Geschenke und Steuren, Zolle und Tribute: Antike Abgabenformen in Anspruch und Wirklichkeit.

• Author: Sperling, S. David
• Position: Gifts and Taxes, Tolls/Tariffs and Tribute (Payments - Book review

Geschenke und Steuren, Zolle und Tribute: Antike Abgabenformen in Anspruch und Wirklichkeit. Edited by H. KLINKOTT, S. KUBISCH, and R. MULLER-WOLLERMANN. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 29. Leiden: BRILL, 2007. Pp. xxix + 568, plates.

The title of the volume under review may be translated as "Gifts and Taxes, Tolls/Tariffs and Tribute (Payments): Ancient Forms of Economic Contributions as Claimed and in Reality." (I follow the blurb on the book's back cover, which renders Abgabenformen as "modes of economic contribution." Abgaben certainly means "contributions," and the translation is not out of place in describing Niehr's article on the temple in Jerusalem and Gilan's on the Hittite state cult, but the German includes various kinds of handovers of money and goods that American Anglophones would not call contributions.) The subtitle refers to the attempt by the contributors and editors to understand the reality behind the practices and terminologies of redistribution of economic goods in the ancient world. Of the editors, Hilmar Klinkott is author of Der Satrap (2005), Sabine Kubisch of Das Alte Agypten (2008), and Renate Muller-Wollerman of Vergehen und Strafen: zur Sanktionierung abweichenden Verhaltens in alten Agypten (2004), a study of deviant behaviors in ancient Egypt and how society dealt with the deviants.

The collection opens with the only essay in the section headed (as translated into English) "Economic-Ethnological Definition." In this theoretical exercise in economic anthropology (pp. 3-27), M. Rossler correlates different kinds of exchange such as ritual giving or market exchange, with different political structures such as city-states vs. territorial states, and with different stages of social development. Klinkott's "Resumee" concludes the book by summarizing the previous essays and raising conceptual and methodological issues that will need to be addressed in future work. These two theoretical pieces frame seventeen essays divided into five sections: Section I, on Egypt, contains three essays. S. Seidlmayer's piece on gifts and contributions in the Old Kingdom (pp. 31-63) examines the archaeological and iconographic evidence. S. Kubisch surveys the terminology of contributions in written sources from the Old Kingdom to the New Kingdom (pp. 65-84). The last essay, by R. Muller-Wollermann on taxes, tolls/tariffs and tribute payments in the Late Egyptian Period (pp. 87-106), is a conscious attempt to remedy...