The Archaeology of Mesopotamia

Theories and Approaches

Roger Matthews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135134532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The only critical guide to the theory and method of Mesopotamian archaeology, this innovative volume evaluates the theories, methods, approaches and history of Mesopotamian archaeology from its origins in the nineteenth century up to the present day.

Ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), was the original site of many of the major developments in human history, such as farming, the rise of urban literate societies and the first great empires of Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria.

Dr. Matthews places the discipline within its historical and social context, and explains how archaeologists conduct their research through excavation, survey and other methods. In four fundamental chapters, he uses illustrated case-studies to show how archaeologists have approached central themes such as:

* the shift from hunting to farming
* complex societies
* empires and imperialism
* everyday life.

This will be both an ideal introductory work and useful as background reading on a wide range of courses.

Chapter 1

---

Defining a discipline

Mesopotamian archaeology
in history

---

A chequered past: origins and development

The history of Mesopotamian archaeology as a modern discipline is rooted in the entrepreneurial and colonial past of the Western powers. The story of modern Western involvement with Mesopotamia, as with other parts of the world, begins with sporadic encounters by enterprising traders and travellers pushing out their horizons and setting up initial and tentative lines of contact between vastly disparate worlds. Since the end of the Crusades in the Middle Ages, a largely disastrous engagement between the West and the East had been in abeyance, but with the widening of cultural, political and economic horizons attendant upon, initially, the Renaissance and then, more urgently, the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe and the consequent capitalist drive towards new resources and markets, a renewal of interactions became inevitable. Over the past two centuries or so, the nature of that renewed engagement has scarcely been less catastrophic than that of the Middle Ages, as is attested by at least one story a day in our newspapers, but one of the surviving waifs of that intercourse is indeed the modern study of the Mesopotamian past. In assessing the role and position of Mesopotamian archaeology within the contemporary world, however, let us try not to visit the sins of the parent upon the child, at least not without a full and fair hearing.

Where, then, in history can we assign the beginning of Mesopotamian archaeology? Does it begin with the long journey through the region in the later twelfth century of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, or with the Italian noble Pietro della Valle collecting a handful of bricks bearing cuneiform inscriptions from the ruins of Ur, Babylon and Borsippa, where he conducted some excavations, and returning with them in 1625 to Europe where his finds caused considerable interest (Invernizzi 2000)? Or do we see a start in the voyage of the Dane Carsten Niebuhr and

Figure 1.1 Map of Mesopotamia and environs, depicting location of selected sites mentioned in the text

his basic mapping of Nineveh in March 1766? Does the discipline begin with Claudius Rich surveying the ruins of Babylon in December 1811 and of Nineveh in 1820 on outings from his post as Baghdad Resident of the East India Company? Or in December 1842 with Paul Emile Botta sinking the first trenches into the dusty earth of Nineveh? Or with Austen Henry Layard's discovery in November 1845 of two Assyrian palaces on his first day of digging at Nimrud? And what of early nineteenth-century attempts at the decipherment of cuneiform, such as those of Grotefend and Rawlinson on the trilingual Bisitun inscription in Iran? All these dramatic events, and many others, can be compounded as an early stage in the evolution of Mesopotamian archaeology.

Are these genuine beginnings to the discipline or are we ignoring earlier or contemporary developments outside the Eurocentric tradition? Tellingly, Seton Lloyd begins his masterful book on the history of Mesopotamian discovery, Foundations in the Dust, with the following sentence:

It is a curious fact that, owing to the almost universal ignorance of Arabic literature in the West during their time, our ancestors' knowledge of the geography of Mesopotamia and Western Asia

Figure 1.2 Borsippa, central south Iraq, mistakenly identified in the past as the Tower of Babylon

Source: photo by R. Matthews.

generally was derived largely from the accounts of various European travellers.

(Lloyd 1947: 11)

Lloyd was correct to point to the underrated (in the West) achievements of Arab intellectuals. Comparative historical narratives dealing with ancient non-Islamic peoples and with Islamic origins, as well as with the classical tradition of Greece and Rome, were already a feature of ninth- and tenth-century Arab historians such as al-Tabari, al-Mas'di, and al-Biruni (Rosenthal 1968; Masry 1981: 222; Hourani 1991: 53–4), while the geographical writings of Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century situate the world of Islam within a rich and diverse global context.

The works of the fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun, above all, are imbued with a concern to transcend particularist histories by developing a ‘science of culture’ (Mahdi 1964), rooted in what we might now see as principles of social theory, human-environment dialectics, and ideology, an intellectual foundation upon which to explore what Ibn Khaldun saw as the five problematic subject areas of human existence worthy of scientific historical investigation: the transformation of primitive culture into a civilised condition, the state, the city, economic life, and the development of the sciences. Why did archaeology not develop out of or alongside this intellectual discourse? In a recent article, Vincenzo Strika speculates that Islamic intellectuals of the Middle Ages were on the verge of arriving at something that might have become archaeology as we know it, had it not been swamped by the European tradition of science and history from the time of Napoleon onwards, a tradition that was too intertwined with Western exploitative colonialism ever to be acceptable or attractive to indigenous intelligentsia (Strika 2000).

If we look for evidence of a specifically Ottoman interest in the past of Mesopotamia, a land ruled by the Ottomans for almost four centuries, we are met with complete silence until after the arrival of the European powers (Özdoğan 1998: 114), followed by the founding of the Imperial Ottoman Museum in Istanbul in the late 1860s. In essence, the past of Mesopotamia had reverted to dust, and its recovery and interpretation have been largely the fruit of Western engagement. By the time of that engagement, Mesopotamia had become ‘a neglected province of a decaying empire’ (Lloyd 1947: 211), ‘the system of irrigation had declined, and vast areas were under the control of pastoral tribes and their chieftains, not only east of the Euphrates but in the land lying between it and the Tigris’ (Hourani 1991: 226–7).

But let us not forget the evidence for the practice of a kind of proto-archaeology by the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia themselves. Irene Winter has suggested that in the first millennium BC ‘the Babylonian past was actively sought in the field’ (Winter 2000: 1785; italics in original), by the inhabitants of Babylonia as part of a concern with royal patronage. Thus carefully executed programmes of excavation at Babylon, Sippar, Ur and Larsa of buildings a thousand or more years old were mounted by kings such as Nabonidus and Nabopolassar in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, while statues of Gudea were recovered and displayed in the palace of a Hellenistic ruler of Telloh, 2,000 years after their manufacture (Kose 2000).

The theory and practice of the modern discipline are heavily rooted in the story of Western political interest in the Middle East. At this point, it may be useful to define some of the geographical terms that will feature throughout this volume, particularly as the origin and usage of these terms cannot be separated from their political contexts in modern times (Bahrani 1998; Van De Mieroop 1997a). The term ‘Mesopotamia’ as used today refers to the territory largely contained within the Republic of Iraq, with much smaller areas in northeast Syria, southeast Turkey, and west Iran. Modern usage of the term ‘Greater Mesopotamia’ applies to the watersheds of the rivers Euphrates, Tigris and Karun (Wright and Johnson 1975: 268). In antiquity Mesopotamia was the name given to a satrapy constructed by Alexander the Great from parts of two Achaemenid satrapies, and subsequently a province of the Roman empire in what today is the region of southeast Turkey stretching from the left bank of the Euphrates at Samsat to the Tigris at Cizre (Talbert 2000: map 89). J. J. Finkelstein demonstrated some time ago that prior to the late second millennium BC, citations in Akkadian of

or ‘the land of Mesopotamia’, referred to ‘the midst of the river’ rather than ‘between the two rivers’, and more specifically that the name Mesopotamia designated the lands contained within the three sides of the great bend of the Euphrates in Syria and Turkey, extending only as far east as the westernmost tributaries of the Habur river (Finkelstein 1962). Use of the term Mesopotamia to mean the lands between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers probably came about with the arrival of Aramaic-speaking tribes in the late second millennium BC, a usage adopted by Alexander the Great and the Romans in their definitions of Mesopotamia. Today the geographical scope of the term has greatly expanded to include all the Euphrates-Tigris lands as far downstream as the Gulf. Zainab Bahrani has argued that the application ofthe term ‘Mesopotamia’from the mid-nineteenth century onwards serves a political end in expropriating the past of Iraq and its neighbours for the European classical tradition, at the same time dissociating the past of the region from its modern inhabitants, whose country is called Iraq, not Mesopotamia (Bahrani 1998: 165); a fair point, given that the term as originally constructed did not apply to territory south of the Habur-Euphrates confluence. Perhaps use by the Romans of the Greek word ‘Mesopotamia’ to designate this fiercely contested border region from the second century AD onwards served a similar political agenda in its own time.

The terms ‘Middle East’ and ‘Near East’ are also of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century origin, coined by European and North American politicians and strategists in order to define parts of what had previously been lumped together under the term ‘the Orient’, a catch-all phrase covering all of Asia from Constantinople to Beijing and much more besides. As Bahrani has shown, usage of the term ‘Mesopotamia’ to cover the pre-Islamic past of the region and of ‘Middle East’ to cover the modern, principally Islamic, manifestation of the region has further served to dissociate the past from the present in the eyes of the Eurocentric tradition (Bahrani 1998: 165). Increasing use of the terms ‘Southwest Asia’ or ‘Western Asia’, particularly in contemporary European academe, to denote ‘the geographical region between the eastern Mediterranean and the Indus Valley and between the Black and Caspian Seas and southern Arabia’ (Harris 1996: xi) is the result of an honest attempt to employ a terminology as empty as possible of political baggage. But within this still huge area we need a term to cover what most of us agree on as a specific geographical region and ‘Mesopotamia’ is the only term readily comprehensible by all.

The story of the early development of Mesopotamian archaeology has been related in several accounts (esp. Lloyd 1947, revised 1980; and Larsen 1996; see also Handcock 1912; Parrot 1946; Pallis 1956), and here we provide no more than a summary of some main features. The early decades of Western archaeology in Mesopotamia were at one level an episode of loot-grabbing whereby spectacular finds such as slabs of stone reliefs from great Assyrian palaces in north Iraq were sought and claimed on behalf of museums in, principally, Britain and France. Working within an intellectual framework shaped by the Bible and the classics, Western scholars and adventurers, led by Botta and Layard, uncovered enormous quantities of valuable antiquities, removed them from their original contexts and then shipped them to the Louvre or the British Museum, who encouraged them with financial inducements ranging in scope from miserly to generous. The scale of these operations was immense. At Nineveh, for example, Layard uncovered a total of 3km of wall faces with sculpted reliefs, principally using the technique of tunnelling.

What was being transported to the museums and upper-class residences of Britain and France was much more than priceless antiquities, however. An entire past was being kidnapped as part of ‘building the Orientalist discourse’, in Edward Said's phrase (Said 1978). In search of biblical verification and a radicalisation of the Western Graeco-Roman tradition within a region now identified as the ‘cradle of civilisation’, scholars sought to bring the Mesopotamian past firmly within a historical trajectory defined by the Bible, classical texts, and primitive theories on the rise of civilisation (Larsen 1989). For the Marxist prehistorian Gordon Childe, the glory of the Orient was to be viewed as an ‘indispensable prelude to the true appreciation of European prehistory’ (Childe 1952: 2). Their success in this expropriation may be measured by the wide acceptance of the accuracy of that trajectory from Mesopotamia through Greece and Rome to the world of the West today (Bottéro 2000; Parpola 2000). As Zainab Bahrani puts it: ‘The image of Mesopotamia, upon which we still depend, was necessary for a march of progress from East to West, a concept of world cultural development that is explicitly Eurocentric and imperialist’ (Bahrani 1998: 172; see also Van De Mieroop 1997a: 287–90).

While accepting the force and validity of this argument, two points may be made. First, writing as a Mesopotamian archaeologist of west European origin, I wish to bring in from the postmodern cold my colonial ancestors who, like us all, were subject to forces of history on a scale larger and subtler than they perhaps could have imagined. As Seton Lloyd has written regarding nineteenth-century excavators in Mesopotamia: ‘No logic or ethics of an age which they could not foresee must be allowed to detract from the human endeavour of these great explorers’ (Lloyd 1947: 212). The context of their interactions with the indigenous peoples of Iraq and adjacent lands may have been one of imperial exploitation, annexation and expropriation. In many cases, however, their intentions were noble and committed, as comes through in surviving diaries and letters, such as those of Gertrude Bell (1953) and others who learnt local languages and strove to improve the social, economic and cultural lot of the inhabitants of the region. Many of them suffered and died in pursuit of their commitments and convictions. Whatever the political context of their passion for the past, and for the present, of the lands of Mesopotamia, that passion was genuine and in some ways productive.

Second, we should not cease to appreciate on their own terms the achievements of the Eurocentric tradition in apprehending the Mesopotamian past, as much as the achievements of that past itself. There is no denying the imperialist and Eurocentric context of the creation of a place for ‘Mesopotamia’ within the world-view of Victorian England. In deconstructing the concept of ‘Mesopotamia’, however, we should not thereby reject all notion that, for example, the world of ancient Greece was heavily affected by a host of influences from the East and that these influences might indeed have been transmitted to us today, however indirectly. These influences and traditions, often subtle and inadequately studied, in fields as diverse as religion, ideology, philosophy, mathematics, music and sport, have received consideration lately in a range of stimulating publications, including Stephanie Dalley's book The Legacy of Mesopotamia (Dalley 1998), an article by Simo Parpola boldly entitled ‘The Mesopotamian soul of Western culture’ (Parpola 2000; see also George 1997), and Jean Bottéro's vision of ‘the birth of the West’ from Mesopotamian origins (Bottéro 1992; Bottéro et al. 2000). The annexation of the past of Mesopotamia by nineteenth-century travellers from Western Europe took place a century and a half ago, but the process has not stopped and the ground remains hotly contested. Above all, we need constantly to be aware of our generally implicit attitudes towards the Mesopotamian past and its part in world history: ‘Perhaps the time has come that we, Middle Eastern scholars and scholars of the ancient Middle East both, dissociate ourselves from this imperial triumphal procession and look toward a redefinition of the land in between’ (Bahrani 1998: 172; see also Larsen 1989). Redefining, realigning and rehabilitating the Mesopotamian past remains a major task and challenge for the decades ahead.

Moving on from the first steps in Mesopotamian archaeology, and the modern postcolonial date, we now provide a brief account of how the discipline evolved in the decades subsequent to the 1840s. Following Botta and Layard's assaults on the great Assyrian cities of the north, a mass of barely controlled investigations started up over much of Mesopotamia, with British explorers Rawlinson, Loftus and Taylor working at Borsippa, Warka, Larsa, Ur and Tell Sifr from 1849 onwards. Layard himself rather reluctantly sunk trenches into Babylon and Nippur in late 1850 without major result. French explorations at Kish and Babylon south of Baghdad in 1851 failed to find the hoped for sculpture-clad palaces now well known in the north, and interest eventually waned. Rassam and Place continued the work of Layard and Botta at Nineveh and Khorsabad, and Rassam found time to commence digging at yet another Assyrian capital, Aššur, in 1853. A major disaster occurred in 1855 when 300 hundred pac...