Outside utopian fantasies, there has never been a human society without tensions and conflict. If we had an Ancient Near Eastern counterpart of the New York Times or Guardian, we would readily recognize the social forces at work: the poor and weak being dominated by the wealthy and powerful, country folk envious and skeptical of sophisticated, privileged city dwellers who mocked them as rural bumpkins, natives disdainful and suspicious of immigrant outsiders.
In reconstructing tensions within Ancient Near Eastern societies we are stymied by the paucity and the partiality of our sources. With the exception of the Hebrew Bible, all written sources for the history of Ancient Near Eastern societies are hard won - or clandestinely acquired - fruits of archaeological excavation or of the study of often badly weathered, fragmented monuments. Although thousands of documents are available to us, they do not provide a continuous or comprehensive record in time or space. Compounding these inadequacies, most of these documents were recovered from the large mounds that are the remains of ancient cities and especially of the powerful city-based institutions of temples and palaces, and thus may not be representative of most of the people, who lived in the country.
Also, literacy in the Ancient Near East generally was the prized possession of a tiny part of the population. The scholars and bureaucrats who produced most of the documents were city-dwelling men conscious of their special status as wielders of the tools of reading and writing - a status that they owed to the powerful palace and temple institutions they served. The records and works that they produced reflected those institutions’ interests and perspectives. We can tease from the evidence, however, echoes of the Ancient Near Eastern ‘‘street.’’ Scholars have used evidence about traditional societies in the contemporary Middle East to develop complex reconstructions of ancient societies that incorporate non-urban components, thus offsetting the urban prejudice of the ancient scribes.
World History
