Mammonymy, Maternal-Line Names, and Cultural Identification: Clues from the Onomasticon of Hellenistic Uruk.

AuthorLangin-hooper, Stephanie M.
PositionEssay

Several thousand cuneiform texts document both Greek- and Babylonian-named persons in the cities of Hellenistic Babylonia and prompt investigation of cross-cultural interactions between residents of these multi-cultural communities. The Hellenistic period in Babylonia (c. 330-64 B.c.E.) is often described as a time of foreign (i.e., Greco-Macedonian) conquest and immigration into the Near East. I However, this was hardly first-millennium Babylonia's first encounter with incursions of alien populations or experience with foreign rule.2 By the time of Alexander the Great's arrival. Babylonian society could be described as having

been multi-cultural, to varying degrees, for nearly half a millennium, particularly if the West Semitic onomasticon is invoked in support of this assertion. (3) The Hellenistic settlers also enriched Babylonia with an infusion of components of their material culture: Greek theatres and gymnasia were constructed in ancient cities such as Babylon, and Greek objects, such as statues, pottery, and coins, were used throughout Babylonia. (4) Babylonia was far from a completely Hellenized society, however: (5) Mesopotamian forms of material culture and architecture persisted, (6) as did the use of cuneiform documents, which are the focus of this article.

The cuneiform documentation necessarily presents a skewed and uniquely Babylonian perspective on Hellenistic Babylonian society; almost all texts of this period written in Greek or Aramaic, which might balance the written record, have been irretrievably lost. In spite of the lopsided nature of our sources, we nevertheless suggest that a nuanced and careful reevaluation of the onomastic data preserved in the cuneiform legal texts from Hellenistic Uruk provides us with unique opportunities to identify markers of individuals' cultural identities, and thereby to access the interplay between cultural communities. (7) Our understanding of this data enables us both to identify multiple expressions of cultural hybridity and to suggest that cross-cultural interactions were renegotiated and differently enacted in a variety of social contexts.

Our re-evaluation of the evidence for cross-cultural interaction begins with our consideration of indications in the Hellenistic Uruk legal text corpus of the social and cultural roles of women and their families. Within Hellenistic Urukean society, women--both Greek women who married into Babylonian families and female scions of native lines--assumed economic roles commensurate with the status of the families into which they married. (8) They owned property and slaves; they bought and sold these holdings to family and non-family members alike. In fact, there is some evidence of women who were at least as, if not more, economically active than their husbands. (9)

However, until now, little attention has been paid to the role of women in transmitting aspects of cultural and family identity in Hellenistic Babylonia. Here we suggest that clues about the contributions of women to the formation of familial and cultural identity can also be gleaned from the same Hellenistic Babylonian texts that document the economic activities of the social elite. It is important to clarify that the appearance of a woman's name in a cuneiform document may record her presence at or participation in an activity or transaction, but it does not in and of itself point to or assign her agency in the cultural-transmission process we describe. That agency is more conclusively identified and determined through analysis of the nature of the activity and the matrix in which she performs her roles.

Rather, we assert that the observed patterns of naming practices point to a process in which a particular feature--the linguistic background of personal names--contributes to the marking of a woman's identity and to that of other family members. It may be possible to discover women's agency in the patterns and processes of cultural transmission if these correlate positively with women's roles in the documented activities. For example, analysis of the transactions in which women are documented, be they principals or wives or daughters of principals, may establish women's crucial role in the formation and preservation of familial wealth. Such an investigation, however, lies well outside the scope of the present inquiry and will be explored in a future study. For the time being, we focus on the potential of onomastic evidence to reveal patterns of the transmission of culture and identity.

We have discovered that when a mother's name and the names of other members of her birth family are preserved, almost without fail they recur in the names of her male and female offspring in subsequent generations. This indicates that, in the naming of children, maternal-line names were considered important--in many cases, as important as the names from the paternal line--suggesting that the heritages of women and men were both regarded as crucial in the transmission of identity across generations.

From the evidence presented here, we conclude that Hellenistic Babylonian maternal-line naming practices gave equal prominence to the woman's identity and past, honoring both her and her familial line. This argument draws on well-established patterns in Babylonian onomastics. The location of these practices in the Babylonian cultural tradition contributes to ongoing efforts within scholarship on Hellenistic Babylonia to understand the process, nature, and degree of Babylonian-Greek cultural interaction.

We began to consider the implications of these naming patterns while re-examining the onomastic data and genealogical trees of the major Uruk families in connection with developing Berkeley Prosopographic Services. (10) This article is an outgrowth of our collaborative work on the onomasticon and prosopography preserved in the texts and on the seal impressions that recorded the economic activity of elite Hellenistic Babylonian society. As such, it reflects the work of two scholars in different disciplines: Assyriology (Laurie Pearce) and art history (Stephanie Langin-Hooper). The questions we pose and the approaches that we apply to the evidence are a direct result of our fruitful exchange of ideas and research methodologies. For instance, in a response to the limitations inherent in the long-standing binary categorization of objects as of either "Greek" or "Babylonian" type, Langin-Hooper's work on Hellenistic Babylonian figurines establishes an innovative theoretical framework of "entanglement" that accounts for the complexity of cultural affiliation and perception that inheres in Hellenistic texts and objects. (11)

Although this theoretical approach was developed in reference to terracotta figurines, and we have both found it productive when applied to Assyriological data as well, it would be an equally valid approach to understanding the contemporary seal impressions, in particular the admixtures of Assyro-Babylonian, Achaemenid Persian, and Hellenic motifs carved in both native and Mediterranean styles that appear almost exclusively on western-style metal seal rings. (12) The broad applicability of the "entanglement" approach to Hellenistic Babylonia reaffirms that this society was particularly marked by complex cultural exchange, which must be carefully analyzed on a case-by-case basis (rather than sweepingly characterized using terms such as "Hellenization-), utilizing tools from a variety of disciplines. The success of our collaboration, measured in part by the present article, reaffirms and reconfirms that research agendas in ancient Near Eastern studies are capable of crossing disciplinary lines and are even more fruitful when they do.

BABYLONIAN NAMING PRACTICES

Three Babylonian naming practices enable us to discern and assess patterns in cultural and familial identification. They are:

  1. Statement of Filiation: Neo- and Late-Babylonian scribes typically identify participants at least once in each legal or administrative record by means of a three-tier expression of filiation in the form: PN (personal name), son of FN (father's name), descendant of LN (family line or clan name), a series of linked relationships often represented via the shorthand PN/ FN//LN. (13) An example of a fully qualified statement of filiation that expands the standard three-tier formulation is evident in the identification of one of the witnesses in CM 12, 8 r. 5: Anu-belsunu rnaru Ina-qibit-Anu mari sa Kidin-Anu mar Hunza, i.e., Anu-belfunu, son of Ina-qibit-Anu, son of Kidin-Anu, descendant of Hunza. It is worthwhile mentioning that each filiation statement thus identifies multiple individuals--members of the individual's paternal line--who may or may not be attested elsewhere in the corpus as participants in other transactions, or at all. The multi-generational notices contained in each kinship statement facilitate reconstruction of successive generations of family trees. A consequence of the convention of providing fully qualified filiation statements for nearly all of the 8-20 participants (in roles such as buyer, seller, guarantor, neighbor, witness, and scribe14) in each economic and legal transaction recorded at Hellenistic Uruk is a substantial set of onomastic and proso-pographic data: the 10,000+ name instances may be estimated to preserve the identity of as many as 7,000 individuals, including those who appear only in the second, third, or higher tier of filiation expressions.

  2. Papponymy: Although papponymy is evidenced as early as the first half of the second millennium B.C.E., it remains an infrequently attested naming practice until the late first millennium and finds its fullest expression in cuneiform sources of the Hellenistic period. (15) A consequence of papponymy, in which a man was named for his grandfather (and even his great-great-grandfather), while his father potentially shared a name with the great-grandfather, is a limited repertory of names across...

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