“The Semiotics of Ethnicity: The Case of Hurrian Urkesh,”
in J.C. Fincke (ed.), Festschrift für Gernot Wilhelm, Dresden: ISLET, pp. 79-90.
The search for ethnicity of ancient populations is indeed a slippery floor: the definition itself of ‘ethnicity’ or of ‘ethnical group’ raises a lot of questions which are investigated in an in-depth analysis within this paper, dealing with the case of ethnicity at Urkesh (under a semiotic perspective).
Paragraph 1 describes the relationship between semiotics and ethnicity, describing how “self-identification is at the root of ethnicity. Individuals recognize themselves as members of a group, and are so recognized by those outside the group” (p. 80). This identification bases on the concept of ‘ethneme’, defined as “any cultural trait that assumes contrastive valence as a group identifier” (p. 80), a kind-of ‘signs’ recognized by a cultural group.
Paragraph 2 defines the boundaries of the definition of ‘ethnicity’, qualifying it with the following characteristics (= it has to be): 1) sufficiently large; 2) consistent through time; 3) a marked sense of identity; 4) a system of cultural traits which are 5) ascribed, 6) symbolic, 7) non-organizational, 8) with no institutional leadership [for this topic, cf. also Buccellati 1999 and Buccellati 2005].
Paragraph 3 focuses on the concepts of ‘factuality’, ‘history’ and ‘historiography’: ‘factuality’ refers to “things and events [which] have a legitimate claim to be factual if they belong to the sphere of referentiality that conditions everything else to which they, precisely, refer” [thus, it is inferential] (p. 82); ‘history’ is a discipline which “brings us to the documentary level” [thus, it is an inferential and direct documentation of factuality] (p. 83); ‘historiography’ “is the moment of reflection about historicity” [thus, it represents the “active/passive/reactivated awareness of, and reflection on, historicity”] (p. 83).
Paragraph 4 presents the cluster of ethnicity at Urkesh, involving: 1) language (Hurrian, reflected on texts, royal titulature and onomastics); 2) religion (detectable in the ābi, the monumental Temple Terrace and the andiron in the household; 3) style and customs; 4) distributional cohesiveness. Paragraph 5 describes the differentiation between ‘Hurrians’ and ‘non-Hurrians’ (i.e Akkadians and Amorites), restressing the clear existence of a ‘Hurrian ethnicity’, at least at Urkesh (a site where this concept finds indeed one of its best attestations).