Bronze Age Bureaucracy: Writing and the Practice of Government in Assyria. By Nicholas Postgate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 484, illus. $99.

The Early Bronze Age Tombs of Jebel Hafit. By Bo Madsen. Aarhus: Jutland Archaeological Society and Moesgaard Museum, 2017. Pp. 245, illus. DKK 350. [Distributed by Aarhus University Press].

This essay focuses on the persistence of conciliarist constitutionalism down into the seventeenth century, and on the particular way in which the Gallican author, Edmond Richer (1559-1631), framed it in his sweeping and influential critiques of the papalist ecclesiology. In the tradition established by his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century predecessors in the Parisian theology faculty, Richer's formulation of conciliar theory was essentially political in nature. As a result, it lent itself readily to use in the cause of constitutionalist aspiration by such (...) eighteenth-century critics of French monarchical policy as Nicolas Le Gros and Gabriel-Nicolas Maultrot. (shrink)

The Bronze Age Towers at Bat, Sultanate of Oman: Research by the Bat Archaeological Project, 2007– 12. By Christopher P. Thornton; Charlotte M. Cable; and G. L. Possehl. Museum Monographs, vol. 143. Philadelphia: The University Museum, 2016. Pp. 352, illus. $69.95.

The Dawn of the Bronze Age: The Pattern of Settlement in the Lower Jordan Valley and the Desert Fringes of Samaria during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age I. By Shay Bar. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 72. Leiden: Brill Pp. vi + 607, 178 illus. $250.

The Late Bronze Age gypsum mould discussed hère was first interpreted as a gold worker's mould. It wears the matrices, for the "lost wax" process, of three figures. At one side, a man is shown holding a jug in each hand and wearing a short kilt and a short-sleaved, tightly fitting garment. He probably formed part of a ritual scène. At the other side are two figures fighting with spears and wearing kilts with horizontal stripes. They may hâve formed (...) a "lutte sportive", a fréquent thème in Aegean iconography. The object under discussion is actually a mould for the décorative éléments of a four-sided bronze stand. Such stands are well known in Cypriot bronzeworking and this mould expands their décorative repertory. (shrink)

The Calm before the Storm: Selected Writings of Itamar Singer on the End of the Late Bronze Age in Anatolia and the Levant. By Itamar Singer. Writings from the Ancient World Supplements, vol. 1. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011. Pp. vii + 766, illus. $69.95. Pax Hethitica: Studies on the Hittites and Their Neighbours in Honour of Itamar Singer. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten, vol. 51. Edited by Yoram Cohen, Amir Golan, and Jared L. Miller. Wies baden: Harrasowitz Verlag, (...) 2010. Pp. xiv + 439, illus., portrait. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFree versus unfree was a fundamental axis of differentiation in ancient Near Eastern societies. Liberty was conceptualized as the power to govern oneself, free from another's domination, thus free to participate in constituting political authority. More concretely, the subject of the state was by definition free, this being the condition of obliging him for duty. Thus the relation between people and polity was predicated on liberty, not servitude as commonly supposed of an area still shackled to the Western ideology of (...) Oriental despotism. I argue that liberty was an operative principle in the organization of ancient Near Eastern polities, basing the case on sources from the Late Bronze Age. The first section sets forth general propositions, and the second puts them in ancient Near Eastern terms. The third and fourth sections examine documents from Ugarit and Emar, two polities under Hittite suzerainty, that illustrate how these principles operated in the lives of individuals. The fifth section examines how they were articulated at the scale of communities, through the lens of the poet who composed the Hurro-Hittite ‘Song of Liberation'. The conclusion draws together the ideas of liberty, bondage and liberation these sources disclose, ideas that remained productive in later ages. (shrink)

The Archaeology of Cyprus: From Earliest Prehistory through the Bronze Age. By A. Bernard Knapp. Cambridge World Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xx + 640. $38.99.

L ’habitat de Krisa, fouillé en 1935‑36, a livré d’importants vestiges de l’âge du Bronze. Le réexamen du site et du mobilier a pour but de revoir l’accessibilité de l’éperon rocheux, de redater les dépôts céramiques découverts dans les bâtiments et les tombes au sein de l’habitat, ainsi que de mettre à jour nos connaissances sur le corpus céramique. On démontre, entre autres, que la porte ouverte dans le mur de fortification se trouve plus à l’Est que l’emplacement indiqué (...) jusqu’alors. De plus, la phase HR I de l’habitat était plus importante que ce qui avait été supposé, alors que la phase HR II A demeure difficile à identifier. Par ailleurs, on souligne la présence récurrente de vases à boire et vaisselle de table dans le corpus céramique mycénienne. Enfin, on soutient que la majeure partie des céramiques à peinture mate et mycénienne examinées a certainement été produite régionalement. (shrink)