Table Of ContentConstituent, Confederate, and Conquered Space
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/17/16 9:29 AM
Topoi
Berlin Studies of the Ancient World
Edited by
Excellence Cluster Topoi
Volume 17
De Gruyter
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/17/16 9:29 AM
Constituent, Confederate,
and Conquered Space
The Emergence of the Mittani State
Edited by
Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum
Nicole Brisch
Jesper Eidem
De Gruyter
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/17/16 9:29 AM
ISBN 978-3-11-026592-7
e-ISBN 978-3-11-026641-2
ISSN 2191-5806
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde
Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
o Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/17/16 9:29 AM
Acknowledgements
The Excellence ClusterTopoi: The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in
the Ancient World in Berlin generously sponsored an international conference onConstituent,
Confederate, and Conquered Space: The Case of the Mittani Transition in the summer of 2009.
The topic of the conference made a significant contribution to the overall research ques-
tions of Area B Mechanisms of control and social spaces, in particular to the agenda of Re-
search Group B II-1Political governance and governed spaces.
We would like to thank the staff of the central Topoi office, Sandra Feix M.A., coordi-
nator of Research Area B, and the students of the Seminar für Altorientalistik at Freie Uni-
versität for their organisational and administrative support, which made the conference a
stimulating and successful event. In addition, we would like to extend our gratitude to the
staff of the editorial team at Topoi, especially Nadine Riedl and Birgit Nennstiel, to Sandra
Feix and Judith Esders, and to Mirko Vonderstein at de Gruyter. The publication of this vol-
ume has been made possible by generous funding of Topoi.
Berlin, November 2012
Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, Nicole Brisch, Jesper Eidem
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS V
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/17/16 9:29 AM
VI
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/17/16 9:29 AM
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . V
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
I Imperial Constructs– Modes of Governance
Eva von Dassow
Levantine Polities under Mittanian Hegemony . . . . . . . . . 11
Adelheid Otto
The Organisation of Residential Space in the Mittani Kingdom as a Mirror
of Different Models of Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Stefano de Martino
The Mittani State: The Formation of the Kingdom of Mittani . . . . . 61
Jörg Klinger
The Imperial Space– The Early Hittite Kingdom . . . . . . . . . 75
II Political Landscapes– Antecedents in Upper Mesopotamia
Maria G. Biga
Inherited Space – Third Millennium Political and Cultural Landscape . . 93
Cécile Michel
Central Anatolia in the Nineteenth and Eighteenth Centuries BC . . . 111
Jesper Eidem
The Kingdom ofSˇamsˇ¯ı-Adad and its Legacies . . . . . . . . . . 137
Michaël Guichard
Political Space– Local Political Structures in Northern Syria:
The Case of the Country of Ida-Maras in the Eighteenth Century BC . . 147
·
TABLE OF CONTENTS VII
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/17/16 9:29 AM
III Cultural Landscapes– Regional Diversity vs. Political Unity
Diederik J. W. Meijer
Marginal and Steppic Areas as Sources for Archaeological Debate:
A case for “Active Symbiosis” of Town and Country . . . . . . . . 163
Rafal Kolin´ski
Settled Space. Evidence for Changes in Settlement Patterns
of Northern Mesopotamia at the Advent and at the Turn of the Mittani Era. 179
Bertille Lyonnet, Xavier Faivre
The Settlement Pattern of the Western Upper Khabur from
the Old Babylonian Period to the End of the Mittani Era . . . . . . . 213
Grégory Chambon
Spaces of Measures and Numbers in Upper Mesopotamia . . . . . . 247
IV Reflections
Norman Yoffee
The Age of Opportunity: Social and Political Transitions
in Mid-Second Millennium BC Mesopotamia . . . . . . . . . . 259
Glenn M. Schwartz
Reflections on the Mittani Emergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
Indices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
VIII TABLE OF CONTENTS
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/17/16 9:29 AM
Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, Nicole Brisch, Jesper Eidem
Introduction
…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection
that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City,
and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course
of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and
so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was
of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for
point.
J.L. Borges, “Of Exactitude in Science.”A Universal History of Infamy
(1954) p.131
The ‘Mittani empire’ is one of the most enigmatic political structures in Mesopotamian his-
tory, largely due to the lack of written documentation from within the state. Reconstructing
the emergence and the organisation of this state, whose territory encompassed Upper
Mesopotamia touching the Levant in the West and the piedmont plains of the Zagros in the
East, as well as parts of Anatolia at the height of its power, is exceedingly difficult. Yet, new
research in the past few decades has shown that such a reconstruction is not entirely
impossible. This volume represents an approach to the question of how a territory in Upper
Mesopotamia of such unprecedented size could be kept under Mittani rule over such a con-
siderable amount of time.
The papers collected here originated from the conference “Constituent, Confederate,
and Conquered Space: The Case of the Mittani Transition”. The original aim of the confer-
ence was to gain an idea of how the Mittani state emerged in Upper Mesopotamia by exam-
ining, on the one hand, previous political and cultural structures in Upper Mesopotamia
and northern Syria, and, on the other hand, by studying the partly contemporary Hittite
kingdom, whose actions may have contributed significantly to the rise of the Mittani state.
Underlying this approach is a rather general question: to what extent is the nature of con-
quered territory constitutive for the organisation of political space? Is the specific character
of the Mittani state therefore mainly a result of contact between differing modes of spatial
organisation co- and preexisting in the region? To put it another way: was the success and
failure of former or coexisting political structures of any consequence to the formation of a
newly emerging state?
The example of Mittani presents a particularly attractive case study since it is linked
to a rather complicated ethnic history. Seemingly, the first language of major parts of the
population was Hurrian, though Akkadian dialects prevailed in the peripheral regions as
INTRODUCTION 1
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/17/16 9:29 AM
