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Constructing Identities: Greek Names as a Marker of Hellenizing Identity

Paper · 2023 · Laurie E. Pearce and Paola Corò

Summary

The paper asks how Babylonians in Hellenistic Uruk signalled an emerging Hellenizing identity, given that the surviving legal records still use traditional Babylonian formulae. The authors work with the legal corpus of Hellenistic Uruk, nearly 700 tablets recording mostly real-estate and prebend-share sales, with some slave sales. They treat three kinds of evidence as diagnostic: Greek personal names, Akkadian~Greek double names (polyonymy), and Hellenistic motifs on captioned seal impressions. With these markers they trace individuals and their contact networks in three groups: the elite Ah'ūtu family, the Dumqi-Anu/Arad-Rēš family (holders of an atû, or porter, prebend share), and the ēpiš dulli ša ṭīdi (clay workers). Outward Hellenizing behaviour is clearest among the clay workers, the lowest-ranked of the three groups. These men obtained tenured land that needed Greek royal authorization. In the Dumqi-Anu/Arad-Rēš family, certain individuals link Babylonian-rooted circles with Hellenizing ones. The study is descriptive and inspired by social network analysis. It shows that naming and seal choices can expose identity strategies in small, formulaic corpora.

Key points

  • Corpus: about 700 legal tablets from Hellenistic Uruk, with an estimated 4–6,000 persons. Only about 125 of them are Greek-named, even under a generous definition.
  • A name counts as Greek if any single element of the full formula (PN/FN/GN//CN: person, father, grandfather, clan) is demonstrably Greek.
  • Patterns in the name chains:
    • A single Greek name usually sits at the start or the end of the chain.
    • Multiple Greek elements appear in father–son pairs.
    • No case shows Greek-named grandfather and grandson with an Akkadian-named father.
    • Only two three-tier Greek chains are known.
    • Polyonymy rarely spans two successive generations.
  • Outside Uruk, Akkadian~Greek polyonymy in archival texts appears in only two documents, one from Babylon (CT 49,138) and one from Nippur. New cases have been added since Boiy (2005), for example in STUBM 96.
  • Ṭāb-Anu is identified as a bridge between two clusters that differ in how strongly they mark Hellenistic identity. Formal SNA statistics are left for future work.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The authors use a deliberately broad, element-level rule: a whole name chain is flagged as soon as one component is Greek. This makes a rare phenomenon easy to detect and count consistently.
  • I2. Genealogical name formulas (PN/FN/GN//CN) are treated as structured records, not flat strings. Each slot carries a relation (father, grandfather, clan), and the slots can be analysed generation by generation.
  • I3. Polyonymy is modelled as one person who carries different names in different contexts. The notation fixes the order of the double name by whichever element is attested first most often.
  • I4. The analysis stresses patterns that never occur, such as no Greek-named grandfather and grandson with an Akkadian father between them, alongside the attested ones. Absences become constraints on the data.
  • I5. In a small corpus, the authors look for bridge individuals who connect differently marked clusters, as a qualitative network signal before any formal statistics.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): Name-origin or script features could be tagged per component of a multi-part proper noun, with a simple "any part" rule for the whole name, so that rare foreign elements are not lost.
  • I2 (world): Patronymic or kinship-chain names could be expanded into linked entities with explicit kin relations, which gives the world model free family facts.
  • I3 (frames): Coreference could keep an alias set per entity and pick a canonical name by attestation frequency, so that mentions by either name resolve to the same referent.
  • I4 (learn): Structural absences found in gold data could serve as negative controls that flag silver annotations or induced rules producing "impossible" configurations.
  • I5 (world): Entities in a text's graph that link otherwise separate groups could be detected and surfaced as likely pivots for explanation or question answering.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Ca' Foscari University of VeniceVenice · Italy8 works · 269 citations

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksReligious studies · 209 worksArcheology · 53 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 1,484 works

Cite

Cite as Laurie E. Pearce and Paola Corò. 2023. Constructing Identities: Greek Names as a Marker of Hellenizing Identity. Studia Orientalia Electronica 11.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI https://doi.org/10.23993/store.129807

@inproceedings{pearce2023constructing,
  title = {{Constructing Identities: Greek Names as a Marker of Hellenizing Identity}},
  author = {Laurie E. Pearce and Paola Corò},
  booktitle = {Studia Orientalia Electronica 11},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.23993/store.129807},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.23993/store.129807}
}

References

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