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The Tribal World of Zimri-Lim 2 The Tribal World of Zimri-Lim During the period of the Mari archives, a large proportion of the popula- tion identified themselves by tribal social structures that incorporated both settled and mobile communities, whose location overlapped the boundaries of fixed kingdoms across wide swaths of ancient Syria, Turkey, and Iraq. The tribal peoples within the Mari kingdom belonged mainly to two confedera- tions that together represented a coherent duality: the Simalites of the “left (hand)” and the Yaminites of the “right (hand),” probably directional ref- erences to north and south. One remarkable discovery of the current Mari publication team is the depth of continuity between urban and nonseden- tary segments of the region’s population. Far from being set in irrevocable opposition as nomads and townspeople, or even in complementary opposi- tion, this large group considered itself part of one social fabric, divided not by mode of life or place of residence but according to traditional associations of kin. It is impossible, then, to understand the kingdoms of our Mari pe- riod without also exploring the intersection of tribe and town and “land” (matum¯ ). Beyond this value for context, however, tribal social organization is strongly correlated with group-oriented forms of decision making that balance the power of “exclusionary” hierarchies and their individual rulers. The entire Yaminite people are defined as a confederation of five tribes, each with its own ruler. Zimri-Lim seems to have been acknowledged as the one Simalite king, but his actual dealings reveal the monarch’s need to ne- gotiate frequently with his own tent-dwelling (Hana) tribesmen to win their military support. These negotiations generally˘ take the form of large inclu- sive meetings, attended by one or more representatives of the king. Under Copyright © 2004. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. University Press. © 2004. Cambridge Copyright the rule of Zimri-Lim, the individual Sim alite “divisions” (gayum) retain no political function, which perhaps makes it all the more impressive that this collective identity never submerged beneath the kingdom’s active political categories. We cannot conclude that all group-oriented decision making at- tested in the Mari archives originated in tribal political traditions, because Fleming, Daniel E.. Democracy's Ancient Ancestors : Mari and Early Collective Governance, Cambridge University Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=255194.24 Created from brown on 2017-08-22 11:15:40. Tribally Organized Pastoralists and the Amorrites 25 ancient towns may have preserved their own collective practices, but the tribes represented one powerful structural counterweight to exclusionary governance. Zimri-Lim’s kingdom was governed by two separate lines of authority. The districts (hals.um) of the inherited Banks-of-the-Euphrates (Ah Purat- ˘ ˘ tim) dominions were overseen by “governors” (ˇsapit¯ .um), each with his own local palace and “deputy” (laputtumˆ ) to allow centralized administration. Residents of the Ah Purattim districts were liable to census as a basis for military draft. Simalite˘ tribespeople who could be classified as Hana (“tent- dwellers”), however, were free from this administrative hierarchy.˘ They ac- knowledged a “leader” (sugagum¯ ) who was affiliated only by tribe, not town, and two Simalite chiefs of pasture (merhumˆ ) served as respected leaders over the entire tent-dwelling tribal population.˘ The merhumˆ s reported only to Zimri-Lim and his immediate cabinet of top advisers,˘ and stood outside the district system. These Simalite Hana represented the backbone of Zimri- Lim’s army, but he could never simply˘ command their active support, and the merhumˆ s had to join in tribal meetings and await the collective decision ˘ (i.e., see the rihs.um). Zimri-Lim did not take the census of his Hana. The sugagum¯ “leaders”˘ require special attention because their office˘ straddles lines of authority defined in tribal and town terms. Although they occupy a key position in Simalite Hana leadership, the sugagum¯ s are best known at Mari as town leaders. We cannot˘ understand the larger structure of the Mari kingdom, especially during the reign of Zimri-Lim, without examining this entire tribal political system. There have been numerous studies of the tribal peoples and “nomadism” in the Mari archives, including a long work in preparation by Durand that will expand tremendously our current knowledge of these phenomena, and my own chapter is not intended to cover the same terrain systematically. The central phenomenon of this book is rather the collective political mode that is most often visible in the town, and I find myself addressing tribes and tribal political order because these are woven seamlessly into the urban landscape of the Mari archives. My focus is the political organization of the tribes, especially as this finds expression in Zimri-Lim’s kingdom at Mari (see the next chapter). To this end, after dealing with some introductory matters, I turn to the contrasting tribal terminology and structures of the Simalite and Yaminite confederacies, in order to establish a framework for all further analysis. Then I discuss the key individual leaders who represent the tribe under Zimri-Lim, the sugagum¯ and the merhumˆ . The sugagum¯ plays an im- portant role in distinguishing Yaminite and˘ Simalite political structures, at Copyright © 2004. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. University Press. © 2004. Cambridge Copyright the same time as he is the one individual leader whose very office can be de- fined by the town he serves. I conclude by considering certain implications of the contrasting Simalite and Yaminite structures, first for understanding the Hana “tent-dwellers” under Zimri-Lim, and then for evaluating specific Yaminite˘ political terminology in the Mari archives. Fleming, Daniel E.. Democracy's Ancient Ancestors : Mari and Early Collective Governance, Cambridge University Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=255194. Created from brown on 2017-08-22 11:15:40. 26 The Tribal World of Zimri-Lim a. tribally organized pastoralists and the amorrites Even in times much more recent than those of the Mari archives, tribal peoples are notoriously slippery subjects for academic study, in large part because they are foreign to both the writers and their sources. The sources are mostly written from a distance by outsiders viewing the tribes with hostility or some other bias. ...They rarely deal specifically or in reliable detail with the basic so- cial and economic organization of tribal communities; and they mention individual tribes only when prominent in supporting or opposing government, when involved in inter-tribal disorders, or when transported from one region to another. (Tapper 1990, 56) Against this pattern, the Mari archives from the reign of Zimri-Lim offer a rare view of tribal organization that includes perspectives from within the tribal societies themselves. Zimri-Lim’s thirteen-plus–year reign represents the brief success of a tribal chief in reestablishing the power of his tribe over a city center and kingdom that had been lost to his kin some years earlier. He was in effect a tribal king over what might be called a tribal state,1 and though his correspondence and his administrative archives do reflect the world of sedentary and nontribal urban society, the world of the tribes has a high profile in these texts and is often described by people who maintain current ties with its structures. Some of the letters were even sent by the tribal rulers and leaders of mobile pastoralist communities themselves. If we want to learn about tribal society in the ancient Near East, there is surely no better source. It is difficult to begin a study of “tribal” peoples in the Mari archives with- out some larger sense of the implications embedded in this identification. At the same time, discussion of the “Amorrite” tribes in these texts is usually joined to ideas about their pastoralist or “nomadic” activities, and the entire cluster requires some reflection. As with my previous treatments of issues and literatures that reach beyond Near Eastern studies, I am selective. My goal is to provide a larger context for the specific problems presented by the Mari evidence. 1. Using the Word “Tribe” One cannot use the word “tribe”2 without defining further what one has in mind. Richard Tapper (1990, 50–1) observes three concepts of the tribe in broad academic discourse: r Copyright © 2004. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. University Press. © 2004. Cambridge Copyright a type of primitive society, attached to specific cultural-linguistic groups and contrasted to “states”; r more precisely, a type of society in a hierarchy from simple bands of hunters to “tribes” to more complex chiefdoms and states, characterized by “kinship” and “descent” in their social-political organization; Fleming, Daniel E.. Democracy's Ancient Ancestors : Mari and Early Collective Governance, Cambridge University Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=255194. Created from brown on 2017-08-22 11:15:40. Tribally Organized Pastoralists and the Amorrites 27 r political groups defined by territory, divided by segments the descent framework of which is to be distinguished from the political-territorial structure of tribes as such. (Evans-Pritchard) These categories do not exhaust the applications of the term, but they offer an immediate sense of some of the basic divisions. Working from the second concept, which is typical of the evolutionary approaches of Sahlins (1968), Fried (1975), and Service (1975), Norman Yoffee refuses to apply the word “tribe” at all to the Yaminites, Simalites, and other such “ethnic groups” of the Mari archives, because a proper tribe is “a social organization without independent units of authority and in which surplus production and storage are discouraged through mechanisms of wealth and power leveling” (Yoffee 1988, 51; cf.
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