The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East

The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East. By J. DAVID SCHLOEN. Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant, vol. 2. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 2001. Pp. xv + 414. $57.50.

Societies of the ancient Near East, prior to the Neo-Assyrian empire, were organized according to a unitary principle that determined all social and economic relations. In pursuing this bold argument, J. David Schloen would align ancient Near Eastern studies with Max Weber's theory of patrimonialism, Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, and Shmuel Eisenstadt's "Axial Age" concept. Early chapters delve into modern European philosophical traditions; later chapters explore philological and archaeological details. Throughout, Schloen dismisses most prior socioeconomic thinking on early states as philosophically unsound. When the topic of Ugarit appears, in the second half of the book, there is little suspense left in the reconstruction to be unveiled. Schloen's Ugarit is one-dimensional: an agrarian population subservient to one man, one fact, and one symbol-the father's house.

The book is divided into two parts and their constituent sections. Section I, "Interpretation Theory and Ancient Studies," stresses two main points. First, facts and material things are determined by symbols, symbols that sociology and anthropology have cynically and arrogantly subordinated to material facts (p. 54). Hermeneutics is the key to understanding the symbols.1 Secondly, prior to the rational, impersonal institutions of the hypostatized Axial Age,2 money and offices did not exist; instead, socioeconomic issues could only be defined within the parameters of father-son and servant-master relationships. These principles are applied to ancient bureaucracy in section II.

Schloen takes Weber much as does P. Michalowski,3 delineating rational from patrimonial types. He demands a strict dichotomy, however, in which pre-Axial bureaucracies follow "simple rules" of the "Patrimonial Household Model (PHM)" (p. 59) and exhibit familial, personal, and a-rational motivations. Complexities of the evidence are flattened, seemingly by design, in the author's attempt to capture the entire ancient Near East within a unitary "encompassing sociohistorical paradigm" (p. 59). Schloen poses this model against conventional Marxist interpretive theory that he calls "monocausal materialism" (p. 66). This argument is rigorously pursued, but his reliance upon selective, dated, and non-specialist sources leads to dubious conclusions about the degrees of rationality characteristic of particular Bronze...