By Daniel E. Fleming
This quantity examines the political panorama of the traditional close to East throughout the archive of over 3,000 letters present in the royal palace of Mari. those letters exhibit a wealthy range of political actors, encompassing significant kingdoms, smaller states and numerous tribal cities. Mari's precise contribution to the traditional proof is its view of tribal association, made attainable specifically by way of the truth that its king, Zimri-Lim, was once, to start with, a tribal ruler who claimed Mari as an administrative base and resource of status. those archaic political traditions are usually not basically not like the different types of pre-democratic Greece, they usually supply clean cause to acknowledge a cultural continuity among the classical international of the Aegean and the older close to East. This ebook bridges the parts of archaeology, old and classical heritage, early heart and close to East, and political and social heritage.
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Additional resources for Democracy's Ancient Ancestors: Mari and Early Collective Governance
Sample text
I avoid here the modern category of “city-state,” as carrying too many associations with very different political systems. ” The Akkadian language provides its own distinction in the words a¯ lum and m¯atum, the first for the settlement and the second for the whole population that defines the kingdom ruled from that central settlement. In light of this kind of integration, it is crucial to address each individual aspect of the system with reference to the others. Ultimately, it is impossible to examine the collective or group-oriented element of ancient political life except as part of a dynamic system that involves both individual “exclusionary” and collective aspects, each with its own ideologies and spheres of activity.
In American English, villages and hamlets are either relics of the past or quaint tourist destinations in other people’s countries (with some northeastern exceptions). A “town” thus spans everything from a rural crossroads settlement to the center of a major city, so I have preferred “town” as a translation for the Akkadian word a¯ lum, which has similar range. Even so, the English word deceives us. The early built-up centers of northern 22 Introduction and western Mesopotamia often retained an old function as meeting places for population spread through the surrounding countryside.
This means that readers who are not familiar with the ancient languages in play will be invited to tolerate a certain dose of the unfamiliar in order to understand what this evidence offers to the broader study of human society. I offer the following comments with the hope of making this obstacle less imposing. Almost all of the essential evidence for collective political traditions in the Mari archives comes from the letters. As a whole, this correspondence is written in Akkadian, the Semitic language of eastern Mesopotamia, native to Babylon, Eˇsnunna, and Aˇsˇsur during the early second millennium.