The Material and Ideological Base of the Old Babylonian State: History, Economy, and Politics.

• Author: Seri, Andrea

The Material and Ideological Base of the Old Babylonian State: History, Economy, and Politics. By LUKAS PECHA. Lanham, MD: LEXINGTON BOOKS, 2018. Pp. xvii + 316. $115.

Lukas Pecha's book on an Old Babylonian state consists of an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. In the two-page introduction, the author explains the aim of the book, provides a definition of state, affirms that the documentary material is not exhaustive but exemplary, and mentions that this work is based on his previous book The Old Babylonian State: Political Development, Economy, Civil Administration, published in 2003. This work is not listed in the bibliography and was not originally published in English, as the reader might think, but appeared under the title Starobabylonsky stdt: Politicky vyvoj, hospoddrstvi, stdtni sprdva (Pecha 2003). Since I do not read Czech, 1 cannot assess whether the work has undergone considerable revision and have to trust Pecha's comments on the differences between the two volumes.

Chapter 1 deals with the written sources. Chapter 2 gives a summary of political history. Chapter 3 is entitled "State Economy." Chapter 4 is about the structure of the Old Babylonian state. Chapter 5 explains the fall of the Old Babylonian state. The three-page conclusion provides an overview of the characteristics of the state.

The length of the chapters and the treatment of the evidence are uneven. The state economy (chap. 3) takes up 130 pages and is loaded with citations from, and insightful comments on, primary sources. Chapter 4, on the structure of the Old Babylonian state, also has abundant information, but is not as thoroughly documented as the preceding one, and relevant information is not provided. That is the case, for instance, with the mention of a conflict between the rabidnum of Harradum and his city, where the reference to the document is omitted (p. 293 n. 121). These two chapters contrast sharply with the one about the fall of the state, which is dispatched in only fifteen pages. The latter includes very few texts and consists mainly of a summary of scholarly interpretations, not always up-to-date, followed by the author's own explanation.

Similarly unbalanced is the treatment of "the material and ideological base of the state." Besides scattered comments, "the ideological base" is compressed into four pages under the subheading "Legitimacy of the Royal Power." Chapters are organized as a collection of notes gathered under...