The Royal Palace Institution in the First Millennium BC: Regional Development and Cultural Interchange between East and West.

• Author: Downey, Susan B.
• Position: Book Review

Edited by INGE NIELSEN. Monographs of the Danish Institute at Athens, vol. 4. Athens: THE DANISH INSTITUTE AT ATHENS, 2001. Pp. 315, illus. $39.95. [Distributed in North America by David Brown Book Company, Oakville, Conn.]

This volume presents the papers of a conference held at the Danish Institute at Athens in November, 1999. The editor describes the purpose of the conference and of the book as follows: "to use the royal palace, a term covering both the palace and the institution as a kind of microcosm to illuminate historical processes, including the relationship between conquerors and conquered" (p. 7). In general, the volume fulfills these aims admirably. It opens with an essay by David Braund on Greek ideas of the palace based on literary sources (Homer, Herodotos, Euripedes, and Plutarch), arguing that for the Greeks it is not the institution of the palace per se but rather the mentality of the ruler that makes a palace-based society good or bad. Essays on palaces in the ancient Near East follow (Stephen Lumsden on Neo-Assyrian palaces, Amelie Kuhrt on Babylon, David Stronach and Remy Boucharlat on Achaemenids) and Cyprus (Thierry Petit). A particularly valuable feature is the inclusion of reports on palaces in Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijian dating from the Achaemenid through the Greco-Roman periods (Aminia Kanetsyan, Felix I. Ter-Martirossov, Florian Knauss, Vakhtang Licheli, Iulon Gagoshidze, and Ilyas Babayev). Central Asia is represented by Antonio Invernizzi's essay on the Parthian palace at Nysa in Turkmenistan, Hellenistic Syria by Graeme Clarke's report on the governor's palace at Jebel Khalid. Two essays on palace and polis in Hellenistic Macedonia bring us back to Greece (M. B. Hatzopoulos, Chryssoula Saatsoglou-Paliadeli), and Inge Nielsen contributes a synthetic essay on the gardens of Hellenistic palaces.

The essays range in type from excavation reports (Clarke, and most of the articles by scholars from the former Soviet Union) to articles that discuss palaces in the light of theoretical debates in archaeological theory. For example, the essays on Assyrian, Babylonian, and Achaemenid palaces pay particular attention to the manner in which rulers expressed their ideology in...