K.W. & E.K. Rosenthal Lecture Series
Nomads and sedentary people in Upper Mesopotamia, from Mari to Šubat-Enlil in the early second millennium B.C.
Lectures by Michaël Guichard, École Pratique des Hautes Études & Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
Tuesday March 5 at 4 pm
“Amorite Tribes and the Formation of Political Territories between Tigris and Euphrates”
Location: HQ L-01
Reception to follow
The cuneiform archives of Mari, as is well known, constitute an exceptional collection of documents - several thousand tablets, some of which are currently being edited - a veritable window on the history and society of the Ancient Near East at the beginning of the second millennium BC. But what makes the study of Mari texts particularly interesting and original is the way in which they vividly portray the structures of a society composed of sedentary and nomadic people, the latter referred to very generally as the Hana. The first lecture will look at their tribal organization and territories, and in particular at what we know about their formation. However, the period covered by written Old-Babylonian documentation is too short to directly document the early stages in the ethnogenesis of the Hana, themselves descended from the Amorites. Nevertheless, it is possible to gather indications or traces of this process in texts from Mari and elsewhere, whose roots can be assumed to go back to the end of the third millennium. Naturally, this approach cannot do without the results of archaeology and recent studies on environmental history. We must also consider that the societies of Upper Mesopotamia were in perpetual transformation due to multiple factors, so there is nothing fixed about tribal organization and territories, and this process of transformation was still underway in the phase that Mari’s archives document. The trajectory of this evolution, if there is one, is however not easy to define. The remarkable place occupied by the nomads between the 19th and 18th centuries, and the importance of the tribal system among them, testifies to the strong dynamics of their culture, their close symbiosis with the kingdom of Mari, which marked for them a phase of apogee. But the Hana hegemony throughout the Middle Euphrates and beyond underwent an apparent decline at the end of the 18th century BC. These topics will be explored primarily in relation to Upper Jezira, the basin of Upper Khabur and its periphery. This was the preferred range of the Hana, known as simalites, with their flocks of sheep. Relations between nomadic and sedentary peoples took on a particularly intense form here, one that is richly documented.
Sponsored by the K.W. & E.K. Rosenthal Memorial Lectures in Ancient and Near Eastern Civilizations