Welcoming the Foreigner in Mesopotamia: Myth and Reality of Integration ; Accueillir l'étranger en Mésopotamie : mythe et réalité de l'intégration

International audience ; The ancient Near East, and especially Mesopotamia - the territories of present-day eastern Syria and Iraq - seems to have developed very early on the rules of a hospitality that functioned primarily within its inhabitants, but which also aimed to regulate the conduct to be observed towards foreigners having the opportunity to stay in the Mesopotamian alluvial plain.In order to deal with this subject, the use of textual documentation in cuneiform script places us in the very long term, from the end of the 3rd millennium BC to the beginning of the Christian era, and it is obviously not possible to discuss all the aspects of this practice of hospitality in the context of a general presentation such as the one below. It will allow us to consider two aspects in particular, based on what can be called "the literature of tradition", that of the myths and epics in Sumerian and Akkadian, and on the documentation of the everyday life. First, the fact that the rules of hospitality are involved in the way the inhabitant of Mesopotamia conceives the integration of foreigners into his model of civilization, and then, in a second step, the major evolution that takes place in the 1st millennium BC due, it seems, to the construction and political establishment of the Great Multi-Ethnic Empires, which multiplied lifestyles and identities. It is then, one might say, that "Babylon becomes Babylon", the place where the various nations of the East meet, without necessarily mixing. ; Le Proche-Orient ancien, et tout particulièrement la Mésopotamie – c'est-à-dire les territoires de la Syrie orientale et de l'Irak actuels – ont élaboré semble-t-il très tôt les règles d'une hospitalité qui fonctionna d'abord en interne, entre ses habitants, mais qui avait aussi pour but de réguler les comportements à observer envers les étrangers ayant l'occasion de séjourner dans la plaine alluviale mésopotamienne.Pour traiter ce sujet, le recours à la documentation textuelle en écriture cunéiforme nous situe dans la très longue ...