1Mr Administrator,

Dear colleagues,

Dear friends,

Ladies and gentlemen,

1 D. Charpin, “Renan, un sémitisant au berceau de l’assyriologie”, in H. Laurens (ed.), Ernest Renan: (...) 2When people ask me what I do, I avoid telling them that I am an “Assyriologist” so as not to confuse them. When I do tell them, the answer is sometimes: “Oh yes, you work on hieroglyphs”. Well no, Assyriologists are not Egyptologists. In 1859, Ernest Renan admittedly coined the word Assyriologist, which is modelled after the term Egyptologist. However, it is important from the start to note a difference between these two disciplines: while the Revue égyptologique was founded in 1880, the same publisher launched the Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale in 1884. Unlike Egyptologists, Assyriologists were therefore not ipso facto archaeologists. From 1843, Assyriologists deciphered the abundance of texts in the Assyrian language that had been discovered in ancient Assyria, in the north of what is currently Iraq (Figure 1). Soon after this discovery they realized that cuneiform writing had served for a sister language, Babylonian, in addition to Assyrian. In around 2000 bce, Babylonian and Assyrian diverged from their ancestor, a Semitic language that their speakers themselves referred to as “Akkadian”. Moreover, from 1877 the Tello excavations showed that before Akkadian, cuneiform was used to write a completely different language, Sumerian. Sumerology thus gradually became a particular branch of Assyriology in the broad sense of the term. The research that followed showed that during the second millennium bce, cuneiform writing was also used for other languages such as Hurrian, Hittite, and Elamite. The term Assyriologist thus became ambiguous: in its broadest sense, it denotes any person studying texts written in cuneiform. These texts, written in very different languages, however, stemmed from distinct civilizations even though the latter were in sufficiently close contact to share the same writing. To avoid this ambiguity, I chose to call the project that was presented to you by Thomas Römer with the support of Nicolas Grimal “Mesopotamian Civilization”, which has also become the title of the Chair that I am honoured to have been appointed to. This wording emphasizes the object of study, and by definition implies a multidisciplinary approach, to which I will return. It keeps the parallel with the Chair of Egyptology, titled “Pharaonic Civilization”. Finally, it has the advantage of fitting within the framework of the Institute of Civilization currently taking shape on the Collège de France’s Cardinal-Lemoine site.

2 A. Parrot, “La civilisation mésopotamienne”, Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale, vol. (...) 3Can we legitimately speak of a “Mesopotamian” civilization? The Ancients did not. In the third and second millennia bce their overarching concept was that of “Sumer and Akkad”. In the second half of the second millennium and in the first millennium bce they spoke of Assyria to denote the north and of Babylonia to denote the south. For a long time this was referred to as the “Assyro-Babylonian civilization”. André Parrot was the one to advocate the concept of “Mesopotamia” in an article published in 1934, which is now long forgotten though it allowed his views to prevail. Mesopotamia, thus understood, was not that of the Greeks or the Romans, which coincided with the Arabic concept of “Al-Jazira”: it combined Assyria and Babylonia (Figure 2). With the discovery of Elba, it became clear that the concept was too narrow since it excluded a large part of Syria, and researchers proposed the more accurate though somewhat clumsy adjective Syro-Mesopotamian. I will stick to “Mesopotamian civilization”.

4I would like to show how Assyriology has developed, shaped by various conditions, some of which are still present today. I will then take you into the Assyriologist’s laboratory to describe the methods that are used in day-to-day work. Finally, I will present a few prospects for further developments to which I hope to contribute here over the next ten years.

5Discussing the birth and transformation of one’s discipline over the decades is not just a mandatory ritual in any Inaugural Lecture; nor should one give in to the current historiographical trend. Reflecting on this evolution affords a greater understanding of the present and helps to prepare for the future.

3 See D. Charpin, “À l’occasion du centième volume: éléments pour une histoire de la Revue d’assyriol (...) 6France’s leading role in the history of Assyriology is well known. We know what role Jules Oppert played in deciphering cuneiform writing; the first Chair of Assyriology at the Collège de France was created for him in 1874, titled “Assyrian Philology and Archaeology”. The Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale, which he founded ten years later, is our discipline’s oldest journal still running. I have the honour of being its director. We also owe the rediscovery of the Sumerians to the successive French teams that excavated the Tello site from 1877. The year 1905 is famous in the history of scientific research; for that was when Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity. Less known is the fact that in the same year François Thureau-Dangin published his Inscriptions de Sumer et d’Akkad, in which he definitively established the deciphering of the Sumerian language.

4 C. Wunsch (ed.), Mining the Archives. Festschrift for Christopher Walker on the Occasion of his 60t (...)

(...) 5 I have in mind the Tabqa dam on the Euphrates, East of Aleppo, which revealed Emar and its archives (...) 7One hundred and seventy years of excavations in the Near East have yielded hundreds of thousands of texts. We should be cautious when using the expression (which I myself have done) “sources received”. First, because using the image of the “source” to describe documentation is inappropriate in the context of the generally arid Near East, where writings are mostly engraved on clay tablets. Some speak of “tablet deposits”, and a recent edited volume was called Mining the Archives. Parrot preferred the metaphor of the soldier to that of the miner when he took stock of the “epigraphic booty” of his excavation campaigns in Mari, in the journal Syria. It is overall a matter of style… Moreover, we did not receive these tablets, we went and extracted them from the tells. We should not speak of the “randomness of excavations” either; for the fact that the sample is biased is not random: it is the product of the regions that archaeologists chose to study, and of the neighbourhoods that they decided to excavate, mostly prioritizing large sites and large buildings, where there is de facto more chance of making “nice discoveries”. More than once, rescue excavations, which are often linked to the construction of a dam, have yielded a wealth of new information on areas about which little was known until then. Legal changes have also played a role in the history of discoveries: the 1933 antiquities law in Iraq, which put an end to the sharing of objects that had been practised until then, interrupted the Ur excavations and led to the extended suspension of those in Larsa, which had only just begun.

8The influence of diplomatic conditions has been considerable. Undeniably, the rediscovery of Mesopotamian civilization took place within the context of competition between the British, the French and the Germans in the second half of the nineteenth century, when they were all seeking to secure a position in a waning Ottoman Empire. After the dismembering of the Empire, France obtained a mandate for Syria from the League of Nations, in 1920, and it was against this backdrop that, in 1933, the Mari site and its palace were discovered. Note that it was because Lieutenant Cabane, who was in charge of the French detachment in Abu Kemal, had learned about the accidental excavation of a statue by Bedouins as they were burying one of their own on Tell Hariri that André Parrot was sent to scout out the site, which he ultimately spent 45 years excavating.

9This is still the situation today: our field activities are directly informed by the vagaries of politics. Iran closing off from the late 1970s led to a rise in archaeological activity in Syria, for example, with the launch of the Tell Leilan excavations. I should point out here the successive tragedies, for Iraq, that were the embargo following the first Gulf war, then the decomposition of the State following the US-UK invasion in 2003. All archaeological missions were ceased in 1991 and have virtually not been resumed since. Sadly, clandestine excavations have multiplied, which have led to the complete destruction of some important sites like Isin. The rampant violence in Syria since 2011 has also caused the interruption of official archaeological activities.

6 See “Mission archéologique de Bash Tapa (Kurdistan)” on the website of UMR 7192 ( http://www.digitor (...) 10To move away from these disastrous impressions, however, let me finish this overview by mentioning a recent positive trend. The autonomy of Kurdistan recently allowed for intense activity to resume in the region, where the last archaeological missions dated back to the early 1960s. With the support of the Foreign Ministry, the Collège de France, and the CNRS research unit, which I co-direct with Thomas Römer, a team launched a new excavation last year in Bash Tapa, where a set of tablets has already been discovered (Figure 3). We hope that current difficulties will soon be resolved.

11Assyriology has not just been marked by uncertainties in the field: it had to be formed as an autonomous discipline within Orientalism. The year 1950, when the first Rencontres assyriologiques internationales were organized in Paris, is a symbolic date in this respect. They allowed scholars in our discipline not only to overcome division following the madness of Nazi Germany, but also to become autonomous from the Congresses of Orientalists, which were until then Assyriologists’ events of choice for international networking. These meetings have since taken place annually; the last one was held in Warsaw in July 2014.

7 A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia. Portrait of a Dead Civilization , Chicago, University of Chica (...) 12Assyriology also had to become emancipated from biblical studies. Research in Nineveh was first linked to Jonas, and Leonard Wolley’s interest in Ur related to the figure of Abraham and the story of the Deluge. The list of examples is long. For Leo Oppenheim’s generation, in the mid-1960s, the case was settled: Assyriology was no longer a sort of outgrowth of biblical studies. In the United States, at the time, the question was whether Assyriology should be part of the humanities or of anthropology – and the famous Chicago Assyriologist vigorously advocated the latter. In Europe the focus was different. Most countries kept the traditional orientalist approach, sometimes packaged as “area studies”, with the main emphasis on the command of languages. In German and British universities it is impossible to become an Assyriologist without having studied at least Hebrew and Arabic. From this point of view, France shares a particularity with Italian universities: in these countries Assyriology is a branch of ancient history studies, and the specialization is taught at Master’s level, that is, at quite a late stage.

13At this point I think it is important for me to describe my own personal journey, if I may. In high school I liked history and I was fortunate to visit Turkey in the summer of my penultimate year, then Syria and Lebanon the following year. When I entered university I therefore naturally chose the “Ancient Orient” modules, which were offered from second year level at the time. Through these modules I met two pairs of teachers: Jean Deshayes, who was Chair of Oriental Archaeology, seconded by Jean-Louis Huot, and Paul Garelli, Chair of Ancient History of the Near East, with his assistant Jean-Marie Durand. I had to choose a subject for my Master’s thesis and opted for texts – a choice that I never regretted. I was subsequently fortunate to be recruited successively by Paris I University, the CNRS, Paris I again, the École pratique des hautes études, and now the Collège de France. Yet I am sad today to see that talented young people no longer have such opportunities. Positions are now rare: there are currently, in total, fewer than 20 tenured Assyriologists in a higher education or research institution in France. And unlike in Germany, there are only a handful of contracted researchers.

14There is thus a paradox: the number of specialists per country is very low, and yet quite distinct national “schools” exist. As a corollary, the small size of Assyriology communities in each country nevertheless offers a considerable benefit: very broad international openness, which often has positive consequences. Here is one of many examples. As the study of Sumerian, which had been revived by Adam Falkenstein after the Second World War, began to dwindle in the late 1970s, the Japanese’s interest in it made apparent that the researchers’ exclusively Indo-European linguistic roots hampered the previous approach. This is when, for example, Assyriologists understood that active/passive categories were irrelevant, as Sumerian was an ergative language.

15Admittedly, Assyriologists’ work all too often remains largely unknown despite much effort. The sense of discouragement they sometimes experience is also fuelled by the discipline itself, given the slow pace at which new ideas spread. In an academic world where productivity is becoming one of the core evaluation criteria, one sometimes wonders: what is the point of continuing to write, if no one has the time any longer to read what others have written? Another issue is that, traditionally, Assyriologists had to master reading in French, English and German. It is concerning to see that a growing number of bibliographies of books published in North America mention only publications in English.

16Our scientific practice is determined not only by the history of our discipline and the academic training that we have received, but also by the concerns of the society in which we live.

8 D. Charpin, “Marchands du palais et marchands du temple à la fin de la I re dynastie de Babylone”, J (...)

D. Charpin, “Marchands du palais et marchands du temple à la fin de la I dynastie de Babylone”, J (...) 9 D. Charpin, “Économie, société et institutions paléo-babyloniennes : nouvelles sources, nouvelles a (...) 17The themes studied are sometimes directly linked to their historical context. I remember how, in the early 1980s as I prepared a study on Babylonian merchants, I was struck by Paul Koschaker’s article on Larsa’s State-controlled economy, published in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie in 1941, the very terminology of which showed the influence of the war economy. More recently I pointed out that the consecutive publication in the United States of two books on the prehistory of democracy in the Ancient Near East was perhaps not unrelated to US debates on the possibility of establishing democratic regimes in current Near Eastern countries. The comment had seemed obvious and in fact rather trivial to me, and I was surprised by some American colleagues’ incredulity and even indignation.

10 K. R. Veenhof, “Fatherhood is a matter of opinion. An old Babylonian trial on filiation and service (...)

(...) 11 N. Ziegler, Florilegium marianum IV. Le harem de Zimrî-Lîm. La population féminine des palais d’apr (...) 18The necessary fight against stereotypes should moreover not lead to counter-truths, which is unfortunately sometimes the case. Several gender studies specialists have vigorously criticized the use of the word prostitute in the context of Mesopotamia. However, if the term is defined as describing a person who engages in sexual activity in return for payment, prostitution did exist in Mesopotamia. Rather than denying this activity, it should be situated in the broader framework of sexuality at the time, which was indeed very different from ours. This probably presents the greatest risk of anachronism, for example by speaking of “free love in Babylon”, as some have done. Still, the status of unmarried woman seeing different men did exist, as a trial published a few years ago showed. Another example is the notion of harem. Nele Ziegler has clearly shown that a women-only space, which was closed off by doors guarded by men on the outside and women on the inside, existed in the Palace of Mari (Figure 4). Criticizing the use of the term harem to describe this space, under the pretext of fighting Orientalizing fantasies, is hardly productive.

19There are many facets to Assyriologists’ work – which is partly what makes it interesting. It is carried out in four complementary places: the field where the texts are discovered; the museums and collections where they are kept; the libraries that give access to scientific output; and the research centres where the often collaborative work takes place. In my case, the latter two places are combined in a very practical way. Part of what makes the wealth of the Collège de France is that it has specialized libraries such as the Assyriology library, founded by Charles Fossey in 1936. This library provides free access to virtually all scientific output since the origins of the discipline, and is continuously acquiring new work.

20Assyriologists’ activity can be broken down into four sequences: their research in the field or in museums; the publication of documents; their analysis and commentary; and finally the presentation of results.

21It all starts with a crucial stage: the discovery of texts in the field. I was fortunate to know the joys – but also the difficulties – of epigraphy in the field: on the Mari site in Syria, thanks to Jean Margueron and Jean-Marie Durand, and on the Larsa site in Iraq, thanks to Jean-Louis Huot. The latter put me in charge of clearing the tablets, a somewhat difficult task (Figure 5). It is less comfortable for an epigraphist to do so himself than to let someone else do it, at the risk of complaining about the state of the tablets after extraction. Epigraphists themselves must be able to clean and consolidate the tablets, even if competent curators’ intervention is then required, and they must also be photographers. Joining fragments is a crucial aspect of their work. This is partly done materially, as a sort of 3D puzzle. The fragments, however, can also be assembled according to characteristics like the writing, the use of a name or expression, and so on. Finding the address matching the content of a letter makes this letter infinitely more valuable. This fieldwork comforted me in the idea, which should be obvious but is far from being the rule, that the archaeological context of written documents absolutely has to be taken into account.

12 D. Charpin, Archives familiales et propriété privée en Babylonie ancienne : étude des documents de (...) 22It is true that Assyriologists often work on tablets kept in museum drawers, whether they come from old excavations, donations or purchases. Sadly, in many cases the origin is unknown: Assyriologists must try to retrace it and associate the tablets with the file to which they belonged. When I was writing my PhD thesis, I was led to question the coherence of the batch of tablets on which I was working at the British Museum. These 100 texts had been published as having originated from Tell Sifr, near Larsa, and as having been uncovered by excavations led by William Kennett Loftus in 1854. In fact, one third of the tablets had no link with the other two thirds; an analysis of the forms and a prosopographical study allowed me to show that these texts had in fact been written in Ur. This is when I realized that while Loftus was excavating in Tell Sifr, his compatriot John George Taylor was working a few dozen kilometres away, in Ur. Manifestly, their discoveries were sent to the British Museum together, and were subsequently mixed up.

13 B. R. Foster, “Albert T. Clay and his Babylonian collection”, in B. J. Collins et P. Michalowski (é (...)

B. R. Foster, “Albert T. Clay and his Babylonian collection”, in B. J. Collins et P. Michalowski (é (...) 14 Provisionally see D. Charpin, “Histoire de la Mésopotamie: les archives d’Alammush-nasir”, Annuaire (...)

Provisionally see D. Charpin, “Histoire de la Mésopotamie: les archives d’Alammush-nasir”, Annuaire (...) 15 D. Charpin, “Trois contrats paléo-babyloniens de prêt conservés au musée Flaubert et d’histoire de (...) 23It is therefore important to know the history of collections, even if it is not always glorious. Recently, Ben Foster showed how Albert T. Clay, the first curator of one of Assyriology’s largest collections at Yale University, had proceeded: he bought entire batches, kept what interested him and sold the rest to other institutions, using the profits to continue his purchases. The result was disastrous, as coherent batches were thus scattered across dozens of US collections. Archives therefore need to be patiently reconstituted. I will cite the case, on which I am currently working, of a wealthy owner contemporary to Hammurabi’s son, whose tablets I tracked down at the Louvre, Yale, Chicago and even… the Vatican. Tablets are sometimes discovered in improbable collections: last year, I had the privilege of editing three tablets kept at the Musée Flaubert et d’histoire de la médecine, in Rouen. Fate sometimes plays a part: through one of my brothers-in-law’s sister-in-law, I was able to track down the trace of inscribed objects brought back by Ernest de Sarzec, the Tello excavator, to his castle in near Poitiers.

24Admittedly, these trips can be enjoyable. I once stayed in Cannes, for example, to work on the collection that the Baron of Lycklama had bequeathed to the museum of La Castre in 1877, and which contained tablets that he had acquired in Babylon. But this scattering of collections has serious drawbacks, and often slows down the work. The common French term “données” (data) is clearly inadequate: documents are not given (“donnés”) to Assyriologists; rather, Assyriologists slowly construct the documents.

25Once they have the tablets, Assyriologists work in several stages, each of which involves interpretation.

26How are tablets to be published? There are two contrasting approaches. Some insist on following tradition by copying the originals by hand. But the benefits of photography are gradually prevailing now that the cost of reproduction is no longer an issue (Figure 6). It would be wrong, however, to think of photography as more “objective” than copying; for lighting is a crucial issue. In this respect, the first tests with 3D scanners are yielding very interesting results. Deciphering originals, the surface of which is often damaged, is not neutral. It is necessarily influenced by what the reader knows. Hence the importance of collation: very often, as the publication of a corpus evolves, it is necessary to review the originals already published in order to improve their interpretation. This is a task that some members of the older generation in the Mari team have struggled somewhat to acknowledge. Yet it in no way challenged their competence or probity; it was simply part of scientific progress. The latter is, however, neither automatic nor linear: returning to the tablets later does not mean that we will necessarily read them better.

16 J.-M. Durand, “Les mines de sel syriennes au IIe millénaire et la ville de Kakkulâtum”, MARI, vol. (...) 27Once the material reading of the signs is mastered, the next challenge lies in transcribing them: a same sign can have one or several phonetic values, but it can also be an ideogram. These are sometimes rare ideograms, the meaning of which needs to be found, as Jean-Marie Durand did with the sign denoting salt in Mari. It is easy to imagine the repercussions of this discovery for the study of nomads and their herds, which could not survive without this foodstuff.

17 A.4626, published in D. Charpin, “Une alliance contre l’Elam et le rituel du lipit napištim”, in F. (...) 28Sadly, most of the time our texts are broken. To what extent should we restore lacunas, in our publications? Some have fustigated “bold restorations”. I say that one must first be capable of proposing such a restoration, which involves being completely immersed in one’s corpus. I was able to test the limits of the exercise myself. In 1990 I published a letter, the beginning of which was broken. I proposed three possible sender names, and restored the lacunas at the beginning of the first lines. Ten years later I was fortunate to find the missing piece (Figure 7). My restorations were sometimes wrong: instead of the name Hammurabi, there was a pronoun, but it did refer to the king of Babylon. The meaning of the passage as a whole had been understood – and the sender was indeed one of the three people I had suggested. The exercise therefore requires a combination of imagination and rigour. This is one of the areas in which digital databases will afford the possibility of producing increasingly reliable work, by providing the frequency of co-occurrences: in a given corpus a given word tends to be used mainly with another specific word, etc.

18 D. Charpin, “L’historien de la Mésopotamie et ses sources: autour du Code de Hammurabi”, Journal as (...) 29All translators have to choose between a literal translation and one that moves away from the words used, without falling into the excess of the old “beautiful infidels”. They navigate between two pitfalls, anachronism and paralysis, and this leads them to a refusal to translate. Take the word šukkallum, which designates the most important member of the royal entourage: should it be translated as “prime minister”? Admittedly, Hammurabi’s šukkallum had a very different status from that of Manuel Valls! Translating as “vizir” adds an Oriental touch but in no way solves the problem. At that rate, none of our words can be used to describe any aspect of ancient reality. The very use of the term king is deceptive: although Hammurabi was compared to the Sun, he bore little resemblance to Louis XIV. We must therefore make do with duly justified approximations.

30Philologists sometimes wrongly consider that translation is enough to convey the meaning of a text. It is however also illusory to believe that once the epigraphist and the philologist have completed their task, the historian’s interpretation work can begin. In fact, editing a text is not and cannot be neutral: with it, the interpretation work has already begun. In other words, even though philology and history are two distinct disciplines, Assyriologists must master both equally.

31This concern is specific to the French school, and is tangibly noticeable. Unlike Fritz Rudolf Kraus’ Altbabylonische Briefe series on Old Babylonian letters, which included only a transcription, a translation and very few notes, the structure of the Archives royales de Mari collection was based on a simple idea: transcription already implies choices, and translation already involves interpretation; it therefore needs to be clarified through a summary and followed through by writing a commentary. More than once, this obligation to comment that we imposed on ourselves resulted in aporias: the translation and sometimes even the establishment of the text had to be reviewed. “Your commentary will become outdated”, some colleagues have objected. Certainly, but anyone reading it will understand why a given passage was translated in a way that should potentially be changed. In the current state of Assyriology, the idea that edition in the strict sense of the term is more lasting than commentary is often illusory.

19 See recently M. Guichard, Florilegium marianum XIV. L’Épopée de Zimrī-Lîm, Paris, SEPOA, coll. “Mém (...) 32Add to this work what we can call “decoding” texts. This is clear when dealing with such specific genres as hymns, epics or commemorative inscriptions. But it is also true for genres seemingly closer to ours, like correspondence. The real danger lies in the apparent familiarity that reading letters generates. There is probably no greater illusion: this is the trap of ethnocentricity.

33Since Michel Foucault’s work, in particular, the academic world has understood that there is no such thing as an accurate representation of a civilization, but instead, only successive approaches, inevitably influenced by their own cultural roots. In this respect, fairly strong national traditions still exist in Assyriology. Divergences in approaches are moreover also a question of personal character. We could distinguish between two categories of specialists. First the wise, like Thureau-Dangin or, nowadays, Miguel Civil, who primarily devote themselves to deciphering and editing texts. The other category is that of the brave, like Meissner or Oppenheim, who agreed equally to wage “the battle for synthesis”, which of course has to start again with every generation. I admit to having chosen sides.

34Irrespective of what famous titles have to say, we will never be able to resuscitate Babylon. Assyriologists contribution is an increasingly rich discourse on Mesopotamian civilization, one that is constantly changing, and which is based both on the growing wealth of available material and on modern scholars’ areas of interests. Rereading famous texts and editing new documents should not be seen as two opposite activities: they are mutually enriching.

35Compared to so-called “classical” Antiquity studies, which can be said to date back to the Renaissance, Assyriology is a relatively young discipline: we have only been able to understand cuneiform texts for the last 150 years. There is still plenty of work to do: even the most famous texts from Mesopotamian literature, though they have often been translated, did not have a critical edition until quite recently. This is the case, for example, of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the “poem of creation” (Enuma Elish). No Babylonian-to-French dictionary exists yet, and many of the instruments we work with are obsolete.

36I would now like to outline a few developments that can be hoped for in the next decade. Progress will come, I believe, not only from mastering a growing corpus more fully, but also from renewing our research questions and multidisciplinary studies.

37Assyriologists’ first-hand documentation is unrivalled across the whole of Antiquity: there are hundreds of thousands of original texts kept in archives and libraries, owing to the longevity of cuneiform writing’s main medium. Clay is the curse of archaeologists: most buildings in Mesopotamia were made of mud bricks, which tend to disintegrate with time. By contrast, it is a blessing for epigraphists, as tablets made in this material last quite well. This medium does however present a drawback: its mass compared to the quantity of information it carries. The history of writing shows how this ratio has considerably changed over time. Yet neither fire nor water could destroy our tablets, which will still be there in a few thousand years – while our floppy disks from twenty years ago are now virtually impossible to read.

38What is the main characteristic of Assyriology within ancient history? First, its great wealth of archives: legal texts, letters, accounting documents, etc., not only from the king’s close circles, but also from ordinary individuals. Whereas Alexander’s correspondence, for example, is largely apocryphal, we have found dozens, even hundreds or thousands of letters addressed to the kings of Mari or Ugarit in the second millennium bce and to Assyrian emperors like Sargon in the first millennium bce; we also have among others the originals of letters exchanged between Egyptian Pharaohs and the Hittite sovereigns of Anatolia. The archives of the classical world are only known through exceptional cases – aside from Egypt and its papyri. I will cite for example the basket containing 170 waxed tablets discovered in 1959 near Pompeii, which provided us with part of the archives on the Sulpicii, who were businessmen from the first century bce. Or yet the wooden tablets inscribed with ink discovered in England, the famous Tabula Vindolanda published in 1983, holding letters received by the members of a Roman garrison. Assyriologists cannot help but smile at the excitement of their colleagues faced with such discoveries: archives of this kind are their daily bread! And every year there is a constant flow of new publications: for Hammurabi’s era alone, an average 500 new texts are edited annually.

39The harvest is abundant, but the labourers are too scarce. This explains why the publication of our largest batches of texts is still in progress. This is the case of the Ebla archives, exhumed by an Italian mission in 1975. It is also true of the archives from the Palace of Mari, discovered between 1934 and 1938, which include no fewer than 20,000 tablets and fragments. They have been, and continue to be, one of the great concerns of my scientific life, in the footsteps of François Thureau-Dangin, Georges Dossin, Maurice Birot and Jean-Marie Durand. One of the current difficulties is carrying out synthesis work when over a third of the archives have still not been edited – even though we now have roughly complete photographic coverage and preliminary transcriptions. Should the priority be on research or on completing the publication of unedited material? The two probably need to continue in parallel. For a while, we were under the illusion that publication would accelerate as our knowledge grew. Actually, resituating a new text in its context is becoming increasingly complex, when the corpus edited includes over 10,000 documents. Hence, it is important that projects such as Archibab be developed in order to navigate this complexity.

20 See D. Charpin, “Les nouvelles technologies au service de l’historien de la Mésopotamie: le projet (...) 40Information technology has become a necessity for processing such masses of data. Pierre Briant, with his website Achemenet, was a pioneer in this field at the Collège de France. Not only documentary databases but also real research tools, designed by and for Assyriologists, have become essential. This is the case of Archibab, a base devoted to the study of Babylonian archives from the first half of the second millennium bce.

21 See the website www.archibab.fr. 41As a child I dreamed of being an organist. Things worked out differently, but I cannot help but think that my taste for programming is in some way related to that childhood dream. The computer instrument created for the Archibab program is not without similarities to an organ and its thousands of pipes. Based on my experience as a self-learner, programming is a mix of logical rigour and ruse. Faced with an insurmountable obstacle, how can one bypass it? The instrument is now ready; it may later acquire new functionalities. The most urgent is now to provide it with ever more data. Continuing with the metaphor of the organist, I am fortunately not alone, like captain Nemo aboard the Nautilus: I benefit from the enthusiastic collaboration of a whole team, which I would like to thank. Moreover, many Assyriologists in France, in Europe and beyond have also actively contributed to informing the base. But we must continue to recruit, and I am highly grateful to the Collège de France for having already provided me with new means to ensure the long-term continuation of the operation.

22 See D. Charpin and N. Ziegler, Florilegium marianum V. Mari et le Proche-Orient à l’époque amorrite (...) 42Greater use of computer technology should allow for a more quantitative approach. Assyriologists have exploited far too little the abundance of quantified data, particularly for carrying out economic studies. We must continue on the path opened by my master Paul Garelli. Admittedly, we very often have only partial samples, but it is nevertheless possible to propose models based on them. I have in mind the strength of the Mari army, for example, which is known not from a chronicle, that may not be particularly reliable, but from a soldier enrolment document. The quantified data of this document match the palace’s records of bronze expenses that were largely allocated weaponry.

43Of course, making these resources available is valuable only if they are studied adequately. In his lecture at the Collège de France in 1943, Lucien Febvre said:

23 L. Febvre, Michelet, créateur de l’histoire de France. Cours au Collège de France, 1943-1944, Paris (...) The document is anything that can serve to reconstruct the past. And the list of what can serve to do so is growing every day. Owing to ingenuity. Owing to curious minds. Owing to historians’ imagination. Turning a series of silent facts into meaningful facts. Turning a series of facts seemingly unrelated to human history into clues – such is the great work of historians.

24 N. Ziegler, Florilegium marianum IV , op. cit. , p. 106 . 44We can take here the example of the “king’s meals” in the Mari archives. In 1957 Assyriologists started editing these small tablets, which were daily records of the quantities of grain used for bread, porridge, cakes, etc. for the king and his table companions. The value of these hundreds of documents for the history of food soon proved limited, given their repetitive nature. However, these texts were dated. It was not possible to organize them at first, as without lists the chronology had to be patiently reconstructed. But once they could be ordered, researchers noticed lacunas in the series corresponding to periods when the king was not in his capital. Despite the absence of chronicles, such texts therefore provide us, by deduction, with the dates of the Zimri-Lim military campaigns. Nele Ziegler found the name of two women scribes who had written hundreds of accounting documents in the palace’s kitchen service: Belti-lamassi and Ištar-šamši would be very surprised to know what historians are now drawing from their work. Making texts say something for which they were not specifically designed is one of researchers’ tasks, and a source of satisfaction when the research is fruitful.

25 A. Jacquet, “Family archives in Mesopotamia during the old Babylonian period” , in M. Faraguna (ed.) (...) 45Assyriologists are constantly thinking about the nature of their documents: why were texts written, and how and why were they kept? But they also often have to think about the problem of “the absence of sources”: is it significant or is it random? Is what we know representative of what existed? An exemplary case lies in the contrast between the end of the third millennium bce, which yielded thousands of texts written by the bureaucrats serving the kings of Ur in dozens of warehouses and other workshops, and the beginning of the second millennium bce, which is marked by the proliferation of family archives. Does this significant reorientation of written sources reflect a social transformation, with a shift from a State-controlled economy to one with greater private initiative? We have good reasons to believe so. But we should not forget that no residential area from the late third millennium bce has been excavated.

26 See for example H. Reculeau, Climate, Environment and Agriculture in Assyria in the 2nd Half of the (...)

(...) 27 J. Eidem and J. Læssøe, The Shemshāra Archive s, vol. 1: The Letters , Copenhagen, Danske Videnskaber (...) 46The contemporary world’s issues have their own influence on research. Our fears regarding the environment are causing us to reflect on the role of climate changes in Antiquity. Without falling back into the geographical determinism of another age, Assyriologists can contribute to this research. Let us take as another example studies on techniques to archive and circulate information (Figure 8): current interest in these questions is directly linked to the revolution we are presently living. A letter discovered in the Zagros, dating back to the eighteenth century bce, is a great example of the feeling of proximity that Ancients experienced through correspondence, which in those regions and at that time was a new phenomenon:

Bullattal brought me your news and I was delighted: I felt like you and I had just met and hugged! As for me, I am well: rejoice!

47It is amusing, reading this passage, to think about the similar feeling that many of our contemporaries experienced when email was introduced.

48One of our main difficulties, in studying Mesopotamia, is that we are dealing with a civilization that held no discourse about itself. Nowhere are principles formulated; they remain implicit and we must deduce them from the texts in which they are articulated. Should we describe the unfortunate Mesopotamians as having been incapable of abstraction? It used to be said that they discovered Pythagoras’s theorem, but were not able to formulate it. Today, we are realizing that they developed a highly subtle method to solve algebraic problems through geometry. The study of all their manuals, whether on law, divination or medicine, shows that their reasoning was based on case studies: it was up to the reader to make the necessary generalizations.

28 J.-M. Durand, Archives épistolaires de Mari I/1, Paris, Éditions Recherche sur les civilisations, c (...) 49Roger Chartier has promoted a cultural history, which is primarily that of practices. This is as much of a necessity for Ancient Mesopotamia as it is for modern Europe. Studies on divination long focused essentially on analysing large divinatory compendia. Jean-Marie Durand had the great merit of studying diviners’ practice, identifying and editing the dozens of letters that they wrote or that mentioned them, from among the thousands of letters in the Mari archives. Having precise knowledge on their social status and their ways of proceeding considerably enhances our understanding of these characters who played a key role in political life.

50The CNRS endeavours to “cross boundaries”, and it is true that this is often what allows for progress. Tradition has it that Assyriologists must be able to read texts from all eras and genres. At one stage Jean-Marie Durand trained me in this, as we waded through the provincial collections in the late 1970s, before he took over work on the Mari archives. Two observations can be made in this respect: certainly, growing specialization is inevitable; but discoveries are often made by combining knowledge from other eras or literary genres than those we generally deal with. In other words, even when editing in a restricted field only, one has to continue to read from a broader range of sources. This is a rule I have always followed, and which I continue to recommend to younger generations.

29 D. Charpin, Le Clergé d’Ur au siècle d’Hammurabi ( xix e- xviii e siècle av. J.-C.), Geneva/Paris, Droz (...) 51As regards Assyriology, the first boundary is the sorting of texts into genres: one is a specialist on literature, on religious texts, or on archival documents. However, many discoveries show that these different categories of texts formed significant units. This is what I showed in my thèse d’État on the clergy in Ur. One of the houses near the city’s main sanctuary was particularly interesting (Figure 9). Contracts and letters showed that it had been inhabited by two generations of purification-priests. The house also contained many religious texts, including several hymns for which no duplicates exist. These were not traditional “works”, but compositions fitting the circumstances, linked to the king’s visit to the temple to which these priests were associated. We must continue to work on all the texts as they were discovered, without artificially segmenting them.

© Crown copyright.

52Other boundaries to cross are those imposed by traditional chronological divisions. Assyriologists work on the long term, since the oldest tablets date back to about 3,200 bce, whereas the most recent tablet is dated from 61 ce. As discoveries evolve, this chronological range is proving to be highly valuable. For a long time, Sumerian literature was only known through manuscripts from the eighteenth century bce. In some cases, they can now be compared not only with later copies, but also especially with their precursors from around 2400 bce.

53We need to define stages in those three millennia. In some cases the split is clear, for example, with the transition from the end of the second millennium bce to the beginning of the first: for several centuries, we have virtually no texts. This is due to the temporary collapse of monarchical powers, both in Babylonia and in Assyria, which were taken over by Aramean tribal chiefs. Material traces from this era are also highly impermanent: because of a lack of resources, public buildings were no longer renovated nor even maintained, and many fell to ruin. There is more doubt about the split in the second millennium, between 1600 and 1450 bce: did these 150 years for which we have no texts really exist, or should Assyriologists adopt a short chronology that brings forward Hammurabi’s reign by a century? The debate surrounding this issue is still fierce: we have to reach consensus on the absolute chronology.

30 P. Villard, “L’(an)durāru à l’époque néo-assyrienne”, Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orienta (...) 54Working on the long term allows us to define broad perspectives. When the Babylonian kings of Hammurabi’s dynasty came to power, they cancelled their subjects’ debts through a measure called andurārum. For a long time, these edicts were essentially known through Babylonian texts from the first half of the second millennium bce. There was uncertainty around the links they might have with far more recent biblical writings regarding similar measures (deror). The practice of andurārum was then shown to have in fact carried on in Mesopotamia until the Neo-Assyrian era; as a result, the evolution of Mesopotamian influence on the texts of the Torah became clearer. I will add that due to biblical prescriptions, similar measures were taken by French sovereigns in the Middle Ages. Royal prerogatives like the right of reprieve have been linked to the presidential status at the beginning of the Third Republic. This leads us to the conclusion that when, following their election, presidents of the Fifth Republic passed an amnesty for fines linked to various offences, they were just continuing a practice dating back to Hammurabi and even beyond.

31 D. Charpin, Lire et écrire à Babylone, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2008, chap. 3. 55By definition, I would say, Assyriologists’ research is multidisciplinary: it relates not only to history and philology, of course, but also to law, economics, religious science, archaeology, etc. I should stress the importance of involving outside disciplines, which naturally have to be tailored to our documentation. I will limit myself to the case of diplomatics: Assyriologists have a lot to learn from Medievalists, in their rigorous analysis of documents’ external and internal characteristics. In this respect, the case of the texts discovered in Terqa is very interesting. For a long time, researchers thought that they were all contemporary to Hammurabi’s successors, based primarily on philological criteria: they mentioned royal andurârum measures, the contracts were dated with the names of years, etc. Ultimately, the dating was reviewed owing to the stylistic analysis of a seal impression. By taking into account the sealing as well as the palaeography and the “formatting” of the tablets, two batches were distinguished, one of which dated back to before 1600 bce, whereas the other was more recent.

32 See the very recently published volume edited by N. Ziegler and E. Cancik-Kirschbaum, Entre les fle (...) 56Very often, an Assyriologist alone cannot have all the necessary competences, hence the importance of collaboration. I will first discuss work with legal experts, primarily citing Sophie Démare-Lafont and her project “Droits de l’Orient cunéiforme” (DOC, “Law from the Cuneiform Orient”). Historical geography research also involves collaboration: not only between philologists and archaeologists, but also with geographers and now with geo-informaticians. The projects led by Nele Ziegler and Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, on second-millennium Upper Mesopotamia, have already yielded many results. One of the most surprising, in my opinion, is the determining of the roads followed by armies or traders’ caravans, by estimating the lowest transport costs based on the topography, combined with records of water points.

33 J. Black, “The Sumerians in their landscape”, in T. Abusch (ed.), Riches Hidden in Secret Places. A (...) 57The distance that separates us from Ancient Mesopotamians makes it difficult for historians to experience the empathy they should feel for their object of study. Comparativism can nevertheless help to reduce this distance to a certain extent. For example, to try to understand how statues of divinities were cared for, it can be very helpful to observe what is still practised nowadays in India. The contribution of ethno-archaeology is sometimes considerable, including for the study of literature. Jeremy Black drew a striking parallel between the photographs that Wilfred Thesiger took in the 1950s in the marshes of southern Iraq, and some passages of Sumerian poetry.

34 Lastly see A. George, “ The Gilgamesh epic at Ugarit ”, Aula orientalis , vol. 25, no. 2, 2007, pp. 23 (...) 58We have seen how Assyriology gradually became independent from biblical studies. Today, it allows Biblicists to understand more fully the cultural backdrop against which the corpuses they study developed. The symposiums organized in this very institution by Thomas Römer and Jean-Marie Durand over the last few years clearly illustrate this. For example, a phenomenon such as prophetism can no longer be studied without analysing Syrian prophecies from the eighteenth century bce. Some research on Mesopotamian literature has revealed surprises, the implications of which specialists on biblical writings must measure. The prologue of Gilgamesh’s epic used to be considered as an addition at the time of Assurbanipal; the Ugarit excavations recently uncovered a thirteenth-century manuscript, which already included the 28 lines that it was assumed had been added six centuries later. For some works, Assyriologists benefit from having access not only to the final edition, but also to traces of intermediary stages, sometimes across more than a millennium.

59What is the purpose of Assyriology? We know the answer of Jean Bottéro, who claimed to “praise a useless science”. But behind this “apology for disinterested knowledge” lay another motive, which became clear when he spoke of cuneiform tablets as “our oldest family records”: it was to know better the origins of our own civilization. It is worth emphasizing the heritage passed down to us from Mesopotamia. Greek astronomers never hid what they owed to “Chaldean scholars”. And the decimal system of the French Revolution did not get the better of the day’s division into 24 hours, which is of Babylonian origin. While the emphasis on such heritage is underpinned by a commendable intention, through the prism of Eurocentrism it reintroduces what we thought we had overcome. This for example leads to a teleological vision of the history of writing, seen as evolving from the beginnings of Sumerian ideograms to the perfection of the Greek alphabet.

60What is the purpose of Assyriology? When I think of the work of Alain Fischer, who was elected to the Collège de France at the same time as me, I appreciate how laughable my discipline can be: seventeen years ago, his team at the Necker hospital saved one of my nephews’ life with a bone marrow transplant. But I also remember what Serge Haroche replied to journalists asking him about his work’s applications just after he received the Nobel Prize: he stressed the importance of fundamental research. Curiosity for its own sake is one of humans’ essential characteristics, accompanied with questions such as: where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? Assyriologists can make a substantial contribution to humanism defined in those terms. Moreover, it is important to try to provide Near Eastern peoples with an unbiased vision of their past. While it is not up to Assyriologists to say how to resolve current conflicts, they can remind the world that despite fundamentalisms of all kinds, there is no “pure” civilization. Mesopotamian civilization was essentially hybrid, or mixed, however one wants to put it: Sumerians and Akkadians at first, then Assyrians and Babylonians, closer but with rivalry between them, have coexisted on this planet – not without conflicts, certainly, but ultimately fruitfully. This is probably one of the topical lessons that Assyriology can teach us.

61So, what is the purpose of Assyriology? The best possible answer is probably that, from a global historical perspective, Assyriologists contribute to expanding the range of societies that can be studied. After all, they do study humanity’s oldest archives! Some of you already know their value. I hope that I have convinced the others about them and I thank you for your attention.

I would like to dedicate this lecture to my parents, for their lifelong trust, and to my wife, Nele, and my children, Émile and Hannah, who put up with competition from Archibab and everything else…