Cuneiform texts, of course, were not written by or for anthropologists; in Sumerian and in Akkadian there are no terms equivalent to concepts like nomadism or seminomadism, nor terms that may be translated strictly by clan or tribe. Nonetheless, the historian may deduce that some populations which occupied territories in the dry regions must have practiced some kind of nomadism. Greater consideration will be given here to the Amorites of the early centuries of the second millennium because they are the best documented.
The Amorites: third millennium bce
In the view of historians of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth it was customary to assume that Semitic peoples came originally from the Arabian desert, and that all of them were nomads who, in successive waves, had invaded the Near East (Kupper 1957: xiv). There is still a debate about the origin of each population using Semitic languages, but it is accepted that, although they shared the same family of languages, they did not necessarily have a common origin, nor were they all nomads.
It is not impossible that some of them were present in the Syro-Mesopotamian region from very remote times. In the middle of the third millennium Ebla in Syria was a powerful, fully urban, Semitic state. The Akkadians had reached Mesopotamia by the end of the twenty-fourth century. Sargon’s achievement was not an invasion but rather the taking of power by a non-Sumerian ethnic group that was already fully established in urbanized Lower Mesopotamia.
In contrast, the Amorites (‘‘the Westerners,’’ M a r t u in Sumerian, Amurru in Akkadian), did infiltrate the land of Sumer and Akkad, coming very probably since the end of the third millennium from the northeast of Syria, but not always as invaders. One may deduce that their sociopolitical organization was tribal because the names attributed to them designate political entities based on descent, in other words, what we call clans or tribes: the Yahmadum, the Yamutum, and the Didanum (Buccellati 1966: 242-5).
The Amorites appeared most frequently in the Sumerian texts from the third millennium as groups that pillaged sedentary territory, to such an extent that under the reign of Su-Sin, monarch of the Third Dynasty of Ur, a ‘‘wall of the Amorites which holds back Didnum’’ was built (Buccellati 1966: 243). It was said contemptuously of them that they lived in the desert, the steppe, or the mountain, dwelled in tents and were considered foreign enemies. It is less clear that it was said that they did not bend the knee and they did not bury their dead (Edzard 1981: 40-1). Nonetheless, some Amorite soldiers and civil servants did live in the cities ofSumer and Akkad, without this implying that they had broken their ethnic links (Edzard 1981: 43). In many texts people called Amorites were not considered Sumerians or Akkadians, but rather a culturally distinct ethnic group (Edzard 1981: 39).
Just after the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur in the year 2004 bce the penetration of the Amorites into urban zones of the entire Syro-Mesopotamian region was intensified to such an extent that they constituted the predominant ethnic group. Throughout the first three centuries of the second millennium many of their chiefs took power in many of the old city-states of Lower Mesopotamia and in other cities that had not been important until then, like Babylon.
The Haneans of Mari
Since the first half of the third millennium, the city of Mari, which appeared in the Sumerian King List as the seat of the tenth postdiluvian dynasty, was an important point of control for the river commerce of Lower Mesopotamia on the middle Euphrates (Jacobsen 1939b: 102). In the last quarter of the twenty-fourth century the city was conquered by Sargon of Akkad. The Akkadian governors quickly behaved as independent rulers and founded a dynasty that lasted over more than three centuries. We do not know under what circumstances they lost power. We may only state that toward the end of the nineteenth century the throne of Mari was occupied successively by two dynastic lines of Amorite origin, as was the rest of all the vast region of Syria and Mesopotamia. But there was a fundamental difference: In Lower Mesopotamia, which was densely urbanized and where the economy was based on intensive exploitation of agriculture on the river plains, the Amorite immigrants adopted the way of life of the urban states. Some lived in quarters where they were grouped according to their tribal affiliations; others lived in agricultural areas; among those were some who were shepherds (Postgate 1992: 76, 81-2). But the pastoral groups in Lower Mesopotamia did not constitute autonomous political entities within the states. Only very much later, in the first half of the first millennium bce, did some ethnic groups of immigrants coming from outside the region, the Chaldeans, manage to constitute autonomous political entities within the territories of urban states. In Mari, in contrast, the Haneans lived in the place of origin of the Amorite ethnic groups, in the steppes in the northeast of Syria, where many of them kept up their tribal ties (Postgate 1992: 86).
Toward the end of the eighteenth century kings and their officials with tribal affiliations adopted forms of government proper to the urban state and tried to subject the tribal groups. But the underlying communities frequently resisted and even rebelled. The tension between the centralizing strategies of the state and the autonomous tendencies of the tribal groups gave rise to a series of compromises and conflicts to which we owe much of our information about these groups.
Haneans, Benjaminites, and Bensimalites
Two great confederations were active in the region of present-day northeastern Syria: the Bensimalites, ‘‘The Sons of the North,’’ who originally occupied the region of the triangle of the upper Habur tributaries, and the Benjaminites, ‘‘The Sons of the South,’’ who occupied the Syrian steppe along the Euphrates, from the zone around Mari, known as The Banks of the Euphrates, upstream between the Euphrates and the Balih River (Anbar 1985: 24). The Bensimalites at some time came to occupy the Middle Euphrates and were then called Yaradu, ‘‘those who descended,’’ and displaced some groups of the Benjaminites, subjecting those who remained. This fact was at the origin of the Benjaminite hostility toward the Bensimalites. The Mari rulers Yahdun-lim and Zimri-lim, of Bensimalite ancestry, thus gave themselves the title King of Mari and of the land of the Haneans with which they tried to reclaim at the same time the sovereignty over the urban state of Mari as well as over all the tribal groups, including Bensimalites and Benjaminites, both of them under a common denomination of Haneans (Charpin and Durand 1985: 337).
Haneans and Akkadians
Haneans came to designate the groups that, regardless of their political tribal loyalties, did not identify themselves culturally with the subjects of the Mari Kingdom. Mari had been conquered by Sargon, became an Akkadianized state, and thereafter its people identified themselves as Akkadians. The opposition between Haneans and Akkadians appears clearly in a very curious text. Horses, still rare in the Near East then, were considered savage animals by Akkadians, who were integrated into the social and economic framework of the urban state. Zimri-lim, a tough and politically insensitive man, at the beginning of his reign apparently used to parade in the city riding on a horse like a tribal chief. A clever high-level official with more political taste took the liberty of giving the king a wise piece of advice:
If (it is true that) you are the king of the Haneans (it is also true) that you are in second place the king of the Akkadians. (Thus), my Lord should not ride horses but (he has to enter the city) only in a litter or else, (riding) on mules. Might my Lord weigh the dignity of his kingship! (Durand 1998: 2: 484-8 text 732).
The same cultural opposition between Akkadians and tribal populations appears in a ritual funerary banquet of communion with the departed which dated to the period in which Siamsi-Adad was sovereign of Mari (Birot 1980:142).In this document it is indicated that the king ought to offer the banquet to the dead Akkadian kings, Sargon and Naram-Sin, and to Hana, meaning probably the tribal ancestors of the middle Euphrates, and also to Numha, probably meaning the tribal ancestors of the middle Tigris.
The political organization of Benjaminite and Bensimalite Haneans
A legal document about the transfer of some communal property registered the names of all the chiefs of extended families who participated, including ‘‘five sons of Awin that live in Apan... eight sons of Awin of the section of the camp’’ (Boyer 1958: 8-10, 20-1). This shows the community was divided into two sections, those who lived in a little village and those members of ‘‘the section of the camp,’’ the group of shepherds that left with the flocks of sheep to the steppe, where they camped during the rainy season.1 We are dealing, then, with seminomads, a tribal community that included a group of families that lived in a village and another group specializing in pastoralism.
But not all the tribal groups were seminomads. We read in a letter that the elders of Dabish, of the Yahrurean tribe, in spite of not being part of the Yaradu who had descended to conquer Mari, were willing to join the Bensimalites, and they were disposed to sacrifice a donkey as a sign of their new alliance (Durand 1992: 117). They declared that they did not have a section of the camp nor any pasture field.2 It is clear they were not seminomads, although they saw themselves as a tribal group, the Yahrureans, part of the Benjaminite confederation. The Bensimalites had no large subgroups, perhaps because they were closely integrated into the Mari state structure. But they had some dozen minor subgroups called ga’um, a term also used for big groups of Benjaminites, so it must not be strictly equivalent to either clan or tribe (Talon 1985). The more autonomous Benjaminites included big subgroups, Yahrureans, Yariheans, Amnaneans, Rabbeans (Charpin and Durand 1985: 337), and Ubrabeans, which were subdivisions of a larger confederation. Thus they could be called tribes, while the small groups, which we could call clans, were represented in this text by the elders of the extended families (Bardet 1984: 361).
The government of the village communities: elders, sugagu, and me’ru
In other texts from Mari the elders performed very diverse and important functions. In one of them they went so far as to exercise power when a governor passed away (Durand 1998: 2: 271-3 text 607). The elders’ collegial institution appears in numerous documents of other cities and periods, but with fewer responsibilities than in Mari. In contrast, officers of government of the tribal groups and the village communities, called the sugagu and the me’ru, appear to be unique to Mari. The sugagu served as chief of the tribal communities of seminomads and of smaller villages. He was an intermediary between the communities and the state administration (Durand 1998: 2: 494-7). Originally the sugagus were elected by the members of their community. In the case of the sugagu of clans living under the kingdom of Mari, the post had to be confirmed by the king himself, after a payment of a tax normally calculated in heads of sheep or the equivalent in silver. One letter explained:
Earlier Yatarum had exercised the function of sugagum of Ya’il, but he died. Today five men from among the principal personages of Ya’il, of the section (of the camp) came to see me. The men of Ya’il said: ‘Put one of our relatives as our ruler.’ This was what they said. [So] I put Yarkab-Addu as a replacement for Yatarum to fill the office of sugagum. He will deliver x minas of silver and x hundreds of sheep and I shall receive from him x minas of silver and x hundreds of sheep as a part payment due from Yatarum (the sugagu who had died) (Durand 1997: 1: 209-10 text 81).
When the groups of shepherds left for the steppes, their government required another more specific type of control, the office of the me’ru. The me’ru was a kind of governor who was named directly by the king himself for the migratory groups. Another letter said:
The Haneans do not go away from their villages because they were retained by the work of the oxen. When I was at Terqa to see my Lord, I commissioned two men to make the Haneans go out to the camps. I said to them: ‘The me’ru has already departed; why do you remain?’ This same day all the Haneans left! (Durand 1998: 2: 504 text 742)
In this document the tension between the interests of the administration and those of the tribes is revealed very clearly. The me’ru had his own plan of work and had to leave for the pastoral zones at a time determined by bureaucratic decisions. The villagers had to combine the work of the croplands and pastoralism. The work in the fields was subject to an unpredictable rhythm. The necessity of plowing the fields, an activity referred to in the texts as the work of the oxen, kept the villagers busy probably because of a delay in the first rains. The sugagus, intermediaries between the village communities and the administration, often found themselves between a rock and a hard place, the rock of the state and the hard place of the people’s resistance.
The seminomadic shepherds
In times of peace the administration wanted the shepherds to leave for the high country. But if there were rebellions brewing, the dispersion of the shepherds raised the suspicion that they might join the insurrection. The same person who sent the last letter intended at another time to stop the shepherds from leaving to the high country under the pretext that the rebels could attack the villages; he wrote:
The men who are in the villages are ready to go away to the highlands. They put their sheep, which are fed in Lasqum, on the way toward the highlands. When one asks them (why), they answer: ‘Here there is no pasture and (thus) we are going to the high country.’ My police are strong. (If) they surprise one of the Benjaminites, moving from the low country towards the high country, he will be apprehended. (Durand 1998: 2: 423-4 text 680)
The levy of the shepherds
The nomads were required to bolster the ranks of the armies partly because they were considered courageous and partly because they had an excess of manpower. Some documents from Mari provide information about the many ways in which the levy was organized by means of a tebibtum, a term which has been translated as ‘‘census’’ (Durand 1998: 2: 332-9). Such documents did not deal with determining the size and the composition of the whole population, but simply with registering the number of men who could be recruited for imminent military campaigns; therefore, it is preferable to translate tebibtum as ‘‘counting’’ rather than as ‘‘census.’’ Samsi-Addu wrote to his son Yasmah-Addu:
Go to the heart of the steppe and be accompanied by La’um’s employees and the sugagus of the Banks of the Euphrates ( = the kingdom of Mari). In the camps there are one thousand men who have not taken the oath. Take care of the center of the steppe. La’um and the sugagus of the Banks of the Euphrates should travel all around the camps and the sugagus of the camps should render the oath by the life of the god. (Durand 1998:2: 502-3 text 740)
In exchange for their military service, the Haneans received fields from the palace. Samsi-Addu ordered that the fields which had been granted to some Haneans (probably Bensimalites), in the times of the earlier rival dynasty, not be redistributed: ‘‘May the Haneans of the camps that had fields earlier on the Banks of the Euphrates keep them’’ (Durand 1998: 2: 342-4 text 641).
Tribal groups in the economy of the state of Mari
Members of the village communities were also required to provide manpower to harvest the fields of the palace and for the shearing of its flocks, which must have had a large number of animals since at any given moment more than 500 men were needed for this task over several days (Durand 1998: 2: 671-5 texts 852, 853). Tribal communities also contributed to the economy of the realm with the delivery of sheep. Keeping in mind that meat did not constitute the basis of the diet, one can infer that the palace’s desire for the sheep can be explained by its need to have provisions of wool for its workshops for making textiles and clothes, an industry that must have been of some importance, as there was a considerable number of administrative texts that refer to this economic activity (Silva Castillo 1981).
Resistance and rebellions
These requirements of the administration were ill received by the tribal groups; some texts speak of their resistance, others of the repression they suffered. In a letter it becomes clear that the governor of the city of Terqa had tried to gather people to harvest the fields within the Benjaminite territory under the pretext of the threat of an enemy attack. But the blackmail did not have the desired effect:
I sent personnel of Terqa to gather the people of Zurubban, of Hishamta, of Himmaran, and of Hanna. I sent a message to the villages of the Benjaminites and the sugagu of Dumtan answered me thus: ‘‘Let the enemy come and take our villages.’’ That he responded! Thus, in the harvest of the Benjaminite villages I have not been able to obtain anything. (Durand 1998: 2: 428-9 text 686)
In other documents the resistance of the villagers collided with the strong arm of the state. An official wrote:
For five days in the agreed place I have been waiting for the Haneans and those people have not come. The Haneans (already) came from the camps and are in their villages. Once, twice, I sent messages to the villages. I have summoned them! And they did not gather. And as many as three times! And they did not gather. So then, if it agrees with my Lord, may a criminal be executed at the prison and may his head be cut off and be sent around through the villages from Hutnim to Appan. In this way the people will be afraid and will gather rapidly. (Durand 1998: 2: 176-7 text 559)
The Benjaminites posed major resistance to the state and clearly identified the Bensimalites with the monarchy in power in their two open rebellions against Zimri-lim. They said, ‘‘Let us go to the Banks of the Euphrates to attack (the Bensimalite populations)’’ (Durand 1998: 2: 444-6 text 700).
Cultural unity of the Hanean groups
Other documents seem to offer a panorama in which the feeling of unity prevailed over division. According to a chief of the Ubrabean Benjaminites, if the threat came from a totally foreign enemy, both branches of the Haneans would unite to make a common front against the enemy. The metaphors of the Ubrabean are very eloquent:
May your god Dagan, as patron of the country, break the arms of the Elamites! If they managed to come to the Banks of the Euphrates, would they not differentiate themselves by chance as the ants that are white from one side of the river (while) on the other side they are black? It is true that it is said: ‘‘Such a city is Bensimalite and such another is Benjaminite.’’ Regardless, are their clashes not like those of the flood of the river of which the (impetuous) waters upriver clash with the (gentle waters) downriver? (Durand 1998: 2: 488-92 text 733)
The Suteans
Besides the Benjaminites and Bensimalites, the group of the Suteans was a third tribal actor in the history of Mari. The Suteans were a population of Semitic language and culture but, apparently, not of the same branch as the Haneans. The Suteans were active around the steppes of the Syrian Desert and the Jebel Bishri, a mountainous massif between Mari and Palmyra (Kupper 1957: 90).
Some texts of Mari refer to plunder committed by them; some others to the defeats they suffered (Durand 1998: 2: 505-11). The assertion that before the introduction of camels seminomads could only have survived in close relation with farmers does not imply that some of them could not have subsisted by living in tents. The tradition given in the Assyrian King List that the first 17 ancestors ‘‘lived in tents’’ suggests that the ancient editors knew of contemporary groups that lived in such conditions. It is not impossible to think that these populations represented a way of life more precarious than that of the Haneans. The Suteans, who during the Old Babylonian period appeared as secondary actors, were at center stage in the history of the pastoral tribes in the centuries following the collapse of Mari about 1758 bce.
The Suteans and the Ahlamu in the second half of the second millennium
Mari, occupied by the troops of Hammurabi around 1760 and burned two years later, did not recover its importance. Terqa became the center of an apparently minor Kingdom of Hana. This was very probably a tribal chiefdom, but we do not know. Babylonia, in turn, succumbed to the attack of the Hittites in 1595 bce which opened the way for the Kassites, mountain people who then became the masters of Mesopotamia. Historical sources were scarce until the fourteenth century, and therefore information ceased about the tribes that had maintained sometimes peaceful, sometimes hostile relations with the rulers of the Old Babylonian period.
In the fifteenth century a document from Alalah, a city on the Orontes River, offers some interesting information. Idrimi, a fugitive king, passed through the land of the Suteans, which must have been the desert of Syria. Once reinstalled on his throne, he stated that he would support the Suteans ‘‘who do not have a dwelling-place’’ (Kupper 1957: 97-8). In the middle of the fourteenth century Suteans were mentioned in the texts from Amarna as having intercepted some messengers between Egypt and Babylonia. Besides a campaign of the Assyrian king Arik-den-ili against the Suteans, the Ahlamu, and the Yauru, some Suteans appeared among the groups that paid tribute to Shalmanesar I of Assyria toward the end of the thirteenth century.
Another tribal group, the Ahlameans, was called Sutean in some texts. Perhaps the Ahlamu were subgroups of the Suteans who were at first oflittle importance, but then over time they predominated politically to such an extent that they overshadowed other Sutean groups. Or perhaps seminomads had been identified as Suteans in Syria but as Ahlamu in Upper Mesopotamia (Liverani 1988a: 716). It is not impossible that this classification is simply due to a confusion of the bureaucrats and the scribes who edited the documents, since for them the desert tribes had been Sutean for centuries. In the middle of the thirteenth century the Hittite king Hatushili III excused himself for not being able to go to Babylonia because the road was unsafe due to the Ahlamu, although by that time the Assyrian king Shalmanesar I mentioned them among the allies ofthe Hittites.
The tribal structure of these two big formations is verified by the way in which the groups were identified as the House of X and the individuals as the son of X. We know only a few names of subgroups of the Suteans (Postgate 1981: 53). About their mode of life the documents of the period emanating from urban administrations as well as the literary texts offer us only stereotypical cliches: they lived in the steppe like onagers and gazelles, did not have houses, they lived in tents, their refuge was the mountain, they did not know agriculture, did not recognize agreements, nor human reason, and their speech was that of animals (Malbran-Labat 1981: 74).
The Aramaeans in the first millennium
Like the confusion that occurred between the Suteans and the Ahlamu, the Aramaeans too were called Ahlamu in the first mention of them (Postgate 1981: 49). In the Mediterranean Levant, right after the cyclone of the twelfth century provoked by the invasion of the Peoples of the Sea, some of the Aramaean tribes constituted little states, and the politically dominant population identified itself on the basis of ethnic affinities (Liverani 1988a: 654-60). The Mesopotamian states of Assyria and Babylonia were more solid and thus, at the beginning, the great Aramaean tribal formations within and around Lower Mesopotamia could only fill the spaces of the arid zones between urban and agricultural zones. Many of the Aramaeans in the arid zones initially were devoted to seminomadic pastoralism with goats and sheep. But as a result of their contact with Arab tribes they slowly adopted the breeding of camels as well. While some Aramaean groups continued to practice pastoral seminomadism, others settled down in cultivable areas to the point that they became sedentary agriculturalists and even city dwellers without losing a strong social cohesion and an ethnic cultural identity based on a supposed common origin.
Over the course of the six first centuries ofthe first millennium bce the Aramaic language came to prevail among all the tribal and urban populations of the Near East from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. The Chaldeans, an Aramaean subgroup, became the elite that succeeded in making Babylonia the capital of the mighty Neo-Babylonian empire, completing in this way the Aramaicization of the entire Ancient Near East.
The Arabs
In Mesopotamian documents the Arabs, although speaking a Semitic language, were never confused with the West Semitic populations. They appeared at the beginning of the first millennium in Neo-Assyrian texts, from Damascus to Aqaba and from Palmyra to the Euphrates (Fales 1989: 122). The cliches about their way of life were similar to those attributed to other tribes, but the harshness of their habitat was noticed. They were described as ‘‘inhabitants of the desert where there are not even savage animals, where the birds of the sky do not build their nest’’ (Malbran-Labat 1981: 63). They were distinguished from other tribes by their large herds of camels which permitted them greater mobility.
The tribes that lived in Arabia had kings who confronted the Mesopotamian armies or negotiated with them. From the texts about the tribute the Arabs paid to the Assyrians one may deduce that the Arab nomads’ economy was then based on breeding livestock, especially camels, and on their participation in the caravan commerce in spices coming from Yemen. Contrary to the traditional image of the aggressive Arabs, the information from some recently published Neo-Assyrian letters paints a more nuanced picture. The Assyrians showed a prudent and at the same time wary tolerance to groups within the territory of their empire. It seems that political relations with the Arabs were just being created, passing from battle to alliance, from pillage to economic relations (Fales 1989: 126-9).
World History
