Thursday, September 10, 2009

Response Paper #1: What is the Ancient Near East?


While reading Marc Van De Mieroop’s A History of the Ancient Near East, I was surprised at how little I really understood about the Near East. Even the definition, something I had always assumed meant the Middle East or simply Mesopotamia, was not what I had expected going into this reading. Mieroop designates the Near East as “the region from the Aegean coast of Turkey to central Iran, and from Northern Anatolia to the Red Sea” and defining Mesopotamia as only a part of the Near East, abet the most important and documented of the areas (1).

I had also never considered that the evidence of past civilizations found in Mesopotamia and the surrounding areas was so important because written word had only recently been discovered (around 3000 BC), providing us with great amounts of evidence about how the people there lived and died. Writing in this area has survived in great numbers. From stone monuments documenting the achievements of kings to clay tablets, the preferred method of documentation in this area, have remained for us to find after all these years. Texts range from “the mundane receipt of a single sheep to literary works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh,” and due to the dry soil of the region, preservation was relatively easy (4). I had never thought about how this might contrast with other cultures that used papyrus and parchment, relatively fragile materials, and how this affects our understanding of the cultures.

Another point made by Mieroop is that we have “only scratched the surface” of the archeological sites in the Near East during the 150 or so years that excavation has been taking place. When I tend to think of areas in the Ancient world that are famous for their ruins or structures, I usually consider Egyptian, Roman and Greek first. While this may be a naive view, I tend to feel that many of the major discoveries in those areas have already been made, or are at least underway just due to the greater amount of traffic and archeological study in those areas that I have read about in the past. The Near East presents a whole new wealth of knowledge that I had never even thought about in much detail. If there are thousands of uncovered sites left to explore, what’s to say that some of the most important discoveries in mankind’s history aren’t still beneath the dirt?

Something that I had heard about, however, was how war and the gradual closing off of the Middle East to western scientists, let alone all westerners who weren’t there for military duty, had effected archeology in this area. Not just considering the sites left to be discovered, but the destruction and looting of artifacts from museums in Iraq and other areas that have gone through wars and the complete destruction of sites, whether deliberate or by accident. This is cultural information that will never be regained, something that is so terrible and unnecessary. This has forced archaeologists to move to different areas of the Near East, mainly to the outlying areas of northern Syria and southern Turkey. Just from my perspective, while it is great that we still have access to some areas, losing the “heartland of Mesopotamia” because of war and internal conflicts is such a loss. That cultural heritage is something everyone should be able to access to, or at least the experts of that field should be able to go and learn what they can from something that could be lost forever.

When I first signed up for this course, I really wasn’t sure what the Near East was going to entail. After reading this chapter, I have a more concrete idea and more insight in to the benefits and problems with researching and exploring this area. I also have a better understanding of what could be found and what its purpose might have been, for example the structures of homes and how their size, placement, and even shape show us what was going on at that time with family structure and cultural shifts. The simple shift to a more rectangular structure from the previous round hints at a new social hierarchy and the evolution of specialized rooms. Taking that into context and the fact that the Near East is the presumed start of many of societies greatest discoveries such as agriculture and irrigation makes this an area of great importance in studying the evolution of mankind. Mieroop states his most important opinion in the introduction as well, that the “ancient Near East provides us the first cultures in human history which true and detailed historical research can take place, ” once again outlining its importance to world history and proving this is a place worth knowing (7).

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