The Languages and Scripts
In the third millennium b. c.e., the people of southern Babylonia spoke Sumerian, while farther north Akkadian was the main language; speakers of both languages, however, were to be found throughout Babylonia. By around 1800 B. C.E., Sumerian had died out as a spoken language but was still used in many inscriptions and literary contexts. Sumerian was unrelated to any other known language.
Akkadian, in contrast, was one of the widespread group of Semitic languages. Old Akkadian was spoken in southern Mesopotamia until around 2000 B. C.E. After this date, two dialects developed, Assyrian in the north and Babylonian in the south. Akkadian was to become the lingua franca of the Near East in the second and earlier first millennia b. c.e.
Semitic languages were also spoken by many of Mesopotamia's western neighbors. People referred to collectively as Amorites ("westerners") are mentioned in texts from the late third millennium. From the ninth century b. c.e., Aramaic, a North Semitic language, is attested; this was later to replace Akkadian as the lingua franca.
Elsewhere, various other languages were spoken: Hattic in Anatolia, Hurrian by the people of Mitanni, Urartian in Urartu, and Elamite by Mesopotamia's traditional adversaries, the Elamites. Indo-European languages made their appearance in the Near East in the second millennium, when they included the language of the Hittite Empire.
Writing began in Sumer, logograms appearing in the fourth millennium B. C.E. During the early third millennium, a full syllabic script developed, using logograms, phonetic signs, and determinatives to record the Sumerian language. Some adjustments were made to record the very different Akkadian language, but the force of tradition meant that, throughout the script's history of use, there were some awkward accommodations in which spelling did not match pronunciation.
The Mesopotamian script was written with a reed stylus on clay tablets. The straight edge of the stylus, more deeply impressed and therefore wider at the end, created wedge-shaped strokes that give the script its name, cuneiform (from the Latin cuneus). The script was written in horizontal rows read from left to right and top to bottom.
This script became widespread in the Near East and was modified to record texts in a variety of languages, including Elamite, Hittite, and Levantine languages. Around the mid-second millennium, a rival script emerged in the Levant. Conventionally known as the first alphabet, it in fact recorded consonants as individual signs, but did not mark vowels. The alphabet was in widespread use in the Levant by the eleventh century b. c.e., but did not replace cuneiform until after the fall of Mesopotamia to the Persians.
Archaeological and Historical Methods of Age Determination
Dating is an essential precondition to studying the past, as it is impossible to analyze and understand past developments until the order in which they occurred is known. Archaeological and historical dating go hand in hand in establishing chronology; each has advantages and drawbacks. Archaeological dating depends to a large extent on relative dating by stratigraphy and typology; precise dates, within certain limits, are offered by a number of scientific dating techniques, which can, however, be used only on certain materials.
Historical sources may provide precise dates within a local chronology or tied to particular external phenomena, such as astronomical events, but these can be hard to pin down. The subjective and biased nature of many historical documents also makes the use of historical dates far from straightforward.
Archaeological Dating. Within an excavated site, stratigraphy indicates the sequence of deposition of the cultural remains that represent past occupation
And activities, creating a relative chronology. Fixed points within the sequence come from typology: dating the deposits on the basis of the material found in them. Changing requirements and technology and the dictates of fashion cause some types of artifact to change frequently in form and appearance: Pottery is an excellent example. Initially fixed in relative time by stratigraphy or dated by historical or scientific means, characteristic artifacts can be used thereafter to provide a relative date for the deposits in which they are found. Pottery styles provide much of the dating for early Mesopotamian sites.
An armory of scientific dating techniques is now also available. Dendrochronology offered precise dates in rare special circumstances by the 1920s; in 1949 radiocarbon dating was the first of many scientific dating techniques to be developed. Often these do not date archaeological material but only the context in which it is found, and therefore depend on the quality of the link between them. Nevertheless, scientific dating techniques are an invaluable tool, producing dates that are quite independent of historical or cultural assumptions that can be subject to bias or misinterpretation. Most have some built-in imprecision, owing to statistical limitations on accurate measurement, and so are generally too imprecise for dating historical events, but they can date material to a particular period, they might help in determining the relative merits of alternative dates reached by other means, and they are essential in the prehistoric period.
Radiocarbon dating is used to date organic material such as bone, wood, and carbonized plant remains. It relies on the principle that radiocarbon (C-14), the radioactive isotope of carbon, present in the atmosphere in tiny but constant amounts, is continuously being taken up by all living things. After death, the radiocarbon decays at a known rate; measurement of the residual radiocarbon in ancient organic substances therefore allows the time elapsed since death to be calculated. Fluctuations in the past in the proportion of radiocarbon present in the atmosphere mean that there is a discrepancy between radiocarbon dates (conventionally written "ce" and "bce") and calendar dates, which becomes significant before 1000 B. C.E. and increases further back in time. Dendrochronology has been used to construct a calibration curve by which radiocarbon dates can be corrected to calendar dates, conventionally written "b. c.e." to distinguish them from uncalibrated dates.
Variations in the width of annual growth rings in certain ("sensitive") species of tree allow their timber to be dated by comparing the sequence of rings in the timber to a master sequence built up from living and dead trees growing in the region. Although the method provides precise dates for the age of the wood, this may not date the structure in which it was used, since there is often an interval for seasoning between felling and use, and timbers are often reused, particularly in a region like Babylonia where timber had to be imported and was therefore valuable. Most of the regional master sequence for the Near East has not yet been worked out, although there are a number of floating chunks that reach back into the fourth millennium b. c.e. Recently a floating sequence in Anatolia has been pinned down to 2220-718 b. c.e., offering precise dating for Near Eastern timbers felled during this period and thence for the contexts associated with them. The rarity of surviving timbers in Mesopotamia makes it of limited utility here.
A large range of other scientific techniques are used by archaeologists, many of which are dependent, like radiocarbon and thermoluminescence, on the decay of tiny amounts of radioactive material: These are known as radiometric dating techniques. Thermoluminescence can be used to date pottery and is therefore of great potential use to archaeologists. Decades of research, however, have failed to overcome the limitations on its precision, running at around 10 percent of the age of the sample, so it is currently something of a blunt instrument.
Historical Dating. Dates for the 2,500 years of Mesopotamia's literate past come from written material of many kinds, including lists of rulers, official inscriptions, annals, and correspondence. From these varied historical materials a chronology covering much of the time span has been pieced together, some parts of it with more certainty than others. Sections of the chronology are generally anchored to real calendar dates only by a few fixed points. The resultant chronology represents only a best fit to the data and is subject to revision whenever new material appears.
Information from inscriptions, chronicles, and other texts enables a chronological framework to be built up, establishing the length of individual rulers' reigns and events within them. These can be given absolute dates by tying them in with the precisely dateable astronomical phenomena that are referred to in the texts. The Babylonians kept daily records of the heavens and produced a summary of these at intervals, linking them in with other occurrences of various kinds: These provide reliable dates for the first millennium B. C.E. The Assyrians used an eponym system, naming each year after an annually chosen official, the limmu. A fixed point for the sequence comes with the record of an eclipse in the year of one limmu: This took place in 763 b. c.e. Lists of these eponyms were meticulously kept. For the period from 910 to 649 b. c.e., these records are complete and dates can be given with precision, with at most an error of one or two years.
Things become less certain in the second millennium b. c.e., and in the third millennium there is even more uncertainty, including a gap of unknown duration between the Akkadian and the Ur III Empires. The chronology has been built up from a variety of sources, including the king lists, which were compiled around 1800 b. c.e. but which cover the period back to the early third millennium b. c.e. In the early part of the list, corresponding to the Early Dynastic period, the list consecutively chronicles the reigns of kings of different cities: These were often actually concurrent. It also gives early reign lengths of hundreds or even thousands of years, which clearly cannot be taken at face value; some later reigns are of a more credible length but still provide plenty of scope for debate. A sequence of annually named years from the time of Sargon of Akkad to the end of the First Dynasty of Babylon provides a chronology for the subsequent period. Later king lists were also produced, including a Babylonian King List running from the First Dynasty to the reign of Nabopolassar (early second to mid-first millennium) and an Assyrian King List covering a similar time span (see photo p. 269). Although there are debatable elements, after 1300 b. c.e. it is possible to give dates to within twenty years.
The chronology for most of the second and the third millennia is floating and is anchored to an actual date by the "Venus Tablet of Ammi-saduqa." This records the first and last appearance of the planet Venus each year during the early part of the reign of King Ammi-saduqa of the First Dynasty of Babylon. Since the movements of Venus are known, Ammi-saduqa's accession date can theoretically be deduced, but there are three dates that may fit the data. That most frequently chosen is 1646 b. c.e.: This date produces the Middle Chronology, adopted in this volume. Since the relative chronology is reasonably sound, the Middle Chronology provides a conventional means of applying notional dates to events in the second millennium, while accepting that these dates en masse may be out by more than a hundred years. An earlier date of 1702 b. c.e., associated with the High Chronology, is favored by some scholars. This best fits independent evidence from the Babylonian lunar calendar and gives a good match for a pair of lunar eclipses that took place late in the Ur III dynasty. Others argue the merits of the Low Chronology, with Ammi-saduqa's accession dated 1582 b. c.e., and recent work on dendrochronology gives strong support to this. It is clear from the contradictory nature of these pieces of evidence that providing true calendar dates for the chronology of early Mesopotamia is fraught with difficulty.
Sources for Studying Mesopotamia’s Past
Chronology provides the essential framework for studying the past. Archaeology and history again combine to provide the material from which what happened in the past becomes known, allowing it to be analyzed and attempts made to understand how and why what occurred did so. For the prehistoric period, before the existence of written records, archaeology is virtually the only source of data, although there are aspects of other disciplines that might also shed some light on what happened. For example, some linguists believe that it is possible to reconstruct the prehistory of languages, revealing links between people and places that may support or call into question claims made by archaeologists about movements of people in the past.
With the emergence of literacy, we gain completely different information about the past—a detailed insight into events, associated with named people, and into their thoughts and beliefs, instead of the anonymous picture of life provided by archaeological data. There has been something of a tendency among those investigating historical times, in Mesopotamia as elsewhere, to rely primarily on written sources in their reconstructions and analyses, relegating archaeological investigations to the study of art and architecture and to gilding the historical picture, instead of recognizing historical and archaeological sources as complementary. Although many aspects of life can only be known from historical sources, this is equally true of archaeology, especially in finding out about the mass of the population generally ignored by the elite who ordered or produced the written sources.
Archaeological Sources. Archaeology provides an abundance of information about the daily lives of ancient individuals and communities and about the development of humanity in general, drawing on the techniques and approaches of many disciplines. Artifacts, including pottery and jewelry, and artwork, such as the Sumerian statues and Assyrian reliefs, allow one to appreciate the aesthetic sense and artistic abilities of the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia. Artistic representations can provide a detailed picture of many aspects of life, from clothing to siege engines, often showing artifacts made of perishable materials that have not survived. Analyses of tools give details of ancient technological achievements; wear patterns and residues on them reveal the uses to which they were put. Relating artifacts to the contexts from which they come can shed light not only on past activities, from food preparation to grave robbing, but also on social organization and ritual practices. Aspects of artifact typology such as shapes and decoration can provide a similar range of information and, linked with physical analyses, can reveal patterns of communication and trade between communities, often over very long distances. Focused observation of modern ethnographic groups operating under similar environmental and other constraints to people in the past can often provide additional insights into tool use, economic activities, architectural function, and so on.
Much can be learned from the layout of houses about domestic organization and activities, while public architecture provides an insight into religion, political organization, and economic practices. Within the historical period and to a lesser extent in late prehistory, excavations in Near Eastern sites have tended to concentrate on the more impressive and spectacular edifices, such as royal palaces and temples, at the expense of studying private housing or industrial areas, although these have attracted far more attention in recent years.
On a wider scale Mesopotamia has seen a number of regional surveys studying the pattern of settlement in the landscape through time and relating it to potential land use, changes in the course of the rivers, and other natural features and alterations. This aspect of archaeological fieldwork has contributed significantly to understanding the historical period. Plant and animal remains, including carbonized seeds and animal bones, also contribute a major source of data on the economic subsistence practices of the past and provide much of the information from which the environment of the past is reconstructed: from the vegetation and climate of the region and the immediate environment to conditions within the home.
The remains of people themselves may reveal minute details of their lives— what they ate, what diseases and injuries they suffered, how their health related to their environment and diet, and even, with DNA testing, to whom they were related. Large cemeteries can yield fascinating information about ancient populations—the patterns of birth and death, the gap between rich and poor, the activities performed by men and women.
Historical Sources. Ancient Mesopotamia's historical documents have been brought to light by archaeology and, like other artifacts, they can yield far more information if they are related to their context. For example, modern excavations of archives in which the exact position of individual tablets is recorded sheds light not only on the significance of individual tablets but also on the whole organizational system behind the records. Earlier excavations and looting, where retrieval of tablets was the only objective, destroyed this contextual evidence. Tragically, in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, looting is now taking place on an unprecedented scale.
Some sites have yielded large archives, such as the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh and the palace records at Mari. At the other end of the scale, individual tablets and inscriptions have been found in most historical sites. Most are economic records, useful for reconstructing many aspects of Mesopotamian life, such as the economy of the palace or temple and the organization of trading activities.
Other documents cover a wide range of subject matter. Inscriptions record the deeds of priests and kings, particularly military victories. Many texts deal with astronomical observations, mathematics, and other scientific subjects, or record hymns, omens, rituals, and incantations. Legal records include law codes, court records, and contracts. In addition there is a rich mythological literature, including the Creation and the Flood. Other literature describes the legendary deeds of rulers or recounts tales of humbler individuals. Many of these survive among the copybook tablets of schoolboys. These also contain their complaints and boasts of their skills, along with many of their exercises, such as bilingual lists in Sumerian and Akkadian and mathematical problems. Some letters survive, mostly those exchanged between members of the Near Eastern royal families but also including the correspondence of lesser folk, such as the merchants of eighteenth-century b. c.e. Assur.
Although documents are often thought of as "true" records, there are many aspects that need to be carefully assessed by experts before judgment is passed on their value. In documents written at the time of the events they record, there is an ever-present possibility of propagandist bias—the hidden agenda. Other documents were compiled long after the events they record, using extant contemporary records. Clearly some selection had already operated to determine which records were preserved and which not, providing the ancient writer with a set of data already biased by omission, and he then made his own selection and added his own slant. Careless scribes could introduce errors during copying, which would then be perpetuated by later copyists.
Despite the difficulties, historical documents combine with archaeology to present a detailed, though still far from complete, picture of the past. In addition to their intrinsic interest, these data can assist in answering what Lewis Binford calls "the Big Questions," such as how and why civilizations arose and declined, questions that have an enduring importance to understanding and coping with the world in which we live.
World History
