Registers and Modes of Communication in the Ancient Near East

Getting the Message Across

Kyle H. Keimer, Gillan Davis, Kyle H. Keimer, Gillan Davis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138635302
• eBook ISBN: 9781351797030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

It is the quintessential nature of humans to communicate with each other. Good communications, bad communications, miscommunications, or no communications at all have driven everything from world events to the most mundane of interactions. At the broadest level, communication entails many registers and modes: verbal, iconographic, symbolic, oral, written, and performed. Relationships and identities – real and fictive – arise from communication, but how and why were they effected and how should they be understood? The chapters in this volume address some of the registers and modes of communication in the ancient Near East. Particular focuses are imperial and court communications between rulers and ruled, communications intended for a given community, and those between families and individuals. Topics cover a broad chronological period (3rd millennium BC to 1st millennium AD), and geographic range (Egypt to Israel and Mesopotamia) encapsulating the extraordinarily diverse plurality of human experience. This volume is deliberately interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, and its broad scope provides wide insights and a holistic understanding of communication applicable today. It is intended for both the scholar and readers with interests in ancient Near Eastern history and Biblical studies, communications (especially communications theory), and sociolinguistics.

Introduction to Part I
Imperial and court communications

This first section contains chapters that deal with communications by royal courts, elites, and/or that attest to the impact of royal/imperial power on the ways communications were manifest in antiquity. While drawing upon written texts and focusing on the modes of those texts, many of the chapters in this section also consider the field and tone aspects of register. They illuminate specific linguistic instantiations and how the rationale for these is based upon practical contextual considerations.

Texts cited in this section are intended to expound elite propaganda/ideology, or are attempts by those who are not elite to become elite and/or be viewed as elite. The various inscriptions cited in the chapters in this section have a strong formality in language use.

Noel Weeks’ chapter on The disappearance of cuneiform from the west and elites in the ancient Near East addresses the question of how cuneiform was adopted and abandoned in areas outside of its Mesopotamian homeland as a particular mode of elite discourse. In particular, he asks, “was it that something came with the cuneiform script and Akkadian that was not otherwise available, or was there something in the character of the Mesopotamian writing system which gave it a practical advantage?” In considering the appearance of cuneiform in Anatolia and the Levant he considers the role of trade, technical expertise, and elite demands, noting that the reasons for the use and replacement of cuneiform as an international script are multivariant and subjective. He suggests that the various reasons are tied to human opportunity and the durability of the medium upon which cuneiform was typically inscribed; the context of each situation must be considered if we are to understand what was being written with cuneiform, when it was being written, by whom, and for what purpose.

In Contrasting representations and the Egypto-Hittite treaty, Sam Jackson breaks down the differences in the Egyptian and Hittite versions of their treaty following the battle of Kadesh. He articulates the different purposes of Egyptian and Hittite historiography and text production and touches on what systemic functional linguistics would consider the field and tenor of the two copies of the treaty. In doing so, Jackson is able to parcel out various factors – be they cultural or ideological – that influenced the specific language choices in the Egyptian version of the treaty in particular. Further, his chapter highlights the tension between the registers of language we see in Egyptian monumental inscriptions versus royal correspondences.

Luis Siddall’s chapter on Text and context: the question of audience for Sennacherib’s ‘public’ inscriptions, indicates that the search for ancient audiences of written texts is not in vain. While they may not be always easy to identify, careful consideration of the context and tone of a given text may make it possible. He demonstrates that an ancient text could have multiple audiences in mind, including, remarkably, just the king himself and the rulers to follow. The audiences could even have imbued multiple meanings to the same text, despite any overarching ideology. Further, texts of the same genre can provide specific details meant to be read/understood/interpreted in very contextually-specific circumstances.

Wayne Horowitz’s Communication and miscommunication in the southern sky: the case of Scorpio and the Southern Cross in cuneiform explicitly discusses how we today communicate with ancient texts. Messages, he notes, are preserved in text and can be understood through an understanding of the context not only of the text itself, but also the implied context – per reader response theory – within a given text. He uses three case studies in the identification of ancient Mesopotamian star/constellation names to highlight how a proper understanding of context allows us to correct previous interpretations, and even to communicate with long dead authors.

In Imperialism and language: observations on bilingual inscriptions from Palmyra, Samuel Lieu notes that Palmyra’s economic standing led to imperial interaction at the site, including the appearance and appropriation of Greek as a prestige language over the local Aramaic. The shift of written language through the impact of imperial presence, and the local attempts to identity or de-identify with that power are highlighted through a detailed assessment of the content of each language in select bilingual inscriptions from the site. Lieu articulates why various authors included the information they did in each given language, identifying each author’s field and tone of communication, and shedding light on the mode of the given text. Lieu’s chapter includes an appendix of every dated Palymrene bilingual and trilingual inscription, including those from Dura Europas.

1 The disappearance of cuneiform from the west and elites in the ancient Near East

Noel Weeks

Introduction

By the late second millennium BC cuneiform script, which had originally been created in Mesopotamia, had spread throughout the ancient Near East. Its presence was particularly noticeable in the countries to the west of Mesopotamia in a broad band stretching from Anatolia, through Syria and Palestine, and even to Egypt. It manifested itself in its Sumero-Akkadian original form, in use for other languages, and in its probable stimulus to the creation of the alphabetic cuneiform of Ugarit. Yet in the first millennium, in the period of the obvious military and imperial presence of Mesopotamian powers in much of that region, aside from some texts reflecting that imperialism, cuneiform lost its ubiquity. What caused the change?

It is easy, and probably erroneous, to read the change in terms of dynamics which seem reasonable to us in our context. We know that Aramaic came to fill the role of the language of international communication, which had previously been filled by Akkadian. Aramaic, with its alphabetic script, seems so much more convenient. However Akkadian and cuneiform survived in the land of its birth long after languages written in alphabetic scripts such as Aramaic and Greek had displaced it as the language of speech and communication (Geller 1997). In our own day, complex scripts survive and thrive in East Asia. Script change involves more than just convenience.

Further, if it were simply a case of replacement by a more convenient script, we would expect a period of transition as cuneiform was replaced over time. The evidence does not show that. In raising this point, I raise a fundamental methodological problem. As historians we are interested in dynamics and processes. Yet, particularly for the ancient Near East, we lack testimony from the contemporary observers of the processes. Hence we look to the evidence of patterns of occurrence or non-occurrence. All such apparent patterns could be the product of accidents of discovery. There is no escape from that reality and this chapter will be vulnerable to that objection.

In trying to find an explanation for the disappearance of cuneiform, we are driven back to questions of the reasons for its spread, and the motives behind its use in foreign cultures. Did the conditions that promoted its transfer and use change? There again we face the same methodological question. The answers to those questions are not obvious and must be inferred from the evidence that remains.

Reasons for spread

Trade

Since this investigation is concerned with the evidence for the spread of cuneiform text, the role of Mesopotamia in trade is especially important. Trade is both an intuitively obvious means of the spread of culture, and a documented factor in the evidence from Anatolia of Assyrian trading colonies, particularly at Kültepe (Kaniš) (Larsen 1967, 1976; Orlin 1970; Veenhof 1972). Yet we need to ask whether the Old Assyrian trade provides the model we must use, or is it an exception to normal patterns.

That leads to the question of what Mesopotamia could give in exchange for imports, especially given that its produce was primarily agricultural. Here the evidence of the Old Assyrian trade is s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• List of abbreviations
• General Introduction Communicating in the past; connecting with the past
• Part I. Imperial and Court Communications Introduction to Part I
• Part II. Community Communication Introduction to Part II
• Part III. Communications Between Families and Individuals Introduction to Part III
• Index