Ancient Near East: The Basics

Daniel C. Snell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135125035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Ancient Near East: The Basics surveys the history of the ancient Middle East from the invention of writing to Alexander the Great's conquest. The book introduces both the physical and intellectual environment of those times, the struggles of state-building and empire construction, and the dissent from those efforts. Topics covered include:

• What do we mean when we talk about the Ancient Near East?
• The rise and fall of powerful states and monarchs
• Daily life both in the cities and out in the fields
• The legacy of the Ancient Near East: religion, science and writing systems.

Featuring a glossary, chronology and suggestions for further reading, this book has all the tools the reader needs to understand the history and study of the Ancient Near East.

1

WHAT WE MEAN WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

Anyone who has studied even a little bit about the Middle East today has had the following conversation: Someone: Wow, the wars in the Middle East are constant. They are always fighting each other, and it seems as though it's been going on forever. You: Well, not exactly forever, and not with the same sides. Someone: But I mean, it goes back to the Bible, doesn't it, and long before? You: Not exactly.

And yet you remember the first Middle East war you paid attention to, back in 1967, when you were a freshman in college. The television was full of the build-up to the war, and both sides were talking tough. The television made it seem as though the clash was inevitable, and the outcome appeared to be headed toward all-out nuclear war, in which the United States would be pulled in as Israel's existence was threatened, and the Soviets would join as the Arabs' well-being was under attack.

But it was the end of the quarter. And you were invited over to the house of your young instructor, Alan Kimball, who would go on to make a career as a Russian specialist at the University of Oregon. Much later you would remind him of this day, which he had forgotten.

The whole class was worried about nuclear war, and the television did, in fact, show the tanks grinding across the desert. But Kimball said, “In my lifetime I have seen this happen two times already.” He referred to the wars around the independence of Israel in 1948 and the Suez Crisis of 1956. “And it hasn't resulted in nuclear war. You just need to take the long view. The great powers are involved, but they are not suicidal, and the Middle Eastern powers aren't either. It will eventually work itself out.”

Kimball was right about that particular war, even though in the very many years since the problems that created that war and the problems that war created have not all been resolved. Is that because the divisions run so deeply into history? Certainly there are new factors that do not go back so very far, like nationalism and the very existence of great powers that could intervene militarily. These particular struggles are not eternal ones, but there were others, many others, that defined how people in the region thought and think about themselves and each other. Here we will try to sort some of those out, though, no matter how superficially we try, we will not get up to 1967 of our era.

The chapter title here is a riff on Raymond Carver's 1981 collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which was a meditation on the things love can mean to different people. Carver did not conclude that love meant any one thing, and he did not imply that love was really self-serving, though it always involved some sort of gratification.

By the Ancient Near East we mean the same thing as the Middle East but in ancient times, down to the invasion of Alexander the Great. Middle East is a term coined by the American naval writer Alfred Mahan in a 1902 article. He wanted to differentiate the regions of what most people then called the Orient, the East. The Middle East did not include the Far East, meaning China and Japan, and it also did not include India. In fact Mahan was talking about “Middle” in the sense of latitude, not longitude, and implied that what today we call the “Northern Tier” of the Middle East was a separate entity that ought to be considered separately, including the modern countries of Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan.

His term caught on, and now all the languages of the region refer to it as the Middle East. The term Near East probably originated in Russia, where people were concerned for the East, the Orient, but especially those areas near to themselves, meaning Iran and Afghanistan, Armenia, and Turkey. But the term Near East persists among scholars of the ancient world and means the whole area. The Orient too continues to be used, but it can be very extensive. And you will meet people in the Middle East who will say things like “You may not be able to understand us; we are Orientals.” In the Western universities we still have institutions called Oriental Institutes, and the American Oriental Society, and those do encompass the scholars of the entire area, but these terms are relics of an American and European attitude that lumped the cultures together as “not us.” They may still be “not us,” but there are definitely distinctions to be made.

Students have told me, when they saw the titles of my books, that I needed to change them all to the Middle East, so people would know what we were talking about. But we do not do that, and in fact we persist in a terminological unclarity. Near to what? Near to us, in Russia and the rest of Europe. This seems unfair and culturally insensitive. Some suggest we should speak of Western Asia, which is more or less correct, but do we mean to include Egypt and the rest of North Africa? Most discussions of the ancient region do include Egypt, although the study of Egypt has evolved in different ways from that of the rest of the region.

What really were the boundaries? In ancient times geographical edges were not so important as centers, and so it is frequently difficult even to define political entities the way we do, by geographical features or imaginary lines on the ground. For ancient times we should not think in terms of borders but centers, and so we speak of clusters of places that seemed to be culturally similar.

The centers we are concerned with start in ancient Iraq. Southern Iraq was called in the first millennium Abr Nahrain, “across the two rivers” in Aramaic, then the common language of the region, and when the Greeks arrived and asked where they were, this got translated into “Mesopotamia,” “Between Rivers.” What this meant was not necessarily the area between the Tigris and Euphrates, but the area beyond the big bend in the Euphrates as it descends from Turkey through Syria and into Iraq. This whole region was a cultural unit in very ancient times. Consequently the term Mesopotamia, like Middle East, is slippery and expansive. The northern limit, though, is the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey, and the eastern is the Zagros Mountains, which are shared between Iraq and Iran.

More to the west was a related cluster of centers which we call Syria-Palestine, naming it after later political entities. To the people in Mesopotamia it was simply the West. There were no geographical borders between the lower river valley that is now southern Iraq and the West, and the Euphrates flowed through to unite the two areas. And yet there were always geographic differences. The key difference was that in the West you could mostly do rainfall agriculture. The winter rains off the Mediterranean would give enough moisture to grow things, and the region is still famous for its wonderful olives and grapes. In Iraq you almost always needed to irrigate from the rivers, and you could not count on the rain, though some would come in the winter months, making the roads impassable.

Another region we include in the Ancient Near East is north of the Taurus Mountains, modern Turkey. This was part of early agricultural experiments and shared much with the more southern areas. But it too could survive on its rainfall and also on snow melt since its mountains did get snow in the winters. Another aspect of Turkey of interest to the ancients was its mineral wealth.

The Iranian highlands to the east were connected through trade to the other areas but were seen as distant and strange places. The mineral wealth there was of great value, though, to people farther west. Especially prized was lapis lazuli, a rich-looking blue stone that came from faraway Afghanistan. But it could be carried in small bits and fetched very high prices. It was used for jewelry and also for inlays on furniture as far away as Egypt.

The final area of focus is Egypt, which means not the whole extent of the modern country but rather the Nile River valley and its delta, sometimes a mere ten miles wide. New explorations in the eastern and western deserts have shown that in ancient times these areas were sparsely occupied, and yet the oases did furnish some agricultural goods. The climate in earlier times may have been wetter than now.

Modern students of the Middle East often include the rest of Africa north of the Sahara Desert on the cultural grounds that Islam spread across the continent, and there was certainly some significant contact with Egypt from Libya. But in ancient times our views are limited by the spread of writing, and we do not find writing to the west of Egypt, though we do find it south of Egypt in the Meroitic civilization in modern Sudan.

One area that was not significantly included in the Ancient Near East is the Arabian desert. For most of the period we are concerned with that desert was practically impassable. Only when camels were domesticated in the mid-first millennium did people go there much. The coast of the Arabian or Persian Gulf, however, had probably been visited by traders whenever southern Iraq could afford to buy spices and stones from distant places, and archaeological investigations there have produced important evidence of settlement originating in southern Iraq.

These are the regions we are interested in when we talk about the Ancient Near East, but as with love, we may mean different things when we talk to different people. And the more basic question of why we talk about the Ancient Near East, as with love, may involve our own self-interest. Edward Said in his 1978 book Orientalism charged that the study of the region was motivated by a desire to colonize it among the Western Powers; he examined particularly Britain and France, both of which did eventually establish supposedly temporary colonies sponsored by the League of Nations in the area after World War I.

Colleagues of mine were amazed to discover that the venerable American Oriental Society, of which I am myself a life member, had not changed its name because of Said's attack. But in several responses to his book and to derivative studies people who study the Middle and Near East have argued that choices of field and area of interest in the past as in the present were not dictated by imperial designs. Funding, of course, might be, but people come to study the region from Europe and the Americas for their own, mostly non-political reasons. Those reasons may be self-serving, and the prejudice against contemporary “Orientals” does sometimes crop up, especially in the works of Western visitors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And on radio talk-shows even now you hear people talking about how “The Arab World” and similar entities are “a thousand years behind” us. Really? But they were so far ahead of “us” for such a very long time.

How this view might have developed we shall explore later on. But here we should clarify some of the geographical terms used over the three thousand or so years of this ancient history. The basic problem is that the peoples of the region called themselves and their geographical areas different things in different periods, and our terminology tries to follow theirs.

To begin with, Sumer meant the cities of southern Iraq, which were a cultural rather than a political unity. This term probably is reflected in the Bible in Shinar (Genesis 10:10, 11:2, 14:1). Sumer may have had some political meaning in that it stood for the members of a coalition of states that had a religious focus in the central Iraqi town of Nippur near Baghdad. The god who headed the religious pantheon was at home there, but it was never a political capital. The edges of Sumer are as usual not well defined. If we look to the Sumerian King List, which is a list of kings of city states written in the Sumerian language, Sumer may have stretched from the Iranian lowlands all the way upriver on the Euphrates to Mari, just inside the modern state of Syria. The Sumerian language was related to no other, and it may have been the one for which the cuneiform writing system was devised.

Akkad was north of Sumer, central Iraq now. It became important in the third millennium when people from there thrust into Sumer. Again, the borders of the region were left undefined. Here too there was a language named after the region, Akkadian, a Semitic language related to still living languages including Arabic and Hebrew.

Assyria was farther north still in Iraq and bled over into the modern states of Iran, Turkey, and Syria. This was an outpost of Mesopotamian culture that in the second millennium was a frontier area. It depended on rainfall agriculture, but some parts of Assyria were marginal in their rainfall, meaning in some years you could not have successful farming.

Syria was a term perhaps derived from the word Assyria, but it included the area to the west of northern Iraq all the way to the Mediterranean coast. In the fourth millennium already there was trade contact, and in many ways Syria was western Mesopotamia. It too relied on rainfall, with somewhat more success than Assyria. The term Syria became common in the first millennium referring to a number of small states in what is now Syria, Lebanon, and Israel and Palestine.

Anatolia is Greek for the area in which the sun rises from the Greek perspective, meaning modern Turkey. Dependent on rainfall agriculture, this mountainous region was isolated from the rest of the Near East in many periods, but the Taurus Mountains did have passes through them, and people from the south traded in Anatolia, and the Anatolians intervened in the south.

Palestine derives from the Egyptian and Hebrew term for the Philistines, people from the Aegean area who came to the coast of what is now the state of Israel and the Gaza Strip. They were the first peoples of the area the Romans encountered, and the Romans called the region behind the Philistines by their name too. This too is an area dependent on rainfall for agriculture.

Nubia was the Roman term for the area south of the first waterfall on the Nile as you go upriver. It was regarded by Egyptians as closely connected to Egypt, though in antiquity people there probably spoke different languages from Egyptian. Like Egypt Nubia got little rainfall and so was almost entirely dependent on the Nile's flood for irrigation and agricultural success. Modern Sudan encloses Nubia, but the modern state is much bigger.

The study of the Ancient Near East has in the past been focused on people who could write or at least whose leaders had access to writing. Writing represented a response to the need to manipulate surpluses, and so it is a cultural product that seems to underline the success of the peoples who used it. But writing was not accessible to most people living in the past, and it gives a narrow picture of human activity and achievement. Since the 1820s archaeological investigations have sought to supplement what we know from the writing of ancient peoples, and they have filled out some aspects of our understanding. Archaeology has allowed us to see much farther back than writing alone did, and we now see the Ancient Near East as the cradle of many of our own physical as well as intellectual successes. Though archaeology is getting more precise and is trying to ask and answer more sophisticated questions, the kinds of things we...