Papers by Seth Richardson
Voices of JIHL, 2024
Interview with Seth Richardson on the "Voices of JHIL" podcast website about Mesopotamian legal c... more Interview with Seth Richardson on the "Voices of JHIL" podcast website about Mesopotamian legal concepts and issues of the 3rd/2nd millennium BC dealt with in the work of the late Amnon Altman. The podcast is hosted by The Journal of the History of International Law; it is the sixth in the journal's 25th anniversary series, jointly produced by Brill and the Max Planck Institute.
Religion and War from Antiquity to Early Modernity, 2024
This essay has a rather basic purpose: to complicate a common assumption in scholarly discourse t... more This essay has a rather basic purpose: to complicate a common assumption in scholarly discourse that Mesopotamian cultural concepts of religion and war were always organized around the endorsement of warfare by the gods and (recursively) that success in war was proof of their power and beneficence. Evidence for this kind of theological rhetoric in royal literature is plentiful enough, but it must be recognized and bracketed for what it is - political speech - and contextualized against other kinds of uses. Beyond typologizing a range of other literary topical responses to war, I argue here that the discursive diversity points to how profoundly unresolved the subject was as a moral/theological problem - as it remains today - and reflects on the incompleteness of the state project.
Ancient States and Infrastructural Power, 2017
Migration and Mobility in the Ancient Near East and Egypt - the Crossroads IV (Lockwood Press), 2024
This study of people displaced from residential and home communities in the Late
Old Babylonian ... more This study of people displaced from residential and home communities in the Late
Old Babylonian period (ca. 1730–1595 BCE) looks at both foreign and native individuals in the same framework for two purposes. First, it is argued that all displacements, from foreign slaves brought from hundreds of miles away to debtors sent to work in local households, belong within a single continuum of displacement for their common attribute of socio-economic inequality. Second, attention to individuals allows us to consider the specific circumstances leading toward displacements that are often not visible in studies of group migration and settlement. Specific populations of displaced persons of the period are then profiled; contexts both ancient and modern are considered to make sense of the findings.
Pomp, Circumstance, and the Performance of Politics: Acting Politically Correct in the Ancient World, ed. Kathryn R. Morgan (Chicago, 2016), 2024
Response paper for the conference volume "Pomp, Circumstance, and the Performance of Politics: Ac... more Response paper for the conference volume "Pomp, Circumstance, and the Performance of Politics: Acting Politically Correct in the Ancient World," ed. Kathryn R. Morgan (Chicago, 2016)
The Cambridge World History of Genocide, 2023
The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery throughout History, 2023
Sacred Nature: Animism and Materiality in Ancient Religions, 2022
This paper surveys the evidence for Babylonian divinatory practices of the Late Old Babylonian pe... more This paper surveys the evidence for Babylonian divinatory practices of the Late Old Babylonian period (ca. 17th century BCE). This is a period in which liver divination was often used to and forts-more so than for almost any other purpose. Catalogues of omens from this time in administrative texts and state letters concerned with obtaining information about the intelligence: from scouts, watchguards, and tribal camps. The parallel concerns for surveillance at the mantic and tactical levels identify an epistemic discourse newly focused on non-urban spaces and concerns, where Mesopotamian ritual and religious attention had previously been focused on cities. Divination was functionally part of a systematic and explicit way of knowledge about landscape, managed through interlocking administrative, ritual, and textual practices.
NABU, 2022
The text reads: 1 udu a-lum 1 aslum sheep 2 sila₄ 2 lambs 1 kir₁₁ gukkal 1 female fat-tailed lamb... more The text reads: 1 udu a-lum 1 aslum sheep 2 sila₄ 2 lambs 1 kir₁₁ gukkal 1 female fat-tailed lamb ud 24-kam the 24th day ki ab-ba-sa₆-ga-ta from Abbasaga šu-mama Šumama i₃-dab₅ took. (blank) iti ezem d nin-a-zu Month of the Ninazu festival mu hu-uh₂-nu-ri{ki} ba-hul Year that Huhnuri was destroyed (AS 7) left side 4 udu (total) 4 sheep
Metatron 2/1, 2022
This essay argues that biblical polemics against “necromancy,” though generally inaccurate as des... more This essay argues that biblical polemics against “necromancy,” though generally inaccurate as descriptions of customs for communication with the dead, nevertheless tell us two things which would otherwise be difficult to discern without comparative evidence. The first is that biblical characterizations about Mesopotamian funerary cult were not whole cloth fictions but built from knowledge—however incomplete and tendentious—of actual practices. Evidence from omens, rituals, and exorcisms gives body to a sense that Babylonians indeed “talked” to the dead, the basis from which cultural stereotypes about “necromancy” could be appropriated and elaborated. The second point is that a full appraisal of the range of practices relating to the care and feeding of the dead in Mesopotamia, while it suggests no “necromancy,” shows that there was less stability to this fraught and contested corner of social life than has generally been acknowledged. Simple declarations that kispum-cult was “the Mesopotamian way of dealing with death” must give way to a recognition of heteropraxy at both the household and institutional level.
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History, 2022
Despite important work on issues of gender and representation with regard to women's history in M... more Despite important work on issues of gender and representation with regard to women's history in Mesopotamia over the past generation or two, less direct attention has been devoted to the hard reality of women's socioeconomic inequality in this starkly patriarchal culture. The present contribution takes up three examples of groups of women living in varying degrees of hardship and deprivation in the Late Old Babylonian period: slave, poor nadītums, and dependents. I analyze small corpora of evidence about these women to make two basic points: first, Mesopotamian women were subject to structural inequities which manifested themselves in repeatable ways (without requiring that we call them "weak" or "powerless"); second, despite consistent and persistent inequality, women's histories were yet as mutable and subject to change as those of men. It is no more effective to write the histories of only "strong women" than it is to write them of only "great men." Intersectional issues such as socioeconomic difference must be taken into account to arrive at a better working picture of this or any society.
Journal of Ancient History
a re-analysis of Old Babylonian letters (2003–1595 BC) reveals the construction of class identity... more a re-analysis of Old Babylonian letters (2003–1595 BC) reveals the construction of class identity for men called “gentlemen” (awīlū) through their use of sympathetic expressions positioning correspondents as brothers, friends, colleagues, etc. While this observation is not new, this article makes two further points. First, I argue that class consciousness was created through the policing of failures to enact the social relations expressed in the letters, rather than superficial claims that such relations existed in the first place. This reading requires that we engage seriously with the contingent nature of class identity—that fears and anxieties about falling out of status were more in evidence as the motor for and incentive towards class membership than simple claims of inclusion or group solidarity. Second, I argue that the sympathy enjoined by the letters simulated the affective-spatial cognitive states necessary for group identity. Group problems of geographic and physical dist...
Tales of Royalty, 2020
What is legitimacy, and what does narrative have to do with it? “Legitimacy” might be the most co... more What is legitimacy, and what does narrative have to do with it? “Legitimacy” might be the most commonly used word in all of ancient Near Eastern political history writing, but its premises have been woefully undertheorized. What follows will, perhaps predictably, quibble over the meaning of a word which is important to many of the papers in this and many other books. But rather than just kibitz over a term and muddy the waters, my goal is to elucidate how narrativity produced political authority through “validity.” I will argue that we ought to use the term “validity” to refer to the concepts of wholeness and cogency of political authority that narrativity creates, rather than the rule-bound criteria that “legitimacy” suggests.
Animals and the Law in Antiquity, 2021
Iraq, 2020
New evidence allows us to demonstrate that a regional trade connected North Syria with both centr... more New evidence allows us to demonstrate that a regional trade connected North Syria with both central Anatolia and Babylonia well into the 17th-Century bc. Archaeological evidence indicates that a specific type of vessel, the globular flask, was produced at Zincirli Höyük in the mid-17th century for the purpose of storing and transporting wine. The simultaneous appearance of these vessels as far afield as Kültepe and Sippar-Amnānum lines up with Late Old Babylonian attestations of alluḫarum-pots in 17th-c. texts from Sippar, Babylon, and Dūr-Abiešuḫ. These, we argue, must refer to the same vessels called aluārum in earlier Old Assyrian texts from Kültepe from the 19th century. Taken together, this evidence points towards the existence of a previously unsuspected trade network centered on the ancient Syrian state of Mamma that thrived in the decades between the collapse of the Old Assyrian Trade Network and the accession of Hattušili I. Through a dialogue between textual and archaeolog...
Impious Dogs, Haughty Foxes and Exquisite Fish, 2019
The Case of Animals in Mesopotamian Literatures 8 E.g., Foster 2002 divided his treatment accordi... more The Case of Animals in Mesopotamian Literatures 8 E.g., Foster 2002 divided his treatment according to the appearance of animals in: 1. cuneiform scholarship (lexicography, divination, and [rare] bestiaries); 2. literature and mythology, both thematically (the animal world and civilization, speaking [to] animals, and figural language) and generically (in proverbs, fables, and narratives); 3. the theme of man as hunter, collector, and tamer of animals; 4. animals and human diet; and 5. animals as objects of humor. On animals in the Near East generally, see further Collins 2002. Kienast 2003 and Yuhong 2001 also treat animals appearing in Sumerian and Akkadian as a unified topic. 9 It is to some degree anachronistic to code Sumerian and Akkadian as 'earlier' and 'later' traditions, respectively; where I point to diachronic change, I do so in a historical rather than linguistic sense. But the changes I describe also track very closely with the historical productivities of the two literary traditions, and to this extent some overlap in the senses is unavoidable and even desirable.
Piracy, Pillage and Plunder in Antiquity, 2019
Having to use the term “empire” to describe Mesopotamian states prior to the first millennium (An... more Having to use the term “empire” to describe Mesopotamian states prior to the first millennium (And specifically prior to the undeniably imperial expansionist Assyrian state before 910 bc.) can cause Assyriologists to shift uncomfortably in their seats. The heroic word fits poorly on the skinny frames of Uruk, Ur, and maybe even Akkad: these states are either not large enough, long-lived enough (hence this volume’s attention to “short-term empires”), or internally coordinated enough to seem to fully qualify.
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Papers by Seth Richardson
Old Babylonian period (ca. 1730–1595 BCE) looks at both foreign and native individuals in the same framework for two purposes. First, it is argued that all displacements, from foreign slaves brought from hundreds of miles away to debtors sent to work in local households, belong within a single continuum of displacement for their common attribute of socio-economic inequality. Second, attention to individuals allows us to consider the specific circumstances leading toward displacements that are often not visible in studies of group migration and settlement. Specific populations of displaced persons of the period are then profiled; contexts both ancient and modern are considered to make sense of the findings.
Old Babylonian period (ca. 1730–1595 BCE) looks at both foreign and native individuals in the same framework for two purposes. First, it is argued that all displacements, from foreign slaves brought from hundreds of miles away to debtors sent to work in local households, belong within a single continuum of displacement for their common attribute of socio-economic inequality. Second, attention to individuals allows us to consider the specific circumstances leading toward displacements that are often not visible in studies of group migration and settlement. Specific populations of displaced persons of the period are then profiled; contexts both ancient and modern are considered to make sense of the findings.
The volume brings Greek and Roman historians together with specialists on early Mesopotamia, late antique Persia, ancient China, Visigothic Iberia, and the Inca empire to compare various models of state power across regional and disciplinary divisions. How did the polis become the body that regulates property rights? Why did Chinese and Persian states maintain aristocracies that sometimes challenged their autocracies? How did Babylon and Rome promote the state as the custodian of moral goods? In worlds without clear borders, how did societies from Rome to Byzantium come to share legal and social identities rooted in concepts of territory? From the Inca empire to Visigothic Iberia, why did tributary practices reinforce territorial ideas about member- ship? Contributors address how states first claimed and developed the ability to delineate territory, promote laws, and establish political identity; and they investigate how the powers that states appropriated came to be seen as their natural and normal domain.