REVIEW: Mountain Peoples in the Ancient Near East: The Case of the Zagros in the First Millennium bce

Silvia Balatti: Mountain Peoples in the Ancient Near East: The Case of the Zagros in the First Millennium bce. (Classica et Orientalia 18.) xxviii, 430 pp. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017. ISBN 978 3 447 10800 3.

The Zagros Mountains have long been an integral part of Near Eastern history. The present volume is a corrected and “slightly revised” (p. xxiii) version of Balatti's 2014 doctoral dissertation from the University of Kiel, addressing the social organization, the “life-ways” and the adaptive socio-political and economic strategies of the Zagros peoples in relation to their mountainous environment and the surrounding states. Chapter 1 briefly surveys Zagros' history and archaeology from prehistory until the late second millennium BC. The genres of the texts studied are then introduced, followed by descriptions of the pertinent archaeological and palynological records. The period covered by the texts is reportedly from the first Assyrian campaigns into the Zagros c. 1100 bc up to Seleucid domination of the entire Zagros Mountains until c. 150 bc. However, the earliest such Assyrian campaigns can be taken back to the periods of Adad-nirari I (1307–1275 bc) and Shalmaneser I (1274–1245 bc) (A.K. Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennia BC (to 1115) (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1987), 131, 179, 206, 207). A review of the secondary literature (which should include more of the work of I.N. Medvedskaya) concerning the Zagros concludes chapter 1....