Chasing Down the Mundane: The Near East with Social Historical Interest

The ancient Near East

If we begin from such current categories in what sometimes sounds like purely modern historiography, there is plenty to connect to the ancient world: questions of family and its constituents; women in society; rural and urban living environments; and considerations of health and physical safety as they affect individuals and communities. Law and religion do not tend to come up, though there appears to be no intent to exclude them. More striking is the absence of economic analysis, which could carry systemic interest. These journals are not marked by contributions with a strong social science and quantitative bent, showing how far they have strayed from their roots.

For me, the attraction of the social historical category for work on the ancient Near East lies in a more ambitious integration of society with politics and economics with the goal of understanding change and continuity through time and space. Such an impulse to integrate was reflected in the French quest for history en totalité⁶ and the stage of Annales definition as plural “Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations” (1946–1993).⁷ Even the microstoria of the Italian “turn” from social history⁸ and the German Alltagsgeschichte offer hope of illuminating deep historical changes that are most visible in the particular and the mundane.⁹ With a view toward the cuneiform tradition, one lasting contribution of the old and ambitious social history was its validation of written sources neglected for their dullness and mind-numbing quantities: public records and household accounts, private legal documents and the notations of courts, the textual detritus of institutions not charged to persuade or to inspire. Such a list should be familiar to Assyriologists, who will recognize the importance of the categories even if not drawn to make of them a life’s work. Because many cuneiform collections of mundane transactions were the work of institutions with political importance, whether by association with palaces or other scribal centers, they offer a view of power and society in organic connection. Where the political may be seen from the top down, with the institutional program driven by kings and leaders, the shape of the society in play reveals itself from the bottom up, in the people named and the affairs addressed. Whether the material in question documents trade, disbursement and receipt of goods, purchase of property, or arrangements for inheritance, matters of economy, law, and religion are all joined to basic questions of social order and exchange. Here in the mundane evidence of the scribal office, we have endless grist for a social historical mill.¹⁰

Recent Assyriological study has taken ever more seriously the archival realities of texts: the schooling of scribes, their passage into specific careers with particular writing-based responsibilities, and where accessible, the physical character of archives in archaeological context. In her treatment of Mathematics in Ancient Iraq (2008), Eleanor Robson even calls this a “social history” with such concerns in view.¹¹ This synthesis of epigraphic and archaeological evidence suggests another trait that should characterize history-writing for the ancient Near East: regular conversation and cooperation between specialists in written, visual, and other material remains. Archaeology as a field has turned decisively in the past half-century toward both large-scale social definitions and the microsocial domains of household and family. Where modern historians have been drawn to the quantitative techniques of sociology, archaeologists have often resorted to anthropology and its theoretical discussions, though their evidence is anchored in specific settings in time and place and calls for treatment as history. Much of this archaeological contribution complements the opportunities in cuneiform writing for chasing down history through the mundane.¹²

As I understand it, the creation of a new Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History has as one goal to draw Near Eastern study more self-consciously into the orbit of history as a discipline. In the United States, the ancient Near East is not located in departments of History except when isolated to a single specialist. Regardless of the processes that led to this situation and any question of intellectual coherence, the result is an institutional distance between specialists in antiquity and the conversations of professional historians. This may be less true in Europe. Certain cuneiformists have targeted history as their particular domain, and some of these have written “histories” of the Near East, including Amélie Kuhrt (1995) and Marc Van De Mieroop (2007), though the genre does not seem to call for engagement with the debate over social and cultural history that has preoccupied the larger discipline. Mario Liverani (1988) nicely sidestepped the standard type by defining his Annales style contribution as Antico Oriente: Storia, società, economia.¹³ The Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis series of Göttingen includes a notable division of labor with its treatment of the rich Old Babylonian period (Charpin, Edzard, and Stol 2004): Dominique Charpin handled “political history” by name; Dietz Otto Edzard addressed “literature and religion” without the “history” rubric; and Marten Stol treated “economy and society” likewise. These could be allotted to the three domains of the session introducing JANEH at the Ghent meeting of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, as political, intellectual, and social, with the social separated as a subset of the historical whole. Stol’s assignment invited him to combine the two ingredients of the original Annales history, though its part in a segmented history did not encourage him to pursue a mentalité that infused it or an histoire totale.¹⁴ Beyond the efforts of individual scholars and publication projects, one ongoing venue for study that included social history in the ancient Near East has been the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, with a title reminiscent of the original name of the French Annales, adding the “East” as a geographical object that might be neglected in historical studies preoccupied with Europe and America.¹⁵ In their introduction, however, the editors show no special concern for the mentalities or totalities that first drove Febvre and Bloch.¹⁶

William Sewell (2005) revisits the social history movement in order to reconsider its contributions, its weaknesses, and its potential, in a book entitled Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. His objective is to find a fresh theoretical basis for the participation of historians in dialogue with social scientists, an interest that recalls once more the Annales, which in 1994 was assigned the subtitle, Histoire, Sciences Sociales. For Sewell, the quantitative methods and theoretical rigor of sociology remain underexploited for historical study, and the pursuit of these methods is one enduring contribution of the social history movement.¹⁷ Another is its focus on the experience of ordinary people, especially in light of rising economic inequalities in the modern world.¹⁸ This “social history” remains defined as it was in its glory, as a critique of whole systems that sharpen class distinctions and that disenfranchise labor – even if material conditions do not “determine” specific social outcomes. Nothing draws Sewell back to this social history, and he makes no attempt to resuscitate it, in spite of the respect he grants.

The separation of social history as a subdivision offers little beyond a framework for collegial affinities without an effort to account for its relation to history writ large. Though the Annales has at last abandoned the “social” as a modifier of its whole history, it remains compelling to think that society is essential to any complete rendition of the past. Marxist critique is not necessary to such an ambition, nor is it excluded. If we do not treat political, intellectual, and social history as separate domains but rather as historical dimensions, the social may then apply to the web of connected human relations: familial, household, tribal, urban, or whatever we may define as political. From this “social” point of view, isolation of the “political” is arbitrary or at least conditioned by particular conceptual need to define it as something separate.¹⁹ In practical terms, the social remains concerned with the relational, especially as an evolving system or organism. Sewell himself spends the last chapter of his volume probing the very word “social,” concluding (2005: 330) that “What I take as basic are streams or sequences of mediated human actions and the humanly created and therefore changeable forms that mediate them.”²⁰ Every level is thus in view. “Cultural history” strikes me as largely “social” in its interest, once the limits of the “60s” project are set aside, though we may certainly accept more than a three-dimensional historical universe.

Emar society

For the past several years, I have been involved with a social historical project in collaboration with Sophie Démare-Lafont. Oblivious to the swirling debate over historical method, we have been working toward a whole portrait of society as apparent in the documentation from Late Bronze Age Emar and related texts.²¹ Nevertheless, we have perceived from the start that this material provides a view of ancient life that cuts across expectations and contributes to discussion of historical questions beyond the Late Bronze Age or Syria for their own sakes. Although we take into account the full range of evidence, the project develops first of all from the strangely diverse collection of legal texts, none of which were collected in the archive of any authority responsible for their composition. One portion of the documents was drawn up by palace scribes with royal witness, yet these are scattered through a variety of find spots with uncertain connection to the king or the city.²² The larger group references varied authorities or none at all beyond some group of witnesses at hand, and these display a malleable framework for household life in and around Emar (Démare-Lafont 2010, especially 45–46).

The social historical interest of the project begins in this evidence itself, which places us at a distance from any center of power and which offers no public or idealized account of society. Emar’s collected writing can frustrate a reader looking for a story-line: we have no self-conscious account of present or past events involving this population, whether representing kings or anyone else. Moreover, the town’s religious life is richly documented from an administrative and practical standpoint, but the archives lack any account of religious speech, whether in prayers and incantations or in tales of gods.²³ Instead we have the mundane stuff of day-to-day existence, and while it may not scintillate, its unselfconscious attention to detail provides better information about the actual workings of Emar society than we might find in an ideologically laden royal inscription. Though the participants in legal documents are not generally the poor, they are the people of Emar working out their private affairs under the various political authorities either traditional or forced on them. Without need of a Marxist laboring class or “oriental despotism” and “Asiatic mode of production” as its antecedents, we nevertheless find in the Emar evidence a “history from below” – below the authorities who might bend public affairs to their will and below the institutions and ideologies that would reflect their interests and inculcate their ideas.²⁴

Indeed, the fascination of the resulting social portrait lies in the difficulty with this evidence in figuring out what authority and power exactly stand above these citizens of Emar. Political and social structures in the ancient Near East are often approached hierarchically, with the expectation of stable lines of accountability from the top down, and the top usually defined by kingship.²⁵ Diverse forms of authority may exist, including collective ones, but each must stand in clear subordination to a level superior to it, with such hierarchy serving a sense of order that is ultimately monarchic. The world on display in the Late Bronze archives from Emar has its quota of kings, including a local representative with longstanding ties to traditional authority in the name of the town, eventually accompanied by outside imperial royalty at two distances, close by at Carchemish and more remotely at the Hittite capital of Hattusha.²⁶ In none of these cases, however, does royal authority result in obviously hierarchical structures. Each ruler is answerable to a superior, and there is no reason to doubt that kings get what they demand, or at least are not refused directly. Yet our view of society from below shows little intrusion from these higher powers into the structures of town life. The local monarch appears to begin as leader in a conventional framework of collective governance by representative “elders,” and legal documentation under this system follows a consistent format that places the king in a network of town-based authority.²⁷ The arrival of empire, far from adding rigidity to the local order, seems to open the floodgates of small-scale social empowerment, expressed in the lack of any arguable templates for legal decision-making (see Démare-Lafont 2010). Authority certainly exists, but it is multiform, and the populace appears to resort to different authorities episodically.

Beyond the legal texts, which do not reflect composition for any single institution, Emar has simply not produced a body of writing dominated by institutions with fixed personnel and physical centers. The one large archive comes from the workplace of a man who calls himself “the diviner of the gods of Emar,” and this collection does include a mass of tablets related to religious administration, including ritual with town-wide interest.²⁸ Even this responsibility, however, brings the diviner in contact with various temples and shrines without evidence for imposition of a rigid administrative structure on the sanctuaries, rites, and cultic exchanges with which he is involved. The so-called cult administrative texts seem more like ad hoc notes than records with consistent format for regular accounting.²⁹ The ritual texts address many types for all sorts of occasions, lacking any dominant templates or forms. One could wonder whether he lacked the staff to maintain such systematic administration. Several letters indicate the diviner’s accountability to external and evidently Hittite interests, even as the texts for local religious practice show no involvement of such outsiders in what the documents regard as the ritual concerns of Emar as a community (Fleming 1992, 2000). As in the legal texts without template, authority appears to exist in more than one form without production of rigid and systemic hierarchy.

In the end, there is nothing uniquely Marxist about the idea of oriental despotism.³⁰ This can become a fallback interpretation for Near Eastern society generally, setting aside the Asiatic mode of production. While numerous lines of evidence challenge such oversimplification of ancient society and politics, the material from Emar offers a particularly productive point of entry. It is not so much that Emar was less centralized than other polities. Rather, the tapestry of its legal and ritual documentation drives us toward more complex and less rigid conceptions of how Emar functioned. History as read at Emar comes into sharper focus when the social interest is allowed full impact. Likewise, this social historical interest should draw the Near East into larger questions that occupy historians of more recent periods. In his resort to despotism, Marx knew that he had to account for what lay beneath the surface of historical change, though he had too little sense of the distant past. The Near East offers more than monarchic power and simple social hierarchies. One contribution could be a kind of cultural anthropology in a geographical domain central to key historical developments through Europe, Asia, and Africa. Once upon a time, in the world of Margaret Mead (1928), anthropologists sought out settings untouched by outside trends, where we might discover different ways to be human, or to organize human society.³¹ By its combination of temporal priority and historical connection, the Near East in all its variety is a reference point and a test for interpretations of the social and political streams that have come to shape our own world. In this endeavor, the social historical interest will surely remain central.