The Historical Geography of Upper Mesopotamia in the 2nd Mill. BC. An Interdisciplinary Research Project – HIGEOMES

The geo-strategical situation and the multifold conditions of the natural environment accounted massively for importance of Upper Mesopotamia within the history of the Ancient Near East. The concrete physical parameters of the region influenced the degree and forms of its socio-economic approriation and political occupancy. During the last decades increased research led to an enormous amount of archeological and epigraphical materials as well as a data from paleo-scientific analysis, thus allowing for new basic insights into the historical geography of the area. The project aims at integrating the informations from these typologically different sources, yet limiting the focus in an exemplary way to the 2nd mill BCE. In the (historically) long-term perspective of a millennium the interaction of natural environment, settlement patterns and ways of communication are analysed in terms of a holistic view. The geographically focussed investigation of changes and transformations in Upper Mesopotamia under varying types of political control is to highligth continuities and discontinuities in anthropogenic access to the area. Archeological evidence, information from written sources and paleo-data will not only be assessed in their own right, but also be processed by means of IT-semantic modelling and thematic surveys. The chronotope of the 2nd millennium seems particularly interesting for its historical and cultural diversification and hence a heterogeneous repertoire of sources. At the same time, an extremely dynamic research is characterised by a mainly disciplinary oriented processing of evidence. The distinctive feature of the proposed cooperation is the association of complementary competences of the French and German partners: this regards not only correlation in archeology, assyriology and geoinformatical modelling, thus disciplinary matters, but also in thematical and methodological specializiation within the disciplines. HIGEOMES is based on earlier cooperative works of the partnes (projet Procope 2007-2008 ayant débouché sur la publication d'un livre: E. Cancik-Kirschbaum / N. Ziegler, Entre les Fleuves, Berliner Beiträge zum Vorderen Orient, Gladbeck, 2009), where i.a. methodological premises and specific problems central to HIGEOMES have been established.