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

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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 develop- ments, 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 re- gional system. The third and last part, Empires (pp. 195–280), follows the development of the three successive empires of the Assyrians, Babylonians 9225-06_Anes_43_11_Bunnens 265 17/1/07, 4:21 pm 266 G. BUNNENS 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 prob- lems 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 con- sidered 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 an- cient 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 as- pects 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. 9225-06_Anes_43_11_Bunnens 266 17/1/07, 4:21 pm A REVIEW ESSAY 267 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, in- cluding 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 cul- ture 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 interrela- tionships 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- 9225-06_Anes_43_11_Bunnens 267 17/1/07, 4:21 pm 268 G. BUNNENS 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 mil- lennium is a time of great transformation and the source of many later de- velopments. 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 emer- gence 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.
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