Unpacking the Lives of Ancient Immigrants with Dr. Teodoro Alstola

Dr. Tero Alstola, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, discusses his work on ancient Near Eastern cultures and the social history of Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. He talks about his research on ancient immigrants, network approaches to historical data sets, and the use of computer-aided study of the Akkadian language. The conversation delves into his involvement in the 69th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale and his interest in the ancient world, starting with ancient Egypt.

 Dr. Alstola's research: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/tero-alstola Information on RAI: http://helsinki.fi/rencontre More information on migration and immigrants: The Ancient Near East Today has blog posts on migration: https://www.asor.org/anetoday How Bad Was the Babylonian Exile? https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-near-eastern-world/how-bad-was-the-babylonian-exile/ 

00:00:30 - Introduction to Dr. Teodoro Alstola
00:01:43 - Dr. Alstola's Background and Interest in Ancient Studies
00:03:22 - Dr. Alstola's Specialization and Research Focus
00:04:01 - Origins of Dr. Alstola's Interest in Migration
00:05:34 - Sources for Studying Ancient Migration
00:06:56 - Comparing Ancient and Modern Migration
00:09:19 - Legal Aspects of Ancient Migration
00:10:54 - Perceptions of Immigrants in the Ancient Near East
00:14:26 - Digital Humanities and Computer-Aided Research
00:22:19 - AI in Academic Research
00:24:31 - The 69th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale
00:30:47 - Assyrian Deportation Policy
00:33:28 - Artifacts Documenting Ancient Migration
00:35:04 - Cultural Assimilation of Migrants

Transcript

Megan: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Digital Hammurabi. Today, I am very excited to be joined by Dr. Teodoro Alstola. Dr. Alstola is a scholar of ancient Near Eastern cultures and languages, specializing in the digital humanities and the social history of Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. His research projects focus on migrant and rural populations in Babylonian society, network approaches to historical data sets, and the computer-aided study of the Akkadian language. He is currently a researcher at the University of Helsinki's Center of Excellence in the Ancient Near Eastern Empires and has kindly agreed to talk to me today about his research into ancient immigrants, the practice of computer-aided research, and the 69th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, I always botch that particular conference name, which is a lot like Comic-Con for academics, just with less cosplay, no movie stars and cutting edge academic research instead of previews of the newest Marvel movie. So, Dr. Alstola, thank you so much for joining me today.

 Dr. Alstola: Thank you for the invite. It's really nice to be here.

Megan: Oh, no, it's my pleasure entirely. Before we get started into research, would you mind introducing yourself and telling the audience how you became interested in the study of the ancient world?

Dr. Alstola: Yeah, sure. As you already told, I'm working currently in Helsinki as a researcher at the Center of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires. That's an eight year project during which we try to answer the question, how did empires, ancient empires in Mesopotamia affect people's life ways and identities? So that's a really big research project I'm part in. My own interest in the ancient world, I think that started in ancient Egypt. So I was like 10 years old or something, and I got interested in pharaohs and pyramids and mummies, you know, all of that really intriguing stuff in Egypt. But then when I grew a bit older, I also figured out that there are really interesting things to discover in Mesopotamia. And then when it was time to go to the university, I was a bit uncertain whether I should go and study a seriology here in Helsinki or whether I should actually do Hebrew Bible. And well, I decided to do biblical studies, Hebrew Bible. But then during the studies, I grew more and more interested in ancient Mesopotamia. And then when it was the time to start doing my PhD. I was totally in astrology and well, nowadays, I would say I'm perhaps a scholar of ancient Near East in general, so rather large region.

Megan: Excellent. Thank you so much. So I kind of gave a brief glimpse into this in my introduction. But what's your personal area of specialization?

Dr. Alstola: I think there are a few of those. First of all, social history and economic history of Babylonia in the first millennium BCE, especially migration, immigrants, all of that. And then secondly, in the last five years or so, I've been focusing more and more on digital approaches to ancient theorists and sources. rather many approaches and not only focusing on Babylonia but also the Neo-Assyrian period and first millennium in general.

Megan: Thank you. Now what prompted you to start working on migration and immigration?

Dr. Alstola: It all started when I was doing my BA here in Helsinki. Here in Finland we usually write a sort of BA thesis as part of the BA degree and in the BA thesis seminar Professor Martti Nissinen suggested that I could perhaps do something related to the new sources, cuneiform sources that were discovered in Iraq that had something to do with Judean immigrants in Babylonia. And that sounded interesting. I knew nothing about it. And then, as it often happens, I continue to work on the topic. I wrote my MA thesis about it and then finally my PhD thesis. So I've been kind of getting deeper and deeper into that subject, although it was just a coincidence that kind of Martti suggested that's something you could do. And well, then I started to do that.

Megan: My undergraduate advisor did something very, very similar. I wanted to be a classicist. My advisor was Alistair Livingstone, who was an Assyriologist. And he suggested for my BA thesis, why don't you look at Assyriological information? We've got so many tablets that need working on. And I was hooked. That was kind of me for the rest of my academic career.

Dr. Alstola: Yeah, I think that's very common.

Megan: When we're looking at migration and how and why populations move in the Ancient Near East, what kinds of sources do you have to work with?

Dr. Alstola: Most often we need to use cuneiform tablets that actually discuss migration from very different perspectives. For example, in royal inscriptions, you get the viewpoint of the state of the king, who, especially in the Assyrian sources, really discusses in detail all these forced migrations of people, how they moved people from the West to the East and from the East to the West. But we can also really focus on the everyday lives of these migrants. And for example, in Babylonia, we have a lot of cuneiform tablets from everyday transactions. We have migrants who are buying or selling cows or some other property. They are perhaps giving their daughter to marriage and so on and so forth. So sometimes we get this imperial viewpoint, but we can also zoom in and really see how these people lived their lives and really have this grassroots level idea of what was going on.

Megan: That's fascinating. Thank you. Can we say what factors drove the movement of people in the ancient world and how they compare to migration patterns today?

Dr. Alstola: I find it really surprising that it's so similar to what happened 2,500 years ago and what's happening today. So first of all, we see a lot of voluntary migration taking place in the ancient Near East. For example, traders traveled because they had something to sell in distant countries, and then went there, came back, went there again. Also other professionals, like craftsmen, mercenaries, and so on and so forth, they traveled because of their profession. But then we also have something that one could call involuntary migration. For example, if there was famine in a country, people just had to flee to find food somewhere else. And also empires of the moved people, something that we can call forced migrations, for example. And that's perhaps the best documented type of migration that took place in the first millennium. As I already mentioned, these Assyrian kings really boast about the forced migrations, how they deported people from the West to the East and back. I think all of these forms of migration are something that we can find in today's world. We can read in newspapers. We know that a lot of people are still migrating only because they want to live a better life somewhere else. But at the same time we know that these forced migrations are also taking place. Unfortunately, for example, we see that that's happening in Ukraine, in some parts where Russia is now forcefully migrating these Ukrainians there. So unfortunately also these problematic aspects of forced migration are still taking place, as well as these positive aspects of people just migrating somewhere to live a better life.

Megan: Thank you. When it comes to the mechanics of migration, do we see the same kind of legal implications in the ancient world as we have in our modern world? If people voluntarily migrated, would they need to apply for some kind of permit to cross borders and settle in another country or was it a more open and free movement process?

Dr. Alstola: Yeah, that's quite different from the modern world, because there were no nation-states, there was nothing like international law, so borders, as we understand them, really didn't exist. So there was no such thing as fixed borders. For example, when it comes to the empires of the first millennium, like Assyria and Babylonia, their borders were somewhat fluctuating. So it was somewhere there, let's say in the Zagros Mountains, But there was not such a fixed border as we think of borders nowadays. But of course, they controlled the movement of people. So not everybody was allowed to move, let's say, to the Babylonian cities or to the Assyrian heartland. So the empires were really controlling the movement of these peoples. but because there was this no concept of nation state so then one cannot really speak of legal or illegal migration in the sense we are talking about it nowadays.

Megan: Thank you. What do we know about how migrants and immigrants were viewed in the ancient Near East in a lot of places? I live in the continent, continental US. A lot of people have kind of a negative view of immigrants and the effect that they have on the country. Was there a similar like positive negative view of immigration or was it more of a neutral, a neutral thing?

Dr. Alstola: We find both and also the neutral view. In some sources, there are very negative views of of foreigners in general, like people who were living in the mountains. But there was often this dichotomy between the cities on the plain in Babylonia, in Assyria, and then these places in the mountains. And then often this dichotomy was then translated into very negative ideas of the people in the mountains, how they were really barbarians, violent people without any traits of civilization. Then at the same time, we also see that some migrants were really held in high value. For example, in the first millennium in Babylonia, many Egyptians worked in the administration and it's clear that they were really somehow admired and really highly held professionals. So we see both very negative and also positive views, but in many cases it's difficult to see that there were any special connotations or any views about these migrants. In everyday sources, it's only the name of a person that may reveal that he or she came from, let's say, the Levantine coast, but was now living in Babylonia. But nothing in their interactions with the local Babylonians reveals that there were any negative or positive attitudes towards them.

Megan: Thank you. We're going to kind of pivot in a moment to the other facet of your work, which is using computers and doing digital humanities research. But before we do that, can you recommend any books or resources that an interested layperson might use to understand more about migration in the ancient Near East?

Dr. Alstola: Yeah, it's a bit unfortunate that there is not much available, especially when I was trying to think about books. I guess there are none available at the moment. Now, if there's anyone listening who would be interested in writing one, that would be wonderful. When it comes to articles and blog posts, there are some, for example, in the Ancient Near East Today blog by Aesor, there are some interesting blog posts on migration. Unfortunately, their archive seems to be offline currently, so you cannot access blog posts before. to 23, so all the older ones are not there, but hopefully they will be online again. So there are several interesting ones. And when it comes to especially migrants in Babylonia in the first millennium, there are some nice articles written by Laurie Pierce. Perhaps we can add those links to the YouTube description after the stream.

Megan: Absolutely. Thank you. I've actually I've put the link for engineers today and an article by Dr. Pierce in the description. So if people are interested, those are both good places to start. And as I said in the introduction, a lot of your work involves computer aided research. Can you explain exactly what that means for you as an historian?

Dr. Alstola: There are two quite different methods or tools I've been using. First of all I've been working with social network analysis. in which we study the interactions or connections between Asian people. It's a bit similar to thinking of Facebook and your Facebook friends. You have a connection to all of your friends and then if you would visualize those connections as a network in which when people have a connection there would be a line between them and then you would end up having a very complicated network of people being connected to each other. For example, in this Facebook example, the connection would be a friendship tie or something similar. In ancient records, we often are interested in different kinds of interactions, so there might be a kinship tie between persons, they might be friends, they might be doing business together, one might be an official let's say and another one might be his underling and so on and so forth. And when we have big data sets, let's say thousands of people, so then the network starts to be so complicated that you really cannot study it anymore using paper and pen. But there are many computational methods to study these networks that allow us to, for example, see what kind of structure you have in the network. Are there some central people who really keep the network together? Some people who connect to different parts of the network? And in this way, we can try to learn more about the social roles the people were playing in that network. So this study of networks is one thing I've been doing. Another one relates to computational linguistics and to the meaning of different words. In ancient records, the problem is that we cannot go and ask people, what does this word mean? So the only way to understand the meaning of words is to study the contexts in which they occur. That's the way how research has been done for decades and centuries. People have been reading texts and when they encounter a strange word, they try to understand its meaning by looking at the contexts, the other words that surround the word you don't know. Nowadays we can also use computational methods for that purpose by assembling a big corpus of thousands or tens of thousands of texts and then we can statistically try to determine the meaning of certain words just by looking at the words that surround them in the text and in that way we can try to say something about the semantics, about the meaning of a new word in the context.

Megan: So from what you're saying it sounds like computers are incredibly useful when you're working with massive amounts of data that it's simply not possible for one person to hold in their head or on a paper filing system.

Dr. Alstola: Yeah, absolutely. When we have only a small dataset, let's say 50 cuneiform texts, using computational methods is not usually very helpful. But then it's better to read the text carefully, make good notes and then try to arrive at understanding of the research question you have. But when you have thousands of texts, it either takes the lifetime of a scholar to really study all of them thoroughly, or then you can use some computational methods and try to do the research in a year or two. So it really helps when we have a lot of data.

Megan: Thank you. Can you give an example of a project you're working on that uses one of these digital tools?

Dr. Alstola: Yeah, perhaps I give examples of both social network analysis and linguistics. For social network analysis, I'm currently working on a a data set from the city of Nippur and its surroundings in Babylonia in the mid-first millennium BCE. I'm working on that with my colleague Adrian Spunaukko here in Helsinki and what we do is that we have a relatively small network of few hundred people who live there in a small village of Yahud in the Nippur countryside. These people were farmers, actually migrants from the Kingdom of Judah, who had arrived in Babylonia in the early 6th century BCE. And in our project, we used this network to study the social roles and positions of people in this countryside community. So who were really the main players in that village, and especially trying to find patterns that you don't immediately see when you are just reading these texts. You find these main players relatively easily, but then trying to find like more nuanced social structures is something that starts to be rather complicated already when you have few hundred people, let alone thousands of people. So this kind of social roles and positions approach is something that we are now interested in knowing what was the position of people in the social hierarchy in the countryside. So that's a network project I'm currently working on. And then on lexical studies, rather recently, we I wrote an article with a few of my colleagues here in Helsinki about the meaning of different verbs in Akkadian that are all usually translated as to fear in English. But they are all different verbs. We studied five verbs and wanted to know if they are actually the same or if there are differences in how they are used. And it turned out that in our dataset of some 5000 texts from the Neo-Assyrian period, these verbs are indeed different. Some of them are used, for example, in relation to like fear of the gods, while some of them are used in more, let's say, secular contexts. For example, when the enemies fear the king in the battlefield and so forth. So we were able to quite nicely reconstruct a semantic field for each of these five verbs and then show that if one only translates them as to fear in English, one is kind of losing the nuances that the Acadian speakers had.

Megan: And they're quite important nuances. I feel like a reverential fear of one's deity is very, very different to fear of having your head removed by an enemy in combat.

Dr. Alstola: Yes, absolutely.

Megan: Now, if anyone has really been paying attention to what's going on in the world of AI, there's a lot of discussion about the dangers of AI-generated content, whether it's visual or written. Do you have any thoughts on the possibilities, either positive or negative, of using AI in a research context?

Dr. Alstola: I think there are both. If we start with positive ones, there are many tasks that could be done more efficiently by AI. For example, if and when we have a lot of broken clay tablets, that should be Combined AI could be, I think, nicely used for that purpose. And there are already some computational approaches that have been successfully used to find fragments of uniform tablets and then combine those. So that would be one example of using AI. But AI also poses quite some challenges. For example, when it comes to teaching at the university level, like all the essay assignments, all the paper students are supposed to write, it becomes rather difficult to know if the student has written the paper by themselves or if it's at least partially AI generates it. So we really need to think the ways we are teaching history or astrology at the university level. So it's rather challenging. And perhaps the biggest challenge is indeed that many things, especially creating very natural sounding language becomes so easy that there is the risk that also a lot of poor research is being produced just by AI and perhaps even published in some journals. So there are challenges but also many interesting opportunities but I think a lot of discussion is needed and also perhaps some regulation when it comes to its uses.

Megan: Thank you so much. Now we have a couple of questions about the upcoming conference before I start taking audience questions. So if anyone does have questions for Dr. Alstola, please put them in the chat and I will pull those and we'll get to them at the end. As I mentioned, University of Helsinki is going to be hosting the 69th Ronchondra, which is the really major serological conference in Europe. Can you tell us what kinds of things are going to be happening there?

Dr. Alstola: Yeah. It will be a very traditional academic conference, meaning that days will be full of presentations on all sorts of topics. There will be a very wide range we have. The theme of the Grand Contra this year will be people's politics, polities and politics in the Asian Near East. So we are really focusing on the interaction between the states and people living there. But there will be a lot of workshops on different topics ranging from digital humanities to motherhood in the ancient Near East and so on and so forth. So really a great variety. And of course important part of conferences is the opportunity to meet people and I guess most academics agree that that's the most important. So you can come and meet your colleagues face to face, have coffee together, have drinks together, and that's a very important aspect. And we are also planning to organize some social activities, of course. There will be some receptions and also some trips to some interesting places here in Helsinki and in the region. So when people are traveling here to Finland, they have also an opportunity to see the surroundings.

Megan: Wonderful. What are you personally most excited to either watch or participate in?

Dr. Alstola: Perhaps for me, the digital astrology workshop will be the most interesting one. But yeah, I have to admit that I'm mostly looking forward to meeting all my colleagues abroad when they are coming here and really have nice discussions with them. That's always the best part of any conference I've attended.

Megan: Absolutely agreed. It's what kind of relates to my next question. Actually, when I go to conferences and workshops, I feel like the conversations I have, it's not only wonderful to socially catch up with people that I don't get to see very often, but I feel like it really gives me food for thought in terms of research and my own work. So how do you think academic conferences can help shape the future of research and foster new ideas?

Dr. Alstola: As you said, it's indeed the interaction with people that's most important. Quite often when one is working on his or her own project, one is kind of becomes too narrowly focused on the questions and the materials one has. And quite often it happens that when you go to a conference and then you discuss your work with others, you just get so interesting new insights that your own work just may even take a completely new direction because you realize that there is something you have just completely ignored, something that's extremely relevant. And now when you take it into account, your research gets much better. But I think this conference is also they shape the field in another way. And that's the kind of the workshops and the emphasis of the conference may also highlight some avenues of research that have been understudied, for example, something that reserve more attention in the future. And then sometimes these workshops, for example, if they take place every year, they may create even new research traditions, even some very important sub-disciplines might be created from these workshops and interactions. So it's always when people come together new ideas emerge and then they start, often slowly, but start to change the field as well.

Megan: Absolutely. Now, a lot of our viewers are non-specialists, obviously still very interested in the ancient world, or they probably wouldn't be watching these videos. Is there any way that non-academics could participate in the Roncontra?

Dr. Alstola: Sure. So everybody is welcome to join us in person here in Helsinki. So anybody can register and attend the conference for a small fee. But also if you're unable to travel to Helsinki, we are planning to live stream some of the papers. We are not able to stream all the six parallel sessions we have, but at least one, perhaps two. So there will be, I would say, some 30 to 50 papers that you can watch online. Of course, in the US, the timing is not optimal because we are so much ahead here in Finland. So it's very early in the morning when most things take place, but everybody is welcome to join us online. And I really recommend watching keynotes and some other sessions.

Megan: Thank you. I did put the conference website in the description so people can check there and then check back as the website gets updated. Now, my final question before we go to viewers questions, if people want to learn more either about your research or the Ronchondra, where can they go for more information?

Dr. Alstola: Mika already has provided the links nicely there in the description, so we have the Rankantri website available with a lot of information on practicalities, the live stream links will be also added there in a new course and so forth. And then if you are more interested in my research, there is also a link to my personal page at the University of Helsinki research portal that includes more or less all of my publications and many are actually downloadable there. So you can even download the articles and read if you are interested in those.

Megan: Wonderful. I am always a fan of open access research. Thank you so much for that. Now, we have four questions from our viewers. The first one is about the Assyrians and their deportation policy. So when we're talking about immigration during specifically the neo-Assyrian period, are we referring to the deportation policy of the Assyrians or was there a different or were there multiple forms of immigration at this time?

Dr. Alstola: There were always multiple multiple ways. I think the deportations are best known and perhaps one would say too well known in a sense that the other forms of migration are not very well studied and especially in many publications the deportations perhaps play a bigger role than they should. Of course the deportations really touch the lives of many people and shape them But at the same time, it is very clear that other forms of migration took place. there were people also migrating voluntarily, looking for a better life, better living. It's difficult to say anything about numbers, so how many people were deported or how many people did migrate voluntarily, but it's very clear from the sources that both took place.

Megan: Thank you. And another question on the new Assyrian deportation policy. Was this deportation about gaining physical labor or was this the empire trying to kind of collect the best minds that they could find to enhance their own status?

Dr. Alstola: Both. So they wanted to have a workforce to cultivate land, especially Assyrian heartland. That's something that happened quite regularly. But they also deported the elites, educated professionals. And in addition to these two reasons for deportations, one very important reason was to pacify the conquered regions. Deportation was of course a punishment, but it also helped to prevent future rebellions. For example, if you deported the elite of a given region to another part of the empire, it was very difficult for this region to rebel again because there are elites who could start the rebellion were absent. So there were many reasons for that, but of course all of them related to the power policies of the Neo-Assyrian ruling house.

Megan: Thank you. Someone is asking, other than textual sources to document the movement of immigrants and migrants, what other sorts of artifacts can you use to better understand this?

Dr. Alstola: We have some really nice iconographic sources, especially from the Neo-Assyrian period, that depict mostly forceful migrations of people, like this Lachish reliefs in the British Museum, where you have this Judean deportees being taken from Lachish to the Assyrian heartland. Archaeology is more difficult because If you see that we have, for example, Egyptian amulets in Babylonia, that doesn't mean that Egyptians themselves travelled. It's possible that only Egyptian amulets travelled. So that's why with archaeological evidence one needs to be rather careful when one suggests that certain evidence is indicative that certain people travelled. Of course, archaeological evidence has been and can be used for this purpose, but with great care and really taking into account the very complex type of evidence we have and the fact that materials may travel without the people traveling who actually produce these materials.

Megan: Thank you so much. Now we have one final question from the sources. Can we get an idea of the degree of cultural assimilation that migrants would have gone through? Can we see cultural enclaves being present in a foreign country, any kind of cultural clashes, or did people quite readily try and assimilate to the culture they found themselves in?

Dr. Alstola: That seems to really depend on who were these people and what kind of environment they ended up. Quite often social environment seems to play a big role here. For example, when it comes to the Judean devotees who were taken from the Kingdom of Judah to Babylonia in the 6th century, we see that those who were taken to Babylonian cities, many of them quite quickly integrated or assimilated started to use Babylonian names. And they rather quickly disappear from our view, because when they are using Babylonian names, we finally have no means of really identifying these people in the sources. But in the countryside, it seems that people living in rather isolated villages, having little interaction with local population, They were able to maintain their identity better and their naming practices, for example. were very traditional over several generations. And that's something we also know from studies of modern migration, that if you end up living in a bigger city, you much more quickly adapt to local cultural norms and traits. But if you are living in a very isolated place, let's say in a refugee camp, it's much more likely that you stick to your own old national native culture and so forth. So this clearly affects and affects how people assimilate it in their antiquity and also nowadays.

Megan: Dr. Aalstola, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and to answer everyone's questions. It's been really, really interesting.

Dr. Alstola: Thank you so much for the invite.

Megan: That's been wonderful. And audience, thank you all for watching. I will be back next Thursday. I'll be talking to Dr. Christian Casey at 10 a.m. Eastern, so same time, same place, about a new book that he has recently published with a 16-year-old on Egyptian scribal practices. So please join us again then. And until next time, resist poor scholarship. Always ask, how do you know that? Digital Hammurabi is made possible by generous sponsorship from our patrons. Their support means that we have the technological and academic resources necessary to bring the ancient world directly to you. If you want to join the team, go to patreon.com forward slash digital Hammurabi to see how you can help.