Suchergebnisse

Stereotypes of the oriental city before and after their rediscovery. Oriental versus Western city. The improvements in digging techniques and in graphic visualization. From evolutionism to neo-evolutionism. From colonialism to decolonization. Neo-marxist and neo-capitalist theories. City, village, and countryside. Temple-cities, palatine cities, and the communal sector. The totalitarian models and their crisis. The advent of new geography and new archaeology, the reconstruction of paleo-environment. The advent of system theory, and the explanation for collapse. Post-modernist de-structuration of the ancient oriental city. The end of a cycle: political instability in the Near East, declining resources in the West, recourse to computer graphics and remote sensing, in order to get a "virtual" reconstruction of ancient cities.

AbstractThe reconstruction of ancient Near Eastern history has mainly concentrated on urban (and especially palace) environments, leaving the rural landscape outside these analyses. Recent advances in archaeological and palaeobotanical fields greatly help in the recovery of the general outlines of rural exploitation in Mesopotamia and the surrounding regions; yet they cannot but miss the details of the individual exploitation units (fields and orchards), whose size and shape can be reconstructed on the basis of textual data such as cadastral texts (and other administrative recordings) and legal texts (related to the transfer of landed properties). Continuing the author's earlier work on the shape of fields in Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 B.C.), based on cadastral documents from Lagash province in lower Mesopotamia, this article examines, by way of 'gross' generalization and occasional exemplification, the entire history of the Mesopotamian landscape from the first administrative landscape in "late-Uruk" documents (ca. 3000 B.C.), down to the Neo-Babylonian documents of the Archaemenid period (ca. 500 B.C.).

"Ever since the archaeological rediscovery of the ancient Near East, generations of scholars have attempted to reconstruct the 'real Babylon,' known to us before from the evocative biblical account of the Tower of Babel. After two centuries of excavations and scholarship, Mario Liverani provides an insightful overview of modern, Western approaches, theories, and accounts of the ancient Near Eastern city"--Provided by publisher