CHAPTER TWO
THE WORLD OF
BABYLONIAN COUNTRYSIDES^1
Seth Richardson
The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American
settlement westward explain American development.
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American
History, Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July 12 , 1893INTRODUCTION:
A CIVILIZATION OF VILLAGEST
urner’s famous thesis – revolutionary in 1893 – is by now long out of fashion
in telling American history, useful only as a talking point for revisions and
reappraisals. The original thesis was about a pericentric process: the western frontier,
through its cornucopia of resources and refuges, shaped the society of the metropole
(the urban East). Frontier history has now become a discipline concerned with the
diversity of places (emphasis on the plural) that accommodated a variety of societies,
politics, and economies.^2 At the same time, critiques from the fields of geography
and comparative politics are reviving attention to spatial relations as an irreducible
political element of the state.^3 These critiques are both long-anticipated (especially
following the influence of Robert McC. Adams)^4 and newly received by the archaeo-
logical arm of Ancient Near Eastern studies.^5
Historical studies of the Babylonian countryside are only recently looking at place
and not process.^6 Whether the countryside was a landscape accommodating Orientalist
narratives about the-desert-and-the-sown, the symbiotic thesis of dimorphism, or the
passive actor to the expansionist state, the countryside has appeared as an undif-
ferentiated foil to state narratives, rather than a subject in and of itself. One of the
results has been to relegate rural political history to the most remote end of antiquity,
because histories typically require that urban dominance of their hinterlands be a
finished process by the end of the proto-historic period (twenty-fourth century BC)
so they can get on with the business of telling stories about territorial states, empires,
and international relations.
In material studies of settlement pattern and economy, the Babylonian countryside
is commonly avowed to be the major catchbasin for population and production – this