Recension libro "The Archaeology of Mesopotamia. Theories and approaches. Approaching the Ancient World", Matthews, Roger. (original) (raw)
Babylonian Archaeologists of the(ir) Mesopotamian Past That ancient Mesopotamians had a clear sense of historical tradition, and were wont to use that tradition for their own purposes, will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the scholarly literature of the field. Studies of the reception of the third-millennium BC ruler Sargon of Agade, his sons, and his grandson Naram-Sln (e.g., Glassner 1986), for example, show how the dynasty was at times reviled, at times reified as a golden age of the past. The Babylonians of the mid-first millennium BCE have actually been called "antiquarians" , particularly engaged with their past (Clay 1912; Unger 1931 : 227); but the archaeological component of their activities has not been investigated systematically. In the present paper, 1would like to move beyond issues of the availability of sources and an awareness of the past, to review the actual practice of excavation as both a technique and a strategy for recovery of the past in ancient times. The evidence is largely textual, and has generally been the concern of text-based historians, as distinct from archaeologists. Yet when this evidence is looked at from the perspective of ancient claims to knowledge it reinforces the premise that in the first millennium BC at least, under the guise of royal patronage and purpose, the Babylonian past was actively sought in the field. The resultant finds then served a variety of purposes that bear a rather striking resemblance to our understanding of the" uses of the past in the present" today. What is demonstrable is that they, like us, mounted campaigns to actively recover ancient remains; and that they declared themselves as having dug in order to reveal works attributed to the ancients. Finally, they also, like at least some of us, proclaimed these finds to be the results of a (divinely directed) research design geared to an empirical and positivist recovery of true "traces" of the past-that is, a decidedly processual as distinct from post-processual set of assumptions! For late zo" century archaeologists of our era, excavations are expected to yield evidence of ancient systems of cognition through patterns of behavior manifest by material culture: architecture, artifacts and texts. So too the Babylonians. While they may not have subjected their finds to modem chemical, osteological, or paleobotanical analysis, they did very much claim to have discovered both ancient materials and evidence of ancient cognition, and to have studied them accordingly. In what follows, I shall cite a number of cases to demonstrate: I. The mounting of Field Campaigns, II. The exposure of Architectural Remains, III. The discovery of Texts and Artifacts, which, once found, were subject to analysis, and IV. The subsequent Display of a selected sample of finds.
2021. Early Mesopotamia in the Third Millennium CE: The Last Two Decades of Research (2000–2020)
Current Research in Early Mesopotamian Studies. Workshop Organized at the 65th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Paris 2019. Dubsar 21, 2021
The aim of this brief article is to provide some quantitative data on newly published written sources kept in major museums and private collections, as well as to offer an overview of the current state of research on the history and culture of third millennium Mesopotamia before the rise of the Ur III dynasty.
Back to the Archive: The Challenge of Old Excavation Data from Mesopotamia.
In E. Aspöck, S. Štuhec, K. Kopetzky and M. Kucera (eds.), Old Excavation Data. What Can We Do?, (OREA 16), 2020
The analysis of scientific archives has emerged in the previous decades as an important element in the study of archaeological sites. While the theoretical and practical roots of this approach date to the early 1960s, the onset of the digital era provided the real breakthrough by enhancing and quickening data collection, elaboration and sharing through different media. In the paper, using a case study of ancient Kish, an important capital of Southern Mesopotamia, I will show how a single scholar can contribute to the study and reconstruction of an old excavation. The paper will raise the specific challenges affecting single scholar research. A working protocol will be proposed and evaluated based on the case study of the ancient Mesopotamian site of Kish.
J. Curtis, ed., 1982 Fifty Years of Mesopotamian Discovery.
Journal of the American Oriental Society 105: 327- 330, 1985
"These new perceptions of Northern Mesopotamian developments in the fourth and third millennia B.C. present a challenging call for the definition of the social and economic relationships which engendered and governed their history... Extensive dry-farming in the north now produces most of the cereal harvest for both Syria and Iraq. What was the nature of cereal dry-farming in Northern Mesopotamia in antiquity, and how did it condition and reflect the organization and distribution of late third-millennium settlement?"
Das Melammu-Projekt, gegründet 1998, organisierte fünf aufeinander folgende Konferenzen und eine sechste 2008. Melammu 7 steht nun für einen Neustart des Projekts mit der Veröffentlichung der Beiträge des Treffens in Obergurgl im November 2013. Künftige Konferenzen haben schon stattgefunden und sind geplant (Kiel 2014, Helsinki und Tartu 2015, Kassel 2016, Beirut 2017). Das Project Board hat sich erneuert und verjüngt, und die Datenbank des Projekts wird ausgebaut werden. Der Fokus ist erweitert worden, um die Kontinuität, die Transformation und die Diffusion mesopotamischer und altorientalischer Kultur vom 3. Jahrtausend v.Chr. bis zur islamischen Zeit zu erforschen. Dieser Band versammelt 42 Beiträge, die den Themen “Prayers and Incantations”, “Foreign Reception of Mesopotamian Objects”, “The Use of Literary Figures of Speech”, “Mesopotamia and the World”, “The World of Politics”, “Iran and Early Islam”, und “Representations of Power” gewidmet sind.
New Perspectives on 'Early Mesopotamia'
JNP is one of the very few scholars who excels both as an excavator and a linguist. He amalgamates the two types of evidence in a powerful combination through which to attempt to understand the past. Others are more qualified than me to detail his contributions to the study of the texts so this article will begin by describing some of the significant results from his archaeological work in Iraq, especially from his excavations at Abu Salabikh. I owe him a huge personal debt as he gave me my first opportunity to dig in Iraq and allowed me to become his first woman site supervisor at Abu Salabikh, something for which I shall always be grateful. A survey of some of the changes in the field which have taken place in the last twenty years will then follow. The work at Abu Salabikh, sadly interrupted by political events, used a wide range of techniques to extract the maximum information for minimum outlay. For example Postgate used the technique of surface scraping, employed previously by the Germans, to work towards a better understanding of the anatomy of a Sumerian town. The scraping can also pinpoint areas where excavation is necessary to solve specific problems and thus allows scarce resources to be used for maximum productivity. The scraping at Salabikh has given us some of the best information we have on the anatomy of a mid third millennium town, demonstrating the shrewdness with which it was used and the value of this technique. It is especially effective in areas where the architectural remains lie close to the surface and where differences in soil colour, caused by the greater retention of moisture in the mudbrick, can be identified. JNP was quick to realise the potential of this method as it fitted well with his research aims and with the wider shift in academic interest towards domestic housing rather than a concentration on public buildings. The information retrieved from the scraping on the Main mound at Salabikh allowed him to identify a town wall, three possible town gates, and to produce detailed plans of a number of houses. He was also able to identify non domestic buildings, such as a potter's workshop, and to add to the plan originally uncovered by the Oriental Institute Chicago of what is possibly a large public building in area A (Postgate 1990). In some cases microstratigraphy, at the time a new technique in Iraq, was used in an attempt to suggest the function of individual rooms. Using the data on the use of space within the town walls he published an important paper on population density in built-up areas (Postgate 1994) based on calculations of the area of non domestic structures and open spaces including streets, which is then subtracted from the total area of the site. Open spaces within the houses, such as courtyards, are also calculated and subtracted from the total. The resulting figure represents the area of the town which was
Jan Turek: THE CRIME IN MESOPOTAMIA - Editorial Archaeologies April 2015
Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress ( 2015) DOI 10.1007/s11759-015-9269-8
Our journal is completing the first decade of its existence and we are pleased by its growing international impact. In this volume, we bring a collection of papers addressing some socially important issues and their reflection in archaeology. In the current days, some turbulent movements occurred in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. Such catastrophic news makes us very concerned.
Cities in the Sand: The Archaeology of Urbanism in Mesopotamia (syllabus, 2017)
In recent years, the deliberate destruction of archaeological remains and the industrial-scale looting of archaeological sites in Iraq and Syria have drawn the Mesopotamian past vividly into the spotlight. Images of legendary ancient cities, now wired with explosives or pockmarked with looters' pits, flit daily across our television and computer screens. For more than a century, archaeologists have been working to uncover and resurrect these early urban centers where the very idea of the city was first envisioned and put into practice. This graduate seminar offers both a general introduction to the archaeological study of urbanism and a detailed examination of the archaeological evidence for cities in Mesopotamia – from Uruk and Ur to Babylon and Baghdad. Chronologically, we will begin with the famous Urban Revolution of the fourth millennium BC and end with the founding of the first Islamic cities during the later part of the first millennium AD.
Building between the Two Rivers: An Introduction to the Building Archaeology of Ancient Mesopotamia, 2020
Building between the Two Rivers aims to supply university students and scholars of Near Eastern archaeology with an introduction to 'Building archaeology' methods as applied to the context of Ancient Mesopotamia. It helps the reader understand the principles underlying the discipline, which deals with the registration and analysis of all building materials and techniques involved in the assembly and erection of a construction, and to outline what knowledge and skills are needed, beyond those that are specific to archaeologists. The in-depth registration and analysis of building materials and techniques requires professional skills and experience, which cannot be achieved with only a standard university training in archaeology. However, archaeologists need to know the basics of the classification of building materials, their physical properties, the main techniques of their finishing, as well as the basic principles of statics. They should also be able to let architects understand how to better tune the registration of data to ensure a fruitful archaeological interpretation. More Info: https://tinyurl.com/9781789696035
Scholarship and Inquiry in Early Mesopotamia
Thousands of texts documenting the activities of scribes and scholars that shed light on the social context of scholarship and scientific inquiry survive from the first half of Mesopotamian history (c. 3400 BC to c. 1600 BC). Since these texts provide ample evidence that scholarship occupied a central place in Mesopotamian culture and society during the period in question, examining their content is essential to reconstructing what can be known about scientific knowledge and practice in the ancient world. In this chapter some of this evidence will be considered in order to present a modest overview of the social position and intellectual processes of knowledge acquisition and inquiry during the first phase of Mesopotamian history and to address preliminarily some of the many questions that can be asked about scholarship and inquiry in early Mesopotamia. Textual sources relating to scholarship and inquiry in early Mesopotamia come from nearly all of the major historical periods from the invention of writing at Uruk (ca.3400 BC) until the end of the Old Babylonian Period (ca.2000–1595 BC), when the city of Babylon was conquered by the Hittite king Mursili I. 1 Since the texts from the main periods vary in quantity and type, and provide different forms of evidence for scholarly and intellectual practices for each period, as well as for continuity and changes in these practices over time, it is essential to consider them from a diachronic perspective. The conventional terms for the historical periods and sub-periods as they will be referred to throughout the chapter and the approximate dates assigned to them are as follows: