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International Relations in the Ancient Near East, 1600-1100 BC. By MARIO LIVERANI. Studies in Diplomacy. New York: PALGRAVE, 2001. Pp. xvii + 241, maps. $68.
The present volume represents a substantial revision of the author's Prestige and Interest (Padua, 1990), itself a summation of more than thirty years of study of political relations between the states of western Asia and Egypt in the second millennium. This new presentation of Liverani's influential views is most welcome. Not only has a decade of further reflection allowed him to refine his argumentation, but his editors have served him well by removing most of the awkwardness and solecisms in English style that made Prestige and Interest difficult to read.
In analyzing the diplomatic intercourse of the Late Bronze Age, Liverani has long employed Karl Polanyi's distinction between "reciprocal" and "redistributive" patterns of exchange. In this work, he makes clear that this approach is only a heuristic model: ". . . the two patterns of integration are here considered not as descriptive models of really different networks of exchange, but as interpretations, mental models, of a reality that in itself does not belong to any pattern" (p. 7). Thus the reader need not particularly concern himself with the question of whether a Polanyian world of marketless trading ever existed in reality.
Indeed, Liverani's...