Giorgio Buccellati 1990

“‘River Bank,’ ‘High Country’ and ‘Pasture Land’: The Growth of Nomadism on the Middle Euphrates and the Khabur,”
in S. Eichler, M. Wäfler, D. Warburton (eds.), Tell al-Hamidiyah 2, Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, pp. 87-117.

Ancient Syria (and in particular the Khabur region) are investigated in this paper as for what concerns the development of civilization within this area, underlining its peculiar environment and emplacement towards the formation of a local ethnical identity of the Amorites, taking into consideration the ancient perception of the environment as documented in ancient sources of the third and second millennium BC (from Mari, Shemshara, Rimah, Chagar Bazar and Terqa).

After a methodological paragraph (stressing the definition of ethnicity and the concept of perceptual geography), the author describes the environment of the Euphrates and the Tigris, retracing the importance of these rivers in shaping royal designation (e.g., of ‘king of the four river banks’) and local identity.

The following paragraphs analyse the high country (the steppe) and the pasture land, retracing the ancient Akkadian terms used to identify these areas. Furthermore, a paragraph particularly zooms on the role of agro-pastoralism in these lands, suggesting that “large scale nomadism […] developed as a form of land reclamation. […] The so-called ‘nomads’ may in fact be viewed as the rural class, or peasants, who were primarily at home in the valley and by necessity came to ‘settle’, as it were, the steppe” (pp. 98-99), speaking about a ‘nomadization of the peasants’ and arguing with the other three models on the origin of nomadism (the ‘invasion model’, the ‘infiltration model’, ‘the symbiotic relationship’ model [see pp. 100-102]).

The last two paragraphs investigate the tribal-urban interaction and the rural-urban interaction, shaping different environmental zones (labelled as A, B, C and D) dealing with a specific “central rather than peripherical” (p. 112) role of the Khabur plains, where three important Hurrian capitals had developed: (in reverse chronological order) the capital of Mittani (identified by Buccellati with Ta’idi and not with Waššukanni), the great capital of Šamšī-Adad (šubat-Enlil) and, of course, Urkesh itself.