People who study the Ancient Near East prefer to find their texts in scientific excavations, but in fact many if not most of the texts have come from the antiquities market. It used to be legal to bring such texts from the Near East as tourist trinkets, and most of the museums in Europe and North America have a collection of Ancient Near Eastern texts. But with the independence of the states of the region came antiquities laws which prohibit the export of historical documents and artifacts. A trade persists in goods that were exported before there were such laws, but it is hard to be sure that small objects like cuneiform tablets were not exported illegally. And by participating in such trade, one is encouraging robbers today to pillage ancient sites in hopes of finding salable objects. In the wake of the 2003 Iraq war especially there was widespread looting of sites, though the objects taken may not yet have reached markets in the West. Clandestinely acquired objects may have important information for historians, but one must consider in using them if one is encouraging the destruction of sites that one day might be scientifically excavated and thus might yield up texts with actual archaeological contexts. The field is not agreed on the proper course of action in this regard, and one can understand that the lure of new texts may overcome qualms about contributing to archaeological destruction. But archaeologists, whose discipline is being deprived of data, uniformly condemn the market in antiquities.
The first goal of Ancient Near Eastern historical investigation is the establishment of archives. By archives we do not mean the modern repositories of manuscripts in which we find texts today. We mean ancient groups of tablets or texts of any sort which were created as a group. The problem for the historian is that the texts were not always preserved together or recovered together by archaeologists or tablet or papyrus robbers who brought them to the antiquities market. The idea is to see what the units of the ancient bureaucracies were and then to investigate the methods of recording, categorizing, and ordering which the clerks used (Gelb 1967; Bagnall 1995: 40-8).
Since few collections of ancient texts have been found in their original situations, historians resort to various devices to identify texts now scattered in different museums and to bring them together intellectually if not physically. The simplest of these devices is prosopography or the effort to constitute group biography. One tries to identify the persons working in or having contact with a particular bureaucracy and then to see if they show up in other texts. This effort involves the use of indices of personal names, and in each period there are more or less serviceable lists, but there are not yet exhaustive lists of names in published texts, and of course few ancient texts that have not yet been published are available in published lists of names (Borger 1975: 141-7). Each of these collections of names is incomplete and antiquated and thus gives only a partial picture of the individuals active in a period. So the effort to establish a list of bureaucrats who served in given capacities is a tentative one, subject to the finding of new texts. And yet good cases can be made that persons appearing in similar texts over time were the same persons and probably served the same institutions.
The criticisms of the method of prosopography that have been important in studies of other periods seem not to be salient in the Ancient Near East. Critics argue that prosopography by its nature groups together only superficial characteristics and does not explore what makes individuals unique (Stone 1971). In particular, ideology, or religious belief, seems to count for little or nothing in group biographies in other periods. The same might be said of studies of Mesopotamian figures; on the other hand, there is almost no information on the interior life and opinions of any Mesopotamian of any age, and we ought not to be surprised if such matters do not impinge on studies of bureaucracies. Still, considerable progress has been made even in unlikely places at reconstructing bureaucracies and how they worked and even something of political developments (Snell 2000). We must not of course simply assume that all the bureaucrats agreed with the party line as put forth in royal hymns and inscriptions, but criticism of that line was rare and muted, though not entirely absent (Snell 1998).
Another way of reconstructing archives and getting at ancient institutions is to look at the forms of the texts. By this we mean the genre, that is, those elements that make up the basic outlines of texts about a particular subject. As with modern genres, strict adherence to form may not be expected, and bureaucrats these days are always tinkering with their forms to make them better at recording different things. Even in the absence of prosopographic links it is sometimes possible to tease out the goals and functions of ancient institutions on the basis of how things were recorded in the texts of the same genre (Snell 1986). Certainly our understanding of kingship derives in large part from close attention to the titles the kings used and to what they considered worthy of representation within the genre of royal inscriptions (Hallo 1957; Von Beckerath 1984).
The very best way to re-create groups of texts is to find them together. In the past this was a rare occurrence since archeological methods were slipshod at best and record-keeping minimal. Nowadays, however, archeologists are obsessive about recording every detail, and the location and disposition of ancient texts is a high priority for them. We have found ancient archives in their original situation, though some of the most important groups of texts were not found in that state. One thinks in particular of the important collection of texts from the bureaucracy from the Ur III state in the capital city which were found together but had been reused as fill under a gate (Jacobsen 1953b). In that case the proximity of one text to another might be significant of their bureaucratically created connection, or it might not, given that the texts were transported and re-deposited. The contrast is striking to the finds at Ebla in northern Syria, where careful long-term excavation resulted in the uncovering of a huge ancient archive more or less in the order in which it fell from the burning wooden shelves that once supported it (Matthiae 1981: after 80).
The reconstruction of archives has proven very fruitful in recent Ancient Near Eastern history writing, but we must admit that there is something inherently narrow in the effort. We are learning more about a defined set of texts, all presumably coming from a single site in a limited period of time. But is what we can derive from that archive analogous to other archives even within the same language area and period? We cannot be sure and so are even more timid than we might have been about the scope of our statements. And we wish to ask broad questions not dependent on only one archive (Van De Mieroop 1997b: 302).
The source of ideas for broader studies is varied and dependent on the researcher’s interests and reading. One obvious question to ask is how the archive one is studying relates to others either in the same period or in other periods but concerning the same activities, like Snell 1986, where I compared sheep-herding techniques with my Ur III archive’s techniques. Another tactic is to look at as many archives as possible from one city in a period, like Van De Mieroop 1992, studying Old Babylonian Ur. Beyond that, scholars draw on analogous disciplines like anthropology to analyze their data and place them in a broader context, like Roth 1987 examining women’s age at first marriage through texts about dowries.
Among the shames of the field are the very long delays from initial study to publication. Part of that delay comes from editors’ efforts to get peers to read and respond to submissions, but part of the delay is from the breadth of teaching most practitioners are called on to do. This means that one is rarely teaching one’s own material, and one finds that the presumed gap between research and teaching, which does not always in fact exist, may get bigger. Another factor in delay of publication is the custom in which museums award the rights to publish to particular researchers, who then may find themselves subject to delay. Because there are so many texts and so few scholars, there is always more to do and more texts to publish, and so everyone who has rights may take an indefinite time to publish even important texts. It may be that journals like N. A.B. U. Notes assyriologiques breves et utilitaires dedicated to quick publication of short notes and other efforts to appear on the Internet may reduce the delays, but the ethic of procrastination is well established, and even technical advances may not frustrate such customs. The great scandal in this regard was the unconscionable delay in publishing all the Dead Sea Scrolls (Shanks 1992: xxi-xxxviii).
The only extended recent treatment of history-writing about the Ancient Near East is Van De Mieroop’s 1999 book (Van De Mieroop 1999a). The author is concerned about the illegitimate separation of text from image, two elements that were certainly not divided in the ancient world, but now, because some are trained as text people and some as art historians, this division happens frequently, also in the present volume (Van De Mieroop 1999a: 58). Van De Mieroop attacks the use of ‘‘philological history,’’ the putting together of all sorts of data from different periods and times just because they share a name or a word; his well-chosen example is the inclusion in most discussions of Sargon of Akkad who died about 2279 bce of a text called the Sargon birth legend, which is from at least 1,500 years later. That text resembles the Biblical story of Moses and the bulrushes and may be from a similar time and milieu; Van De Mieroop argues that it tells us almost nothing about the historical Sargon but is much more important for the survival of his myths, that is, Sargon in tradition but not history. But because we have relatively few sources on Sargon, we include this late text even though it is not historically helpful (Van De Mieroop 1999a: 88). This same point was made for Egypt by Bjorkman about the Instruction for Merikare which is a literary text set in the First Intermediate Period (2125-1975 bce) but available only in later, Eighteenth Dynasty copies from between 1539 and 1292 bce and therefore cannot count as a witness to the First Intermediate Period (Bjclrkman 1964). It can of course be seen as a reflection of the traditions about that more distant period and perhaps also of the ideas about how societies collapsed in general. Such texts do have a historical value, but as products of later times and of later ideas and not as images of the times they depicted.
Van De Mieroop attacks what he calls ‘‘positivism’’ in several places. Although he does not define positivism in this book, elsewhere he notes that for him the contrast to positivism is theory-driven scholarship (Van De Mieroop 1997b: 304). An example of the latter may be the three problems addressed in Zettler 2003, where he tries to combine texts and archaeology to study the history of a temple, ideas about radical climate change and societal collapse, and ideas about the crops Mesopotamians grew. What Zettler did was to look at the modern disciplines and questions and to mine the ancient material with these issues in mind.
Positivism includes ‘‘The doctrine that the goals and methods of natural science can be transferred to historiography,’’ perhaps including ‘‘an anti-speculative conception of history, that stresses empirical research on particular subjects and shuns generalization and the quest for laws (Ritter 1986: 327). Another commentator observes that positivists see ‘‘history as a preliminary to a predictive and scientific sociology’’ (Simon 1973: 538). This so-called ‘‘physics envy’’ is widespread in the social sciences, the very term for which in English expresses this envy. Although ancient historians do not see themselves as conducting experiments and predicting outcomes, what this means in ancient studies is that one sees oneself as building only a small part of an empirical monument through editing original texts and constructing archives. The great synthesis can only come later, in this view. The archival approach described here may be an element of that positivism, but it is hard to see how theory-driven studies can dispense with archives either.
Van De Mieroop raises the very important question of whether social categories translate over time. He writes, ‘‘Are we to see a Mesopotamian wardum as the equivalent of a Roman slave, whose body belonged to his owner, or as somewhat similar to the medieval European serf, tied to the land he or she worked?’’(Van De Mieroop 1999a: 88). The question goes beyond the proper analogy for conditions of servitude to the question of whether social arrangements persisted. There is also the question of whether words in even the same language and culture mean the same thing over time. With slaves we can only answer this question through lots of anecdotes, and not all periods have the properly significant anecdotes. When the good stories are lacking, we have certainly in the past assumed a monolithic continuum especially to social arrangements, and for purposes of argument that sometimes works. But it is not necessarily always the case. For the idea that there was continuity one may note the persistence in the economy of the price of wool of 18 grains of silver for a pound from 2000 bce into the Neo-Babylonian period before 539 BCE (Snell 1982: 203). But is this a continuity of economic circumstances or of traditional reporting of prices? Certainly it does not mean that economic conditions were entirely similar in two separate periods since other prices did vary over time; indeed the recording of prices indicates that they were expected to change and did.
The assumption of continuity derives from the very old idea, brought forward in the nineteenth century, that the Orient is unchanging. Perhaps the most detailed argument for the assumption is Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism, in which he argued that the East has attempted to suppress dissent in general and in politics, arguing that the general good demands uniformity (1957). Wittfogel, an anti-Communist Marxist, saw the origin of this effort in the need to organize irrigation projects in the river valleys. This idea about origins dissolves in confrontation with evidence about the small scale of early irrigation efforts (Adams 1981: 243). But even if Wittfogel has the origins wrong, the argument for a relatively unchanging Orient might still be right. The continuities are plain for all to see - an Egyptian writing system essentially static for 3,000 years, and Mesopotamian concepts of centralized kingship persisting for hundreds of years. And yet there is evidence everywhere for change in technical and state arrangements. It is of course easier for the modern writer to assume a lack of change; then applying the Sargon birth legend text to Sargon’s own time makes sense. But historians do not sign up for ease. They seek these days at least to understand change over time.
For the public, part of the attraction of ancient history is its apparent timelessness. For the practitioner, the interesting aspect is change within tradition. As with the Bible, there doubtless was social advantage to keepers of traditional knowledge within the societies to asserting the societies’ age and unchanging nature. They seem to assert, ‘‘The knowledge we hold is forever applicable and true because it has been unchanging from most ancient times.’’ And yet we can show that even traditions frozen in writing changed over time, as in Gilgamesh and congregational laments (Tigay 1982; Kutscher 1975).
There is too in the assertion of continuity a drift toward the old man’s (sic!) view of history: the old days were best, and a return to them is the best we can hope for. Obviously, though, the old men deplore current life and its changes, implying there are changes, but should not be. This may be a basic constituent of human thought, or perhaps just Western thought, where successful revolutions tend to present themselves as conservative returns to earlier and better forms (Berman 1983).
World History
