Syria-Palestine in the Late Bronze Age: An Anthropology of Politics and Power

Abstract

This book addresses the political history of Syria-Palestine during the Late Bronze Age from an explicit anthropological perspective on politics and social relationships. From that angle, it is possible to grasp the ways in which power was constructed and political subordination was imagined and expressed in Syria-Palestine, as reflected by the diplomatic epistolography of the Late Bronze Age, notably the El Amarna letters. The present study deals with the socio-politics of Late Bronze Age Syria-Palestine, as expressed in the textual and epigraphic remains from that time and especially from the perspective of a critical political anthropology of Levantine societies. The First Part analyzes the textual repertoires of the Late Bronze Age on inter-regional diplomacy, such as the El Amarna correspondence, Hittite treaties, the archives, especially from Ugarit but also from secondary sources here, such as the Mari and Nuzi textual corpora, and using Egyptian texts as well, mainly from New Kingdom?s notices of the Levant. Matters of inter-regional marriages, commodities exchanges and the circulation of specialists are treated comprehensively within an economic anthropological framework, dealing with topics such as gift-giving, reciprocity, redistribution, symbolic capital, etc., as the main means to produce social exchange. The Second Part aims at building a properly anthropological perspective for dealing with the primary socio-political data from our sources. What constitutes statehood in ancient Near Eastern societies and how that relates with kinship relationships, patrimonial structures and patronage networks is reviewed and studied, taking into account the ethnographic record of the Mediterranean and the Middle East as well. The political nature of the Egyptian and Hittite rule over Syria-Palestine is analyzed from an anthropological point of view, considering also the native Syro-Palestinian political perceptions of their Egyptian and Hittite overlords. The concept of patrimonialism is particularly useful in this context as a means to address and understand the socio-political structures in Western Asia, but also the kinship and household terminology employed to convey political relationships, as they can be witnessed in the epistolographic material, but also in inter-polity treaties and royal edicts. The Third Part approaches the textual and epigraphic data from the theoretical case built on the Second Part. The studies and results from the so-called ?anthropology of the Mediterranean? (which gained momentum between the 1950s and the 1970s) are used to treat such matters as prestige and power, honour and shame and the symbolic and ideological representations of socio-political practices in the textual sources of the period, especially the Amarnianepistolographic repertoire. The purpose and conclusion of this study is to draw attention regarding what may constitute a political ontology, native to Syro-Palestinian societies, which informs and constitutes their social worlds. This political ontology, based on patronage relationships, can be a useful interpretative tool for understanding the political culture and the social dynamics of Levantine peoples, together with its ideological manifestations, as reflected in the extant written material, but also the historical processes taking place in the region, based on a patrimonial articulation of society and by means of patron-client bonds of political subordination.