A Companion to the Ancient Near East

Daniel C. Snell

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119362494
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The new edition of the popular survey of Near Eastern civilization from the Bronze Age to the era of Alexander the Great

A Companion to the Ancient Near East explores the history of the region from 4400 BCE to the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire in 330 BCE. Original and revised essays from a team of distinguished scholars from across disciplines address subjects including the politics, economics, architecture, and heritage of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Part of the Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World series, this acclaimed single-volume reference combines lively writing with engaging and relatable topics to immerse readers in this fascinating period of Near East history.

The new second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include new developments in relevant fields, particularly archaeology, and expand on themes of interest to contemporary students. Clear, accessible chapters offer fresh discussions on the history of the family and gender roles, the literature, languages, and religions of the region, pastoralism, medicine and philosophy, and borders, states, and warfare. New essays highlight recent discoveries in cuneiform texts, investigate how modern Egyptians came to understand their ancient history, and examine the place of archaeology among the historical disciplines. This volume:

• Provides substantial new and revised content covering topics such as social conflict, kingship, cosmology, work, trade, and law
• Covers the civilizations of the Sumerians, Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Israelites, and Persians, emphasizing social and cultural history
• Examines the legacy of the Ancient Near East in the medieval and modern worlds
• Offers a uniquely broad geographical, chronological, and topical range
• Includes a comprehensive bibliographical guide to Ancient Near East studies as well as new and updated references and reading suggestions

Suitable for use as both a primary reference or as a supplement to a chronologically arranged textbook, A Companion to the Ancient Near East, 2 nd Edition is a valuable resource for advanced undergraduates, beginning graduate students, instructors in the field, and scholars from other disciplines.

PART I
THE BIG PICTURE

CHAPTER ONE
A History of the Ancient Near East

Mario Liverani

Unity and Diversity

The history of the Ancient Near Eastern civilizations is very long; its timespan from the late fourth to the late first millennium BCE is equal to or even longer than the rest of history, from the collapse of the Near Eastern cultures to our own time. It is correct to use the label “the first half of history.” We could even say “of our history,” because this long trajectory is now considered part and even the very foundation of our own “Western” history – not like other more remote civilizations in India or China or elsewhere.

The reasons for the Western appropriation of the Ancient Near Eastern cultures and history were especially important at the time of their rediscovery. These included the colonialist ideology and practice of the nineteenth century, the interest of the Christian world in Biblical antiquities, coupled with the Islamic disregard for pre‐Islamic heritage. In recent decades these motivations have faded, and they are no longer primary to the community of scholars. Yet Biblical connections are still widely of concern to popular audiences, and so the interest in the history of the Ancient Near East is something more serious than curiosity about a remote and alien past.

Our Western civilization acknowledges a privileged role for Greek civilization in generating the foundational values of freedom, democracy, individual personality, economic enterprise, rational thought and science, and the aesthetics of the visual arts and poetry. But our indebtedness to the Ancient Near Eastern civilizations in the material foundations of culture (urban life, political organization, administration, writing) and in the field of religion remains important.

But is the Ancient Near East a unified subject for historical inquiry? The area is characterized by a notable diversity in natural environments (hills and steppe‐lands, river valleys and Mediterranean countryside), by different peoples and languages (Semites and Indo‐Europeans and others), by various ways of life (urban to nomadic) and modes of production (from agriculture and pastoralism to specialized crafts and complex financial dealings), by different complicated writing systems, by social diversity in access to resources, communication, and decision‐making – so that a unitary treatment may seem unjustified. Nevertheless, when compared with other centers of civilization (including the contiguous centers of Egypt, the Indus Valley, the Aegean basin, and Central Asia), and especially when contrasted to the periphery between the centers of the major civilizations, the Ancient Near East seems compact enough to allow for a unified treatment because of intensive cross‐fertilization. But such a treatment must not neglect the specific features of the regional sub‐units of Lower Mesopotamia, Upper Mesopotamia, the Levant (areas bordering the eastern Mediterranean), Anatolia (modern Turkey), and southwestern Iran.

The history of the region, as far as it can be reconstructed from written and archaeological records, follows a trajectory that is diverse in details but unitary in its major features. The relevance of the environmental factors, the introduction of technological improvements, and socio‐economic development, can be followed all over the area with similar patterns.

Environmental constraints, painstaking production of food, the difficult access to basic resources, and the consequent low levels of demographic growth, were all factors that contributed to the slow development of the Ancient Near Eastern civilizations. We are accustomed to appreciating the large cities and the monumental temples and palaces, the elegant artistic and literary compositions, and the great polities and “empires” as something obviously resulting from high levels of civilization. We should never forget, however, that such accomplishments were the result of painstaking labor and of forced allocation of the limited resources then available, and that the periodic crises were not an accident but a structural feature in the system.

In fact, the ancient history of the Near East can be summarized as a cyclic sequence of growth and collapse, a sequence that is apparent also in the preservation of the documentary record. The periods of major development – with burgeoning polities, big cities, important monuments, extensive archives, and rich craftsmanship – are separated by “dark ages” of localism and fragmentation. We have to consider that the ups and downs are mostly pertinent to the upper classes, to the political structures, and to the complex urban economy, while the common peasantry in rural villages and pastoral units continued their basic struggle for survival. The ups and downs are the result of a different equilibrium between the two opposed strategies of development and of survival, typically located in the royal palace and in the village, and carried on by the political elite and by the local community. The strategy of development required a leaching of resources from the local communities that was detrimental to the local strategy of survival, and therefore could be carried on only during limited periods, in selected areas, and under specific circumstances, allowing the political elites to impose their will through the exercise of power and through shared ideologies.

Notwithstanding these constraints, we see a long‐lasting tendency toward enlargement in the scale of the political units, improvement in the technologies of production (and also of destruction), widening of the geographical horizons, and also the increasing role of individual personalities. The most objective and concrete proxy for expansion, however, namely demographic development, seemed to remain more subject to the recurrent fluctuations than to a positive trend.

The Urban Revolution, about 3500–2800 BCE

The beginning of the historical trajectory was marked by a phenomenon of tremendous relevance, currently assumed to mark the shift from prehistory to history in the proper sense. The phenomenon can be labeled in various ways. We can use the label “urban revolution,” if we want to underscore demography and settlement forms, or the “First Urbanization” if we take into account the subsequent cycles of urbanization. We can speak of the origin of the state or the early state, if we prefer to underscore the political aspects. We can also emphasize the beginning of a marked socio‐economic stratification, and of specialized crafts, if we want to underscore the mode of production. We can also use the term “origin of complexity,” if we try to subsume all the various aspects under a unifying concept. The origin of writing has also been considered to mark the beginning of true and proper history, because of the old‐fashioned idea that there is no history before the availability of written sources. But now that such an idea is considered simplistic or wrong, we still can consider writing the most evident and symbolic culmination of the entire process.

The “revolution” took place in Lower Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq, and was the result of particular technological improvements and socio‐political strategies. The agricultural production of barley underwent a notable, possibly tenfold, increase thanks to the construction of water reservoirs and irrigation canals, of long fields adjacent to the canals watered by them, and thanks to the use of the plow, of animal power, of carts, of threshing sledges, of clay sickles, and of improved storage facilities. The agricultural revolution could not have taken place without the managerial activity of central agencies, the temples, which were able to overcome the purely local strategy of survival carried on by the rural villages.

The technological improvements alone, however, could generate no “revolution” at all if the food‐producers had devoted the entire surplus to their own consumption. The role of the central agency was decisive in diverting most of the surplus to social use: both for financing the common structures (irrigation networks, temple building, defensive walls), and for the maintenance of the specialized craftsmen and the sociopolitical elite. The “redistributive” economy of the early state, centered on the temples, was not based on the procedure of taxation, that is, the extraction of a part of the product from the producers’ families or local communities, but basically on the procedure of forced labor or corvée work imposed on local communities to work the temple lands. In this way the central agency, the owner of the best irrigated lands, could transfer to the local communities most of the social costs, paying just the rations for the workmen but not their families in limited periods of harvest and other seasonally concentrated operations.

The result of the technological improvements was a rate of seed to crop of around 1:25 in comparison to 1:5 outside the river valleys. The result of the central management was that only a third of the crop covered the expenditures of seed for the next year, rations for workmen and animals, and two‐thirds went to the central agency for the social uses described above. Also the breeding of sheep and goats for the production of wool underwent a tremendous increase under temple management, again thanks to technology (the weaving loom) and social exploitation (slave women and children concentrated in temple factories). The administration of an economy based on unequal transfers of product, rations, and services generated writing. Already available tools (tokens, seals, clay sealings) were coordinated to produce round clay seals we call bullae, then “numerical” tablets, and finally proper clay tablets with numbers and logographic icons for the various items to be recorded. The “archaic texts” from the city of Ur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations List
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: THE BIG PICTURE
• PART II: THE PHYSICAL WORLD
• PART III: THE SOCIAL WORLD
• PART IV: THOUGHT
• PART V: CULTURE
• PART VI: INHERITANCES
• Index
• End User License Agreement