Reviews

046

Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture

William H. Stiebing, Jr.
(New York: Longman, 2003) 368 PP., $57

A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000–323 BC

Marc Van De Mieroop
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004) 336 PP., $27.95

Nowadays scholars tend to produce thick, difficult treatises on narrow, highly specialized topics. So it is welcome indeed to have two eminent historians—William Stiebing of the University of New Orleans, and Marc Van De Mieroop of Columbia University—publishing extremely readable works covering great swathes of ancient history.

Combining a thorough knowledge of past theories with fresh archaeological and historical evidence, Stiebing presents a synthesis of Near Eastern history from the beginnings of sedentary life, around 10,000 B.C.E., to the end of the Persian period (330 B.C.E.). He also ventures beyond the traditional powerhouses, Egypt and Mesopotamia, to include the civilizations of Arabia, Anatolia, Iran and the Indus River Valley. Along the way, he covers an immense amount of cultural material: writing, ceramics, religion, economics, education, arts, science, warfare and agriculture.

To his credit, Stiebing does not shy away from controversial issues. In the halls of academe, furious battles are fought over, among other things, the role of race in antiquity, whether Neolithic humans farmed grain to produce bread or beer, or if the domestication of animals and cereals led inevitably to patriarchy. Stiebing deals with all of these issues, and walks away unbruised.

The biggest asset of Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture is that it gives readers access to the inner workings of the discipline. Stiebing not only discusses the contributions of scholars—such as the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon at Jericho, and the Austrian archaeologist Manfred Bietak in the Nile Delta—but he also demonstrates that historical reconstruction is much less a “hard” science than a process of interpretation.

For Stiebing, historians and archaeologists are like detectives, who try to create logical theories based on limited clues. A good example is the famous burials at Ur, in southern Mesopotamia. Excavating at Ur in the 1920s, the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley unearthed approximately 2,000 burials dating to the mid-second millennium B.C.E., 16 of which he designated as “royal” because of their elaborate construction and ornate grave goods. Inscriptions found in the tombs mention two kings, Meskalamdug and Akalamdug, and two queens, Ninbanda and Puabi. The figure identified as Queen Puabi had been adorned with jewelry and buried along with armed guards, attendants and a pair of oxen harnessed to a wooden sled.

Maybe it is Queen Puabi. More than half a century after Woolley’s excavations at Ur, the identity of those buried in the tomb is still not secure. The names of those four 048kings and queens do not appear on another ancient inscription known as the Sumerian King List. Perhaps, as Woolley himself argued, the figures buried in the Ur tomb belonged to a dynasty that reigned before those recorded on the King List. But other factors complicate this theory. The inscriptions naming the kings and queens were found only in one part of the so-called royal tombs, for instance, and if all the articles did in fact belong to royalty, one might expect more inscriptions. Even more damaging, the royal inscriptions were often not clearly linked to the principal burials. For example, the cylinder seal of King Meskalamdug was unearthed above a woman’s burial chamber. So it is possible that the ornate objects were merely burial offerings made by royalty. This has led some scholars to theorize that the interred were surrogates for the royalty, much as the Sumerian Sacred Marriage rites used substitutes for the king.

In exploring this intriguing dilemma, Stiebing consults Sumerian and Assyrian texts, along with information supplied by the material record. Ultimately he is forced to conclude that “the meaning of the ‘Royal Tombs’ of Ur remains a mystery that will not be solved without new archaeological discoveries and/or a better understanding of early Sumerian texts.”

Marc Van De Mieroop’s book, A History of the Ancient Near East, is the first volume published of the much-anticipated Blackwell History of the Ancient World Series. Unlike Stiebing, Van De Mieroop only briefly discusses Near Eastern peoples outside of Mesopotamia, such as the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Persians or Hittites. He is primarily concerned with the Mesopotamian civilizations of Sumer, Babylon, Akkad and Assyria. His clearly written and concise book is a thorough political approach to history; it does not deal in any depth with culture or archaeology (except for the archaeology of major archival centers like Ebla, Mari, Amarna and Nineveh).

Van De Mieroop confines some of his most interesting material to sidebars, such as “The Epic of Gilgamesh” and “Alphabetic Scripts.” One sidebar discounts the Hebrew Bible as a historical source because it did not take its final shape until after the Babylonian exile and because it was “not intended to be historically objective.” Van De Mieroop also follows recent “biblical minimalist” trends—largely found in northern Europe and at the University of Tel Aviv—in doubting the existence of a large tenth-century B.C.E. Israelite kingdom under David and Solomon. Van De Mieroop’s discussion of this controversial material would have been more balanced if he had at least presented both sides of the issue, including important work on the historical value of the Hebrew Bible by Baruch Halpern and the archaeological evidence for a tenth-century Israel as stated by Amihai Mazar.

A History of the Ancient Near East includes a number of primary texts, such as numerous letters and royal annals. The book does a great job of explaining the Mesopotamian numerical system, calendar and dating systems. For example, Van De Mieroop notes that the earliest Akkadian references to years were named after significant events, such as military campaigns or building enterprises. This was later replaced in Babylon with a system that counted by the regnal years of each king, which lasted until after Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.E.). Van De Mieroop also provides, at the end of his book, a useful section of king lists, with family trees and dates.

It is extraordinary to have two such competent, reliable, up-to-date, accessible and wide-ranging histories of the ancient Near East. Both would make excellent textbooks for courses on ancient Mesopotamia. This is a wonderful time to be a student of Near Eastern history.

Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture