Political History of Ancient Mesopotamia and Syria

PART ONE THE APPROACH

1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 2

WHAT AND WHY .....................................................................................................................2 Boundaries of a civilization .................................................................................................2 Periodization........................................................................................................................2 Syro-Mesopotamia and Mesopotamia and Syria: the basic elements ...........................2 Political history....................................................................................................................3 Can a dead civilization live? ............................................................................................3 Relevance of Mesopotamian history....................................................................................4

THE GROWTH OF POWER STRUCTURES:...........................................................................6 TOWARDS A THEMATIC HISTORY OF SYRO-MESOPOTAMIA ......................................6 2.1 A thematic approach to Mesopotamian history ...................................................................6 2.2 Structuralism and nominalism .............................................................................................7 2.3 The dynamics of political development in ancient Mesopotamia........................................7 2.4 The nature of progress .........................................................................................................9 2.5 The socio-economic dimension ...........................................................................................9 2.6 The significance of technology..........................................................................................10 2.7 The perceptual response ....................................................................................................10 THE ORDERED UNFOLDING:...............................................................................................12 METHODS OF ANALYSIS .....................................................................................................12 3.1 History and historiography ................................................................................................12 3.2 Synchrony and diachrony ..................................................................................................12 3.3 Science and humanism ......................................................................................................13 3.4 Generalization, generics, specialization.............................................................................13 3.5 The search for meaning .....................................................................................................14 3.6 The use of distributional classes ........................................................................................15 3.7 The dimensions of distributional analysis..........................................................................15 3.8 The nature of objectivity....................................................................................................16 3.9 Culture and experience ......................................................................................................17

Giorgio Buccellati

1 WHAT AND WHY

1.1 Boundaries of a civilization
When defining a civilization, we must determine what its degree of self-identity might be. As an approximation, we can use the notion of a structural balance between different elements of a system, a balance which is maintained above and beyond the change of single, individual elements. The unity of the overarching system is maintained when the permutations of the components can be aligned in some meaningful overall pattern; in historical process, for instance, we would look for a goal-oriented direction in the temporal development of institutions.

1.2 Periodization
Within the continuum of temporal process, where do we find thresholds from one phase to the next? The concept of revolution refers to the most marked threshold: in such case, a transformation from a given configuration of a cultural system to another such configuration happens quickly, and it affects a vast array of important components of the system. The concept of evolution refers to a more gradual development, without any clear single threshold, and without a concomitant transformation of many elements at once. Thus periodization is an abstract, theoretical framework, useful only within limits: it identifies stages which correspond to major permutations within a system. (To make an analogy with the personal lives of individuals: marked thresholds may be characterized by physical events, e.g., the birth and death of an individual are parallel to the establishment or destruction of a city; gradual transitions may be characterized by symbolic events, e.g., graduation or moving from one city to another as parallel to the signing of a treaty.)

1.3

Syro-Mesopotamia and Mesopotamia and Syria: the basic elements

The main traits which give a specific identity to Syro-Mesopotamian civilization are as follows:
Geography: a common habitat, defined by geo-morphological and climatic characteristics (steppe, rivers, piedmont areas, rainfall, etc.).

Political History of Ancient Mesopotamia and Syria

Language: common linguistic traditions are defined by specific isoglosses which identify discrete languages (e.g., Sumerian) or dialects (e.g., Babylonian, Assyrian, etc.) Religion: a common pantheon, beliefs and cult (e.g., a specific god such as Enlil or a specific cultic building such as the ziggurat). Art and literature: common stylistic traits (e.g., the cylinder seals or the systematization of knowledge in lists). Society: common institutions in the articulation of power, distribution of wealth, social stratification (e.g., the bureaucratic scaffolding which supports the system of delegation of power or the merchant tradition).

Using these criteria, we can distinguish two major focal areas. In the early historical periods, between 3000 and 1500 B.C., Syro-Mesopotamia is a unified cultural area; after 1500 B.C., Mesopotamia and Syria are two distinct, though in many ways still closely related, cultural areas.

1.4 Political history

When concentrating on politics as a factor of social dynamics, we ask: how do human groups develop, achieve and maintain inner solidarity? How is power wielded by special interest groups and individuals to affect the group? What types of power are used from coercive forces and managerial entrepreneurship to psychological persuasion and religious legitimation? What are the key centers of power, and how are they wrested from their current holders? What is the degree of consciousness with which power is held, and how are the corresponding institutions organized and managed? This presentation of Mesopotamian history focuses primarily on such questions in the measure in which they can be documented for the Mesopotamian sphere. Cultural factors are introduced only occasionally to the extent that they help understanding political development (e.g., the origin of writing). More about this in the next chapter.

1.5 Can a dead civilization live?

The subtitle of Oppenheim's book, Portrait of a Dead Civilization, is programmatic in that the author wants to convey a certain suspicion about the possibility to recapture the spirit of this civilization and bring it back to life, as it were. In this, he was reacting against a certain tendency to simplistically and naively read into the record what we would like to see there. We should not, however, be led into a sterile cynicism which robs us of the very reason for studying this, or any ancient, civilization in the first place. I will come in

Giorgio Buccellati

Chapter 3 to the question about meaning. For now, I wish to stress that clearly Mesopotamia was not a dead civilization while it lived. Conversely, even a contemporary living person might appear to be quite dead if our methods of study fossilize it into a mere specimen. So: Mesopotamia was definitely a living civilization, and it is this life which we seek to describe. We do not reabsorb it into our living consciousness by recreating its socio-political system as if a borough of some sort of Fantasy Park. But we legitimately appropriate its values as we can objectively identify them from the record (more about objectivity in Chapter 3). An alternative concept is that of a broken tradition. Not only are there no living Mesopotamians today to relay their experience about Mesopotamian-ness. Not only have there not been any for more than two thousands years. What is even more important is that the documents of their civilizational existence were lost to our civilizational stream for the same period of time. In other words, for some two thousand years we knew little more than their name, and had no access whatsoever to their records until archaeology bridged the gap and resurrected the records and, through them, the civilization itself. Or, if we wish to use a less dramatic metaphor, it mended the break. Whatever the image, the fact is that through the discovery and interpretation of artifactual and textual records we have re-embedded the civilization itself, as a system, in our consciousness. This process of decoding and interpreting is particularly difficult when we are faced with such a long break. We may be more easily open to serious mistakes. But the process remains the same as with a contemporary society: our intellectual vision encompasses civilization as a whole, and we are only studying natural (hence living) civilizations, not artificial or dead ones.

1.6 Relevance of Mesopotamian history

The relevance of Mesopotamian political history may be argued on two levels. (1) In a general sense, we have the basic human responsibility to understand the burden of our collective past as humans. This has been well expressed long ago(Ed. Meyer) by saying that the basis of all historical investigation is always universal history. Nothing human is alien to us, and we cannot fully survive as humans if we ignore anything human that is within reach. (2) More specifically, Mesopotamian political history is relevant to us on two major grounds. First, methodologically: there is here a welter of data which is self-contained, very explicit about social phenomena and yet little studied (partly because of the difficulty to understand the sources); as a result, the field is wide open for new broad systematizations of the data, for the fresh

Political History of Ancient Mesopotamia and Syria

discovery of relations and patterns. Second, substantively: there are major traditions which shape our own present political social being and which may be brought back to Mesopotamia. What has been said (G. Marcel) of the individual I am my own past is also true of a social group: the past irreversibly conditions the present. For this conditioning not to be determinant, we have to understand its nature, and thus mitigate or channel its impact. What psychoanalysis does to the individual, history does to the social group: not a mechanistic belief in a formula which may allow to predict the future from the past, but rather heightened awareness of our social being as it is conditioned by our social past. We will trace a link between a few such traditions and contemporary concerns especially with regard to the technology of communication (writing ~ computer), the extreme functionalization of man-to-man relationship (slavery ~ urban alienation), the progressive integration of tensional layers within ever widening structures (parallel growth of increasingly more complex social structures, with a tendency toward universal institutions), the use of managerial skills for group control (parallel consolidation of power by means of bureaucratic means).

Giorgio Buccellati

2 THE GROWTH OF POWER STRUCTURES: TOWARDS A THEMATIC HISTORY OF SYROMESOPOTAMIA

2.1 A thematic approach to Mesopotamian history
We will not attempt to give equal time to all important events and individuals, nor will we cover all important institutions. To a large extent, this is done respectively in the two volumes by Roux and Oppenheim, which are among the required readings. G. Roux, Ancient Iraq, is more properly a chronicle and gazetteer than a history of ancient Mesopotamia: the main sorting criterion for the materials presented is chronological and factual, and in this respect the work is a convenient summing up of what may be called a philological and antiquarian type of approach to historical development useful, though not particularly enlightening. On the contrary, A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, is a provocative work, which concentrates on the most important facets of Mesopotamian cultures, presenting points of view which are often controversial, and always original; for each of the topics discussed, Oppenheim follows essentially a synchronic approach, identifying the elements which are recurrent within the culture, and highlighting their interrelationships within the overall system of Mesopotamian civilization. We will follow a different approach. We will follow in a diachronic way certain specific themes, in an effort to identify the structural transformations of political institutions, and, to a lesser extent, of social and economic institutions and of the technological infrastructure. This development is so well articulated in ancient Mesopotamia that it can be traced as if an organic growth, building on its own premises in a surprisingly coherent way. Thus we will trace the growth not so much by detailing the moments of its unfolding (which can be found in Roux), nor by concentrating on statically juxtaposed frames of its structural make-up (as brilliantly done by Oppenheim), but rather by seeking the consequentiality of its inner transformations. It is in this sense that I speak of a thematic approach: we will select a few specific themes, and follow them through showing the momentum that is intrinsically built into them, the directionality that human experimentation shows as an inextricable dimension of its very existence. And we will marvel at the both the irreversible nature of cultural achievements and the constant effort to adapt to their

Political History of Ancient Mesopotamia and Syria

impact, whether positive or negative. So, rather than as a textbook, this Primer is meant to serve as an interpretive essay. Note that the two major textbooks (Roux and Oppenheim) and the lectures plus this Primer are meant to be used in a complementary fashion. I will not specifically integrate in class my point of view with that of the two books. In particular, I have not assigned portions to be read in conjunction with certain class presentations. I want it to be your task to integrate the readings with the lectures. This is part of your learning experience: contrast, compare, evaluate and achieve your own integration. Culture should not be poured in you as if in unchanging vessels: you must absorb culture and make it your own. Only thus will it become experience.

2.2 Structuralism and nominalism

The common approach to Mesopotamian history has been influenced by a nominalist rather than a structuralist approach. By nominalism I mean a reliance on the words or nouns of the original languages, translated with a narrow lexical understanding that ignores semantics and semiotics (see below, 3.5), as if the words were the things themselves. A study of structure, on the other hand, assumes that there is a meaningful structural and systemic whole, into which words give us insight, but not in such a way that each discrete element of that whole would necessarily overlap with a word, or conversely that each word stands for a discrete element. Hence, for a proper structural analysis, we must follow a double course of inquiry. On the one hand, we must be familiar with theoretical and comparative systems of principles that may allow us to properly understand what the structure would have been (in our case, for instance, political, social and economic theory). On the other hand, we must analyze the words for the full range that they express (semantically and semiotically), and determine to what extent they correspond to institutional structural elements, either discretely or cumulatively (different words used for the same element, see, e.g., Buccellati 1977). Conversely, we must be ready to recognize cases where structural elements have not been given a specific label in the original language, but can nevertheless be identified as real.

2.3 The dynamics of political development in ancient Mesopotamia

Let us look now at the major themes we will study. The course traces the development of Syro-Mesopotamian political institutions from late prehistory to the formation of the universal state, i. e. from about 6000 B.C. down to about 500 B.C. Special emphasis is given to the analysis of socio-political in-

Giorgio Buccellati

stitutions, viewed as structural systems. There was a sustained pattern of growth which maintained through time a clearly discernible inner momentum: changes were only partially affected by external events, and were instead for the most part due to the natural evolution of intrinsic structural premises. The process began with the discovery of territorial bonds as the main cause for group solidarity: the earliest cities (by about 3000 B.C.) showed how such territorial communities could not only survive, but even be strengthened, once the fateful threshold was reached when face-to-face association was no longer possible within the community. The consolidation of power which derived from this development was momentous: the first cities were also the first states. These new centralized institutions, supported by writing and other technologies, helped to span ever larger political entities. First, the expanded territorial state (by about 2400 B.C.) brought several major urban centers under a unified political control, within geographically homogeneous boundaries. Then macro-regional states (by about 1500 B.C.) introduced new control mechanisms which allowed for partial local autonomy in the areas beyond the core, but asserted an effective centralization in matters such as warfare and taxation. The final stage was the universal state (the empire in the proper sense of the term, by about 700 B.C.), through which the entire civilized world (as it was then perceived) came to be vigorously integrated within a rigid administrative, and to some extent cultural, framework. Along the fringes of such a unilinear institutional progression, important variations also developed. The most important was steppe pastoralism, which began on the Middle Euphrates by the end of the third millennium. The socio-political constructs which accompanied this true revolution were the tribe as a unified human group whose solidarity did not depend on territorial contiguity among its members, and eventually the national state (by about 1200, especially in Syria-Palestine, where the best know examples were represented by the states of Israel and Judah). A fundamental dimension of this institutional development, which took place along parallel lines with the development of the territorial state, there is the phenomenon of ethnicity: I consider this to have started relatively late, and I believe we can pinpoint its origin in the late third millennium in the steppe regions of Syro-Mesopotamia. Such a dynamic development of political institutions is all the more remarkable when one considers the contrast with other aspects of Mesopotamian civilization, notably the religion, which were much more static.

Political History of Ancient Mesopotamia and Syria

2.4 The nature of progress

Since so much stress is placed here on a progression along a line of structural changes, one may well wonder whether this is the same as progress. The term tends to have a qualitative connotation which is not compatible with historical analysis. In this sense the term is inoperative. We cannot say that humans have progressed to where, being civilized, they are better than their barbarian forebears. For one thing, we cannot accurately define, in historical terms, what it means to be better, since this is a philosophical, not a historical question. And if we follow any common sense standard, we cannot show that the later Mesopotamians were happier than the earlier ones, or that we are smarter than the Mesopotamians. The only way in which the notion of progress can properly be used is if we equate it with increase in complexity. If so, this clearly defines the thrust of Mesopotamian civilization as following an inexorable line of progress, at least in terms of political institutions as we study them here. Such growth in complexity is, for the most part, cumulative. Here are some examples. (1) Once the territorial dimension of the state starts growing, there is no turning back: the need for Lebensraum is perceived as just that, a need, which becomes encased in an ambitious ideological superstructure (divine mission, manifest destiny, etc.). (2) Once the use of a given technology (farming, pottery making, writing, metallurgy, etc.) is introduced, it is never unlearned: in fact, it comes to be taken for granted and new inventions build on former ones. (3) Once social stratification takes place, cleavages among classes only increase, and functionalization of human relationships becomes more and more rigid. The opposite occurs very seldom. There are occasional phenomena of de-urbanization, but they are limited in scope and time. Periods of dark ages (resulting often from external conditions, such as drastic climatic changes or large intrusions of foreign populations with a lower degree of socio-economic complexity) cause for the most part a pause rather than a new beginning.

2.5 The socio-economic dimension

A second aspect that we will study is that of social and economic institutions. If politics is the articulation of power within the community, the nature of the community will obviously have a determinant impact on the modalities of such articulation. I will stress the tensionality factor as something that holds ever larger groups together even when no apparent bond can immediately be recognized: what is the solidarity bond among individuals who do not know each other within a city? Or within a tribe? Or an empire? How do

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they know each other without really knowing each other? The answer to such question helps to understand the political question: leadership both motivates, and is made possible by some sort of social integration. In other words, a king needs a power base as much as a large human group needs leadership. Another point about the social dimension that is important is the degree of adaptation either in time of crisis or in front of natural and ongoing intrusions (e.g., the foreigners). Here I will stress the open aspect of Mesopotamian society, which was resilient and receptive. The fundamental role of economy may be summed up under two headings. First, the rapid accumulation of wealth made for major disparities among individuals within the group, and provided additional means of control to the leadership. Those who controlled wealth controlled the people who produced the wealth. Second, trade served as a powerful stimulus to link up with foreign communities. This was a major thrust in expanding the tensionality beyond kin and ken, to ever wider reaches of the physical and human landscape.

2.6 The significance of technology

The technological infrastructure was of great significance not only in itself, but because of the impact it had on political and socio-economic development. I will view this as a progressive increase in the range of controls over nature, and a consequent progressive distancing from nature (understood as the unmodified environment). Some innovations were specifically related to alterations of the natural dimension whether of the eco-system (e.g., agriculture) or of individual items (e.g., smelting of metals). Others were related to the manipulation of human faculties (especially writing, understood as the extra somatic extension of brain functions). In either case, the political system was quick to incorporate the advantages of the discoveries: agriculture and permanent storage of supplies place easy means of control in the hands of a few; metals allow the development of weapons which give coercive force a whole new dimension in human relationships; writing develops rapidly into a means for the capillary control of the impersonal links among human persons. Thus technology, as an underpinning for economic, military, managerial skills is one of the most powerful tools in the hands of the holders of political power.

2.7 The perceptual response

Ideology played a major role in all of this, especially through religion and literature, and it was put to good use by the political leadership (from con-

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sidering the king as representative of the community in propitiating fertility, to using the written word for political propaganda). We will deal to a lesser degree with these factors, only because they are of such magnitude that they require a distinct treatment (specifically, they are covered in two other courses). We will deal instead at some more length with the way in which ideology was received by the members of the social group, i.e., with the perceptions that were held by the common people, and were skillfully fostered by the elite. For example, I will suggest that a critical dimension of the urban revolution was precisely in the way in which it impacted the collective psyche, as it were, of the population. Analogously, the growth of the scope of public institutions, from the city to the empire, can effectively be described, I submit, in terms of how people related to the territory in which they lived. Or again, technology (as already suggested above), may fruitfully be seen not only in terms of the concrete manipulation of physical resources or the improvements of tools, but also in the way in which social intercourse was affected by all this.

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3 THE ORDERED UNFOLDING: METHODS OF ANALYSIS

3.1 History and historiography
By history we mean in the first place the real time unfolding of events, as concrete individual happenings (say, the days of our lives). We also mean the record of these events as they have unfolded (say, a diary we keep of each day). By historiography we mean our systemic ordering of the record on the one hand, and on the other the interpretation of the systemic connections and background of these same events (say, a biography that uses a diary and other concomitant records). The search for causes consists in seeking such links, in showing (hidden) influences, in explaining how inner forces may account for systemic changes, etc.

3.2 Synchrony and diachrony

It is important to understand the difference between the two. Diachrony is not synonymous with chronology, and synchrony is not a thin slice of diachrony. Rather, synchrony is the systemic co-functioning of elements of a structural whole, and diachrony the structural realignment of a system as it undergoes different configurations. Central to both definitions is the concept of structure. As long a structural whole maintains its wholeness, it remains the same structure; hence its study is synchronic, even if it spans a long period of time. For instance, we may speak synchronically of Sumerian city-states, bridging thereby a period of some six centuries. The broader the structural whole, the longer the time period within it may retain its identity, and within which it makes sense to speak of it synchronically; thus the synchronic parameters of the human race are much wider than those of the Amorite ethnic group. A diachronic study such as the one we are undertaking here will attempt to take related synchronic configurations and to show how they can be aligned as consequential stages of development. Causality is presupposed not so much in the sense that we will identify single individual facts, persons or events that on their own would have brought about change. (This deus ex machina approach is often used as a shortcut based on spectacular events: hence history conceived exclusively and simplistically as a list of battles, invasions of foreign people, great individuals.) Rather, causality is identified by tracing a variety of factors that are concomitant with change and survival: for example, the birth of the Akkadian empire builds on the effective range of a ten-

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sionality that had given rise to the first cities and the first states, on the implicit reach of this tensionality for ever wider outer limits, on the newly discovered sense of supra-territorial bonds among ethnic groups, on the reliance on a widely tested capillary system of public administration, and so on. These are more realistically its causes than the arrival of the Akkadians from the steppe or the romantic legends about Sargon.

3.3 Science and humanism

A scientific approach to the past may be described as one which relies on a documented reconstruction of abstract structures, identified through a distributional analysis of patterns. A humanistic approach, on the other hand, may be described as one which induces a personal experience of, and reaction to, a concrete cultural embodiment of the past. To this extent, the humanistic approach is immediate, while the scientific one is mediated by generalized systems of principles: we have an immediate, personal reaction to a Mesopotamian work of art which has survived, but we can perceive the functioning of an ancient political system only through the mediation of abstract reasoning. Thus political history is narrower and more limited than cultural history, in that it is only scientific, and cannot be humanistic as well.

3.4 Generalization, generics, specialization

A broad survey, such as the one given here for Mesopotamian political history, cannot provide any real documentation, and it may result in oversimplification and false impressions. Yet there is a measure of validity to this approach, if the following is observed. This survey is conceived as an interpretive synthesis, which grows out of a confrontation of several facts, an evaluation of their relationship, a discovery of meaningful sequences, and an emphasis on certain facts rather than others. It is, in other words, a thesis oriented presentation, which proposes a given conception of Mesopotamian history, with whatever documentation and argumentation is deemed relevant. The information is selected partly by way of exemplification, but it is at the same time meant to provide an adequate informational outline for the central topic. It is important, in this respect, to understand the difference between a generalized and a generic presentation. A generic statement is one which expresses a vague concept, based on the broadest conceptual categories, and thus lacking in true explanatory power e.g., how wonderful Greece was, how dark the Middle Ages. A generalized statement, on the other hand, is derived from a well defined system of principles, through explicit procedures e.g., Greek and Medieval city-states had a different attitude toward manual labor.

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Generalizations are powerful conceptual tools, but to be valid they can only rest on verifiable, specialized data; minute specialization, on the other hand, can only be brought into meaningful patterns through a generalized evaluation of the data themselves. Hence generalization and specialization are two indispensable components of a single polar system. The present survey attempts to give a generalized presentation of Mesopotamian political history, with a modicum of specialized documentation.

3.5 The search for meaning

How can we attribute meaning to data belonging to a broken tradition? Is it legitimate to trust our intuition and project our values, or should we be so detached that no judgment is expressed as to the potential for meaning? The former solution seems too subjective, the latter too unsatisfactory. The very fact that we are concerned with our civilizational past points to a certain apprehension of a basic level of meaning: we are not considering Mesopotamia, however broken the transmission of the record may be, as the mere projection of a fantastic imagination, as if a novel whose meaning lies merely in its intrinsic coherence, regardless of its relationship to fact. Nor should we seek meaning only through the connections with other segments of the record which speak more directly to us. Especially, we should not limit our interest in Mesopotamia to the links that can be established with the Old Testament: if we look at Mesopotamia through a Biblical filter we do a disservice to both Mesopotamia and the Bible. To Mesopotamia, because we concentrate on features which do not necessarily have the same order of priority within the structural make-up of the Mesopotamian setting proper. And to the Bible, because the Mesopotamian parallel is no longer germane and independent if it has been singled out in the first place through the eyepiece of the Biblical record itself. The best claim to a recovery of meaning is the identification of coherent distributional patterns within the record itself. The assumption is that repetitive co-occurrence of observed phenomena cannot have been generated at random, and that it must instead have originated in an original perception of meaning on the part of the society that produced the record in the first place. I will first provide some concrete examples of how distributional analysis can be implemented, and then I will indicate how, as a result, different dimensions can be recognized, with corresponding different layers of meaning.

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3.6 The use of distributional classes

By way of illustration, I will use a modern example. Suppose that you find scattered in the record the following occurrences of alphanumeric configurations: 10 1,000.00 1.20 1:20 1:59 1.60 1.85 2:00 2.00 9 1 Q K The sorting criterion through which I have extracted them from our sources is that of the numeric and alphabetic sequence. This provides a certain meaning to the sequence as such, but it does not shed any light on the context in which these symbols occur. We try then to see how they are distributed both in their context and in their reciprocal interrelationships, and we come up with two distributional observations. First, there is correlation between certain types of configurations and certain additional symbols, and that their sequencing may not correspond the alphanumeric sequence: $1.20 $1.60 $1.85 $2.00 $1,000.00 1:20 A.M. 1:59 A.M. 2:00 A.M. 1 9 10 K Q Second, we notice a negative correlation: we do not find instances of $1.101, or 1:60 A.M.. Since this exemplification is drawn from our own, rather than from a broken tradition, we can immediately recognize the coding limitations on the notation of dollars and cents, of the time of day, or of a hand of cards in a poker game. What is particularly significant with a living tradition, is that the statement of impossibility (e.g. that we have 2:00 A.M. instead of 1:60 A.M.) can be arrived at rather quickly, whereas with a broken tradition we need a much more careful assessment of the universe from which the sample is drawn, and a very capillary system of data retrieval (it is here that electronic data processing introduces a whole new dimension in the study of the past).

3.7 The dimensions of distributional analysis

When we deal with a broken tradition, we may often, at best, do no better than reconstructing patterns of co-occurrence (and lack thereof). We may, in other words, be able to sort the three sets of data as shown above, but not recognize that they pertain to money count, time division or value notation for game cards. But distributional classes are nested within each other, and the greater the number of correlations that we can establish, the greater our insight into levels of meaning can become. For instance, the correlation of signs with the dollar sign and specific commodities with which it may be associated will give us an insight into the purchasing power of what otherwise would remain a purely graphic array.

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There are three major ranges within which the various levels of meaning cluster. (1) What I would call the UNIDIMENSIONAL approach establishes a one-to-one correlation among elements. An example from the field of language would be the lexical understanding of the Akkadian word arrum as king. An example from the field of institutions would be the use of chronology to place specific events at certain points in time (e.g., the year Hammurapi became king; the year Hammurapi established justice in the land; the year the canal Hammurapi-gives-prosperity was built; etc.). (2) The BIDIMENSIONAL approach establishes a correlation between two sets of elements. An example from language would be the semantic identification of arrum as the member of a set of words relating to public officials, this term referring to the official at the top of the pyramid. An example from the field of institutions would be the archival correlation of a list of year names with actually dated tablets, proving the actual presence of the king at the place where the tablets were found. (3) The PLURIDIMENSIONAL approach establishes a correlation among a variety of sets. An example from language would be the semiotic identification of arrum as referring to the person who claims primary responsibility for completing civil works, winning military campaigns, exercising supreme judicial functions, etc. An example from institutions would be the functional correlation of events that took place in different places during the same time period.

3.8 The nature of objectivity

In conclusion, how can we claim objectivity in dealing with a society that is remote from our own (hence more difficult to control) and yet connected, through the Bible, with aspects of our life where strong convictions are held (hence a great degree of personal bias is possible)? We may consider the following criterion. If objectivity is measured by the way in which we relate as observers to the data, it emerges as something relative relative, that is, to the degree in which the subject is aware of its stance vis--vis the object. Objectivity may then be viewed as the calibration of perception, i.e., as the way to calibrate our subjective approach to the data. By way of example, we may attempt to calibrate our own approach to Mesopotamian history. We state an interest in the political dimension of that tradition. We define the scope of our interest in terms of a certain system of principles (e.g., the articulation of power within the social group, as I have argued above). We spell out the kind of sources that we are going to use (as we will do in the next chapter). We specify the additional criteria that we are going to apply (e.g., the concept of

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distributional analysis). This type of self-declaration calibrates the rapport that intervenes, at the conscious level, between us and the data in our effort to build an interpretive synthesis. The calibration makes it easier for another observer to interpret in turn our interpretation, and this establishes an acceptable type of historical objectivity.

3.9 Culture and experience

Culture may be seen as the frame of nature, a way in which perceptions of the world around us are embedded in a coherent framework. This framework is then the inventory of acquired and shared traits within the group. Experience, on the other hand, is the spontaneous confrontation with nature and the internalization of culture. Mesopotamians experienced their own culture because the relevant traits were part and parcel of their lives. We can (scientifically) identify these traits and (humanistically) re-embed them in our experience by internalizing them. A translation becomes then more than a simple transfer of words from one language to another. It becomes a vehicle for discovering and conveying meaning on the level of both culture and experience. Consciousness is the reflection about ones own place in reality, both the natural and cultural reality. An interesting question is to identify the degree of awareness with which, for instance, a king formulated and pursued his policies. When we say, for instance, that Hammurapi wanted to build a sense of solidarity and loyalty by making known his role in judging disputes (the socalled law code), how much weight can we actually give to what we assume to have been his wish?