Archaeology’s contributions to Ancient Near Eastern history involve more than supplying the raw data - archives and monumental inscriptions - identifying ancient sites on the ground, and checking chronological outlines, all first steps toward the reconstruction of historical narratives. At the same time, historical documents from the Ancient Near East provide otherwise inaccessible information for many issues pertinent to archaeological analysis of its societies. The two fields of archaeology and history thus complement each other, but by definition examine their subjects by using different sources, and from these orient themselves toward different objectives.
This essay will touch on some aspects of the past and current relationship between archaeology or the archaeological perspective and Ancient Near Eastern history. History is defined here in terms deriving from the Annales school of historians in France to cover events and also instances or patterns of social and economic behavior that include mentalities, or culture, and the historian refers to the specialist whose primary sources are written (Bloch 1953; Braudel 1972). The archaeologist, in contrast, relies on the material record rather than the written one, and consults artifacts, building plans, settlement patterns, and other tangible remains of human activity for primary interpretive data. Reconstructing sequences of events and the personalities behind them remains the preserve of the historian, while issues of cultural definition and change, within a specific context and in a broader landscape, concern the archaeologist.
Historian and archaeologist together share the ambition and the need to recreate mentalities and social patterns, Braudel's second tier of historical analysis, and in this respect the two fields would appear to be closely linked. The extent to which they have formed alliances in their mutual program ofresurrecting the ancient civilizations of the Near East is presented here from the archaeological side of their association.
World History
