The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— D. T. Potts —
found at Uruk and Babylon, the majority of which date to the Neo-Babylonian period
(Ziegler 1942: 230–231).
CONCLUSION
This chapter should not be considered a complete guide to all of the exotic goods
that entered Mesopotamia from foreign parts. Many more, about which we know
even less, could be added to the list of those discussed above. The presence of such
materials in Mesopotamia – all of which were imported – demonstrates that while
the essentials of existence were all readily available in the Tigris–Euphrates basin, a
wide range of exotics, needed to articulate the cultural messages of Mesopotamian
social dialogue, were imported from far and wide. Furthermore, it is important to
remember that Babylonia was far from monocultural, and this undoubtedly had a
bearing on the sources and types of exotics imported. In the Old Babylonian period,
for example, Kassites, Elamites, Suteans, Suheans, Gutians and Subarians – peoples
from the north-east, the north, and the west – are all attested at Sippar (De Graef
1999). By the first millennium, the level of diversity in Babylonian cities had increased
markedly. Scythians (Dandamaev 1979), Persians, Medes, Choresmians, Indians and
other Iranian peoples (Zadok 1977), as well as Syrians, Urartians, Kassites, Egyptians
(Zadok 1979), Jewish colonists (Dandamaev 1982: 41) and others, made Babylonia
a thoroughly multi-cultural society. Translators, already attested in the third
millennium BC (Gelb 1968), must have been increasingly common. The diversity of
exotic materials attested at sites such as Uruk and Babylon in the first millennium
suggests that Babylonia was like a great harbour in a vast sea of resources, extending
from Africa to Inner Asia, and from the borders of Europe to South Asia. It was a
harbour in which a multitude of peoples, goods and ideas mixed on a daily basis;
where gold from Africa, lapis from Afghanistan, amber from the Baltic, and carnelian
from India, changed hands on a regular basis. Babylonia was, by this time, truly a
land open to more cross-cultural possibilities than it had ever known in its long and
complicated history.
NOTES
1 The identification of Bahrain with Dilmun dates to the nineteenth century and is based on a
number of lines of evidence. Greek sources dating to the time of Alexander the Great’s expedition
and slightly later refer to a large island in the Persian Gulf called Tylos, which was adjacent
to a smaller island called Arados. Arados can be identified with the smaller of the two main
islands of Bahrain, Muharraq, where the name ‘Arad’ survives to this day. Tylos is a Graecized
form of Akkadian Tilmun (Sumerian Dilmun). The only qualification to this equation concerns
the earliest periods in which Dilmun is mentioned, for between c.3000–2300 BC there is little
evidence of substantial occupation on Bahrain, whereas the mainland of eastern Saudi Arabia
(as well as the offshore island of Tarut) has abundant evidence of ceramics and stone vessels
which can be paralleled in southern Mesopotamia. This suggests that Dilmun may originally
have denoted the mainland (around Dhahran and al-Qatif) and that its centre may have shifted
to the Bahrain islands towards the end of the third millennium BC. From that point on, as
the substantial settlements at Qalat al-Bahrain and Saar, and the important temple complex
at Barbar attest, Bahrain must have been Dilmun. From the mid-second millennium BC, when
Dilmun fell under the control of the Kassite kings of Mesopotamia, we have Kassite cuneiform
texts from Qalat al-Bahrain and from Nippur in central Iraq which confirm the identification.
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