Magic. She is the author of Magico-Medical Means of Treating Ghost Induced Illnesses in Ancient Mesopotamia (2003). She and medical professor Burton Andersen are currently in the last stages of preparation of a book Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine: Diagnostics. The preparation of a further volume, Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine: Treatments is being supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the author of a number of articles on ancient Mesopotamian magic, religion, medicine, and political history. ´ frica in the Jorge Silva Castillo is Professor in the Centro de Estudias de Asia y A Colegio de Me´xico. He edited Nomads and Sedentary Peoples (1981) and translated the Gilgamesh epic into Spanish (1994). He researches nomadism especially in the archives from Mari in Syria. Daniel C. Snell is L. J. Semrod Presidential Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. His books include Life in the Ancient Near East (1997), Flight and Freedom in the Ancient Near East (2001), and a study of the Biblical Book of Proverbs, Twice-Told Proverbs and the Composition of the Book of Proverbs (1993). He is working on an anthology of translations of Ancient Near Eastern texts on slavery. Anthony J. Spalinger is Associate Professor in the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has published Aspects of the Military Documents of the Ancient Egyptians (1982), Revolutions in Egyptian Calendrics (1994), and The Private Feast Lists of Ancient Egypt (1996). He is working on a study of the textual transmission of the ‘‘poem’’ about the Battle of Kadesh.

xiv

Notes on Contributors

S. David Sperling is Professor of Bible at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, New York. He was educated at Brooklyn College, Jewish Theological Seminary, and Columbia University. Recent books include Students of the Covenant: A History of Jewish Biblical Scholarship in North America and The Original Torah: The Political Intent of the Bible’s Writers. Elizabeth C. Stone is Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her books include Nippur Neighborhoods (1987) and Adoption in Old Babylonian Nippur (1992) with David Owen. She has excavated in Syria, at the Iraqi site of Mashkan-shapir, and is now working at Ayanis in eastern Turkey, a site of the Urartian state of the first millennium. She is interested in how urban structures reflect social, political, and economic organization of civilizations. David A. Warburton, Research Fellow, Aarhus University, Denmark, teaches Ancient Egyptian religion. He works on social, economic, and political systems in early antiquity, stratigraphy, and chronology. Recent books include Egypt and the Near East: Politics in the Bronze Age (2001) and Macroeconomics from the Beginning: The General Theory, Ancient Markets, and the Rate of Interest (2003). He is currently working on issues of ‘‘color’’ in antiquity and prehistoric religion. Bruce Wells is Assistant Professor of religion at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota. He is publishing his 2003 Johns Hopkins dissertation as The Law of Testimony in the Pentateuchal Codes.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Prof. Paul Bell, Dean of Arts and Sciences in the University of Oklahoma, Prof. Robert Cox, Director of the School of International and Area Studies, Prof. Steven Gillon, sometime Dean of the Honors College, and Prof. Robert Griswold, Chair of History, for their support of this project. My graduate student Hava Ben-Yosef and undergraduate Honors student Anna Bostwick gave invaluable help with the initial conference. Anne Petzinger, an Honors student, acted as a research assistant in the final stages of preparation of the manuscript; her care and meticulousness saved me from many errors. The many colleagues in the field, who, if they could not themselves write, helpfully suggested others who could, also deserve thanks, as well as the learned people who actually did accept the assignments proffered. The editor Al Bertrand was ever ready with advice and aid. DCS

LYDIA IA

ASIA MINOR TURKEY Bogazköy

ION

Aegean Sea

Black Sea

M TS

Carchemish Habuba Kabira Ebla

Alalah Ugarit

Byblos

CYPRUS

SYRIA

Sais

Jordan River Jerusalem

INE

Naucratis

ISR

Ashkelon Gaza

Hazor

Mediterranean Sea

Gulf Aqa of ba

ile

LIBYA

Deir el-Medina

Aswan

Map 0.1

The Near East

Harran

Red Sea

ARABIA

Caspian Sea

Nineveh Kalah

ASSYRIA Nuzi

Euphra t

is R

G S

Eshnunna

M T S

Dur-Kurigalzu Sippar Mashkan-shapir

IRAN

Mari

A Tigr MI TA PO SO ME s R. e

Assur Terqa

Akkad

PERSIA

Susa

Babylon Nippur Umma Girsu BABYLONIA Adab Isin Lagas E LA Uruk M Larsa b a l-Ar Ur a t t Sha Eridu

ARABIA

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The Near East

Introduction Daniel C. Snell

These essays stand alone and need no introduction, but it seems wise to clarify issues at the beginning in the form of responses to questions.

What is the Ancient Near East? The term refers to the ancient area now called the Middle East in the languages of the area and of Europe; we mean the modern countries of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. The term Near East refers to proximity to Europe and is therefore Eurocentric; Western Asia would be preferable, and some of our essays use that term, but that phrase is not widely understood, and so we have kept to the old terminology. Is Egypt included? With the growth of studies of Mesopotamia, ancient Iraq and Syria, we are so specialized that the discipline does not necessarily include Egypt, and there are many fine introductory books on Egypt. Nonetheless we believe that many if not most introductory courses to the Ancient Near East do include Egypt, and that the general public definitely feels Egypt is part of the Ancient Near East. Hence we have included treatment of ancient Egypt where possible. In fact we have slighted it in contrast to the lands further to the east, and most of the experts writing here were trained in Mesopotamian studies, not Egyptian. A longer project would have resulted in a more balanced view, but I felt it was important to acknowledge the very close links between Egypt and the rest of the Ancient Near East, even if full justice could not be done to both sides. Is the work a companion to a particular textbook? Not really. It was commissioned by Blackwell, which was in the process of publishing Van De Mieroop’s A History of the Ancient Near East (2004), but that book was

Introduction

xix

published after several essays had been completed, and the authors here have not necessarily reacted to it in their pieces. While we certainly conceived these essays as an amplification of a political history of the Ancient Near East, we hope that it will be found to be useful by undergraduates and beginning graduate students regardless of what else they may be reading.

What chronology will be used here? Chronology, the study of the time periods, especially the absolute dates, from the Ancient Near East, is undergoing rethinking now, and we have decided not to impose uniformity in how authors deployed it. Most have resorted to the Middle Chronology, now perhaps in the course of being discredited. But this has been the standard chronology for many years, and if it is wrong by a hundred and more years, it at least affords comparison with other works. When we now pick up historical works on the Ancient Near East from the beginning of the twentieth century, we find ourselves somewhat disoriented by the suggested chronology, and yet one can make sense of what the authors then believed. We beg the indulgence of future readers and can assert that given what we now know, the chronology presented here is a responsible one that will allow the reader to understand at least the relative chronology of events. The chronology used is summarized in J. A. Brinkman’s appendix to Oppenheim 1977 for Mesopotamia and Baines and Malek 2000: 36–37 for Egypt. All the authors have striven, I believe, to present their field in a way that will be accessible to persons without previous exposure to it and in a way that will be useful to scholars fifty years hence. That is a high ambition, and only time will judge whether our efforts really bore the fruit for which we hoped. But I recall with pleasure the response of one of the essayists on seeing the range of topics proposed here; the scholar wrote, ‘‘To answer broad and stimulating questions like these is the reason most of us got into the field to begin with.’’ We hope these essays will be as stimulating as the questions that provoked them, and that students and scholars will for a time at least begin here when they seek the ancient and modern meaning of the Ancient Near East.

PART I

The Shape of the Ancient Near East

CHAPTER ONE

Historical Overview Mario Liverani

Unity and Diversity The history of the Ancient Near Eastern civilizations is very long: its time-span from the late fourth to the late first millennium B C E is equal to or even longer than the rest of history, from the collapse of the Near Eastern cultures to our own time. It is correct to use the label ‘‘the first half of history.’’ We could even say ‘‘of our history,’’ because this long trajectory is now considered part and even the very foundation of our own ‘‘Western’’ history – not like other more remote civilizations in India or China or elsewhere. The reasons for the Western appropriation of the Ancient Near Eastern cultures and history were especially important at the time of their rediscovery. These included the colonialist ideology and practice of the nineteenth century, the interest of the Christian world in Biblical antiquities, coupled with the Islamic disregard for preIslamic heritage. In recent decades these motivations have faded, and they are no longer primary to the community of scholars. Yet Biblical connections are still widely of concern to popular audiences, and so the interest in the history of the Ancient Near East is something more serious than curiosity about a remote and alien past. Our Western civilization acknowledges a privileged role for Greek civilization in generating the foundational values of freedom, democracy, individual personality, economic enterprise, rational thought and science, and the aesthetics of the visual arts and poetry. But our indebtedness to the Ancient Near Eastern civilizations in the material foundations of culture (urban life, political organization, administration, writing) and in the field of religion remains important. But is the Ancient Near East a unified subject for historical inquiry? The area is characterized by a notable diversity in natural environments (hills and steppe-lands, river valleys and Mediterranean countryside), by different peoples and languages (Semites and Indo-Europeans and others), by various ways of life (urban to nomadic) and modes of production (from agriculture and pastoralism to specialized crafts and complex financial dealings), by different complicated writing systems, by social diversity in access to resources, communication, and decision-making – so that a unitary

Mario Liverani

treatment may seem unjustified. Nevertheless, when compared to other centers of civilization (including the contiguous centers of Egypt, the Indus Valley, the Aegean basin, and Central Asia), and especially when contrasted to the periphery between the centers of the major civilizations, the Ancient Near East seems compact enough to allow for a unified treatment because of intensive cross-fertilization. But such a treatment must not neglect the specific features of the regional sub-units of Lower Mesopotamia, Upper Mesopotamia, the Levant (areas bordering the eastern Mediterranean), Anatolia (modern Turkey), and southwestern Iran. The history of the region, as far as it can be reconstructed from written and archaeological records, follows a trajectory which is diverse in details but unitary in its major features. The relevance of the environmental factors, the introduction of technological improvements, and socio-economic development, can be followed all over the area with similar patterns. Environmental constraints, painstaking production of food, the difficult access to basic resources, and the consequent low levels in demographic growth – all these factors contributed to the slow development of the Ancient Near Eastern civilizations. We are accustomed to appreciating the large cities and the monumental temples and palaces, the elegant artistic and literary compositions, and the great polities and ‘‘empires’’ as something obviously resulting from high levels of civilization. We should never forget, however, that such accomplishments were the result of painstaking labor and of forced allocation of the limited resources then available, and that the periodic crises were not an accident but a structural feature in the system. In fact, the ancient history of the Near East can be summarized as a cyclic sequence of growth and collapse, a sequence that is apparent also in the preservation of the documentary record. The periods of major development – with burgeoning polities, big cities, important monuments, extensive archives, and rich craftsmanship – are separated by ‘‘dark ages’’ of localism and fragmentation. We have to consider that the ups and downs are mostly pertinent to the upper classes, to the political structures, and to the complex urban economy, while the common peasantry in rural villages and pastoral units continued their basic struggle for survival. The ups and downs are the result of a different equilibrium between the two opposed strategies of development and of survival, typically located in the royal palace and in the village, and carried on by the political elite and by the local community. The strategy of development required a leaching of resources from the local communities that was detrimental to the local strategy of survival, and therefore could be carried on only during limited periods, in selected areas, and under specific circ*mstances allowing the political elites to impose their will, through the exercise of power and through shared ideologies. Notwithstanding these constraints, we see a long-lasting tendency toward the enlargement in the scale of the political units, the improvement of the technologies of production (and also of destruction), the widening of the geographical horizons, and also the increasing role of individual personalities. The most objective and concrete proxy for expansion, however, namely demographic development, seemed to remain more subject to the recurrent fluctuations than to a positive trend.

Historical Overview

The Urban Revolution, about 3500–2800 BCE The beginning of the historical trajectory is marked by a phenomenon of tremendous relevance, currently assumed to mark the shift from prehistory to history in the proper sense. The phenomenon can be labeled in various ways. We can use the label ‘‘urban revolution,’’ if we want to underscore demography and settlement forms, or the ‘‘First Urbanization’’ if we take into account the subsequent cycles of urbanization. We can speak of the origin of the state or the early state, if we prefer to underscore the political aspects. We can also emphasize the beginning of a marked socio-economic stratification, and of specialized crafts, if we want to underscore the mode of production. We can also use the term ‘‘origin of complexity,’’ if we try to subsume all the various aspects under a unifying concept. The origin of writing has also been considered to mark the beginning of true and proper history, because of the old-fashioned idea that there is no history before the availability of written sources. But now that such an idea is considered simplistic or wrong, we still can consider writing the most evident and symbolic culmination of the entire process. The ‘‘revolution’’ took place in Lower Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq, and was the result of particular technological improvements and socio-political strategies. The agricultural production of barley underwent a notable, possibly tenfold, increase thanks to the construction of water reservoirs and irrigation canals, of long fields adjacent to the canals watered by them, and thanks to the use of the plow, of animal power, of carts, of threshing sledges, of clay sickles, and of improved storage facilities. The agricultural revolution could not have taken place without the managerial activity of central agencies, the temples, which were able to overcome the purely local strategy of survival carried on by the rural villages. The technological improvements alone, however, could generate no ‘‘revolution’’ at all if the food-producers had devoted the entire surplus to their own consumption. The role of the central agency was decisive in diverting most of the surplus to social use: both for financing the common structures (irrigation networks, temple building, defensive walls), and for the maintenance of the specialized craftsmen and the sociopolitical elite. The ‘‘redistributive’’ economy of the early state, centered on the temples, was not based on the procedure of taxation, that is, the extraction of a part of the product from the producers’ families or local communities, but basically on the procedure of forced labor or corve´e work imposed on local communities to work the temple lands. In this way the central agency, the owner of the best irrigated lands, could transfer to the local communities most of the social costs, paying just the rations for the workmen but not their families in limited periods of harvest and other seasonally concentrated operations. The result of the technological improvements was a rate of seed to crop around 1:25 in comparison to 1:5 outside the river valleys. The result of the central management was that only 1/3 of the crop covered the expenditures of seed for the next year, rations for workmen and animals, and 2/3 went to the central agency for the social uses described above. Also the breeding of sheep and goats for the production of wool underwent a tremendous increase under temple management, again thanks

Mario Liverani

to technology (the weaving loom) and social exploitation (slave women and children concentrated in temple factories). The administration of an economy based on unequal transfers of product, rations, and services generated writing. Already available tools (tokens, seals, clay sealings) were coordinated to produce round clay seals we call bullae, then ‘‘numerical’’ tablets, and finally proper clay tablets with numbers and logographic icons for the various items to be recorded. The ‘‘archaic texts’’ from the city of Uruk levels IV–III attest the organization of scribes, schools, and archives. The transition from the Late Chalcolithic (the Ubaid culture in Mesopotamia) to the early urban economy around 4000 B C E went hand in hand with the sudden increase in the size and structure of the city and of the temples. As for the cities, the transition from the small villages and hamlets of the Ubaid period (under one hectare or 2.47 acres in size) to the walled cities like Uruk (70 hectares or 172.9 acres) is quite impressive. Inside the cities, the small shrines of the Ubaid period, which were devoted to cultic use only, became large buildings including shops and stores besides the sanctuary of the god, along with the apartments of the clergy and the administrative personnel. The social changes were as important: beside the rural communities, based on family structures and communal self-government, a ruling class emerged as the necessary premise, but also the result, of the centralized administration of the economy. The Uruk culture is so called because of the archaeological discoveries at that site. In Uruk the entire complex of Eanna (with the adjacent Anu temple) has been excavated, while the contemporary levels in other Lower Mesopotamian sites remain hardly touched by digging. The only other important center of the same period in the lowlands is Susa in Iranian Khuzistan. The impression that Uruk could have been the most important center in the period is probably correct, since it is supported by memories preserved in the later mythological and epic literature of Sumer. The paramount role of the temple in the Uruk period was the obvious result of the strongly unequal relationships that the complex structure of the early state introduced into society. The elite could successfully exploit the rural population only by convincing them that their work was intended to support the god, his house, and his properties. A religious mobilization was necessary in order to keep the unequal relationships effective and enduring. No purely physical constraint could have been effective, but the ideological constraint made the exploitation tolerable. The priestly leadership also had the effect of depriving the kinship groups of their role and thwarted their ambitions for prestige; the priests moved the whole community toward an impersonal management. Outside the core area, Uruk culture spread in a wide periphery, by means of various types of colonies and outposts. Upper Mesopotamia was colonized both along the Euphrates (at Habuba Kabira and Jebel Aruda) and the Tigris (at Nineveh) and in the Syrian Jazira (at Hamukar and Tell Brak). The most remote colonies were located along access routes to the highlands of Anatolia (at Samsat and Hassek Hoyuk) and on the Iranian plateau (at Godin Tepe). Important local cities were also influenced by the Uruk culture in their autonomous development (Arslan Tepe is the best known site of this type). Trade and access to highland resources (copper and timber in Anatolia, tin and semi-precious stones in Iran) were most probably the main factors

Historical Overview

for the spread of the Uruk colonies, and the resultant ‘‘regional system’’ brought different ecosystems and cultural traditions into reciprocal relationships. During the same period, the Early Dynastic civilization of Egypt underwent a similar process of state formation and urbanization, but remained separate from Mesopotamian civilization, except for isolated contacts. The collapse of the entire system came abruptly at the beginning of the third millennium. Most colonies were abandoned in Upper Mesopotamia and in the highlands. The destruction of the Uruk period complex at Arslan Tepe is really impressive, and the burial of a Trans-Caucasian chief on the top of the ruins may hint at the role of the pastoral mountaineers as responsible for the disaster. But the crisis is also visible in Lower Mesopotamia, with no northern intrusion, so that we can doubt whether the nomads were the primary factor in the collapse; they may just have profited from an internal structural crisis. In any case, the unitary horizon of the Uruk period was followed by the emergence of various local cultures: the Jemdet Nasr culture in Lower Mesopotamia, the Proto-Elamite in Susiana, the Ninevite V in Upper Mesopotamia, and others in Eastern Anatolia and in Iran. All of them are characterized by a decline of city life in the river valleys, or even by a total reversion to village life in the periphery. The ‘‘first cycle of urbanization’’ had come to its end.

The ‘‘Second Urbanization,’’ about 2800–2000 BCE The new cycle of urbanization encompassed an enlarged horizon and was based on a deeper rooting in the society. The urban cultures spread again from Lower Mesopotamia in the so-called Early Dynastic period, about 2800–2350 B C E , to include Upper Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia, and Elam. The spread of cuneiform writing in most of these regions, except Anatolia and Palestine, makes the interconnections more visible. The adjacent areas also underwent similar processes of growth and consolidation in Old Kingdom Egypt, in the Early Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley, and in northeastern Iran and Central Asia. All these areas were linked together by trade contacts and cultural cross-fertilization. The large size of the area involved and the spread of writing made the ethnic diversity much clearer than in the previous period. Lower Mesopotamia hosted two different linguistic groups: the Sumerians prevailed in the south, or Sumer, and the Semites in the north, or Akkad. The two groups, although coexisting in the same polities, differed not only in language and other cultural traits (for example, the style of figurative arts) but also in basic social and political features. The heritage of the temple-city was characteristic of Sumer, while in the Semitic area the influence of the kinship groups and pastoral tribes was more visible. In Upper Mesopotamia the prevailing population was Hurrian, and in Susiana and Anshan, the later Fars, it was Elamite. In Syria an early stage of the later northwest Semitic dialects was represented by Eblaite. For Anatolia we lack direct evidence, but the analysis of later languages and personal names makes us believe that the area was inhabited by Hattians and other non-Indo-European peoples.

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The typical polity was the city-state in the densely inhabited regions of the lowlands, and probably some kind of ‘‘ethnic’’ state among the mountaineers and the steppedwellers. In the Sumerian south, the city-state was basically a ‘‘temple-city’’ as already described in the Uruk period, although the royal palace acquired a separate political role, leaving to the temples the role of managerial agencies of the economy in addition to their cultic role. The city leader in the south was usually a ‘‘priest-king’’ (e n), or a ‘‘city administrator’’ (e n s i), the ideology leaving the role of the true sovereign to the city god. The temple-city was in theory the property of the god, and was in practice a state centered on the city and dominating a rural landscape of some 10 to 20 km or 6 to 12 miles in radius. The major Sumerian city-states of the period were Ur, whose ‘‘Royal Cemetery’’ provides the most brilliant image of wealth and craftsmanship, Uruk, Eridu, Umma, Lagash, Adab, and Shuruppak. Between the Sumerian south and the Akkadian north, the city of Nippur played a special role as seat of the leading god of the Sumerian pantheon, Enlil – a role of providing political legitimacy to kings who held the city and of providing a symbol of cultural unity for Sumer in the theory that only one king could be paramount at any one time. At an early stage of development, in Early Dynastic II, a ‘‘league’’ of Sumerian cities seems to have played an important political role. More often, competition for agricultural lands could spark wars among neighboring cities, and the long war between Lagash and Umma in Early Dynastic III is well known from the royal inscriptions of Lagash. But the equilibrium between the various city-states seems to have been resistant to imbalance. In the area of Akkad city-states like Eshnunna or Akshak seem to have shared the southern model. But the most important city, Kish, was formed differently, with a neat prevalence of the palace over the temple, with a larger territory, with a warlike king (l u g a l ‘‘big man’’), and clear expansionistic intent. It is possible that ethnicity had some influence in generating the two different models, but certainly the ecological and economic basis was also a factor. In the north pastoralism was more important, and agriculture was less dependent on irrigation, with local systems of square fields prevailing over the temple-run sets of elongated fields in the south. The modified model also spread to Upper Mesopotamia: along the middle Tigris (at Assur) and the Middle Euphrates (at Mari), in the Jazira (at Tell Brak/Nagar and other centers), and in Syria (at Ebla). Various administrative archives have been recovered, both in the south (Ur ‘‘archaic’’ in Early Dynastic II, about 2700–2600; Fara in Early Dynastic IIIa, about 2600–2450; and especially Lagash in Early Dynastic IIIb, about 2450–2350), and more recently in the north (Mari, Tell Beydar) and Syria (Ebla, about 2500–2350). The two major archives, Lagash and Ebla, have been correctly contrasted as representing different socio-economic systems. In fact the economy of Lagash was managed through a system of temples, by a class of priestly administrators, and was mostly based on intensive agriculture. Ebla was managed by the palace, with an important role left to the representatives of kin groups and local communities, and it was based on mixed agricultural and pastoral production and on long-distance trade in metals and textiles. The temples at Ebla were devoted to cultic activities and ceremonial redistribution, but nothing comparable to the administrative redistribution of the Sumerian temples.

Historical Overview

The competition among the various trade networks was an important factor. Apart from local exchange in city markets and fairs, long-distance trade was especially important in the cities located between the river valleys and their periphery from which most of the raw materials came: Susa trading with the Iranian plateau, Assur with the upper Tigris and Anatolia, Abarsal with the upper Euphrates, Mari and Ebla with Syria. Trade was carried on with caravans of donkeys by merchants dependent on and financed by central agencies. Relationships between merchants and palace or temple were of the ‘‘administrative’’ kind, with fixed prices and a system of yearly accounts, the value of the imported goods being balanced against the value of entrusted goods. But when outside the area of control of the central agency, the merchants were free to negotiate for profit, and could also use their money for loans at interest and loans with personal guarantees. The competition in trade networks was a factor in the struggles between the most important city-states, especially during the final phase of the Early Dynastic III. In some cases the competition was settled by agreement and delimitation of the respective networks as in the treaty between Ebla and Abarsal, in other cases by recourse to war as between Mari and Ebla. The rise of a new polity in central Mesopotamia, Akkad as heir of Kish, brought about a series of destructive wars. Some of them, under the first ruler of Akkad, Sargon (2335–2279), were intended to conquer the Sumerian south and gave origin to the first regional state that included the entire Lower Mesopotamian river region. After that, more wars were intended to acquire control of the trade network, and were directed against Susa (Iranian network), against Magan (Gulf network), against Mari and Ebla, both of them destroyed by Naram-Sin (2254–2218), the most important king of Akkad. The celebrative inscriptions and monuments of the Akkadian kings were the expression of a new idea of ‘‘heroic’’ kingship and of enlarged territorial control. The deification of Naram-Sin clearly contrasted to the old Sumerian ideology of the city leader as administrative representative of the god. Later legends and epic compositions, while reserving to Sargon the image of the pious and successful king, blamed Naram-Sin for hubris and disaster. The Akkad dynasty did not survive for long, and the decline started after NaramSin. A major factor was the pressure of the outer nomads, both from the mountaineers (Gutians and Lullubi in the Zagros Mountains) and the steppe tribes (Martu, better known as Amorites). Archaeology also gives a picture of decline of the splendid civilizations of the Early Bronze age, in Anatolia, in the Levant, in Iran, and the Gulf area. We get the impression that the ‘‘second urbanization’’ reached its peak around 2300, and then started a fast decline. The massive intrusions of the Gutians (about 2200) and the Martu (about 2000) in middle and lower Mesopotamia were part of this scenario. In Egypt, the fragmented socio-political order in the first ‘‘Intermediate Period’’ was roughly contemporary. In the Levant, the so-called ‘‘Intermediate (Early/Middle Bronze) Period’’ showed an archaeological picture dominated by pastoralism and decline of urban life. As usual, the periphery was more decisively affected, while the main core of urbanization, in lower Mesopotamia, could better resist the troubles. The last century of the third millennium, when the crisis was already well advanced in the peripheral areas, was dominated in the river valleys by the third dynasty of

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Ur (2112–2004), which represented the most efficient and stable state organization that Mesopotamia ever experienced, in earlier or later times. In a short period, under Ur-Nammu, Shulgi, Amar-Sin, and Shu-Sin, the Ur kings were able to revitalize Sumerian culture and religious ideology, and to extend the model of the temple-city to a wider region in which the former city-states were transformed into provinces. Instead of celebrative monuments, they left temple buildings, including the famous temple-towers or ziggurats, irrigation canals, and defensive walls. They unified prices and measures inside their kingdom, and provided it with a law-code and a landregister. They produced a uniform and efficient bureaucratic record of the economy with the most detailed accounting procedures: crop estimates before harvest, estimates of growth for herds and flocks, balanced accounts for merchants, all based on administrative conventions and fixed rates. Cultic literature and royal hymns flourished during the ‘‘Neo-Sumerian renaissance,’’ while cities and countryside in the core of the empire flourished in peace and order. However, the effect of external troubles could not be avoided forever. In spite of various expeditions carried on in Subartu (Upper Mesopotamia) and on the Zagros piedmont, and in spite of the ‘‘Martu-wall’’ erected from Tigris to Euphrates in order to stop, or at least to check, the infiltration of the West Semitic nomads, the Martu finally succeeded in penetrating in substantial number into Mesopotamia, possibly driven out of their homeland in the Syrian steppe by an unfavorable climatic change. The Martu conquered and ravaged all the provinces, and Ur was left without revenues and protection. The capital city was finally besieged and conquered by the Elamites. The name of the last Ur king, Ibbi-Sin, remained in the handbooks of Babylonian omens as a symbol of disaster.

The ‘‘Regional System,’’ about 2000–1200 The cycle of the ‘‘Third Urbanization’’ was quite long (about 2000–1200) and included both the Middle and the Late Bronze periods in archaeological terminology as applied to the Levant and Anatolia; these periods followed each other with no obvious break. The geographic scene was wider than in the previous cycle, but while some areas remained flourishing during the entire period (Egypt from Middle to New Kingdom; the Aegean civilization from the first Minoan palaces to the Mycenean period), others underwent an evident decline toward the mid-second millennium (the Indus Valley and Central Asian civilizations). This decline – from Middle to Late Bronze – in amount and distribution of settlements (an obvious proxy for demographic estimates) also affected some areas inside the Near East. In Syria and Upper Mesopotamia many large settlements in the semi-arid lands were abandoned, and population concentrated in the areas better provided with water from rainfall or rivers, so that a long-term drier trend can be suspected of being responsible for these general developments. In contrast to the ‘‘second urbanization,’’ which had been clearly centered on Lower Mesopotamia as the area of origin of the basic cultural features and also as the seat of the major political powers, the ‘‘third urbanization’’ was much more multi-

Historical Overview

centric and balanced in technological levels, in socio-political organization, and in military power. The role of Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, and eventually also of a mountain area like Anatolia, became paramount, marking the shift from a monocentric arrangement with a clear center/periphery contrast to a ‘‘regional system’’ of competing and interacting ‘‘peer’’ polities. The previous periphery became part of the inner system, mountains and steppe were fully integrated into the multidirectional exchange of resources, and peoples formerly considered barbarian became accepted partners. The entire system, stretching from Egypt and the Aegean in the west to Elam and the Gulf in the east, coalesced into half a dozen regional states. Starting from a marked fragmentation at the very beginning of the period, a process of unification took place during the Middle Bronze period (about 2000–1600), to reach its final shape during the Late Bronze period (about 1600–1200). The regional states (the extent of which ranged from 200,000 to 500,000 km2, or 77,220 to 193,050 square miles, roughly from the size of Great Britain to that of France) were: Egypt, the Hittite kingdom in Anatolia, the Hurrian state of Mitanni and later the Middle Assyrian kingdom in Upper Mesopotamia, Kassite Babylonia in Lower Mesopotamia, and Elam on the Iranian plateau. The minor polities were annexed or integrated into the major powers in two ways, either direct annexation or indirect rule. In some areas, mostly in the river valleys, the former independent kingdoms were annexed as provinces of a conquering kingdom. This process was clear in Lower Mesopotamia and culminated in the annexation by Babylonia under Hammurabi (1792–1750) of the rival kingdoms of Eshnunna and Larsa, which had previously annexed Isin and Uruk, and Mari. Also Assyria developed from a city-state (Assur) to a regional power, structured in a series of provinces and finally (fourteenth–thirteenth centuries) encompassed all of Upper Mesopotamia. In central Anatolia, a series of competing city-states (nineteenth–eighteenth centuries) was unified by the Old Hittite kingdom (seventeenth century). In other areas of Syria, Palestine, southern and western Anatolia, and the mountain lands of Armenia and the Zagros the local polities, be they formal kingdoms in the urbanized area or chiefdoms in the hills, remained autonomous but not independent, becoming vassals of the major powers, namely of Egypt in Palestine and southern Syria, of Mitanni and later Hatti in northern Syria, and of Hatti also in western Anatolia. The extent of the local kingdoms varied from the small city-states in Palestine and on the Lebanese coast (about 2,000 km2 or 772 square miles) to the larger ones in Syria and Anatolia (about 6,000 km2 or 2,316 square miles). The leaders of the regional states conceived political relations as based on a hierarchy of ‘‘great kings’’ (the regional powers) and ‘‘small kings’’ (the local citystates), the latter being ‘‘servants’’ of the former, their ‘‘masters.’’ In some cases, especially under Mitanni and Hittite rule, formal treaties were required in order to define clearly the duties of the two parties, basically a duty of loyalty from the vassal king toward his master, and of protection from the master toward the vassal. Treaties were also written to regulate specific problems of border, refugees, and compensation. Egypt did not engage in direct military control, only requiring an oath of loyalty from its vassals. Treaties between great kings were rare: treaties between Hatti and

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Kizzuwatna in southeastern Anatolia were formally reciprocal but masked an uneven relation. Only the treaty between the Hittite king Hattushili and the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II (about 1270) was really conceived in terms of equality. Diplomatic relations inside and among the regional states were better documented when important archives were preserved. This was especially the case of the ‘‘Mari age’’ (seventeenth century) for Upper Mesopotamia, and of the ‘‘Amarna age’’ (fourteenth century) for the Levant. But the Hittite and Middle-Assyrian archives also provide useful information. The diplomatic language in letters and treaties of the time was Babylonian, and cuneiform writing was also used in most of the area for internal court and administrative records. Interpreters, messengers, and ambassadors carried out diplomatic missions, which were based on the exchange of messages, of gifts, and of women. Letters had to express ‘‘brotherhood,’’ friendly attitudes, wishes of good health for the partner and information about the good health of the sender, and at a formal level the exchange of greetings was the most important message. Letters were normally accompanied by gifts, in order to express generosity and to please the other king. Both to give and to receive gifts increased prestige in the eyes of the kings and of the public. The ideology of gifts based on disinterest and on more valuable return gifts was formally expressed, but actually contradicted by miserable bargains and obvious greed. Gifts were just the tip of the iceberg when compared to normal trade exchange. It has been calculated that the biggest amount of copper sent as a gift from the king of Cyprus to the pharaoh was just 5 percent of the copper found in a single cargo shipwrecked off the coast of Turkey. And we know from the Old Assyrian trade documents that a 5 percent gift was requested by the Anatolian kings to allow the Assyrian merchants to practice their trade activities in the kingdom. Of course, gifts were personalized and had a social or political aim, while trade was carried on for profit, and in order to get resources not available locally. In both cases, gold came from Egypt, copper from Cyprus, tin and lapis lazuli from faraway Afghanistan, while textiles mostly moved from the urbanized areas to the periphery. Trade procedures were very well attested in the archives of the Old Assyrian merchants, found at Ku¨ltepe, ancient Kanish, in central Anatolia in the nineteenth century. These were the most detailed commercial archives of the entire ancient world – similar for their relevance to our understanding of trade to the documents of the Cairo genizah for the Levantine trade of medieval times. The Kanish archives were unique, but the amount and modalities of trade they revealed should have been quite similar in many other cases as well. The Assyrian merchants, organized in family firms, and moving with donkey caravans, exported textiles produced at Assur or Babylonia and tin from Iran and got back silver to be reinvested in more textiles and tin, and their big profits largely covered taxes and risks. Exchange of women was quite important at the political level. We know of two different systems, one centralized and the other reciprocal. The centralized movement of women was attested in the Mari archives and also in the Hittite kingdom. The great king gave his daughters in marriage to the small vassal kings in order to increase their loyalty and to ensure the local throne to a descendant of the great king.

Historical Overview

The Egyptian pharaoh used the centralized system in reverse, by requesting women from the Levantine vassals and from the Asiatic great kings, but never offered his daughters to them, just to increase his own prestige. The reciprocal system was widely practiced by the Asiatic kings, giving and receiving daughters to and from neighboring kings – a system known through the entire period but better documented from the Amarna and Hittite archives. In addition to wives, professionals including artists, scribes, doctors, and magicians also circulated among the royal palaces of the Late Bronze period, increasing cross-fertilization in the cultural sphere. Inside the various kingdoms, the political ideology and the related socio-economic measures underwent a notable change from the Middle to the Late Bronze period. In the first phase, the most evident feature was paternalism, that is, a view of the king as a ‘‘good shepherd’’ for his people, attentive to the needs of his subjects, and interested in turn in winning the consent of a large free population outside of the limited palace circles. The paternalistic attitude was possibly related to the tribal origin of most royal dynasties in Mesopotamia and Syria, who were the descendants of the Amorite invaders at the turn of the millennium. In any case, the attitude materialized into law codes (the famous code of Hammurabi is just the largest and best preserved in a series) and into royal edicts regulating the remission of debts, and therefore resulting in the liberation of enslaved debtors and in the restitution of land to families. Toward the middle of the second millennium, the attitude shifted toward a different model of kingship. Also in this case it is possible that the new ideology was linked with the prominence of hill peoples like the Kassites, Hurrians, and Hittites, but even more directly with technological changes. The introduction of the horse and the two-wheeled chariot as the most important war machines changed not only war tactics but also the socio-political relations. The new aristocracy of chariot warriors (the maryannu) could condition the behavior of kings, giving rise to a ‘‘heroic’’ attitude whereby the king’s prestige was based on his personal merits, rather than on justice and tradition, and this also led to more strained socio-economic relations. The royal edicts of debt remission were no longer proclaimed, debt slavery increased, landed properties concentrated in the hands of creditors, and the basic support for the king was no longer the free population but palace circles and the warrior aristocracy. Socio-economic relations had already undergone an important change at the beginning of the second millennium, when workers under corve´e (forced labor), used widely during the Early Bronze, were replaced by hired workers. Of course, the corve´e system was based on the existence of substantial village communities, while hired manpower came from a large dispossessed peasantry. Yet during the Middle Bronze the idea that free families had the right to keep their ancestral lands, and individuals had the right to keep their free status, was still quite strong. The royal edicts reflected this idea. Land could be sold only to relatives, in order to remain in the family; sons had a right to inherit family land which brothers often farmed together. The increased practice of adoption undermined the traditional system, by accepting the alien buyer into the family in order to overcome the time-honored rules and traditions about not selling land outside the family. In the Late Bronze, as an effect of the new ideology, inheritance became something to be earned and won,

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property could be sold outside of the family, the hierarchy of brothers became ineffective, and the number of dispossessed people increased. This growing socio-economic harshness, along with the long-term demographic and agricultural decline due to climatic worsening in the semi-arid belt and due to deterioration of the irrigation system in the river valleys, was the precondition for the final crisis of the Bronze Age. This culminated in an external shock, the invasion of the ‘‘Sea Peoples’’ at the beginning of the twelfth century. The invaders of Mediterranean origin destroyed the Aegean, Anatolian, and Levantine coastal cities, and reached the Egyptian Delta about 1180. A few years later the Phrygian invaders in central Anatolia, where the Hittite kingdom collapsed completely, reached the Upper Tigris area. A parallel movement took place on the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, where the Libyan tribes moved from the Sahara region to invade the Nile valley. All these movements, probably caused by a sharp climatic drying about 1200 B C E , drastically changed the political and urban system in the area west of the Euphrates. The former regional powers of Hatti and Egypt disappeared, city life and local royal dynasties remained in just a few cases on the Phoenician coast and in some Neo-Hittite kingdoms, and room was left for intruders of pastoral origin, the Arameans and related peoples. The entire socio-political order had to be built anew along different lines. East of the Euphrates, in contrast, the regional powers of Assyria, Babylonia, and Elam were unaffected by the western intruders, although they suffered from Aramean pressure, and were able to continue their life along traditional lines.

The Early Iron Age, about 1200–750 BCE West of the Euphrates, the serious crisis of the twelfth century had to be surmounted by increasing the basis for productive activities and for political consensus. Various technological improvements were effective to this end. The collapse of the palace-centered scribal schools left freedom for the emergence of the alphabet from the Levantine belt. This writing system was a much more accessible tool that produced a kind of democratization of writing competence. The disruption of international trade in copper and tin made it necessary to have recourse to iron production, for which raw material was more widespread, and making iron was easier than bronze. Agricultural exploitation extended to landscapes that were marginal during the Late Bronze period, into the hills, thanks to wood clearing and terrace building, and in the arid belt, thanks to deeper wells and wadi-bed water capturing systems. Irrigation, previously limited to the large alluvial plains, became a factor also in mountain valleys, because of the Iranian qanat (artificial underground water channels), and in the mountain/desert contact areas, because of the huge dams of Southern Arabia. Large desert spaces were opened to more intensive frequentation and use in the breeding of camels in the Iranian plateau and in Central Asia and dromedaries in the Syro-Arabian desert. Other changes took place in the area of socio-economic and socio-political relations. After the collapse of cities and palaces in the Levant and Anatolia and also in the Aegean area, the difference between small towns and fortified villages became less marked. The increased size of the pastoral tribes generated new political relations

Historical Overview

based on common descent, language, and religion – as contrasted to the Bronze Age polities based on dependence on a royal palace. Two kinds of polities characterized the western half of the Near East in the Iron Age: city-states, the direct heirs of the ‘‘small kingdoms’’ of the Late Bronze especially along the coast, and ethnic states especially in the arid belt of Arameans and related peoples and in the hilly areas of the Phrygians in Anatolia, and the Medes and related peoples in Iran. The new royal dynasties reserved a larger political role for collective bodies of elders and assemblies who had previously devoted their time to judicial matters. Royal ideology reverted to a ‘‘paternalistic’’ model stressing justice and protection of the kinbased social structures. Trade and crafts, previously centered on palaces, were left to the free enterprise of private firms or individuals. The independent states of the Levant became centers of a lively artistic and commercial life. Breeding of camels and dromedaries and parallel improvement in nautical techniques opened enlarged horizons in the Mediterranean Sea, along the caravan roads from Syria to Central and Southern Arabia, and along the caravan roads from the Zagros to Central Asia. Trade routes were centered on the new polities, the city-states of Phoenicia and Greece, the ethnic states of Media and Arabia, and the routes avoided the traditional states of Egypt and Mesopotamia which kept their roles as major areas of demographic concentration and major markets. The remaining regional states underwent a phase of decline, but were able to reach a new equilibrium. In northern Mesopotamia, Assyria had to suffer from Aramean intrusions and was reduced to its original core in the twelfth and eleventh centuries. But it kept alive the idea that its theoretical borders were those once reached by the Middle Assyrian kings Tukulti-Ninurta I (1243–1207) and Tiglath-pileser I (1114–1076) – that is, from the Zagros Mountains to the Euphrates. The reconquest took up the tenth and ninth centuries, with Assyrian kings leading military campaigns inside Assyrian territory, a process culminating with Assurnasirpal II (883–859), who recovered the entire area to the old borders and celebrated his military success in annals of unprecedented length. Ashurnasirpal was also important as builder of a new capital city, Kalkhu, Calah in the Bible, with a palace decorated with impressive sculptured slabs. His successor Shalmaneser III (858–824) started a new policy of an ‘‘imperial’’ kind, by invading outer regions in Syria (the Aramean city-states), in southeastern Anatolia (the Neo-Hittite states), in Armenia (the new kingdom of Urartu), and in the Zagros Mountains (the rising ethnic states of Mannea in northwest Iran and Media). For a while it seemed that nobody could stop the growth of Assyria, neither the small city-states in the west, nor the ethnic states in the north, nor the enfeebled Babylonian kingdom in the south. But the growth had been too fast, and competition arose inside Assyria itself. The major governors of the western provinces tried to acquire a position of virtual independence. Half a century of ‘‘feudal’’ fragmentation halted the imperial expansion, and the smaller states west of the Euphrates were able to keep their independence and restore equilibrium in the area. The case of Babylonia was different. After the end of the Kassite dynasty, and after the brilliant reign of Nebuchadnezzar I (1125–1104), the kingdom suffered from Elamite and Assyrian forays, and from nomadic infiltration of the Arameans along the corridor between the Tigris and the Zagros and later also of the Chaldeans along

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the lower Euphrates. But the main problem was the disruption of the irrigation system, bringing about a demographic and economic decline. The central power was unable to follow the Assyrian model and recover control of the whole area. Various dynasties of different origin, including Chaldeans, were in control of limited parts of Lower Mesopotamia. The Aramean and Chaldean intruders did not establish independent kingdoms as in Syria, but were not subjugated as in Assyria, and they became components of the political scene. Beyond Babylonia, Elam was strong enough to become a permanent actor in Mesopotamian affairs. In a sense, the fate of Babylonia was similar to that of Egypt. Egypt was also unable either to reject or to absorb its Libyan invaders, and it fragmented into various dynasties mostly of Libyan origin. It was threatened by Nubia playing the same role as Elam in Babylonia, and it was no longer a factor on the international scene.

Empires, about 750–330 BCE The situation changed in the mid-eighth century. The state of fragmentation and equilibrium was broken by the sudden expansion of the only major power left, namely Assyria, along the lines already indicated by Shalmaneser III, but on a wider scale and with more stable results. Tiglath-pileser III (744–727) defeated Urartu and its NeoHittite allies and conquered most of Syria and northern Palestine. He then penetrated deeply into Media and then finally defeated the Chaldean tribes and proclaimed himself king of Babylon. The empire was organized in small provinces with no possibility for ‘‘feudal’’ fragmentation, and the celebrative apparatus of both texts and images proliferated. The borders of the empire were extended farther under Shalmaneser V (726–722), Sargon II (721–705), and Sennacherib (704–681), but in different ways in various directions. In the West, the Levant was almost completely annexed except for a few minor and marginal vassal kingdoms like Judah. In Anatolia, the Neo-Hittite kingdoms were also annexed, while Sargon’s attempt to conquer the central plateau (Tabal, the later Cappadocia) was short-lived. In the North, Urartu was defeated but remained independent, and Sargon’s attempt to extend the provincial system to Media was also brief. Babylonia, which recovered independence under Merodach-baladan, was the scene of important fights between Assyria, Elam, and the Chaldean chiefs, until Sennacherib opted for the final solution of total destruction that brought about serious reaction because of the religious and cultural prestige of the city. The Assyrian capital cities, the ephemeral Dur-Sharrukin, built by Sargon, and Nineveh, finally selected by Sennacherib as metropolis of the empire, were embellished by huge palaces and refined sculptures. When Esarhaddon (680–669) became king, Assyria apparently had no rival, and the dream of a ‘‘universal empire’’ had become true; the effort of military expansion could end. The only surviving polities belonged to two distinct types. On the one hand three ‘‘great kingdoms’’ were still independent: Egypt, Elam, and Urartu. On the other hand, the tribal polities in the highlands, the Medes, and on the arid steppe, the Arabs, were unified in large confederations. The conquest of the great kingdoms

Historical Overview

was more prestigious, and they became the major targets for Esarhaddon and for his son Assurbanipal (668–631). Egypt was conquered, but it proved impossible for Assyria – with the logistics of the time – to annex a region so distant, large, and populous. Elam was conquered and its capital city Susa destroyed, but that allowed for the growth of a new power, Persia, in the same area. As for the Medes and the Arabs, conquering them proved impossible because of logistic problems and because they lacked a political structure suited to being reused as provincial divisions of the empire. The tool of the loyalty oath was therefore applied as a sufficient act of subordination. The ‘‘ethnic’’ periphery of the empire remained basically independent, and was viewed as ideologically irrelevant from the point of view of an empire based on royal palaces, urban centers, formal administration, and an agricultural economy. The huge royal palaces of Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal in Nineveh, the expensive celebrative programs in architecture, visual arts, and inscriptions, and the enlarged royal court including large numbers of officials and officers, astrologers, and scribes, were supported by an economy that during the conquest phase was partly based on booty and tribute. But during the phase of Assyrian-imposed peace it could only depend on internal production. Wars, destructions, and deportations intended to break local resistance and to provide manpower opened large voids in the productive structure of the empire, and the attempt to colonize marginal lands proved ineffective. Establishment of the empire had been based on the physical and cultural destruction of the annexed areas; the maintenance of the empire proved a very hard task on such a depleted productive basis. After Assurbanipal, twenty years of wars over succession to the throne were sufficient to bring the empire to its final collapse. The external shock came from two different directions. The Chaldeans of Babylonia and the Medes united their forces to defeat the empire, to destroy the capital cities, and to transform the center of the civilized world into a wasteland. The two conquering powers were quite different and exploited their victory in different ways. The Medes, the heirs of the pastoral tribes of the Zagros that had been attacked and oppressed for centuries by the Assyrian empire, put all their enraged energy into the destruction of Assur and Nineveh. They themselves later disappeared from the political scene, reverting to a tribal organization and even abandoning the ceremonial centers built during the Assyrian period. They were happy enough to exert their hegemony on the peoples of the highlands. The Chaldean kings Nabopolassar (625–605) and Nebuchadnezzar II (604–562) inherited the lowlands and the urbanized part of the empire, and basically inherited the Assyrian imperial strategy. They conquered the entire Levant, including Judah, and the sieges of Tyre and Jerusalem remained famous in later historiography. Then they defeated the Egyptians, deported the vanquished populations, and devoted most of their resources to rebuilding the capital city of Babylon as the most populous and splendid metropolis of the time. They also tried to restore lower Mesopotamian agriculture to high levels of productivity. The mental map of the ‘‘universal empire,’’ however, was not so satisfactory in the Chaldean version as it had been in the Assyrian version. Besides Babylonia, the

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political system included a major state like Egypt (Saite dynasty), a growing state like Persia (heir of Elam), and the Anatolian kingdoms of Lydia, Tabal/Cappadocia, Armenia, and Khilakku/Cilicia. The ethnic confederacies of the Medes and the Northern Arabs were no longer an outer periphery, but they became an integral part of the system. Farther away, the Greek cities and the South Arabian caravan cities were also becoming more and more linked through trade and mercenary military service to the Near Eastern world. The system remained mostly stable during half a century, although the Medes included Armenia and Cappadocia under their hegemony, and the last king of Babylonia (Nabonidus, 555–539) conquered North Arabia at the very end of the period. The age was significant from a cultural point of view. It is the core of the socalled ‘‘Axial Age,’’ with the rise of the monotheistic religions of Judaism and Zoroastrianism, the activity of the major Israelite prophets in the Babylonian exile, and the blooming of the Greek ‘‘archaic’’ civilization with the Ionian philosophers, poets, and artists, and the formative period of democratic ideologies. It is significant that the major innovations took place not in the area of the traditional states of Babylonia and Egypt but rather in the new ethnic states and city-states, and that the most accelerated change took place in the century of disruption between the decline of the Assyrian empire starting about 630 and the consolidation of the Persian empire about 540. The Persian empire of the Achaemenid dynasty was not the heir of the loose Median confederacy, but rather of the Elamite tradition. Persia was virtually congruent with Elam in its narrow definition, and the Persian administration at Persepolis used the Elamite language and script for its archives. The empire was founded by Cyrus II, called the Great, who defeated the Medes in 550, annexed most of the Iranian plateau, and then conquered Lydia in 547, and Babylonia in 539, while the date of annexation of Bactria and Sogdiana, the ‘‘outer Iran’’ of Central Asia, remains unclear. His successor Cambyses annexed Egypt in 525, approximating again the mental map of the ‘‘universal empire’’ to the inhabited world of his time. The conquest of Babylonia marked the end of independent Mesopotamian history, at least from the political point of view, since the seat of power shifted to Iran. However, the material basis of civilization remained largely unchanged. No technical innovations mark the new period, and Babylonian irrigation agriculture bloomed spectacularly in the last part of the Chaldean period and the beginning of the Achaemenid period without any breaks. Also the cultural tradition remained unchanged during the Persian period. The Babylonian scribes continued to use their own script and language, and the Babylonian deities were still worshiped in the same temples. Astrologers continued to record the position of the stars and the historical events according to their time-honored tradition, and Akkadian literary texts, omen collections, and lexicographical lists were still copied in the schools as before. The Persian empire was in a sense a synthesis of different traditions, among which the Babylonian tradition was predominant. The empire inherited from Assyria the very idea of empire, and the basic features of the celebrative apparatus. It inherited from Elam the federal system of governance that had been typical of the Iranian peoples for a long time. And it inherited from Media important features of court life,

Historical Overview

and probably the Zoroastrian religion. The empire included the Babylonian templecities and the Phoenician city-states as different but equally acceptable centers for running the economy. At a symbolic level, it is significant that the celebrative inscription of Darius I (521–486) was written in three different languages, Babylonian, Elamite, and the new Persian script, and that the seat of the court shifted seasonally between the highland cities of Ecbatana, modern Hamadan, and Persepolis and the lowlands cities of Susa and Babylon, as a formal acknowledgment of the role that the four regions of Elam, Babylonia, Media, and Persia played in the building of the empire. Under Darius I the empire extended farther, to include the Indus Valley in the east, and Ionia in the west, but it left the Arabs and the Scythians alone. The Oriental empire had finally annexed the entire Levantine zone. Oriental despotism had prevailed over the autonomous city-states and the ethnic polities. In the extreme western periphery, in Greece, a few small city-states were still left, however. The expeditions by Darius (490) and Xerxes (480) tried to eliminate that minor anomaly and to absorb the distant and almost irrelevant appendix of the Near Eastern world. But things went differently from what the Persians planned, and the struggle between the universal empire and the last city-states not only ended in the unpredictable rebuff of the Persians, but also generated in Greek, and later European, minds the opposition between East and West, between despotism and democracy, slavery and freedom, magic and rationality, and redistribution and enterprise, which was to mark world history for many millennia to come.

FURTHER READING The standard historical treatment of the Ancient Near East is Edwards, Gadd, and Hammond 1971–92. A recent synthesis of the subject can be found in Kuhrt 1995. On Mesopotamia proper, the best introduction remains Oppenheim 1977. For a thematic introduction see Sasson 1995. For more technical discussions see Ebeling et al. 1928–. For historical geography and maps see Ro¨llig 1977–. More synthetic is Roaf 1990. A good collection of sources is Pritchard 1975.

CHAPTER TWO

From Sedentism to States, 10,000–3000 BCE Augusta McMahon The first sedentary communities in the Near East appeared about 10,000 B C E , and by 3000 B C E we find urbanized complex societies. The path between these dates is peppered with major innovations – farming and herding, pottery, irrigation, organized religion, public art and architecture. It is temptingly easy to view this span of time as exhibiting progression to civilization. But there are unresolved debates and biases in our approach to this crucial era.

Theory and Bias in Near Eastern Archaeology The Near East was first explored for its historical archaeology and importance for Biblical and Classical traditions, and there are firmly rooted culture-history and textbased approaches that color study of its prehistory. But problem-driven archaeological research since the 1960s has had a tremendous impact on work in the region, and scholars working in the Near East have led the way on the key questions of agriculture and state origins (Matthews 2003). However, this ‘‘big picture’’ research has a legacy in the lingering assumption of a unilineal trajectory toward agriculturebased complexity, marginalizing alternative economies and political systems in deserts, marshes, and fringes of agricultural communities. Farming-hunting or herding-gathering blended economies and loose tribal groupings were viable long-term possibilities, rather than temporary stages (Zeder 1994), but these alternatives remain under-researched. Although many archaeologists continue to ask cultural and historical questions, Watkins (1992) and Cauvin (2000) have explored the symbolic revolution in the Near Eastern Neolithic (12,000–6300 B C E ), focusing on psychological changes rather than economic, social, and political ones. Beyond fashions in archaeological theory, one of the most difficult problems in reconstructing Near Eastern prehistory is our vision of the region’s inhabitants. Are the innovations we see active, brought about by individuals, or reactive, the result of inexorable systemic changes or imbalances? Most importantly, what is the nature of the state when it emerges:

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benevolent or tyrannical? Are Western scholars who characterize Ancient Near Eastern states as oppressive and exploitative subliminally affected by their opinions of the modern states of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey?

Labeling Time and Locating Sites Time blocks and cultural labels are basic vocabulary elements in all archaeological discourse and some generalization is inevitable. But for Near Eastern prehistory, our time units are often over-long; for example the Ubaid period, 5800–4000 B C E , or the Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, 8200–5600 B C E , are about 2,000 years each. And the material culture used to define these units is often clustered in a few sites or a short time range within longer periods. Near Eastern prehistory suffers further from the nature of its settlements – small, low sites in a landscape of destruction, which has been exploited for millennia. Identification of sites, even in intensive surveys, favors large multi-period settlements. Low sites are under-recognized in the rolling landscapes of northern Mesopotamia and the Levant, that is, the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, and in southern Mesopotamia sites may be removed by subsequent land use or wind and dune action or covered by river deposits.

Sedentism and its Effects Sedentism, remaining in one place throughout the year, was first identified as a necessary precursor to agriculture in the 1960s (Binford 1968; Wright 1971; Flannery 1973), and although it is no longer considered a simple equation, the link between sedentism and agriculture in the Near East persists today (Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen 1989). Clearly, sedentism can create ‘‘positive feedback.’’ Early semisedentary sites already had greater densities of artifacts than did Paleolithic sites (before 18,000 B C E ) of mobile peoples, along with more non-portables such as storage facilities, grinding stones, burials, and increasingly substantial architecture (Byrd 1989). Sedentism promoted acquisition, and object ownership meant reluctance to move on and leave things behind. Sedentism had a corollary in increased group size, as female fertility increased and birth spacing and mortality decreased. Larger numbers can also mean disinclination to mobility. Further, increased group size can be linked with more complex social relationships. The mortality rates that were most reduced by sedentism were those of infants and the elderly; not only did group size increase but the nature of the group changed. The larger group contained more old individuals with memories and acquired status, and more young individuals with hopes for the future. And this social environment preceded and provided fertile ground for agriculture. Sedentary farmers had less free time than nomadic hunter-gatherers (Bender 1975). The schedules and concepts of work differed. Farming involved spikes of intensive labor and troughs of free time, and the free time was differently arranged

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across the year. This new arrangement opened up vistas for non-subsistence activities. But the effects of sedentism and agriculture were not all positive. Reduction of resource diversity could mean greater risk of catastrophe. A restricted-resource agriculture-based diet could mean nutritional deficiencies and dental problems (Smith, Bar-Yosef, and Sillen 1984). The tighter arrangement of sedentary villages and their piles of rubbish (and rats) meant higher rates of infectious disease, and closer contact between humans and animals might favor species-jumping diseases, as organisms associated with animals came into contact with new potential hosts. The repetitive manual labor involved in grain processing could cause skeletal stress (Molleson 2000). Apparently, positives did outweigh negatives, but the persistence of hunting well into the historic periods points out the necessity for keeping alternatives open.

Foraging, Cultivation, and Domestication There is an indivisible continuum from mobile to fully sedentary settlements, mirrored by a continuum from foraging to farming. Economic stages can be defined: ‘‘Foraging’’ implies opportunistic exploitation of resources; ‘‘intensive foraging’’ indicates strategic decisions to focus on a few species or to exploit a wide range. ‘‘Cultivation’’ means manipulation or taming of individual animals, while ‘‘agriculture’’ involves domestication of species, with dependency of plants and animals on humans for reproduction and protection. But in the Near East these economies were neither mutually exclusive nor necessarily linked. A group might rely on both farmed and hunted species. Species might be cultivated but not subsequently domesticated, like the gazelle in the Levant before the Neolithic. And crucially, domestication of plants and animals also ‘‘domesticates’’ human populations, imposing limits on movement and time.

Where Was the Origin of Agriculture? Experiments by Hillman and Davies (1990) indicate that domestication of grain and consequent changes in the plants may be achieved within 20 to 30 years by specific harvesting techniques but can take 200 years or more. In animals, with lengthier generations, morphological changes are even slower to appear. By the time we see the ‘‘first’’ domestic plant or animal, the decision that brought it about was already generations distant. But this has not prevented many scholars from searching for those elusive ‘‘firsts.’’ Most recent literature reconstructs the center of agriculture in the southern Levant, with subsequent spread to the rest of the Near East and Europe (McCorriston and Hole 1991; Wright 1993; Bar-Yosef and Meadow 1995; Bar-Yosef 2002). But this Levant-centric presentation is clouded by modern political tensions. A smaller amount of archaeological research has been done in the comparable environmental zone of the Zagros foothills along the Iran–Iraq border, and the extant work is mostly pre-1979, creating a knowledge gap there and a bias toward the Levant as the

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supposed center for agricultural origins. Research in Syria and southeast Turkey has only begun to alter the picture (Willcox 1999). Many sites have provided archaeological evidence for early ‘‘founder crops’’ with the larger size, restricted dissemination mechanism, and morphological changes that mark them as domesticated. For the Near East the founder crops were emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, lentils, peas, chickpeas, and bitter vetch. Domesticated emmer wheat and barley from southern Levant sites such as Jericho (7500 B C E )1 and Netiv Hagdud (8260–7800 B C E ) were increasingly joined by early domestic grains from sites in other regions: Tell Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates in Syria (einkorn, emmer, and barley 7700 B C E , domestic rye possibly as early as 10,000 B C E ), Tell Aswad near Damascus (emmer and barley from 7800–7600 B C E ), and in southeast Turkey, Cafer Ho¨yu¨k (einkorn, emmer, and barley 7500 B C E ), C ¸ ayo¨nu¨ (einkorn, emmer, and barley 7300–7200 B C E ), and Nevali C ¸ ori (einkorn 7200 B C E ). Archaeologically derived evidence for domestic plants is now supplemented with genetic research. Distribution maps of wild progenitors of domestic species have been updated with this genetic profiling. These studies are complicated by modern agricultural practices and the possibility of relatively recent genetic change within the wild populations (Harlan and Zohary 1966; Heun et al. 1997), but hom*ogeneities found have led to the conclusion that there was a core zone within which grain and legume domestication took place. Accumulation of evidence for einkorn and emmer wheats points toward a southeastern Turkey or northern Syria origin for domestication (Nesbitt and Samuel 1998; Willcox 1999; Lev-Yadun, Gopher, and Abbo 2000; ¨ zkan et al. 2002). O Domestication of animals has also been studied through the bones themselves and through profiles of age and sex at death. Domestic animals are smaller, lighter, and lose defensive mechanisms seen in wild forms. But there are problems with size assessments, as these may relate to climate or topography variations and are complicated by differences between the sexes. Age and gender profiles are more reliable; managed and domesticated animals usually show selective culling of young males and late killing of adult females. The dog was certainly the first domesticated animal, in the Epipaleolithic in the Levant, about 14,000 years before the present and perhaps much earlier. The dog was unique in that it was domesticated for protection and hunting, a companion and servant rather than a source of meat, milk, hair, or traction, as were the pig, goat, sheep, and cattle that followed. The Zagros foothills have been posited as the core animal domestication zone (Hole 1984). The earliest known domesticated goat bone has been identified from Ganj Dareh, initially on the basis of small size, reconfirmed by gender and age kill patterns (Zeder and Hesse 2000); this is currently radiocarbon dated to about 7960–7660 B C E . Or pigs in southeast Turkey may have been the second animal domestication (Rosenberg 1999). Food is arguably basic to human concepts of the self and is involved in everything from taboos to feasting, so the species shift, as well as the very fact of domestication, means a major change in self-perception and self-expression. Another issue is that complementary farming-herding practices became common over a wide area during a relatively short time span. Why did this happen?

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Agriculture and Herding: Choice or Necessity? Entwined with arguments over locations are debates over reasons for domestication. Climate change-based hypotheses (Childe 1928) were followed by evolutionary ideas (Braidwood 1960), population pressure theories (Boserup 1965; Binford 1968; Smith and Young 1972; Flannery 1973), systems theory explanations (Redman 1978; Henry 1989), and psychological concepts (Cauvin 2000). Childe named the ‘‘Neolithic Revolution,’’ but his vision, that climate drying forced development of agriculture in ‘‘oases,’’ is no longer accepted. Nevertheless, the Younger Dryas event, a relatively rapid climatic shift to cooler and drier conditions from about 11,000 before the present, is recognized as impacting human economy, especially in the Levant (Bar-Yosef and Belfer Cohen 1989; Bar-Yosef 1996; Hole 1997; Sherratt 1997; Wright 1993). Some would see the cooling and drying climate as having reduced food supplies and encouraged individuals to reconstruct previously available wild stands of grain and herds in now marginal areas (Moore and Hillman 1992). Others would see climate change encouraging stronger seasonality and the migration of plants to new zones and into contact with semi-sedentary humans (McCorriston and Hole 1991). The impact of this event in Anatolia, modern Turkey, and the Zagros has not been sufficiently researched. Braidwood noticed that humans and potential domesticates lived together on the ‘‘hilly flanks’’ of the Zagros, Taurus, and Lebanon mountains. There, he postulated, simple proximity and humans’ love of experimentation led to cultivation and domestication, although he was later to revise that view (Braidwood et al. 1983). Boserup argued that technological changes responded to human population growth. Her idea was elaborated by identification of optimal zones (Smith and Young 1972) or marginal zones (Binford 1968; Flannery 1973), within which an increasing population might develop agriculture. Systems theory acknowledges positive and negative feedbacks within the relationships among environment, geography, humans, and domesticates, but this reduction of humans to parts of a system may be too impersonal. More recently Watkins (1992) and Cauvin (2000) envision agriculture as embedded within a series of wider changes in symbolic and religious behaviors and in recognition of dichotomies between male and female, natural and artificial, human and ‘‘super-human.’’ But there is still no consensus on whether agriculture was chosen or forced.

Sedentism and Definitions of Space Domestic structures increased in solidity and size during the Epipaleolithic (18,000– 8000 B C E ) and early Neolithic (8000–6000 B C E ). Further, within the Neolithic there was a shift from round to rectilinear houses. It is easier to add to or divide a rectilinear house than a round one, so the shift may point to increasing household size and complexity. Also very different mental concepts are involved in circular and rectilinear architecture. A round house has two units, the continuous wall and a

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roof. A rectilinear house involves a minimum of five units, four discrete walls and a roof. The investment in a rectilinear house, no matter what size, was higher than in a circular one. A more permanent definition of private space does not mean that the idea was new, but that visible marking of space had become more important. This may have been due to better definition of edges and internal divisions of communities (Watkins 1992). It might also be linked to notions of land ownership that came with agriculture and household-based production and consumption (Byrd 1994). Or space definition might relate to increases in social distance, as a community increased in size, requiring greater structuring of inhabitants’ interactions and communication of taboos and tolerances. Public buildings, communally constructed if not necessarily community-accessible, also appeared in the early Neolithic and may be seen as indicators of increased attachment to a place. The tower and settlement wall at Neolithic Jericho is an example that has been identified as defensive (Kenyon 1981), or as a means of water management, or a shrine platform (Bar-Yosef 1986). Neolithic Maghzaliyah, in northern Iraq, had a settlement wall, and in southeast Turkey Neolithic sites had special buildings, distinct from houses in plan, construction, and contents ¨ zdogan 1999; Schmidt 2000). These buildings may have (Hauptmann 1993; O been exclusive elite advertising, or they may have been communally owned religious structures. But either way, they might have been intended as prominent visual cues of landscape ownership.

Pottery and Structural Bias Production of pottery was closely coupled with sedentism and farming. Pottery was heavy, breakable, and difficult to transport and was almost exclusively found among sedentary peoples. The lulls in agricultural labor were easily filled by pottery production, and straw generated after harvest made ideal pottery temper. Economy and technology dovetailed perfectly. But what problem did the invention of pottery solve? Morphologically similar containers existed before pottery, in stone, lime-plaster, basketry, and wood. Ceramic containers were more portable than stone but less so than baskets. Pottery vessels were more secure than pits or bins, so the impact on storage was potentially substantial. However, the earliest pottery vessels were not storage jars, but bowls, small jars, and cooking vessels. The main areas in which pottery had a positive impact were cooking, especially boiling grain, and serving and eating. As soon as the technical aspects of production were established in the late eighth millennium B C E , the surface of pottery vessels became a canvas for artistic expression in the applied clay blobs and paint dribbles of northern Mesopotamian wares, rocker and punched patterns of Amuq A, and early Zagros ‘‘tadpole’’ ware that may imitate the look of tightly woven baskets. Later, Hassuna period cross-hatching and geometric designs enlivened an otherwise drab fabric (6300–5700 B C E ). By the time we reach the Samarran ware (6100–5500 B C E ) with its dense geometric or elaborate

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pictorial decoration, the symbolic coding was rich, potentially signaling wealth and social identity, family or ethnic affiliations, or even archetypal myths. Feasting was the most likely outlet for display of this signaling, but it is unclear whether feasting was competitive or collaborative at this early date. Ultimately, pottery is implicated in a conceptual bias in our reconstruction of the past. Is pottery production so important that its absence should define a time period (the awkward ‘‘Pre-Pottery Neolithic,’’ 8000–6500 B C E )? From the earliest humans through the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, preserved material culture was dominated by stone tools. But from the Pottery Neolithic onward (6500 B C E ), the most common artifact was pottery, and pottery becomes our primary instrument for labeling time and society – a shift from tools associated with acquisition to tools associated with consumption. This surely has an effect on our view of society in the later Neolithic and thereafter, consumption seeming to us more civilized and peaceful than the messy and tiring process of acquisition.

Chiefdoms? A progression from band to tribe to chiefdom to state was first expounded by Service (1975) to replace the progression from savagery to barbarism to civilization popular in nineteenth-century scholarship. Many scholars think chiefdoms preceded states (Wright 1984; Earle 1987), although the possibility remains that chiefdoms were reactions to states or unrelated organizational forms. The earliest states in the Near East appeared in the later fourth millennium B C E , the Uruk period, in southern Mesopotamia. The argument might be made that a state existed in northern Mesopotamia or Anatolia contemporary with or even prior to that in southern Mesopotamia, since there are urban sites such as Tell Brak in Syria (about 100 hectares or 247 acres) and impressive buildings at Hacinebi and Arslan Tepe in Turkey. The earlier view of these areas as peripheries to a southern core is currently under revision. But despite evidence of complexity, the north has yet to produce a building to rival Uruk’s Eanna IV temple complex or artworks like the Warka vase. Nor did northern Mesopotamian material culture expand into other regions as did that of the south. The north was complex and vibrant but still owed much to, and followed the lead of, the south. If the chiefdom preceded the state, we need to look for it in the Ubaid period of the sixth to fifth millennia (5800–4000 B C E ). A chiefdom is structurally kinship-based, with a degree of social complexity and inequality and a single leader, in contrast to the corporate entity implied by a state. The Ubaid does offer many identifiers of chiefdoms: two-tier settlement hierarchies, specialist production of pottery, large wellplanned structures at Tell ‘Oueili, shrines at Eridu, possible chiefs’ houses at Tell Abada, and stamp seals indicating the increased importance of ownership. An unresolved question is whether Ubaid chiefs’ power was based on ‘‘wealth finance,’’ restricted luxuries, as is traditionally assumed for chiefdoms (D’Altroy and Earle 1985; Earle 1991), or on ‘‘staple finance,’’ surplus basic materials such as grain, with control of the land, water, and labor which allowed surpluses (Stein 1994,

From Sedentism to States, 10,000–3000 BCE

1996). Imported luxuries do not appear in quantity in Ubaid sites, while the Tell Abada houses do have space for grain storage and the Tell ‘Oueili structures have been interpreted as granaries (Huot 1996). Nevertheless, it seems that the Ubaid power base rested on a combination of basics and luxuries, a strategy that allowed acquisition and advertisem*nt of power at different levels. And later the Uruk state had the same dual foundation.

Origins of the Mesopotamian State Theoretical approaches to state origins match trends in approaches to agriculture origins, and there are comparable arguments over whether the state was a choice or an inevitability. Explanatory theories have replaced evolutionary assumptions (Childe 1928; Service 1975). Classic explanatory theories developed for other regions, for example the hypothesis that states arose to effect irrigation or to reduce conflict, have proved inadequate for the Mesopotamian situation, but other forces scholars have suggested include population pressure (Smith and Young 1972), climate change, and river shifts (Hole 1994). Systems theory has also been applied, with its identification of the many factors that contribute to social change (Adams 1966, 1981; Redman 1978). But the most enduringly popular explanations for Mesopotamian state origins involve trade and its management (Wright and Johnson 1975; Oates 1993; Algaze 2001a). Scholars have focused on positive aspects of the Mesopotamian river plains – agricultural surplus potential, predictability of rainfall and floods, efficient water transport – but also point out the necessity for local and long-distance trade to acquire and disperse key items and resources, trade which promoted development of a state structure. But in southern Mesopotamia we have only scattered excavated material of the Ubaid and early Uruk periods.2 Because of the sparse evidence, we are too willing to place Levantine Neolithic sedentary communities, north Mesopotamian Hassuna farming villages, and Ubaid chiefs’ houses in a trajectory leading to urban sites of south Mesopotamia, while these are mere footnotes to the earliest state complexity. This had strictly southern Mesopotamian predecessors, and until excavation in south Iraq is again possible, we have a flimsy framework derived from neighboring regions and limited local material. It may even be the case that the state was seen first and most dramatically at Uruk because of its proximity to the marshes and head of the Arabian Gulf, which offered a unique environmental setting and range of resources. Even Nippur, Umma, and other southern sites may have learned ‘‘stateness’’ from Uruk.

Nature of the State Most visions of the Mesopotamian state involve centralized control and vertical hierarchy (Adams 1966, 1981; Adams and Nissen 1972; Wright and Johnson 1975; Wright 1977; Nissen 1988). Focus is on the material evidence of elites and

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of state economic administration – public buildings and art, seals, bullae (clay tags), and tablets which recorded movement of goods, and mass-produced pottery. There is assumed to have been efficient gathering and redistribution of agricultural products, textiles, and other manufactured items, grounded in an urban core and a rural periphery. Scholars see the Mesopotamian state as urban, typified by Uruk in the Late Uruk period around 3100 B C E , at about 250 hectares or 620 acres and with population estimates of up to 40,000 inhabitants (Nissen 2002). But what do we know of south Mesopotamia beyond Uruk, and what of Uruk beyond its size and the layout of its religious quarter in the final phase? Urbanization also ‘‘ruralizes.’’ Pre-urban and post-urban villages may appear similar, but small villages within a larger system have a new counterpoint in urban sites, and the land between sites takes on a new meaning (Yoffee 1995). The Uruk period with its four-tier hierarchy of site sizes which is visible in survey around Uruk (Adams and Nissen 1972; Nissen 2002) may not exactly match a power hierarchy but does translate into variability in settlement character. Craft production and centers of religion and secular administration may be displaced to urban centers, creating a system of rural dependency. Pottery and flint tool production remained at the village level of production in the Uruk period at Abu Salabikh (Pollock, Pope, and Coursey 1996). But metallurgy seems to have been restricted to urban sites, while centralization of textile production, often assumed, remains unproven. We know a great deal about the vertical inequalities of the Mesopotamian state but need more research into rural sites and into household and private economies. The shift in terminology from ‘‘state’’ to ‘‘complex society’’ in archaeological discourse is welcome, with its emphasis on horizontal variation as well as vertical structures. But it must be applied more comprehensively to the Uruk period situation. And the vertical inequalities may not necessarily mean exploitation and oppression, as is often supposed. It is notable that images of leaders in the Uruk period generally did not dominate, but rulers were depicted as unifying and protecting. There are a few seal impressions representing a ruler with captives, but the majority of artworks showed him in ritual contexts or symbolic scenes with animals or building projects. Texts interpreted as ration lists for enslaved or disenfranchised workers may equally be lists of payment for part-time work, in an economy where staple goods acted as money. One recent theory avoids definitions and looks to ‘‘effects’’ of states: ‘‘identification, legibility, and spatialization’’ (Trouillot 2001). Legibility is particularly apt for the early Mesopotamian state, with its new visible language, written and iconographic ruler images, cylinder seals and clay tablets, temple complexes, and the urban sites themselves. It is unclear whether Mesopotamian states brought a new spatialization, with borders and enforced population movements, inside to outside, outside to inside, or displacement within. Population movements were certainly a feature of late Mesopotamian states like the Neo-Assyrian empire. And for fourth millennium B C E Uruk, we see a suddenly larger urban center and depopulation of its immediate surroundings (Adams and Nissen 1972). It is unlikely that this was merely the result of a need for protection or the draw of employment opportunities. But Uruk was an

From Sedentism to States, 10,000–3000 BCE

anomaly, and the smaller city-states of Nippur and Adab, mostly built through incremental growth, may be more typical. The identification effect – all individuals within a state identifying as members of it – is related to one of Childe’s traits of civilization, which sees membership based on location, rather than kinship. We do not yet have the equipment to assess to what degree early inhabitants of cities and their hinterlands identified themselves as citizens of Uruk or Nippur. But the strength of family relations in Mesopotamia into the first millennium B C E and beyond suggests that identification was negotiated through both physical location and kinship.

Art and Architecture Natufian carved bone animals and stone human figures from 10,500 to 8200 B C E are the earliest artworks in the Near East. Although their contexts are often unclear, they are surely possessions and expressions of individuals, not of a kin or residence group. And art remained primarily in the realm of individuals into the fourth millennium; the portable figurines of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic through Ubaid periods (8000–4000 B C E ) were individually rather than corporately owned. But the Anatolian Neolithic sites of Nevali C ¸ ori and Go¨bekli Tepe present early monumental art: massive stone pillars with relief figures of wild animals or of rough human forms. The effort of transporting and carving the stones was certainly shared across the community, which then owned them corporately. The slightly later wall painting of an onager hunt at Umm Dabaghiyah was also potentially a group effort. Decoration on pottery was available to all. But art became restricted in access in the Uruk period, even as media and motifs expanded. Figurines representing average humans disappeared and did not reappear in quantity until the later third millennium B C E . Reliefs and statues representing kings, priests, and possibly deities, dominated. Instead of figurines of pregnant women, celebrating fertility, we have cylinder seals showing rows of women at looms, celebrating mass production. Figurines of wild animals were replaced by stylized representations of well-behaved temple flocks. Art was apparently hijacked to the ordered world of the elite as high culture (Baines and Yoffee 1998). We might view all art produced by an elite as propaganda, to maintain, reinforce, or extend power. But Uruk period art might also have been simply educational. The generic leader figure seen in statues, reliefs, and seals was unlike any prior human representation, just as the leaders themselves were a new category. The rounded hat, schematic beard, and cross-hatched skirt were new ruler identifiers, as was the limited range of contexts in which the ruler was shown: religious, symbolic, occasionally military. Both the easy legibility of this information and its appropriateness meant that much of the visual vocabulary introduced in the Uruk period, like kings killing lions, was still in use in the Neo-Assyrian and Persian periods, 2,700 years later. The division of the world into horizontal registers and conceptual categories, as represented on the Warka vase, similarly presented new concepts and showed comparable persistence. Monumental architecture can be propaganda; Trigger (1990) points out that monumental architecture in early complex societies was often bigger and more

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elaborate than was required by function. The building of the Late Uruk temple complexes of Uruk Eanna IV and the Anu ziggurat, followed by unnecessary razing and rebuilding, looks very like an attempt to impress the power of an authority on a subject population. But would a small elite have been able to coerce a large labor pool to build monuments that only served to remind of their oppression? The temples celebrated not the ruling class, but nature-based deities who created and protected ‘‘civilized’’ society. The temple-complexes were not just buildings commissioned by elites, but vibrant places for ritual and houses for the gods. Now unused and depopulated, the buildings appear to us as evidence of tyranny.

Writing ‘‘Prehistory’’ is as biased as ‘‘pre-pottery.’’ Writing’s transformation of human life was not entirely for the better. The earliest texts in the Near East, from the end of the Uruk period, about 3100 B C E , were primarily economic; and it is tempting to believe there could be no bias in such basic documentation. But the texts belonged to temple–palace institutions and were instrumental in our vision of the Uruk state as economically centralized. The absence of economic texts from villages does not mean an absence of economic behavior there. The Late Uruk ‘‘Professions List’’ presents us with an indigenous vision of society’s vertical and horizontal categories, but this list was written by scribes firmly located near the top (Nissen, Damerow, and Englund 1993: 110–15). Most scholars believe that numeracy and information storage in the Near East had had a long history (Schmandt-Besserat 1992; Nissen, Damerow, and Englund 1993; Englund 1998). Accounting was present from the Neolithic, in the form of clay and stone tokens, initially loose, then from the late fourth millennium B C E encased in clay bullae, or tags. The idea is that the patterns of the tokens were reduced to impressions and ultimately to incised signs on flat clay tablets, resulting in the earliest writing. This is an elegant theory, linking disparate elements of the archaeological record. Among tokens there were definable size and shape categories, and repetition that implies agreed meanings. But equally there were unique tokens, and we do not know when or how the tokens might have been transferred to two dimensions (Nissen 2002). The archaeological evidence for the relevant period is ambiguous and limited, with tokens in bullae and early numerical and pictographic tablets overlapping in time and a gap in the data existing for the Early Uruk. And then there is the problem of the transition from numeracy to literacy. Compared to the long life of tokens, writing developed rapidly and surely was a response to the state’s need to deal with complex record keeping and transactions (Nissen, Damerow, and Englund 1993; Michalowski 1993b). The complexity of transferal of an aural, oral, and mental code to a visual code does imply that writing was the conscious solution to a problem. And the distance created by such transferal potentially made written communication into something esoteric and restricted. Restricted literacy meant restricted knowledge, and writing itself could be an avenue for bias and deception.

From Sedentism to States, 10,000–3000 BCE

Discussion of the development of writing in Mesopotamia often involves the question of whether writing always signifies or encodes speech. Pictographic writing, such as that of the earliest tablets, can evade connection with speech; a symbol for a ziggurat, for instance, might relate to either a mental image of a temple tower or the spoken word ‘‘ziggurat.’’ Neither system of translation, sound to symbol or mental image to symbol, can be called more logical.

Production and Consumption Archaeologists distinguish craft specializations as ‘‘independent’’ or as ‘‘attached,’’ most often with focus on the New World (Brumfiel and Earle 1987; Costin 1991; Inomata 2001). Independent specialization involves production for an assumed, but amorphous, demand for goods from the general population; attached specialization means production of goods for patrons, with implications of complex society and elite control of media and motifs. Attached specialists generally produce valuable goods, while independent specialists produce utilitarian items (Stein 1996). For the Ubaid period (about 5800–4000 B C E ) and Uruk period (about 4000– 3100 B C E ) in Mesopotamia we have yet to reconstruct the pattern of craft production. Even for the historical periods, with detailed information of who was working for whom and producing what, we often cannot be sure that attached specialists recorded in texts were attached full time or even specialists full time. An Ubaid period potter might create common wares and elaborate painted wares for different clientele, but fire them at the same time in one kiln, blurring the specialization boundaries. Similarly, textile-production might be household-based, although the final products had many destinations. In the Uruk period, there were surely attached craft specialists who produced cylinder seals, stone vessels, and statues exclusively for the temple or palace and its elite occupants. The ‘‘Professions List’’ points to the existence of potters, weavers, and carpenters who may have been producing for either elite or common demands, or both (Nissen, Damerow, and Englund 1993: 110–15). Were these individuals fulltime specialists? And is there any link between value of product and status of producer? Attached specialists may be of low status because of their dependence on patrons. But their esoteric knowledge, artistic skill, and access to restricted media and motifs might be socially valuable. While cylinder seals were clearly valuable because of medium, motifs, artistic skill, and use, what about, for instance, the hundreds of clay cones used for public building decoration? This was clearly an attached specialization, since cones were used exclusively by the temple and palace. But the skill level was low and the medium cheap and ubiquitous. Technically, anyone could have decorated his or her house with cone mosaics. The temple and palace control made clay cones absurdly valuable, but was this status passed on to their producers? Standardization of pottery was present in shape and style from the Pottery Neolithic (after 6500 B C E ). But in the Uruk period, we see probable massproduction. Decoration dropped to a minimum; volumes as well as forms may have been standardized. Many vessels were made on a fast potter’s wheel, and it is possible

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that some pottery production moved from the hands of women to those of men, while women were more often found at the weaving loom. But questions persist about pottery’s mode of production. We cannot agree who was responsible for production of the ubiquitous beveled-rim bowl, nor can we agree on its purpose. Was this a ration bowl, produced under elite management, filled under that management, and distributed by it (Nissen 1970, 2002)? Might it have been produced in less regulated circ*mstances, within the family or village, but brought to the elite for filling? Or neither? Beveled-rim bowls have also been interpreted as salt containers (Buccellati 1990), bread-molds (Millard 1988; Chazan and Lehner 1990), yoghurt containers (Delougaz 1952), templeoffering bowls (Mallowan 1933; Beale 1978), and vessels used at banquets organized by elites (Forest 1987). The reconstruction of the beveled-rim bowl as ration container is problematic. As any refugee knows, the size of container for receiving rations is irrelevant, a plastic bag or empty tin will do; the sole container for which size is important is that held in the hand issuing rations.

Trade, Interaction, and the Uruk Expansion In concert with development of the state, about 4000 to 3000 B C E , the Near East witnessed an expansion of population and material culture from southern Mesopotamia into northern Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Iranian Zagros Mountains. New sites with purely southern Mesopotamian culture were founded, while at longoccupied sites local traditions were overrun by southern pottery and architecture. These colonies were an essential element of early Mesopotamian complex society, and this phenomenon is one of the most intensively studied aspects of the region. The most popular current model is that these were southern trade colonies, established to ensure continuous and increased access to the resources of the mountainous areas around the lower river plains – timber, stones, and metals. But we are now in the uncomfortable position of knowing far more about the Uruk period at these sites than we do about the contemporary southern Mesopotamian homeland. And the fact that most work on the Mesopotamian state for several decades has necessarily been based in this ‘‘Uruk expansion phenomenon’’ has perhaps meant an overestimation of trade’s importance for that state. It must be emphasized that the Uruk phenomenon was an intensification of an interaction sphere present in the region for millennia. Initially these sites were viewed as evidence for the south Mesopotamian core exploiting peripheral areas (Algaze 1993). But it is now generally acknowledged that the north exhibited social complexity before the arrival of southern Uruk people and material culture, and the relationship cannot be considered asymmetrical (Algaze 2001b; Stein 2001). The purpose of the southern expansion is still debated between those who see it as motivated by desire to control resources and those who see it as motivated by desire simply to gain access to resources. There was also great variability within the expansion phenomenon, from genuine southern Mesopotamian settlements as at Habuba Kabira in central Syria, through southern outposts embedded

From Sedentism to States, 10,000–3000 BCE

within local populations seen at Hacinebi in Turkey, to sites which retained local traditions while borrowing from the south illustrated at Arslan Tepe also in Turkey. Was each colony linked to a different city-state in the south, or did southern cities unite to invest in an array of colonies, or were the colonies’ inhabitants economic migrants, no longer associated with the south at all? Questions about the expansion remain, but it is far more important that we return to ask questions in and of south Iraq.

NOTES 1

The date of the Jericho grain has been disputed (Nesbitt and Samuel 1998); the earliest evidence for domesticated grain from this site may date as late as 7200 B C E . 2 For the earlier Uruk period in the south, the Eanna Sounding at Uruk supplies a pottery sequence, but not without problems (Su¨renhagen 1986a, 1987; Nissen 2002); a similar stratigraphic sounding at Nippur was also limited in scale (Porada et al. 1992). The Ubaid levels at Eridu (Safar, Mustafa, and Lloyd 1981) and Tell ‘Oueili (Huot 1996) offer limited hints of pre-Uruk developments.

FURTHER READING Useful introductions include Algaze 2001a and 2001b and Stein 1994 and 2001.

CHAPTER THREE

The Age of Empires, 3100–900 BCE Mark Chavalas Our goal here is to describe early Ancient Near Eastern empires, the earliest expansive states in human history. First, it seems imperative that we attempt to define and describe the nature of empires in the context of the Ancient Near East, even though the term has been described as a ‘‘word not fit for scholars’’ (Doyle 1986: 11). The term empire has often been taken for granted as if it designated something obvious to everyone. Of course, ethnologists argue that ‘‘man is an imperial animal who has an inbuilt need for expansion.’’ Others have said that imperialism and colonialism are as old as the state and they thus define the political process. Of course, if we use these statements, we do not have to give reasons for the expansion of political systems except to say that they are able to expand (Larsen 1979: 98). Empire comes from Latin imperium, with the root denoting order and command. For the Romans, the term described the executive authority possessed by Roman magistrates. By the modern age the term began to denote an expansive polity that incorporated multiple states. An empire, according to Doyle, is a ‘‘system of interaction between two political entities, one of which, the dominant metropole, exerts political control over the internal and external policy – the effective sovereignty – of the other, the subordinate periphery’’ (1986: 12). Thus, empire is effective control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinated society by an imperial society (Sinopoli 1994: 160). Empires by definition have an international aspect. They can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, or by economic, social, or cultural dependence (Doyle 1986: 45). Even without consensus or clarity of definition, one should be able to describe the types of empires and how they dealt with subordinate entities. Eisenstadt attempted to distinguish between centralized bureaucratic empires that have welldeveloped military, political, and financial administrative bureaucracies, which attempt to restructure the political relations with the peripheral areas, and more loosely knit patrimonial states that have limited bureaucracy and little or no restructuring of other polities (Eisenstadt 1963; Sinopoli 1995: 6). There are some generic aspects of empires: they often exhibit dramatic success at the outset in territorial expansion and consolidation, often beginning because of a period of fragmentation or weakness in their regions. However, many will also

The Age of Empires, 3100–900 BCE

experience rapid collapse. They often begin because of the need for protection against external threats, economic goals of security or acquisition of valued resources, ideological factors, or as a result of ‘‘natural consequences of power differences between polities.’’ Military conquest is often a last resort and is the most costly, involving the massive disruption of production and lives. Coercive diplomacy with the implied threat of force is often a preferred alternative. Even better is the role of ideology in motivating action, since it provides legitimation and explanations for inequalities in subject populations. Empires often appropriate local beliefs and deities, while imposing new imperial beliefs, gods, rulers, and practices. Wallerstein defines empires as a ‘‘mechanism for collecting tribute, while political empires are a primitive means of economic domination’’ (1974/80, 1990). They are often characterized by massive urban material remains, large-scale monumental art and architecture, road systems, cities, and temples. Unfortunately, scholars of Ancient Near Eastern studies may very well find it difficult not to have an inferiority complex when it comes to the comparative study of empires, since most general studies altogether ignore the evidence from Mesopotamia, the area of the world that was responsible for creating the first known empires (Eisenstadt 1963; Wittfogel 1957). Moreover, the educated public will no doubt think of the ancient oriental empires of Xerxes, Sennacherib, and Nebuchadnezzar as characterized in Classical and Biblical sources as their datum point for understanding Ancient Near Eastern empires. But most Mesopotamian scholars have rejected old ideas about Mesopotamian states being temple-states or totalitarian states and see the latest empires as outgrowths of earlier states. Before discussing Ancient Near Eastern empires, one has to come to an understanding of still more basic questions concerning the nature of the ancient state. In other words, we cannot discuss Mesopotamian empires before we understand the concept of the Mesopotamian state. In recent years it has been the anthropologist who has attempted to clarify this problem. Baines and Yoffee define the ancient states in the Near East as ‘‘the specialized political system of the larger cultural entities that we denominate ‘civilization’ ’’ and ‘‘the central governing institution and social form in a differentiated, stratified society in which rank and status are only partly determined through kinship’’ (1998: 199). To complicate matters, some say that, technically speaking, there was no Mesopotamian ‘‘state’’ (Baines and Yoffee 1998: 205). This does not help us in our search for the Mesopotamian ‘‘empire,’’ to say the least. To compound this problem, there has been no consensus concerning the nature of Mesopotamian empires, if in fact they existed. Some have even argued that the concept should be restricted to the late empires of the first millennium B C E (Larsen 1979: 91). However, there has been no substantive attempt to define the term for Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamians, of course, had no term for ‘‘empire,’’ but they had no term for ‘‘religion’’ either. Both, however, were realities. All of the ideas of expansion, domination, and exploitation are to be found at one level or another. Larsen concludes, at least for Mesopotamia, that an empire is a supranational system of political control, and such a system may have either a city-state or a territorial state at its center (1979: 91). This is understandably a political definition. Certainly the difference between Old Akkadian and Late Assyrian empires is one of degree.

Mark Chavalas

The Akkadian state certainly contained elements of empire in which there was a methodical and permanent occupation of conquered territory, military garrisons, and a division of the territory into provinces which were accountable to the center. According to Larsen, the three basic Mesopotamian political structures were city-state, territorial state, and empire, all of which were related and concerned to some extent with territorial expansion (1979: 92). Over the duration of Mesopotamian history there is a clear trend toward more complex organizations after recurrent political breakdowns. Empires also tended over time toward larger units and stronger centralization. Thus, Larsen sees a system of city-states and loosely organized empires in the third millennium B C E , territorial states and ‘‘federal’’ empires in the second, and imperial systems in the first that covered the entire Near East. The periods in between are seen as ‘‘dark ages,’’ after which reconstruction begins. However, many of these ideas are not in the mainstream any longer in Mesopotamian studies (Michalowski 1993a: 56). In fact, most empires collapsed after only a few generations. We will be analyzing a number of ‘‘empire’’ periods in Mesopotamian history, including the so-called ‘‘informal empire’’ of Uruk in the fourth millennium B C E (about 4150–3100) (Wright and Rupley 2001: 85–122), the Kish and Syrian or Ebla traditions of the early to mid-third millennium, and the centralized states of Akkad and Ur III in the late third millennium. We will then briefly look at the Old Assyrian, Old Babylonian, and Syrian kingdoms of the early second millennium B C E , and the states of Hatti, Assyria, Mitanni, and Babylon in the mid-late second millennium B C E , to the break-up of those states (around 1200–900 B C E ).

The Uruk ‘‘Empire’’ Since the 1950s, anthropologists have used an evolutionary model to explain the rise of states, consisting of a stepladder model of bands becoming tribes, chiefdoms, and then states. This, however, has been criticized in the past decade. A chiefdom has been described as an autonomous regional unit under a paramount chief. Another model is world-systems, an attempt to explain the development and function of the European capitalist system on a global scale from the outset of the modern age. This has also been employed as an explanation for archaeological studies of secondary state development, especially when discussing Uruk period Mesopotamia (Wallerstein 1974/80; Algaze 1989, 1993). In a nutshell, world-systems (which do not necessarily encompass the entire globe) develop when various polities start to have high levels of interaction, especially through trade. However, the world-systems theorists argue that by definition there is asymmetry in this relationship, with centralized authorities (that is, the ‘‘core’’) dominating the periphery, the outer edges of the world-system, those polities that are less centralized and weaker than the core. According to Stein, the world-systems theory minimizes the roles of polities in the periphery, and local production and exchange, as well as their complexity (1999: 16). Even if one admits that the world-systems approach works for ‘‘world empires,’’ one cannot easily determine the nature of these archaic empires (Stein 1999: 43).

The Age of Empires, 3100–900 BCE

A number of scholars have argued that in the fourth millennium B C E , Uruk in Mesopotamia and nearby areas formed a world-system (Algaze 1989, 1993; Frangiapani and Palmieri 1987). With our present knowledge, it appears that southern Mesopotamia created the earliest known urbanized state society, even though this region lacked the natural resources of metals, lumber, and semi-precious stones that were available in neighboring regions of the northwest in the Taurus Mountains in Turkey and the east in the Zagros Mountains in Iran. In fact, there appear to be efforts to procure these materials as early as the Ubaid period of the fifth millennium in southern Mesopotamia, with the development of chiefdoms (Stein 1999: 85; Oates 1993). But the extent of interaction seems to be the northern adoption of ceramic and architectural styles, as well as religious ideology, showing a commonality of beliefs. There do not appear to be large trade exports, however. And the nature of the Ubaidian state is not clear. It is, however, clear that in different periods, southern Mesopotamian states obtained raw materials with different strategies, including trade, gift exchanges, raiding or tribute, and conquest. The nature of the interaction changed with the nature of the political organization in Mesopotamia. Large-scale trade networks do not appear to have begun until the Middle and Late Uruk period (about 3800–3100 B C E ), which is not only evidenced in southern Mesopotamia at Uruk but in southwest Iran at Susa, northern Mesopotamia, Syria, the Zagros, and southeast Anatolia, modern Turkey. By this period, urbanism, centralized authority, complex settlement hierarchies, social stratification, and administrative bureaucracy were all manifested. The fact that there were a number of urban-centered hierarchies in the south and in Iran suggests to some that there were multiple competing polities, and not a unified state. Sometime in the early fourth millennium B C E , the Uruk polities economically expanded to outlying areas, creating trading colonies to obtain commodities not accessible in the south. This has been considered the first known colonial system. These ‘‘colonial’’ sites, as they are called, exhibit Uruk-type architecture, ceramics, and material evidence of administrative activity. They were strategically located along major trade routes in the Iranian Zagros, on the northern Tigris, and the Habur River headwaters. This has often been called the Uruk Expansion. While originally thought to be of short duration, it is now clear that this trading enterprise lasted for over six centuries (Pollock 1992). However, over that period the nature of the expansion varied greatly in both numbers of trading posts and areas. For example, on the Syrian Euphrates, where the population was evidently sparse, the Uruk posts were larger and more numerous. It is apparent that the Uruk ceramic repertoire occurs in the outlying regions, and although it is massive in number, it is limited to beveled-rim bowls and other items. In fact, there are only a few sites that have a full repertoire of Uruk ceramics as well as Uruk-type domestic and public architecture, along with cylinder seals, round stamp seals or bullae, tokens, and clay tablets (Su¨renhagen 1986b: 26). These include Godin Tepe in Iran, Tell Brak and Nineveh in northern Mesopotamia, Habuba Kabira and Jebel Aruda on the Syrian Euphrates, and Hassek Hoyuk in Anatolia, among others. They appear to have been strategically placed. Stein has argued for four different types of settlements: 1. sites

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with Uruk material remains (colonies), 2. Mesopotamian residential quarters inside a Late Chalcolithic settlement (for example, Godin Tepe and Hassek Hoyuk, and Hacinebi), 3. small Late Chalcolithic settlements located near an Uruk enclave, and 4. local sites, which have only minimal interaction with Uruk enclaves (1999: 96). The political relationship between the colonies and the south is unclear, and once again it is not certain whether this was a singular political enterprise, or a group of competing polities. In fact, Hacinebi appears to receive its Uruk material culture from Susa, and not Uruk proper, suggesting that Susa may have been an independent polity (Stein 2001: 302). The various colonies exhibited a heterogeneous network of interaction with the outlying polities, and the relationships, according to Stein, were exchange, emulation, and the establishment of Uruk settlements in the territories of those outlying polities (1999: 101). There is no concrete evidence that any of the Uruk settlements actually dominated local polities. In fact, it has only been recently that scholars have spent a lot of time studying these peripheral Chalcolithic period settlements. The highland Anatolian areas were composed of smaller-scale, less complex polities, often described as chiefdoms. These include Arslan Tepe, which showed minimal evidence of Uruk culture, especially in regard to a centralized bureaucracy, which used both Anatolian and Mesopotamian styles of administrative technology. Thus, there appears to have been selective local borrowing of Mesopotamian elite symbolism, but little evidence of Mesopotamian imports. So, was there an informal empire, as argued by Algaze, meaning an economic hegemony, not simply administrative control (1989, 1993)? Algaze argues that the settlements could only have survived if there was an exchange of manufactured goods from Mesopotamia for unprocessed materials from outlying areas (1993: 61). He states that the relationship took different forms, depending on local conditions. Susa was completely colonized by the Uruk peoples, while more distant areas established colonial enclaves that functioned as gateway communities that regularized the flow of trade. Algaze still accepts the core assumptions of the world-systems theory, that is, that there was asymmetrical exchange, core dominance, and trade as the prime mover of social development (Algaze 2001b). But excavations in southeastern Anatolia show that there was no such asymmetry in the technological development of the outlying areas and Uruk Mesopotamia, but instead technological parity. In fact, this parity seems to have occurred before the Uruk Expansion, not because of it. Many areas reflect a very advanced copper metallurgy at an early date, and thus highly processed products were probably sent south, not unfinished raw materials. The enclaves could not have survived without local cooperation (Stein 1999: 117). Stein has studied the Anatolian site of Hacinebi in the Euphrates River Valley over 1000 km or 620 miles from the Mesopotamian core and has found evidence for social complexity at the site before pre-contact phases, including evidence for stamp seals and seal impressions (implying a complex social hierarchy), long-distance exchange, a high level of craft production, and complex mortuary and public architecture. When Hacinebi had contact with the Uruk culture about 3700 B C E , it is clear that there was a small Mesopotamian colonial center inside a larger Anatolian regional center, analogous to the Old Assyrian trade

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with Anatolia of nearly two millennia later. Evidence similar to this can be found at Tell Brak in Syria, where fragments of a casemate fortification encircling the large Chacolithic period site have been found, as well as in surveys at Tell al-Hawa on the Sinjar plains, and Arslan Tepe. This trading relationship may have lasted for as long as one half of a millennium, at least implying a peaceful coexistence. There is also no evidence that the Mesopotamians were able to monopolize the exchange system. Stein argues for a ‘‘distance-parity’’ model in this case (1999: 163). In fact, the two areas, core and periphery, maintained autonomous economic systems, and there was no dramatic change showing a rapid increase in local complexity after the Uruk presence was manifested. However, there were no apparent Anatolian trade colonies in Mesopotamia, explained in part by the geographic nature of the evidence. Mesopotamia, lacking in raw materials, needed the relationship, possibly more than Anatolia. One could even argue that it may have even been southern Mesopotamia that was dependent upon their resource-rich neighbors, and not vice versa. What was the nature of the Uruk state? Steinkeller has recently argued that Uruk was a religious capital during this period and the subsequent Jemdet Nasr period, based upon a small number of Jemdet Nasr period tablets that reputedly show different Sumerian cities sending resources to Uruk as ritual offerings to Inanna, one of the primary deities of Uruk (2002a). He argues that this is probably a continuation of a situation that began in the Uruk period, and is analogous to the b a l a distribution system that served Nippur as the religious core during the Ur III period. Of course, if there was such a centralized state at Uruk, it is not mentioned in any later Mesopotamian textual traditions. The creation of buffer areas between large urban polities implies rival centers, rather than a single entity, and armed conflict was depicted in Uruk iconography (Algaze 2001b: 55). Thus, Algaze has modified his argument to state that southern Mesopotamia in the Uruk period was characterized by a small number of competitive polities, each surrounded by a hinterland that provided both labor and material resources. Uruk itself was certainly the largest and probably most powerful state. In fact the competition between states likely was the catalyst for economic expansion into other areas. Political fragmentation may have fostered conflict and exchange between the centers. Algaze sees this as analogous to the European states and the New World in the early modern era and to the Greek city-states of the eighth century B C E (1993: 113). At any rate, the Uruk states differed from the later expansionist empires and tribute-demanding states in that it appears that the local elites played a role in creating a significant trading system, apparently beneficial to both parties to some extent. The problem may be one of semantics; was the relationship symmetrical or asymmetrical? Were the Uruk polities creating ‘‘trading post empires’’? Steinkeller argues that since Sumer did not have such a powerful infrastructure until the late third millennium B C E , it is hard to imagine that it existed at such an early date (1993: 110–11). He argues that it was a commercial enterprise, analogous to the Old Assyrian/Kanish trading mechanism of the Old Babylonian period. By the late Uruk period there was evidence of a breakdown of the southern economy. City walls were now found at Uruk, as they were at Habuba Kabira and

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Godin Tepe, along with settlement pattern changes. Su¨renhagen proposed that the outlying areas became hostile and cut off agricultural supplies (1986b). Steinkeller theorizes that since this was a commercial enterprise, movements of new people in the Early Dynastic I period may have ended it, that is, with proto-Akkadians coming in like later Amorites (1993: 116). But this cannot be easily substantiated.

Pre-Sargonic ‘‘Empires’’ in Mesopotamia? The Jemdet Nasr (around 3100–2900 B C E ) and Early Dynastic (about 2900–2300 B C E ) periods are no easier to define in terms of political development. The traditional view is that in the Early Dynastic period Sumer consisted of city-states that likely controlled one or more urban centers and a hinterland. The states appear to have been linked to each other in a league that had a religious aspect, but it is not certain that there were any political affiliations. Each state had divinely sanctioned borders that separated the different polities. In a sense, this made expansion or even unification difficult, since each city-state was divinely ordained. The city ruler was the representative of the city god or goddess. There was thus a strong tradition of small states centered on a capital city and its patron, or matron, deity and associated temple (Hallo 1960). One of the first discussions about the political situation in prehistoric and Early Dynastic Mesopotamia came from Jacobsen, who argued for a large city-state institution that unified all of Sumer into a single political and religious entity, known as the Kengir League, centered around the city of Nippur. Aside from textual evidence from later Mesopotamian traditions, Jacobsen claimed that a group of texts from Uruk III, Early Dynastic Fara, Abu Salabikh, and Old Babylonian Ur, and so-called ‘‘city seals’’ from Early Dynastic Ur contain many depictions of city names which imply a formal arrangement (Jacobsen 1957: 106–9). Thus, the seals, which are dated to the Early Dynastic I period, may show the existence of a league of neighboring cities centered on Nippur in this period, but this is far from clear (Steinkeller 2002a: 257). Matthews has argued that these seals indicate the existence of a ‘‘cooperative institutionalized grouping of a number of cities,’’ but is unclear as to their nature, although he argues for a formal military and defensive league (1993: 49). Others have seen the seals as indicating a complex system of storehouses or trade associations. A recently published text from Tell Uqair has the same city seal that appears on the Jemdet Nasr documents studied by Matthews (Green 1986). The implication is that the owner may belong to a supra-city-state institution. If this is correct, it would be the first tangible evidence for a Pan-Babylonian organizational scheme in the Uruk III/Jemdet Nasr periods. Possibly this organization involved a number of cities that were required to provide ritual offerings for the chief deity or deities of Uruk. The fact that Uruk was so big and played a key role in the development of writing and scribal learning should not be surprising. The propagandistic Sumerian King List spread the doctrine that only one Mesopotamian city-state ruled the whole area at any given period. Even though the document created its own fictional past, the document itself has been said to have its

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own historical integrity, and it should be called the Mesopotamian city list, where cities were the focal point of political and social struggle in the absence of centralized polities (Yoffee 1993a: 305). The city seals were an acknowledgement of this fact (Yoffee 1993b: 66). They may have had nothing to do with political or economic patterns. Certainly it is true that there was a shared sense of Mesopotamian cultural unity, exhibited by a shared standard literary language, pantheon, and textual tradition, which may be the only thing the seals represent. During the early third millennium B C E northern Mesopotamia had a substantially different political economy from the south. This region, a dry-farming zone depending on rainfall rather than irrigation, was composed of a series of rival complex chiefdoms that controlled the agricultural surpluses (Schwartz 1994: 153). But these states looked to the more urban south for ideological legitimization. Schwartz argues that agricultural intensification in the north, as well as emulation of southern socio-cultural and political forms may have played a key role in the eventual transformation of the chiefdoms of the Ninevite V period, named after the painted incised pottery recovered in the fifth level of the prehistoric sounding at Nineveh from about 3100–2500 B C E . These states changed into urbanized societies later in the third millennium B C E , between the period of Uruk colonies and the Ebla state around 2600 B C E (1994: 154). There is evidence of local urbanization and monumental architecture during the Uruk period at Hamukar, Tell el-Hawa, and Tell Brak, and thus the Ninevite V period exhibits a case of an aborted secondary state formation (Schwartz 1994: 164). The new centers were between 40 and 100 hectares or 99–247 acres in size across northern Mesopotamia and Syria, including Tell Chuera, Tell Brak, Tell Mozan/ Urkesh, Tell Leilan, Tell Taya, and Titris¸ Ho¨yu¨k in southeast Anatolia. This period had little evidence for monumental architecture, writing, and urbanization before the mid-third millennium B C E , with the exception of Mari and possibly Terqa. Schwartz (1994) argues that during the Ninevite period, polities in the north were more complex than previously imagined and can be described with the chiefdom model proposed by Service (1975). These chiefdoms are described as regional polities that have a relatively modest degree of social and economic organization, hierarchical administration, and elite control of surpluses. This was manifested in the variation of mortuary furnishings and architecture, large-scale storage of staples in granaries, and the frequency of cylinder seals and impressions. By the mid-third millennium B C E Syria and northern Mesopotamia had become heavily urbanized. Gelb posited a northern Mesopotamian tradition centered around the city of Kish (1981, 1992). He argued for a Semitic power in the north at least two centuries before the Sargonic empire, rivaling the Sumerians in the south. Of course, the discoveries at Mari and Ebla have furthered our understanding of the Kish civilization, causing scholars to recognize that it was geographically far reaching, at least to the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. There was thus a highly developed civilization with its own cities, languages, literary traditions, and polities, somewhat apart from the Sumerian south. According to the Sumerian King List, the first dynasty of Kish held sway over all of Sumer after the world-destroying primordial flood. Other Kish dynasties were

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mentioned in the list, while kings and the city itself were also mentioned in scattered references in Sumerian royal inscriptions of the third millennium B C E . There were also other cities with dynasties, including Akshak and Hamazi. The rulers of these dynasties bore Semitic names (Old Akkadian or Eblaite), and a few had Sumerian names. Though the rulers and dating of king lists are disputed, they may reveal a kernel of historical truth about the domination of Kish over the region. From Kish Gelb dates the earliest texts, which were administrative in nature, to the pre-Fara period (before about 2600 B C E ). However, they were probably composed by Sumerian scribes. Ebla and Mari in the north and Kish and Abu Salabikh in the south were linked by scribal contacts. The Early Dynastic Sumerian kings who claimed to have defeated Kish assumed the title King of Kish. These included Mesanepada of Ur (a votive inscription of this king was found at Mari), as well as kings of Lagash and Uruk. Mesalim, described as King of Kish, arbitrated a boundary dispute between Lagash and Umma, possibly around 2500 B C E . In fact, except for Mesalim, all of the rulers who assumed this title had a close relationship with Inanna, but not with Enlil, chief god of Sumer (Maeda 1981). Eannatum is the first known Sumerian to have taken the title of King of Kish. It is not certain whether this title was officially recognized at Nippur, the religious center. In sum, there are very few attestations of rulers who took the title of King of Kish before Sargon. At any rate, the King of Kish was usually described as a mighty ruler able to defeat enemy lands. Sargon’s ‘‘King of the land’’ was a broader title, which marked a dramatic step in the developing political ideology of empire (Maeda 1981: 13). There is no concrete evidence of a Kish empire, however. Kish, as well as Ebla and Mari, appears to have been an autonomous state. But there were cultural similarities, even in certain aspects of systems of weights and measures, year dates, number systems, month names, religion, and Semitic personal names, but not in the area of material culture, law, or art (Gelb 1981: 72). Gelb has argued that the same Semitic language was used in writing at both Mari and Ebla (1992: 124). It does appear that Mari was the catalyst for the Kish civilization that was transmitted to Ebla and northern Syria (Gelb 1992: 201). Following Gelb, Steinkeller has even argued that there may have been two different political systems in Mesopotamia, both of which endured to the middle of the second millennium B C E (1993). This highly interpretative scenario, however, is very controversial, and has been subject to considerable criticism. Steinkeller argues that during the Early Dynastic I period, central Mesopotamia was occupied by Semitic proto-Akkadians who created a political and socio-economic system different from that found in the south. For example, there may not have been independent city-states in the north, as in the Sumerian south. It is possible the north at least by Early Dynastic II/III was a single political organism, all the way to Mari, with the focal point at Kish (Steinkeller 1993: 117). There is also a tradition of a war between Uruk and Kish in the literary composition Gilgamesh and Agga, as well as the Sumerian King List, which argues that Kish was the earliest historical dynasty (Steinkeller 1993: 119). Kish was mentioned in Ebla economic texts, while very few other eastern cities were mentioned. Steinkeller argues that this shows a preeminence of Kish. The northerners, according to Steinkeller, also appear to have been more

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‘‘secular.’’ The King of Kish was a title that even the southerners coveted, implying an autocratic rule, rather than southern control over the north (Steinkeller 1993: 120). The temple domain appears to have been less important in the north, and private ownership of land flourished and may have spread to the south from there. In this scenario, pre-Sargonic Ebla is similar to the Kish model, not the Sumerian south. Ebla, as well as Mari, also had a stratified society, like Kish, and it has even been argued that there was an ‘‘urban oligarchy’’ in the north, spanning more than a millennium (Steinkeller 1993: 124). Thus the traditions of northern Mesopotamia and Syria appeared to share a common origin. It is possible that contact with the north led the Sumerian south to create more powerful royal institutions, with rulers at Ur and then at Lagash attempting to assume ascendancy over neighboring states. This, of course, is very speculative. By Early Dynastic IIIb, Uruk had claimed rule over Ur, and then a limited rule over the entire south, under Lugalzagessi, who was called ‘‘King of the land,’’ implying control of the world outside of Sumer. Lugalzagessi did not create an empire out of the blue, as once thought, but his empire was the product of an evolutionary phenomenon (Charvat 1978). However, it appears that he held primacy within the existing city-state structure. Starting from Umma, he was able to claim rule at Ur and Uruk either by force or dynastic arrangement, and then Lagash, while taking Nippur and its priesthood. He was apparently the first ruler to have unified the whole south, and he claimed rule all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. Because of ideological constraints, he probably never thought of a unified state, although a northerner was to forge such a state soon thereafter. Thus, Steinkeller argues that the Sargonic Empire was not an innovation, since some of the tendencies of Sargon’s state (autocratic rule, centralized government, and ideology of conquest) were already in place (1993: 129).

The First World Empire We can now finally turn to the person who is traditionally viewed as the first empire builder, Sargon of Akkad. Initially, it appears that Sargon began his conquests from Kish in a manner similar to the Early Dynastic expansionists, creating a confederacy of city-states against an enemy. With the defeat of Lugalzagessi, he was able to bring most of the south under his control. He then was able to create his own ideology of domination. He also built a new capital city, Akkad, installed his daughter as high priestess of Ur, and established the principle that only the ruler of the whole area had the prerogative to do this. He also appointed royal officials who served alongside the rulers of the conquered city-states. The royal officials were charged with breaking down administrative barriers and providing material support to the army. Sargon took the title King of Kish, giving it new meaning, as it now was understood in Akkadian as king of totality, from kisˇsˇatu ‘‘inhabited world, totality.’’ Sargon’s grandson, Naram-Sin, added a divinity marker to his name and the title ‘‘king of the four quarters’’ (that is, the earth) (Michalowski 1993a: 88). The emperor was no longer simply a chief, but now had a different essence from other humans, and was called to world dominion. Shar-kali-sharri, a later king, whose name

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means ‘‘king of all kings,’’ went back to being simply the King of Akkad, however. At any rate, Sargon dispensed with previous views, like the king as a shepherd of the people and representative of a city god. Thus, it is not so easy to defend the idea that the Sargonic Empire was a result of a continuous evolutionary development from village to chiefdom, to city-state, to regional state, to empire. On the other hand, it can be seen that the Akkadian state was not a novelty when compared to Ebla, Uruk, or the early Sumerian states. Many of the charismatic aspects of kingship in the Early Dynastic period were part of a search for an ‘‘ideological center,’’ as Michalowski calls it, which created the context for Sargon (1987: 67). Of course, when looking at the contemporary royal inscriptions, monumental art and architecture, and material remains, one can give primacy to Sargon and his successors, although much of our information comes from later traditions, which are suspect at best as historical sources. However, was Sargon’s state truly an ‘‘empire’’ that had taken control of a large area of formerly separate citystates? It is not an easy task to detect Sargon’s influence in Iran, Syria, or the Gulf area (Michalowski 1993a: 75–6). Naram-Sin claimed to have conquered Ebla and Armanum, perhaps also in Syria, a feat that he claimed had never before been accomplished. However, Sargon had made the same claim, and the archaeological information is unclear. It is possibly better understood at Tell Brak/Nagar on the Upper Habur. There were at least two Akkadian occupations at the site, one of which built a palace of Naram-Sin. There were traces of a fire, after which there is evidence of Akkadian occupation during the reign of Shar-kali-sharri (Michalowski 1993a: 80). However, most of the material remains at Tell Brak were of local origin, and were not Sargonic. Tell Leilan also has some Akkadian period remains, and there is evidence of population redistribution (that is, Tell Mohammed Diyab, near Tell Leilan, shrank from 50 to 10 hectares or 124 to 25 acres). There is also evidence of a massive city wall at Tell Leilan, intensification of agricultural production, recognizable Akkadian pottery, and agricultural redistribution (Foster 1993b: 59–68). At Tell Mozan/ Urkesh Akkadian tablets have been found which show that the Akkadians probably controlled the Habur triangle for a generation or two, but there is no evidence of any longer period of occupation. Certainly there was no war devastation in the area. This was only evidenced with the collapse of the Akkadian state a bit later, when the whole area witnessed a climactic destruction. The Akkadians were also in Assyria, especially at Nineveh and Assur. It is more difficult, however, to see evidence of Akkadian involvement as far away from lower Mesopotamia as Mari on the Euphrates. There was Akkadian evidence at Susa in Iran, where there was a strong administrative presence (Foster 1993b: 61). The fragments of Akkadian evidence in southeastern Anatolia do not prove a permanent presence in the region. There were signs of instability in the Akkadian state from the outset. The uneasy sharing of power between the royal subordinates and the conquered rulers led to power struggles. The very success of the Akkadians in the north galvanized the conquered peoples to form powerful defensive alliances. This empire had a great effect on all of Mesopotamian civilization, which was reflected in later historical traditions as shown in chronicles, legends, and omens.

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Two figures in particular were represented, Sargon and Naram-Sin. Oddly enough, Sargon was praised, while Naram-Sin, certainly the most successful king in the dynasty, was condemned as unworthy, and was doomed to defeat and destruction because of his sinful pride. Interestingly, although harking back to the remote past of the legendary Uruk kings such as Gilgamesh, Sˇulgi of the Ur III dynasty implicitly emulated Akkadian tactics, at least in claiming divinity and organizing the state. This approach provided a broader vision of a societal center, which had previously been organized around the city, temple, and city ruler.

The Ur III Centralized State The next multinational empire in Mesopotamia during the Ur III period (about 2112–2004 B C E ) reached its height in two generations, and spectacularly fell within a century. The founder Ur-Nammu claimed hegemony over both Sumer and Akkad, although there is some doubt of his control over northern Babylonia (Steinkeller 1987a: 19). We can call this state an empire by virtue of the fact that it did conquer peripheral regions in the north and east. Sumer was the center of the empire, not just Ur. For the Sargonic kings, the main thrust of expansion appears to have been in Syria. But, because of the strong Amorite presence in Syria, the Ur III kings had a defensive posture toward that area and directed their efforts at expansion toward the mountainous areas east of Mesopotamia. They invoked the remote past of legendary Uruk kings, such as Gilgamesh, who had campaigned in that direction. Ur-Nammu’s son Sˇulgi, like Naram-Sin, was the true founder of Ur III organizational power. There was an effort to imitate the Akkadian kings, which was not difficult, since they had left monuments that presumably still could be seen by later political elites. During Sˇulgi’s reign Sumer was forged into a highly centralized bureaucratic state. Sˇulgi was successful in having the king depicted as a god, in reorganizing weights and measures, in making a new calendar, and possibly even in synthesizing the law code once attributed to Ur-Nammu (Steinkeller 1987a: 20–2). He also created a standing army, a taxation system, and a unified administrative system for all of southern Mesopotamia. It has been argued that the Ur III state was the most centralized of any of the early Mesopotamian empires. The former Sumerian city-states were now provinces of the Ur III state.

Second Millennium States The collapse of the Ur III state was gradual in that governors of outlying provinces began to assert their autonomy from the central administration. By the end, these governors had set up their own dynasties, which denied supplies to the capital. The central state was thus vulnerable to outside attack from Iran, and the Elamites invaded (Jacobsen 1953a). After 2000 B C E rival states struggled for political power, and many of them were controlled by Amorite dynasties. The next major attempts at empire were about two

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centuries later, with two ephemeral states founded upon the personality of the kings, Sˇamsˇi-Adad I (reigned 1814–1781 B C E ), an Assyrian king of Amorite descent who was apparently a usurper, and Hammurabi (reigned 1792–1750 B C E ), a Babylonian king also of Amorite descent. Sˇamsˇi-Adad claimed to have conquered all of northern Mesopotamia. He ruled from Shubat-Enlil (most likely Tell Leilan) in Syria. Like his Assyrian successors, he attempted to control the trade routes to both south and north. But the Anatolian colonies were discontinued soon after Sˇamsˇi-Adad. He had made a conscious attempt at connecting himself with the Akkadian dynasty, claimed descent from Akkadian kings, and rebuilt a temple built by Manishtushu, son of Sargon. However, his empire died with him, as his two sons were unable to keep this large territorial state together. By Hammurabi’s tenth year and his conquest of neighboring Larsa, he was able to unify southern Mesopotamia for the first time since the Ur III dynasty. It is not easy to verify his claims of ruling all of Mesopotamia, including Assur and Nineveh. His system was apparently a loose confederation of states under control of the Babylonian king. Hammurabi’s successors continued to rule a smaller state in the south. There do not appear to be any major centralized states in the Near East until the fifteenth century. Then the international political scene was dominated by Egypt and Mitanni, located in northern Mesopotamia. Although there are no royal Mitanni archives preserved, it is evident from Egyptian, Hittite, and Mesopotamian sources that Mitanni was a political term used to describe a confederation of Hurrianspeaking states and vassals. Each of the vassals had its own king who was bound to Mitanni by a treaty sworn under oath. It appears that by 1500 B C E Mitanni had expanded into most of Syria under the reigns of Paratarna and Saushtatar, and likely came into conflict with the expansionist policies of Thutmose III of Egypt (reigned 1504–1450 B C E ). Later Mitanni kings were known from the Amarna Letters as engaging in diplomatic relations with Egypt, including marriage alliances, probably resulting from the rising powers of Hittites and Assyrians, which threatened the existence of the Mitanni state. Mitanni did become somewhat fragmented during the reign of Tushratta and suffered defeat at the hands of the Hittite king Suppiluliuma. Thus after 1350 B C E the state of Mitanni ceased to play a major role in Ancient Near Eastern politics, although it was a buffer state for nearly two more centuries. The Middle Assyrian empires of Tukulti-Ninurta I (about 1243–1207 B C E ) and Tiglath-pileser I (about 1114–1076 B C E ) were precursors to the great Assyrian world state of the first millennium, which will be considered in another essay. Although it is apparent that it is difficult to define the concept of empire, let alone the state, it is true that the norms of thinking about empires were forged in the Tigris–Euphrates valley over five thousand years ago and were perfected to an extent by the Sargonic kings in the third millennium B C E . The early empires were different from the first millennium Ancient Near Eastern and Classical empires in degree but not in kind. Though not as competent, the early empires did contain the elements of empire as we understand it, including permanent occupation of conquered territory, military garrisons, economic exploitation of dominated areas, and an effort to provide ideological justification for their control. Thus any study of the nature of empires must begin with the early states of the Ancient Near East.

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FURTHER READING For empires in general, see Doyle 1986, Eisenstadt 1963, Sinopoli 1994, 1995, and Wallerstein 1974/80. For the Uruk period expansion, see Algaze 1993, Rothman 2001, and Stein 1999. For the pre-Sargonic period and the Akkadian empire, see Liverani 1993a and Steinkeller 2002a. For the Ur III and second millennium B C E empires, see Gibson and Biggs 1987 and Larsen 1979.

CHAPTER 4

World Hegemony, 900–300 BCE Paul-Alain Beaulieu

Between the ninth and the fourth century B C E the Near East was ruled by a succession of states which fully deserve the label of ‘‘empire.’’ The first one was Assyria, which after a period of growth and crisis between about 930 and 745 B C E achieved the true status of centralized empire under Tiglath-pileser III (745–727 B C E ), eventually enabling the Sargonid dynasty (721–610 B C E ) to exercise its hegemony over the entire region. The second one, Babylonia (610–539 B C E ), immediately emerged from the ruins of the Assyrian empire and fell heir to most of its territory. The third one, the Persian or Achaemenid empire (539–331 B C E ), replaced the Babylonian empire almost overnight in the autumn of 539 B C E and grew to rule vast territories from Afghanistan in the east to Thracia in Europe and Nubia in northeastern Africa for a period of two centuries. Finally, after his conquest of the Persian empire Alexander the Great laid the foundations for an even larger Greco-Macedonian empire which quickly disintegrated after his death, but by the end of the fourth century the royal house founded by his general Seleucus had firmly established its rule over the core of Alexander’s empire. The first question that arises concerns the very concept of ‘‘world hegemony,’’ especially how such hegemony was understood in the native political vocabulary of the Ancient Near East. The second issue is whether we can assert that the period extending between 900 and 300 B C E was characterized by a new phase of world hegemony which differed substantially from what had preceded, both in our view and in the ancient perception. There certainly was a view current in antiquity that during the first millennium B C E the known world had experienced a succession of hegemonies on a scale not seen before, which had succeeded each other without any intervening period of political fragmentation. Such views were circulated at least as early as the Hellenistic period, and they found a literary and spiritual expression in the Book of Daniel, which envisioned in the metaphorical dream and vision of chapters 2 and 7 a succession of four hegemonies: the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, and finally the Greco-Macedonians, each kingdom inferior to the preceding, the disintegration of the last one leading to an eschatological climax (Hartman and Di Lella 1978: 29–42).

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The geopolitical vision of the period is exemplified by the Babylonian map of the world, in which Babylon stands only slightly away from the center of a roughly circular world, while the text as a whole exhibits a remarkably limited geographic horizon (Horowitz 1998: 20–42). The map can roughly be dated to the eighth or early seventh century, and the vision it presents accommodated both Babylonian and Assyrian pretensions to hegemony, as Mesopotamia and its immediate surroundings were portrayed as coextensive with the civilized world. Two traits stand out that made the first millennium empires radically different from what preceded. First, there was a departure from the previous imperial models in the level of structural transformation which first millennium empires imposed on both the imperial core and the conquered periphery in the course of their expansion. Second, whereas the previous empires had been rather ephemeral, Assyria in the first millennium eventually grew into something not seen before, not only in scale, but also in a distinctively new imperial structure, its ideological expression, and especially its lasting success. Like Rome, the history of Assyria was not only the history of the growth of an empire, but also the history of the growth of an imperial idea. Although the Assyrian empire eventually collapsed under the combined assault of the Medes and the rebellious Babylonians, the structure it had created ultimately survived because there was no serious attempt at returning to the previous state of political fragmentation. Assyria’s enduring contribution was to create the irreversible fact of empire and to inculcate it so deeply in the political culture of the Near East that no alternative model could successfully challenge it, in fact almost up to the modern era. Therein lies the radical departure from the early forms of Near Eastern imperialism.

The Assyrian Empire What seems most remarkable about Assyria is its dynamism in the ninth century, at a time when almost every other region of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean was still reeling from the economic and demographic depression which had accompanied the transition to the Iron Age around 1000 B C E . The ability of the early NeoAssyrian kings to levy masses of native troops for their program of conquest, and to launch in addition a program of recolonization of the areas formerly lost to the Aramean invaders, probably means that the country experienced at that time a very strong demographic growth. Assyria’s ninth-century revival culminated with Assurnasirpal II (883–859 B C E ) and his son Shalmanezer III (858–824 B C E ), who transferred the royal residence from Assur to the more northern site of Kalhu (modern Nimrud) and created a provincial system that later became the backbone of the empire and the guarantee of its stability. Assurnasirpal’s foundation of a new capital and royal palace at Kalhu was later emulated by Sargon II at Dur-Sharrukin and Sennacherib at Nineveh, while Tiglath-pileser III, Esarhaddon, and Assurbanipal built palaces in a previously existing administrative center. To build a new capital was a momentous decision for the future of the Assyrian monarchy. It increased the remoteness of the king, shut up in an

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immense palace and seemingly totally inaccessible to the majority of Assyrians, more and more resembling the cardboard image of the oriental despot dear to the European romantic imagination. Yet at the same time it favored the individualization of the expression of power. Every king with a dominant personality and sufficient resources would now try to put his own imprint on the ideological expression of the monarchy, especially the palace relief decorations, almost exclusively centered on the king as hero and embodiment of the Assyrian state. This focus on the king’s heroic and creative person is typically Assyrian and is also observed in the realm of historiography with the elaboration of the genre of annals (Tadmor 1997). These were records, organized chronologically, of the king’s conquests and other exploits, narrated in the first person. The construction of Kalhu is also very significant because it provides the first important example of the systematic restructuring that became a dominant characteristic of the Assyrian state under Tiglath-pileser III and the Sargonids. In this case Assurnasirpal’s restructuring efforts focused more on the center than the periphery, which under his reign was still largely a territory to be raided rather than controlled permanently. But the riches amassed thanks to the relentless campaigns to the west enabled him to muster enough resources and manpower to turn Kalhu into an impressive capital, peopled significantly both with old-stock Assyrians and deportees from the newly conquered regions, surely a symptom of a new vision of power and the state. With Shalmanezer III (858–824 B C E ) the policies of Assurnasirpal were largely carried on, with an increased effort to reduce the various Aramean and other states of the Levant to Assyrian clients. Shalmanezer III also consolidated and extended the provincial system in the regions east of the Euphrates, within Assyria’s traditional sphere of interest. This provincial system, which probably originated in the creation of a network of forts and supply centers for the annual campaigns of the army, was Assyria’s most original contribution to imperial governance. Already the Assyrian state was radically departing from the previous empires created by the Hittites of central Anatolia and the Hurrians of Mitanni in northern Syria, which were little more than feudal assemblages of vassal kingdoms and some directly administered territory under the loose control of the royal household. The new provincial system tended to blend and Assyrianize the conquered lands, and by making the imperial administration more efficient, it paved the way for increased interventionism. Also, in spite of the occasional co-optation of local elites in the Assyrian control system and the fact that provincial capitals were often the former seats of local dynasties, Assyrianization of a region was usually achieved by two different means: at the top by the removal of the former ruling groups and the appointment of Assyrians from the Assyrian heartland to administer the province, and at the bottom by deportation of population and relocation of production centers which destroyed local allegiances and often seriously altered the economic character of a region. A good example of Assyrianization in the ninth century is Til Barsib (modern Tell Ahmar) on the Euphrates in Syria, the capital of the former Aramean kingdom of BitAdini, which was integrated into Assyrian territory by Shalmanezer not too long after his first campaigns in the West and renamed ‘‘Port Shalmanezer’’ (Sader 1987:

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47–98). Shalmanezer eventually captured Ahunu, the leader of Bit-Adini, and claimed to have deported 22,000 of his people to Assyria. A large Assyrian palace was built on the acropolis of Til Barsib, and its painted wall decoration depicted scenes typical of Assyrian palaces of the first millennium, with no concessions to local taste and culture. This iconography demonstrated a will to export the Assyrian center and duplicate it in the provinces, a will to transform and to ‘‘make Assyrian.’’ This will to make Assyrian was transmitted in the language of annals and royal inscriptions by a series of expressions which kept a very strong ideological distinction between the ‘‘land of Assur’’ and the outside world, composed first of client states bound to the Assyrian king by various types of agreements and treatises, and then of outlying states not yet reduced to vassal status. Modern historians often make a distinction between Assyria proper and the Assyrian empire, Assyria referring specifically to the small triangular region on the upper Tigris River which formed the original homeland of the Assyrians. Yet in the native political vocabulary no such distinction was made except in a rather allusive manner. When a conquered region, however distant from the center, was turned into a province, it became part of Assyria, the ‘‘land of Assur,’’ and the people were made into Assyrian subjects. The deportation of foreign populations, mostly Arameans, to the Assyrian core, and the exportation of Assyrian administrators, architecture, and culture to the provinces, made Assyrianization a reality by gradually eradicating differences between areas of the empire that were previously culturally distinct, to the extent that the northern Syrian city of Harran, well outside Assyria’s original area, could become the last Assyrian capital after the fall of Nineveh in 612 B C E . That Syria itself probably owes its name to Assyria vividly testifies to the ancient perception that the two regions eventually fused into one country (Frye 1992). The process was also reciprocal, in that it was accompanied by a gradual aramaicization of the original Assyrian homeland with the influx of deportees from the west. Assurnasirpal II and Shalmanezer III only initiated the process of hom*ogenization, and Assyria was to undergo a serious crisis before territorial expansion and consolidation would resume. The crisis period, which lasted more than seventy-five years (827–745 B C E ), started with a rebellion in the Assyrian heartland which lasted several years and is usually interpreted as a reaction of the old nobility against the expansion of the provincial system which put forward a new class of royal favorites. And indeed, after the suppression of the rebellion, the influence of this new nobility of high officials increased dramatically, especially the influence of the commander-in-chief of the army, whose power often overshadowed the authority of the king. The northern state of Urartu posed a serious challenge to Assyrian hegemony, and together with its North Syrian allies it dominated the trading networks, creating serious economic problems for Assyria. The extent of actual royal authority was at times quite limited, while some provincial governors acted as nearly independent monarchs. If stronger factors of disintegration had been at work, Assyria might have disappeared altogether, or shrunk into complete insignificance as it had at the end of the Middle Assyrian period about 1076 B C E , except that this time it might have happened for good. But once more the country resurrected, and Assyrian expansion started on a new footing.

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Historians generally view Tiglath-pileser III (745–727 B C E ) as the real founder of the Assyrian empire, although it is obvious that in many respects he only systematized and expanded older administrative practices. One important step he took was to remodel the provincial system, first by splitting the very large provinces, thereby preventing leading high officials from becoming too powerful, and second by expanding the system for the first time west of the Euphrates, where a large number of provinces were created in the wake of the campaigns against the small kingdoms of Syria and the Levant. By abolishing the old border between the land of Assur and the client kingdoms of the west, Tiglath-pileser in fact inaugurated the true imperial phase of Assyria, and after him almost every new conquered land would automatically become a province, pushing the borders of Assyria far beyond the limits reached by any previous Near Eastern empire. Expansion did not focus exclusively on the west, however. Urartu was relentlessly attacked until it was finally neutralized at the end of the eighth century. Tiglath-pileser also invaded Babylonia and ascended the Babylonian throne under the name Pulu, inaugurating the principle of a double Mesopotamian monarchy. This final wave of expansion brought Assyria close to the borders of Egypt and Elam, which also fell prey to Assyrian territorial appetites during the reigns of Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal in the seventh century. The rapid expansion of the imperial control system from 745 to the fall of Nineveh in 612 posed a number of logistical and ideological challenges which received various answers and attempted solutions. The dominant traits of this new phase were the intensification of the system of deportations and forced resettlements, a planned policy of economic rationalization affecting primarily the provinces, and finally the emergence of an imperial culture celebrating artistic and literary achievements and presenting Assyrian rule in a more grandiose, and sometimes even magnanimous light. Mass deportations of the population of newly conquered regions were not new in Assyria, and were not even an Assyrian invention. However, the scale on which they were practiced by Tiglath-pileser III and his successors so much surpassed everything in previous recorded history that they must be reckoned as a new phenomenon, almost as a new means of government. The inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III, Sargon II, and Sennacherib alone mention more than 1,000,000 deportees, which accounts for more than 80 percent of all the people displaced between 745 B C E and the end of the empire (Oded 1979). Even keeping in mind that these numbers must be used with caution, they still convey a certain order of magnitude which reveals the scale of the new policy (De Odorico 1995: 170–6). Deportations affected everyone, from kings to menial workers. While breaking local resistance and obliterating rival centers of power had been their primary aim before the eighth century, during the imperial period they seem to have also become a tool of economic rationalization. Deportees were resettled where manpower was needed, especially in Assyria proper, which appears to have suffered from a demographic slump in the late eighth and seventh centuries. This of course further increased the cosmopolitan character of the Assyria heartland, especially that of its bloated palatial capitals, and at the same time allowed non-Assyrians, especially Arameans, to gain access to positions of responsibility and eventually to develop

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some allegiance to the empire (Garelli 1982; Tadmor 1982). Under Tiglath-pileser III the Assyrian army began to include vassal contingents which turned the army from a purely Assyrian one, based on the royal military service, into an imperial one. The influx of foreigners must have created some unease among native Assyrians, whose attitude toward them probably wavered between acceptance and mistrust, but in this respect Assyria was not different from Rome where the process of Romanization of the conquered populations inevitably led to their influx into the center, even at the imperial level, generating similar attitudes of recognition and hostility. Efforts at economic rationalization were particularly well documented in the Levant, the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. While entire areas like the kingdom of Israel underwent planned depopulation, others expanded demographically and economically because they were targeted by the Assyrian administration to fulfill a specific role in the imperial structure. This was especially true of the Phoenician and Philistine ports which received favorable treatment because of their privileged role in bringing the empire into contact with the larger trading networks of the Mediterranean. A particularly interesting case is the inland Philistine city of Ekron, which vastly increased in size after 700 to become the largest known olive oil production center in antiquity (Gitin 1997). Such industrial concentration can only have happened from Assyrian impetus, and the reason for this concentration may have been to facilitate production and especially distribution of the products, the logistics of transportation favoring one large production center over a myriad of smaller ones. It also appears that some textile production was concentrated at Ekron to make maximal use of the facilities and manpower located there, since the olive oil production season lasted only four months. At the cultural and ideological level several new traits emerged. One outstanding achievement was the library of cuneiform texts assembled by King Assurbanipal (668– 627 B C E ) in Nineveh, the largest collection of literary and scholarly texts ever found in Mesopotamia (Leichty 1988a; Potts 2000). In its comprehensiveness and organization it compares, though on a smaller scale, with the other great libraries of the ancient world such as those of Alexandria in Egypt and Pergamon in Turkey in the Hellenistic period. Assurbanipal himself claimed that he had been trained in the scribal art and could read difficult texts, ‘‘inscriptions from before the flood,’’ meaning from primordial time, and his personal involvement in the library is evident from the colophons, which contained detailed information on the texts and labeled them as his personal property (Hunger 1968: 97–108). In all respects, but especially in its ambition to gather in one single place the entire knowledge of a civilization, this library must be reckoned as a typical prestige achievement of a self-confident imperial culture at its zenith. A similar impression is gained from the stone reliefs commissioned by Assurbanipal for his palace. In their refinement, thematic breadth, and boldness of treatment they surpass everything produced before in this medium, ranking as one of the superlative artistic achievements of ancient Mesopotamia. A new concept of space appeared in art and texts. We now find statements that Assyrian kings ruled from the horizon to the heights of heaven, claiming distant conquests located on the edge of the world where people never heard the name of the Assyrian king, or whose existence the Assyrians hardly suspected (Tadmor 1999).

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Inscriptions showed an increasing interest in giving distances in miles to convey an idea of the size of the empire and the remoteness of its outlying regions. In art Sennacherib commissioned reliefs abandoning the former flat, one-dimensional, and strip-like display of imagery for a more complex iconography favoring expansive vistas and bird’s-eye perspective, a new spatial arrangement no doubt influenced by the widening and deepening horizon of the empire (Russell 1991: 191–222). Science and particularly cosmology were also impacted, with texts now measuring cosmic distances in hundreds of thousands of miles, thereby sharply departing from the tradition which viewed the cosmos as a rather small place, measurable and quantifiable on the same scale as the earth (Horowitz 1998: 177–86). In religion important changes also took place under Sennacherib (704–681 B C E ), who in the wake of his campaigns of destruction in Babylonia imposed a number of religious reforms which aimed primarily at co-opting the Marduk theology created by the Babylonian intellectual elites in the previous centuries into an imperial theology exalting the god Assur (Machinist 1984/85). These reforms also gave primacy to the cities of Assur and Nineveh as cosmic centers, thereby stripping Babylon of that role. The pivotal status of Babylon had been propagated by an array of myths, rituals, and other religious texts which proclaimed its role as center of the universe. This dogma created serious ideological problems for the Assyrians because of their cultural dependence on Babylonian scholarship and literature. The ideological conflict worsened as the rulers of Assyria faced an increasing urge to resolve the contradiction of ruling a world empire from Kalhu, Dur-Sharrukin, or Nineveh, while fostering a literary tradition exalting the centrality of Babylon, a conflict further exacerbated by the staunch opposition of Babylonians to Assyrian rule. Among the various solutions, alternately violent and peaceful, but none satisfactory, Sennacherib’s destruction of Babylon was undoubtedly the most radical one. Another important aspect of Sennacherib’s reforms was the identification of the god Assur with the primeval god Anshar, which gave the national god of Assyria a theological primacy and universal character in perfect harmony with the new Assyrian ambitions. Although the new Assur/Anshar theology gained lasting recognition, the anti-Babylonian aspects of his reform ultimately failed. Upon his accession his son Esarhaddon (680–669 B C E ) immediately reverted to a more traditional conciliatory attitude which was not basically to change under his successors, even after the suppression of the revolt of Sˇamasˇ-sˇum-ukin in 648 B C E . The official Assyrian attitude toward Babylonia then became very similar to the Roman attitude toward the Greeks after their conquest of Greece and the Hellenized kingdoms, one of deference to cultural superiority mixed with a certain protective attitude stemming from the acknowledged role of the new imperial power as custodian of a shared civilization. However, the simmering ideological conflict found a clear resolution only with the collapse of Assyria and its swift replacement by an empire ruled from Babylon. At the end of the seventh century it all came to a rather swift end. It has become almost a cliche´ of Assyriological writing to marvel, sometimes even to express regret at the sudden collapse of Assyria and to try to find some explanation for what is generally regarded as an unnatural event, a historical accident, something that should not have happened. However, a quick survey of world history, especially in the Near

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East, will demonstrate that empires generally tend to disintegrate and fall rapidly. This is due to their very nature. Empires often suffer from overextension of resources and from an extreme centralization of decision-making which facilitates the collapse of the entire structure if the core is successfully attacked. Assyria certainly did not fall more swiftly than the succeeding Babylonian or Persian empires, which disappeared from the world scene even faster than they had arisen. Even the Western Roman Empire completely disintegrated in the space of two generations in the fifth century of our era. Of course, every case is particular, and what were the specific weaknesses of Assyria that made it so vulnerable to attack remains open to speculation. Various factors have been invoked, such as the small size of the Assyrian heartland in relation to the empire, its demographic decline in the seventh century, the fact that richer parts of the Near East lay outside of Assyria while Assyria itself was only a conglomerate of small villages, with the exception of Assur and the large capitals which were largely financed by the spoils of conquest. In the final analysis, perhaps Assyria had been a typical case of a state which massively and successfully invested in one area, the military, and built an empire with the help of that powerful tool and the incentive of an irresistible will to power. One is reminded of Russia under Peter the Great, or Prussia in the eighteenth century, which launched ambitious programs of selective modernization and huge investments in military technology, while structurally they remained massively agrarian and economically backward compared with the emerging capitalist economies of Western Europe. Assyria proper and its north Syrian extension seem to have lost all dynamism after the fall of Nineveh. The large imperial and provincial capitals where population and resources had been concentrated declined rapidly, leaving the former heart of the empire largely ruralized, a backwater in the political landscape of successor states. It took centuries before Assyria regained some economic and political importance under the Parthians, a fact which may reveal that some structural weakness plagued it during the last phase of the empire. In short, Assyria’s collapse was perhaps unavoidable. The powerful allegory of empires found in the Book of Daniel, with its motif of the statue with a head of gold and feet of clay, indicates that in ancient times it was perfectly well understood that empires had an inherent fragility concealed beneath their outward might.

The Babylonian Empire In Babylonia the old ideology of the Sumerian city-states had never died out in spite of the unification of the country and the creation of a single Babylonian monarchy during the Old Babylonian period (2004–1595 B C E ). In contrast to Assyria, Babylonia was a conglomerate of cities with very ancient traditions, built around large and wealthy temples where gods and goddesses reigned like earthly monarchs and owners of the land. This contrast was reflected in the building programs of the two monarchies. Whereas the mammoth architectural undertakings of the NeoAssyrian period aimed at exalting the king, those of the Neo-Babylonian monarchs

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were devoted mainly to the care of the gods. True, they built for themselves an impressive palace in Babylon, and, if we are to believe later reports about the famed Hanging Gardens, they spared no expense to provide their residence with delightful surroundings. But we are far from Assyrian palaces which their owners intended as living cosmic centers. In Babylon this role was not filled by the royal residence, but by the city itself. The emphasis on the cosmic role of Babylon in texts, art, and architecture was the manifestation of a dogma, well illustrated by the inscription of Nabopolassar (625– 605 B C E ) commemorating the restoration of the inner defensive wall of Babylon. Inserted in the body of the inscription was a hymn to the wall, praising it as ‘‘the solid border as ancient as time immemorial,’’ as ‘‘the staircase to heaven, the ladder to the netherworld,’’ and with many more epithets extolling its creation in primeval time and status as favorite residence of the gods (Beaulieu 2000b: 307–8). The outer aspect of the city at the time of Nebuchadnezzar II (604–562 B C E ), when most of the building works were carried out, must immediately have reminded the onlooker of the city’s status as the center of the cosmos, the passageway between heaven, earth, and the netherworld, with the dazzling blue-colored bricks of the ceremonial gates merging into the light brown color of the walls and buildings, like sky and sand dunes meeting at the horizon. The main decorative motif in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace was the tall, stylized palm trees of the throne room rising against the walls. Virtually nothing of the artistic display of Assyrian palaces survived into Babylonian imperial iconography, not even the colossal guardians standing at their gates. In Babylon such guardians were depicted in reliefs made of molded bricks, standing in superimposed rows at the city gates. Literally floating in the lapis-blue sky of the glazed bricks, they possessed none of the immediacy and reality of their Assyrian counterparts. They lived in the cosmic realm of the idealized city, not in the concrete world of the royal art of might and power. Babylon was not the only city in the core of the empire. Sippar, Borsippa, Nippur, Ur, Uruk, Kutha, and several others also laid claim to very ancient traditions, and the Neo-Babylonian kings acknowledged their sanctity by lavishing great riches on their temples. Such largesse allowed them publicly to display their devotion, and thereby to secure their legitimacy. A new official discourse arose which proclaimed the correct performance of religious rituals and duties and the meticulous rebuilding of sanctuaries as the sole reason of the monarchy for being (Talon 1993). This ideology was accordingly reflected in the epithets of the kings, who contented themselves with the titles of ‘‘king of Babylon,’’ which reflected the cosmic centrality of Babylon, and ‘‘king of Sumer and Akkad,’’ which embodied their duty to provide for the sanctuaries of Babylonia. They generally refrained from using old Mesopotamian titles implying universal dominion, such as ‘‘king of the world’’ and ‘‘king of the four quarters,’’ which had formed the mainstay of Assyrian royal titles. Only with Nabonidus (555–539 B C E ), who looked back to the Assyrian period and seems to have been more preoccupied than his peers with the political expression of universal dominion, do we find some limited resurrection of imperial titles. From reading the inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian kings one gains the feeling of a systematic denial of the fact of empire, contrasting with the very obvious exercise of it in practice.

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The reasons for this ideological denial are open to speculation. Perhaps the Babylonians, who had never really had an empire, did not exercise universal dominion long enough to be able to create an adequate political vocabulary. Yet there were models to emulate, at least the Assyrian model, the memory of which was still fresh. But several times the official inscriptions of the Babylonian empire commented on the fall of Assyria, and almost always with the same theological explanation, that it was caused by divine retribution for the crimes committed in the past by Assyrian kings, chiefly Sennacherib, against the cult centers of Babylonia. In the inscription of Nabopolassar the theological argument was further developed into a glorification of the contemplative life of the devout king, representing the Babylonian model, contrasted to the brutality of the impious, illegitimate ruler who trusted only in feats of might and power, representing the Assyrian model (Beaulieu 2003a). And history had proven that Babylonian piety had triumphed over Assyrian hubris and savagery. The Babylonian denial of empire may well have originated in this moral condemnation of Assyria by the theologians. But there was indeed an empire. Yet, how it was administered and how much it coopted the former provincial system of the Assyrians remain open questions. The evidence from Dur-Katlimmu in northeast Syria seems to suggest that Babylonians just stepped in and reused the former Assyrian administrative structure, but we lack texts to substantiate this (Ku¨hne 1997). Apart from a few documents, no provincial archive from the western part of the empire has been discovered. The texts found in the royal palace in Babylon are still mostly unpublished, and official inscriptions give no information on military conquests. If it were not for the Babylonian Chronicle Series, only partly preserved for that period (Grayson 1975: 87–113), and the Bible, we would know almost nothing about the growth of the empire. By and large, however, it seems that Babylonian policies were modeled on Assyrian practices, in particular regarding the restructuring of the conquered regions. Mass deportations continued. The case of Jerusalem and Judah is well known from the Bible, yet not unique. Several small towns in Babylonia were named after Levantine cities, suggesting that they had been peopled by deportees from the west. Although some of these settlements may have originated in the Neo-Assyrian period, others were established under Babylonian rule. This is certain for Surru (Tyre), which appears in the cuneiform documentation soon after the capture of its famed Phoenician namesake by Nebuchadnezzar (Joanne`s 1982). As in imperial Assyria, the influx of foreigners must have increased the diversity of the already composite population of Babylonia. Babylon must have become a real cosmopolitan Babel, if we are only to judge from the few published texts from the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. These record mostly allocations of rations to various deportees and other foreigners stationed in the capital. Among the various people listed we find Philistines from Ashkelon, Phoenicians from Tyre, Byblos, and Arwad, Elamites, Medes, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks (here called Ionians), and Lydians (Weidner 1939). In some respects Babylonian methods of government surpassed the Assyrians in brutality. The Palestinian policy of Nebuchadnezzar is a case in point. The year 604 saw the annihilation of Ashkelon in the wake of Nebuchadnezzar’s campaign to secure the Levant against the ambitions of Egypt (Stager 1996). In the following

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years Ekron was similarly destroyed. The evidence for planned destruction is massive, and the sites remained deserted until the reign of Cyrus (538–530 B C E ), when the Persians allowed activities to resume. Judah and its capital were similarly devastated. It is possible that Babylon did not have the resources to integrate and develop the area in the same manner as the Assyrians had done in the previous century, and therefore a policy of burnt earth may have been instituted in order to prevent the Egyptians from gaining a foothold in the areas. One sector where the Babylonians enjoyed greater success than their predecessors was northern Arabia. The last Babylonian king Nabonidus was able to secure the entire area for the empire down to the modern city of Medina. According to Babylonian sources he built a palace in the oasis of Teima, where he took up residence for about ten years, and destroyed the herds and means of subsistence of the nomadic population, probably with the intention of forcing them to settle in areas under imperial control (Beaulieu 1989: 169–85). In this respect the Babylonian empire again followed the same methods as the Assyrians, in spite of the official tenor of royal inscriptions which recorded only the pious and pacific deeds of the rulers. Unlike what happened in Assyria, the end of the Babylonian empire did not cause the demise of the Babylonian urban core. Babylonian cities had prospered before the empire and continued to do so under the Persian and Hellenistic monarchies. The empire had brought an influx of riches to Babylon and the old cities of Sumer and Akkad, allowing unprecedented architectural activity to be sponsored by the kings. Yet the spoils of conquest and tribute were certainly not the main source of wealth for imperial Babylonia, if we are only to judge from the fact that under the Persian rulers, well after the loss of political independence, Babylonia contributed the largest amount of precious metal in taxes to the treasury. With such natural riches it is hardly surprising that the Babylonians never looked beyond Babylonia in the elaboration of their ideology of power and of their geographic conception of the world.

The Persian Empire Since the third millennium various states and nations with their center of gravity east of Mesopotamia, either in the Zagros Mountains, or the plain of Susa, or even further east on the Iranian plateau, had interacted with Mesopotamia. At times harmonious, at others adversarial, these relations had generally tended to stabilize around a point of equilibrium, since Mesopotamian states never succeeded in controlling those regions effectively except for short periods of time and at great military cost, while easterners occasionally raided Mesopotamian territory but never achieved lasting occupation. Why suddenly in the sixth century the balance tipped in favor of the Persians, we simply do not know. It is probable that various economic, demographic, and technological factors worked in their favor, but we lack the kind of information that would make the analysis of those factors possible. The irruption of the Persians onto the world stage and their swift success seem as sudden and unexplainable as that of Islam in the seventh century of our era. In a relatively short span of time the Persians built an empire so territorially extensive that even by modern standards it would seem extremely difficult to administer.

World Hegemony, 900–300 BCE

The Persians, led by the ruling family called the Achaemenids, certainly possessed an innate genius for co-opting the administration and structure of the kingdoms they conquered, and this must to some extent explain their success. Egyptian and Babylonian sources reveal that the transition to Persian rule was remarkably smooth. The former Babylonian empire remained whole for a long time, forming the satrapy, or province, of ‘‘Babylon and Transeuphratene’’ which lasted at least until the end of the reign of Darius (521–486 B C E ), more than half a century after the conquest of Babylon (Stolper 1989). The superimposition of Achaemenid imperial institutions was therefore slow and cautious. Their function was to ensure the regular flow of taxes to the center for the maintenance of the court and the military. During the entire period of Persian rule one of the most conspicuously attested Achaemenid institutions in Babylonian documents was the regime of military colonies, which was particularly well documented, though indirectly, in the archives of the Murashu family from Nippur (Stolper 1985: 70–103). Furthermore, the Achaemenid rulers did not try to Persianize their subjects in the same way as the Assyrians and the Romans sought to spread an imperial identity. For the Assyrian kings the world was divided into Assyrians and non-Assyrians, terms which had lost their ethnic connotation very early on to become expressions of the political divide between Assyrian subjects and all the people who had not yet submitted to the yoke of the god Assur. With the Achaemenids, on the other hand, conquered people were fully recognized as distinct and left undisturbed as long as they acknowledged their vassal status within the empire. There is no evidence for the extensive and sometimes brutal restructuring which characterized the previous Mesopotamian empires. Achaemenid imperial art eloquently reflected the nature of Persian rule. It was a composite art, made up of juxtaposed elements borrowed, almost without alterations, from Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and other subject peoples of the empire. Yet, it also had, in spite of this, a highly distinctive, immediately recognizable style characterized by a cold and distant mood. Achaemenid art created an impression of calm and harmony emerging from the acknowledged diversity of the empire, expressed in its cosmopolitan iconographic repertoire. It also stressed the acceptance of Persian rule, expressed in a unified and subtly refined aesthetic, a far cry from the power art of the Assyrians impudently exalting the heroic and often brutal aspects of the monarchy. Indeed, there were no scenes of war or humiliation of the conquered in Achaemenid art. The procession of subject peoples at Persepolis proclaimed only a voluntary participation of every nation with its own traditions in the celebration of Achaemenid power. Such ideology was not only deduced from the art, but was also made explicit in the foundation charter of Darius I from Susa, which specifically named the nations from all over the empire which provided craftsmen to build the citadel at Susa (Lecoq 1997: 234–7). It can be objected that such harmony existed only as an ideological claim, yet one suspects that it really tells us something about life in the Persian empire. The relative ease with which Achaemenid rule was installed and maintained almost undisturbed for such a long period, 539 to 331 B C E , contrasts with the enormous difficulties encountered by Assyrian and Babylonian empire builders in the previous three

Paul-Alain Beaulieu

centuries. Assyria especially was surrounded by enemies and powerful rival states, and the empire could be maintained only by costly annual campaigns. Even in the seventh century, when it reached a critical mass, rebellions were always simmering in one or another of its provinces, often encouraged by powerful rivals. More distant countries like Egypt were controlled only briefly, and never fully. The Babylonian empire reached a more harmonious equilibrium with its neighbors, but its hegemonic position was constantly held in check by equally powerful competitors such as Egypt and Persia. With the Persians all these formerly rival powers became finally united into one huge administrative and economic space. One must not forget that the work of imposing the imperial idea and structure had already been accomplished well before the Persians entered the stage. In a sense the Achaemenids gave Mesopotamia the world empire with a vast hinterland which neither Assyria nor Babylonia had ever achieved, although they had taken the initial, most difficult steps in that direction. One important ingredient of Achaemenid success was precisely this absence of competing powers which allowed the ruling elite to exert its hegemony far more efficiently, while using much less force and repression than any previous imperial state. The fact that the Persian ruling elite was a very small minority in the empire also accounts for the rather tolerant exercise of power. Forced acculturation of conquered people was unthinkable and not even desired. Like the Manchus in China during the Qing period (1644–1911 of our era), the Persians formed a thin aristocratic layer which could survive only by adapting to the nations it conquered as it was co-opting them into a fast-rising imperial structure. The Achaemenids formed an ethnically hom*ogeneous ruling class (Briant 1987). Access to that class was severely restricted because of the fear of being diluted in the mass of subjects, and for the same reasons Persianization was not encouraged by the state, the main purpose of which was to maintain the privileges of that compact and jealously guarded aristocracy. The Achaemenids envisioned no dramatic reshaping or restructuring of their conquests since such policies were not necessary to ensure this basic function of the imperial structure. Indeed, such policies would have been counterproductive and imperiled the very reason of the state for being. As had happened with Assyria and Babylon, the empire of the Achaemenids seemingly crumbled like a house of cards when faced with the onslaught of Alexander the Great. Should we then conclude that the empire suffered from a structural weakness that made it an easy prey for Alexander’s appetites? Such views were indeed propagated by fourth-century Greek writers, who did much to create the myth of Persian decadence and ineffectualness in order to provide a moral justification for the conquest or simply to explain the astonishing ease with which it was accomplished. This view of steady Achaemenid decline, which has survived in modern historiography, has been completely debunked by recent research (Briant 1993). Unlike Assyria on the eve of its destruction, it seems that neither Babylon in the sixth century, nor the Persian empire in the fourth, showed any particularly alarming sign of decline. On the contrary, in both cases the explanation for their demise probably lies in the superior resources and organization of their enemies. In the case of Persia an easy conquest was conceivable, for one could see that once the

World Hegemony, 900–300 BCE

ethnically hom*ogenous ruling class was successfully attacked and removed, the entire edifice would easily fall into the hands of the aggressors. Yet this does not mean that the empire was a diseased body, for in many respects the Persian state represented the culmination of Ancient Near Eastern empire building, a final synthesis of the oldest civilizations in that part of the world before their irreversible transformation by the ferment of Hellenism.

FURTHER READING Parpola 1987a discusses the eclipse of Babylonia and Assyria at the end of the Bronze Age. Boardman et al. 1991 offers well-balanced surveys of the political and cultural history of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. For the growth of the Assyrian empire see Liverani 1988b and Postgate 1991–2, while Parker 2001 offers a more detailed assessment based on its northern frontier. On the rule of conquered territories and the provincial system see Grayson 1995. Reflections of Assyrian ideology and official propaganda in art and texts are treated by Liverani 1979, Tadmor 1981, and Winter 1981. There is no up-to-date comprehensive treatment of the Babylonian empire, but Brinkman 1984 offers a detailed survey of the conditions leading to its rise. For the Persian empire the essential introduction is Wieseho¨fer 1996. Briant 2002 is a tour de force of historical writing with in-depth analysis of Greek sources.

PART II

Discourses on Methods

CHAPTER FIVE

Archaeology and the Ancient Near East: Methods and Limits Marie-Henriette Gates Archaeology’s contributions to Ancient Near Eastern history involve more than supplying the raw data – archives and monumental inscriptions – identifying ancient sites on the ground, and checking chronological outlines, all first steps toward the reconstruction of historical narratives. At the same time, historical documents from the Ancient Near East provide otherwise inaccessible information for many issues pertinent to archaeological analysis of its societies. The two fields of archaeology and history thus complement each other, but by definition examine their subjects by using different sources, and from these orient themselves toward different objectives. This essay will touch on some aspects of the past and current relationship between archaeology or the archaeological perspective and Ancient Near Eastern history. History is defined here in terms deriving from the Annales school of historians in France to cover events and also instances or patterns of social and economic behavior that include mentalities, or culture, and the historian refers to the specialist whose primary sources are written (Bloch 1953; Braudel 1972). The archaeologist, in contrast, relies on the material record rather than the written one, and consults artifacts, building plans, settlement patterns, and other tangible remains of human activity for primary interpretive data. Reconstructing sequences of events and the personalities behind them remains the preserve of the historian, while issues of cultural definition and change, within a specific context and in a broader landscape, concern the archaeologist. Historian and archaeologist together share the ambition and the need to recreate mentalities and social patterns, Braudel’s second tier of historical analysis, and in this respect the two fields would appear to be closely linked. The extent to which they have formed alliances in their mutual program of resurrecting the ancient civilizations of the Near East is presented here from the archaeological side of their association.

Marie-Henriette Gates

Archaeology’s Contribution to Historical Accounts about the Ancient Near East A