2014/03/14 by Eva von Dassow · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts #Islamic Studies and History #Global Peace and Security Dynamics #Hegemony #Geography #Political science #Politics #Law
paper · pdf · doi:10.1515/9783110266412.11
openalex publication_date 2014/03/14 · openalex created_date 2016/08/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
University of Minnesota.I am grateful to the other workshop participants for their contributions to the discussion, as well as for remarks on sources pertinent to my own theme which I had overlooked. 1 For such an outline, from the perspective of Alalakh, see von Dassow 2008, 12-64, esp.19-23.From a broader perspective, Giorgieri (2005) offers a selective overview treating the structure of Mittani's political hegemony and the cultural influence exercised by Mittani upon the regions under its sway.West Semitic designation Naharina (var.Nahrima), "river-land" (or "rivers twain"), which was preferred in Egypt. 2 In the present paper I discuss the shape, structure, and dynamics of Mittani's empire in the Levant, and of the polities under its rule.This involves addressing questions such as how Mittani acquired hegemony over Levantine kingdoms, how it governed them, and how those realms responded to Mittanian rule.(It should also involve Mittani's interaction with Levantine kingdoms it did not rule, which however is not encompassed in the present paper.)The largest number of textual sources that bear directly on such questions derives from 15th-century Alalakh.These may be supplemented by sources from Arraphe on the opposite side of the empire, while various other sites or text corpora yield somewhat less, or less useful, material.Within Mittani's domain, this material includes one or more tablets apiece from Terqa, Tall Bazi, Tall Brak (ancient Nagar), Umm el-Marra, and Emar; beyond the empire's periphery, the archives of Hattus ˇa, Egyptian texts, and the Amarna correspondence contribute perspectives, data, and soundbites. 3 This body of evidence, which has grown but incrementally over the course of the last century, discloses so little information about the Mittani Empire that the resulting vacuum attracts specious modes of explanation.Two interconnected approaches to the study of Mittani are to be excluded at the outset: 1) explaining the kingdom's origins and successful growth by reference to the arrival of a new population, specifically, an Aryan one; and 2) explaining these phenomena by reference to the development of a new military technology, namely horse-drawn chariotry.Having addressed both issues in extenso elsewhere, 4 I shall merely summarize them here.1.The kingdom called Mittani was not the creation of an Aryan population newly arrived in southwestern Asia.A tiny quantity of Indo-Aryan vocabulary and proper nouns became incorporated into the Hurrian language of Mittani, while also spreading among realms with which Mittani interacted, over the course of the empire's floruit. 5 Apparently no one in Mittani spoke the Indo-Aryan source language, for the borrowed lexical items were unproductive in the borrowing language, there is no Indo-Aryan grammatical interference therein, and no other extant evidence indicates that the donor language had ever been the 2 Recently Valério (2011) has argued for reading Hani-GAL-bat as Hani-rabbat, which he would interpret as "Great Hani" and relate to the designation Hana, denoting mobile pastoralists and the land they occupied.Addressing his arguments in full will have to await another occasion; for the nonce, suffice it to note that spellings with GAL9 occur in three different archives (ibid.: 178), a distribution that cannot be explained as the outcome of scribal misapprehension or error.3 To this list should be added the five-line letter found at Tell Hamma ¯m et-Turkma ¯n and dated c. 1500, assuming that it was indeed sent by a king of Mittani (van Soldt 1995: 277-278).The letter, a concise directive from "the king" to one S ˇatuwatri that one Karukka(ma) should come quickly, is so laconic that it contributes virtually no historical information beyond its existence and findspot.4 von Dassow 2008, 77-90.5 The much tinier quantity of Indo-Aryan lexical material that entered Kassite, perhaps independently, is left aside in the present context.