Maria Grazia Masetti-Rouault. Cultures locales du moyen-Euphrate: modeles et evenements, IIe-Ier mill. av. J.-C.

Maria Grazia Masetti-Rouault. Cultures locales du moyen-Euphrate: modeles et evenements, IIe-Ier mill. av. J.-C. MARIA GRAZIA MASETTI-ROUAULT. Cultures locales du moyen-Euphrate:modeles et evenements, IIe-Ier mill. av. J.-C (Subartu 8). iii+200pages, 14 figures. 2001. Turnhout: BREPOLS; 2-503-99116-5 paperback 55[euro]. The author is a researcher with the Centre National de la Recherche La Recherche is a monthly French language popular science magazine covering recent scientific news. It is published by the Soci��t�� d'��ditions scientifiques (the Scientific Publishing Group), a subsidiary of Financi��re Tallandier. Scientifique in France, working across many periods from the prehistoricto the first millennium BC in north Mesopotamia. In this monograph, inthe series produced by the Leuven-based European Centre for UpperMesopotamian Studies, she seeks to set an inscribed stele stele(stē`lē), slab of stone or terra-cotta, usually oblong, set up in a vertical position, for votive or memorial purposes. Upon the slabs were carved inscriptions accompanied by ornamental designs or reliefs of particular significance. in its ninthcentury BC context. That contextualisation of a unique and solitary textallows her to build the beginnings of an understanding of the culturaland political world of the middle Euphrates in Syria, where Assyrianimperial expansion came into contact with a poorly understood localscene. The stele at the centre of this work was found in 1948 in the smalltown of Ashara, which sits on the site of ancient Terqa on theEuphrates, about half-way between its confluence with the river Haburand the modern frontier with Iraq. When the cuneiform cuneiform(kynē`ĭfôrm)[Lat.,=wedge-shaped], system of writing developed before the last centuries of the 4th millennium B.C. inscription on thestele was first published in 1952, it was attributed to the Assyrianking Tukulti-Ninurta II, who was known to have campaigned throughout thearea in the early ninth century BC. It was a mere twelve lines in lengthand was largely formal in content, and it excited no scholarly interestbeyond the few specialists interested in neo-Assyrian history. Masetti-Rouault briefly introduces the difficulties that have besetstudies of the beginning of the Iron Age in the Middle Euphrates region,a time when many of the powers of the preceding Late Bronze Age (theHittite empire, the Mitannian kingdom, the Egyptian New Kingdom, and theMiddle Assyrian kingdom) were eclipsed and the Aramaeans were enteringthe historical scene throughout the Levant Levant(ləvănt`)[Ital.,=east], collective name for the countries of the eastern shore of the Mediterranean from Egypt to, and including, Turkey. and across north Mesopotamia.The first chapter then provides an historical and geographical overviewof north Syria and the Middle Euphrates region. The key geographicalpoint is the shifting frontier of the zone within which arable farmingwas practised, supporting networks of stable village and urbansettlement. All across north Mesopotamia, there is a fairly narrow bandof good, rain-fed agricultural land, lying south of the piedmont andmountains in southeast Turkey and north of the semi-arid and aridsteppe steppe(stĕp), temperate grassland of Eurasia, consisting of level, generally treeless plains. It extends over the lower regions of the Danube and in a broad belt over S and SE European and Central Asian Russia, stretching E to the Altai and S to . Quite small fluctuations in annual rainfall have moved theboundary between the productive and the marginal north and south, withprofound effects on the settled communities. From the later Neolithic tothe Early Bronze Age, there was dense and increasingly urban settlement.In the Middle Bronze Age (the first half of the second millennium BC),the settlement landscape changed, and most of the long inhabited tellsites show little sign of habitation HABITATION, civil law. It was the right of a person to live in the house of another without prejudice to the property. 2. It differed from a usufruct in this, that the usufructuary might have applied the house to any purpose, as, a store or manufactory; whereas . Documentary sources indicate thatscattered cities were the seats of extensive kingdoms much of whoseterritory was thinly inhabited by mobile pastoralists who remainarchaeologically invisible. The second chapter follows the transition into the second half ofthe second millennium BC, when the number of known sites furtherdecreases. With their disappearance the potential documentary sourcesare likewise greatly reduced. The Middle Assyrian kings grewexpansionist ex��pan��sion��ism?n.A nation's practice or policy of territorial or economic expansion.ex��pansion��ist adj. & n. in the thirteenth century, campaigning aggressivelywestwards from their Tigris homeland, and it is they who list theirconquests, and first mention the people that they encountered on theMiddle Euphrates as 'Aramaeans'. In Chapter 3, the story iscarried into the early Iron Age, a transition that involved seriouspolitical crises and wholesale restructuring of the geo-politicallandscape. Masetti-Rouault turns to the Levant and southern Anatolia,where there is at least some information on the relatively small-scaleand localised political entities that emerged in the early firstmillennium BC. The annals of the neo-Assyrian kings document theexistence of similar small, city-based kingdoms or chiefdoms acrossnorth Mesopotamia and on the Middle Euphrates. The clues were all there to suggest that the stele and itsinscription should be re-examined. Chapter 4 discusses the decidedlynon-Assyrian iconography and style of the sculpted figures on the stele,and carefully reviews the inscription. Masetti-Rouault shows that thereis no reason to attribute its authorship to an Assyrian king but,rather, argues that it was produced locally to honour Tukulti-Ninurta IIand his father and predecessor on the throne. As a product of anAramaean kinglet kinglet,common name for members of a subfamily of five species of Old and New World warblers, similar to the thrushes and the Old World flycatchers. Kinglets are small birds (4 in./10 cm) with soft, fluffy, olive or grayish green plumage and bright crown patches. , the stele can then be made to yield significantinsights into the multicultural, multi-ethnic environment of the westernJezirah and the Levant. The old historical assumptions are shown to havebeen ill-conceived, but further archaeological fieldwork--and someluck--are needed. TREVOR WATKINS Department of Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland.