Ancient Near Eastern History As a Subject of Scholarly Investigation: a Review Essay

doi: 10.2143/ANES.43.0.2018772 A REVIEW ESSAY ANES 43 (2006) 265–274265

Ancient Near Eastern History as a Subject of Scholarly investigation: a Review Essay

G. BUNNENS

Avenue de la Briqueterie, 36 B-1300 Wavre BELGIUM E-mail: [email protected]

Marc Van De Mieroop, 2004 A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000–323 BC. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Pp. xix + 313 pp. ISBN 0-631-22551-X; ISBN 0-631-22552-8 (pbk).

Marc Van De Mieroop, Professor at Columbia University, is known for a wide range of publications dealing with Mesopotamian civilisation. His most recent work is a textbook about ancient Near Eastern history. After an introduction (“Introductory Concerns”, pp. 1–16), which gives preliminary information about geography, source material and prehistoric developments, the book is subdivided into three main parts. The first, under the title City States (pp. 17–118), covers the period from 3000 to 1500 BC. and reviews the emergence and development of urbanism through chapters de- voted to the Uruk period, the Sumerian city-states, the centralised states of the Akkad and Ur III dynasties, and the reorganisation of the political map of the Near East in the first half of the second millennium BC. The second part, Territorial States (pp. 119–194) includes the period from 1500 to 1000 and pays special attention to the international relations dominated by the “Club of the Great Powers”. Two chapters describe the western states (Mitanni, Hatti and Syria-Palestine) and the eastern states (Assyria, Babylonia and Elam). A last chapter covers the disintegration of this regional system. The third and last part, Empires (pp. 195–280), follows the development of the three successive empires of the Assyrians, Babylonians

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and Persians, down to the conquest of the region by Alexander. A series of “King Lists” (pp. 281–296), a “Guide to Further Reading” (pp. 297–302), and an index (pp. 303–313) have been appended to the book. An original feature of this History is its illustration about which more will be said below. Van De Mieroop presents a well balanced account of the most saliant features of ancient Near Eastern history. The narration is both personal and comprehensive. Rather than commenting on the author’s personal choices and opinions on particular topics, the publication of this book will be taken as an opportunity to comment on some of the methodological problems that anyone wanting to write a history of the ancient Near East would face.1 Van De Mieroop made the task easier by explaining his views on these problems in the review he published of Amelie Kuhrt’s The Ancient Near East (Kurht 1995; Van De Mieroop 1997, col. 285–305) and by elaborating, in a previous book, on some theoretical and practical aspects of the writing of ancient history (Van De Mieroop 1999). The first problem is to define the meaning of the phrase “ancient Near East”. In his 1997 review, Van De Mieroop noted how vague and fluctuat- ing the existing definitions were and concluded that the only conceptual unity he could find was that the history of the ancient Near East was the history of “an area now considered to have been part of ‘the West’ prior to ancient Greece” (col. 287). However, he did not propose his own definition. In his new book, he adopts geographical boundaries that, as he admits, “are deliberately somewhat indeterminate” (p. 1). He illustrates this indetermi- nation with a few examples. For instance, Egyptian history, that is not considered as belonging to his subject, “intersects with that of the Near East at many times” (ibid.). Similarly, “at times Mesopotamian states reached into the Arabian peninsula” (ibid.). It is therefore necessary, in some occasions, to go beyond the proposed limits of the Near East and to include, among others, Egypt and Arabia. This, however, is an ad hoc solution. It does not resolve the general problem of a satisfactory definition of the subject of ancient Near Eastern history. The difficulty, that is not specific to the new book, probably arises from the way the problem is formulated. The two examples of Egypt and Meso- potamia only concern political history. They do not imply that other aspects of ancient life, such as social organisation or religion, are also con- cerned. A different approach was suggested seventeen years ago by Mario Live- rani. In his own history of the ancient Near East, unfortunately not avail- 1 The present review continues a discussion started in Bunnens 2000.

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able in English, Liverani defined his subject in terms of the progression of urbanisation (Liverani 1988, pp. 13–15). According to him, the entire area affected by urbanisation, and by the subsequent palatial system, should be taken into account. It consisted of a series of interrelated sub-regions, including southern Mesopotamia where the earliest urban society emerged. Liverani deliberately restricted his subject to southern Mesopotamia and the areas adjacent to it. Although he denied any “regional imperialism”, he implicitly admitted some kind of “mesopotamocentrism”. Given those premices, Liverani had also to recognize that the boundaries of the ancient Near East varied over time. With Liverani’s approach we might get closer to a solution of the debate on the nature of the “ancient Near East”. Liverani shifted the discussion from the exclusively geographical level — what is the Near East? — to a more global approach in which the human factor, especially urbanisation, was determinant. Such an approach must be considered as more produc- tive. History is about human society and its change over time. The human aspect must be considered first. If we go further, we notice that human societies consist of networks of interrelationships between individuals, which result in formalised systems of comportments and thoughts that are common to entire groups and/or subgroups of human beings. The most adequate term we can use to refer to these systems is “culture”. Therefore the real goal of history as a scholarly discipline cannot be but the study and interpretation of the development and interaction of past cultures. If we apply these methodological presuppositions to the “ancient Near East” we notice that the way it is treated by Van De Mieroop, and many others before him, actually consists of a study of the Sumero-Akkadian culture and of its interaction with neighbouring cultures. The “Mesopotamo- centrism”, for which Liverani felt obliged to apologise, is not an arbitrary choice on the part of historians — admittedly a choice favoured by the fact that Mesopotamia offers the most abundant source material — but an atti- tude dictated by a comprehensive study of the various developments that took place in the regions to the east of the Mediterranean. The object of study is thus not a geographical region but a specific culture and it is only a matter of convenience if we refer to its development as to “ancient Near Eastern history”, because, contrary to what this phrase suggests, geography is not the main defining factor. It is subordinate to the human factor. The “ancient Near East” is the area in which developed a network of interrelationships between the Sumero-Akkadian and other cultures. Another problem about which historians cannot reach a consensus is the defintion of the chronological boundaries of “ancient Near Eastern his-

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tory”. When to start? When to stop? The period considered by Van De Mieroop extends from the end of the fourth millennium down to Alexan- der’s conquests. These two limits, however, differ in nature. The upper chronological limit adopted by Van De Mieroop, namely the end of the fourth millennium BC, finds its justification in the fact that “several prehistoric processes culminated simultaneously at this time, and writing appeared, dramatically changing the nature of our source material” (p. 2). It is the time of what Van De Mieroop calls the “Uruk revolution”. More generally, it is the time of the “urban revolution”, as Gordon Childe called it many years ago, or, to put it more simply, of the emergence of urbanism. One cannot but agree with such a choice. The late fourth millennium is a time of great transformation and the source of many later developments. To appreciate its real significance, however, it must be considered in all its complexity. Van De Mieroop pinpoints the invention of writing as its most salient feature. This is congruent with the old opinion that held that history begins with the first textual evidence. The criterion, however, is more accidental than essential, especially considering that the first texts, to the extent they are understood, are not very informative. The real distinc- tion should be between recorded and unrecorded history. When writing emerges, wherever it is in the world, it only begins to inform on processes that have already been going on for a long period of time. The fact that Mesopotamia, together with Egypt, had one of the first writing systems known in history does not alter the fact that, when both Mesopotamia and Egypt started writing, they already had a long past — that is a long history — behind them. On the other hand, many regions of the “ancient Near East” are poorly documented by textual evidence or not documented at all. More than in the invention of writing, the importance of the emergence of urbanism must be seen in the fact that, in some regions such as southern Mesopotamia and Egypt, it gave birth to an original culture, of which writing was only one feature, however essential it may have been. Urbanism was thus a real turning point, a “revolution”, but it cannot be used as a chronological terminus in “ancient Near Eastern history” without further qualification. Urbanism emerged first in southern Mesopotamia, western Iran and Egypt, and only several centuries later in other parts of the “ancient Near East”. The emergence of urbanism, if it is taken as a chronological terminus, applies thus differently to different parts of the Near East and the rationale for its adoption as a chronological terminus for the entire area cannot be restricted to its intrinsic significance.

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Again, culture could open the way towards a solution. With the phrase “Uruk revolution” Van De Mieroop symptomatically brings us back to Mesopotamia. It is also symptomatic that, in his review mentioned above, Van De Mieroop discussed the periodisation, not of the ancient Near East as a whole, as the title of his essay would make us expect, but of Mesopota- mia and Egypt (Van De Mieroop 1997, col. 289–296). In clear, this shows that, when discussing the periodisation of “ancient Near Eastern history”, Mesopotamia, which was only one part of the region, emerged as repre- sentative of the entire region. The real starting point of “ancient Near East- ern history”, that henceforth will be put between inverted comas, is thus nothing else than the starting point of Mesopotamian culture or, to use a term that is probably anachronistic in the fourth millennium, of the Sumero-Akkadian culture. Only in this perspective can the emergence of urbanism determine a turning point in absolute chronology. If we admit this, the problem of the lower chronological limit of “ancient Near Eastern history” becomes that of the end of the Sumero-Akkadian culture. As is well known, the Akkadian language was written, if not spo- ken, until the beginning of our era. But this is only one of the most salient features of a process of dilution that had started much earlier. Actually, the beginning of the end should be placed at the beginning of the Achaemenid period. The conquest of Mesopotamia by Cyrus and its integration in the Achaemenid empire marked the end of the political independence of Meso- potamia. If Sumero-Akkadian culture, in the narrow sense of the word, sur- vived for several centuries, it stopped affecting neighbouring cultures, or it only affected them through the heritage it transmitted to the Achaemenid culture. The process of dilution was accelerated when Alexander destroyed the Achaemenid empire. However, in the perspective that is proposed here, the date of Alexander’s conquest, which Van De Mieroop, after many others, takes as marking the end of “ancient Near Eastern hirtory”, is only one step in a longer process. The real turning point is the Achaemenid period. On the one hand, it perpetuated the Mesopotamian empire of the Assyrians and Babylonians, but, at the same time, it shifted the focus of attention to regions situated to the east of the fertile crescent. And, by en- compassing vast regions from the Mediterranean to the Indus valley, it fa- cilitated the interaction between the various cultures of the empire. It is not sufficiently emphasised that the Achaemenid period is also the period during which hellenism started spreading to most regions of the ancient world. The Achaemenid period is a time of profound mutations and culture change. It should be seen as the beginning of a new era rather than the end of “ancient Near Eastern history”. Its inclusion in a survey of “ancient Near

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Eastern history” can be justified only as a conclusion to the whole story, when a new chapter of history is progressively opening. “Ancient Near Eastern history” covers the time span between the emergence of urbanism in southern Mesopotamia and the “globalisation” that took place during the Achaemenid period. The periodization of “ancient Near Eastern history” is another of the problems on which historians hesitate. Van De Mieroop is extremely dubitative about the possibility of reaching an agreement in this respect. His opinion is best summarised by himself (pp. 2–3; see also Van De Mieroop 1997, col. 289–296). After observing that “a sequence of phases, mostly defined in dynastic terms based on events in Mesopotamia, is strung together as a historical continuum,” he concludes: “In the end, the avail- ability and extent of the sources define the ancient Near East as a historical subject and subdivide its history” (p. 3). Such a statement seems to be much too pessimistic. It is true that the available evidence only gives sorts of snap- shots of various apparently unrelated fields. “Stringing them together” in a “historical continuum” may seem an impossible task, but the difficulty can be overcome, at least to some extent. The problem is to identify similarities between isolated groups of sources. If similarities exist between groups that are dated to different periods, continuities may be hypothesised between them and, consequently, gaps can be filled and a general picture can be drawn, however blurred it may seem in many places. Let us consider Mesopotamia. The traditional periods of Mesopotamian history could be grouped together in the following way:

I. The formation of Sumero-Akkadian culture A. The origins (= Uruk period) B. Shaping Sumero-Akkadian culture (Early Dynastic and Akkad) C. The classical age (Lagash dynasty/Gudea, Ur III, Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods) II. The mature Sumero-Akkadian culture A. Canonisation of the heritage (Kassite period and early first millennium BC) B. A Babylonian “Renaissance” (Neo-Babylonian period)

During phase II a sub-group of the Sumero-Akkadian culture emerged in the North around Assur. It took shape during the Kassite period (Middle Assyrian period) and culminated in the first half of the first millennium BC with the Neo-Assyrian empire which came to an end when the Neo-Babylonians started a kind of Renaissance. Prior to the Middle-

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Assyrian period, during the so-called Old-Assyrian period, the region around Assur was part of a whole that extended to all northern Mesopota- mia, which politically materialised at the time of Shamshi-Addu in the eighteenth century. However, the Mesopotamian scheme applies only loosely to other regions. Let us take the example of Syria. During the Uruk period, and de- spite the presence of Uruk settlements in Syria, the region was still at the village level of organisation and the period can be broadly defined as Chalcolithic. Urbanism emerged in the first half of the third millennium (Early Bronze I–III) and culminated in the second half of the millennium (Early Bronze IVa and b). The time around 2000 BC was a period of inten- sive change. Soon emerged the mature Syrian culture (Middle Bronze I and II) which extended into the second half of the millennium (Late Bronze I and II). Another crisis affected the area soon after 1200 and, from the elev- enth century onwards, a kind of Renaissance took shape in the Aramaean and Syro-Hittite states. This period came to a progressive end with the spread of the Assyrian domination. This evolution could be formalised as follows:2

I. The formation of Syrian culture A. The first urban culture (EB I–III) B. The age of the large regional centres (EB IVa and B) II. The mature Syrian culture A. Rebuilding the Syrian culture (MB I) B. The classical age of Syrian culture (MB II and LB I–II) III. The “Syrian Renaissance” A. Rebuilding Syrian culture again (IA I) B. The Aramaean and Syro-Hittite “Renaissance” (IA II/III)

The emergence of Syrian culture does not go back as far in the past as that of the Sumero-Akkadian culture. It is true that major crises — one around 2000, another one in 1600/1500 and a third one in 1200/1100 — affected both areas simultaneously, but their impact differed according to

2 P. Matthiae has proposed a periodisation of ancient Syria into “Proto-Syrian” (“archaic” = EB I–III; “mature” = EB IVa; “late” = EB IVb), “Palaeo-Syrian” (“archaic” = MB I; “mature” = MB II), “Medio-Syrian” (LB), and “Neo-Syrian” (Iron Age) (see Matthiae 1995, pp. 48–49). Besides the terminology, the periodisation that is proposed here differs from that of Matthiae essentially on two points: it considers the Middle and Late Bronze Ages as form- ing one cultural period and leaves the door open to identifying more recent periods in the development of Syrian culture, such as the Hellenistic/Roman period or the Umayyad period (see Bunnens 2000, p. 8).

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the regions. If the 2000 crisis seems to have had a profound impact on both areas, the 1600/1500 crisis affected Mesopotamia more than Syria and, con- versely, the 1200/1100 crisis affected Syria more than Mesopotamia. The same kind of observations could be made about other areas of the “ancient Near East”, for instance Anatolia or Iran. There is no perfect match between the internal development of the Sumero-Akkadian culture and that of these regions, event though, at times, they seem to follow the same path. The first conclusion that can be drawn is that no periodisation applies to the entire “ancient Near East”. This, however, should not be taken as an indication that these regions cannot be considered together. There is a unifying factor, which is the level of Mesopotamian interference. Mesopotamian interference can be evaluated not only by political intru- sions from Mesopotamia but also by practices such as the adoption of the Akkadian language and script, the use of cylinder seals or a specific form of iconography, all originating in Mesopotamia. Local cultures developed at their own pace and faced their own internal problems, but they were all affected, to some degree and differently according to time, by Mesopotamian culture. Only very broad phenomena, such as the emergence of urbanism or the advent of Hellenism, concern the entire region, but rarely at the same time everywhere. The sole unifying factor of “ancient Near Eastern history” is therefore the development of its most expansive and most long- lived component, the Sumero-Akkadian culture. Interaction between this and other cultures forms the framework of “ancient Near Eastern history”. This is why, even though no periodisation can apply to the entire area, the “ancient Near East” can, nonetheless, be considered as a subject of historical investigation. In the three instances of geographic extension, chronological boundaries and periodisation, culture appears to be satisfactory as a defining factor. Culture is thus the notion on which historians should concentrate when they define the subject of their research. Geography is misleading, as is, in the present case, the notion of “Near East”. As for chronological boundaries, dates of particular or spectacular events, as, in the present case, the emergence of writing or Alexander’s conquest, may mask a deeper and more significant reality. And periodisation is satisfactory only if it applies to a smaller unit than the “ancient Near East”. We can now turn to more practical considerations. As was said above, an original feature of Van De Mieroop’s book is its illustration, which aims to present supporting evidence for the notions developed in the text. Illustra- tions include “figures” reproducing photos of artefacts, “charts” with chronological tables and a list of weights and measures, “maps”, “boxes”

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with explicative texts about specific problems such as year names (p. 61) 3 or Assyrian royal annals (p. 170) and “documents” that consist of translations of ancient texts. The author must be praised for including these in his study. Illustration is not there just to make the pages less compact, as is most often the case, but to contribute to the general goal of the book, i.e. to introduce the reader to “ancient Near Eastern history”. A minor criticism would concern the “boxes”, which are mere developments of some aspects of the themes discussed in the text. They could have been placed in the text as an integral part of it. It must be regretted that these illustrations are not more abundant. All the main themes developped in the book should have been illustrated by an example of either textual or material evidence. The publisher is perhaps more to blame for this than the author, as publishers are often reluctant to develop illustration. More generally, these illustrations raise a major problem of history-writing when it aims at popularising the conclusions reached by scholars in often esoteric publications: how to offer a plausible recon- struction and explanation of the past without masking the uncertainties of our knowledge? An ideal textbook should not only summarise the conclusions that the author finds the more plausible, but it should also introduce the reader to the intricacies of historical criticism, especially complicated when dealing with cuneiform text material. Information supplied by diplo- matic correspondence, for instance, cannot be treated in the same way as evidence deriving from a later chronicle. The ideal textbook should also give an idea of the debates going on in scholarly literature. Van De Mieroop developped excellent ideas about these methodological problems in Van De Mieroop 1999. The present book might have gained from including more of these ideas in its discussions. As it stands, however, this book is an extremely useful introduction to “ancient Near Eastern history” and it should be recommended to students at all levels. Good reading for beginners, it will remain a reliable compan- ion throughout their studies.

Bibliography

Bunnens, G. 2000 “Syria in the Iron Age: problems of definition,” in Essays on Syria in the Iron Age, edited by G. Bunnens, pp. 3–19. Ancient Near Eastern Studies Supple- ment 7, Louvain: Peeters.

3 The only exception is the Uruk vase (p. 26) that should have been placed among the figures.

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Kuhrt, A. 1995 The Ancient Near East. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1995.

Liverani, M. 1988 Antico Oriente: Storia, società, economia. Bari: Laterza.

Matthiae, P. 1995 Ebla, la città rivelata. Milan: Electa.

Van De Mieroop, M. 1997 “On writing a history of the ancient Near East.” Bibliotheca Orientalis, 54: col. 285–305.

1999 Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History. London and New York: Rout- ledge.

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