The relationship between past and
present, is a problem raised in the first article of this series about popular Archeology.
When accounts of Assyrian and Achaemenid imperial policies have an uncannily
familiar ring modern archeological texts might indeed reflect the ideologies of
their composition rather than their content. Archaeologists tend to see all
materials from one context as contemporaneous. However, they may be altered
items and texts from earlier times, and such modified objects or texts may tell
us less about their time of production than that of their alteration, or
"selective intentionality."
Did the late kings of Judah have all the
freedom for ideological and political maneuvering some accord them? Could they
decide themselves about their relationships to the "superpower"
Assyria? And could it not be that decisions taken at the Assyrian court were to
a certain extent dependent not only on power play and internal conflict, but on
habitual practices? In these cases, intentionality and deliberateness emerge
like islands out of an unaddressed sea of habitual practices.
On the other hand, where the habitual is
explicitly discussed, its presence or absence is simply asserted - as in the
claim that change in the Uruk period was slow, and
that people were appreciating the growing polities as being in their own
interest, no matter where they were positioned in society. Writing an account
of the past is deeply influenced by our own deliberate or habitual ways of
bestowing intentionality on some past people and withdrawing it from others, a
subject that warrants much more explicit discussion in archaeology.
But what then are some of the elements
modern Archeology can work with in case of the Middle East today?
Levantine Neandertals and the Skhul/Qafzeh humans
Pleistocene humans, including the Skhul/Qafzeh humans and the
Levantine Neandertals, both lived in small groups during periods when rapid
climate change caused dramatic short-term changes in their habitats. Countless
human populations must have become extinct, and it is possible, indeed likely
that both the Levantine Neandertals and the Skhul/Qafzeh humans are among these evolutionary "dead
ends." The sentimental need to identify a "winner" among the
evolutionary players in the Levant makes it difficult for us to accept the nonancestral status of these fossils, but the Levant is a
tough neighborhood. It is a region in which many species have been weighed and
found wanting.
The hypothesis that early modern humans
were not successful in their first attempt to adapt to the Levant and adjacent
parts of Europe and western Asia refocuses our attention on the differences
between the Middle Paleolithic Upper Paleolithic modern human adaptations as
clues to later humans' adaptive radiation. The presence of well-entrenched
Neandertal populations in the Levant, effectively blocking the major land route
out of Africa, may have been a major stimulus to the development of Upper
Paleolithic adaptations by modern humans along the Northeast African
"frontier."
The first post-Middle Paleolithic modern
human occupations of Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas all contain evidence
for two novel behaviors, the use of high-speed/low mass projectile weapons and
the establishment of extensive alliance/exchange networks reinforced by
symbolic material culture.
The former suggest a devastating
capability to attack a wide range of prey whose legacy can be seen in large
mammal extinctions throughout these newly-colonized lands. The latter suggest a
high degree of integration between language and material culture for which
there is little or no prior evidence in human evolution.
One of the key differences between
Neandertals and early Upper Paleolithic modern humans may lie not so much in
possessing spoken language, but rather in modern humans' novel ability to
invest meaning in material culture, and thereby to forge extensive alliance
networks among otherwise small, isolated populations. It may be difficult for
us to imagine living in a society in which material culture is not a medium for
symbolic information. Yet, it appears that early modern humans and Neandertals
lived this way for tens of thousands of years. In contrast, it is relatively
easy to imagine how individuals living in such a society would be at an
immediate and disproportionate evolutionary disadvantage in competition against
individuals who belonged to such extensive social networks.
The appearance of these novel Upper
Paleolithic adaptations marks a major change in modern humans' ability to
displace rival human species. Throughout Western Eurasia, the appearance of
modern humans together with Upper Paleolithic material culture precedes
Neandertal extinction by only a few thousand years. Even in those parts of
Western Europe where Neandertals adopted elements of Upper Paleolithic
adaptations, doing so seems only to have bought them relatively little time and
no detectable increase in their geographic range.
Unless there was some demographic
catastrophe among European Neandertal populations that has left neither
archaeological nor fossil evidence, the principal cause of Neandertal
extinction appears likely to have been a change in modern human behavior. The
most likely context for such a change is in the contest between Neandertals and
early modern humans for the human niche in the Middle Paleolithic Levant.
Figurines in the Middle East
Analysis and interpretation of the
social and symbolic context of prehistoric anthropomorphic figurines has
produced an extensive series of debates and discussions which explores
questions of why people make figurines, what figurines "do," what
figurines mean, and what we can learn about a society from its figurines.
But with so little contextual
information published, it is important to highlight the unresolved nature of
figurine research: specifically, how little we understand about the
interrelationship between the size of communities, ritual and political action,
and the social context of figurine manufacture, use, and discard.
First, why did Neolithic people
represent ambiguity in the majority of their human figurines, and alternatively
mark or not mark sex or gender attributes on a small percentage of human
representations? There are several possible interpretations, including the
masking or emphasis of individual or structural differences to help negotiate
social and economic changes experienced by these early agricultural communities
in which we witness the initial development of storage technologies, surplus
economy, and social differentiation. Similarly, these people may not have
conceptualized male and female bodily differences as important aspects in their
worldviews in understanding what it meant to be a person in a body. Conversely,
these differences may have been crucially important in everyday interactions,
and therefore they found it important to mask them in creating idealized social
memories of the way life should be.
A second question is why make figurines
at all? We can draw on ethnographic analogies of bodily representation in
ritual and non-ritual contexts to help us address this question, as the topic
obviously holds important implications for functionalist interpretations. In a
related way, we can also ask, "Why make different types of figurines
(human, zoomorphic, or geometric)?" We argue that there is a definite
shift in the manufacture of these figurine classes through the Pre-Pottery
Neolithic, and that future exploration of this issue may enhance our
understanding of the Neolithic.
Posing this last question leads us to
our second point for consideration: the continued need for contextual analysis
of figurines. It is unfortunate that in many cases, the development of grand
models and interpretations of Neolithic figurines is founded on a remarkably
poor consideration of context and archaeological data. There is, for example,
only limited understanding of the manufacture, use, and discard of figurines.
While many interpretive models of the Neolithic use figurine data from secondary
sources and there is very little contextual data published from the southern
Levantine contexts, we do not feel any need to be pessimistic. Among others,
Mary Voigt has demonstrated the utility of contextual studies of Neolithic
figurines from Turkey and Iran, and has established a strong analytical
approach that focuses on context.
Mesopotamia
The advent of the state has given rise
to many interpretations so lets look for a moment at
Mesopotamia.
Basically the Mesopotamian state emerged
about 5,000 years later than the first villages in the area. We may trace the
slow evolution leading to the state and isolate six levels of organization
prior to the state proper. Each may be characterized by its most salient
feature:
• in simple village societies
decisions concerning the group were taken in common by heads of nuclear
families under the care of an elder;
• in complex village
societies stem families appeared in order to limit the numbers of people
responsible, and the right to take decisions was temporarily delegated to
certain individuals until the elders were replaced by new generations;
• in simple chiefdoms
authority was further concentrated, and responsibilities were delegated to a
few individuals (probably lineage heads) selected according to genealogy, so
that the basic social unit reverts to the nuclear family;
• in complex chiefdoms the
same responsible people became isolated from commoners and formed a class of
their own;
• city-states were
characterized by the appearance of hereditary, royal power;
• city-states ran into
difficulties and ultimately declined as rivalry and
warfare arose among them, problems that
were solved only through Sargon's conquest.
The criteria that differentiate these
levels of organization depend on what one could call the structure of control of
society. Such a perspective resulted from the sense that the most salient
features of the data (whether architecture, burials, or movable items) allude
to particular individuals whose status led to prestige and authority. This
allows the unambiguous detection of the ranking of society, status differentiation,
and corresponding responsibilities. The evolution of the structure of control
towards greater hierarchy was not intentional and therefore cannot be
attributed to a search for personal achievement. It is the society which,
through its members and especially the most eminent ones, adopts the most
appropriate solutions for mastering problems encountered, in particular the
necessity of integrating increasing numbers of people. Indeed, the mode of production
encourages population growth, while particular environmental conditions incite
people to stay together. If the relations between people and their environment
thus appear so strong as to seem deterministic, it is because they are based
upon numerous personal reactions which, leading in the same direction, tend to
exclude any random drift.
Being the product of a particular class
of objective regularities, the habitus tends to generate all the `reasonable',
`common-sense' behaviors (and only these) which are possible within the limits
of these regularities, and which are likely to be positively sanctioned because
they are objectively adjusted to the logic characteristic of a particular
field, whose objective future they anticipate. At the same time, `without
violence, art or argument', it tends to exclude all `extravagances, that is,
all the behaviors that would be negatively sanctioned because they are
incompatible with the objective conditions.
As society increases in size, its
structure of control must be reorganized. Insofar as responsible people are
nominated according to general agreement (e.g., genealogical order), the trend
towards inequality is due only to the need to face demographic changes. One of
the most noteworthy implications of such a process is urbanization. The
pristine state cannot come into being without some preliminary phase of
urbanization, because it is the failing of integration at the urban stage that
leads to state formation. The city-states of the alluvial plain became too similar
to one another and too structured for a higher level of integration to appear
spontaneously, and their vitality was consumed in enduring conflicts - until an
exceptional leader took advantage of the situation to set up a new order for
his own benefit.
The Bible as Narrative
The questions of the historicity of the
biblical narrative on ancient Israel and the ability of archaeology to
contribute toward a better understanding of the text have hovered like black
clouds, over both academic research and public discussion.
The scholarly discussion as recently
seen with reactions to The Da Vinci Code book, sometimes has drifted into a
bad-tempered debate, characterized, unfortunately, by harsh language and name
calling. Together with the offensive language have come the generalizations:
one is expected to be a “nihilist” or a “fundamentalist”; nothing in between.
For example that the stories in Genesis
are Judah-centric is reflected in the mocking of Ammon and Moab by mentioning
(Genesis 19:30-38 – a J text) that the eponymous fathers of these nations were
born of an incestuous union of a father with his daughters. And the Edomites
and the Arab tribes in the south were portrayed as savages, compared to
sedentary Judah. These perceptions, too, fit late-monarchic times more than any
other period, including post-Exilic times, when some of these neighbors were
quite insignificant.
Though the Pentateuch and the
Deuteronomistic History were put in writing relatively late in Israelite
history, most biblical scholars would accept that they include materials
earlier than the time of the compilation. The problem is that in most cases the
old memories are so vague, or so manipulated by the later writers, that the
early realities in them are beyond recovery. Only archaeology can help, in
certain cases, in identifying such earlier traditions. We wish to briefly
demonstrate this with two examples, both from the Deuteronomistic History.
The excavations at Shiloh in the 1980s
have shown beyond doubt that the site reached its peak of activity in the late
Iron I, in the eleventh and early tenth centuries B.C.E. In the Iron II there
was only meager activity at the site and in most of this long period it seems
to have been deserted. It is clear therefore that the stories in I Samuel about
the importance of Shiloh in premonarchic times cannot
reflect late-monarchic realities. Rather, they must represent some sort of
memory of the prominence of the site in earlier times.
The same holds true for the cycle of
stories about the wandering of David and his men along the southern fringe of
Judah. These narratives clearly fit a description of a band of Apiru (a term describing outlaws, uprooted bandits in
Bronze Ages texts) moving in a sparsely settled region, far from the reach of
central authority. This kind of background does not fit the period when the
Deuteronomistic History was put in writing. At that time the area was densely
settled, with no trace of Apiru reality left.
Therefore, I see no alternative but to argue that the stories reflect what I
have labeled before “the Amarna-like” situation in the Judahite hill country
prior to the great demographic growth in the late eighth century B.C.E.
But recognizing the possible historical
value of isolated elements is something very different from accepting the
entire story of the rise of a united Israel from earliest times. Should we
therefore consider the biblical materials on the formative periods in the
history of Israel as ahistoric and therefore useless?
The answer is both positive and negative.
Positive, because the biblical material
cannot help us reconstruct this formative history. Negative, because it tells
us a lot about the society and realities of the time of the writing. And this
is the point which I have tried to emphasize throughout this chapter, that the
main contribution of the “view from the center” is to demonstrate that these
texts should not be read as a sequential history, from ancient to later times,
but the other way around – from the time of the writing.
For example Archaeology shows absolutely
no sign of a great tenth-century territorial state ruled from Jerusalem. First,
tenth-century Jerusalem was no more than an Amarna-type highlands stronghold.
Second, the Judahite countryside was very sparsely settled at that time. There
were no human resources available for conquest and domination of large
territories. And there seems no reason why the marginal, underdeveloped
southern highlands would become a center of the only territorial state in the
Levant; state formation in this region came only in the ninth century and was
closely related to Assyrian expansionism. As far as recent radiocarbon dates
indicate, the strata with monumental architecture in the north, which formed
the basis for the reconstruction of a material culture of a great tenth-century
state – mainly the Megiddo palaces – should be redated
to the early ninth century B.C.E.
And there is more. In the northern
valleys, the tenth century is characterized by a revival of the Canaanite
system of the second millennium B.C.E. The main cities in this landscape,
probably served as centers of city-state territorial entities. Almost all their
features – pottery, metallurgical and architectural traditions, layout of the
main cities, cult, and settlement patterns of the countryside around them –
show clear continuation of second-millennium traditions. The tenth-century
monarchs in Jerusalem could not have ruled, therefore, in the northern valleys.
The idea that poor Jerusalem, with its sparsely settled hinterland ruled over
the far away, rich, and prosperous cities of the lowlands is an absurd one.
Biblical scholars have long acknowledged
that the description of the United Monarchy, especially the glamour of the days
of Solomon, draws a picture of an idyllic Golden Age wrapped in later
theological and ideological goals. Indeed, in this case, too, it is not
difficult to identify the landscapes and costumes of seventh-century Judah as
the stage setting behind the biblical tale. The lavish visit of Solomon’s
trading partner, the Queen of Sheba, to Jerusalem no doubt reflects the
participation of seventh-century Judah in the lucrative Arabian trade. The same
holds true for the description of the building of “Tamar in the wilderness”
and the trade expeditions to lands afar setting off from Eziongeber
in the Gulf of Aqaba – two sites which were securely identified and which were
not inhabited before late-monarchic times.
Troops of Cheretites
and Pelethites, long assumed by scholars to have been
Aegean in origin, should probably be understood against the background of the
service of Greek mercenaries in the armies of the seventh century – certainly
in the Egyptian and possibly in the Judaean armies (Finkelstein forthcoming).
Many other items in the story (such as the frequent mention of copper and
horses and the mention of Achish as king of a
Philistine city in the Shephelah) also fit
late-monarchic realities.
The tale of a glamorous United Monarchy
had obvious power for the people of Judah. A new David had now come to the
throne, intent on “restoring” the glory of his distant ancestors. This is
Josiah, the most devout of all Judahite kings. He was able to roll history back
from his own days to the time of the mythical United Monarchy. By cleansing
Judah from the abominations of the nations and undoing the sins of the past he
could stop the cycle of idolatry and calamity forever. He could reenact the
United Monarchy of David before it went astray. So Josiah embarked on
reestablishing a United Monarchy. He was about to “regain” the territories of
the now destroyed Northern Kingdom, and rule from Jerusalem over the
territories of Judah and Israel combined.
Now back to the tenth century. Neither
archaeology nor the biblical text supply the slightest clue for the extent of
the Jerusalem territory of that time. The only clue – if there is one – is the
appeal of the Deuteronomistic Historian to the collective memory of his
compatriots, that in the distant past the founders of the Davidic dynasty ruled
over a territory larger than the traditional boundaries of the Southern Kingdom
in late-monarchic times.
So the role of modern archaeology in the
study of ancient Israel can be successfully utilized in this endeavor only
after being liberated from the simplistic reading of the text, which made it a
secondary character in the play and forbade it from raising its own, genuine
voice.
After the end of Western colonialism,
the scholarly approach had to change, even if rather reluctantly, to give space
to a multi-centered perspective on world history – even if the Euro-centered
line of development still finds its place in secondary school textbooks. And in
order to conceal the opposition of West vs. Orient, an opposition that became
unpopular both in Western democracies and Asiatic markets, the specific
connotations of oppressive despotism, burdensome bureaucracy, and military
expansion gave way to a multifarious and largely meaningless use of the term.
The end of the Western colonial hold on
the Middle East did not mean that the Western world renounced its political,
economic, and historical pretensions. It simply means that another strategy has
been assumed, namely the neo-capitalist one of controlling resources rather
than territories, exploiting the low costs of local work-forces and stimulating
local markets. Even archaeological activities in the Middle East have now –
quite often – a neo-capitalist flavor, with salvage projects and regional
planning programs in the service of local states. The old model of “imperial”
political relationships, which reserved an active role for the ruling partner
only, has been complemented by others such as “underdevelopment,” “world
system,” “peer polity interaction,” or others that provide every
component in a system with its own space and role.
The model of “underdevelopment”, based
on an analysis of the modern world, states that development in the core of
(economic) empires brings about a parallel process of underdevelopment in the
exploited periphery. This model has received scant attention in the field of
ancient Near Eastern studies, yet its relevance has already been hinted at
above. Ancient empires, like early modern ones, are based on the exchange of
different kinds of resources; but, in the former cases, such imbalance did not
bring about a different rate of development in the center vs. the periphery.
Nevertheless, these problems deserve a specific analysis that is still missing.
In contrast, the “world system” model
has been influential in ancient Near Eastern studies, mostly applied to late
prehistoric and protohistoric periods with particular insistence on the Uruk period, rather than to fully historical empires. The
use of this label has been criticized in various ways. The “world” covered by
the Uruk network is too small, and a label such as “regional
system” would be more appropriate. Moreover, long-distance trade probably
affected a minor part of the societies involved, which remained basically
concerned with the exploitation of local resources in agriculture and animal
husbandry.
The model of “peer polity interaction”
(Renfrew and Cherry 1986) is in fact most useful in describing the Late Bronze
state of affairs, for example, when half a dozen states of regional extent
(Egypt, Hittite, Mitanni, Assyria, Babylonia, Elam) interacted through trade
and diplomacy more often than through war, with the impossibility for any of
them to assume wider control or even some form of hegemony. Yet each of the
interacting states could have been convinced that it was the “central empire”
in the system.
In any case it seems clear that the last
two generations of scholars have also been, consciously or not, influenced by
their socio-political setting, both in discarding old ideas and in advancing
new models. But the task of unveiling (and confessing) our own bias is much
more difficult than underscoring that which influenced scholars of past
generations.
Analogies, Critical Evaluation of Hypotheses
Critical evaluation of hypotheses
concerning function and meaning of archaeological feature(s) or practice(s) to
be interpreted are among others:
1 Analysis of archaeological context
(formation processes, spatial analysis, etc.) in order to reconstruct past
systemic context.
2 Preliminary reconstruction of structuring
principles of archaeological objects.
3 Preliminary reconstruction of ancient
practice.
4 (Cross-cultural) search for comparable
ethnographic examples.
5 Analysis of structure (or general
structuring principles) underlying these examples.
6 Comparison of archaeological and
ethnographic records (identification of similarities and differences).
7 Critical evaluation of the eloquence
of the comparison: (a) relevance, (b) generality, and (c) “goodness-of-fit”
must be assessed.
8 Reconstruction of structuring
principles of archaeological objects.
9 Reconstruction of ancient practice.
10 Synthesis (structure, practice,
function, meaning).
The Concept of Time in the Ancient Middle East
The Sumerian notion of time, being an
eternal cycle of ever-returning marker entities, it was also conceived as
linear, having an overall direction in which it proceeded. Short of being
envisaged as an independent force, it was embedded in a series of other
coordinates of the visible world, most notably in space and in the disposition
of its material components. To a certain extent, time was also a function of
processes involving the discharge of natural fertility and represented thus a
"living" affair. Time had a mythical, "eternal" interior of
components that were unchanging and stabilized, and an outer shell or rather
"atmosphere" of unstable and transitory phenomena which, though
superficial, did carry a certain amount of importance. This is borne out by
the fact that at least from around the year 700 B.C.E., Babylonian astronomers
took great pains to record with the utmost patience, night by night, details of
the motions of the principal celestial bodies which must have represented just
this kind of superficial and changeable evidence.
It does seem that once the Sumerian
notion of time had become well-established, there was hardly anything to
replace it in the minds of the successor populations of Babylonians and
Assyrians. We can, then, at least attempt to question when the essential
ideational concepts behind the Mesopotamian perception of time began to emerge.
To uncover the perception of time in one
of humankind's earliest literate civilizations has raised more questions than
it has answered. The Sumerians apparently had a peculiar manner of conceiving
and handling time, a manner appropriate to them which has to be understood in
its own right. This mental tool was sufficiently sophisticated to delineate
both "eternal" (long-term) components of ancient Mesopotamian
civilization and to accommodate the changes brought forth by the variety of
common, everyday situations. It enabled Mesopotamian elites to create a basic
spatiotemporal context for their society in which life was worth living, both
for elite members and for the population strata whom they served and by whom
they were served.
Chance has offered us the possibility to
witness the emergence of this basic concept of time in its material incarnation
(the cylinder seal) in the Middle Uruk period, at a
moment just preceding the creation of one of the world's first literate
civilizations. The rotation of the cylinder seal stands for circular/cyclical
time; the linear extension of the image impressed by the seal represents a
linear orientation, the "vector" of time. The cylinder seal's faculty
of making an impression in a malleable surface stood for the basic unity of
time and space; and the fact that supplies marked by the cylinder seals brought
plenty to elite households indicated the filling capacity, or
"fruition" of time. How far this perception of time reflected notions
developed in the preceding, prehistoric age, or how far it represented a
deep-reaching transformation of the mental apparatus of bearers of Mesopotamian
civilization, must be determined by future research.
Bearers of the Hassuna
and Samarra cultures decorated their products with patterns displaying rotation
as the most characteristic principle. This seems to follow out of the
prehistoric principle that within a world that is non-humanized and both
potentially and actually hostile, only the point where human settlement is
established represents a safe abode, a lynch-pin from which human civilization
must be suspended and on which it can be anchored, and which constitutes a
reference point for all human activities within its radius.
Representatives of the Halaf culture advanced further in the sense that theirs was
a world of axial symmetry. Here prevails the vision of sedentary human
populations, acknowledging a hierarchically ordered world centered, as before,
on human settlements but, unlike in Neolithic times, perceiving them as
embedded in concentric tracts of humanized landscapes, beyond the frontiers of
which extended the wild, and therefore "in-human" and potentially
dangerous landscapes. Thanks to studies by André Leroi-Gourhan,
we know that while the perception of the world in nomadic societies knows only
one certainty - the human encampment - nomads tend to see the rest of the world
as a loose series of environments in no logical relation to one another,
existing in a more or less haphazard manner and not tied to any unifying
structures. Such traits of human thought as the notions of center and periphery
emerge only within the systems proper to sedentary societies. Such creations of
Halaf-culture potters as bowls or plates bearing
concentric flower- or rosette-like ornaments surrounded by concentric bands of chequered patterns may well visualize a notion of a
"civilized" quadripartite world inclosed in
a large circle of ever-flowing time.
What, however, was a truly fundamental
invention was undoubtedly the cylinder seal, invented and introduced perhaps
some time during the Middle Uruk period. In addition
to its technological advantages, the cylinder seal represents a nearly perfect
materialization of the Sumerian perception of the spatiotemporal structure of
the world.
Being endowed with the capacity to
impress images in the wet clay or any soft matter, and thus create a new form
of materiality, it may not only function within a coordinate system of a
different order than time, such as that of space, but it can actively create
reality. At this stage of development of the human mind, practical operations
involving the human environment tend to be performed both in actual fact and
"magically," (also) by means of images; one approach is a
prerequisite of the other.
Mounts, Texts and Representations
It is the quest for answers that drives
us to uncover the past and reassemble it into a complete picture. It is quite
possible, even likely, that a researcher may never satisfactorily (with regard
to her own expectations) fully achieve the most difficult step in modeling a
sacred landscape. The appearance of a full-fledged cosmology reported in a site
report, and written as if an informant sat for hours as the tape-recorder ran,
would most likely be met with suspicion and even derision. The line between
data-based inference and utter imagination must be carefully drawn and
assiduously followed. However, it should never be doubted that spirituality and
mysticism most probably played a significant role in the settlement practices
and indeed in the remarkable stasis of place that created mounds as matrices of
meaning across a sacred landscape.
Thus Middle Eastern mounds contain
secrets to the past that will never be unearthed. The fact that these secrets
may be conceptual rather than material in nature makes our work even more
daunting. Ancestors and spirits may have been far from the minds of prehistoric
inhabitants as they chose to settle and remain on a portion of soil for
decades, centuries, millennia. But we, as the illuminators of the past, have
spent too long envisioning mindless and faceless figures making decisions based
purely on survivability and practicality. The past that we study was created by
actors who thought about, emoted over, and believed in the natural world around
them in terms that must have reached far beyond the functional. As we stretch
our own minds beyond the functional, into the cognitive, we will surely be led
to places that allow us to view those actors as living, breathing, thinking
beings whose homes high atop a human-made hill evoked deeply-felt faith and
emotion as they carried out their daily lives. To connect with even a fraction
of that perception of the living landscape moves us exponentially forward as we
carry out our roles as elucidators of those who made the past, for those who
inhabit the present.
Texts
Earliest documents from Anatolian soil
have been exploited for evidence on such subjects as the early migrations of
Indo-Europeans, the emergence of the Hittites, and the character of the Old
Assyrian city-state. In relating texts to archaeology, however, they are most
interesting on the subject of trade.
Thanks to the tablets found for example
in Kültepe, one is in a position of knowing
what goods were being traded, who did the trading, and what institutions were
associated with it. Assyrian merchants themselves, who were hundreds of miles
from home and living in a foreign culture, apparently adopted the living styles
of Anatolia and left very little indication of their presence, except for the
cuneiform tablets and the seals and sealings associated with them. Yet when the
various sources of evidence, textual and archaeological, are taken together,
they provide us with a remarkably full picture of how this trading network
functioned.
There are, of course also caveats and
pitfalls in the application of these sources to historical and cultural
understanding. The full potential of integrating textual and archaeological
data has seldom been realized or even recognized. The overwhelming majority of
cuneiform inscriptions were unearthed with little attention to their
archaeological context, either before controlled methods of digging were
understood or in clandestine excavations directed solely to acquiring
marketable portable artifacts. The scholars working with the enormous body of
material thus put at their disposal had little incentive for insisting on
precise contextual information, nor providing it to their colleagues operating
in the field.
Differences in the training, capacities,
and objectives between the fields of Assyriology and Near Eastern archaeology
have also retarded communication. Interpreting the texts is not always as
straightforward as non-specialists might assume. Scribes, presuming knowledge
that we simply do not have, leave out much information that we would dearly
love to have. This is particularly true in letters, which are rarely dated and
emerge from contexts that were well understood by the correspondents, but
utterly opaque to us. It is often the exceptional things that get written down,
not the routine, and we always run the risk of generalizing from very
particular cases with texts. On the other hand, archaeology's strength comes
from its concern with the most basic and recurrent elements of human existence.
Granted that its data sets are invariably incomplete and often
unrepresentative, they still embrace larger segments of society and broader
chronological ranges than texts. The primary challenge here is to make reliable
and convincing inferences on the basis of large shadows rather than individual
points of light.
Representations
The processes of artistic production,
and the establishment of monuments in public settings, constituted material
manifestations of elite ideology. These processes made possible public
consumption of statements about societal order and proper governance.
Ideological messages, however, were subject to renegotiation and renewal,
challenge and change. Artistic changes therefore provide evidence and sometimes
served as vehicles for the shifting sociopolitical and technological structures
that stood behind them.
An analysis of iconography produces an assessment
of what is, and what is not, represented, and the ways in which depictions may
have served to reinforce elite authority. Study of iconographic change over
time may reveal shifts in the structures of power or in their representation.
The media of artistic representations
play a role in the selective dissemination of imagery through a population. We
can ask what role material may have played in the expression of ideology. We
must also consider how the circumstances of viewing, or the context of the
representations, affected viewer perceptions of meaning, and even the identity
of those viewers. Finally, compositional details such as (but not limited to)
size, scale, position, pose, gesture, and inscription all had potential bearing
on the reading of an image. These various components of artistic expression
formed a comxpositional whole, but different makers
and observers may have read from them distinct meanings. Both the artist/patron
and the viewer held tools to generate and deduce meaning from representations;
by applying the framework above, we may be better equipped to recognize the
intended ideological content and its potential interpretation and
reinterpretation in particular historical and sociopolitical circumstances.
Ideology is not monolithic: viewers, who
brought their own perceptions to the interpretation of public art, had
opportunities to develop alternative readings, or to resist the statements
being communicated. At any time, multiple ideologies, sometimes
"nesting" or complementary, sometimes conflicting, could be present.
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