Review: Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East, by Ömür Harmanşah

Abstract

Omur Harmansah Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 372 pp., 9 maps and 51 b/w illus. $99, ISBN 9781107027947 The urban and architectural traditions of Syro-Anatolia, the region of southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, are the focus of Omur Harmansah’s Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East . As the “world’s desire” in preclassical antiquity, this is the area where the great conquests of the founders of the Hittite Kingdom were directed, through which the Hittite state became acquainted with ancient Mesopotamian lore, and where Assyria had also turned its face on its westward expansion. Syro-Anatolia is a region of deep-seated traditions of city building that reach back to the third millennium BCE; it is the geographic area to which Hittite culture had shifted from its Anatolian heartland by the end of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1550–1200 BCE), and where it remained throughout the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200–850 BCE). It was also the region most coveted by the Assyrian kings, from their forays in the Middle Assyrian period (ca. 1350–1000 BCE) down to its annexation in the eighth century BCE; here they hunted elephants and ostriches, symbolically washed their weapons in the Mediterranean Sea, and exploited the much-prized ivory-carving workshops and viticulture that both flourished in the area. The Egyptian Empire had also aspired toward Syria, with the Thutmoside conquests of the fifteenth century BCE reaching the river Orontes, where famously the Battle of Kadesh was fought in the thirteenth century BCE. As the alleged location of the Cedar Forest of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh , it was a region of mythical grandeur, admired for its position as a commercial crossroads and for the high levels of culture and civilization attained by its often singular civic polities. Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East is a much-needed and welcome project, investigating through the lens of archaeology the built …