History of discoveries

When it comes to the Ancient Near East, the term "international relations" is generally used, although it is a misnomer if taken literally, since the term "nation" cannot be used as such for these high periods; it is probably better to speak of diplomatic relations. Whatever the period, the conclusion of alliances played a central role: this year's lecture has sought to show how closely law and religion intertwined in the conceptions and practices of alliances, attested over some two millennia, from the middle of the ^3rd to the middle of the ^1st millennium.

A passage from theEpic of Tukulti-Ninurta (^13th century BC) offers an interesting perspective:

" Peace is not established without conflict,
Good relations do not come about without rivalry. "

In other words, for the Mesopotamians, peace was not a natural state, but something that had to be built.

Most studies of diplomatic relations in the Near East are devoted to a particular period [1] ; those with a broader temporal spectrum follow a chronological order [2]. To better highlight continuities and evolutions, and avoid too much repetition, this year's lecture has been built thematically.

As an introduction, it was necessary to present the major phases in the history of cuneiform archival discoveries of "international" significance: Tell el-Amarna in Egypt (1887), followed by Hattuša (from 1906), documented the second half of the ^2nd millennium BC. The royal archives at Mari (exhumed from 1934) shed extraordinary light on the ^18th century BC. While the Ugarit site has been excavated since 1929, the " international archives " (14th^{and 13th} centuries BC) were only discovered in the palace in 1951. A veritable revolution in our knowledge of the ^3rd millennium was made possible by the discovery of the Ebla archives (in 1975). Finally, it was only in 1987 that the republication of Neo-Assyrian sources (Nineveh, Nimrud, etc.) gave new impetus to the study of the empires of the ^1st millennium.

We propose here to abandon the "Amarna-centric" perspective that prevails in the study of the history of diplomatic relations in the Ancient Near East, largely due to the history of discoveries, and to restore greater importance to the first half of the ^2nd millennium BC, based on the much more abundant sources published more recently.

References

[1] For example, M. Liverani, Prestige and Interest, International Relations in the Near East, ca. 1600-1100 B.C., Padua, Sargon, coll. "History of the ancient Near East, studies", vol. 1, 1990, or B. Lafont, "Relations internationales, alliances et diplomatie au temps des royaumes amorrites", in J.-M. Durand and D. Charpin (eds.), Mari, Ébla et les Hourrites: dix ans de travaux. Actes du colloque international (Paris, May 1993). Deuxième partie, Amurru 2, Paris, Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations (ERC), 2001, p. 213-328.

[2] This is the case of A. H. Podany, Brotherhood of Kings. How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East, New York, Oxford University Press, 2010, which covers the millennium from 2350 to 1300 in four chapters. Even broader: A. Altman, Tracing the Earliest Recorded Concepts of International Law. The Ancient Near East (2500-330 BCE), Leiden/Boston, Martinus Nijhoff, Legal History Library, vol. 8,^{no. 4} , 2012. On these two books, see my study on "Les débuts des relations diplomatiques au Proche-Orient ancien", Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale, vol. 110,^{no. 1} , 2016, pp. 127-186, DOI: 10.3917/assy.110.0127.