Negotiating Imperialism and Resistance in Late Bronze Age Ugarit: The Rise of Alphabetic Cuneiform

Boyes, Philip J.

doi:10.1017/s0959774318000471

Cited by 3 publications

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References 28 publications

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“…Ugaritian elites appropriated and deployed Hurrian language in certain social contexts while restricting its use in others. It is tempting to see this as part of a broader attempt to balance wider regional elite culture (which often drew on features seen in the former Hurrian-speaking empire of Mitanni) with a popular localism, which we see in other aspects of elite practice in the city in the later thirteenth century (Boyes 2019a).…”

Section: Brexit Archaementioning

confidence: 99%

Writing and Social Diversity in Late Bronze Age Ugarit

Boyes

2022

Papers From the Institute of Archaeology

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Writing at Ugarit has received a great deal of scholarly attention for the wide range of languages and writing systems used, and especially for the city’s distinctive alphabetic cuneiform script which accounts for around half of the inscribed material from the site. The vast majority of the rest is in the Akkadian language and logo-syllabic cuneiform script. This written material is, justifiably, usually seen as scribal, in that the vast majority stems from the state bureaucracy and from professional writers formally trained in a curriculum derived from the Mesopotamian cuneiform tradition. However, by using the blanket term ‘scribe’ we risk obscuring potential diversity in who used writing and why. This paper will explore the extent to which we can identify social diversity within writing practices at Ugarit and will focus in particular on three main areas: gender and women’s literacy; social mobility and writing outside the traditional literate establishment; and the relationship between writing and possible minority communities within Ugaritian society.

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Section: Brexit Archaementioning

confidence: 99%

Writing and Social Diversity in Late Bronze Age Ugarit

Boyes

2022

Papers From the Institute of Archaeology

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“…1.Writing probably has a much longer history at Ugarit, but this is the only period for which tablets survive. For discussion, see Boyes (2019, 4–5; 2021a, 280).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Wider World of Writing. Networks of People, Practice and Culture Underpinning Writing in Late Bronze Age Ugarit

Boyes

2022

CAJ

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Writing is a social practice, and as such is fundamentally entwined with a wide array of other forms of human activity, professional categories and aspects of cultural life. However, this is often not fully reflected in scholarly approaches to writing practices, which tend to focus almost exclusively on the act of inscription itself, and on the practices of literates alone. Taking as its case study the Late Bronze Age Syrian polity of Ugarit and focusing on the social and cultural aspects of the procurement of raw materials for writing, this article aims to explore some of the ways in which groups of people beyond the urban, literate elite facilitated, contributed to and shaped the nature of writing practices.

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Urban Squares in Late Bronze Age Ugarit: a Street View on Ancient Near Eastern Governance

Gilibert

2021

Journal of Near Eastern Studies

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Zaccagnini, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Here and in the following, dates are intended as , if not stated otherwise.1 Fargher et al., "Wealth Inequality, Social Stratification, and the Built Environment" (2020); McAnany, "Approaching the Archaeopo-this perspective, political authority is always performative, people-oriented, and negotiated in public. In archaeological terms, an archaeopolitical perspective focuses on public space to apprehend the negotiation of power between rulers and other civic community members. 2 In ancient Near Eastern studies, text-oriented scholars are currently rediscovering a similar interest in non-royal institutions and the politics of consensus. 3 litical" (2018); Martin, "Reflections on the Archaeopolitical" (2016). Central to this approach is collective action theory, as theorized in the social sciences since the 1990s. Essentially, collective action theory postulates that governance works through cooperation and bargain rather than coercion and mystification. One of its tenets is that "the more principals (rulers) depended on the populace for labor, tribute, or other revenues, the greater the agency (or "voice") a population had in negotiating public benefits." (De Marrais and Earle, "Collective Action Theory" [2017]: 183). Daniel Fleming has used collective action theory to interpret the social landscape of Emar, Mari, and Israel: Fleming, Legacy of Israel (2012), Democracy's Ancient Ancestors (2004) and Time at Emar (2000).2 "Civic community" is here intended to mean every community of persons bound together by a sense of belonging to a specific urban place, following Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia (1964), 95.3 E.g., the essays on collective governance in Wilhelm, Organization, Representation, and Symbols of Power (2012), 85-225, the session on "the world of politics" in Rollinger and van Dongen, Mesopotamia and the Ancient World (2015), 413-86, and Martin and Snell, "Democracy and Freedom" (2005).Rural Community [1976], 103) or 22,000-29,000 individuals (Liverani, "Histoire" [1979], who distinguishes between 20,000-25,000 villagers and 2,000-4,000 individuals affiliated with royal estates). Adding 6,000-8000 city dwellers, the total population of the kingdom was thus estimated at 28,000-36,000 individuals. According to these calculations, city dwellers would have amounted to 16%-29% of the total population. Based on the newly published administrative list RS 94.2411, Vidal recently proposed a lower estimate for the rural population of 11,000-14,000 individuals, organized in 200 villages, with, on average, fourteen families per village with four to five members per family (Vidal, "On the Demography of Ugaritian Villages" [2014]). If this were true, the total population of the kingdom would drop to 17,000-22,000 individuals, with a considerably higher percentage of city dwellers (27%-47%). Vidal's new estimate, however, should be emended by adding the personnel of the royal farms (Ug. gt) and vineyards, shepherds employed fulltime by th...

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Negotiating Imperialism and Resistance in Late Bronze Age Ugarit: The Rise of Alphabetic Cuneiform

Cited by 3 publications

References 28 publications

Writing and Social Diversity in Late Bronze Age Ugarit

Writing and Social Diversity in Late Bronze Age Ugarit

The Wider World of Writing. Networks of People, Practice and Culture Underpinning Writing in Late Bronze Age Ugarit

Urban Squares in Late Bronze Age Ugarit: a Street View on Ancient Near Eastern Governance

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