"Tu es de mon sang": Les alliances dans le Proche-Orient ancien.

• Author: Mieroop, Marc Van De

"Tu es de mon sang": Les alliances dans le Proche-Orient ancien. By DOMINIQUE CHARPIN. Paris: COLLEGE DE FRANCE, LES BELLES LETTRES, 2019. Pp. 337, illus. [euro]21 (paper).

Although this book investigates a subject that has already generated an enormous scholarly literature--treaties and treaty-making in the ancient Near East--it offers a fresh perspective and is enjoyable to read. This is not a chronological survey and analysis of the evidence, but a study of the practices that treaty-making involved, drawing on evidence from third-millennium BC Ebla to the Neo-Assyrian period in the mid-first millennium BC. The actual treaties preserved are not the only sources Dominique Charpin considers in detail; he relies very extensively on letters that illustrate what the participants did when drawing up such documents. The book is peppered with translations of passages that enliven the presentation with ancient voices. The author presents the scholarly apparatus in fifty pages at the end of the volume, which leaves the main text unencumbered by footnotes and makes it more user-friendly, especially to a non-specialist audience.

Charpin states explicitly that one of his aims is to decenter the El-Amarna material from the study of international relations in the ancient Near East (p. 45). As he has stated already long ago (Charpin 2001). he strongly disagrees with the opinio communis that only with the Late Bronze Age after 1500 BC real international relations started in that region's history. The evidence he relies on the most in the book comes from the early second millennium, the period he designates as "epoque amorrite," and which has been a career-long focus of his research. Almost all the sources he uses in the second chapter on the "actes et paroles" that accompany treaty-making, for example, derive from that period. He quotes extensively from letters from Mari--a corpus few know better than he does--and from other northern Mesopotamian sites of the early second millennium (Leilan and Shemshara).

In contrast, the Amarna letters are rarely mentioned--they are quoted mostly for their information on the exchange of gifts and women. I agree with Charpin that what we see in the Amarna age is essentially a continuation of long-established practices; what makes it unprecedented is the inclusion of Egypt into the "international" system. It is to be hoped that this corrective will reach a wide audience. Charpin blames/credits the early discovery of the...