By Way of Conclusion

From what has been written here about tribal groups before and after the Age of Mari, the disproportion of qualitative information that we have becomes evident.

About the Amorites, the Suteans, the Ahlamu, the Aramaeans, and the Arabs, aside from the stereotypical images about their ways of life, what little we know is that they assaulted merchants and messengers, attacked sedentary people, confronted the armies of small and large states, and ended by submitting themselves to them, judging from the fact that they paid tribute or taxes. We have more substantive information about the Aramaeans, but military and political affairs largely predominated here. The texts from Mari also provide that kind of information, but add invaluable anthropological, social, and economic aspects. The haphazard nature of archaeological finds can frequently distort our perspective. If we had more information about Suteans, Ahlamu, and Aramaeans, we would probably find some processes that were at least similar, if not identical, to some of those revealed by the Mari documents.

The view of the Semites as being both nomads and invaders was modified in the first large monograph devoted to Mari. Its author interprets the immigration of the nomads not as a series of tides but as the continuing flow of a river which could be contained by means of dikes if the urban state was strong, but which would overflow if it was weak (Kupper 1957: xiv-xvi and 1959: 124). Further, Kupper presents the nomads as always lying in wait to throw themselves upon the sedentaries, but he also sees them as always in an evolutionary process toward sedentarization themselves (Kupper 1957: xiii). This position was acrimoniously criticized by Luke, who insisted on the social and economic unity of agriculturalists and pastoralists within a village culture (1965: 277-80). The pastoralists for him were not newcomers or hostile invaders but were part of communities which included both agriculturalists and shepherds. Rowton, based on the study of more recent well-documented nomadism, proposed in a series of articles (1965-81) that the case of Mari could be explained as an enclosed nomadism, a kind of seminomadism typical of the regions in which the tribal groups conduct their affairs within the territory under the jurisdiction of an urban state (Rowton 1974) which implies a ‘‘close interaction between nomad and sedentary, between tribe and state...’’ (Rowton 1973a: 201).

Each of those authors has pointed out factors which, if they are not taken as exclusive positions, offer useful elements for approaching the understanding of phenomena revealed by the documents of Mari. The model proposed by Kupper, although probably not thoroughly suitable for the case of Mari since there tribal people were involved, applies quite well to Lower Mesopotamia. One cannot deny that people from arid zones flowed continuously toward urbanized irrigated ones, where they slowly tended to become sedentary, although the movement was not unidirectional or irreversible. The kingdom of Hana affords a good example of this; after the collapse of Mari, Hana became a tribal political entity which lasted several centuries but was probably never a true urban state. The village communities, as presented by Luke, were certainly composed of farmers as well as of seminomadic shepherds whose own interests did not always coincide with those of the state, although sometimes they did. Without going so far as conceiving of an idealistic symbiosis between the seminomads and the state, we can see that their interrelation points to a tribal autonomy in the territories under state jurisdiction, as well as an urban autonomy in a nomadic environment as envisioned by Rowton.

What we glimpse in the documents of Mari is a kind of ambiguous interplay between the state and the tribal groups. In some cases, we find state officials trying to gather villagers for harvesting the fields or shearing the sheep of the palace, but in other cases they tried to have the shepherds depart to the highlands and appointed an official to take charge of them. At still other times the shepherds were prohibited from departing for the highlands in spite of the lack of pasture for their flocks. The shepherds were seen either as eventual recruits or as virtual enemies. Moreover, we find some tribal individuals interested in getting corrupt elders on their side, we find elders planning for their people to adhere to the Bensimalites and to be loyal to the state, and we find other Haneans endowed with fields from the palace. The state needed the contributions provided by the tribal communities, sheep and wool as payment of taxes, recruits for its troops, and the manpower of villagers and shepherds for the exploitation of the rural properties of the palace. The tribal communities, according to the interests of their leaders, expected military protection from the state and the economic advantages derived from the state structure. They collaborated with it when it seemed to be convenient to them, but resisted when it did not. Whenever that happened, the Hanean tribal groups, either Benjaminites or Bensima-lites, rebelled, and then the state responded with repression.

All urban states, ancient or modern, act according to a logic of their own. The apparently contradictory attitudes of the Mari officials show how rulers of an urban state, regardless of their tribal origin, subscribed to such logic. If we neglect superficial circumstances and focus on the deep significance of phenomena, would not the attitudes of the administrators of the Mari kingdom remind us of attitudes of today’s technocratic experts? The peculiarities of ancient history, of course, differ widely from what happens nowadays among the pastoral tribal communities of the region. However, it is probably not too risky to compare migrations from the steppes to urban zones of the past with migrations from rural to industrialized zones now. They are motivated not by any kind of aggressiveness of the immigrants toward urban people, but by a simple and understandable strategy for survival.