From the historiographic perspective of the longue durée, the history of the
cultures of the ancient Near East appear to have been shaped by astonishingly
durable forms of governance or structures of authority. Upon closer
examination, however, it becomes clear that these essentially monocratic
systems engendered highly divergent forms of authority, each oriented to a
specific set of regional relations. This process produced a series of
institutions which served to implement governmental authority in specific
territories. In style and configuration, these types varied dramatically
between the city state and the large-scale territorial state, yet at the same
time (and this is the central thesis of our research group), processes of
norming and standardization played a decisive role in generating spatial and
societal identity in every type of early state. An awareness of the
significance of such processes of normativity is reflected in the significance
attributed for example to the utilization of texts and the application of
metric standards in all ancient Near Eastern kingdoms. The relationship
between local, regional, and supraregional regulations in the context of such
standardizing systems and their transformations in the wake of changing
political structures testify to the active deployment of commensurate
knowledge in the assertion of territorial authority. A project on norming and
standardization processes in the cultures of the ancient Near East, carried
out in 2008/2009 in the framework of Topoi, was conceived as basic research
whose initial objective was to generate a database that could be reconfigured
in the context of the examination of subsequent issues. Investigated here is
the relationship between the establishment of territorial authority and
norming and standardization in the realm of cultural techniques, with a focus
on metrology, primarily on the basis of reference objects bearing inscriptions
pertaining to metrical units, and on a special type of writing, specifically
Hieroglyphic Luwian