Studies in Egyptology and the Ancient Near East This interdisciplinary series publishes works on the ancient Near East in antiquity, including the Graeco-Roman period, and is open to specialized studies as well as to works of synthesis or comparison. Series Editor John Baines, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford Editorial Board Jeremy Black (University of Oxford) Alan Bowman (University of Oxford) Erik Hornung (University of Basel) Anthony Leahy (University of Birmingham) Peter Machinist (Harvard University) Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan) David O'Connor (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) D.T. Potts (University of Sydney) Dorothy Thompson (University of Cambridge) Pascal Vernus (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris) Norman Yoffee (University of Michigan) Also Forthcoming in this Series Local Power in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia Andrea Seri Statue of Idri-Mi Courtesy of the British Museum Myth and Politics in Ancient Near Eastern Historiography MARIO LIVERANI Edited and Introduced by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop LONDON Published by Equinox Publishing Ltd Unit 6 The Village 101 Amies St. London SW11 2JW www.equinoxpub.com First published in the UK 2004 © Mario Liverani 2004 Introduction and editorial apparatus © Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-9047-6804-0 (hardback) Typeset by CA Typesetting, www.sheffieldtypesetting.com Printed and bound in Great Britain by Anthony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire eISBN: 1845534719 Contents Editors’ Introduction vii Acknowledgements xiii Abbreviations xiv PART ONE: MESOPOTAMIA 1 Adapa, guest of the gods 3 PART TWO: HITTITE ANATOLIA 2 Telipinu, or: on solidarity 27 3 Shunashura, or: on reciprocity 53 PART THREE: SYRIA 4 Leaving by chariot for the desert 85 5 Rib-Adda, righteous sufferer 97 6 Aziru, servant of two masters 125 PART FOUR: HEBREW BIBLE 7 The story of Joash 147 8 Messages, women, and hospitality: Inter-tribal communication in Judges 19–21 160 Bibliography 193 Index 209 * Editors’ Introduction Myth and Politics in Ancient Near Eastern Historiography brings together, for the first time, a series of essays by the leading historian of the ancient Near East, Mario Liverani. These essays have all appeared previously in scholarly journals, mostly in the Italian language (one in French). Because their original language is not widely read outside Italy, they have been ignored to a great extent by non-Italian scholars, despite their often fundamental rereading of ancient texts that are the basis of many of our historical reconstructions. Their presentation here is thus aimed at giving them the audience they deserve. The intention of this edition is also to provide more than a translation into English of earlier essays: the col- lection has the unifying theme that all the chapters are fundamentally concerned with the question of historiography. Although they cover a wide range of his- torical and chronological subjects, they are all rigorous investigations of how the historian makes meaning of an ancient document. In other words, they address the historian’s craft as an intellectual enterprise. This focus on the work of the historian has implications for history as a practice in general, not only for the ancient Near East. At the same time, this is also a collection of essays that allows the reader to see the development of Liverani’s work from the early 1970s until the 1980s. The papers retain a great validity more than twenty years later because they were revolutionary in character and their concerns have only recently come to be shared by other scholars in ancient Near Eastern studies. They continue to stand as a paradigm of historical criticism of ancient Near Eastern textual sources. * The essays published here were originally translated from the Italian and French by Mario Liverani himself, who also removed some philological discussions. They were sent to John Baines for publication in the Equinox series. Baines asked us to edit them for their English style. We decided also to provide short introductions that are intended to contextualise the material discussed in the essays. We do not aim to update the bibliography and discussion, except when easily accessible recent English translations are available. John Baines went over our work several times, and Mario Liverani read and commented on the final version. We have attempted to turn Liverani’s elegant Italian style into acceptable English academic writing, but must acknowledge that this has on occasion done a disservice to his original. Since the content of these contributions is so important, we have persevered, even if we may not always have succeeded in rendering the form. viii Myth and Politics in Ancient Near Eastern Historiography Liverani’s scholarly and methodological concerns were developed in relation to literary and anthropological scholarship of the time when he wrote the essays. In retrospect, from the point of view of twenty to thirty years on, we can see that the work arose out of an intellectual climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when structuralism and post-structuralism was being developed in Continental Europe. Liverani’s questions and concerns, his insistence upon the nature of the processes of reading historical documents, emerged within this climate. One of Liverani’s methodological innovations is his utilisation of a structural analysis of myth for Mesopotamian material. In ‘Adapa, guest of the gods’ (chapter one), rather than adhering to a standard reading on the level of the narrative myth, he takes an anthropological approach, inspired by Claude Lévi- Strauss, that considers the rituals of hospitality. The dyads of food and drink, clothing and bathing are aspects of treating guests according to obligatory rules of behaviour. Anu’s startling offer of immortality is understood in the context of these rules, and Adapa’s rejection saves the god from having to change the destiny of mankind. Liverani intersects a structuralist approach of mythical narrative with anthropological discussions of rituals of hospitality (deriving notably from Julian Pitt-Rivers), and with the more standard philological criticism of the ancient historian. In chapter two, ‘Telipinu, or: on solidarity’, Liverani explicitly takes his colleagues to task. He points out that the ‘lazy historian’ reads the ancient text at face value, and considers it to be an accurate narrative that only needs to be adjusted with additions or minor corrections from other sources. Liverani insists on the point that sources are always historical reconstructions in themselves and that they do not have a ‘pure historical aim’. Instead, their aim is political, moral, theological, and so on. We have to analyse their ideology in order to come closer to the original intent of the text and the historical reality. In the case of the edict of Telipinu, a structural analysis reveals a binary pattern of good and bad reigns that succeed one another, with Telipinu’s presenting a culmination of the positive development. To accept this as an accurate reflection of what happened in Old Kingdom Hittite history is naive, and the text of the Edict has to be seen as providing information about Telipinu rather than about the reigns of his predecessors. The above points may seem obvious to the theoretically aware reader today. However, at the time of the essay’s publication in 1977, historians generally did not think about these methodological issues. It also needs to be stressed that Liverani, as a historian of the ancient Near East, was not simply following meth- odological trends established in other areas of the discipline of history. In fact, he addressed these historiographic issues at the same time as historians such as Hayden White were beginning to write more directly about historical criticism. Hayden White’s work in the 1970s and 80s is best known for employing the Editors’ Introduction ix critiques of literary narrative, rhetoric, and so on, in the study of historical texts that had been traditionally considered transparent documents (see, for example, the papers collected in Hayden White, The Content of the Form, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Parallel to that body of work, Liverani already in the early 1970s insisted on considering the historical document as a written source, with qualities that require the same kind of reading as other written texts. Thus, Liverani’s work should not be seen as influenced by these changes, but rather as participating in them at the forefront, in relation to sources from antiquity. Part of the reason why his theoretical commentaries on history have been less known than those of his contemporaries is no doubt that work in ancient Near Eastern studies is not widely read by other historians, who consider the field to be peripheral, if a historical discipline at all. An important aim of this edition of Liverani’s writings is to present the development of his thinking about historical criticism to a wider audience by contextualising and historicising it within the broader framework of academic theories that emerged in both the humanities and social sciences in Continental Europe while he was composing them. Take, for example, the third chapter, ‘Shunashura, or: on reciprocity’ (first published in 1973). Here Liverani discusses a document that is neither a historical narrative of events nor an annal, but a single document – a treaty. He analyses it as a literary text, focusing on the use of symmetry in its formation, and correlat- ing that duality or mirroring to the importance of exchange and binary parity in certain events.