Of Peoples and Pots. Ethnic identity depends on the recognition of significant similarities within a group and significant differences to distinguish members of one group from another. Any combination of differences in language, social customs, material culture, religion, mode of subsistence, political organization, and territorial contiguity might, under various conditions, come into play in the process of defining one ethnic group in contradistinction to others. Modern knowledge of the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia depends largely on those ancient texts that have by happenstance survived since antiquity to be recovered and interpreted by modern scholars. On the basis of these texts ancient culturally distinct groups who share a common ancestry—ethnic groups—may be distinguished on the basis of the languages and dialects they chose by which to name themselves, to speak, or at least in which they chose to write, and by the terms...