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In the Late Bronze Age, the polities in the South Caucasus developed a new assemblage directed toward transforming charismatic authority into formal sovereignty. This chapter examines the assembling of this political machine, which drew the civilization and war machines into an extensive apparatus of rule, one that resolved the paradox at the heart of the joint operation of both. This novel political machine did not supersede the war and civilization machines. Rather, the political machine cloaked their contradictions, allowing the relation of the one to the many to persist as a “mystery” of sovereignty. The political machine not only provided the instruments of judicial ordering and bureaucratic regulation but it also transformed the polity itself into an object of devotion, securing not simply the surrender of subjects but their active commitment to the reproduction of sovereignty.

Drawing on Bourdieu’s practice theory, style is taken as part of embodied practices that catalyze collective memories and community identity. These stylistic practices include both the production and consumption of style(s) as separate but intersecting spheres of practice, and thus act as a generator of networks of social relations. This chapter explores how stylistic traits form a critical component of collective memory, being the product and source of shared social practices at the levels of both creation and appreciation. Through such a lens, visual similarities between first millennium Levantine art and works from the preceding Late Bronze Age (c. 1600-1200/1180 BCE), here taking a particular set of animal markings as a case study, assume heightened meaningfulness within the context of newly emerging communities of identity in the early Iron Age Levant (10^th and 9^th centuries). The early Iron Age arts visually and materially manifested a connection to a past “golden age” through the selection of these stylistic traits that were freighted with Late Bronze Age connotations of heroic kingship.

Mervyn Popham was a questioning, quiet person, driven by an uncompromising honesty to find the truth, and always ready to doubt accepted explanations or any theory-driven archaeology for which he could find no evidential basis. He was probably the most percipient archaeologist of the Late Bronze Age of Crete and the Aegean to have worked in the second half of the 20th century, and became almost as important in the archaeology of the Early Iron Age, which succeeded the Bronze Age. In his archaeology he took an analytical-empirical approach to what he saw as fundamentally historical problems, reaching unprecedented peaks of intelligent, and commonsensical, refinement.

The Middle-Late Bronze Age (1620–1500 B.C.) was a period of emerging and intensifying social complexity involving small-scale settlement hierarchies, but the archaeological understanding of social organization at this time has remained limited. In a comparative case study of funerary treatment and skeletal biology, the authors consider the distribution of multiple skeletal pathological conditions between distinct tumuli-style burials at Pigi Athinas. Though social rank may have started to displace the centrality of kinship, subtle variations in both funerary and bioarchaeological data indicated the most important structuring factors were sex and age distinctions. Over time, the influence of differential diets, divisions of gender, and ritual feasting appear as the people participated in a widespread Mycenaean system that shaped both gender and health in ancient Greece.

Chapter Six examines the historical origin of Yahweh, the dominant deity of Israelite religion. Readers can evaluate the Hebrew Bible’s foundation stories about Yahweh (and vis-à-vis El worship) juxtaposed next to the epigraphic record with datable texts ranging from 14th-13th centuries BCE Egyptian geographical lists to a ninth century BCE Moabite inscription to multiple ninth-eighth centuries BCE Yahwistic inscriptions from a remote site on the Darb el-Ghazza caravan route just south of Qadesh-Barnea, a site with a long biblical pedigree. Additional topics include the meaning of the name Yahweh and its attestations in extra-biblical sources as well as the geographic origin of the deity. The latter includes a review of the Midianite-Kenite hypothesis studied alongside archaic Hebrew poetry (biblical and epigraphic) describing militaristic wilderness theophanies. Methodologically, the chapter also describes the Canaanite cultural continuum from the Middle Bronze Age through the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

On the northern border of Mycenaean civilization and encompassing several ecological zones, the province of Thessaly represents an opportunity to test the Cross-Cultural Interaction Model involving processes such as acculturation and ethnogenesis in a border/frontier zone. In the Late Bronze Age (c. 1600–1100 BC) southeastern Thessaly, with a climate and topography similar to the Mycenaean core zone of southern and central Greece, was in direct contact with the centers of Mycenaean civilization and evolved in a similar manner, while in the inner plains further north, a transition zone between the Mediterranean environment of the coast and the Continental environment of southeastern Europe, local elites selectively adopted some aspects of Mycenaean culture, and in the mountainous zone further to the north and west nomadic pastoral tribes had little contact with the Mycenaean world and were even more selective borrowing cultural elements.

The collapse of Bronze Age civilizations in the Aegean, southwest Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean 3200 years ago remains a persistent riddle in Eastern Mediterranean archaeology, as both archaeologists and historians believe the event was violent, sudden, and culturally disruptive. In the first phase of this period, many cities between Pylos and Gaza were destroyed violently and often left unoccupied thereafter. The palace economy of the Aegean Region and Anatolia that characterized the Late Bronze Age was replaced by the isolated village cultures of the Dark Ages. Earthquakes, attacks of the Sea Peoples, and socio-political unrest are among the most frequently suggested causes for this phenomenon. However, while climate change has long been considered a potential prime factor in this crisis, only recent studies have pinpointed the megadrought behind the collapse. An abrupt climate shift seems to have caused, or hastened, the fall of the Late Bronze Age world by sparking political and economic turmoil, migrations, and famines. The entirety of the megadrought’s effects terminated the Late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean.

The great wave of destruction and abandonment of Mycenaean sites at or near the end of the Late Helladic IIIB period is one of the inescapable landmarks of the Aegean Late Bronze Age. For the past twenty years and more, however, many scholars have also seen it as something else: as the occasion of a mass immigration and permanent settlement in Greece of non-Mycenaean peoples. When we examine the other archaeological evidence from the Aegean, we find that the testimony of architecture, of funerary practices, of grave goods, and above all of pottery, so far from giving any suggestion of the arrival of a non-Mycenaean population, presents an almost uniform picture of the post-destruction period, the earlier part of Late Helladic IIIC, as a survival of its predecessor. There were few steps in Greek metallurgy more important than the introduction of the full-length sword to the Greek mainland. The fibula is a development of the European pin, not of Mycenaean buttons, and therefore could hardly have originated in Mycenaean Greece, where buttons were used only exceptionally.

This chapter discusses the history of Assyria between the sixteenth and eleventh centuries BC, which saw a small merchant city-state with little political clout rise to prominence in Upper Mesopotamia and beyond to become one of the leading powers on the Late Bronze Age. Through the study of royal inscriptions, archival documents, and archaeological records, the chapter examines the political, ideological, and cultural evolutions that accompanied the drastic change in the conception of power in Assyria, as well as the accompanying socioeconomic evolutions, both during the kingdom’s apex in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC and in the crisis years in the twelfth and early eleventh centuries BC, at the transition of the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age. The chapter offers a critical examination of scholarship pertaining to Late Bronze Age chronology, (proto-)imperialism, and socioeconomic decline and its relationship to climatic and environmental change.

Mycenaean society of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1675–1050 B.C.) Aegean world is well known as a hierarchical culture from its archaeology, mortuary patterns, and dietary structure. In particular, Mycenaean culture featured complex heterarchies in terms of class, sex, and gender. Skeletal remains from the major site of Pylos reveal some of the biocultural interplays within life and society. This study illustrates the benefits of integrating written records with multiple lines of paleopathological and isotopic data. Shepartz et al. identify mortuary treatments that serve as indicators of social differentiation in terms of at least two clear-cut macro-class distinctions. The analysis shows that the lower social strata possessed significantly poorer quality diets and that poor oral health was especially common among women. Those of high status evidently enjoyed greater access to protein as constructions of gender may have cross-cut vertical status differentiation.

The goal of this volume is to generate discussion on the variability in burial practices in Greece during the Late Bronze Age (LBA) and to create a more nuanced understanding of the society by bringing together a group of scholars who are either excavating newly discovered tombs or reexamining older excavations of LBA tombs. The data from these recent excavations and renewed studies suggest that the patterns of burial may contain more variety than has been recognized in earlier scholarship, and indicate the need for a detailed comparison of these burial practices combined with a synthetic comparative study of the tombs. Attention to variations in the mortuary practices can enrich current understanding of the range of connections between tombs and their respective communities, adding nuance to accepted interpretations of the LBA mortuary customs and their related societies. With variability in local burial practices as their initial commonality, broader themes and topics were revealed in the chapters assembled in this volume, including the rich connection between tombs and the political economy; their role in power and identity creation; the differences between palaces and second-order sites; the changing focus and identity of the various communities throughout the LBA; the combination of older more traditional practices with new ones in the tombs; social differences between genders; and varied emphasis on family lines.

From the mid-seventeenth to the early twelfth centuries BC, Central Anatolia saw the development and expansion of the Hittite state whose influence came to spread beyond the Taurus mountains into Syria and which was seen at the time as one of the Great Powers of the Late Bronze Age. Commonly interpreted as a territorial state in its first phase and an empire in its second phase, this state’s center was situated in the mountainous city of Hattusa (modern Boğazköy), which was its enduring but not continual capital. The chapter focuses on how the Hittite state negotiated the exercise of authority over a highly fragmented landscape. Persistent fragility of dominion, internal dynastic squabbles and external conflicts, all rooted in deep-seated problems of achieving and capitalizing on territorial unity, brought forth innovative responses to the delegation of power, which manifested themselves in the development of a complex system of treaties as well as coordinated interventions in landscape management. The chapter also addresses questions resulting from the sources and the significant disconnect between material culture and archaeological evidence, on the one hand, and narratives owed to the copious textual material preserved on cuneiform tablets from the Hittite capital, on the other hand.

The Story Now Moves beyond the mid-Holocene. By around 4000 B.C.E., viable agrarian settlements had appeared in many parts of the world. Not only could larger populations be supported, but surplus food produced by toiling farmers enabled the differentiation of labour and social status. Settlements expanded, made trading connections, and formed larger collective polities. Hierarchical authority and power began to replace horizontal flows of local information and decision-making. The vagaries of climate, however, lurked on the horizon. Agrarian societies, with their increasing dependence on harvest staples, were painting themselves into a corner. Also, as populations grew and settlements coalesced, mutant strains of animal-hosted microbes that made a successful crossing from livestock or urban pests to humans took advantage of larger, intermingling host populations. A few of these adventurers, such as the measles virus, not only initiated new epidemics but continued circulating, between outbreaks, as endemic “crowd diseases.” Measles, a microbial success story, is still with us today. The advent of property, food stores, and occupied land in nearby populations stimulated both war and conquest, each having diverse, debilitating, and often bloody consequences for health and survival. Climatic conditions in Sumer, sitting at the meteorological crossroads of the Middle East, began changing about 3600 B.C.E., one-third of the way into the fourth millennium B.C.E. . There was a general cooling and drying in the northern hemisphere as the first phase of the Holocene Climatic Optimum waned and as the Icelandic Low and Siberian (Asiatic) High circulations intensified, funnelling colder air southwards. Rainfall declined in southern Mesopotamia, compounded by a southerly drift of the rain-bearing Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone and the regional monsoon. Further west, the Sahara was changing from green to brown, and Egyptian agriculture was faltering. As rainfall declined and arrived later in the year, farming became more difficult; farmers now needed to make a year-round effort, with double-cropping and shorter fallow periods. By extending their irrigation systems, the Sumerians compounded another problem: several centuries of overirrigation and deforestation had already begun to turn the soil saline.

The second phase of the Assyrian colony period was marked by widespread conflicts which affected every area in Anatolia where the Assyrian merchants conducted their trading operations. This was followed by a new era in the history and civilization of Anatolia, the so-called Late Bronze Age, the era in which Anatolia was dominated by the kingdom of the Hittites. This chapter focuses on the reigns of Hittite kings Labarna and Hattusili I, the rebellion in the city of Sanahuitta against Labarna, Hattusili I's accession to the Hittite throne, Hittites' invasion of Syria, Hattusili's campaign against the land of Arzawa, rebellions in the Hittite kingdom's subject states, Hattusili's second campaign in Syria, what Hattusili achieves by his military campaigns, the ideology of kingship, Hattusili's later campaigns, Hattusili's summoning of an assembly of the most powerful political and military personages in the kingdom, the involvement of Hattusili's family members in the royal succession, and the selection of a new Hittite king.

The kingdom of Mittani, also known as Hanigalbat, the Hurrian kingdom, and Naharina, was established in the area of the upper Khabur River in the late sixteenth century BC. Having first taken form as Hanigalbat, this kingdom incorporated immigrants from beyond the Zagros into local populations among whom speakers of Hurrian predominated. Mittani acquired an empire extending across northern Mesopotamia, Syria, and eastern Anatolia during the fifteenth century BC, vying with New Kingdom Egypt as one of two “superpowers” in the Near East. It later lost this status, and its empire, in competition with Assyria and Hatti, then struggled along under the name Hanigalbat until it was extinguished in the thirteenth century BC. This chapter surveys the sources and covers the history of Mittani from its obscure origins through the growth of its empire to its dismemberment and demise. The chapter also examines the role attributed to speakers of an Indo-Aryan language, horse-drawn chariotry as a factor in the emergence of a new political and social order, and the governance of Mittani’s empire. During its floruit, the kingdom of Mittani appears to have experimented with diverse models of imperial rule, pioneered the differentiation of citizenship between sovereign and subject states, and promoted the differentiation of social classes according to status and socioeconomic capacity. Meanwhile, its culture featured an efflorescence of new styles and technologies in diverse media, notably including glass manufacture. Some of the innovations survived Mittani’s demise, as did some Hurrian literature, transmitted and transformed by Assyrian, Hittite, and other hands.

From the emergence of the first urban forms of society in the fourth millennium BC to the Achaemenid era, the kingdom of Elam in southwestern Iran played a significant role in the political and cultural landscape of the Middle East. After a period of political dominance of Mesopotamia over Elam in the Ur III period, the country developed into one of the wider region’s most important political and economic powers in the course of the second millennium BC. This development reached its climax in the Late Bronze Age during the so-called Middle Elamite period, when Elam’s political and economic expansion transformed the regional power structures. Such change is characterized by the concentration of power in the person of the king, whose office combined the highest secular position with religious authority. The king’s access and control over resources is reflected by the significant increase in construction activities and the foundation of new settlements, while the demand for further resources resulted in increasing military activities and wars of expansion, which led to the conquest of Mesopotamia in the last phase of the Middle Elamite period. This chapter discusses the current state of understanding of Elam’s chronology and history based on archaeological data and written sources and discusses key aspects of society, state administration, and religious practices.

First, this book has sketched out some of the historical context from which the early Israelite scribal curriculum emerged. As the New Kingdom receded, emerging kingdoms borrowed and adapted some of the Egyptian bureaucracy that was left behind as Egypt retreated to its confines along the Nile River Valley. In addition, there is tangible influence of the cuneiform school tradition from the Late Bronze Age in the development of an early alphabetic curriculum. There are a number of striking examples of how the cuneiform scribal curriculum can be seen in early Hebrew inscriptions beginning with the Gezer Calendar, which looks like an adaptation of a Mesopotamian lexical tradition. The Hebrew Bible itself was influenced by this scribal curriculum. And the scribal creativity that generated biblical literature had its foundation in the building blocks of the educational curriculum.

The foreign relations of the New Kingdom of Egypt can be described as a combination of continuity and change. On one hand, the physical geography of its environment and the basic underpinnings of the relationship with its neighbors, whoever they were, remained constant, whatever political events affected Egypt. On the other hand, a change in attitude can be discerned from the rich textual and pictorial records documenting wars against newly emerging powers in the north and the east and an unprecedented effort to subjugate Nubia in the south. This chapter offers a review of the evidence and theories regarding New Kingdom Egypt’s contacts with its neighbors (Nubia, Libya, the Mediterranean, Canaan, and Syria), as well as the pharaohs’ foreign policy toward Hatti and Mittani.