The author's main argument in this volume is that inhabitants of Mesopotamian polities created a sense of identity through the performance of rituals and daily practices, and that rituals were always politics. Priests, kings and commoners used festivals to negotiate, to establish, or to contest political power – not just in the Ancient Near East, as the author illustrates by examples from different periods and areas (cf. pp. 4–24: The Persepolis celebrations in 1971; the French Revolution; Majapahit processions on the island of Java in the fourteenth century; the Fiesta de Santa Fe; rituals for Maya ancestors in Meso-America). Having such examples and the anthropological and sociological approaches of É. Durkheim and C. Geertz in mind, the three main chapters of the book discuss ritual performances.
Ritual texts from Ebla show that they not only refer to the city, but – as can be seen by the wedding and coronation ritual of Tabur-Damu (pp. 40–42) – they aimed to connect the city/palace with the countryside, and pilgrimages to cult centres in northern Syria also played an important role in establishing political dominion in that area. Four local cultic centres (pp. 82 ff.; Gre Virike, Hazna, Jebelet al-Beda, Banat) were not only under the control of political elites, but the ritual carried out there served both the elites and resisting groups. Such ambiguity shows both the political influence and “unity” of northern Syria which was imposed on the local kingdoms by Ebla, but through the performative power of rituals and mortuary practices the local communities gained and upheld their authority. Processions between the cult centres also created networks to give rise to shared religious concepts.
The author postulates that there was a unitary cultural landscape (from Iran to northern Levante) in the Old Babylonian period that transcended the linguistic, ethnic and political diversity through the performance of elite rituals and daily practices taken from a shared past. The kispum-ritual was crucial for creating such shared memories (cf. pp. 113 f.). Rituals which accompanied the dead tended to be uniform, regardless of the form of the grave which included jewellery, personal adornments, cuts of meat and beer-drinking sets. The author also discusses two different terms for graves, qubūrum and kimaḫḫum, the latter could be used for a spacious grave-building where rituals could take place. Archaeological data (pp. 120 ff.) show that such grave-buildings are spread all over “Greater Mesopotamia” (e.g. Arbid, Aššur, Chagar Bazar, Urkiš, Isin, Uruk, Ur, Sippar, Susa): as well as such graves, vaguely anthropomorphic basalt figures (“stone spirits”) – measuring from 9 to 145 cm – were found in northern Mesopotamia, dating from the entire Bronze Age, as objects connected with ancestor practices. Other important markers of memory are the humūsum (pile of stones) and rāmum (burial cairn); as commemorative monuments they are not only connected with burials, but serve also as victory monuments or they create place for treaty making. So during the early second millennium as a period of political and social change and instability, the people's engagement with the past through death and commemorative rituals (like kispum), and by monumental constructions (and also craft production) helped to transcend individual kingdoms and to create a shared vocabulary for religion and rule (cf. pp. 149 f.). This also led to a common architectural style and to the adoption of the Old Babylonian dialect, leading to a unitary culture in Mesopotamia.
The last section deals with the preservation and transmission of tradition, as can be seen best in the case of the akītu festival (pp. 153 ff.). The Hellenistic era brought a deep-rooted change with the loss of Babylonian political sovereignty, but this did not result in the loss of tradition. It would be too simple to say, with regard to pottery and figurines, that Greek elements were innovations and Babylonian elements were the continuing tradition, but such objects of material culture are “representative of a multicultural society that no longer made a clear distinction between Greek and Babylonian iconography and manufacturing practices” (pp. 175 f.). This multiculturalism preserved Ancient Near Eastern knowledge, and textual transmission occurred in temples and the private houses of priests. The Esagila had a library comparable in size and scope to Assurbanipal's, and we know that the Esagila or temples in Uruk sponsored the work of hundreds of scholars, scribes, diviners and astrologers (cf. pp. 182 ff.). As Sumerian-Greek-Babylonian texts show, the priests were also busy preserving knowledge by transmitting the “dead” languages through Greek transcription and by transmitting the literary tradition (e.g. prayers to Nabu, incantations), because Babylonian religion still mattered until the beginning of the first century ce. Another example of preserving tradition is Berossos’ Babyloniaca, which transmitted Babylonian tradition in Greek ethnographic style (cf. p. 192). The celebration of the akītu festival in Babylon in 205 and again eighteen years later by the Seleucid ruler Antiochus III also shows the ongoing tradition. These celebrations can be seen as paying respect to the venerable Babylonian tradition, but from the priests’ side the ritualistic “humiliation” of the king in the festival was perhaps also understood as their opposition to foreign (Seleucid) rule (cf. pp. 207 f.).
The author has well presented the close intersection of ritual, performance and politics and how rituals draw up a system of collective representation. She also shows – in my opinion more convincingly for the early second millennium and the late period – that communities are mental constructs, built through social interaction. So her book offers a new look at Mesopotamian history both by carefully reading ritualistic texts and by making use of a vast variety of objects of material culture in order to present a “thick description” (C. Geertz) of society. In this way, the study can be stimulating for researching other areas or periods of the Ancient World.
