“cApiru and Munnabtūtu — The Stateless of the First Cosmopolitan Age,”
Journal of Near Eastern Studies 36/2, 145-147.
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The historical analysis proposed by M.B. Rowton [see, as for the present topic, JNES 35/1 (1976), pp. 13-20 (JSTOR)], namely the so-defined ‘structural approach’ (i.e. the attempt to understand historical events as an organic process), is discussed in this paper focused on the problem of the capiru and their definition as ‘fugitives’: since another Akkadian term, munnabtūtu, means almost the same, the author addresses the question of how we could better define the first lemma.
The first possible explanation deals with a possible synchronic use of both the terms; the second advanced solution is to envisage a chronological distribution (thus, a diachronic difference) in the use of both the terms. The same phaenomenon, i.e. the transferring of social groups from a place to another, ought to have been defined with two different, but lexically homogenous terms.
The author further explains the difference in terminology: “The city-states and the expanded territorial states were the natural locus for such a political and legal development, and it is with them that the political term munnabtūtu originates. The social term capiru, on the other hand, is more closely linked in its origins with the outcasts from a tribal group, or ‘detribalized’ individuals, as Rowton calls them, although by the second half of the second millennium the term is commonly used for individuals uprooted from their original group in general, whether urban or tribal. The growth of the universal state (the ‘empire’) in the first millennium accounts for the disappearance of the phenomenon and therefore of the two terms in their meaning described here: the political centralization achieved by the Assyrians, and others after them, left no interstices within the politico-territorial fabric of the Near East through which the ‘fugitives’ could slide” (pp. 146-147).
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