What all this means is that none of these concepts — nomad, tribe, and state — can be divorced from the other. Any study of sociopolitical change or interaction in the ancient Near East will have to take each element into account to build a comprehensive picture. We need to understand how each element interacts with, affects, and changes the other in ways that feed back, and either alter or reinforce existing patterns of economic, social, and political behavior.
Near Eastern tribes (e. g., Hole, this volume; Porter 2002, this volume; Rosen et al. 2007).
This book raises several questions that address how that goal might be accomplished. Does it make sense to talk about nomads, tribes, and states as separate, if none can really be understood without the others? How should we integrate them? What evidence should we draw upon? How can we even understand one another if we are using a vocabulary that is often so imprecise? At a basic level, these are the same questions scholars have been asking for a long time, though never before has a group of scholars come together to address specific issues of integrating these approaches in the ancient Near East. some recent conferences have helped move the general debate along in various ways, but while some have been more expansive in scope (Leder and streck 2005), others have been narrower in either geographic (saidel and van der steen 2007) or methodological (Barnard and Wendrich 2008) focus. The chapters in this volume describe a variety of types of nomadism and tribal organization in different regions of the near east (syria, Jordan, egypt, Israel, Iran), and different time periods (from prehistory to the early islamic period), and draw on archaeological, textual, ethnographic, ethnoarchaeological, and ethnohistoric data.
Within this diversity, however, the contributors share a concern with both the methods by which nomads and tribes can be accessed in the archaeological and historical record, and with how mobile populations and tribal groups actually behaved — how they organized their economies, how they structured their society and interactions with other societies, where they lived, etc. That these concerns were predominant became especially clear during discussions over the course of the seminar that touched on the role of ethnographic analogy, the categories of data that may indicate the presence of pastoral nomads at a site, the extent of participation of nomads in craft activities, or even whether tribal kingdoms were ever capable of being sustained. The organization of the book follows those organically generated themes that guided and derived from discussions during the conference and reflect the most pressing issues, according to the participants, in the study of pastoral nomads and tribe-state interaction in the ancient near east.
Integrating methods and data: archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and texts
The first part of the book focuses on the first step in solving some of these problems: how to identify ancient pastoral nomads and tribes. These papers all deal with collecting and interpreting problematic or scarce data: How do we interpret the past when texts confront archaeology? How do we interpret archaeological data in the absence of texts? How do our own assumptions about modern nomads affect the way we analyze ancient remains? The first two chapters (Barnard, Ritner) offer contrasting approaches for studying nomadic populations in the deserts of Egypt. Both of these papers, and many others that follow, deal with the intersection of texts and archaeology. For example, Barnard assails the tendency of researchers to assume that a certain complex of material remains must equate with a named nomadic population simply because that name appears in texts. Those texts, however, were often composed by people who in fact knew very little about the populations to which they refer. Ritner highlights this very incongruity as evidence for the nature of the relationship between the Egyptian state and Libyan nomads.
The reliability of archaeological and ethnographic data was a subject of some debate during the seminar. for example, although several participants agreed that Lyonnet’s suggestion that Kranzhugel sites may have been the locus of seasonal communal activity among pastoralists made intuitive sense, some participants also stressed the need for more conclusive quantitative data to support or disprove the hypothesis. These data can come from faunal remains that may point to seasonality or patterns of sheep/goat exploitation, presence of wool production tools or agricultural implements, or chemical residue analysis that might point to cultural or economic links between pastoral and non-pastoral populations. Rosen’s paper makes a clear case that when several categories of archaeological data exist, they can be combined to analyze long-term trends in nomadic and sedentary interactions.
During the seminar, discussion also centered on the appropriateness of ethnographic analogy for understanding ancient nomadism. The archetypal black tent, upon which many ethno-archaeological studies of camp layout, domestic space, and personal effects have been based (Cribb 1991; Hole 1979), is probably not an appropriate analog for ancient nomadic environments or behavior (Barnard, Rosen, this volume; Saidel 2008). Furthermore, the behavior of modern pastoral groups in one region may be very different from that of pastoralists in another region, either as a result of geographic, political, social, or a host of other contingent factors (Alizadeh). Porter makes a strong case that archaeologists have long operated according to a misguided model, derived from modern ethnography, of ancient nomads as “essentially alien to urban and agricultural society in the Near East of the third and second millennia BC.”
Despite the critique of ethnographic analogy that is woven into several of the chapters in this volume, other chapters suggest that new technologies (Saidel) and a nuanced ethno-historical approach (van der Steen) can indeed offer new ways of understanding changes in social, economic, or domestic behavior in the past. Hole also reminds us that there is much to be gained from a careful analysis of the behavior of modern pastoral nomadic groups in the Middle East, especially when those behaviors are a response, in part, to geography and climate, features that have changed very little since antiquity (see also Alizadeh, this volume), or indeed to mobility itself, which Porter sees as the fundamental feature of pastoral nomadism that shapes social structure. Hole’s response serves to caution us that although new approaches to ancient pastoral nomadism are both necessary and often fruitful, we must be careful not to stray too far from understanding nomadism as much more than an adaptive response to generally stable environmental factors.
INTEGRATING PARADIGMS OF TRIBE-STATE INTERACTION
The chapters in the book’s second section focus on a second recurring topic of discussion during the seminar — what exactly Near Eastern tribes and nomads were capable of accomplishing. This includes not only the potential for nomads to undertake large construction projects (Lyonnet) or craft activities on an industrial scale (Levy), but also how the social structures of mobile tribes enable particular patterns of political or social interactions with non-tribal actors (Alizadeh, Fleming, Khazanov, Porter), or how mobile tribes transition to states (Whitcomb). These topics naturally generated a great deal of debate. For example, Alizadeh disagreed with Khazanov about the extent of the military capabilities of nomads prior to the domestication of the horse and camel. Levy’s proposal that the copper production that took place at Khirbet en-Nahas was carried out by the same nomadic pastoralists who utilized a nearby cemetery and who may have been the Shasu of Egyptian texts was also the subject of some debate. Whereas some participants wondered how, or indeed if, the site might look different if copper production was controlled by a state (i. e., Egypt) rather than by nomads, others agreed that the tenth century was a period in which no centralized state in the region had the means to control such an operation. Here, the debate seemed as much about the archaeological data supporting tribal organization of copper production as it was about whether a tribe of pastoral nomads was capable of organizing and practicing metallurgy on an industrial scale.
There was also discussion of what constituted a “tribal state,” and whether such a thing could have existed at all. Barfield suggested that what some referred to as a tribal state was more likely a situation in which a tribal leader, by means of military advantage and charisma, became the leader of a state, but did not maintain tribal traditions or organizational structures. Whitcomb suggested that Mu’awiya was indeed the ruler of a tribal state, but that this was short-lived, having devolved as a result of political factionalization. Although we came to no consensus, this was, as one participant pointed out, perhaps partly the result of the differing definitions of tribal states, one of the very problems that the seminar intended to address. The fact that this issue surfaced near the end of the second day of the seminar should serve to remind us that semantic disagreements may underlie similar debates. If we are to continue to make progress in understanding the ways tribes and states interacted in the ancient Near East, we must strive to be unambiguous in our terminology and specific in our analysis.
The final section of the book contains a response by Hole to the preceding chapters. His response is informed by personal experience and therefore offers a case study in the integration of methodological and conceptual approaches to Near Eastern nomadism and tribe-state interactions.
Although this book is organized according to the thematic links that I found most salient, another editor may have made different choices. The fact is that several conceptual threads weave all the chapters together in different ways.3 For example, several contributors take an approach to particular regions or communities to assess long-term changes in the nature of pastoral nomadism or tribe-state interactions. The time scales vary — Rosen looks at thousands of years of nomad-sedentary interaction, whereas Levy looks at sociopolitical changes among nomads in Jordan over the course of the iron age. What is significant, however, is that pastoral nomadic tribes do change. The way they develop and interact with their neighbors at a given moment, whether those are states or other tribes, is as much the result of the contingent historical, economic, or social circumstances both within and external to the tribe that have led up to that moment, as it is the result of more predictable, immediate factors like ecology, for example. The dynamic nature of pastoral nomadism, tribal structures, and tribe-state interactions is a key element of these papers, which seem to build upon recent approaches that view tribalism as a process, rather than as a static category (fowles 2002).
Future research
In many ways, these papers turn the notion of tribe-state interdependency on its head and demonstrate that in some cases not only can tribes act entirely independently, but states can sometimes be dependent on tribes. At other times, many of the features of nomadic tribes begin to look very state-like, which suggests that we will need to continue to wrestle with our definitions of tribe and state. it is likely that the line between tribes and states will continue to blur, as several of these chapters argue that nomadic tribes can take a rather sophisticated role in regional interactions, industrial and administrative organization, the development of
Sessions that were organized along different lines from the presentation of chapters in this book
Urban centers, and state formation. Many of these papers stretch previous ideas concerning what tribes can do. construction of urban sites, monumental architecture, and the formation of powerful kingdoms turn out to be well within the realm of tribal accomplishments. Each of the contributors to this book raises vital questions that future research will need to address. One of the more exciting questions these papers raise is whether, if we are only just beginning to identify nomadic tribes as the agents of significant social change in the ancient Near east — changes we had previously thought were instigated by states or even empires — in how many other cases have we overlooked the autonomous role of nomads or tribes in regional developments?
JEFFREY SZUCHMAN
World History
