that ‘belonged’, in one way or another, to a particular city. Heather Baker’s chapter
concentrates on Babylonian cities during the first millennium BC. She discusses the
infrastructure, street systems, canals, city walls, gates, temples and other monumental
buildings, paying particular attention to the often neglected domain of residential
quarters. She also raises the question of whether one could detect any design or
planning strategy in the urban lay-out and how tradition, inheritance patterns and
topography determined the use of private and public space.
Material culture is an almost inexhaustible subject; in Mesopotamia it had been
the subject of scholarly scrutiny from the earliest period of writing, when the first
word lists were devised which eventually classified both man-made objects (from tools
to medicines) and natural phenomena (from birds and fishes to the planets).
In Part II, Harriet Crawford, when discussing the built environment of the Old
Babylonian period (roughly, the first half of the second millennium BC), stresses how
the configuration of buildings and streets reflects and determines social behaviour.
She also takes a close look at new architectural techniques that were introduced at
this time, especially in the middle Euphrates region, where ambitious projects, such
as the palace of Mari, attracted attention throughout the Ancient Near East for their
innovative designs. Following on from Heather Baker’s chapter, it gives an opportunity
to compare to what extent the Babylonian urban environment changed and remained
the same across the span of some 1 , 000 years.
Cylinder seals were a unique invention of Mesopotamian culture, closely associated
with the emergence of a complex bureaucracy and urbanism in the late fourth
millennium BC. Dominique Collon, for many years in charge of the seal collections
of the British Museum, presents an overview of the Babylonian seals, their usage,
materials, iconography and design. Seals not only reveal much about managerial
processes and accountability in all kinds of transaction, but also about religious beliefs,
notions of kingship, modes of clothing, links of trade and beliefs in the magic
properties of certain minerals. Mesopotamia’s alluvial soils were famously fertile but
poor in metals and minerals. Dan Potts describes how coveted exotic materials, both
organic and inorganic, were imported to Babylonia, focusing primarily on the east
and south-east, a main source for Mesopotamian trade across the ages. Given that,
in archaeological terms, most of the Babylonian periods belong to the Bronze Age,
the procurement of copper was of vital importance. Many other substances, known
primarily from cuneiform texts, such as precious stones, aromatics, cloths, resins, were
an integral part of the rich material culture which relied on long-distance imports
by sea and land to satisfy the increasingly demanding consumers of luxury goods.
Textiles, on the other hand, were a famous and highly prized export commodity.
Irene Good examines the evidence, epigraphic and archaeological, for the materials,
techniques and design of cloth in Mesopotamia. Though ‘fashions’ in the cut and
draping of clothes seem to have changed little over the centuries, this may be an
impression conveyed by conservatism in modes of visual representation. Zainab Bahrani
takes key examples of public and private monuments that have encoded culturally
specific messages. Bahrani evokes the notion of ‘image magic’ which endows visual
representations with agency to make things happen rather than passive ‘reflection’ of
reality. It shows that the Babylonian world was one in which human beings experienced
themselves as part of a continuum that enmeshes the ‘supernatural’ with the mundane.
Even food and drink were more than just nourishment for the body. Frances Reynold
— Introduction —