New Book from VRS Alum Anne Porter

Anne Porter, one of ISAW's visiting research scholars in 2007-08, has announced the publication of her new book, Mobile Pastoralism and the Formation of Near Eastern Civilizations, by Cambridge University Press. Much of the research was undertaken during Dr. Porter's time at ISAW. The book argues that mobile and sedentary populations were not fundamentally separate groups, but formed integral parts of the same polities throughout greater Mesopotamia during the period 4000 to 1500 BCE. She draws on a wide range of archaeological and cuneiform sources to show how networks of social structure, political and religious ideology, and everyday as well as ritual practice, worked to maintain the integrity of those groups when the pursuit of different subsistence activities dispersed them over space. Dr. Porter also shows how these networks shaped many of the key events and innovations of the time, including the Uruk expansion and the introduction of writing, so-called secondary state formation and the organization and operation of government, the literary production of the Third Dynasty of Ur and the first stories of Gilgamesh, and the emergence of the Amorrites in the second millennium BCE.