Ann-Margret “Maggie” Yonan
California
Zinda-March 12, 2008
Georges Roux
Ancient Iraq
Third Edition 1992.
Penguin Books, England.
Georges Roux, in this third edition, conveys that this book was published to update some of the information he provided in his previous two editions, first published in 1966 and republished in 1980. Roux uses new archaeological evidence with which to discuss the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, in order to give a more complete picture of the many strata that formulated the Mesopotamian culture, history and civilization, spanning a period of three thousand years.
In his foreword to the third edition, Roux admits that Mesopotamian studies have made tremendous strides, since he wrote the first and second editions, and many international “rescue excavations” have been carried out in some 140 tells, prompted by the building of three main dams on the Euphrates and the Tigris, radically changing our evaluation of some of the prehistoric periods. He affirms that through Assyriologists’ decipherment of some of these new finds and the revision of some of the published data, our knowledge of the political, socio-economic, and cultural history of ancient Mesopotamia has improved over the last few years.
In his introduction, Roux writes, “This new version, the series of articles which appeared between September 1956 and January 1960 in Iraq Petroleum, the now defunct magazine of the Iraq Petroleum Company, under the title The Story of Ancient Iraq. Written in Basrah, with no other source of documentation than my own personal library. These articles suffered from many serious defects and were far from even approaching the standards required from a work of this nature.” (xvii).
This book is in fact a more complete and accurate study of the history of Mesopotamia, in which Roux redeems himself for many of the mistakes he made earlier in his writings. It provides many answers to important questions that have remained unanswered for long periods of time, and it is one of the few books available that is dedicated exclusively to ancient Iraq, as opposed to the greater ancient Near East.
The first sixty pages of this book are dedicated to Mesopotamia’s proto-history in which Roux posits that excavations in ancient Iraq had provided enough evidence for historians to build-up a sequence of five proto-historic cultures which explained the early stages of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization in about 3000 B.C., but that all these cultures belonged to the late Neolithic and to the Chalcolithic ages, which at the most, covered 2000 B.C. Hence, the Stone-Age of Iraq was practically unknown. All this changed however, when in 1954, the University of Chicago began to excavate the Zab river basin in northern Iraq, and Dr. Ralph Solecki discovered the caves of Shanidar and Homo Sapiens’s earliest material culture. According to Roux, these discoveries have vastly contributed to our understanding of the Stone Age period, which he divides into three subdivisions, (the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic) and which reveal the story of the passage from Neolithic to History, from the formation of the first primitive villages in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains to the relatively large and highly civilized Sumerian cities of the lower Tigris-Euphrates valley.
This book, according to Roux, is a more complete study of the history of Mesopotamia, beginning with the first human presence during Paleolithic times, and ending with the collapse of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization, followed by the emergence of the Christian era and its affects on the Mesopotamian civilization.
However, Roux does not delve into the Christian era to discuss how this phenomenon began to spread to Mesopotamia or what particular events prompted it, much less how this region was Christianized and by whom.
Roux describes ancient Mesopotamia and its inhabitants as one unified culture, divided into different city-states, which fought one another for dominance and rule of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization. To demonstrate this, Roux writes, “Surprising as it may seem, the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia had no name covering the totality of the country in which they lived, and the terms they used were either too vague, (“the Land”) or too precise, (“Sumer”, “Akkad”, “Assur”, “Babylon”). So deeply imbedded in their minds were the concepts of city-states and of narrow politico-religious divisions that they apparently failed to recognize the existence of a territorial unity which to us is obvious.” (3). Roux emphasizes that “the only obvious difference between the Akkadians and the Sumerians is a linguistic one; in all other respects these two ethnic groups are indistinguishable.” (151). Roux’s opinion is that the Sumerian and the Akkadian languages are unrelated to one another so far as the information available to us. But he reiterates many times that Sumerians borrowed many Akkadian words, as Sumer lost its glory and power when it was succeeded by other dynastic periods.
Roux argues that the Uruk culture appears as the development of conditions that existed during the Ubaid period, and that the Sumerians were the product of that culture, hence indigenous to Iraq. From there on, Roux divides the book into historical periods that span three thousand years, beginning with the Sumerians, followed by the Akkadians, the Amorites, the “new people,” (Hurians and Kassites) all the way to the rise of the Assyrian empire, which was finally succeeded by the Babylonian dynasty.
Roux’s description of each dynasty is illuminating, to the extent he uses new archaeological evidence to shed light on some of the misinformation with which traditional historians have plagued us. His description of the Arameans is particularly enlightening in the way he uses Assyrian inscriptions to clarify some of the misconceptions regarding the Arameans. For example, Roux states that the Arameans made their first appearance in texts of the Akkadians, Ur II and Old Babylonian periods, where occasional mention is made of the city of Arami and of individuals by the name of Aramu. He suggests that this may be no more than a phonetic resemblance, hence we must consider only two dates: the fourteenth or the twelfth century, depending on the acceptance of some kind of relationship between Arameans and the Ahlamu. The Ahlamu, according to Roux, “are first mentioned in a mutilated el-Amarna letter, alluding to the king of Babylon, during the same period their presence is attested to in Assyria, at Nippur and even Dilmun, (Bahrain).” (274). Roux, in an earlier chapter of his book, had asserted that Shalmaneser I defeated the Hurrians and their Hittite Ahlamu allies in Jezira, and that in the following century, a road was cut from Babylon to Hattusas, and Tikulti-Ninurta I (1244-1208) claims that he conquered Mari, Hana, and Rapiqum on the Euphrates and the mountains of the Ahlamu. He maintains, that this gives the indication that the Arameans were troublesome mountain tribes active in the Syrian desert, along the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf, at least from the fourteenth century B.C. Roux cites an inscription of Tiglath Pileser I (1115-1077 B.C.) in which the Assyrian king, mentions for the first time, the “Ahlamu-Arameans” (Ahlame-Aramaia). Roux further states that from then on, the Ahlamu rapidly disappear from Assyrian annals to be replaced by the Aramaeans, (Aramu-Arimi) and that the word Aramaia is “gentilic” adjective and could be translated as (Those of) the Ahlamu (who are) Aramaean, in which case is an indication that the Aramaeans were the highlander tribes of the Ahlamu. This would make perfect sense, considering that in our language “Ramaya” means high, or in this case highlander. To the Assyrians, it is obvious that if the word “Aramaya” is a gentilic adjective, and has always been used to describe someone living above, (Ramaya) as in rumyateh, then the Arameans were nothing more than people of the mountains, or highlanders.
One of the most important discussions in this book is how the Aramaic language came to be in use. Roux states that “barbaric Aramaeans” contributed nothing to Mesopotamian culture, but upon these “savages” fell the privilege of imposing their language on the entire Middle East. To a large part, this was due to their sheer numbers, and partly because they dropped the Akkadian and adopted the Phoenician alphabet, which was much simpler than Akkadian. As early as the eighth century, Aramaic began to compete with Akkadian, and around 500 B.C. when the Achaemenian monarchs, who had conquered Mesopotamia, were looking for a language that could be understood by all their subjects, they chose Aramaic. From there on, Aramaic became the lingua franca of their vast empire.
Another interesting comment Roux makes is in relation to the Akkadian Period, in which Sargon I unifies Mesopotamia for the first time since the prehistoric Ubaid Period, extending it from the Taurus to the “lower sea” and from the Zagros to the Mediterranean. This expansion and unification, according to Roux “became the dream of every subsequent monarch, and from the middle of the third millennium until the fall of Babylon in 539 B.C. the history of ancient Iraq consists of their attempts, their success, and their failures to achieve this goal.” (147).
Roux’s humanistic approach to the Assyrian empire is quite different from most historians, who have nearly always depicted the Assyrians as genocidal jihadists, hell-bent on liquidating their non-Assyrian neighbors for the sake of their God, Ashur, and their land Assur. According to Roux, the Assyrians, like any other nationality in Mesopotamia, did commit atrocities in war time, but Roux adds the following remarks:
“It must be noted, however, that these atrocities were usually reserved for those local princes and their nobles who had revolted and that in contrast with the Israelites, for instance, who exterminated the Amalekites for purely ethno-cultural reasons, the Assyrians never indulged in systematic genocides.” (291).
Having used the first four hundred pages of this book to describe how the Mesopotamian civilization was born, discussing the splendor of Assyria and Babylon in full detail, Roux uses the last 23 pages to describe how it died. Roux divides the time between the fall of Babylon in 539 B.C. to 227 A.D in three periods: 1) the Achaemenian period (539-331 B.C.), 2) the Hellenistic period (331-126 B.C.) and finally 3) the Parthian period (126 B.C.-A.D. 227). Each of these periods had dramatic affects on the Mesopotamians and their country, but Roux emphasizes that it was during the Achaemenian period, that Mesopotamia, without her own rulers, became paralyzed. Her buildings left unattended would crumble, her canals neglected would become silted-up and part of the land would revert to desert once more, and Mesopotamia would be buried under a blanket of earth. Having remained under the earth so long, humanity forgot the Mesopotamian contributions to science, astronomy, law, government, libraries, art, medicine, agriculture, and all the things modern man has attributed to the Hellenestic and Parthian civilization.
In an attempt to be more exacting, Roux injects some fairly recent geo-political changes that have affected Iraq’s topography. For example, he substitutes the word “Kurdistan,” for many of the ancient northern Iraqi sites familiar by geography and history. This is confusing, especially when Roux fails to identify the “Kurdistan” region, even on the maps he provides in this book, and falsely assumes the average reader will comprehend this transformation. By not using the traditional names of ancient northern Iraqi cities, some of Roux’s cultural and geographic discussions in relation to ancient people, become mired in recent geopolitical events affecting the “new Iraq,” which is in contradiction to the title of his book, “Ancient Iraq.” To that extent, it is not only difficult to visualize some of the areas described by Roux, but the historical and geographical realities are simply not there when we think of ancient Mesopotamia in relation to Kurds, whose origins can be traced to the ancient city of Kurdo-Khoi in Iran, not ancient Iraq.
This book accomplishes two important goals for Roux: The first is that Roux wants to redeem himself for the first and second editions, which were admittedly not up to the standards required from a historian. The second is to uncover the glory of Mesopotamia, so long remained hidden and unknown to the modern world, in an attempt to “do justice to the importance assumed by the Sumero-Akkadian civilization in the history of mankind.” (425).
