Flight and Freedom in the Ancient Near East.

• Author: Chavalas, Mark W.
• Position: Book Review

Flight and Freedom in the Ancient Near East. By DANIEL C. SNELL. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 8. Leiden: BRILL, 2001. Pp. xi + 200. $60.

For years Daniel Snell has been at the vanguard of Assyriologists who have desired to make their work appeal to a larger audience. Once again, he has succeeded in this goal, this time with his new study on flight and freedom in the ancient Near Eastern world, wherein he pleads with Assyriologists to "step forward from time to time to put it [their work] in a broad and accessible context" (p. 8). In fact, he hopes that his book will be widely read and contribute to a contemporary discussion of freedom. Moreover, he rightly argues that this is a fruitful topic for those interested in the "voiceless" in antiquity, as one can "understand the devotion to freedom among the illiterate and oppressed."

This work is an outgrowth of Snell's Life in the Ancient Near East (Yale Univ. Press, 1997). His primary goal is to study the concept of freedom in the ancient Near East in an attempt to show that it was not exclusively a Greek invention, but had Mesopotamian precursors at least two millennia before the "Greek experiment." Snell's illustrative examples are quite widespread; he provides material not only from the ancient Near East and classical sources, but also from the American South and the recent revolutions against Communism. Snell works with three basic goals: 1) to understand what type of subordinates escaped and how they fled from the bureaucratic authorities, 2) to recover the basic definition of freedom and escape for the elites, and 3) to see how this understanding was modified by the experience of those who escaped.

In the first chapter Snell surveys the history of freedom and escape, centering his discussion on a critique of O. Patterson's works, especially Freedom I: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991). Patterson contends that, although the concept of freedom is found in non-Western contexts, it was not a cultural value of any importance in pre-classical contexts, including the biblical literature about the Exodus. In fact, Snell admits that this present work is a response to Patterson's negative findings. He argues that the desire for personal freedom is universal, and not restricted to a particular cultural group. Those in the field of Assyriology will not be particularly surprised with his findings, but it will be important for those outside to...