Constituent Confederate And Conquered Space The Emergence Of The Mittani State Topoiberlin Studies Of The Ancient Worldtopoiberliner Studien Der Alten Welt 17 1st Edition Eva Cancikkirschbaum by Eva Cancik-kirschbaum, Nicole Brisch, Jesper Eidem 9783110266412, 3110266415 instant download after payment.

The ‘Mittani empire’ is one of the most enigmatic political structures in Mesopotamian history, largely due to the lack of written documentation from within the state. Reconstructing the emergence and the organisation of this state, whose territory encompassed Upper Mesopotamia touching the Levant in the West and the piedmont plains of the Zagros in the East, as well as parts of Anatolia at the height of its power, is exceedingly difficult. Yet, new research in the past few decades has shown that such a reconstruction is not entirely impossible. This volume represents an approach to the question of how a territory in Upper Mesopotamia of such unprecedented size could be kept under Mittani rule over such a considerable amount of time.
The papers collected here originated from the conference “Constituent, Confederate, and Conquered Space: The Case of the Mittani Transition”. The original aim of the conference was to gain an idea of how the Mittani state emerged in Upper Mesopotamia by examining, on the one hand, previous political and cultural structures in Upper Mesopotamia and northern Syria, and, on the other hand, by studying the partly contemporary Hittite kingdom, whose actions may have contributed significantly to the rise of the Mittani state. Underlying this approach is a rather general question: to what extent is the nature of conquered territory constitutive for the organisation of political space? Is the specific character of the Mittani state therefore mainly a result of contact between differing modes of spatial organisation co- and preexisting in the region? To put it another way: was the success and failure of former or coexisting political structures of any consequence to the formation of a newly emerging state?