Representations of Political Power.

• Position: Book review

Representations of Political Power: Case Histories from Times of Change and Dissolving Order in the Ancient Near East. Edited by MARLIES HEINZ and MARIAN H. FELDMAN. Winona Lake, Indiana: EISENBRAUNS, 2007. Pp. xii + 212, illus. $39.50.

Collected here are eight essays on the question "how did the politicians [sic!] and the religious leaders of 5,000 years ago confront and control change and continuity?" (p. vii), with particular attention--as indicated by the volume's title--on the visual and textual representations these leaders employed in directing their societies. Of course, the exercise of hegemony and the manipulation of majorities by elites through the exploitation of widely shared and unquestioned behavioral norms and assumptions about social behavior and roles are matters central to the modern social sciences and cultural criticism. Yet we find no mention in this book of the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Norbert Elias, Georg Lukacs, or Raymond Williams, and only passing reference to Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu (see Index of Authors, pp. 211-12).

I am certain that this situation has arisen not due to the various authors' ignorance of the work of the theorists mentioned, but rather to the resistance of the scanty material left to us by the cultures of the ancient Near East to the kind of detailed analysis that these writers practice. We seldom find systematic statements of political or religious belief systems in the ancient records, but must make do largely with prosaic records such as those of deliveries and disbursement of silver or goods, with programs for cultic ceremonies, or with the boastful inscriptions of kings. From the latter we may indeed observe that the societies of Mesopotamia and her neighbors were centered around the person of the king, who was himself the representative of the gods on earth, but this was already obvious to the first scholars able to read the cuneiform inscriptions. Sadly, we simply have no means for achieving the type of "thick description" that would enable us to discern the more subtle aspects of ancient ideologies of domination or their operation.

How, then, do the contributors to this book deal with this situation? Some use their imagination. For example, Marlies Heinz ("Sargon of Akkad: Rebel and Usurper in Kish") says far more about the establishment of the Akkadian empire and its reception by its subjects that can responsibly be gleaned from the sources. For instance, how do we know...