All general histories of the Ancient Near East refer to sites and objects in their discussions, and often include illustrations, plans, and reconstructions. These have been almost exclusively provided by excavations carried out in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries ce, at Mesopotamian urban sites like Warka, Ur, and Babylon, Assur, and the later Assyrian capitals, and moving west, Mari, Ugarit, and the Hittite capital Hattusha. Although many of these projects are still running, and recent findings from these sites occasionally make their way into new historical accounts, they nonetheless hardly alter, reconfigure, or replace the familiar standards. No excavations begun since the 1950s have enjoyed a similar popularity among historians.
The reasons behind this conservatism are several. The most obvious is that excavations before World War II were carried out on a scale appropriate to recovering historical information. Archaeologists exposed entire cities without being encumbered by sampling techniques, subsistence strategies, micromorphology, post-depositional processes, or the statistical recording of potsherds (for these techniques, see Matthews 2003). Nor did they waste much time on occupational levels later than the period or periods that interested them as historically significant and illustrious, or on levels of occupation within a building or period. The single-minded pursuit of total site recovery for specific levels aimed at, and succeeded in, producing urban plans, placing monumental buildings within their administrative neighborhoods, and uncovering large structures in their entirety (Parrot 1953: 40). We can indeed be grateful for the accomplishments of this stage in the history of archaeological research. It revealed the layouts of cities like Babylon and Assur that are far beyond what the 10 X 10 meter, or 33-foot, trench - the largest format in current use - can ever hope to expose. By providing a preliminary framework and typology for architecture, urbanism, and art in the Ancient Near East, such projects cleared the way for later generations of excavators to concentrate on a finer-grained recovery of comparable or contrasting sites.
Secondly, a major motive behind the choice of which sites to excavate was to find direct evidence for supplementing and reconstructing history. Urban centers therefore took precedence over towns and villages, as did the excavation of their monumental buildings, the construction of which could more likely be connected to historical episodes and important figures than private houses. Since the midnineteenth century, when Botta’s and Layard’s discoveries at the Assyrian capitals of Khorsabad and Nimrud first showed that palaces could be expected to contain inscriptions on their walls and tablets inside their rooms, and that such contexts might confirm or enrich a historical outline initially drawn from the Old Testament and the Greek historian Herodotus, they became preferred targets because they seemed more informative. Once the deciphered inscriptions and tablets demonstrated the wealth of social and economic detail to be anticipated from such sources, their recovery became a driving force behind archaeological excavation. Excavators were pressed by the need to find cuneiform tablets, as one can read in the prefaces to their reports. By the third day of the first campaign at Mari in 1933, although a statue of Sumerian type had already been found, ‘‘we were not satisfied since Paris was urging us to hurry up and discover ‘a text’ ’’ (Parrot 1974: 15).
Inscribed finds also compensated for stratigraphic complexity, recycling, or imperfect excavating, by generating of themselves the required chronological and contextual information (at Byblos, Dunand 1954: 3-7,1968: 99-100). That the remarkable series of inscribed statues commissioned by Gudea and his relatives was discovered in a palace built and occupied about 1,800 years after their lifetimes did not affect assigning these early governors of Lagash to their correct historical place (Azarpay 1990: 97; deGenouillac 1936b: 9-10). It seems incidental that the temple in which the dedications originally stood was not recovered, and indeed most likely destroyed, by its excavator (Lloyd 1980: 159-60). The texts inscribed on the statues related, in satisfactory detail, the circumstances surrounding the temple’s construction and the name of its patron-god; and a model brick on the lap of Gudea the architect was incised with his divinely inspired temple plan. Sculptures such as these, which prompted museums throughout the world to sponsor projects in the hope of securing display-worthy artwork, also contributed to focusing excavation on royal and urban centers with historic credentials. Thus de Sarzac, the first excavator of Gudea’s temple at Telloh/ancient Girsu, could be congratulated for making the Louvre ‘‘the chief European treasure-house of early Babylonian (Sumerian) art and history’’ (de Genouillac 1936a: 1).1
Finally, Near Eastern projects carried out before the 1950s were conducted with small teams, large local labor forces, and seasons lasting six months or more, three conditions that favored the emergence of the big picture. The Zimri-Lim palace at Mari, for example, a 2.5 hectare, or 6 acre, complex with over 260 rooms preserved in parts to a height of 5 m, or 16 feet, was dug in only four years (twelve months of fieldwork) by a four-person staff and 230 workmen (Parrot 1953: 28-9, 1974: 19-20). De Morgan, digging at Susa before World War I, considered 1,000 to 1,500 workers an appropriate labor force, although a few decades later Parrot could criticize this as more suitable for a ‘‘civil engineering project,’’ with any number above 300 posing a ‘‘serious threat to scientific work’’ (1953: 27). At Mari as elsewhere, supervision of the excavation’s progress and the recording of its findings were the responsibility of the single field director and the project head, the two other staff members being assigned to architectural plans and finds illustration, photography, and preliminary conservation.
The results of such broad enterprises suited a narrative publication format whose sweeping conclusions could be readily adapted into historical accounts. Object catalogs and technical discussions for specialists were placed at the end of this narrative, and often set in smaller print. Finds thus illustrated the context, instead of constituting the basis for its interpretation. The recovery of immense quantities of artifacts also favored selecting those few with artistic and historic merit that best served the excavation’s immediate aims. One could call this a sampling strategy of sorts, in a research program that made the archaeologist a full partner of the historian. In the words of Parrot, Mari’s distinguished excavator, historic sites do not lend themselves to ‘‘digging with a microscope’’ (1974: 19).
From this heroic era of fieldwork emerged a historical and chronological framework for the Ancient Near East that today remains unchallenged. The outline has of course been fleshed out and refined, both in its historical and in its archaeological details. In particular, an interest in the dynamic between urban centers and their countryside has introduced into mainstream discussions information collected by later archaeological surveys (Matthews 2003: 182-8), and efforts to understand archival practices and economic systems have encouraged study of the archaeological contexts where individual archives were found (Zettler 1996; Reichel 2001). But such interdisciplinary studies have, on the whole, been initiated by archaeologists who can also read the texts, rather than by specialists in the ancient languages. In fact, the changes that transformed archaeological research after the mid-twentieth century and shaped its many excavation projects do not coincide well with a historical agenda. Current archaeological research might even be thought irrelevant to a historical scheme, given the technical perspective and problem-oriented focus with which most of the recent projects are associated. Hence the tendency has been for historians to sideline new projects in favor of old standards. Even the spectacular (non-epigraphic) finds from Tell Mardikh, ancient Ebla, remain consigned to a few lines only in connection with the conquests of Akkadian kings - hardly more than before the site was excavated, and despite its widely circulated and accessible publications (Matthiae 1977, 1985; Matthiae, Pinnock, and Scandone-Matthiae 1995). Yet Ebla’s third millennium bce urban development says much about Sumerian cultural and economic preeminence over a large geographical area, as other excavations in western Syria can confirm. New historical studies of Early Dynastic Sumer must take these sites into account if they are to explain why the rulers at Ebla and elsewhere turned to the cities of Sumer for models to emulate.
World History
