A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000–323 BC

Citation

Van De Mieroop, M. (2015). A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000–323 BC (3rd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.

Chapter Summary

The book has sixteen numbered chapters: an introductory chapter, then fifteen chapters grouped into three parts, followed by an epilogue, king lists, a guide to further reading, a bibliography and a comprehensive timeline. The three parts follow the author's own periodization: city-states, then territorial states, then empires. The publisher lists, for the third edition, "Key Debate" boxes at the end of each chapter, a new chapter on governance and continuity under the Persian empire, and 46 new illustrations.

Chapter 1: Introductory Concerns

The opening chapter defines the subject before the narrative begins. It treats "Near East" as the region from the eastern Mediterranean coast to central Iran and from the Black Sea to the Red Sea, with Egypt left out except where its empire reached into Asia. Its sections cover the sources (clay tablets and archaeology), the geography and the prehistoric developments that precede the story. The chapter also explains why the book starts in the late fourth millennium and stops with Alexander's defeat of Persia, and sets out the city-state, territorial-state and empire scheme that organizes the rest.

Part I: City-States

• Chapter 2, Origins: The Uruk Phenomenon: the origins of cities, the development of writing and administration, the "Uruk expansion" and its aftermath.
• Chapter 3, Competing City-States: The Early Dynastic Period: the written sources and their historical uses, political developments in southern Mesopotamia, the wider Near East, Early Dynastic society and scribal culture.
• Chapter 4, Political Centralization in the Late Third Millennium: the kings of Akkad and the Third Dynasty of Ur.
• Chapter 5, The Near East in the Early Second Millennium: nomads and sedentary people, Babylonia, Assyria and the east, and Mari and the west.
• Chapter 6, The Growth of Territorial States in the Early Second Millennium: Shamshi-Adad and the kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia, Hammurabi's Babylon, the Old Hittite kingdom and the "Dark Age".

Part II: Territorial States

• Chapter 7, The Club of the Great Powers: the political system of the major states, diplomacy and trade, regional warfare, and shared ideologies and social organizations.
• Chapter 8, The Western States of the Late Second Millennium: Mittani, the Hittite New Kingdom and Syria-Palestine.
• Chapter 9, Kassites, Assyrians, and Elamites: Babylonia, Assyria and the Middle Elamite kingdom.
• Chapter 10, The Collapse of the Regional System and Its Aftermath: the events, an interpretation of them, and the aftermath.

Part III: Empires

• Chapter 11, The Near East at the Start of the First Millennium: the eastern states and the west.
• Chapter 12, The Rise of Assyria: patterns of Assyrian imperialism, the historical record, ninth-century expansion and internal decline.
• Chapter 13, Assyria's World Domination: the creation of an imperial structure, the defeat of the great rivals, administration and ideology, Assyrian culture and the empire's fall.
• Chapter 14, The Medes and Babylonians: the Medes and the Anatolian states, and the Neo-Babylonian dynasty.
• Chapters 15–16, The Creation of a World Empire: Persia; Governing a World Empire: Persia: the sources and their challenges, the rise and expansion of Persia, governance of subject states, imperial structure, administration, local forms of Persian administration and the end of the empire.

Epilogue and Reference Matter

The epilogue is followed by king lists (pp. 348–363), a guide to further reading, the bibliography and a comprehensive timeline.

Key Concepts

Framing the Subject (Chapter 1)

• Ancient Near East: the region of Mesopotamia and its neighbours, defined by where sources survive rather than by fixed borders.
• Mesopotamia, Assyria, Babylonia: geographical terms that the book fixes in a box on usage, with Assyria in the north and Babylonia in the south.
• Tell: the artificial mound formed by successive occupation, the typical archaeological site of the region.

Political Forms (Parts I–III)

• City-state, territorial state, empire: the three stages of political organization used as the book's structure.
• Uruk phenomenon: the late fourth-millennium developments in cities, writing and administration treated in Chapter 2.
• The "Dark Age": a period of thin documentation after the early second millennium, discussed in Chapter 6.
• Club of the great powers: the diplomatic system of the late second millennium covered in Chapter 7.
• Collapse of the regional system: the end of that order, to which Chapter 10 gives its own interpretation section.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear organizing idea. The city-state, territorial-state and empire sequence gives a sprawling twenty-seven centuries a visible shape, and the part divisions at pp. 19, 135 and 221 make it easy to locate any period.
• Candour about sources. Chapter 1 explains that surviving texts and excavations favour moments of political strength and the viewpoint of rulers, and that excavation has followed modern politics. Chapter 3 opens with a section on the written sources and their historical uses. Readers are taught to question the evidence, not only to absorb a narrative.
• Thematic as well as political coverage. Sections on scribal culture, society, Assyrian culture, shared ideologies and administration sit beside the dynastic narrative.
• Study apparatus. The front matter lists illustrations, charts, maps, debates, boxes and documents, and the back matter has king lists, a further-reading guide and a timeline.

Limitations

• Mesopotamia-centred. The author acknowledges in Chapter 1 that Mesopotamia supplies the geographical and chronological frame and that other regions are often treated through their contact with it.
• Defined scope. Egypt is excluded except when its empire extended into Asia, prehistory is only outlined in the introduction, and the account stops at Alexander. Readers wanting a treatment of earlier or later periods need other books.
• Organized by states and periods. The chapter structure follows rulers and states, so society, economy and culture appear as sections inside period chapters (for example Early Dynastic society and scribal culture in Chapter 3) rather than as themes traced across the whole span.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the ancient history course this is the only book that covers the Near East, and it is a full-length survey of one region. Cartledge's Ancient Greece: A Very Short Introduction is a short history told through eleven cities, Lane Fox's The Classical World is a single-volume narrative of Greece and Rome, and Hornblower's The Greek World 479–323 BC and Goodman's The Roman World 44 BC–AD 180 are detailed period histories. Van De Mieroop's account ends with Alexander's defeat of Persia in 331 BC, shortly before the year at which Hornblower's volume stops, and its two Persian chapters tell the story of the empire whose wars with Greece form the backdrop to Hornblower's starting point.

Livy's The Early History of Rome is a primary source of a different kind, a Roman narrative of origins. Read after Van De Mieroop, it shows how another civilization wrote about its beginnings, whereas the Near Eastern book is about how modern historians reconstruct a past from tablets and excavations.

How to Use This Book

The book suits first-time readers of Near Eastern history. The publisher presents it as a comprehensive overview of the multicultural civilizations of the region, with accessible discussions of key texts and sources. Comfort with maps and chronological tables helps, since the narrative moves between Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria-Palestine, Egypt's frontiers and Iran.

A practical plan:

• Start with Chapter 1, including the box on geographical names, which settles the vocabulary used later.
• Core path: Chapters 2–6 for the origins and the first states, Chapter 7 for the diplomatic system, Chapter 10 for the collapse, then Chapters 12, 13 and 15–16 for the first-millennium empires.
• Skim or use as reference: Chapters 8, 9 and 11 for specific regions and states, and the king lists when a name or a date needs placing.
• Use the study features: read each chapter's Key Debate box critically and compare it with the sources the chapter itself lists, and keep the timeline open while moving between regions.
• Add primary texts: the publisher notes discussions of the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh, so a translation of either gives the chapters a text to test against.