1
Introductory Concerns

1.1 What Is the Ancient Near East?

Few people use the phrase “Near East” today. Yet, it has survived in the study of ancient history in a scholarship that is rooted in the nineteenth century when the term identified the Ottoman empire on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Today we say Middle East to designate this geographical area, but the two terms do not exactly overlap, and most ancient historians and archaeologists continue to speak of the Near East. Already this habit gives a certain vagueness to what constitutes the ancient history of this area, and the geographical boundaries of the region can differ substantially from study to study. Some definitions, then, of what this book covers are in order.

In this survey of history, Near East designates the region from the eastern Mediterranean coast to central Iran, and from the Black Sea to the Red Sea. Egypt, whose ancient history intersects with that of the Near East at many times, is not included, except when its empire extended into Asia in the second half of the second millennium. The boundaries remain vague, because in essence we study a set of core areas, and the reach of each one of them shifted in different periods. Foremost in any study of the ancient Near East is Mesopotamia, a term we use to designate the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern‐day Iraq and northern Syria. It was home to many cultures and political formations, whose sequence we know well from an abundant documentation. At times Mesopotamian states extended far beyond their borders, drawing otherwise poorly known regions, such as the Arabian Peninsula, into their orbit. The same is true for other core areas in central Anatolia, southwest Iran, and elsewhere. As historians, we rely on sources; their coverage, both in geographical terms and in what facets of life they document, fluctuates enormously over time. When they report on activity somewhere, that place becomes part of the Near East; when they do not, we have little to tell. The ancient history of the Near East is like a dark room in which the sources offer isolated points of light, some brighter than others. They shine especially clearly on certain places and periods, but leave much else concealed. It is the historian’s task to try to make sense of the whole.

The chronological boundaries of ancient Near Eastern history are also ambiguous, and both the beginning and the end dates are flexible. If we consider history to rely on written sources, as tradition often does, the origins of writing in Babylonia around 3000 BC must be seen as the start of history. Yet script was just one of several innovations that had roots in earlier times, and the earliest texts contain no “historical” information that we can understand beyond the fact that people had the ability to write. Thus, most histories of the Near East start in so‐called prehistory, oftentimes around 10,000, and describe the developments that took place before writing existed. During these seven thousand years, so many important changes happened in the lifestyles of humans that they deserve in‐depth treatment, using archaeological sources and methodologies. There is not enough room in this book, which intends to discuss the historical periods thoroughly, to do full justice to all prehistoric developments. Therefore we will start in the late fourth millennium, when several prehistoric processes culminated simultaneously, and also writing appeared, changing the nature of our source material. I will outline earlier developments only cursorily in this introduction.

History rarely knows clear‐cut endings. Even when states are definitively destroyed, they leave an impact, the duration of which depends on whether one looks at political, economic, cultural, or other aspects of history. But the historian has to stop somewhere and the choice of when needs justification. Various dates are commonly used to end the ancient history of the Near East, most often either the fall of the last native Mesopotamian dynasty in 539 or Alexander of Macedon’s defeat of Persia in 331. I have chosen Alexander as the last figure of my political history, because while the changes he instituted were probably not momentous for most of the people at that time, our access to the historical data is transformed starting in his reign. The gradual shift from indigenous to external classical sources necessitates a different historiographical approach. The arrival of Hellenism is a fitting borderline because the historian’s access to events changes significantly.

Some twenty‐seven centuries elapsed between 3000 and 331. Few historical disciplines engage with such a long time span – a comparison would be a survey of European civilization from Homeric Greece to the present day. While we can see clearly distinct periods in that western evolution and appreciate pivotal changes that took place over time, it is harder to do so for ancient Near Eastern history. Our distance from the Near East, both in time and in spirit, sometimes leads to a view that blurs distinctions and reduces everything to one large static mass. One can take a diametrically opposed view and fragment this history into short, coherent, and manageable segments, and then discontinuity becomes the focus. The latter attitude lies at the basis of the standard periodization of Near Eastern history, which strings together a sequence of phases that are mostly named after royal dynasties. Each phase experienced its cycle of rise, prosperity, and decline, as if it were a biological entity, and in between fell the so‐called Dark Ages, moments of historical silence.

I take an intermediate stance here, and while I maintain the traditional subdivisions into dynastic periods, I group them into larger units. We should not overemphasize continuities, but we can recognize basic patterns. In political terms, for example, power in the Near East was oftentimes fragmented and there were only relatively short‐lived moments of centralization under rulers or dynasties whose territorial reach became increasingly wider. But these moments of centralization tend to draw our attention more, because they produced large numbers of written and archaeological sources. Taking the escalating growth of political forms into account, this history is divided into the ages of city‐states, territorial states, and empires, each with their moments of greatness and disruption (if we equate power with greatness). The city‐state was the primary political element from 3000 to approximately 1600, territorial states dominated the scene from that point on to the early first millennium, and empires characterized later history. Mesopotamian states usually demonstrate these stages of development most conclusively, but it is clear that they also occurred elsewhere in the Near East.

In the end, the availability and extent of the sources define the ancient Near East as a historical subject and subdivide its history. Extensive written and archaeological documentation appears in certain places at certain times, and those regions and moments form the core of the subject. The cultures of Mesopotamia dominate in this respect. They were often the leading civilizations of their time and had an impact over the entire Near East. When they influenced or controlled non‐Mesopotamian regions, those areas become included in our research; when they did not, we often lose track of what happened outside Mesopotamia. Archaeological exploration in the last decades has made it increasingly apparent that other regions of the Near East experienced developments independent of Mesopotamia and that cultural innovations cannot all be credited to that area. Still, it remains difficult to write continuous histories of those regions without relying on a Mesopotamia‐centered model. Mesopotamia provides the geographical and chronological unity to Near Eastern historiography. Its use of an age‐old script, its preservation of religious practices, and its cultural continuity from the third to the first millennia allow us to look at its long history as a whole. The study of the other cultures in the region is mostly pegged to that of Mesopotamian culture, but we should not ignore their contributions to the history of the Near East.

Box 1.1 What’s in a name?

Just as the use of the term “Near East” is now uncommon outside the study of ancient history and archaeology, the exact meaning of many other geographical names is peculiar to those disciplines. Oftentimes usage is a matter of habit and it is rarely spelled out explicitly what names designate. They regularly derive from ancient sources, but their meaning was modified to indicate a somewhat different reality, oftentimes following British imperial terminology of the nineteenth century, when the study of the ancient Near East developed. One such term is “Mesopotamia,” a Greek label for the area encircled by the great bend of the Euphrates in Syria, but now applied to the entire region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and sometimes even beyond these boundaries. Two distinct zones make up Mesopotamia: Assyria in the north and Babylonia in the south. These are in origin political terms referring to ancient states that existed after 1450 BC, but they are often used purely as geographical designations at any time in history – I will use them in this way here. Many scholars utilize another political name, Sumer (or at times the incorrect Sumeria), to refer to the southern half of Babylonia in the fourth and third millennia. I do...