2015 Iran and Early Islam: Introduction

Mesopotamia in the Ancient World Impact, Continuities, Parallels Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium of the Melammu Project Held in Obergurgl, Austria, November 4–8, 2013 Edited by Robert Rollinger and Erik van Dongen

Melammu Symposia 7 Edited by Robert Rollinger (Helsinki / Innsbruck)

In collaboration with Ann Gunter (Evanston), Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila (Helsinki), Johannes Haubold (Durham), Giovanni-Battista Lanfranchi (Padova), Krzysztof Nawotka (Wrocław), Martti Nissinen (Helsinki), Beate Pongratz-Leisten (New York), Kai Ruffing (Kassel), Josef Wiesehöfer (Kiel)

Mesopotamia in the Ancient World Impact, Continuities, Parallels Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium of the Melammu Project Held in Obergurgl, Austria, November 4–8, 2013 Edited by Robert Rollinger and Erik van Dongen

Ugarit-Verlag Münster 2015

Mesopotamia in the Ancient World. Impact, Continuities, Parallels. Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium of the Melammu Project Held in Obergurgl, Austria, November 4–8, 2013

Edited by Robert Rollinger and Erik van Dongen

Melammu Symposia 7

© 2015 Ugarit-Verlag – Buch- und Medienhandel GmbH, Münster www.ugarit-verlag.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Printed in Germany by Memminger MedienCentrum, Memmingen ISBN 978-3-86835-128-6 Printed on acid-free paper

Table of Contents Introduction: Obergurgl 2013, or A New Dawn for the Melammu Project ................ 1 Robert Rollinger

Old Battles, New Horizons: The Ancient Near East and the Homeric Epics ........ 5

Talking to God(s): Prayers and Incantations Tzvi Abusch (Chair) Introduction ......................................................................................................... 35

Cynthia Jean Performing Rituals in Secluded Places: A Comparison of the Akkadian and Hittite Corpus ............................................................................................... 41

Patrick M. Michel Worshipping Gods and Stones in Late Bronze Age Syria and Anatolia ............. 53

Alan Lenzi The Language of Akkadian Prayers in Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi and its Significance within and beyond Mesopotamia ............................................... 67

David P. Wright Ritual Speech in the Priestly-Holiness Prescriptions of the Pentateuch and its Near Eastern Context ................................................................................... 107

Alberto Bernabé To Swear to Heaven and Earth, from Mesopotamia to Greece ......................... 125

Martin Lang (Respondent) Response ........................................................................................................... 135

Et Dona Ferentes: Foreign Reception of Mesopotamian Objects D. T. Potts (Chair) Introduction ....................................................................................................... 143

Giacomo Bardelli Near Eastern Influences in Etruria and Central Italy between the Orientalizing and the Archaic Period: The Case of Tripod-Stands and Rod Tripods ................................................................................................ 145

VI Table of Contents

Winfried Held and Deniz Kaplan The Residence of a Persian Satrap in Meydancıkkale, Cilicia .......................... 175

Joachim Ganzert On the Archetype of Sacral Rulership Legitimization and the Lower Court in the Lüneburg Town Hall ............................................................................... 193

Ann C. Gunter (Respondent) Response ........................................................................................................... 221

‘Fighting like a Lion’: The Use of Literary Figures of Speech Simone Paganini (Chair) Introduction ....................................................................................................... 227

Sebastian Fink Metaphors for the Unrecognizability of God in Balaĝs and Xenophanes ......... 231

Johannes Haubold ‘Shepherds of the People’: Greek and Mesopotamian Perspectives ................. 245

Krzysztof Ulanowski The Metaphor of the Lion in Mesopotamian and Greek Civilization .............. 255

Amar Annus and Mari Sarv The Ball Game Motif in the Gilgamesh Tradition and International Folklore ........................................................................................ 285

Thomas R. Kämmerer (Respondent) Response ........................................................................................................... 297

Mesopotamia and the World: Interregional Interaction Giovanni-Battista Lanfranchi (Chair) Introduction ....................................................................................................... 307

Reinhard Pirngruber šulmu jâši libbaka lu ṭābka : The Interaction between the Neo-Assyrian King and the Outside World ................................................ 317

André Heller Why the Greeks Know so Little about Assyrian and Babylonian History ........ 331

Julien Monerie Writing Greek with Weapons Singularly Ill-designed for the Purpose: The Transcription of Greek in Cuneiform ........................................................ 349

Krzysztof Nawotka Alexander the Great in Babylon: Reality and Myth .......................................... 365

Table of Contents VII

Birgit Gufler and Irene Madreiter The Ancient Near East and the Genre of Greek Historiography ....................... 381

Simonetta Ponchia (Respondent) Response ........................................................................................................... 397

The World of Politics: ‘Democracy’, Citizens, and ‘Polis’ Kurt A. Raaflaub (Chair) Introduction ....................................................................................................... 413

Kristoffer Momrak Identifying Popular Power: Who were the People of Ancient Near Eastern City-States? ....................................................................................................... 417

Kurt A. Raaflaub Lion’s Roar and Muses’ Song: Social and Political Thinking in Early Greek Poets and Early Israelite Prophets ..................................................................... 433

Sabine Müller A History of Misunderstandings? Macedonian Politics and Persian Prototypes in Greek Polis-Centered Perspective ............................................... 459

Raija Mattila (Respondent) Response ........................................................................................................... 481

Iran and Early Islam Lucian Reinfandt (Chair) Introduction ....................................................................................................... 487

Aleksandra Szalc Semiramis and Alexander in the Diodorus Siculus’ Account (II 4–20) ............ 495

Tim Greenwood Oversight, Influence and Mesopotamian Connections to Armenia Across the Sasanian and Early Islamic Periods ................................................ 509

Lutz Berger Empire-building vs. State-building between Late Antiquity and Early Islam ................................................................................................. 523

Josef Wiesehöfer (Respondent) Response ........................................................................................................... 533

Representations of Power: Shaping the Past and the Present Sabina Franke (Chair)

Introduction ....................................................................................................... 539

VIII Table of Contents

Frederick Mario Fales Looking the God in the Eye: Sennacherib’s Bond with Destiny, from Rock Reliefs to Cylinder Seals ................................................................ 543

Dirk Wicke Assyrian or Assyrianized: Reflections on the Impact of Assyrian Art in Southern Anatolia ......................................................................................... 561

Rocío Da Riva Enduring Images of an Ephemeral Empire: Neo-Babylonian Inscriptions and Representations on the Western Periphery ................................................. 603

Christoph Schäfer Inspiration and Impact of Seleucid Royal Representation ................................ 631

Jonathan Valk and Beate Pongratz-Leisten (Respondent) Response ........................................................................................................... 643

List of Contributors ................................................................................................ 653 Index ....................................................................................................................... 657

Introduction

Lucian Reinfandt The thematic subject of “Iran and Early Islam” is directing the focus on the Per-sian presence in the Islamic world. In other words, it deals with phenomena that have survived into the Muslim era and how, and why, they had an impact on the new, Islamic, civilisation to come. On a more systematic level, talking about Iran and Early Islam means talking about cultural diffusion and the matters of continuity and change. Bringing the early Islamic perspective into the discussion is for several rea-sons beneficial. On the one hand it is of interest what Near Eastern civilisations ended in – or how they came to a fulfilment, as Islamicists may be tempted to say. On the other hand it is not unlikely that certain aspects of Ancient Near Eastern civilisations can best be explained from an early Islamic point of view, i.e. in retrospect, because from this aftermath may be preserved sources unavail-able for other, earlier periods. And, last but not least, for all those occupied with the Islamic Near East, especially but not exclusively in its formative phase, the millennia of pre-Islamic Near East are indispensable for an understanding of their own field of study. The Melammu meetings stand out not least because they recall those long and transcultural perspectives. It has become fashionable (again) in recent years to look for continuities between the Islamic and pre-Islamic periods.1 When it comes to Iran, the poten-tial of this approach is perhaps best demonstrated by Ehsan Yarshater’s monu-mental article “The Persian Presence in the Islamic World” from 1998, which, apart from the material it provides, is a good overview of the state of the art and the different positions taken in the discussion.2 A lot more has been written since that carries the expressions “change” and/or “continuity” in the title, but the whole subject remains theoretically understudied, and Michael Morony’s book Iraq after the Muslim Conquest from 1984 still seems to be the best examination of the subject.3 A general problem that increasingly concerns contemporary research on the Near East is a restriction of the frameworks of the own discipli-

1 A passionate plea for continuity is Crone, 1987: 1–17 (“The state of the field”), who dis-cusses the research tradition of 19th century Ancient History and Oriental Studies. 2 Yarshater, 1998. 3 Morony, 1984.

488 Iran and Early Islam

nary boundaries; this is related to the disciplines’ growing complexity and need for specialisation but may make it blind for the fact that the world of people in Antiquity was more complex than the canons of modern academic disciplines may provide.4 The “view from the box” is especially evident when dealing with ‘Iran and Islam’. To what extent was the Muslim conquest of Iran a historical watershed? What were immediate, and what were eventual consequences of the Islamic conquest? Questions like these are a matter of professional perspective, if not bias. There were indeed long-term changes in Iran that had begun in the pre-Islamic era but were caught up and institutionalised under Muslim rule. On the other hand, there were elements of Late Antique civilisation that either sur-vived fairly untouched into Muslim societies or found at least an Islamic appear-ance. Those who stress the differences between Islamic and pre-Islamic civilisa-tions may do so because they work within narratives of disciplinary specialisa-tion and emancipation, or bow down to nationalist or religious apologetics. Or they simply have failed to look enough at the period from about 300 until 600 CE, when “the changes taking place in western Asia made the culture of this region look more and more ‘Islamic’”.5 One gets a sense of how much the assessment of continuity and change is bound to value judgments. In this regard, continuity may be understood as sta-bility, while change becomes a synonym for unwelcome disruption.6 But from a different point of view, change can be regarded as positive, namely in those cases when the change is caused not by the other but by one’s own side; one need only recall the European expansion and the rise of capitalism in the early modern era. Different axes of time and space also play a role: the spread of Is-lam to Iran in the 7th century was conceived as a discontinuity by Iranian elites and as a break with their own pre-Islamic past in a vertical and time-oriented perspective, while the Arab side must have understood it as a form of continuity in matters of a horizontal gain of territory. In return, the Iranian revival, or šu®ū-biyya movement, during the 9th century meant a factual loss of claim of territory for the Arabs but a continuity with the past for the Iranians.7 It was Alexander Gerschenkron who has drawn the attention to the problem of value judgments when dividing history into periods.8 Heterogenetic explanations that stress a

4 Cf. the harsh criticism expressed by Maehler, 2012: 452, with respect to research on Greek papyrus documents from Ptolemaic Egypt that do not sufficiently take into account the multilingual social situation of Ptolemaic society. 5 Morony, 1984: 3. 6 Cf. Morony, 1984: 4: “Continuity tends to be regarded as positive and to be identified with stability”, while “change tends to be regarded as negative and to be identified with the disrup-tion ( . . . ) brought about ‘unnaturally’ by external factors”. 7 Cf. Enderwitz, 1997, for the phenomenon of the šu®ūbiyya movement which was a response by non-Arab Muslims (of not exclusively Iranian background) to the privileged social status of Arabs within the Muslim community. 8 Gerschenkron, 1968: 11–39; cited in Morony, 1984: 4. According to Gerschenkron, the rela-

L. Reinfandt: Introduction 489

‘borrowing’ from older cultures undermine Islamic originality, while orthoge-netic explanations that maintain an internally self-generated Islamic civilisation minimise historical continuity. And it can be maintained with some certainty that a periodisation in any form whatsoever tends to minimize continuities.9 Accordingly, some kind of compromise has dominated the field in the past dec-ades, where monist and one-dimensional explanations of a Roman or Iranian or Arab or Christian of Jewish origin of Islam have been abandoned in favour of a more pluralist approach. Accordingly, the formation of Islamic civilisation is now seen as a cultural synthesis of many traditions of diverse origin.10 How did cultural interaction happen? The cultural synthesis approach has the disadvantage of treating the different components of cultures as more or less monolithic wholes, and tends to neglect conflicting trends inside the compo-nents. Also the notion of ‘cultural osmosis’ seems misleading, for why should people imitate their neighbours? According to the Weberian concept of Herr-schaft, domination is based on the consent of the ruled.11 The success of cultural diffusion is dependent on a benefit for the receiving side, while force from the giving side rarely leads to success. It is the Bourdieuian decision-making in a set of choices that is causative for the success or the failure of cultural interaction.12 It is for this reason that research on Iranian elites after the Muslim conquest is important. How and why did the Iranian population convert to Islam and still keep, and even rebuild, a specific Iranian identity? Here the concept of cultural memory comes into play. An analysis of the early Islamic history of Iran that focusses on the role of pre-Islamic memory and its modifications shows how the descendants of the Persian imperial, religious, and historiographical traditions became a fundamental part of the Islamic ‘world’. An outstanding recent study of this process is Sarah Bowen Savant’s “The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran” from 2013 which examines how Iranians developed a sense of Islam as an authentically Iranian religion.13 Another key issue is material culture and archaeology. The frontier line be-tween Byzantium and Sasanian Iran was an area for numerous facets of cultural tionship between Late Antiquity and the Islamic civilisation(s?) may be “put in terms of con-tinuity in the direction of change”. 9 Morony, 1984: 3. For the periodisation of early Islamic history cf. now the thematic volume “Arabic Pasts. Histories and Historiography”, edited by Konrad Hirschler and Sarah Bowen Savant. Der Islam 91/1 (2014), especially the contributions by Hirschler / Bowen Savant, 2014, and Donner, 2014. 10 With Marshall Hodgson one may call it a balance of ancient heritage against Islamic originality; cf. Hodgson, 1974: 79–83. 11 Weber, 1978: 53. 12 Bourdieu, 1990: 74, who holds that there is a “specific logic of strategies which groups use to produce and reproduce themselves, that is, to create and perpetuate their unity, and thus their existence as groups, which is the condition of the perpetuation of their position in the social space”. 13 Bowen Savant, 2013.


symbiosis and continuities beyond day-to-day political events. The creation of an urban cultural centre in Mesopotamia that drew on neighbouring civilisations has been examined, on the basis of a combination of archaeological and textual evidence, by Isabel Toral-Niehoff in her recent book from 2014.14 The role of human interference in the natural environment of the region, on the other hand, is dealt with in Peter Verkinderen’s upcoming book about the long-term artifi-cial irrigation of southern Mesopotamia.15 Likewise, the related subject of economic history has experienced a recent upswing; after Michael Morony’s “Economic Boundaries? Late Antiquity and Early Islam” from 2004, studies on Abbasid tax revenue and tax policies have been published by Michele Campopiano, while a whole volume of the Journal of Economic and Social History is devoted to the sub-ject of factor markets in Mesopotamia.16 The political history of Sasanian and early Islamic Iran, on the other hand, has been dealt with in overviews by Touraj Dar-yaee.17 Of special importance and worth mentioning in this regard is the Encyclopaedia Iranica, which is published in book form and also freely accessi-ble in the internet.18 The contributions assembled in this section all address the key issues in one or the other way. Aleksandra Szalc in her chapter “Semiramis and Alexander in the Diodorus Siculus’ Account” deals with the Alexander Romance that had a strong influence on Arabic literature. Her analysis shows that the transmission of some literary motives through the cultures can be taken as an indicator for cul-tural continuity. Tim Greenwood in his chapter “Oversight, Influence and Mes-opotamian Connections to Armenia Across the Sasanian and Early Islamic Peri-ods” discusses aspects of ethnography and the connections between religious organisations and the state in Sasanian and early Islamic Iran. It is noteworthy that religious diversity was handled differently in Late Antique societies: while the Byzantines outlawed religious diversity, the Sasanians achieved an accom-modation towards the members of non-Zoroastrian religious groups, which in fact foreshadowed the way Muslims dealt with their non-Muslim subjects.19 Lutz Berger in his chapter “Empire-Building and State-Building between Late Antiquity and Early Islam” addresses the administrative system of the early cali-phal empire and the question of how social stability was achieved after the Mus-lim conquests. The role of local, non-Muslim, non-Arab elites in former Byzan-tine and Iranian lands and their participation in the Muslim administration is

14 Toral-Niehoff, 2014. 15 Verkinderen, 2014. 16 Morony, 2004; Campopiano, 2011; 2012; Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 57 (2014), including Rezakhani/Morony, 2014 and van Bavel / Campopiano / Dijk-man, 2014. 17 Daryaee, 2009; 2011. 18 Yarshater, E. (ed.), 1982ff.: Encyclopædia Iranica. 14 vols. London / New York. http:// www.iranicaonline.org/ [accessed 17 May 2014]. Cf. also the review by Dickinson, 1998. 19 Morony, 1984: 4.


elucidated by him. This is extremely valuable comparative material to Jamsheed Choksy’s monograph on the role of Zoroastrian elites in early Islamic Iran.20 Berger’s contribution opens a gateway to looking back on the role of Babylonian elites in the Achaemenid empire, as has been done by Michael Jursa,21 and com-paring their role to that of Zoroastrian dihqans in Iran or Christian pagarchs in Egypt under Muslim rule. A number of aspects are common to all chapters, such as the history of re-ception and the cultural memory as well as the nature (the ‘reliability’) of narra-tive sources (Szalc, Greenwood, Berger). Another one is the role of local elites in the fabrication of the past (Szalc), their networks (Greenwood), and their compliance with authorities (Greenwood and Berger). The political stability of empires is addressed with reference to founders such as Alexander (Szalc), or to ruling dynasties such as the Sasanians (Greenwood) or the early caliphs (Ber-ger). Another issue is the applicability of comparative approaches, such as the transmission of textual motives (Szalc), the intentions behind the texts (Green-wood), or the comparison of empires (Berger), whereas taking into regard the longue durée is indispensable for a proper understanding of short-term develop-ments (Szalc, Greenwood, Berger). Religion is understood not from the per-spective of doctrinal conflict, as is suggested by the nature of most narrative sources. Rather it is seen from the perspectives of centralising economic effects of the conversion to Christianity and Islam (Berger) and of the networking po-tential of religious affiliation (Greenwood) as well as of the ability of conflict resolution (Greenwood and Berger).22 Coherence of papers is an important prerequisite for any panel but can be misleading in the case of “Iran and Early Islam”. The object of study is simply too multilayered for that. Cutting out certain aspects and inviting relevant spe-cialists seems systematic at first sight but brings little added value in the case at hand; research libraries are full of books of this kind that more or less reaffirm existing discourses but hardly leave the common frame. “We have to get out of the box.” It does not work without preconceptions and filtering, but preselection narrows down and simplifies the complexities of past reality. The stronger the profile of the conceptual framework is, the stronger is the tendency towards (un-reasonable) restriction. Formulated to the extreme one could say: the humans of

20 Choksy, 1997. 21 Jursa, 2007. 22 A fourth paper with the title “Some Remarks Concerning Achaemenid Royal Titulature: Mesopotamian Influences in the Universalistic Titles of Darius I” by Andreas Johandi and Vladimir Sazonov (Tartu) was not included in this book but productively contributed to the discussion during the conference. It addressed the subjects of cultural diffusion and translatio imperii with regard to the influences of Assyrian royal ideology on Achaemenid Iran. There is comparative evidence for the transition from Sasanian Iran to the caliphal empire, and it is an interesting question whether the Sasanian recollection of the Achaemenids is in any way com-parable to the Abbasid recollection of the Sasanians.


Antiquity were more interdisciplinary than modern scholars are. In archaeology, the decision is somewhere between the cautious restoration and the archaeological park; while the latter is spectacular but perhaps prema-ture and at the expense of the true value of the site, the former is more complex and less tangible but more adequate for the object of study. In the case of the panel at hand with its complex thematic subject, a series of aphorisms may be more productive than long narratives can be. The following chapters are such a kind of building blocks that encourage intellectual creativity and help to open up new perspectives on the relationship of Iran and early Islam.

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Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Stanford. Pp. 59–75. Bowen Savant, S., 2013: The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran. Tradition,

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2015 Iran and Early Islam: Introduction

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