Hans J. Nissen - The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C.

Preface to the English Edition

In this English translation of the original German edition of my Grundzge einer Geschichte der Frhzeit des Vorderen Orients, substantial changes have been incorporated. Due to strict space limitations and the impossibility of including photographs, parts of the German version were substantially abridged and the illustrations could not meet the quality intended. I was happy to be able to restore and, at the same time, to revise the text. Also, the bibliography could extensively be enlarged to include more technical titles but still be important for a general presentation. Last but not least, I was grateful for the opportunity to increase the number of illustrations, most of which serve their purpose better in the form of photographs than in line drawings.

Reviewers of the German edition have voiced some criticism: archaeologists would have appreciated the discussion of more archaeological details, and philologists would have preferred a larger presentation of the vast written record of Early Mesopotamia. But as the German title implied, this book was intended to be the outline of a historyof several possible oneswith a particular general view in mind. Again, it is true that aspects of religion are not treated with the same weight they enjoyed in the life of the ancient inhabitants of Babylonia. But more than twenty years after A. L. Oppenheims statement in his Ancient Mesopotamiathat a Mesopotamian religion cannot and should not be written I still see his arguments fully justified: the difficulties result from the nature of the available evidence, and the problem of comprehension across the barriers of conceptual conditioning.

This having been said regarding the historical periods, it applies even more to the earlier periods. Yet, future research still may give us better insights.

A word should be said about the geographical terms used here, as they may differ from what the reader is used to. In order to avoid ethnic designations for areas and periods that we have no certain information about, like Sumer or Akkad, I prefer using more neutral terms as they were coined in the Hellenistic period. Thus I am using the terms Babylonia designating the plains between modern Baghdad and the head of the Gulf, and Susiana for the plains of modern Khuzestan. Mesopotamia stands more or less for the territory of modern Iraq, of which Northern Mesopotamia means the area north of Baghdad, whereas Southern Mesopotamia refers to the same territory as Babylonia.

I should like to express my thanks to those who helped me in the process of producing this book in English: to those who instigated the idea, to the translators, to those who provided the photographs, and, particularly, to the people at the University of Chicago Press.