Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean

623 Pages·2013·4.426 MB·English

by  Peter Fibiger Bang, Walter Scheidel

[UNTITLED]
[UNTITLED]
The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediter­
ranean
Edited by Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel
Print Publication Date: Feb 2013 Subject: Classical Studies
Online Publication Date: Jan 2013
(p. iv)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Page 1 of 2
[UNTITLED]
The Oxford handbook of the state in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean / edit­
ed by
Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–518831–8
1. State, The—History—To 1500. 2. Political science—History—To 1500.
3. Middle East—Politics and government. 4. Mediterranean Region—
Politics and government. 5. Comparative government.
I. Bang, Peter F. (Peter Fibiger), 1973– II. Scheidel, Walter, 1966–
JC51.O94 2013
320.935—dc23
2012009018
ISBN 978–0–19–518831–8
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
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Maps
Maps
The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediter­
ranean
Edited by Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel
Print Publication Date: Feb 2013 Subject: Classical Studies
Online Publication Date: Jan 2013
Maps
(p. vii)
2.1 Pharaonic Egypt 66
2.2 Ptolemaic Egypt 67
3.1 Cities of the Ancient Near East, circa 3500–100 BCE 98
4.1 Empires of Western Asia, circa 2350–1700 BCE 132
4.2 Empires of the Near East, circa 1500–1100 BCE 136
4.3 Empires of the Near East, circa 900–550 BCE 139
5.1 The World of the Hittites 162
6.1 Palestine under Herod and His Heirs 182
7.1 The Achaemenid Empire 200
7.2 The Parthian and Sasanian Empires 206
8.1 Bronze Age Greece 238
9.1 The Greek Polis of the Aegean World 261
9.2 Greek Colonization 262
10.1 The Athenian Empire 281
10.2 Sicily and Southern Italy 282
11.1 Koina in Mainland Greece in the Fourth Century BCE 305
12.1 The Hellenistic World around 250 BCE 331
13.1 The Carthaginian Empire from the First to the Second Punic War 362
14.1 The Roman Empire circa 60 BCE 385
15.1 The Roman Empire around 70 CE 416
15.2 The Roman Empire in the Early Fourth Century CE 451
16.1 The Byzantine Empire and Its Neighbors circa 840 CE 477
17.1 The Early Medieval Successor States around 525 CE 500
18.1 The Umayyad Empire circa 740 CE 520
(p. viii)
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Figures and Tables
Figures and Tables
The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediter­
ranean
Edited by Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel
Print Publication Date: Feb 2013 Subject: Classical Studies
Online Publication Date: Jan 2013
Figures and Tables
(p. ix)
Table 3.1. Standard Periodization of Early Mesopotamia 99
Fig. 3.1. A representation of the city-state economy 113
Fig. 4.1. A sketch drawing that shows the oscillation in Mesopotamian history be­
tween political fragmentation and imperial centralization from the third to the first
millennium BCE 123
Table 8.1. Outline Chronology of Second-Millennium BCE Crete and Mainland
Greece, Showing Cultural and Ceramic Phases and Approximate Absolute Dates 240
Fig. 12.1. The tributary and economic flows of Hellenistic empires 347
Table 15.1. Roman and Early Modern Military Mobilization 419–420
Table 15.2. Army Expenditure and the Economy of the Roman Empire 445
Table 15.3. Army Totals and Battle Strengths, Late Roman and Early Modern 455
(p. x)
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Contributors
Contributors
The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediter­
ranean
Edited by Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel
Print Publication Date: Feb 2013 Subject: Classical Studies
Online Publication Date: Jan 2013
Contributors
(p. xi)
Walter Ameling is Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Professor of Ancient His­
tory at the University of Cologne. Besides Carthage, he is mainly interested in the
Eastern Roman Empire, its religions, and its inscriptions.
Peter Fibiger Bang is associate professor at the Saxo Institute of the University of
Copenhagen and holds a doctorate from the University of Cambridge. He is a Roman
comparative historian with a keen interest in historical sociology and world history.
Gojko Barjamovic is Assistant Professor of Assyriology at the Department of Cross-
Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His main areas of re­
search are early Assyrian history, society, and economy.
John Bennet is Professor of Aegean Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. His
research interests lie in the archaeology of complex societies, particularly the Mi­
noan and Mycenaean cultures of the Bronze Age Aegean; the archaeology and history
of Crete; and early writing and administrative systems, especially Linear B.
Page 1 of 3
Contributors
Trevor Bryce is Professor Emeritus at the University of Queensland. He has pub­
lished extensively on the Ancient Near East.
Steven J. Garfinkle is a professor of ancient history at Western Washington Univer­
sity. His current research focuses on the society and economy of early Mesopotamia.
John F. Haldon is Professor of History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University.
His research focuses on the history of the early and middle Byzantine empire; on
state systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds from late an­
cient to early modern times; and on the production, distribution, and consumption of
resources in the late ancient and medieval world, especially in the context of warfare.
Mogens Herman Hansen at the University of Copenhagen is a leading authority on
Athenian democracy and the Greek polis.
John Ma was trained in ancient history in Geneva, Oxford, Paris, Hamburg, and
Princeton; he now teaches ancient history at Oxford University. His main interests
are Greek epigraphy and the social history of power in the ancient world, through the
study of the two complementary forms of tributary empire and local city-state. (p. xii)
Emily Mackil is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berke­
ley. A historian of the ancient Greek world, she has a special interest in issues of
state formation and political economy.
Joseph G. Manning took his doctorate in Egyptology at the University of Chicago.
He taught at the University of Chicago, Princeton, and Stanford before taking up his
current position as the William K. and Marilyn M. Simpson Professor of Classics and
Ancient History at Yale.
Page 2 of 3
Contributors
Ian Morris is Willard Professor of Classics and Professor of History at Stanford Uni­
versity. He works on long-term global history.
Henrik Mouritsen is Professor of Roman history at King’s College London. He
works on Roman social and political history.
Chase F. Robinson is Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center. He works
on the early history of Islam and the Arab expansion.
Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. His
research focuses on premodern social and economic history, demography, state for­
mation, and comparative and transdisciplinary perspectives.
Seth Schwartz is Professor in the History and Classics Departments at Columbia
University. He writes on the social, cultural, and political history of the Jews in antiq­
uity.
Josef Wiesehöfer is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Kiel. His main
interests are the history of the ancient Near East and its relations with the Mediter­
ranean world, social history, the history of early modern travelogues, and the history
of scholarship.
Ian Wood is Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leeds. His chief
research interests are the post-Roman period, the Christianization of Western and
Central Europe, Anglo-Saxon England in the Age of Bede, and eighteenth-, nine­
teenth-, and twentieth-century interpretations of the Fall of Rome.
Page 3 of 3
Prologue
Oxford Handbooks Online
Prologue
Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel
The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and
Mediterranean
Edited by Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel
Print Publication Date: Feb 2013
Subject: Classical Studies, Greek and Roman Law, Social and Economic History
Online Publication Date: Jan 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195188318.013.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the history of
state formation in ancient North Africa and western Eurasia. The book aims to bridge the
disciplinary gap between the study of the ancient Near East and the study of the ancient
Mediterranean, exploring various factors that influenced state formation, including
ideologies, political power, cooperation, exploitation, and military power. The areas
covered in this study include Egypt, the Mesopotamian Empires, and the Anatolian
States.
Keywords: state formation, ancient North Africa, ancient western Eurasia, ancient Near East, ancient
Mediterranean, ideologies, political power, exploitation, military power, cooperation
A handbook of the “ancient state” is the result of multiple demarcations, which require
explanation. One demarcation is in time. Our case studies begin with the earliest
documented states in the Fertile Crescent. These beginnings are inevitably obscure, and
we have to allow for the possibility that the very first states may not be known as such:
What were conditions in the Nile Valley prior to the First Dynasty, and were the Sumerian
city-states of the third millennium BCE preceded by forerunners in the Levant, or by a
territorial state centered on Uruk, or by polities in nearby Khuzestan? In the absence of
written records, these questions are difficult to answer with certainty. Our endpoint is the
period of transition of the fifth through eighth centuries CE, marked by the fading of
Roman and Iranian empire and the formation of Arabic and Germanic successor states.
This is merely a conventional boundary, chosen for pragmatic reasons: a more “natural”
one, between premodern states and the modern nation-states and their colonial empires,
would have led to a very different project, and certainly to more than one volume.
Page 1 of 3
Prologue
A second set of limits is imposed in space. Our project deals with the ancient states of
western Eurasia and northern Africa. This ecumene was firmly bounded by the ocean to
the west and quite clearly, for our present purposes, by stateless peripheries to the north
and south. By contrast, Eurasian geography provides no similarly convenient boundary to
the east. We focus on the region that gradually came to be encompassed by a single
political-military network, a system of states that interacted regularly in a variety ways
far beyond the more ephemeral exchange of prestige goods and information that was
feasible across much longer distances. Political and military contacts between the states
of the Near East and the Mediterranean and regions farther east were not completely
absent but generally remained rare: Achaemenid expansion into the Indus Valley and
Alexander’s (p. 4) campaign and its consequences are the main exceptions. Our
geographical boundaries are at their murkiest in Central Asia, and our selection is in the
first instance governed by a desire to avoid a chain reaction. If we had included the
Kushana, coverage would have had to be extended into the Indian subcontinent; and in
that case, only a few other states would have been rather awkwardly excluded from an
otherwise fairly pan-Afroeurasian survey. Faced with a stark choice between confining
ourselves to the state system of the Fertile Crescent, with its growing Iranian and
Mediterranean extensions, and covering all of Afroeurasia, constraints of space favor the
more limited version. A companion volume on much of Asia is therefore a desideratum.
Our third kind of demarcation concerns the level of resolution. This volume is not
intended as an encyclopedic compendium of all states that are known to have existed in
the area and period under review. The quality of the historical record is the key criterion:
While we are aware of Elam and Urartu, of Phrygia and Lydia, of Armenia and the
Bosporan Kingdom, or of Meroe and Himyar, lines must be drawn. We also refrain from
including entities whose “state-ness” is uncertain, such as the Celtic polities of pre-
Roman Gaul.
These demarcations leave us with eighteen historical chapters, many of them devoted to
several states or to a particular type of state, some to a single case, and a few covering
different phases of the same system (Rome). These surveys are not only meant to provide
important information but also to support cross-cultural and comparative perspectives. In
order to ensure the consistency required for this purpose, emphasis is put on a series of
key issues: the political system; the organization of military power; mechanisms of
cooperation, coercion, and resource extraction; means of arbitration and rule
enforcement; economic activities; belief systems; systems of communication and
representation; state identity; and the end or transformations of these states. At the same
time, the uneven quality of the evidence and diverse scholarly preferences necessitate a
measure of flexibility that serves to enrich the resulting accounts.
Our main objectives are to bridge the disciplinary gap between the study of the ancient
Near East and the study of the ancient Mediterranean, and to provide a resource that is
accessible, useful, and of interest not only to students and specialists of ancient history
but also to historians of other periods as well as anthropologists, historical sociologists,
and political scientists. To further these goals, we include an introductory chapter that
Page 2 of 3
Prologue
seeks to convey a sense of the wide range of approaches to the study of the early state
and not least to relate these to the discourse on state formation in general that has
developed in the last decades. This latter literature has to a very large extent been
dominated by what we might term the European experience, from the Middle Ages
onward. With this volume, we hope to widen the analytical horizon and call attention to
the preceding “ancient” experience of several millennia of state formation and its
potential for refining and nuancing the existing body of theory in the field.
Peter Fibiger Bang
Peter Fibiger Bang is Associate Professor of History at the University of Copenhagen.
He works on the comparative economic history and political economy of early
empires.
Walter Scheidel
Walter Scheidel, Dickason Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.
Page 3 of 3