Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

What was the relationship between pastoral nomadic tribes and sedentary peoples in the ancient Near East? After decades of research, scholars are more aware than ever of the challenges posed by this deceptively simple question. Although the attitude of early Mesopotamian states was overwhelmingly negative toward tribal groups, their textual record often hints that mobile populations played an important role in the rise and fall of early states. In Late Antiquity and the Islamic period, despite the fact that nomads made up a relatively small portion of Near Eastern society, their impact on the social and political trajectory of Near Eastern history was substantial (Donner 1989). The conflicting evidence on Near Eastern nomadism makes it exceptionally difficult to describe the complex socio-political relationship between nomadic and sedentary peoples in the ancient Near East.

Textual biases that are a product of the urban setting in which the ancient sources were composed are only one source of difficulty for the modern researcher. Problematic ethnographic parallels and the generally poor archaeological preservation of the remains of mobile peoples present additional challenges to the study of ancient nomadism. In many cases, we are left to reconstruct tribe-state interactions based only on the ephemera of excavated nomadic encampments, tantalizing implications gleaned from the context of primary documents, and tenuous analogies with modern tribes. Nevertheless, the spate of recent research in the field suggests that new techniques and nuanced analytical frameworks are helping researchers make strides towards a more comprehensive understanding of tribe-state interactions in the ancient Near East. This conference brings together a diverse group of archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists to explore new ways of approaching the study of nomadic populations and tribe-state interactions in antiquity.

Those who study ancient mobile peoples must contend with historic biases against sheep- and goat-herding nomads. Texts that touch on nomads were composed by urban elite, whose wealth and power were rooted in their control over agricultural resources and labor. The fundamentally negative attitude toward nomads was maintained over centuries and worked its way into scholarship well into the 20th century. By the 1950s researchers continued to assume that the primary role of nomads throughout history was as agents of destabilization (Kupper 1957; Dossin 1959). Kupper (1957:ix), for example, was convinced that “permanent conflict” existed between sedentary and nomadic societies, a clash which resulted in waves of nomadic invasions from the Syrian desert into the otherwise bucolic rural and urban centers of Mesopotamia and the Levant.

TASKS

1. Name the paragraph(s) describing problematic issues in the research of nomadic tribes history.

2. Name the paragraph(s) describing the material available for the researcher in nomadic history.

3. Thoroughly read paragraph 1 and define its main point.

4. Thoroughly read paragraphs 2, 3 and condense their content.

5. Summarize paragraph 1 in no more than two or three sentences. Begin with:

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