PART III - THE NEAR EAST

Summary

In the sections on East and South Asia I have been mainly concerned with the recent past and with the analysis of material derived from field studies. But in turning to the Near East (including West Asia) attention shifts to the past rather than the present. This change in focus is partly because it is on this earlier period that discussions about broad changes in forms of family and marriage have often concentrated. And partly too because the richer evidence enables us to look at the relevant facets of kinship associated with the kinds of agricultural regimes, intensive and pastoral, found in a period long before Europe played a dominant role in world history and so tended to treat as marginal, peripheral, even ‘primitive’, the civilisations of the East. As we will see, these societies of the Near East raise problems which are not only of particular interest but relate closely to those practices found in the other major Asiastic societies, especially regarding the endowment of women, close unions, monogamy and concubinage, as well as regarding other strategies of continuity such as adoption, filiacentric unions and the levirate, evidence of which already exists in the earliest documentary material on the human family that we possess, namely, that on Mesopotamia (Glassner 1986). There we see some reference to large-scale kin groups (p. 103) but their structure appears to be basically bilateral.