Introduction

The ancient Near East describes a geographical region which includes Mesopotamia, the Levant, and at least the northern part of the Arab peninsula, as well as Anatolia and Iran. Egypt may also be added to these regions, though due to its distinct language, society, and culture it is often treated as a separate entity. The Near East is defined by natural boundaries - seas, rivers, mountain ranges, and deserts - which determine the accessibility of its regions: the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, the Euphrates river in the west, the Syr Darya (mod. Jaxartes) in the north-east, and the Indus in the east, as well as the mountain ranges of the Caucasus, the Zagros, and in its most eastern extent, the Paropamisadai (mod. Hindu Kush), as well as the Dasht-e Kavir, the Dasht-e Lut and the Gedrosian deserts in east and south-east Iran. Among these regions Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, witnessed the birth of ancient civilizations. The fertile lands of southern Mesopotamia allowed for a surplus agriculture (producing barley, emmer, wheat, and millet), while the northern plains permitted animal husbandry and horse breeding. The urbanization of Mesopotamia, the establishment of international trade, the creation of writing, and the birth of literature mark such a revolutionary change in human history that Mesopotamia became rightly known as “the cradle of civilization” (for Near East see Map 1).

While European travelers to the Orient are attested as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, modern interest in the ancient Near East awoke in earnest in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One of the driving factors was the desire to find the famed cities of the East which were mentioned in the Bible, especially places like Nineveh, Babylon, and Susa. The discovery of ancient Mesopotamia is owed to two figures in particular, Austen Henry Layard and Paul Emile Botta. Layard excavated the sites of Kalhu (mod. Nimrud) and Nineveh (1845-55), and Botta Sargon’s city Dur-Sharrukin (mod. Khorsabad) (1843-54), discovering reliefs of the palace walls and copying down inscriptions written in cuneiform (Larsen 1996). The decipherment of this script had only become possible after Henry C. Rawlinson, a British officer stationed at Kermanshah in north-west Iran, had copied the monumental trilingual inscription of the Persian king Darius I (522-486 bc) at Mt Bisitun, written in Elamite, Babylonian and Old Persian. It allowed Rawlinson and, independently from him, Georg Friedrich Grotefend, to decipher cuneiform (cf. Wiesehofer 2002: 223-45). Now, tens of thousands of cuneiform documents, including literary and religious texts, as well as legal, administrative, and economic documents, which had been preserved over millennia because they were written on clay, and then sun-dried or baked, could be studied by Assyriologists, scholars of Near Eastern languages written in cuneiform scripts. In contrast, it took several more decades before Near Eastern archaeology was established as a scientific discipline. Research in both fields requires specialized knowledge in the different languages and dialects, geographical areas, and periods of history, and therefore often depends on scholarly collaboration. General difficulties are posed by the fact that the tablets from the numerous sites are dispersed in museums and private collections worldwide or are unprovenanced due to illicit excavations, while political events of the twentieth century and the relative instability of the modern Middle East make it difficult to carry out continuous and systematic excavation of archaeological sites.