Migration and Colonialism in Late Second Millennium BCE Levant and Its Environs

The Making of a New World

Pekka Pitkänen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317196358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This book examines migration and colonialism in the ancient Near East in the late second millennium BCE, with a focus on the Levant. It explores how the area was shaped by these movements of people, especially in forming the new Iron Age societies.

The book utilises recent sociological studies on group identity, violence, migration, colonialism and settler colonialism in its reconstruction of related social and political changes. Prime examples of migrations that are addressed include those involving the Sea Peoples and Philistines, ancient Israelites and ancient Arameans. The final chapter sets the developments in the ancient Near East in the context of recent world history from a typological perspective and in terms of the legacy of the ancient world for Judaism and Christianity. Altogether, the book contributes towards an enhanced understanding of migration, colonialism and violence in human history.

In addition to academics, this book will be of particular interest to students of this period in the Ancient Near East, as well anyone working on migration and colonialism in the ancient world. The book is also suitable to the general public interested in world history.

1 Introduction

A. The overall context and significance of the study, with a summary of chapters of the book

Human life has been marked by extensive changes in its historical trajectory. Sometimes change has been fairly incremental, at other times more rapid, even cataclysmic. Certain changes have been of a rather local nature, others more extensive, even global. Also, importantly, some changes have had a wider impact than others on what cumulatively happens in the future as a result of such changes. The move from hunting and gathering societies to agriculture and the change from agricultural societies to industrial ones are, at least arguably, the two great transformations that have had the widest impact on human history.¹ However, a change from Late Bronze Age societies to those in the Iron Age in the ancient Near East, the topic of this book, has also had a far-reaching impact on later history. This change involved some cataclysmic events, such as the collapse of an international system of trade together with the collapse and loss of grip of empires in the ancient Near Eastern area. At the same time, the period was also marked by continuity and less overt transformations in a number of areas. One of the entities that arose, ancient Israel, has had a tremendous impact on the world through its sacred texts and the two religions that arose from it and its legacy, Judaism and Christianity, together with a third religion, Islam, that was influenced by a number of aspects of the other two. Christianity’s impact on the world was above all accentuated by its adoption as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE and the subsequent era of Western explorations and colonialism since the fifteenth century CE that was then also accentuated by industrialisation in the West from the eighteenth century on. All of these developments fed back to the rediscovery of the wider ancient Near East in the nineteenth century, itself then having at the minimum typological² significance for understanding human life, for example considering that writing and the earliest civilisations of the world also developed in the area.³

Such a tangle of considerations can be seen in the context of history’s interest in the study of the past in order to gain a greater understanding of human life. The endeavour is already of interest just for the sake of knowledge, to see how people lived in the past. However, it is part of human nature to even instinctively compare what happened and how people lived in the past with human experience in the present. And, of course, the study of history by human actors always takes place in the present time of those actors. In that, then, the interests of those actors in many ways decide what to study and how to go about it. If certain events of the past are considered significant, it will be more likely that more attention will be given to studying those events than to studying other events. Also, if the events in question are cataclysmic, it is easier to pay more attention to them as the topic can be seen as more exciting than more mundane affairs. On the whole, the bigger the changes, the more likely it is on average that they will have had a significant impact on subsequent events and ultimately the human present. In these respects, the book at hand should fit the bill nicely, as the following discussion should also demonstrate.

The study of the ancient Near East also involves a number of interesting but also challenging considerations from the standpoint of history writing that bear on this study. Modern historiography developed in the West from the Enlightenment on, building on existing societal historiographic traditions. One of these was the study of the classical world due to the transmission of manuscripts in an unbroken chain since antiquity through the Renaissance that accentuated their reading and even rediscovery with resulting cultural impact on the West. The transmission of the biblical documents also was unbroken and continued in the West in the context of Western Christendom. The impact of the West on the rest of the world was greatly accentuated by the development of science and technology in Europe. It was the Portuguese explorations, made possible by advances in ship technologies, that started off the expansion of the West. Eventually, the West controlled most of the globe by the end of the nineteenth century.⁴ For the West, the history of Greece and Rome provided a model of civilisation to be emulated. As one would expect, in such a situation, the study of the classical world was considered of primary importance, with considerable resources naturally devoted to the subject.⁵ The study of the classical world was combined with the study of Christianity itself, including the Bible, even though the Enlightenment resulted in the waning of the power of Christianity to influence society as a whole. An important accompaniment to the study of Christianity was the development of biblical criticism from the late eighteenth century on, and with it the development of modern theology in the West. In the nineteenth century, interest was spurred in exploring lands where the biblical events took place, with the Napoleonic conquests of Egypt already having exposed to the West monuments and artefacts from ancient Egypt. Decipherment of the ancient Egyptian language followed, and exploration and excavation in Palestine and lands to the north and east of it also started to take place in the course of the century. This led to the rediscovery of the ancient Near East, and by the late nineteenth century, the subject of Assyriology was born. In due course, with the expansion of exploration and development in methods of study, the studies branched into a variety of sub-disciplines that exist today.

Such findings as the flood tablets of the Gilgamesh epic as a parallel to the Genesis flood story were fundamental in showing that the Bible had its roots in the ancient Near East, instead of being an isolated document as it would in many ways have been perceived before the rediscovery of the ancient Near East. The findings then would cast the Bible in a new light. At the same time, in the course of time, including as secularisation increased in the West, the study of the ancient Near East became a completely independent field from biblical studies. However, as the Bible itself has its origins in the area, it is clear that the study of the Bible cannot and should not fundamentally be decoupled from the study of the wider ancient Near East.

In the so-called postcolonial era of the twentieth century, the study of the classical world has experienced a relative decline in popularity. This undoubtedly has to do with the use of that study for the purposes of supporting the colonialist and imperial ideology of the West.⁶ Due to the postcolonial turn, it is no longer fashionable to refer explicitly to the classical world as providing models for the West in the same way that might have been possible earlier. At the same time, the scope of the study of the past has been widened considerably. Ultimately, the scope of history now covers all areas of the world and time periods that pertain to human activity. This includes reconstructing history before writing was invented or taken into use by societies considered, and, especially as one goes backward in time in history, much of history has to be reconstructed based on both written and non-written material remains.

Nevertheless, in terms of education, much of the study of history in the West to date still focuses on the classical tradition as the foundation of Western civilisation, even when that study is now seen in a somewhat different light from how it was seen in the pre-postcolonial era. This in itself is significant as the West still incorporates a lion’s share of world academic historical research and also continues to have a strong influence on the world, even if this influence may soon at least potentially be attenuated by, for example, the rise of the power of Asia in the twenty-first century. That there still is such a dominant focus on the classical world in the West is lamentable, as it is by now clear that the classical world itself was preceded by the ancient Near East and was also greatly influenced by it. Accordingly, events that took place in the ancient Near East can be seen as being of fundamental significance for Western civilisation and, at least due to the influence that the West has had on the world, for world history. In this connection, with the post-Christendom turn in the West, the study of the biblical documents as part of the study of the ancient Near East has also been waning in both scope and influence. However, here again, it is not necessary to require that the study of the Bible be connected with any religious commitments. Instead, for the purposes of historical study, one can focus on the history that the biblical documents portray as part of the ancient Near East, together with the study of the impact that the biblical documents have had on the world from their inception till the present.⁷

However, except for reasons that relate to the intellectual and sociopolitical history of the West, the study of the ancient Near East presents a number of challenges that may have contributed towards its relatively limited impact in the Western and world scene. One important issue is that the relatively young field is marked by certain undeniable complexity. Above all, there is a linguistic complexity that any potential student of the area will have to deal with. The area spans more than ten languages,⁸ with a number of them having differing scripts. Also keeping in mind that the first human languages were pictographic, logographic or syllabic, with alphabet invented only at a later stage, mastering all of the languages for a comprehensive proficiency in the study of the area requires a considerable investment. In addition, one should be able to be well-versed with the study of non-written remains, requiring a good handle on archaeology. And, important works of academic scholarship on the area have been published in several languages, including English, German, French and Italian, adding to the work required in pursuing academic studies in the field. One may add to this the fact that the number of Akkadian cuneiform tablets that have been discovered runs in the tens of thousands. As the writing system is syllabic and typically on tablets that may, for example, be partially damaged, the task of just reading the documents is enormous, with many tablets still waiting for decipherment. Altogether, much of the effort in ancient Near Eastern study has been on simply decipherment and publication of tablets, and there has been only a relatively limited amount of effort spent on actually writing histories of the ancient Near East, especially in the context of spanning the whole area.⁹

This book on its part intends to help fill the ga...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The societal contexts of the ancient Near East and analysing migration, colonialism and violence
• 3 The imperial context of the second half of the second millennium BCE
• 4 The Sea Peoples and ancient Philistia
• 5 Ancient Israel
• 6 Ancient Arameans
• 7 Other migrations and societies
• 8 Migration and colonialism, ancient and modern
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Ancient Sources