Editorial Introduction to JANEH

We are very pleased, along with the Editorial Board, to welcome you to the first issue of the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History. We extend our deep appreciation to Michiel Klein-Swormink and Walter De Gruyter Press for providing both inspiration and support for this project.

We envision this journal as a venue both to foster and to develop critical thinking about the history of the ancient Near East, and as a platform to nurture connections with allied fields and disciplines. This is reflected in our statement of purpose:

The Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History seeks to encourage and stimulate the study of the history of the ancient Near East, which is broadly defined to include areas from Iran to the western Anatolian coast and the Black Sea to Southern Arabia from its prehistoric foundations to the Late Antique period. It is also interested in interactions with other regions and cultures, such as ancient Egypt, the Mediterranean World, the Indian Ocean and Central Asia. Articles may focus on any aspects of history (political, social, economic, cultural, intellectual, etc.) and of modern historiography. The journal seeks to integrate the study of the ancient Near East firmly in the historical discipline in general and encourages its authors to take into account current methodological debates and approaches.

Some readers may already be wondering, “Why another journal? And why now?” The answers to these questions are of course connected. There are a number of fine journals that treat the Near East from Prehistory to Late Antiquity but these are often, and appropriately, specialized venues in which the primary goal is the presentation of texts, transliterations, and commentary the foremost concerns of which are philological and not historical. A lot of good history is published in these journals, but it is not often being widely read by historians. A journal focused on the history of the Near East in antiquity can remedy this.

And it is of vital importance that we offer a remedy now. As Marc Van De Mieroop noted in a recent area review in the Journal of Ancient History, the emphasis in history has been shifting from older national and/or Eurocentric models toward a greater focus on regional and world histories. This has been accompanied by a growth in popularizing books on world history. In many cases, the authors and historians at work on these endeavors are only dimly aware of recent work and trends in Assyriology and the ancient Near East. Some of this is the result of old barriers erected within the field of history that continue to marginalize discussions of the ancient Near East as pre- or proto-historical. Some of this, however, is the result of our own inaction. With some notable exceptions, we have not communicated effectively across these disciplinary boundaries. Our overriding concern for the preservation and presentation of our data has often left us outside of, or inattentive to, methodological discussions in history. Of course, this is not a problem limited to the study of the ancient Near East, but we must make a greater effort to participate in the broader conversations taking place among historians. This is especially the case given our chronological position within such discussions.

The ancient Near East has essentially been fetishized as a place of firsts, but the conversation rarely goes beyond such acknowledgments. We participate in our marginalization if we are content to be noticed but not engaged. How many of us have been troubled to see a publisher touting a new work on “ancient history” only to find within the covers that ancient history does not include the Near East other than as prologue or footnote? And how often have we realized on reading these books the extent to which the density of the data and the extant material culture from the ancient Near East could contribute to the authors’ conclusions?

With this journal we hope not only to demonstrate the ways in which we as scholars of the ancient Near East have begun to rewrite history but also to make that apparent to our peers. This is an opportunity to broaden conversations that many of us are already having with departmental or university colleagues. We anticipate that JANEH will not only aid scholars of antiquity in their continuing work but also help us prepare for the increasing rigors of teaching ancient history at the collegiate level where we are often expected to be masters of world history curricula.

To inaugurate the journal we asked four individuals to write brief surveys on the state of the field in four significant sub-disciplines of the wide domain of history: intellectual, political, social, and the history of science. We could easily have included other topics such as economic, biographical, gender, legal, environmental, border history, and so on, as for all of them the ancient Near East provides a wealth of material, and we hope in the future to publish such reviews as well. We anticipate a discussion of religious history in late antiquity in our next issue. We gave the authors few guidelines, so their approaches here are all different. When one looks at the theoretical literature that treats concepts such as “social history” in more recent periods, a high degree of anxiety is visible. Such unease is not unexpected in scholarly disciplines that investigate human beings and their behavior. Anthropologists, historians, and others periodically need to suffer through moments of doubt and reflection, as their search for the truth is quixotic. Entire journals are devoted to questions of how to deal with cultural prejudice, incomprehension, the opacity of the sources, the historian’s narrative voice, and so on. These issues should concern the historian of the ancient Near East as well and the papers here touch upon them. They show how attitudes toward a field of study are embedded in the changing preoccupations of the contemporary academic world, and that history of science, for example, today is very different from what it was a century ago. They indicate that disciplinary boundaries are artificial and that intellectual history is also social history of the intellectual. Textual and archaeological sources – the latter admittedly mostly ignored in this issue, a shortcoming we hope to repair in the future – can be read at different levels, not only at face value but also between the lines, so to speak. We can look at what they do not discuss. Political histories are not just those of the powers that produced the sources, but need to look at the non-state actors and at the failures of the state.

The ancient Near East has much to offer on all these questions to the historian, as its surviving evidence is abundant and of a highly varied nature. It needs to be studied with multiple methodologies to reveal its true richness and we can do so in conversation with all other fields of history and other humanistic sciences. This journal hopes to promote that dialogue. Future issues will include not only articles but also area reviews from within the ancient Near East as well as from neighboring regions so that scholars of the Near East and related fields can participate in the conversations mentioned above. Readers can also look forward to occasional articles on pedagogy. JANEH will not routinely offer book reviews, but we will occasionally solicit bibliographic reviews.

JANEH is committed to best practices for the consideration, review, and publication of contributions. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the JANEH website and can be written in in English, French, or German. The style guide for the journal is also available on the website. The international Editorial Board oversees a double-blind peer review process. Under normal circumstances, authors can expect to wait no more than 10 weeks from initial submission to final decision. Moreover, for all subsequent issues of JANEH, articles that have received final approval will be published immediately online and will enter the queue for the next available print issue.

We look forward to your readership and we hope you will consider supporting JANEH by submitting your work for our consideration.

Marc Van De Mieroop and Steven Garfinkle,

Editors of JANEH