International Relations in the Ancient Near East, 1600-1100 BC.

• Author: Beckman, Gary
• Position: Book Review

By MARIO LIVERANI. Studies in Diplomacy. New York: PALGRAVE, 2001. Pp. xvii + 241, maps. $68.

The present volume represents a substantial revision of the author's Prestige and Interest (Padua, 1990), itself a summation of more than thirty years of study of political relations between the states of western Asia and Egypt in the second millennium. This new presentation of Liverani's influential views is most welcome. Not only has a decade of further reflection allowed him to refine his argumentation, but his editors have served him well by removing most of the awkwardness and solecisms in English style that made Prestige and Interest difficult to read.

In analyzing the diplomatic intercourse of the Late Bronze Age, Liverani has long employed Karl Polanyi's distinction between "reciprocal" and "redistributive" patterns of exchange. In this work, he makes clear that this approach is only a heuristic model: "... the two patterns of integration are here considered not as descriptive models of really different networks of exchange, but as interpretations, mental models, of a reality that in itself does not belong to any pattern" (p. 7). Thus the reader need not particularly concern himself with the question of whether a Polanyian world of marketless trading ever existed in reality.

Indeed, Liveruni's primary interest lies not in "win es eigentlich gewesen," but in the ideological messages of the documents. Of course, these value-laden communications were not intended for the use of modern scholars reconstructing ancient history, but were directed toward contemporaries. Furthermore, among contemporaries, the internal audience for the texts was more important than the foreigners to whom many of those considered here were actually addressed. As Liverani observes, "the authors and addressees of the political texts were virtually one and the same" (p. 13).

Under such circumstances, the author finds the attempt to extract the "truth" from ancient inscriptions and archives to be misguided. It is more realistic--and interesting--to study the documentation on its own terms, that is, to recover the mental world of those created it. He puts this succinctly: "The problem is not to sift away ideology in order to discover the 'real facts,' but on the contrary to better appreciate ideology through an evaluation of its factual basis" (p. 119).

But ideology is a crucial factor even for those scholars who seek to reconstruct actual occurences. Liverani observes...