Nomads, Tribes, and the State in the Ancient Near East: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives
Click on the participant’s name to download a recording of their lecture (mp3). Unfortunately, technical difficulties prevented us from capturing recordings of the introductory lectures and the first session. Recordings of the discussions following Sessions 2 and 3 vary in quality according to the location of the microphone on the stage.
INTRODUCTION
- Opening Remarks by Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute
- Jeffrey Szuchman (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago) ; Pastoral Nomads, Tribes, and the State: Questions and Problems
SESSION 1: Identifying Nomads: Texts, Artifacts, and Ethnoarchaeology. Chair: McGuire Gibson
- Hans Barnard (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA); The Archaeology of the Pastoral Nomads between the Nile and the Red Sea
- Robert Ritner (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago); Egypt and the Vanishing Libyan: Institutional Responses to a Nomadic People
- Benjamin Saidel (East Carolina University); Pitching Camp: Ethnoarchaeological Investigations of Inhabited Tentcamps in the Wadi Hisma, Jordan
- Bertille Lyonnet (Centre National de la Rechereche Scientifique, Paris); Who Lived in the 3rd Millennium “Round Cities” of Northern Syria?
- Discussion
SESSION 2: Mobility, Economy, and Social Transformation. Chair: David Schloen
- Anatoly Khazanov (University of Wisconsin, Madison); Specific Characteristics of Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Near East
- Anne Porter (University of Southern California); Beyond Dimorphism: How Mobility Shapes, and has Shaped, the Ancient Near East
- Abbas Alizadeh (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago); Prehistoric Mobile Pastoralism in Southwestern Iran: “Enclosed” or Enclosing Nomadism
- Thomas E. Levy (University of California, San Diego); Pastoral Nomads and Iron Age Metal Production in Ancient Edom
- Response: Frank Hole (Yale University)
- Discussion
SESSION 3: Varieties of Tribe-State Interaction. Chair: Adam T. Smith
- Steven A. Rosen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev); History Does Not Repeat Itself: Cyclicity and Particularism in Nomad-Sedentary Relations in the Negev in the Long Term
- Donald Whitcomb (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago); From Pastoral Peasantry to Tribal Urbanites: Arab Tribes and the Foundation of the Islamic State in Syria
- Daniel Fleming (New York University); Kingship of City and Tribe Conjoined: Zimri-Lim at Mari
- Eveline van der Steen (University of Liverpool); Tribal Societies in the 19th Century: A Model
- Response: Thomas Barfield (Boston University)
- Discussion
Revised: June 11, 2008