Myth And Politics In Ancient Near Eastern Historiography (Studies in Egyptology & the Ancient Near East)

231 Pages·2004·2.42 MB·English

by  Mario Liverani

Studies in Egyptology and
the Ancient Near East
This interdisciplinary series publishes works on the ancient Near East
in antiquity, including the Graeco-Roman period, and is open to
specialized studies as well as to works of synthesis or comparison.
Series Editor
John Baines, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford
Editorial Board
Jeremy Black (University of Oxford)
Alan Bowman (University of Oxford)
Erik Hornung (University of Basel)
Anthony Leahy (University of Birmingham)
Peter Machinist (Harvard University)
Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan)
David O'Connor (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)
D.T. Potts (University of Sydney)
Dorothy Thompson (University of Cambridge)
Pascal Vernus (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris)
Norman Yoffee (University of Michigan)
Also Forthcoming in this Series
Local Power in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia
Andrea Seri
Statue of Idri-Mi
Courtesy of the British Museum
Myth and Politics in
Ancient Near Eastern
Historiography
MARIO LIVERANI
Edited and Introduced by
Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop
LONDON
Published by

Equinox Publishing Ltd
Unit 6
The Village
101 Amies St.
London
SW11 2JW

www.equinoxpub.com

First published in the UK 2004

© Mario Liverani 2004
Introduction and editorial apparatus © Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop
2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1-9047-6804-0 (hardback)

Typeset by CA Typesetting, www.sheffieldtypesetting.com
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Anthony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
eISBN: 1845534719
Contents

Editors’ Introduction vii

Acknowledgements xiii

Abbreviations xiv
PART ONE: MESOPOTAMIA
1 Adapa, guest of the gods 3
PART TWO: HITTITE ANATOLIA
2 Telipinu, or: on solidarity 27
3 Shunashura, or: on reciprocity 53
PART THREE: SYRIA
4 Leaving by chariot for the desert 85
5 Rib-Adda, righteous sufferer 97
6 Aziru, servant of two masters 125
PART FOUR: HEBREW BIBLE
7 The story of Joash 147
8 Messages, women, and hospitality:
Inter-tribal communication in Judges 19–21 160

Bibliography 193

Index 209

Editors’ Introduction*

Myth and Politics in Ancient Near Eastern Historiography brings together, for the first
time, a series of essays by the leading historian of the ancient Near East, Mario
Liverani. These essays have all appeared previously in scholarly journals, mostly
in the Italian language (one in French). Because their original language is not
widely read outside Italy, they have been ignored to a great extent by non-Italian
scholars, despite their often fundamental rereading of ancient texts that are the
basis of many of our historical reconstructions. Their presentation here is thus
aimed at giving them the audience they deserve. The intention of this edition is
also to provide more than a translation into English of earlier essays: the col-
lection has the unifying theme that all the chapters are fundamentally concerned
with the question of historiography. Although they cover a wide range of his-
torical and chronological subjects, they are all rigorous investigations of how the
historian makes meaning of an ancient document. In other words, they address
the historian’s craft as an intellectual enterprise. This focus on the work of the
historian has implications for history as a practice in general, not only for the
ancient Near East.
At the same time, this is also a collection of essays that allows the reader to see
the development of Liverani’s work from the early 1970s until the 1980s. The
papers retain a great validity more than twenty years later because they were
revolutionary in character and their concerns have only recently come to be
shared by other scholars in ancient Near Eastern studies. They continue to stand
as a paradigm of historical criticism of ancient Near Eastern textual sources.

* The essays published here were originally translated from the Italian and French by Mario Liverani
himself, who also removed some philological discussions. They were sent to John Baines for
publication in the Equinox series. Baines asked us to edit them for their English style. We decided
also to provide short introductions that are intended to contextualise the material discussed in the
essays. We do not aim to update the bibliography and discussion, except when easily accessible
recent English translations are available. John Baines went over our work several times, and Mario
Liverani read and commented on the final version. We have attempted to turn Liverani’s elegant
Italian style into acceptable English academic writing, but must acknowledge that this has on
occasion done a disservice to his original. Since the content of these contributions is so important,
we have persevered, even if we may not always have succeeded in rendering the form.
viii Myth and Politics in Ancient Near Eastern Historiography
Liverani’s scholarly and methodological concerns were developed in relation
to literary and anthropological scholarship of the time when he wrote the essays.
In retrospect, from the point of view of twenty to thirty years on, we can see that
the work arose out of an intellectual climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s,
when structuralism and post-structuralism was being developed in Continental
Europe. Liverani’s questions and concerns, his insistence upon the nature of the
processes of reading historical documents, emerged within this climate.
One of Liverani’s methodological innovations is his utilisation of a structural
analysis of myth for Mesopotamian material. In ‘Adapa, guest of the gods’
(chapter one), rather than adhering to a standard reading on the level of the
narrative myth, he takes an anthropological approach, inspired by Claude Lévi-
Strauss, that considers the rituals of hospitality. The dyads of food and drink,
clothing and bathing are aspects of treating guests according to obligatory rules of
behaviour. Anu’s startling offer of immortality is understood in the context of
these rules, and Adapa’s rejection saves the god from having to change the destiny
of mankind. Liverani intersects a structuralist approach of mythical narrative with
anthropological discussions of rituals of hospitality (deriving notably from Julian
Pitt-Rivers), and with the more standard philological criticism of the ancient
historian.
In chapter two, ‘Telipinu, or: on solidarity’, Liverani explicitly takes his
colleagues to task. He points out that the ‘lazy historian’ reads the ancient text at
face value, and considers it to be an accurate narrative that only needs to be
adjusted with additions or minor corrections from other sources. Liverani insists
on the point that sources are always historical reconstructions in themselves and
that they do not have a ‘pure historical aim’. Instead, their aim is political, moral,
theological, and so on. We have to analyse their ideology in order to come closer
to the original intent of the text and the historical reality. In the case of the edict
of Telipinu, a structural analysis reveals a binary pattern of good and bad reigns
that succeed one another, with Telipinu’s presenting a culmination of the
positive development. To accept this as an accurate reflection of what happened
in Old Kingdom Hittite history is naive, and the text of the Edict has to be seen
as providing information about Telipinu rather than about the reigns of his
predecessors.
The above points may seem obvious to the theoretically aware reader today.
However, at the time of the essay’s publication in 1977, historians generally did
not think about these methodological issues. It also needs to be stressed that
Liverani, as a historian of the ancient Near East, was not simply following meth-
odological trends established in other areas of the discipline of history. In fact, he
addressed these historiographic issues at the same time as historians such as
Hayden White were beginning to write more directly about historical criticism.
Hayden White’s work in the 1970s and 80s is best known for employing the
Editors’ Introduction ix
critiques of literary narrative, rhetoric, and so on, in the study of historical texts
that had been traditionally considered transparent documents (see, for example,
the papers collected in Hayden White, The Content of the Form, Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Parallel to that body of work, Liverani
already in the early 1970s insisted on considering the historical document as a
written source, with qualities that require the same kind of reading as other
written texts. Thus, Liverani’s work should not be seen as influenced by these
changes, but rather as participating in them at the forefront, in relation to sources
from antiquity. Part of the reason why his theoretical commentaries on history
have been less known than those of his contemporaries is no doubt that work in
ancient Near Eastern studies is not widely read by other historians, who consider
the field to be peripheral, if a historical discipline at all. An important aim of this
edition of Liverani’s writings is to present the development of his thinking about
historical criticism to a wider audience by contextualising and historicising it
within the broader framework of academic theories that emerged in both the
humanities and social sciences in Continental Europe while he was composing
them.
Take, for example, the third chapter, ‘Shunashura, or: on reciprocity’ (first
published in 1973). Here Liverani discusses a document that is neither a historical
narrative of events nor an annal, but a single document – a treaty. He analyses it
as a literary text, focusing on the use of symmetry in its formation, and correlat-
ing that duality or mirroring to the importance of exchange and binary parity in
certain events. The symmetry in the text is only apparent, however, and disguises
a lack of equality in the political reality: the equality is not between the king of
Hatti and Shunashura, king of Kizzuwatna, but between the former and the king
of Mitanni, the intended but only indirectly implied audience of the treaty.
Without a literary and structural semiotic analysis, such an understanding could
not have been achieved.
From his earliest work Liverani has been concerned with the idea that history
is a realist genre. In terms of narrative, or rather of the relationship between
historical narrative and realism, we can look at the essay on Idrimi, ‘Leaving by
chariot for the desert’ (chapter four). Liverani argues that the story told about
Idrimi is true, but that the narrative follows the format of a fairy tale and can be
analysed with the techniques developed by Vladimir Propp. The elements of the
young hero who has obstacles to overcome, and sets out by himself into the
desert, can be also found in other ancient Near Eastern texts, where they need
equally to be seen as literary devices rather than factual data. The details in these
stories are emphasised or concealed according to the function of a specific remark
in the framework of the entire narrative. This emphasis on details is what Roland
Barthes called ‘the Reality Effect’ (e.g., in The Rustle of Language, R. Howard,
translator, New York: Hill and Wang, 1968, pp. 141–54): the historical narrative