Constituent, confederate, and conquered space : the emergence of the Mittani state / edited by Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, Nicole Brisch, Jesper Eidem.

Proceedings of a conference held summer of 2009.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- I. Imperial Constructs – Modes of Governance -- Levantine Polities under Mittanian Hegemony / Eva von Dassow -- The Organisation of Residential Space in the Mittani Kingdom as a Mirror of Different Models of Governance / Adelheid Otto -- The Mittani State: The Formation of the Kingdom of Mittani / Stefano de Martino -- The Imperial Space – The Early Hittite Kingdom / Jörg Klinger -- II. Political Landscapes – Antecedents in Upper Mesopotamia -- Inherited Space – Third Millennium Political and Cultural Landscape / Maria G. Biga -- Central Anatolia in the Nineteenth and Eighteenth Centuries BC / Cécile Michel -- The Kingdom ofS ˇ amsˇı¯-Adad and its Legacies / Jesper Eidem -- Political Space – Local Political Structures in Northern Syria : The Case of the Country of Ida-Maras· in the Eighteenth Century BC / Michaël Guichard -- III. Cultural Landscapes – Regional Diversity vs. Political Unity -- Marginal and Steppic Areas as Sources for Archaeological Debate : A case for “Active Symbiosis” of Town and Country / Diederik J. W. Meijer -- Settled Space. Evidence for Changes in Settlement Patterns of Northern Mesopotamia at the Advent and at the Turn of the Mittani Era / Rafal Kolinski -- The Settlement Pattern of the Western Upper Khabur from the Old Babylonian Period to the End of the Mittani Era / Bertille Lyonnet, Xavier Faivre -- Spaces of Measures and Numbers in Upper Mesopotamia / Grégory Chambon -- IV. Reflections -- The Age of Opportunity: Social and Political Transitions in Mid-Second Millennium BC Mesopotamia / Norman Yoffee -- Reflections on the Mittani Emergence / Glenn M. Schwartz.

The Mittani empire is one of the most enigmatic political structures in Mesopotamian history. Reconstructing the emergence and the organisation of this state, whose territory encompassed Upper Mesopotamia touching the Levant and the piedmont plains of the Zagros, is exceedingly difficult. Cuneiform specialists, archeologists and historians discuss the Mittani state with regard to modes of spatial organisation co- and preexisting in the region.