Constituent, 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