Some Things, Somewhere, for 2000 Years

Amanda H. Podany. Weavers, Scribes and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Like Deirdre in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Amanda Podany can take a pile of receipts and read vivid, compelling stories of real people’s lives. In this case, the receipts are made from clay and are up to 4000 years old, but the principle is the same. Some of the stories end badly; most dissolve into the fog of history; and there are a few happy endings. This is, quite simply, the best popular history of any region of the ancient Near East I’ve read, and probably the nearest thing possible for the ancient Near East to Kathryn Hughes’s Victorians Undone which I talked about a couple weeks ago. The account of the nabitums, women dedicated by their families to the sun god Shamash who exercised more autonomy than the vast majority of women in ancient agricultural societies, is alone worth the price of admission.

I loved this book. Now I’m going to complain about one tiny little mistake: both because the mistake is significant in its own right, and because it’s an opportunity to talk about another kind of potential contradiction–those between the biblical text and ancient texts outside the Bible. These never trouble biblical literalists, since they can simply say that an ancient source is ignorant of the events the Bible is discussing. So it is different. For the rest of us, it’s way of expanding our horizons.

Late in her book, Podany is discussing the Persian king Cyrus, who conquered Babylon in 539 BCE. A famous ancient document called the Cyrus Cylinder records how happy most of the Babylonians were about Cyrus taking over, since the previous king, Nabonidus, was very unpopular. She doesn’t quote the cylinder, but rather summarizes:

“He reversed the practice of deporting conquered peoples and instead allowed former deportees to return to their homelands. Among these were the Jews, who were permitted to leave Babylon and to return to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple.”

This vision of oppressed people throughout the old Babylonian Empire rising up and going home is a commonplace of biblical and ancient Near Eastern writing. This vision might be historically true. But it is emphatically not supported by evidence. The only people deported by the Babylonians that we know to have returned to their homeland after the Persians took over are the Jewish people… and a single family of Syrians from a town called Neirab.

Where does this stirring vision come from, then? From conflating two different edicts of Cyrus, one from the Bible and the other from the Cylinder.

Here’s the biblical version (Ezra 1:2-4, NRSV):

2 ‘Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem in Judah. ³Any of those among you who are of his people—may their God be with them!—are now permitted to go up to Jerusalem in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel—he is the God who is in Jerusalem; ⁴and let all survivors, in whatever place they reside, be assisted by the people of their place with silver and gold, with goods and with animals, besides freewill-offerings for the house of God in Jerusalem.’

Compare this to Podany’s completely typical summary, and what do we see? Instead of all sorts of nations rising up, only the Jewish people are authorized to go home. Now, compare the Cyrus Cylinder. It begins by recounting how happy the Babylonians were that their chief god Marduk had given their kingdom to Cyrus. He then continues by saying whom he allowed to return to their homes:

“From [Shuanna] I sent back to their places to the city of Ashur and Susa, Akkad, the land of Eshnunna, the city of Zamban, the city of Meturnu, Der, as far as the border of the land of Qutu – the sanctuaries across the river Tigris – whose shrines had earlier become dilapidated, the gods who lived therein, and made permanent sanctuaries for them. I collected together all of their people and returned them to their settlements, and the gods of the land of Sumer and Akkad which Nabonidus – to the fury of the lord of the gods – had brought into Shuanna, at the command of Marduk, the great lord, I returned them unharmed to their cells, in the sanctuaries that make them happy.” (Israel Finkel, tr.)

(Check out the British Museum’s website for this artifact; it’s fantastic and contains 3 complete translations: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1880-0617-1941)

It is easy to miss in this long periodic Akkadian sentence, but the returnees here are divine statues of the gods, together with their cultic personnel, and all the locations are in Mesopotamia. And somehow, when twentieth-century scholars looked at the Cylinder in one lens, and Ezra 1 in another lens, they stereoscopically combined “all the god and temple personnel” and “all the Jewish people” into “all the peoples.”

A few scholars have pointed to the small town of Neirab as a possible second group of returnees, which would at least make the number of people groups plural, and, if 2, why not 3, or 4, or 10? This town is not well known, and there are only a few studies of it. Below I’ve listed the three more recent articles I’ve relied on to discuss these folks. (One of them I spent $42 to read–only the second time I’ve spent money on this site, but probably not the last.) They’re excellent and each builds on the last to reach the conclusion I do here.

The Neirab tablets are just the sort of archive of receipts that Podany deals with so excellently. They’re records of loans of grain and silver, mostly from one family, all living in a town called Neirab. Because the texts were found in Neirab in Syria, the first scholars to read these texts assumed that this was that Neirab, a town that still exists (now notable for being one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps). The problem was that two texts had one person traveling from Neirab to two other cities in two days that are more than a 100 miles from Syrian Neirab–a prodigious accomplishment by horse!

The problem was solved by Israel Eph’al, who noted that when the Babylonians deported an ethnic group, they settled them in Mesopotamia in a town named after their homeland. The “Neirab” in these texts was not in Syria, but by the banks of the Euphrates. But because the tablets were found in the hometown, its people must have returned there at some point after the last date in the archive, in the reign of Darius, a Persian king later than Cyrus. Presto: a second returned ethnic group!

Except… Tolini and Alstola worked through the archive very carefully, and found that only a few tablets did not reference one particular family, and that the main family so clearly had a leading role in the larger community that those others probably belonged to people who were in one way or another connected to them. So this joyous homecoming–and I’m sure it was joyous–was by one group of family and friends, not by a whole ethnic group. And the movements of one merchant family in Mesopotamia are no mystery, as Podany demonstrates throughout her book.

So what does this mean? It means that the return of Jewish people, in a few waves, to Judea has no parallel in the ancient Near East. It means that the biblical version of the Cyrus edict may reflect some close historical reality: royal authorization, whether from Cyrus or a later Persian king, for large sections of one ethnic group to relocate to their homeland. It was unprecedented. It was weird, idiosyncratic, possibly inscrutable. Or, might we say, in historical terms… a miracle?

There. The one blemish in Podany’s book is polished away. If you have any interest in ancient history, especially of ancient people that often seem just as modern as we are, you have a wonderful read ahead of you.

Things I Read for This:

Israel Eph’al. “The Western Minorities in Babylonia in the 6th-5th Centuries B.C.: Maintenance and Cohesion.” Orientalia 47 (1978): 74-90.

Gauthier Tolini. “From Syria to Babylon and Back: The Neirab Archive,” in Exile and Return: The Babylonian Context (Jonathan Stökl and Caroline Waerzeggers, eds.). Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Tero Alstola. Judeans in Babylonia: A Study of Deportees in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BCE. Leiden: Brill, 2020 (pp. 237-250). This one is Open Access, folks! URL: https://brill.com/display/title/35981?language=en