Van de Mieroop and the urban landscape of the Ancient Near ...



Bochay I. Drum April 6, 2007

City and Festival Prf. Harmansah

Tourist’s eye view: Van de Mieroop and the urban landscape of the Ancient Near Eastern City

Marc van de Mieroop is quite honest in his writing of the landscape of the ancient Mesopotamian city. He writes prudently as an archaeologist, politely explaining in the very beginning that most everything is long buried and hidden. To approach the city the reader travels as a tourist, and Mieroop the tour guide. The city is shockingly empty throughout the tour; even the ghosts of the inhabitants are barely mentioned. He is willing to make generalizations about the physical landscape based on exceptional evidence, but seems uninterested in conjecture about the relationship of the people of the city to the landscape. Although the concept of an urban landscape can encompass much more than the physical artifacts, Mieroop is mostly appropriate, if conservative, in his chapter. He is an academic archaeologist writing a chapter about the landscape. This notion of an urban landscape without people is of course non-existent to human knowledge that is ostensibly outside of the realm of imagination. According to Partridge’s etymological dictionary Origins, as quoted by Emberling (2003), a city is “an aggregation of citizens”. This is seemingly entirely at odds with Mieroops depiction of the city as an empty landscape. Mieroop fills in the necessity of human subjects for the existence of an urban landscape by substituting all the millions who lived in the cities with the characters of himself as archaeologist and writer and the reader as tourist. What references he does make to the lives of people from the cities greatly enliven his account. In order to make a more compelling writing of the urban landscape, more references to the narratives of the lived past would be an improvement. Using this strategy, a recombinant chapter between “The Urban Landscape” and the other chapters in the book dealing with social organization, economic relationships and governmental structure would be useful for making some conjectures about the nature of the urban landscape as lived by its citizens and provide a more engaging account for the reader-as-tourist.

As Mieroop states at the beginning of the chapter, the dearth of complete evidence and high degree of variability over time and space make the chapter problematic from the very beginning. He is successful, however, in discerning many of the common physical elements of ancient Mesopotamian city. Where he is most problematic in this regard is in his discussion of those things assumed to be universal for which he uses exceptional examples. This is the case for his description of the suburbs of Mesopotamian cities which he bases upon the example of Tell Taya—a small walled city with extensive suburbs—whch he describes as “unique…Tell Taya may have been a very unusual settlement” (69-71). His discussion of karum is also troublesome in this regard. The example of Kanish-Kultepe that he employs is also suspect for its location being in Anatolia, not Mesopotamia. He even makes reference to the windy paved streets (66) that would not exist in Mesopotamia. The example could be made more appropriate if the chapter were not divided into a discussion of upper and lower Mesopotamian cities, effectively excluding discussion of Hittite and Neo-Hittite cities like the Kultepe to which the karum Kanish was satellite. The diversion of attention to obscure settlements such as Tell Taya and remote trading posts as Kanish to make these examples of presumed standard features of the Mesopotamian city are acceptable for his purposes but do enforce the feeling of the reader being treated as a casual tourist who does not know any better.

This is how Mieroop writes the ancient Mesopotamian city, walking into it from a distance as a traveler arriving. And although he writes it as “the Mesopotamian visitor”, what is most conspicuous to the suspicious traveler to this foreign land is the absence of any people. If it were truly a Mesopotamian visitor, the landscape would be teeming with people and the actions and creations of lives. Mieroop leads a modern tourist through empty ruins and shadows: Through the suburbs and harbors which are conflated from afar, and the gardens and orchards that need not exist either with no people to feed, Mieroop leads the reader into an empty husk, a landscape built for and by people who are scarcely mentioned.

What he does include about the people greatly enlivens the landscape. One of the first mentions is about the walls of the city, Mieroop muses: “Perhaps the presence of city walls was the main characteristic of a city in the eyes of an ancient Mesopotamian: all representations of cities prominently display walls, and even literary works sing their praise” (73). This somewhat captures the essence of city as a place of people being together, as represented by the built environment. Mieroop neglects to pointedly make the obvious cultural reference to the city as ‘sheep fold’ or ‘cattle pen’ that is a vital conception of the Mesopotamian urban landscape. Instead, perhaps even unwittingly, he relies on an Akkadian literary quote, three pages on in the chapter (76), to reference this:

The countryside is quiet, the land is totally still,

The cattle lie down, the people are asleep,

The doors are fastened, the city gates closed

This is perhaps the best view of the urban landscape that Mieroop provides in his text. It is intimately related to the physical landscape to which he is devoted, but describes the experience of it from within, breathing some life into the dusty streets on which Mieroop leads the lonely reader. It gives an account of the protection of the city that veers from military practicalities that Mieroop discusses with Herodotian quotes. As Dalley (1993) notes, the walls of the ancient Mesopotamian city protected against dangers less glamorous than other humans; the rooting of wild boars and pigs, and the danger of flooding rivers bursting their banks.

The next reference to that Mieroop makes to people interacting with the landscape is “A humorous tale” from the 1st millennium describing confusing directions given to find a house in Nippur (79-81). The identification with a similar experience that is presumably elicited from the reader shows how the inclusion of narrative from the peoples of the city creates a more salient experience for the reader, particularly one who is a casual tourist. The next image of these past bodies in space is Mieroop wondering if the ancients slept outside under the sky. Again it is the reference to the human body that enables the imagination of a roof on buildings that have lacked them for millennia.

The final and longest discussion of people in the urban landscape is that of population, and they are discussed essentially as objects that fill the landscape to an unknown degree.

If Mieroop is to treat the reader as a casual tourist, it would be much more effective to call more heavily upon ancient accounts of urban space, particularly those that contain some kind of narrative with which the reader can identify. This is potentially problematic because of the preponderance of texts and inscriptions about the urban landscape that are attributed to the king. But even this provides great insight into the conception of the urban landscape as it was built and lived. As a brief, general archaeological overview of a large geographic area and a vast time span, Mieroop’s chapter is successful. It is conservative and not greatly imaginative, but does cover the basic repeated formants of the ancient Mesopotamian city.

References:

Dalley, Stephanie; 1993. Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens and the Identification of the

Hanging Gardens of Babylon Resolved. Garden History. Vol. 21 No.1, 1-13

Emberling, Geoff; 2003. “Download[pic]Urban social transformations and the problem of

the ‘first city’: new research from Mesopotamia” in The social construction of

ancient cities. M.L. Smith (ed.). Washington D.C. : Smithsonian Books, 254-268.

Mumford, Lewis; 1968. “Download[pic]The nature of the ancient city” City in history: Its

Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Harvest Books: 94-118

Van de Mieroop, Marc; 1997. “The urban landscape,” The Ancient Mesopotamian City.

Oxford University Press: Oxford, 63-100

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