The Face of the Ancient Orient

Near Eastern Civilization in Pre-Classical Times

Sabatino Moscati

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780486147697
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

"A lucid, intelligent, and lively summation … an appetizing and stimulating introduction to the study of man's early civilizations." — Science
This fascinating, lively study — praised by the American Historical Review as "a valuable introduction, perhaps the best available in English, to the ancient Near Eastern civilizations" — is essential reading for history students and for anyone interested in the development of Western civilization. The author, who was director of the Center of Semitic Studies at the University of Rome, undertook the study in order to make sense of several enormously important discoveries from the mid-twentieth century — including the discovery of Ugarit, a Syrian city that flourished for 4,000 years; the unearthing of Mari, an equally important city of ancient Mesopotamia; and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Professor Moscati begins with a chapter on the "Oriental Renaissance" and goes on to examine the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Hittites, Hurrians, Canaanites, Aramaeans, Israelites, and Persians, before offering, in the final chapter, a synthesis of Near Eastern accomplishments in politics, society, literature, and the arts. His conclusion is that "the civilizations of the ancient Orient [were] a tremendous human experience … without which another, subsequent civilization would not be conceivable." One of the great pleasures of this intriguing book is its delightful sampling of illustrative quotations from primary sources — some from the Bible and many others (often with strikingly biblical intonations) from the little-known writings of Sumer, Egypt, Hurria, and the other great civilizations that prefigured Greece and Rome.

PART I

The Conditions

1

THE ORIENTAL RENAISSANCE

I THE ORIENT IN A NEW LIGHT

For some years now a profound transformation has been going on in our knowledge of the ancient Near East; a transformation for which the history of European culture suggests the apt name: the Oriental Renaissance.

The transformation has been based fundamentally on archaeological data, but from archaeology it has naturally extended to literature, to religion, to art, and to the entire cultural sphere. It had its beginning in April 1928, when a Syrian peasant, ploughing in his field, ran his share into the remains of an ancient tomb, and so discovered Ugarit.¹ True, the earlier years of the present century had seen other important discoveries; but that of Ugarit, and those which followed, have a significance reaching beyond their own local limits, and have transformed a whole historical and cultural area. These finds are equalled only by those which in the second half of the nineteenth century first revealed the previously almost unknown peoples of the ancient Orient.

In the Oriental Renaissance we may distinguish three archaeological key discoveries: Ugarit, Mari, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. In all three cases the discovery was made by chance: at Ugarit, a peasant was ploughing; at Mari, some natives were burying a dead man;² near the Dead Sea, a Beduin was looking for a stray sheep.³ In all three cases, the additions to our knowledge were revolutionary in their effect. Ugarit proved to be the site of an ancient city which had flourished for four thousand years, and had been the centre of fertile cultural exchange between the Near East and the Mediterranean islands; hundreds of texts, new in language and in script, revealed the beliefs and mythology of the peoples who preceded the Hebrews in Palestine and Syria.⁴ Mari disclosed another city of like antiquity, the centre of a state which in its heyday had held sway over a great part of northern Mesopotamia. Its diplomatic archives, containing over 20,000 documents —still in course of publication—are leading to a rewriting of the history of Western Asia in the first half of the second millennium

.c.,⁵ and they have revolutionized our chronology by advancing our dates for ancient Western Asia by about two centuries.⁶ The Dead Sea Scrolls are older by several centuries than the earliest Hebrew manuscripts hitherto known; their Biblical texts are especially valuable to scholars in the field of textual criticism, while the non-Biblical texts throw a new, vivid light upon the beliefs and the ritual of the Hebrew world on the eve of the Christian era.⁷

In addition to these, there have been many other significant discoveries. For example, in the field of pre-history the American excavations in the Kirkuk region⁸ furnish material covering the Mesopotamiam palaeolithic and mesolithic periods, and have yielded new information on the neolithic and chalcolithic periods. In the historical field, the documents found at Alalakh⁹ and a further collection from Ugarit¹⁰ enable us to verify and fill out from local sources our knowledge of the policies pursued by the great empires in Syria after the middle of the second millennium. In the field of law, ancient codes have now been discovered¹¹ which lay bare the foundations of the work of the great king Hammurabi, and indicate the tradition to which he and the other oriental legislators belong. Finally, in the sphere of art, the excavations at Nimrud,¹² together with those at Ugarit and Mari, are bringing to light works so remarkable and significant as to call for revision of the accepted opinions on much of Near Eastern art.

Obviously, all this new information affects certain regions more directly than others, and the same applies to the various periods. However, paradoxically yet understandably, this fact rather increases than diminishes the changes in our knowledge. For it is not sufficient to consider only the areas and the periods immediately affected by the recent discoveries; when we have done this we still have to determine the relationships between the new and the old. And this process necessitates new judgements on much that was regarded as well established. For example, the chronology of ancient Anatolia has had to be revised not so much because of finds in that region but rather in order to harmonize it with data from Mesopotamia; while many modifications in our knowledge of ancient Egypt arise from the fact that Asiatic parallels have now taken on a new aspect.

Our comparison with the Classical Renaissance is based, of course, not on the kind or the manner of the discoveries themselves, but on the nature and the intensity of the transformation which they achieve. Taking the comparison further, we might suggest that the present phase in our knowledge of the ancient Orient is still that of an incipient Renaissance, a Humanism in which scholarly activity is almost entirely absorbed in the discoveries, their publication, and their analysis. To fit the individual results into the general picture, and to reorganize our knowledge accordingly, remain tasks for the future. When these tasks are accomplished—but it is impossible to foretell when that will be —we shall see the consummation of the Oriental Renaissance. Its main significance will certainly lie in the reconstruction of the foundations of classical civilization, which hitherto have been only partially and imperfectly determined. When Greece and Rome have been assigned their proper place in the historical process, when the premises and conditions of that process have been defined, we shall see how extensive, varied, and at times decisive was the influence which the ancient Orient which preceded them exercised on those civilizations.

II THE AREA

An attempt to outline the main features of the ancient Oriental civilizations is without precedent, so we must briefly consider its conditions and prerequisites: the area and the time, the personages, and the pre-history. All these may possibly be the subject of controversy, and the solution of that controversy might play a decisive part in our investigations, or the questions involved may have been raised anew by the latest discoveries, and so may provide new bases for our investigations.

First, then, the question of the area. The ‘Ancient Orient’ has come, by a widely accepted scholarly convention, to mean the ancient Near East. This is justified by the indubitable general unity of the different components of that region. Its history begins at a very remote period in time, with documents that mark the dawn of history itself in the Mediterranean basin, and then continues uninterruptedly within an area enveloped, for much of the time, in the obscurity of peoples lacking written documents, and therefore lacking history. The Eastern Mediterranean basin constitutes the common centre of attraction or gravity for its peoples, who all, sooner or later, turn towards that basin and find on its coasts places of meeting and intercourse. For this reason we can use another apt term: the ‘Mediterranean East’; this separates it from the cultures of India, and even more of China, which have different centres of gravity and developed in substantial independence. Nor is it simply a matter of separation—the Near East, with its trends towards the Mediterranean, played an important part in the task of laying the foundations of classical civilization, to which India and China made a much more limited contribution.

Passing from West to East, the ancient Oriental world includes Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Arabia, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Iran. Viewing this area as a whole, we may take as its nucleus the Arabian desert with its wastes of sand. Around it the ‘Fertile Crescent’ extends in a great arc, consisting of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian river valleys, with the Syro-Palestinian region which links them together. This crescent is the most fertile expanse in all the Near East. Beyond it to the North and the East curve the table-lands of Anatolia and Iran, agriculturally poorer, but possessing notable natural resources, from timber to stone and metals.

However, this demarcation of the extent of the ancient Orient involves us in certain difficulties. In the first place, ought we to include the Iranian civilizations in the scope of our argument? Opinions on this point are divided; but we incline to think we should, precisely because of the criteria of interdependence and gravitation towards the Mediterranean which we have just specified.

It is harder to decide the question of the more outlying cultures of Crete and the Indus. Although many historians are of the contrary opinion,¹³ we consider it best not to include these cultures within our survey. The ancient civilizations of the Indus lie outside the main Mediterranean area, and cannot be coordinated with the organic development of the region. And although the Cretan and Mycenean civilization undoubtedly had a great influence upon and was greatly influenced by our area, it had its roots in a soil which was, and constantly remained, geographically and ethnically distinct.

Finally, the ancient Southern Arabian civilization constitutes a case apart. From the viewpoint of area and time it is hard to exclude it from the general picture of the ancient Near East; but the desert encompasses it with a protective girdle, which cuts it off both from continuity with the other regions, and from gravitating together with them towards the Mediterranean. This gulf was bridged only by Islam; hence, if it be permissible to judge by the historical rather than the geographical factor, it will be as well to ignore the Southern Arabian civilization, which more properly belongs to Arabian history or Islamic pre-history. But we must add that this decision may have to be modified in the light of further knowledge, and that if the sporadic information now available concerning relations between Southern Arabian colonies in the north and other Near Eastern states increases in extent and importance we may find a decidedly different picture emerging.

Within the limits thus defined, we may resort to subdivision for various quite intelligible considerations, but not for any positive, historical reason. This applies especially to Egypt, which, because it is a specialized subject, is mainly treated independently of Western Asia,¹⁴ even though Western Asia lacks any intrinsic historical unity which might be counterposed to that of Egypt. For either we must deal with the history of the various separate regions and of the peoples who dwelt within them, namely, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, the Hebrews, and so on, or we must visualize a wider historical entity. If we do so, that entity can only comprise the entire Near East, including Egypt. It is the broad outline of this entity, as a clearly defined, composite whole, despite the variety of its component parts, which is the true subject of our historical research.

III THE TIME

With the problem of area is associated the no less controversial problem of time. The history of the ancient Orient begins with the first documents shortly before 3000

.c. But how far are we justified in extending it?

On this point, three views are expressed; or rather, since they are not explicitly discussed, three views are followed in practice: the later limit may be set at 538 B.C., or soon after, when Babylon fell and the Achaemenid empire under Darius began its contact with the Greeks;¹⁵ or at 330

.

., the date of Alexander’s decisive victory over the Persians; ¹⁶ or at the time of Christ, in which case ancient Oriental history is regarded as the prologue to that of the Christian era.¹⁷

Of these three views, we consider that the first and last do not withstand scrutiny. On the one hand, why wholly or partly exclude the Achaemenid empire, which has an incontestable claim to belong to ancient Oriental history? On the other, why include the history of the Hellenistic states, which, though established in the East by conquest, were western in their origins and their government?

Therefore the only satisfactory later limit would seem to be the victory of Alexander the Great. Down to that date we have an Orient under the government of Oriental empires; after it, an East subject to Western domination. Moreover, this transition from independence to subjection is amply reflected in the more varied forms of culture, and so we shall take its beginning as our limit in time.

IV THE PERSONAGES

Within the bounds of area and time which we have posited we find a complex of peoples differin...

Table of contents

• DOVER BOOKS ON HISTORY, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Table of Figures
• Table of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• FOREWORD
• PART I - The Conditions
• PART II - The Components
• PART III - The Catalysts
• PART IV - The Synthesis
• INDEX
• A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST