TheKish civilization was a civilization that was proposed in earlier theories among Ancient Near East scholars, which encompassed the sites ofEbla andMari in theLevant,Nagar in the north,[1] and the proto-Akkadian sites ofAbu Salabikh andKish in centralMesopotamia[2] into the earlyEast Semitic era inMesopotamia and theLevant. The term itself was coined byIgnace Gelb. The epoch that this supposed civilization existed started from the early 4th millennium BC and ended with the rise of theAkkadian empire.[3] The theory has been discarded by more recent scholarship.[4]
According to the theory, the East Semitic population migrated from what is now the Levant and spread into Mesopotamia,[5] and the new population could have contributed to the collapse of theUruk period c. 3100 BC. This early East Semitic culture was characterized by linguistic, literary and orthographic similarities extending from Ebla in the west to Abu Salabikh in the East.[6] The personal names from the Sumerian city of Kish showed an East Semitic nature and revealed that the city population had a strong Semitic component from the dawn ofrecorded history,[7] and since Gelb considered Kish to be the center of this civilization, hence the naming.[6]
The similarities included the use of a writing system that contained non-Sumerianlogograms, the use of the same system in naming the months of the year, dating byregnal years and a similar measuring system.[6] However, each city had its own monarchical system.
While the languages of Mari and Ebla were closely related, Kish represented an independent East Semitic linguistic entity that spoke a dialect (Kishite),[8] different from bothpre-Sargonic Akkadian and theEbla-Mari language.[6]
The theory has been rejected for a number of reasons: the linguistic, literary and cultural similarities and connections between the different parts of the alleged Kish civilization have been shown to be much smaller than Gelb thought, the alleged central role of the city of Kish remains unproven, and it has been argued thatonomastic and other evidence suggests that Semitic speakers were still a small minority in Northern Babylonia during the period in question.[4]
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