Seminar on The Late Bronze Age in Northern Mesopotamia

Mittanni, Assyria and the Syrian Local Kingdoms

This article first appeared in ISAW Newsletter 18 (Spring 2017).

Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Lorenzo d’Alfonso, Associate Professor of Western Asian Archaeology and History

This spring’s seminar was attended by graduate students from Hebrew Bible Studies in the Skirball Department, NYU, and Columbia University, visiting research scholars, as well as a faculty member from the Hebrew Bible Studies who with their diverse competences all contributed to a successful research atmosphere.

In the history of the ancient Near East, the geographical space of Upper Mesopotamia (today northern Iraq and Kurdistan) and Northern Syria represented the crossroads where major traffic routes between the Eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, the Iranian Plateau and Mesopotamia intersected. Due to its character as a transit zone, it was always contested between the major powers surrounding it, featuring for the second half of the 2nd Millennium BCE Hatti in the north, Assyria in the East, and Egypt in the south. Never defined as a unified political entity, it was made up of many petty kingdoms that constantly shifted their alliances between these major powers.

Large parts of Syria belonged to the dry-farming belt that could rely on rainfall. In addition, the head of the Habur River, made up of many springs, as well as the entire Habur Basin, formed extensive highly fertile regions with an immense potential for agriculture. This situation was exploited first by the rising Mitanni State of the Hurrians, during the second half of the second millennium BCE, who decided to build their royal residences in the outmost western and eastern parts of the Habur Basin, as well as subsequently by the Assyrians who, after having freed themselves from the Mitannian dominion, expanded towards the west and turned the Habur Basin as well as the valley of the Balikh River into their bread basket.

The geographical regions of Upper Mesopotamia and Northern Syria offer an ideal case study to probe labels that have been introduced in ancient Near Eastern Studies to categorize people, periods, and political spaces, such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Hurrians, the Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian period, Middle Assyrian and Middle Babylonian periods, Assyria, Mitanni, etc. It is, however, only at a very superficial level that such traditional assumptions about cultural identity can be used productively. The chronological, ethnic, and spatial distinctions just mentioned include notions of wholeness and purity of cultures and ethnic authenticity, which were originally established by bureaucratized academic institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By contrast, the contemporary age of global mobility has generated a need to formulate “new ways to understand the vitally important dialectic of cultural persistence and change and new theories of hybridity, network theory, and the complex flow of people, commodities, information, and ideas across endlessly shifting social landscapes.” (S. Greenblatt, Cultural Mobility, 2010, 2). The moment we embarked on investigating particular questions including the formation of political entities such as the Mitanni state or Assyria, their respective creation of administrative districts and provincial systems, the question of style, in particular artifacts, or the question of alloglottography as attested in the Hurrianized Akkadian of the administrative texts in Alalakh, as well as in the letters from Qatna, archaeological and textual evidence defied clear-cut categorizations of things as simply Hurrian, Assyrian, etc. Rather, textual, archaeological, and artistic evidence testify to immense cultural competences of the various people and polities interacting with each other including the use of the cuneiform writing system for administrative and diplomatic purposes to write in Hittite, Hurrian, Assyrian languages or the appropriation and simplification of it as attested in the Ugaritic language, which used cuneiform to create an alphabetic script. Other cultural competences included the transformation of conquered and controlled territory into provinces to secure the subsistence of a political center, the organization of urban space to serve economic needs, and industrial production on the one hand and political representation on the other.

The seminar culminated in a workshop with archaeologists and philologists who are experts in the Late Bronze Age, including Aslihan Yener, Hartmut Kühne, Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, Daniel Fleming, and Betina Faist.