Part of the conversation in Theory tonight is worth mentioning.
In discussing landscape archaeology and issues of space and it's social construction, we fell back into the difficulties inherent in characterizing the political organization of early societies without reverting to language implying Neo-evolutionary views of political development (Band-Tribe-Chiefdom-State). It's a can of worms. Essentially by using terms like "state" you gloss over any individuating characteristics of a given society's organization for the sake of an implicit statement concerning the linearity of human cultural history.
So we were discussing this and came to the topic of borders, as we talked about the fact that it's quite probable that many early polities didn't really concern themselves overmuch with physical borders of 'their land', but rather were preoccupied with control of resources - be they human or material (this could well have been the case with the Inca for instance, territoriality having been imported by Pizarro and his spaniard chums).
Mapped over to the marginal areas of the Southern Levant, this yields that semi-nomadic groups who lived (mostly) from herding or trade would have been predominantly interested in establishing rights not to surface territory or even resource points or nodes, but rather to vectors. That is, routes from one place to another.
The concept of borders has been relatively uncritically applied to the study of ancient Israel (unless I'm mistaken). I wonder how different the borders of, say, the divided monarchies are from our 20-21st century conception.
9.4.08
Borders
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2 comments:
I think it's an interesting point that needs to be made, but I also think that we need to re-think our concept of "borders" in general. The "borders" of the United Monarchy, or any polity in the ancient Levant were undoubtedly much more fluid than we can imagine in the absence of check-points or somewhere to get your Philistine passport stamped. That being said, I think you're right about trade networks or routes being more important (technically these cross-cut "borders" like an interstate highway), so I think instead of building a catalog of fortresses (e.g., Negevite forts or those in the Galilee) and connecting the dots to get a border, we should look at potential routes through the area and more importantly, what resources can be gained by using those routes. In the words of Dan, does that make sense? Talk to my colleague, he does fortifications; I only look at settlements and hinterlands in an Annales perspective (Merci, Le Roy Ladurie).
have you ever heard of Mesopotamian kudurru - the boundary stone? always makes me think of how different the borders were back then. too bad I missed that class. it's crunch time and the topic are more and more interesting, as always.
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