Zwischen Euphart und Indus: Aktuelle Forschungsproblem in der vorderasiatischen Archaologie.

• Author: Potts, D.T.
• Position: Review

Edited by KARIN BARTL, REINHARD BERNBECK, and MARLIES HEINZ. Hildesheim: GEORG OLMS VERLAG, 1995. Pp. X + 387 + 20 fig. DM 94.

Zwischen Euphrat und Indus is a collection of eighteen essays that examine a broad range of major culture-historical and ethnohistoric units in the ancient Near East, including the Neolithic (Reinhold and Steinhof, Bernbeck), Chalcolithic (Kerner), Ubaid (Bernbeck), Uruk (Bernbeck), Early Dynastic (Sievertsen), Old Assyrian (Brisch and Bartl), Neo-Assyrian (Lamprichs), and Achaemenid (Hauser) periods; as well as topics such as nomad-sedentary relations (Kirsch and Larsen), Gulf trade (Franke-Vogt), migration and assimilation (Heinz), international relations during the second millennium (Crusemann, Feller and Heinz), the "Dark Ages" and the end of the Late Bronze Age (Bartl), and the state of archaeology in Palestine (Lehmann). The essays are meant to highlight questions and theses within each area, not to summarize the extant data in an unproblematic way. Thus ZEI is not a survey of Near Eastern archaeology and culture history and it is certainly not a collectively authored handbook. Yet it is also much more than a critical appraisal of major issues in the field, for the vast majority of its authors were products of the Institut fur vorderasiatische Altertumskunde at the Free University of Berlin, which is to say that all have studied principally under Hans J. Nissen and Hartmut Kuhne (archaeology) and in most cases with Johannes Renger (Assyriology) and Volkert Haas (Hittitology).

To single out individual arguments made in these papers would not be appropriate here. Suffice it to suggest that the work seeks to challenge current assumptions in an entire field of study, particularly in the notoriously conservative German academic environment of Near Eastern archaeology. As anyone familiar with German Near Eastern archaeology knows, two dominant schools are now at work there. There is the "art historical" approach of scholars such as Anton Moortgat, Thomas Beran, and Wolfram Nagel, the exponents of which include B. Hrouda, R. M. Boehmer, R. Mayer-Opificius, U. Moortgat-Coorens, E. Strommenger, E. Braun-Holzinger, J. Borker-Klahn, J. Boese, H. Kuhne, and U. Seidl. And there is the "socio-economic" approach of Hans Nissen, itself informed by an eclectic range of...