The Middle East as Middle Ground?: Cultural Interaction in the Ancient Middle East Revisited

The Middle East has always been - and still is today - a place of cultural interaction for local communities and larger political entities. This interaction requires constant negotiations between the various groups and it is here that the Middle Ground concept can offer a valuable framework for our analysis. Originally conceived by Richard White for his study of the Great Lakes region in the 18th century, the Middle Ground concept emphasizes the importance of negotiation and the agency of both larger political entities and local communities in this process. The papers of this volume originated in a conference of the same name held at Cologne University in April 2017. They show the possibilities of using the Middle Ground concept in analyzing the ancient Middle East but also allow the development of other ideas on cultural contact in a changing world: Conquest and expansion of dominant groups like the Hellenistic monarchies or the Roman Empire created a need for local partners who were able to use their position to negotiate a communicable framework, even if this process involved a risk of frequent misunderstandings. At the same time, native communities utilized contacts to other and often dominant groups to express their identities and formulate their interests in this newly developed mutually communicable framework. The Ancient Middle East can thus be shown to be a Middle Ground - a place where actors from different cultures negotiated a common understanding.