Race, Racism and Archaeology || Race and Ethnicity in Mesopotamian Antiquity

Race and Ethnicity in Mesopotamian AntiquityAuthor(s): Zainab BahraniSource: World Archaeology, Vol. 38, No. 1, Race, Racism and Archaeology (Mar., 2006), pp. 48-59Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40023594 .

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Race and ethnicity in Mesopotamian antiquity1

Zainab Bahrani

Abstract

In this paper I will maintain that race and ethnicity are discursive concepts that are historically and culturally variable. While in the modern West the discourses of race, and later ethnicity, are biological discourses of the body that present 'race' in scientific terms, the ancient Mesopotamian conception of otherness was not articulated in terms of biology or of linguistic groups. The conclusions are drawn from a study of the ancient Mesopotamian textual and visual representations, following the theoretical premise that alterity is formulated in and through representation.

Keywords

Akkadian; alterity; Assyria; Babylon; ethnicity; imperialism; Mesopotamia; Orientalism; race; representation; Sumerian.

The study of race and ethnicity in relation to Mesopotamia

Race and ethnicity are taxonomic categories used in archaeology but there is by no means any broad consensus as to their exact definition. The ancient Mesopotamians had no such terms or equivalent categories in their own languages. However, that need not mean that contemporary archaeology cannot therefore use these categories to study ancient people. Nevertheless, the present paper draws attention to the need for a constant self-reflexive approach that remains aware of the influences our taxonomies have in interpreting the past. The field of Mesopotamian archaeology emerged in the mid-nineteenth century during the time of British and French imperial expansion into Mesopotamia. The earliest archaeologists were colonial governors and officials primarily from France and Great Britain. The earliest interpretations of Mesopotamia were therefore heavily influenced by geo-political interests and by the racial theories that were prevalent at the time. Those early definitions of race in Mesopotamia are a product of a particular time and place

S3 Routledge World Archaeology Vol. 38(1): 48-59 Race, Racism and Archaeology 1\ Tayior&Frandscroup © 2Q06 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/ 1470- 1375 online

DOI: 10.1080/00438240500509843



Race and ethnicity in Mesopotamian antiquity 49

Figure 1 Map of the Ancient Near East during the Assyrian Empire. After Michael Roaf (1990) Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, New York: Facts on File, p. 191.

(Bahrani 2003; Bohrer 2003). Likewise, our own interpretations of race and ethnicity today are clearly products of our own contemporary concerns and desires.

This paper therefore rests on the premise that race and ethnicity as categories cannot be defined in any absolute or scientific way. Ethnicity is ascribed to groups or to others, or self-ascribed by particular people who identify themselves according to a shared ancestral

myth, religious belief, or language. In other words, the reality of ethnicity or race, if one can use the term reality in this context, is inter-subjective rather than absolute. It is a

relationship of alterity. Ethnicity and race, furthermore, are taxonomic categories that are constructed at a

particular time and place, that can and ought to be historicized. Therefore, the paper will first address the historiography of the use of these terms in the literature and practices of the field of Mesopotamian archaeology. The paper will then address how the

Mesopotamians themselves conceived of alterity or otherness. While they did not have terms for race or ethnicity, they certainly did think in terms of difference. The paper thus addresses two formulations of alterity, the first being the nineteenth-century European racialism that influenced the rise of Mesopotamian studies and the second being the

Mesopotamian expressions of alterity in textual and visual representations. The paper maintains that both of these can be defined as a discourse of the other.



50 Zainab Bahrani

Racial theory in Mesopotamian archaeology

Race and ethnicity as categories have been utilized in the study of ancient Mesopotamia since the nineteenth century. In the earliest European scholarly writings on Mesopotamian antiquity, race was a means of categorizing peoples in relation to material culture and to

languages. The taxonomies and categorizations of Near Eastern archaeology emerged out of the

broader intellectual background of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Theories of the development of culture and civilization and the relationship to

geographical regions and racial groups were established during the height of imperialism in the East. At this time, the rise of professional scholarship regarding the world beyond Europe, historical and contemporary, and the ordering of this knowledge into academic

disciplines were clearly bound up with the development of racial theory (Bahrani 2003:

13-49). This theory not only permeated all areas of academic thinking of its time, it

actually formed the basis of its divisions and organizations, working as a scientific framework of world culture (Said 1978: 227). By the end of the nineteenth century, material culture, including the arts, became an established means of categorizing the identities of peoples and cultures in a comprehensive global system. In archaeology, it was

only logical that the equation of material culture to racial groups would be seen as a

scientifically sound methodology. While philology and linguistics had organized languages into groupings that were racially distinct, material cultural production came to be analysed as indexical of racial groups. A good example of this type of racial classification in relation to monuments is the work of the architect and archaeologist James Fergusson, who was in the employ of the British Museum. Among his numerous publications, Fergusson wrote a

comprehensive work on world architecture in which he stated explicitly that his

methodology was the equation of building styles with racial groups, charted both

historically and geographically (Fergusson 1865). Other scholars of the time wrote

scientifically on the equation of artefacts with race (Bahrani 2003: 13-49). Today, racial theory is rejected by the majority of scholars of the ancient Near East. It is

now also generally accepted that concepts of culture, cultural developmental stages and racialism were interdependent in nineteenth-century history and archaeology. At that time, Near Eastern antiquity was seen in this broader framework of global historical

development envisioned in European narratives of a unilinear progress of civilization that

naturally culminated in modern Europe. A number of scholars working in the area of colonial criticism and postcolonial theory have analysed the complicity of academic knowledge regarding race and culture with the history of European colonialism, and the new discipline of archaeology was no exception (Asad 1973; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1983; Said 1978; Spivak 1985, 1987, 1993; Young 1990, 1995).

In many ways, Mesopotamian archaeology first developed as an integral and significant part of the colonial enterprise in the East. The relationship of Mesopotamian archaeology to French and British geo-political interests in the region was not understated or masked in the writings of the earliest excavators in Ottoman Iraq, such as Austen Henry Layard and Paul Emile Botta. Their correspondences and publications make clear that the process of excavating Mesopotamia was in the service of their country's imperial interests. Yet the discipline of Mesopotamian archaeology, as it developed on the footsteps of empire, was




never a strict and unproblematic discourse of the other, of a civilized Western antiquity compared to a barbaric Oriental past. In the global map of world history, Mesopotamia was rather allocated a place that was both the primeval past of Western history and Other at the same time (Bahrani 1998).

The relationship of archaeology to colonial discourse has now been argued by a number of archaeologists, and has become an accepted part of archaeological self- reflexive writings on the history and practices of the discipline in recent years. So, any discussion of race and

ethnicity as working terms in Mesopotamian archaeology must first be contextualized within the disciplinary history of this field of research. The concept of race in ancient Near Eastern scholarship cannot be considered outside the socio-political framework of

nineteenth-century conceptions of culture and civilization as racial developmental stages (Bahrani 2003: 13-49). If we accept that the latter statement is true, then we must also consider that the discourse of race in antiquity, and how we may or may not access it

through the archaeological, visual, and historical record, must also be subjected to a

historiographic critique. In this paper I will maintain that race and ethnicity are both discursive concepts, and that, while in the modern West the discourses of race and, later, ethnicity are biological discourses of the body that present 'race' in scientific terms, the ancient Mesopotamian conception of otherness was not articulated in terms of biology or of linguistic groups.

Contemporary divisions of groups in ancient Mesopotamia as being racially or (more often today) ethnically distinct are made from the position of modern scholarship, as a tool of categorization that has been considered a methodological means of understanding historical developments and chronology, stylistic differences in the arts and material culture in general. We ought to be clear, however, that the division into these categories by Mesopotamian scholarship does not coincide with ancient Mesopotamian views and

categories. The Mesopotamians certainly did differentiate between self and other, but that distinction was not seen in terms of a biological difference.

The ancient Mesopotamians had no category for 'race' in their own scientific or medical

texts, or in their descriptions of the inhabitants of other places. Race, as has been used in

classificatory biology or in the way that it was formulated by modern scientific theories of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America, was not a

part of the way in which the people of Mesopotamia categorized the people in their local environment or the surrounding world. We know that the Mesopotamians spoke various

languages and that some of these languages were not, in the linguistic sense, related. Yet

remarkably, there is no indication, either in the earliest stages of written documentation, or in later periods, that the Mesopotamians ever used language as a racial category.

While race does not appear as a term in Mesopotamian antiquity, a formulation of self and other certainly existed in both the texts and the images of various periods. However, the idea of the foreign appears to have been seen in spatial, rather than biological terms.

Alterity was also defined in terms of behaviour. The common binary formulation of barbarian and civilized is clear in the ancient record. Normative behaviour is set, but the

divergence from the normative was seen as a result of class, gender or even as a possession by the demonic or the retribution of the gods. Likewise, the practice of slavery existed but the status of slave was not a racial category. Alterity was certainly a concern in relation to social groups, but it was not reduced to a bodily inscription of race.



52 Zainab Bahrani

The Sumerian problem

Racial theory was particularly prominent in the scholarship of Mesopotamia in the first half of the twentieth century. Many philologists, art historians and archaeologists working in this field turned to racial divisions in order to create cultural and chronological categories analogous to scientific classifications. Nowhere is this dependence on racialism more obvious than in the early debate on the origin and identity of the first inhabitants of

Mesopotamia and the inventors of the world's first system of writing: the Sumerians

(Emberling 1997; Potts 1997; Bahrani 2003). According to the unilinear narrative of world history dominant at the time, the place of

the invention of writing was positioned as the origin of the progress of civilization. The ultimate telos of this progress was in the modern West, therefore the identity of the first inventors of this technological advance was considered relevant to the origins of Western

history. In this atmosphere, the identity of the original inventors of the cuneiform script used for the Sumerian language became the subject of racial discussions.

The earliest written documents were discovered in 1928-9 at the ancient city of Uruk, in southern Iraq. Here, more than 1,000 clay tablets were found that were mostly records of economic transactions. Although Sumerian is the language that appears to have been used in these early texts, some philologists argued that the script was in fact first invented for a

language other than Sumerian, a language that is now lost to us, and that it was only later

adopted for Sumerian. I. J. Gelb, for example, in A Study of Writing, refers to the 'X- element' (1952: 63) as the ethnic group responsible for the invention of writing. The

argument for the earlier unknown ethnic group was based on the identification of some terms for professions and tools that were estimated by these philologists to belong to a

language other than Sumerian. The view that an 'X-element' invented writing pre-dates the work of Gelb and continues to appear in some textbooks on the ancient Near East

today, although explicit arguments are no longer made for it. Most philologists however, no longer adhere to this view (Bottero 1992).

At the same time, in the early twentieth century, art historians of Mesopotamian antiquity regularly defined sculptural groups as direct reflections of race (Potts 1997; Bahrani 2003). In the work of leading art historians such as Anton Moortgat and Henri Frankfort, race reappears throughout the text as a means of categorizing sculptural stylistic developments. In more recent years, such categories are not explicitly described in racial terms but a trace of that methodology has survived nevertheless. For example, in the Reallexikon der Assyriologie, a publication that Assyriologists and Mesopotamian archaeologists widely consider to be based in objective empirical observation, articles such as 'Kopfbedeckung', i.e. 'Headdress', categorize types of head-gear in visual representations based on ethnic groupings (Boehmer 1980-3). A closer examination of this method reveals that the argumentation is often circular. The appearance of a specific headdress is used by archaeologists as evidence for the existence of the racial or ethnic group in question in a geographical region, and the same headdress type is

iconographically categorized as being indicative of the same ethnic group. For example, a 'Hurrian headdress type' is a category in the chart, yet the object on which the headdress appears cannot be identified as Hurrian based on other criteria, and yet, when that type of headdress is found elsewhere, archaeologists are likely to see it as Hurrian based on its




existence in this relief. The article chosen as an example here is part of a general methodological mistake in the field, to which I have drawn attention before: archaeologists often mistakenly read visual representation directly as evidence of daily life and historical facts (Bahrani 2001). The idea that images can be used as markers of the real is

unacceptable in art historical theories and philosophies of representation. Therefore the

problematics of representation ought to be considered in the search for ethnic groups in

iconography also. Categorizations into Sumerian and Akkadian art and so on are still the standard method in art history today, although the divisions are no longer seen in racial or ethnic terms. These subdivisions are now made on the basis of form and style in association with find spot.

Eventually, in the later twentieth century, race came to be seen as a cultural construct in the scholarship of Mesopotamia. Ethnicity, however, continues to be considered a scientific working category, one that can be relied upon according to the methods of a strict empirical observation. Interestingly, while most Mesopotamian archaeologists consider that gender is a modern categorization imposed on to the past, they are more

likely to see ethnicity as a cross-chronological and cross-cultural reality, even though both

gender and ethnicity are discourses of the body and identity. In the rejection of racialism by Mesopotamian scholarship in the second half of the

twentieth century, the previously accepted idea that language could be linked directly to racial groups came to be questioned. However, it was still maintained that language could be linked to ethnic groups. From this label the idea came about that groupings of material culture could be correlated to ethnic groups, that ethnic groups were more inclined to make a particular type of object or to decorate it in a specific way. In some ways, when race was discredited, ethnicity came to take its place. Language, material culture and

symbols continued to be seen as markers of ethnic groups, markers that worked passively to reflect the existence of that group in the archaeological record.

Ethnic groupings are still commonly used as a means of creating chronologies. Archaeologists have used divisions to refer to Hassuna, Halaf, Ubaid and Uruk as ethnic

groups in prehistory that can be identified through types of pottery and other material artefacts. In the historical period, Sumerian, Akkadian, Amorite, Kassite, Hurrian, Assyrian and Persian are examples of categories that archaeologists take as groups with an ethnic consciousness that they made manifest in their material production. The often unstated

working assumption in such archaeological practice has been that ethnicity is reflected in

objects, and that distributions of objects are evidence of the existence or movement of ethnic

groups. The appearance of Uruk-type bevel rimmed bowls and tablets at various sites in the

region at the end of the fourth millennium and the early second-millennium Assyrian trading colony at Karum Kanesh in Anatolia are both examples of situations in which the movement of ethnic populations is traced through the presence of artefacts.

Archaeologists whose work has focused on theories of ethnicity have argued that

ethnicity is an ascription rather than a set of characteristics that come from within the individual (Emberling 1997; Emberling and Yoffee 1999; Yoffee 1990). At times ethnicity is imposed by outside groups, as in colonial situations where outsiders subdivide

indigenous peoples according to what they perceive to be logical tribal or ethnic groups, or, in other cases, ethnicity is self-consciously cultivated by a group of people as a form of

identity politics. Were there similar practices in Mesopotamian antiquity?



54 Zainab Bahrani

The other in Mesopotamian antiquity

The foremost arguments for ethnic consciousness in Mesopotamian antiquity have been based on the fact that the Mesopotamian population was always multi-lingual. In the third millennium BC, the Sumerian and Akkadian languages existed and were in use at the same

time; however, while 'Sumerian' is used as a group name or as an ethnic term by archaeologists, there is no evidence of such an ethnic distinction in antiquity. Speakers of Sumerian or of Akkadian were not identified as ethnic or racial groups in the ancient records. While Sumer and Akkad were used as terms for geographical regions and for

languages, there were no similar or variant terms corresponding to ethnic groups. Exhaustive searches in the ancient literature for such terms have failed to produce any evidence for their use (Kraus 1970; Emberling 1997). Languages in Mesopotamian antiquity were not seen in correspondence with racial or ethnic groups, thereby dismissing one of the main forms of ethnic ascription that modern conceptions of ethnicity rely upon. In the same way, we should not expect material culture to coincide with language groups (Renfrew 1987; Yoffee 1990; Emberling 1997).

Exhaustive research in the area of differentiation between speakers of Akkadian and of Sumerian as being parallel to groups of Semitic and a non-Semitic peoples as the

originators of civilization does not coincide with the view of the ancient inhabitants themselves. Let us consider one or two names of groups of people that are often quoted as evidence for the existence of ethnic group differentiation in Mesopotamian antiquity. First of all, we have the expression, 'Land of the Black-Headed People'. This expression appears to apply to north and south, and to all the inhabitants of what we now call

Mesopotamia. 'Black-Headed People' was not a term reserved for one ethnic group or the speakers of one language as opposed to another. The expression was used by and for Sumerian and Akkadian speakers without differentiation. Later, it appears to be used for all people in the region. In the Neo-Assyrian period, the king Sennacherib uses the term to refer to the people 'from the upper to the lower sea' who submitted to him, meaning the Mediterranean to the Gulf (CAD 16: 76). On the other hand, there is a clear differentiation between the inhabitants of Mesopotamia and the pastoral nomads in the same adjacent areas. The nomadic groups are described as uncivilized because they are not urban, and being uncivilized they are considered to pose a threat to sedentary society (Schwartz 1995).

In a late third-millennium literary text, 'The Curse of Agade', the pastoralist Gutians are described as 'not classed among people, not reckoned as part of the land . . . with human instinct but canine intelligence and monkeys' features' (Cooper 1983: 31). Else- where, in another text known as the 'Weidner Chronicle', they are described as people '[w]ho were never shown how to worship god, who did not know how to properly perform the rites and observances' (Schwartz 1995: 250). These descriptions of the Gutians as uncivilized nomads reflect a far greater differentiation than descriptions of people who lived outside Mesopotamia, such as in Anatolia or Iran. It seems that urbanized peoples in other lands were far more acceptable to the Mesopotamians than nomadic groups. In addition, the texts cited above were written after the fall of the Akkadian dynasty to the same Gutians mentioned in the literary compositions. They were seen as barbaric and uncivilized intruders who became kings of the land and were




therefore unlikely to have been described in sympathetic terms in a composition such as The Curse of Agade'.

A number of ancient tribal or geographical names have been cited as evidence of the existence of ethnic groups. Amorite, Hurrian and Mitannian are good examples of these

types of terms. On closer investigation, however, we can see that the categorization by modern scholarship of these names as ethnic groups is problematic and that there is neither consensus nor clarity on what these terms meant in antiquity. Amorite, for

example, in many instances appears to mean simply Westerner. The word Amurru, in Sumerian Martu, is also a compass point and geographical location. There is no evidence for an Amorite written language, Amorite religion or Amorite mythology. There is no list of physical characteristics that make up an Amorite either. Therefore what is Amorite is

very vaguely defined as other (Whiting 1995). The ancestors of the kings Ammisaduqa and Shamshi-Adad are described as Amorites, as Kings who lived in tents. In other words, the Amorites are described as nomadic and un-urbanized, which is to say uncivilized by Mesopotamian standards. In Babylonian literary texts the uncivilized nature of Amorites is emphasized:

(The Amorite) he is dressed in sheep skins; He lives in tents in wind and rain; He doesn't offer sacrifices. Armed [vagabond] in the steppe, He digs up truffles and is restless. He eats raw meat, Lives his life without a home, And, when he dies, he is not buried according to proper ritual.

(Van De Mieroop 2004: 78)

However, the idea of an Amorite identity, an Amorite dynasty and Amorite rule is an

accepted part of Mesopotamian scholarship. While Whiting argues that Amorite is not a term that can be defined in relation to a set of physical or cultural characteristics, Dominique Charpin argues that the Old Babylonian period should be described instead as an Amorite period (Charpin 2003, 2004).

For the first millennium BC it is mostly the visual arts, and specifically Neo-Assyrian relief sculpture, that have been cited as a source for the depiction of ethnic difference

(Wafler 1975; Cifarelli 1998). Physical features of enemies, it has been argued, are made to look different from the Assyrians in these reliefs, but do the Assyrian annals talk about ethnic or racial difference?

The Assyrian palace walls of the first millennium BC were covered with stone slabs, carved in relief with images of court rituals, hunting and war. Many Assyrian palace reliefs

represent the imperial campaigns in conquered lands. The people, armies and rulers of those lands are depicted in detail, and a great amount of realism is utilized in the depiction of the surrounding terrain. However, there appears to be no attempt at a naturalistic or veristic depiction of the facial or physical features of people, either Assyrian or foreign. While the realistic style of the Assyrian reliefs has led many to take them as a source of historical information, it is important to recall that these sculptures are not a mimetic



56 Zainab Bahrani

record of perception but compositions that follow traditions of iconography and

representation as well as being ideological glorifications of king and empire. With the rise of the Assyrian empire at the beginning of the first millennium BC, the

Assyrian armies began to expand the empire and conquer foreign lands to east and west.

They often deported conquered populations (Oded 1979). The historical annals record the

campaigns in great detail, providing a level of realism in the writing that is not paralleled by earlier texts. The accounts of the campaigns describe the conquest into foreign land, and often describe the enemy as being barbaric in behaviour or lacking in correct religious conviction or adherence to correct ritual. The enemy is described as cowardly, as evil and

guilty of wrongdoing against Assyria, of not keeping oaths, of plotting against Assyria. However, the annals do not describe the enemy people as having different physiognomies in features or skin colour.

A number of texts describe an enemy as barbarian or uncivilized, but that designation cannot be correlated to geographical distance. For example, descriptions of campaigns against the Nubians do not describe the Nubians as barbaric nor do they write about any perceived physical differences between the Assyrians and the Nubians. As in earlier

periods, the descriptions of barbarism appear to be reserved for non-urbanized, nomadic

peoples. During the eighth and the seventh centuries BC there was an increasing reliance on the

use of realistic details as narrative devices in the reliefs depicting wars. The texts on these reliefs also begin to use epigraphs, a method of placing names next to images of individuals in order to identify a particular king by name, for example. Because the texts identify specific people, we are able to see how a particular person or group was depicted. These

images follow a standardized rendering of physical form. Specific identity, whether of an individual or a foreign group, is depicted in clothing and headgear, rather than in physical features.

The exception that has been stressed by some scholars is the depiction of Nubians

during the reign of Ashurbanipal. During the seventh century, Nubians are depicted with

close-cropped curly hair and what have been described as distinctive facial features, in addition to the usual rendering of clothing and headgear (Albenda 1982). This convention of depicting Nubians has been explained as a result of the more general influence of

Egyptian art on Assyrian reliefs at this time (Reade 1983; Kaelin 1999; Collins

forthcoming). In Egyptian art, the convention of depicting Nubians and Asiatics in a somewhat caricatured formulation of physical features had long been standard. At the entrance of the Temple of Rameses II at Abu Simbel (thirteenth century), for example, bound and kneeling Nubian and Asiatic prisoners are depicted, clearly identified by physiognomy. Statues of bound Nubian captives were known already from the Old Kingdom (2675-2130) when they were set up in mortuary temples. New Kingdom temples have numerous depictions of foreign peoples (Leahy 1995). In the tomb of Seti I (1291-79) at Thebes, a painted relief represents an Egyptian, an Asiatic, a Nubian and a Libyan as being four physically distinct types with differing facial features, hair and skin colour (Leahy 1995: 227). There are no similar depictions in the art of Mesopotamia that can give us an idea of their view of the ethnic composition of the world. In the art of the third and second millennia defeated enemies are sometimes depicted. They can be recognized as defeated foreigners only because of a difference in hairstyle or clothing. At times,




foreigners are shown carrying objects, vessels or weapons, which are known to be Anatolian or Syro-Palestinian.

While foreign peoples are commonly depicted in the Neo-Assyrian palace sculptures, in

general, it is very difficult to see a physical difference between Assyrian and non-Assyrian when they are not marked by clothing styles, or by position in the narrative itself. In other words, we know that they are the enemy because they are shown imprisoned, defeated, executed and so on. It is therefore the defeat itself that signals the enemy in the relief.

A good example of this standardized physical type can be seen in a relief from Sennacherib's palace in Nineveh (704-681 BC). In it we see two soldiers from the imperial guard (Reade 1983: fig. 75). Physically they are very similar. The two soldiers are of the same height, have similar beards and facial features, yet the spearman on the right is from Palestine and the archer on the left is Assyrian. We are able to see this difference of identity by means of their headgear and clothing. However, by the reign of Ashurbanipal the

conquered enemies begin to look physically different as can be seen in the Egyptian campaign relief (Reade 1983: fig. 99) and in the depiction of Elamites or Urartians as

being somewhat of stockier proportions than the Assyrians, and the Urartians having larger noses along with their distinctive floppy hats. Arabs are depicted as fighting on camel back, but they also have long straight hair in comparison to the curly hair of the

Assyrians. It has been suggested that these changes came about as a result of influence from Egyptian narrative reliefs of war (Reade 1983). A reading of the annals of

Ashurbanipal reveals no evidence that foreign and conquered peoples were seen as

racially different or that an ethnic difference was perceived in terms of physiognomy or

biology. The sculptures of the Assyrians and the Assyrian annals written at the height of imperial

expansion into the surrounding lands give a good indication of the Assyrian encounter with the foreign and the Assyrian discourse of the other. While in the third and second millennia there are images and descriptions of foreigners, the record is not as clear as that of the later Neo-Assyrian Empire. In earlier periods there appears to be a formulation of self and other as urban and civilized in comparison to nomadic and uncivilized, yet not all

foreigners are described as uncivilized and the most negative descriptions are found in relation to pastoral nomads. It is only during the Neo-Assyrian period that we can

recognize a clear dominant discourse of the non-Assyrian other as cowardly, evil and

ungodly, deserving of Assyrian imperial intervention. Nevertheless, that difference is not described in terms of race or genus, of a biological or physical inscription of alterity either in the texts or in the visual representations of the Assyrians. The discourse of the other does not appear to be a discourse of the body or physiognomy, even in the Neo-Assyrian period. The place of difference continues to be in behaviour that is described as ungodly or barbaric, deviating from the normative behaviour of the Assyrians. As in other historical periods of imperial expansion, it is that discourse of the other that in the annals becomes the justification for war, the violent physical treatment of prisoners and the

conquest of land.

Department of Art History and Archaeology , Columbia University, New York



58 Zainab Bahrani

Note

1 A volume of collected papers on race and ethnicity in Mesopotamia, edited by W. van

Soldt, appeared as this paper was going to press and was not available to the author at the time of the writing of this essay. See Van Soldt, Race and Ethnicity in Ancient

Mesopotamia, Proceedings of the 48th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at

Leiden, 1-4 July 2002, Leiden: Netherlands Institute for the Near East, 2005.

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Zainab Bahrani is Edith Porada Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York. She is the author of, among other publications, Women of Babylon, London: Routledge, 2001, The Graven Image: Representation in

Babylon and Assyria, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, and Rituals of War, New York: Zone Books, forthcoming.



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Race, Racism and Archaeology || Race and Ethnicity in Mesopotamian Antiquity