In discussion of ancient society, as examined in the broadest possible framework, all terms are up for negotiation. It is not even clear how and to what extent our categories are meaningful in these distant settings. The “state” may be archaic, but the tiered relationships of ancient kingdoms may not best be understood as truly fixed hierarchies with dominant power flowing down from above. The “city” may not involve a concentrated population, and its residential aspect may even be incidental to its administrative and ritual functions. There are political entities that may overlap multiple kingdoms, bound by ties that do not depend on geographical proximity, whether or not they are best considered “tribal.” Large populations move through the back country with their flocks and herds, but they are so closely integrated socially and politically with settled peoples as to test the utility of the word “nomad.”
In a re-evaluation of kinship studies based on his own research in the Pacific caroline Islands, David schneider reflected on the inadequacy of his own analytical framework until he paid attention to the indigenous vocabulary for social organization. When he first evaluated the evidence that he gathered from ethnographic work, he treated a category called the tabinau as a patrilineage, in purely kinship terms. Later, returning for a closer look at actual usage, he concluded that his preconceived notions of society had impeded his ability to build a picture of social organization from the ground up. The tabinau had different meanings in different settings: a dwelling, persons related through ties of land, a group living together with different ties to the same land, or a place where something is founded, but never land without people.1
For ancient societies, careful attention to language should likewise challenge preconceived reconstructions. The problem is that indigenous information about mobile herding peoples can be hard to come by, with texts generally produced in settled centers, and “nomads” treated as outsiders. In the midst of such perspectives, the archives of early second-millennium mari have long offered something different, in which the pastoralists are more visible if not more accessible. Along with thousands of palace administrative records, 3,000-4,000 letters were collected by Mari’s kings, mostly in the thirteen-year reign of Zimri-Lim, its final ruler.93 94 The letters offer unparalleled access to a range of social situations in a landscape that includes every sort of political affiliation encountered by the Mari leadership.95
Charpin 2004: 453-75. The following publications relate especially to mobile herding populations and social organization in what are usually understood as “tribal” terms: Kupper 1957; Luke 1965; Rowton 1967: 109-21; idem 1973: 201-15; idem 1974: 1-30; and several related pieces; Charpin and Durand 1986: 141-83; Anbar 1991; Nicolle 2004 (and especially articles by Durand, fleming, and Alba in Nicolle 2004); fleming 2004.
DANIEL E. FLEMING
The Mari archives allow us to approach a conversation about nomads, tribes, and the state with access to the political and social vocabulary of the peoples themselves. such written evidence presents a host of obstacles to our comprehension, both by the distance from modern settings and by the need to disentangle who speaks from what perspective. The indigenous voices nevertheless offer a constant challenge to each generation of our social reconstructions. With the most recent mari research, it is becoming evident that under king zimri-Lim, the categories commonly isolated as “tribe” and “state,” along with “nomad,” “pastoralist,” and the like, came together in a single social web.96 In zimri-Lim’s kingdom, these were not merely mutually dependent, as envisioned by Michael Rowton.97 The categories, so far as they apply, were dimensions of a social unity that incorporated elements of them all.
The city of Mari was located upstream of Babylonia on the Euphrates, just below where the Habur flows into it from the hills to the north. Through several decades and two separate political administrations, the Mari kingdom bridged the eastern Mesopotamian powers and the great Syrian centers of Aleppo and Qatna.98 Mari’s rulers had dealings with peoples from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, with particular interest in the swath of land north of the Euphrates and filling the Habur drainage and surrounding steppe. Mobile herding groups constituted a major component of the region’s population in this period, and they form a constant presence in the archives.
World History
