Contents
Foreword and Acknowledgements ………………………………… v
Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East and the Aegean ………………………… 1
Catherine Breniquet and Cécile Michel
1 Bronze and Iron Age Wools in Europe ……………………………………… 12
Antoinette Rast-Eicher
2 The Expansion of Sheep Herding and the Development of Wool Production
in the Ancient Near East: An Archaeozoological and Iconographical Approach …….. 22
Emmanuelle Vila and Daniel Helmer
3 Sheep, Wool and Textile Production. An Interdisciplinary Approach
to the Complexity of Wool Working ……………………………………… 41
Eva Andersson Strand
4 The Archaeology of Wool in Early Mesopotamia: Sources, Methods, Perspectives ……. 52
Catherine Breniquet
5 Lambs of the Gods. The Beginnings of the Wool Economy in Proto-Cuneiform Texts ….. 79
Petr Charvát
6 The Value of Wool in Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia. On the Control of Sheep
and the Handling of Wool in the Presargonic to the Ur III Periods (c. 2400 to 2000 BC) …. 94
Walther Sallaberger
7 Wool in the Economy of Sargonic Mesopotamia ……………………………….. 115
Benjamin R. Foster
8 From Weighing Wool to Weaving Tools. Textile Manufacture at Ebla
during the Early Syrian Period in the Light of Archaeological Evidence ……………………….. 124
Luca Peyronel
9 Some Aspects of the Wool Economy at Ebla (Syria, 24th Century BC) ……………………………. 139
Maria Giovanna Biga
10 Making Textiles at Arslantepe, Turkey, in the 4th and 3rd Millennia BC.
Archaeological Data and Experimental Archaeology ………………………………………………………. 151
Romina Laurito, Cristina Lemorini and Assunta Perilli
11 Wool Economy in the Royal Archive of Mari during the Šakkanakku Period …………………. 169
Laurent Colonna d’Istria
12 All Wool and a Yard Wide. Wool Production and Trade in Old Babylonian Sippar ………… 202
Katrien De Graef
13 Wool Trade in Upper Mesopotamia and Syria According to Old Babylonian
and Old Assyrian Texts ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 232
Cécile Michel
14 Wool in Anatolia in the Old Assyrian Period ………………………………………… 255
Agnete Wisti Lassen
15 Wool Economy in Minoan Crete before Linear B. A Minimalist Position ……………………….. 264
Pietro Militello
16 Wool in the Nuzi Texts ……………………………………………………………… 283
Philippe Abrahami
17 Wool Production and Economy at Ugarit ……………………………………………. 310
Valérie Matoïan and Juan-Pablo Vita, with a contribution by Étienne Bordreuil
18 Sheep Rearing, Wool Production and Management in Mycenaean
Written Documents ……………………………………………………………. 340
Françoise Rougemont
19 Mycenaean Wool Economies in the Latter Part of the 2nd Millennium BC Aegean ……….. 371
Marie-Louise Nosch
20 Wool, Hair and Textiles in Assyria ………………………………………… 401
Nicholas Postgate
21 “If you have a sheep, you have all you need”. Sheep Husbandry and Wool
in the Economy of the Neo-Babylonian Ebabbar Temple at Sippar ………………………………… 428
Stefan Zawadzki
22 Fabrics and Clothes from Mesopotamia during the Achaemenid
and Seleucid Periods: The Textual References ……………………………………………………………….. 453
Francis Joannès
Foreword
The present volume gathers together the contributions presented at the European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop on Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East and the Aegean: From the Beginnings of Sheep Husbandry to Institutional Textile Industry, which took place in Nanterre, November 7–10, 2012. The workshop brought together experts from many different countries and various disciplines in order to reconstruct the role played by wool in the economies of ancient Mesopotamia and the Aegean. This conference was another step in a long term joint project started in the 2000s.
In 2008, an initial internal workshop encouraged scholars from the Maison de l’Archéologie et de l’Ethnologie (Nanterre, France) to work together to study textiles according to different sources and approaches: archaeology, ethnology, textile studies, etc. The aim of that workshop was to study technical systems, especially those which dealt with textile production. Then it became clear to us that the thematic project needed to be constructed on a different basis. Indeed, textile research has developed considerably during the last two decades in large national or international projects; but French research in this domain concerned mainly isolated researchers in various CNRS groups and Universities across France. Since 2005, the French team Histoire et archéologie de l’Orient cunéiforme (HAROC), which belongs to the CNRS large group Archéologies et Sciences de l’Antiquité located in Nanterre, has launched an ongoing collaboration with the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Textile Research (CTR) which is the main European centre working on ancient textiles.
In March 2009, a further workshop brought together international scholars on a restricted topic, dealing with textile terminologies in the Mediterranean and the Near East from the 3rd to the 1st millennia BC. This conference was mainly financed by the European Science Foundation (ESF). This first ESF Exploratory Workshop took place in Copenhagen and reinforced the collaboration between our two centres of research, the CTR and HAROC teams. Written sources offer many references to a complex vocabulary associated with textiles, tools and techniques, and also with textile decoration and the various professions linked to this craft. Even if translations for all these words often remain difficult to propose, the workshop has shown that textile terminology circulated and changed in a complex way according to fashions, to the discovery of new fibres and to the markets. A focus was made on the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC because, during that period, we can observe the growth of textile manufacturers belonging to palaces and temples. Through the analysis of textile terminologies we have underlined contacts, innovations and structures of a pre-monetary economy. During the final discussion of that first joint meeting, plans were already being formulated for a workshop devoted to the wool economy. Half of the contributors to the wool workshop have already contributed a paper to the first joint meeting in 2009. Efforts were successful to publish the proceedings a year later in the series Ancient Textiles (Oxford).
This second ESF Exploratory Workshop was organized within the frame of a new collaborative project between HAROC and the CTR which started in January 2012 and will last for three years. This Projet International de Cooperation Scientifique (PICS), entitled Textiles from the Orient to the Mediterranean (TexOrMed), intends to unite historians of texts and images, archaeologists, craftspeople testing techniques and textile tools, palaeobotanists, and palaeozoologists in order to reconstitute the processes which led to the first form of large scale industry in Antiquity. Participants in this research program are members of the CTR in Denmark and, for France, researchers and University professors from several CNRS and University teams in Nanterre, Lyon, and Clermont-Ferrand.
The other main contribution of the PICS TexOrMed in 2012 was the joint publication of a special issue of the journal Paleorient (vol. 38) dedicated to the Prehistory of Textiles in the Ancient Near East.
Among the many planned projects within the PICS TexOrMed is a second international workshop on the theme of Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean 1000 BC to 1000 AD. This conference, which will take place in Copenhagen in June 2014, will explore textile terminologies in a range of languages and cultures; presentations will be based on defined areas as well as comparative studies, synchronic and diachronic approaches.