Mesopotamia History

Thorkild Jacobsen (1963; 1976) entwarf ausgehend von den Begriffen von Rudolf Otto (1917) ein Modell der mesopotamischen Religion, das sich durch seine Konsistenz auszeichnet und weite Bereiche von Göttervorstellungen, Mythologie und Ritual abdeckt. Dieser Beitrag will sowohl die Attraktivität wie die Grenzen des substanzialistischen religionsphänomenologischen Ansatzes herausarbeiten, der durch eine monotheistisch geprägte Perspektive gekennzeichnet ist. Des weiteren zeigt sich, wie weit verbreitet dieser Ansatz in der Altorientalistik war und ist, während funktionalistische Ansätze (etwa von E. Durkheim, C. Geertz) kaum rezipiert wurden. In Hinblick auf die religionshistorischen Befunde ist hervorzuheben, dass bei heutigem Wissensstand die Repräsentation von Herrschaft in der Götterwelt schon in der Uruk-Zeit nachweisbar ist, während der von Jacobsen als urtümlich aufgefasste Dumuzi-Amaʼušumgalana aufgrund seiner Namensform einer späteren Schicht des frühen dritten Jahrtausends angehört. Die Quellen der Uruk-Zeit, insbesondere die schriftliche Repräsentation von Städtenamen durch ihre jeweiligen Götter, deuten die Existenz eines mesopotamischen Pantheons schon im Chalkolithikum an. Man muss deshalb davon ausgehen, dass mit der Differenzierung von Göttern nach ihren Funktionsbereichen schon in der Uruk-Zeit auch eine lokale Gliederung einherging.

This two-volumes monograph offers the edition or reedition of 65 letters and documents from Mari (Tell Hariri) pertaining to irrigation agriculture and the management of agricultural land, together with a comprehensive study of irrigation technology in 18th c. BCE Mari.

The book can be ordered on the SEPOA's website: http://sepoa.fr/?page_id=24

Hz. Süleyman'ın krallığı vefatının akabinde İsrail ve Yahuda olarak ikiye ayrılmıştır. Önce İsrail'in
tarih sahnesinden çekilmesi ve ardından da Yahuda krallığının yıkılması sonucu, Yahudilerin bazıları
Mezopotamya bölgesine sürgün olarak gelmişlerdir. Nitekim Diyarbakır'daki Yahudiler de bu sürgünlerin
çocuklarıdır. Yüzlerce yıl burada yaşayan Yahudiler, 1948 yılında İsrail'in kuruluşuyla Diyarbakır'ı
tamamen terk etmişlerdir. Tanzimat sonrası Diyarbakır Yahudilerinin tarihi serüvenlerine bir girizgâh yapma
iddiasında olan bu makale, Diyarbakır Şehir tarihi ile Yahudi Tarihi araştırmalarına katkı sağlamayı
hedeflemektedir.

A REVIEW AT THE DIYARBAKIR JEWS DURING THE TANZIMAT ERA
(1839-1873)
ABSTRACT
The kingdom of the king-prophet Solomon was divided into two parts as Israel and Judah after his
death. With the collapse of these kingdoms a number Jews came and settled in the Mesopotamia. The origins
the Diyarbakir Jews goes back to this episode in history. The Jews who lived in Diyarbakır for hundreds of
years abandoned the city to move to the State of Israel in 1948. This short article aims to shed some new
lights on the Diyarbakır Jews during the Tanzimat Era and thus to contribute to the Jewish studies in general
and to the history of Diyarbakir city in particular.
Key Words: Mesopotamia, Diyarbakır, Jews, Tanzimat, Israel

The evidence for a history of Mandaeism during the period of Late Antiquity (3rd–8th c. CE) and its evolution as a religious tradition prior to and immediately following the advent of Islam is surveyed. This evidence includes the Mandaean manuscript tradition, the testimony of outside witnesses, and the corpus of incantation texts from Late Antique Mesopotamia. It is noted that the study of this evidence has typically been subsumed under the study of related traditions, and that it could benefit from a reassessment. The issues addressed include Mandaeism’s relationship to other religions, such as Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Manichaeism, the antiquity and authenticity of its traditions, and the extent of Islamic influence upon them.

The visual devices used by Tony Blair and George Bush to get themselves elected and maintain power, come not from modern times, but a world that is thousands of years old. How Art Made the World ventures back to the creation of Stonehenge and the reign of Alexander the Great to reveal how imagery became an indispensable weapon in every leader's political armoury.

This episode explores how art can be used as a persuasion device by those in power and when did we learn to use images, to create a powerful icon or symbol, this way?

The use of art as a tool for those in power, started at different times, in different cultures. Near Stonehenge the grave of the Amesbury Archer was discovered in 2002, the grave was different to those previously found near the site, as this one was not Roman, but much earlier, dating to when the first sarsen stones were erected. What made him interesting were his gold hair tresses, possibly the oldest dated gold objects in Britain, and the fact that he was a foreigner, from the region that is now Germany / Switzerland. The archer had completed an epic journey for the time, and the treasures in his grave show a man of status. Art for personal adornment, like these hair clasps, elevated him above his peers.

As time progressed, art became a political tool, kings competed for more dazzling adornments. As kingdoms got bigger the kings had to overcome communication issues. Darius the Great of Persia, ruled over 20 nations from Persepolis. As very few people could read, Darius had stone reliefs created that combined styles from all over the empire, the carvings showed each nation bring tributes to their king. This showed respect, and the carvings communicated that Darius admired and respected his people. Darius created a symbol for himself, that of the archer, symbolic to Persians of leadership and wisdom, central to the concept of kingship. Darius embossed this symbol on gold coins, which became the currency to trade within the empire.

Darius’ conqueror, Alexander the Great, took this concept further. From an early age, Alexander’s image was being made for him. In his fathers tomb, an Ivory head recognisable as Alexander’s was found, showing that his image had been made for him in advance of him becoming king. In Pompeii, a copy of an original Macedonian painting, shows Alexander the Great, fearless, fixated on his enemy and leading from the front. He is in the midst of battle with king Darius, shown fearful and panicking. Where Darius had used a symbol to communicate his power, Alexander used his face. On defeating the Persians, Alexander melted down all their coins replacing them with coins bearing his head. Tests have shown that people are more influenced by the image of the head and this technique has endured 2500 years and still used today.

This artistic power can be used for sinister purposes, to persuade us to see things a certain way or even deceive us. The earliest known use of this dates back to the Romans. In 40BC Rome was in crisis, the city state was split between royalists and republicans. You could tell people’s political allegiance by how they dressed. Octavian (Augustus) understood the power of art and used it to his advantage. He needed to persuade his opponents ,and used artists to create a less threatening image, one that won over the republicans. Although the image showed him as a powerful general, it didn’t show any military arms, and his gestures were more about humility than power. His armour breast plates show him accepting surrender of the Parthian Empire, with the gods looking on approvingly. The statue offered reassurance, but it was all a lie. While he portrayed himself as a peace maker, he was getting rid of the opposition; while he was preaching humility, he lived like corrupt royalty and while pretending to hand power to the people he reinstated himself as a king.

The leaders of past used paint and marble, today we use digital manipulation. But as humans we still remain vulnerable to the persuasive power of art.

Resumen Los toros y leones androcéfalos alados, representaciones monumentales de genios guardianes benéficos de personas, palacios y ciudades, síntesis de una larga tradición religiosa y artística, se convirtieron en símbolo del prestigio y poderío neo-asirio. Dejaron huella en el imaginario no sólo de los pueblos dominados, sino incluso de imperios posteriores. Estos colosos ya forman parte del gran " Museo imaginario " de la humanidad. Abstract The Winged human-headed Bulls and lions, monumental representations of guardian benevolent genii for persons, palaces and cities, summary of a long religious and artistic tradition, they became symbol of neo-Assyrian prestige and power. They left traces in the popular imaginary, not only for the dominated peoples but even for later empires. These colossi are already part of Humanity's great " Imaginary museum " .

Built well over 3,000 years ago (c. 1380 BCE), the Eugal (Sum. é.u.gal) ziggurat at Dūr-Kurigalzu in southern Iraq still dominates the landscape.  Although in a heavily deteriorated state, the original ziggurat, along with modern reconstruction efforts and other buildings unearthed during archaeological excavations at Dūr-Kurigalzu can be viewed using satellite imagery from Google Earth. This work explores possible celestial orientations for various points of the ziggurat, as well as possible sunlight and shadow scenarios pertaining to Mesopotamian justice and/or divination.

Third-millennium Mesopotamia has provided an impressive quantity of sources for the study of ancient slavery, among them a collection of standards (the so-called Laws of Ur-Namma). Despite the volume of documents, Mesopotamian slavery remains elusive in its general traits. This is partly due to the nature of the sources, but also to the approaches and interpretations of modern scholars. Slavery in ancient Mesopotamia has been the focus of several studies in the 1960s and 1970s that interpreted the sources using comparative approaches and Marxist analyses. Since then, the topic has seldom been revisited. In this article, I present the status quaestionis with an overview of the available sources and related studies, together with a sketch of the different types of bonded and forced labor in the Neo-Sumerian period (21st cent. bce).

The point of departure is a short definition of prestige: “The prestige of a person, an object or a cultural practice is higher, the more exclusive its bearers and the more widespread its
estimation in the relevant group are”. This allows modern scholars to identify the cooccurrence of various aspects of prestige at state festivals as culturally significant markers.
This not only pertains to the participants, above all the king of the Third Dynasty of Ur (21st c. BCE), the governors of his provinces and foreign messengers, but also concerns
time, space, the ostentatious presentation of treasures, artistic performances etc. Interestingly, personal gift-giving is not included in the exchange of goods at state festivals, where goods from all over the country are collected and partly redistributed.

Bodies make space speak. This graduate seminar investigates the relationship between bodily practice, social performance, and the production of architectural space. Critical literature on the human body, its gender and sexuality, its materiality, and everyday life have flourished in the recent decades, while discussions of architectural space, place and landscape came to the foreground. Drawing on this corpus of recent scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, we will work closely with architectural, art historical and archaeological case studies drawn from the ancient Near Eastern world, and consider the impact of such new paradigms on the field. Neolithic figurines, megalithic monuments, rock reliefs, cave paintings, funerary rituals, urban festivals and festive spaces with visual narrative programs will constitute some of the case studies. Discussions of embodiment, embodied subjectivity, agency of objects, animism of architectural spaces and landscapes, gendered representation of the body, gender performance, multi-sensorial experience of the everyday world, spectacles of the state and biopolitics will play a central role in the seminar. While reading theoretical scholarship on body, performance and space, we will also be studying closely select case studies of archaeological sites, bodies of material evidence drawn from athe ancient Middle Eastern world from prehistory to the late Iron Age.

Praca została pierwotnie stworzona na potrzeby zajęć uniwersyteckich w 2013 roku. Udostępniam ją ponieważ zbiera najważniejsze informacje w temacie, a jest ich niewiele w polskojęzycznym internecie – jednakże nie jest to praca naukowa i nie nadaje się do cytowania. W razie pytań zachęcam do skontaktowania się.

This new series provides a forum for exchange on a myriad of alternative histories of marginalized communities and individuals in the Near and Middle East and Mediterranean, and those of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean heritage. It will highlight thematic issues relating to various native peoples and their narratives and – with particular contemporary relevance – explore encounters with the notion of ‘other’ within various societies. Often moving beyond the conventional state-centred and dominant monolithic approach, or reinterpreting previously accepted stories, books in the series examine and explain themes from inter-communal relations, environment, health and society, and will explore ethnic, communal, racial, linguistic and religious developments that go beyond geopolitical compositions.

Building on the foundations of scholarship within an interdisciplinary framework, this series spans the continuum of Near Eastern and Mediterranean traditions extending from the fourth millennium B.C. to the present – bridging previous fields which originally had little connection with each other. The aim is to enhance perspectives by applying various methodological approaches to dilemmas that have in the past been treated as the exclusive concern of a single given discipline.

Key Features

Creates a forum for marginalized and/or indigenous communities to engage with the ‘accepted past and present’ and to challenge previously accepted truths
Opens a dialogue for alternative intellectual histories/narratives
The first series to focus on indigenous and minoritized related narratives from the understudied and often marginal perspective
Covers cultural, linguistic, ethnic, gendered, political, numerical and economic communities in the Near and Middle East, the Mediterranean and its extended environs
Engages with all periods of history from the ancient world to the present day, especially in terms of continuity of culture, cultural heritage and heritage preservation
Communities studied may include Alawites, Alevis, Armenians, Assyrians, Christians, Copts, Druze, Jews, Mandaens, Maronites, Palestinians, Pontian/ Anatolian Greeks, Samaritans, Shabbaks, Yezidis and Zoroastrians among others

The article explores an unusual literary phenomenon in both biblical and Mesopotamian traditions: a consecutive order of clauses in a law collection serves to structure the plot of a later, narrative composition. The plot of Ruth follows the list of
commandments in Deut 24:16-25:10, while a portion of the Neo-Babylonian work, “Nebuchadnezzar King of Justice” follows the order of LH 1-5. Strikingly, these narrative compositions invoke the venerated law codes of their respective traditions, and yet, at the same time, the practice of those very same laws invoked, is seen to be at variance with the prescriptions of the earlier codes. The implications of the phenomenon for understanding processes of legal revision in the ancient Near East are explored.

Uruk, Auruk or Warka was an ancient city of Sumer (and later of Babylonia) situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates River on the dried-up ancient channel of the Euphrates 30 km (19 mi) east of modern Samawah, Al-Muthannā, Iraq.

Uruk is the type site for the Uruk period. Uruk played a leading role in the early urbanization of Sumer in the mid-4th millennium BC. By the final phase of the Uruk period around 3100 BCE, the city may have had 40,000 residents, with 80,000-90,000 people living in its environs, making it the largest urban area in the world at the time. The legendary king Gilgamesh, according to the chronology presented in the Sumerian king list, ruled Uruk in the 27th century BC. The city lost its prime importance around 2000 BC in the context of the struggle of Babylonia against Elam, but it remained inhabited throughout the Seleucid (312–63 BC) and Parthian (227 BC to 224 AD) periods until it was finally abandoned shortly before or after the Islamic conquest of 633–638.

William Kennett Loftus visited the site of Uruk in 1849, identifying it as "Erech", known as "the second city of Nimrod", and led the first excavations from 1850 to 1854.

The Arabic name of Babylonia, which eventually became the name of the present-day country, al-ʿIrāq, is thought to derive from the name Uruk via Aramaic (Erech) and possibly via Middle Persian (Erāq) transmission.
In Sumerian, the word uru could mean "city, town, village, district, circular area"

O.P. Nieuwenhuyse, P.M.M.G. Akkermans, J. van der Plicht, A. Russell & A. Kaneda (2016). In: P. Biehl & O.P. Nieuwenhuyse (eds.). Climate and cultural change in prehistoric Europe and the Near East. Buffalo, NY: State University of New York Press, 67-93.

The Nabonidus Controversy The controversy among historians concerning the Neo­Babylonian king Nabonidus is one that seems to be impossible to solve, hence the controversy, and yet evidence for either side of the argument is to be found. Within the sources which we can study and analyse, one can turn a sentence here or a sentence there into clear evidence as to why their side of the argument is right, while the other side is wrong. I found myself almost unable to choose which side I was on. Was Nebonidus in Tayma for ten years, as the standard history tells us, or was the story of Nebonidus abandoning Babylon for Arabia simply that, a story fabricated by the priesthood of Babylon and by Cyrus to discredit him and bolster their own power and authority? In the end, I have to say that I side with the revisionist historians I will argue that Nebonidus did leave Babylon, and that he did go to Arabia, but that he did not stay permanently in Tayma during the ten years that the standard history tells us he did. The first source to examine and analyze is the Harran inscriptions, which were discovered by Dr. D.S. Rice in 1956​ 1​. The Harran Inscriptions are found on Babylonian carved stone stelae dating from the 6th century BCE that were found by Dr. Rice when he realized that they had been repurposed as part of the steps of a Middle Ages mosque ​ 2​. These stelae contain the proclamations of Nebonidus and his royal mother Adad­Guppi, written, as the article tells us, likely with the use of scribe. The inscriptions speak of Nebonidus and he and his mother's desire to serve the moon god Sin by rebuilding the temple of Harran ​ 3​. The purpose of the inscriptions on the stelae seem to be religious as well as political in nature.

PANTA REI. Digital Journal of History and History Teaching is an international peer-reviewed journal focused on History and Teaching History. Its main objective is the transmission of scientific knowledge by giving also an opportunity to young researchers who want to make their way in the study of human sciences.

CEPOAT (Centre of Studies of the Middle East and Late Antiquity of the University of Murcia) is the institution in charge of the coordination and management of this journal. The journal is co-edited together with the Servicio de Publicaciones of Universidad de Murcia through EDITUM. Once a year the call for papers will be launched for all the people interested in publishing their papers, always related to History, Teaching History and other sciences or disciplines related to it (Archaeology, Art History, etc.).

This course presents a broad survey of historical forces at work over the past 6,000 years, examining the manners in which human societies have organized themselves along categories of race, ethnicity, class, and gender to meet the challenges of the increasing human population and its demands on natural resources: thus, it examines continuity and change in societies over time, in different places, and among various peoples.

This booklet has been produced to explain the history and contents
of the Slemani museum, which is the second largest museum in Iraq
and the largest in Iraqi Kurdistan. The museum has several important
missions among them the enhancement of the public knowledge and
awareness concerning the history of Kurdistan, a region
distinguished as a “crossroads” of civilizations. We hope many
people will enjoy the rich artefacts exhibited in our museum and
obtain from its displays reliable knowledge relating to the history of
the Kurdistan region. May this booklet serve as a helpful companion
during your visit.

Zakoni nastali u staroj Mesopotamiji predstavljaju najstarije poznate pisane izvore prava, od kojih je najstariji Zakon Ur-Nammu (oko 2100. godine pr.n.e), zatim Lipit Ištara (oko 1930. pr.n.e); Ešnune (oko 1770. pr.n.e) i Hammurabija (oko 1750. pr.n.e). Najobimniji i najrelevantiji za oblast krivičnog prava je poznati Hummurabijev zakon koji sadrži najveći broj krivičnih djela od navedenih zakona. U radu se izvršava izvođenje osnovnih načela i instituta prisutnih u pomenutim zakonima a koji imaju krivičnopravni karakter i kategorizacija istih u logičku cjelinu. S tim u vezi tretira se ukratko i procesni dio krivičnog prava ove stare civilizacije.

Orione, le Pleiadi, la Costellazione dell'Aquila, fino a Venere, Marte, la Luna: i corpi celesti sono protagonisti di moltissimi nomi, cognomi, toponimi della Sardegna e del Mediterraneo, secondo i risultati degli studi del linguista Salvatore Dedola. Nel seguente lavoro si trovano, per ciascun elemento celeste (o categoria), i corrispondenti nomi.