Ancient Mesopotamian Assemblies: An Addendum - Geoffrey Evans

Ancient Mesopotamian Assemblies-An Addendum Author(s): Geoffrey Evans Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 78, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1958), pp. 114115 Published by: American Oriental Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/595445 Accessed: 20/11/2009 16:23 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aos. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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BRIEF COMMUNICATIONS Ancient Mesopotamian Assemblies-an addendum 1 From the use of the words sid and minutum in association with these assemblies, it would appear that they reached decisions by a process of counting; at any rate counting and an assembly of craftsmen occur in the closest association in our text. While it is conceivablethat these words carry some other significance, much the most probable would appear to be that there was some system of voting which involved counting. Perhaps it is permissible to suggest a parallel with the division into three of the assembly of the "great" at Kanes, which I have already discussed. If this line of reasoning is not too far astray, a further conclusion may be drawn, that the technique of voting would appear to have arisen not so much in a political context, as our own experience would lead us to assume, but in a social or judicial one.5 There the environment may have been more favourable both to its appearance and survival, in that the groups involved would generally be small and homogeneous in their interests, functions and The next few lines go on to enumerate various status. In this connection, it is interesting to find, as Landsberger observes, that "the dignity of types of judges. The considerations which led Professor Lands- rabidnum (of the village of Supur-subula) rotated 6 This rotation berger to translate sid/minitum by "voting year by year among the elders." board" are unknown to me.3 Even without this may have been effected by the vote-we cannot say. exact term, however, the context seems clear Whether it was or not, the practice strongly sugthis enough. Scribes, and probably other craftsmen as gests a liberal and democratic spirit among atmosan In such of local small dignitaries. group well, held assemblies, no doubt to discuss matters of mutual interest, appoint officers and so on.4 phere, democratic procedures within the group might easily arise. 1 Between the submission and the appearance of the Voting among the Mesopotamian peoples, theremain part of this article, Professor Jacobsen published a fore, may have been a social and judicial usage, further "Early political development in

Since this paper was written, there has come to my attention a piece of evidence which, in my view, considerably increases the possibility that voting was employed in certain Mesopotamian assemblies as a procedural technique. Taken with one or two other scraps of information, it may also suggest the circumstances in which the practice arose. The text is brief enough to be quoted in full. It is from the second tablet of HAR-ra = hubullu, as translated by Landsberger: 2 master of the 13 um-me-a um-man-nu scribal craft 14 URUxBAR assembly (of pu-uh-ru masters) (=unkin) mi-nu-tum 15 sid number, voting board 16 sid um-me-a mi-nu-tum number, or um-ma-ni-e voting board of a mastercraftsman

long study, Mesopotamia," ZA, n.f. 18 (52) 1957, p. 91-140. Some of this is in a neighbouring field, especially pages 99-104. I am most gratified to find that in a few instances where Professor Jacobsen and I have discussed the same text, we are in agreement upon its significance. On the other hand, he has not modified his position upon the composition of the assemblies of Uruk and Kanes, merely referring to his earlier remarks on the subject. 2MSL, Vol. V, p. 51. 3 For an earlier discussion of the meaning of sid by Landsberger, see JAOS, 69 (1949), p. 214, apud Kramer, Sumerian composition relating to the "Schooldays-A education of a scribe." This text seems also to be relevant to the disputed

issue of the existence of trade gilds in Babylonia, and if the interpretation proposed is correct would undoubtedly support their existence. See I. Mendelsohn, "Gilds in Babylonia and Assyria," JAOS, 60 (1940), p. 68-72. " great" 6 It will be recalled that the assembly of the at Kanes was a judicial body. It is well known that there were boards of judges in Babylonia, and these may have reached a verdict by vote; at any rate I cannot help wondering if the fact that our text is immediately followed by lists of judges is altogether coincidental. 6 "On the archive of Ubarum," JCS, 9 (1955), p. 127, note 44. Cf. ibid. p. 126.

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Brief Communications rather than a political one. Given the character of their civilisation, this is not surprising; centuries later, in Hellenistic times, innumerable clubs and societies of every kind were run upon democratic principles long after the triumph of autocracy in the political field. If voting was employed politically in the ancient Near East, it seems likely that it was by bodies which the Greeks would have regarded as oligarchic rather than democratic in complexion, such as the abba uru, or the assembly of the "great" at Kanes. There is nothing paradoxical in this: to take another instance from Classical Antiquity, the board of the Ephors and

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the Council of the Gerousia of the ultra-conservative and oligarchic state of Sparta employed the vote and based decisions upon a simple majority.7 At least it can be claimed that such evidence as we possess supports this view, for these bodies, like the assembly of scribes, were small in numbers and composed of men whose interests and status were closely similar. GEOFFREY EVANS UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

7I have already pointed out that the Spartan popular assembly did not vote, except by acclamation, and was always liable to be overruled by the Gerousia.

Stress Continuity in Iranian In addition to an excellent descriptive account ward (134) the attractive suggestion that three of of Word stress in Persian,1 Ferguson has put for- the features discussed by him are inheritances in Lg. 33 (1957), 123-35. While the bulk of Ferguson's article is, as the title suggests, a descriptive account of the incidence of distinctive stress in important categories of modern Persian words, certain interesting phrase and sentence types are also treated in respect of their stress patterns. From Ferguson's treatment we learn that the incidence of stress in modern Persian is by no means the simple automatic matter that standard handbooks by assertion or by silence would have us believe. My present note should be taken neither as implying that Ferguson's article covers his topic incompletely nor as supplementing his main subject. At the end of his article, as a sort of appendix, Ferguson happily took the opportunity of suggesting the Indo-European background of a few of the features just described by him. It is from that portion of his work that the present note took its course. The reader is referred to Ferguson's article for the descriptive facts. For convenience, and, most of all, for clarity and to avoid ambiguity, certain terms and concepts are introduced below which may usefully be briefly defined here for the benefit of those readers whose daily tasks do not justify their keeping up a running familiarity with the neologisms occasioned by the rapidly changing field of Phonemes, the basic sound units of lanlinguistics: guages,

are

often

spoken

of

as

SEGMENTAL (vowels,

consonants, semivowels, and the like) or SUPRASEGMENTAL; the latter term of the dichotomy is more or less equivalent to accentual or prosodic, and includes such This may be items as stress, pitch, tone, length, juncture. regarded as an arbitrary, but highly useful, analytic dichotomy whose precise reflection in nature has not yet been demonstrated, but whose reality and power to generate new and productive statements cannot be doubted. Morphemes are most easily identified by observing and grouping together recurrent sequences of phonemes; such sequences may, if certain conditions are

detail from Indo-European. These three features are: 1. recessive stress and lack of stress in vocatives; 2. stress on preverb and frequent absence of stress in verb forms; 3. pitch and stress on interrogative words. By carefully inspecting earlier attestation within Iranian and correlating these facts with features assumed on other evidence for Indo-European, this list of features can be extended. Numbering will be continued from the points recapitulated above; in each case, reference is made to the relevant paragraph number in Ferguson's article. satisfied, consist of a single phoneme, or even of zero. It is convenient, then, to call a morpheme which is manifested

by segmental

phonemes

a SEGMENTAL

MORPHEME.

Though it may seem a trifle strange at first, it is quite common in most known languages for us to encounter morphemes that are manifested entirely by suprasegmental phonemes, i. e., by sequences of stresses, pitches, junctures,

etc.

Since such SUPRASEGMENTAL

MORPHEMES

have never yet been observed to behave as bases or stems, it is reasonable and compact, on the analogy of affixes (i.e., prefixes, infixes, suffixes), to call them SUPERFIXES.

In this

way,

we can in our discourse

dis-

tinguish unambiguously between a superfix, which is a morpheme just as a suffix is, and the separate accents or stresses through which it is manifested. The term CLITIC is a handy cover-term for the familiar proclitic and enclitic: A base (and, thus, not an affix) which attaches to an adjacent word without intervening For juncture and with no independent accentuation. such terminology generally, see Hamp, A Glossary of Technical 1925-1950 American Usage Linguistic 1957). (Utrecht/Antwerp