Diversity and Standardization: Perspectives on Social and Political Norms in the Ancient Near East

Hardcover, multilingual, xvi + 222 pages, b&w illustrations in text, NOT ex-library. Book is clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Minor handling wear only. Issued without a dust jacket. -- This volume offers a collection of scholarly essays exploring the dynamic interplay between cultural diversity and the processes of standardization in the ancient Near East. The contributors examine how social and political norms were established, enforced, and adapted in areas such as law, administration, religious ritual, and diplomacy. Drawing on case studies from Hittite Anatolia, Assyria, and Babylonia, the work challenges monolithic views of ancient empires, revealing a constant negotiation between centralized standards and persistent local traditions. It serves as a key resource for understanding the mechanisms of norm-setting and cultural integration in the cuneiform world. -- Contents: Preface; Vorwort; Anatolian Fate-Goddesses and Their Different Traditions / Alfonso Archi; Harrädum, entre Babylone et le 'pays de Mari' / Dominique Charpin; Nommer ä l'époque amorrite / Jean-Marie Durand; Gods of Commagene: The Cult of the Stag-God in the Inscriptions of Ancoz / J. David Hawkins; Urbanisierung, Stadtplanung und Wirtschaftsweise in "marginalen Gebieten" Nordostsyriens: Das Beispiel von Tell Chuera sowie erste Überlegungen zum Transfer dieser Siedlungsweise nach Westsyrien / Jan-Waalke Meyer; A Tale of Two Cities: New Ur III Archives and Their Implication for Early Old Babylonian History and Culture / David I. Owen; Neuassyrische Schrift und Sprache in den urartäischen Königsinschriften (9.-7. Jahrhundert v. Chr.) / Mirjo Salvini; Gauging the Influence of Babylonian Magic: The Reception of Mesopotamian Traditions in Hittite Ritual Practice / Daniel Schwemer; Between Scepticism and Credulity: In Defence of Hittite Historiography / Itamar Singer; Appendix: Index of Texts Cited; Program of the Symposium Normierung und Emanzipation: Bausteine für eine Kulturgeschichte des 2. Jts. v.Chr. im Alten Orient -- "The ancient Near East is a construct defined by present-day scientific investigations, a construct whose temporal and spatial boundaries are fuzzy, constantly shifting under the weight of new empirical data and increasingly sophisticated analytical methods. Its objects of investigation, even those that have resided in museum collections for generations, are in flux, as the profound cultural, geographical, ethnic and social diversity of the ancient Near East threatens to drown out any points of commonality. Yet it is these points of commonality that draw us inevitably to questions of Diversity and Standardization as categories for cross-cultural and trans-historical analysis. As we look across the variegated horizons of antiquity, do these categories have any real analytical power? For instance, the introduction of a new system of measurement or bookkeeping technique or even the imposition of a standardized repertoire of pottery forms on a more-or-less subject population are all examples of the real power of processes of standardization to stabilize territorial political entities. The problem must be posed for the ancient Near East at an even more fundamental level, however: what role do concepts, methods of standardization and, more generally, sign systems play in the reconfiguration and reconstitution of cultural, political, religious, scientific and social spaces? This volume results from a symposium under the aegis of the TOPOI Research Cluster (a trans-disciplinary research center devoted to the investigation of the interdependencies between space and knowledge in the ancient world) that brought together leading archaeologists, philologists, historians and linguists in order to investigate concrete historical examples that speak to questions of Diversity and Standardization in the ancient Near East.".…