D. Snell – A Companion To The Ancient Near East

Автор: D. Snell
Название книги: A Companion To The Ancient Near East
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Древний мир и Античность
Страницы: 525
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

A Companion to the Ancient Near East offers students and general readers a comprehensive overview of Near Eastern civilization from the Bronze Age to the conquests of Alexander the Great.

Covers the civilizations of the Sumerians, Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Israelites and Persians
Places particular emphasis on social and cultural history
Covers the legacy of the Ancient Near East in the medieval and modern worlds
Provides a useful bibliographical guide to this field of study

These essays stand alone and need no introduction, but it seems wise to clarify issues
at the beginning in the form of responses to questions.
What is the Ancient Near East?
The termrefers to the ancient areanowcalled the Middle East in the languages of the area
and of Europe; we mean the modern countries of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon,
Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. ThetermNear East refers to proximity to Europe and is therefore
Eurocentric;WesternAsia would be preferable, andsomeof our essays use that term,but
that phrase is not widely understood, and so we have kept to the old terminology.
Is Egypt included?
With the growth of studies ofMesopotamia, ancient Iraq and Syria, we are so specialized
that the discipline does not necessarily include Egypt, and there are many fine introductory
booksonEgypt.Nonethelesswebelieve thatmanyif notmost introductory courses
to the Ancient Near East do include Egypt, and that the general public definitely feels
Egypt is part of the Ancient Near East. Hence we have included treatment of ancient
Egypt where possible. In fact we have slighted it in contrast to the lands further to the
east, and most of the experts writing here were trained in Mesopotamian studies, not
Egyptian. A longer project would have resulted in a more balanced view, but I felt it was
important to acknowledge the very close links between Egypt and the rest of the Ancient
Near East, even if full justice could not be done to both sides.
Is the work a companion to a particular textbook?
Not really. It was commissioned by Blackwell, which was in the process of publishing
Van De Mieroop’s A History of the Ancient Near East (2004), but that book was
published after several essays had been completed, and the authors here have not
necessarily reacted to it in their pieces. While we certainly conceived these essays as an
amplification of a political history of the Ancient Near East, we hope that it will be
found to be useful by undergraduates and beginning graduate students regardless of
what else they may be reading.
What chronology will be used here?
Chronology, the study of the time periods, especially the absolute dates, from the
Ancient Near East, is undergoing rethinking now, and we have decided not to impose
uniformity in how authors deployed it. Most have resorted to the Middle Chronology,
now perhaps in the course of being discredited. But this has been the standard
chronology for many years, and if it is wrong by a hundred and more years, it at least
affords comparison with other works. When we now pick up historical works on the
Ancient Near East from the beginning of the twentieth century, we find ourselves
somewhat disoriented by the suggested chronology, and yet one can make sense of
what the authors then believed. We beg the indulgence of future readers and can
assert that given what we now know, the chronology presented here is a responsible
one that will allow the reader to understand at least the relative chronology of events.
The chronology used is summarized in J. A. Brinkman’s appendix to Oppenheim
1977 for Mesopotamia and Baines and Malek 2000: 36–37 for Egypt.
All the authors have striven, I believe, to present their field in a way that will be
accessible to persons without previous exposure to it and in a way that will be useful
to scholars fifty years hence. That is a high ambition, and only time will judge whether
our efforts really bore the fruit for which we hoped. But I recall with pleasure the
response of one of the essayists on seeing the range of topics proposed here; the
scholar wrote, ‘‘To answer broad and stimulating questions like these is the reason
most of us got into the field to begin with.’’ We hope these essays will be as
stimulating as the questions that provoked them, and that students and scholars
will for a time at least begin here when they seek the ancient and modern meaning
of the Ancient Near East