The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Seth Richardson —
4 E.g., Schwartz and Falconer 1994, especially essays by G. Stein (Ch. 2) and C. Kramer
(Ch. 14).
5 Smith 2003; Algaze 2001.
6 Notably, Fleming 2004, Steinkeller 2007, pp. 37–48; the defensibility of even the largest
geographical term in our field was already brilliantly interrogated by J.J. Finkelstein in his
article of 1962. Other Assyriological literature has sometimes assumed too much a total state
power over hinterlands, e.g., Bailkey 1967 and Leemans 1982, pp. 245–8.
7 A welcome exception is G. van Driel’s “On Villages” (2001); E. Stone’s fourteen-page study
(though promisingly entitled “Mesopotamian Cities and Countryside”), in Snell 2005, devotes
only the last page to the countryside as a subject of social and political interest.
8 Rather, (māt) Karduniash, restricted in emic use to the fifteenth to tenth centuries BC (RGTC
5; cf. RGTC 8). A few references to a “land of Babylon” (kur Babilunê / ká.dingir.ra ki ), either
derive from outside Mesopotamia, or have a strictly local meaning, i.e., the land around the
city of Babylon, not “Babylonia” (PBS 1/2 4332: t.uppi tēlīti sˇa igi.eden ù kur ká.dingir.ra ki ).
9 Of 1,225 whole place-name entries in RGTC 3, 604 (49.3 percent) are known only from a
single text or year-name formula. Methodological problems in accounting for these “lonely
onlys” abound (e.g., GNs may not be in rural zones, they may not be in Babylonia, there
has been much new evidence since the publication, etc.), but the estimate nevertheless suggests
a certain distribution of evidence. Of even later times, Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1990: “The
Persian empire may well have included many villages or niches inhabited by Asterixes and
Obelixes, besides those whose existence is known.”
10 Cf. Hallo 1971.
11 Cole 1996, Ch. 2.
12 On agricultural production, e.g., Hrusˇka (this volume), Renger 2004, Eyre 1995, esp. his
bibliography. On demography and settlement, see Stone 2005.
13 Indeed, large-scale cultivation required such management, but not all production was large
scale: Butzer 1995.
14 Wright 1981.
15 Butzer 1995, p. 323; on historical patterns of riverine regime change, see also Gasche and
M. Tanret 1998.
16 Only for the conquest of Uruk did Sargon specify the submission of multiple (i.e., fifty)
governors (RIME 21.1; Irdanene of Uruk (Year “ba”) claimed to have given freedom for the
“surrounding villages” of the region; Rīm-Sîn’s defeat of Irdanene’s state specifically included
uru.didli.ma.da.nun ki .ga, the “various cities of the land of Uruk” (RIME 42.14.9).
17 These definitions generally prefer Steinkeller 2007 (‘City and Countryside’), who distinguishes
six grades of sites as small as 2 ha. (in the Ur III province of Umma alone, he already estimates
around 110 of these smallest communities), to Adams 1981 and Adams and Nissen 1972,
who accounted for “villages” as occupying up to 10 ha. and 6 ha., respectively. Differential
rank-sizes are observable even within the modest frame of 2 ha: most sites cluster around
modal sizes of 0.1, 0.5 and 1.0 hectares; cf. Stone 2005, pp. 153–4.
18 The village-heavy territories around Kisˇ, Dilbat, Babylon, Sippar, etc., are not represented.
19 In terms of area: the Uruk survey covered about 2,800 square kilometers; the Nippur-Adab
survey was approximately four times this size. In terms of time: the shortest period here is
the Akkadian state (ca. 140 years), which cannot be directly compared to the ±500-year
Early–Middle Uruk or Middle Babylonian periods.
20 Alone among the sites Adams 1981 surveyed at 2.0 ha. or below in this respect is Site 99,
with a very small Akkadian occupation, grown larger in Ur III-OB times (slightly larger
sites between 2.0 and 4.0 ha. seem to have had some greater chance of becoming larger). Isin
is another rare example, a major urban center which appears to have had modest beginnings
(i.e., below 10 ha. in Early Dynastic occupation).
21 The fourth to third millennia boasted many small sites whose number indeed gradually
declined all the way into the Akkadian period. In the north, this decline harmonized with
shrinking urban occupations, but in the south the number and size of cities crested as village
occupation fell. The better-surveyed south presents a coherent picture of urbanization, but
the northern area does not seem to have undergone the same transformation.
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