Ethnography

Sources

Of Peoples and Pots. Ethnic identity depends on the recognition of significant similarities within a group and significant differences to distinguish members of one group from another. Any combination of differences in language, social customs, material culture, religion, mode of subsistence, political organization, and territorial contiguity might, under various conditions, come into play in the process of defining one ethnic group in contradistinction to others. Modern knowledge of the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia depends largely on those ancient texts that have by happenstance survived since antiquity to be recovered and interpreted by modern scholars. On the basis of these texts ancient culturally distinct groups who share a common ancestry—ethnic groups—may be distinguished on the basis of the languages and dialects they chose by which to name themselves, to speak, or at least in which they chose to write, and by the terms they applied to people they defined as “themselves” and “others.” Further indications of ethnicity may be judged from the facial features, hairstyles, and dress of peoples represented artistically in various media, including wall paintings, carved relief, and sculpture in the round—subject, of course, to the skill of the artisan and to any artistic conventions that he might have employed. In the absence of any of these indicators of ethnicity, ceramic types and styles, in combination with other characteristic features of material culture, including the materials and forms of tools and weapons, the style and iconography of seals, building design, and burial practices, are often taken as indicators of particular cultural groups. The limitation here, of course, is that readily portable objects, especially distinctively decorated pottery containing some desirable commodity such as oil or wine, might travel through trade far greater distances than the peoples who created them.

Ethnicity and Language. It is pointless to attempt to discuss the population of ancient Mesopotamia in terms of modern concepts of “culture” and “race.” The earliest identifiable inhabitants of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, who referred to themselves as the “black-headed” people, were speakers of a language isolate, that is, a language unrelated to any other known language, living or dead. The Sumerians appear as the masters of the southern Mesopotamian city-states in the earliest decipherable texts of the first half of the third millennium b.c.e. Whether the Sumerians had been present in the region for just a few centuries or for one, two, or three millennia prior to the mid-third millennium b.c.e. remains a topic of much discussion. Surviving texts from the latter half of the third millennium b.c.e. include evidence that during that period, as the political fortunes of the Sumerian rulers waned and as cuneiform writing spread up the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys to urban centers in Akkad and Syria, there were in the region a variety of speakers of Semitic languages, principally Akkadian, as well as speakers of other language groups, including Hurrian. In addition, even in the earliest texts, the names of cities and other place-names, as well as personal names, include evidence of other, often unknown, languages and presumably their associated ethnic groups. Further, some groups, such as the Semitic Amorites and the Kassites (another language-isolate group) became so thoroughly assimilated following their entry into Mesopotamian urban culture that, but for their foreign names, they are indistinguishable from “native” Mesopotamians.

Ethnicity and Appearance. The first evidence of Mesopotamians’ interest in representing the human form in some detail in both two and three dimensions dates from toward the end of the fourth millennium b.c.e., with depictions of the so-called “priest-king” and those who supported him, typically in hunting and ritual activities. The essential conventions for representing the human form remained more-or-less fixed until the Hellenistic period. The highly stylized art depicts Mesopotamians typically with faces that are round or oval, with prominent cheekbones, thin lips, large high-bridged noses, and almond-shaped eyes—occasionally inlayed with blue or black stone—set beneath a single double-arching eyebrow. Their hair—colored black, where preserved—is curly, and the men, when not clean shaven, have curly beards. There is little in the art, except in renderings of hair style or costume, to distinguish sharply any one Mesopotamian ethnolinguistic group, even enemies, from any other.

FOUNDING MARI

The city of Mari (modern Tell Hariri) was founded in the middle Euphrates River valley by unknown builders early in the third millennium b.c.e. This part of Syria is a semi-arid region with insufficient rainfall to support dry-farming agriculture. Nonetheless, the founders of Mari established their city on a canal-laced terrace a few kilometers west of the river. They surrounded the city with a circular dike to protect it from floods and connected it to the river through a diversion canal. Behind the dike stood a 6.7-meter-thick (22 feet) defensive rampart. The area is at an important juncture between the main irrigation-based Sumerian city-states along the lower Euphrates River to the south and the dry-farming plains of north Syria along the upper Euphrates and Khabur Rivers, but Mari itself is of no agricultural significance. The position of Mari seems rather to have been determined by the location of trade routes through the area, which its leaders must have sought to control. The city was equipped with metalworking furnaces, as well as workshops for dyeing and pottery making, suggesting that supplying refined metals to the metal-poor south may have been one of its principal sources of wealth. For reasons that remain unknown, the city was abandoned for about a century, beginning about 2550 b.c.e. The ruins of the first city were leveled, and an even greater city was erected in its place, one that remained a major urban center until its destruction at the hands of an Akkadian king, circa 2300 – circa 2250 b.c.e. The city was rebuilt a third time by a dynasty of local governors serving the Akkadian Empire. During the early second millennium b.c.e., the city became the focus of attention of the rulers of several competing Amorite kingdoms, among them Hammurabi of Babylon, who, circa 1760 b.c.e., captured the city and destroyed it forever.

Sources : Jean-Claude Margueron, “Mari,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, 5 volumes, edited by Eric M. Meyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), III: 413–417.

Margueron, “Mari and the Syro-Mesopotamian World,” in Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus, edited by Joan Aruz with Ronald Wallenfels (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), pp. 135–138.

City Dwellers and Nomads. Perhaps the most fundamental characteristic by which the ancient Mesopotamians defined themselves was their urban lifestyle. Among the suggested translations for Ki-en-gir, the Sumerian name for their land, are “civilized land” and “noble land.” Early urban Mesopotamians apparently accepted without question the city as the sole communal organization, with no

evident vestiges or memories of earlier tribal organizations. By and large they were not antagonistic toward those who dwelled in the open countryside. In fact, they were intimately and irrevocably connected, exchanging raw materials and finished goods. But hostile nomads and uncouth mountain folk were to be pitied—in a text assigned the modern name The Sargon Geography, they are as those

who do not know construction … whose ha[ir-style] is chosen with a razor, devoured(?) by fire, who do not know burial. Meat-eaters, milk (and) roasted-grain eaters, whos[e insi]des do not know oven-baked bread, bellies (do not know) beer. (Horowitz)

Sources

Geoff Emberling and Norman Yoffee, “Thinking about Ethnicity in Mesopotamian Archaeology and History,” in Fluchtpunkt Uruk: Archaologische Einheit aus methodischer Vielfalt. Schriften für Hans Jorg Nissen, edited by Hartmüt Küne, Reinhard Bernbeck, and Karin Bartl, Internationale Archaologie Studia honoraria 6 (Rahden: Marie Leidorf, 1999), pp. 272-281.

Henri Frankfort, The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, fifth edition, with supplementary notes and bibliography by Michael Roaf and Donald Matthews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography, Mesopotamian Civilizations 8 (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1998).

A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, revised edition, completed by Erica Reiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).