Ascertaining whether or not nations existed in the ancient Near East is not merely for the sake of determining historically when these territorial relations of social kinship appear.1 If the evidence, however complicated, suggests the existence of nations in the ancient Near East, a more accurate understanding of not only antiquity but also “modern times” should emerge, as the classification of the self and others on the basis of birth and residence in a territory would not have originated with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and certainly would not be novel to the so-called “Age of Nationalism” of the nineteenth century.