Egypt and the Levant: Interrelations from the 4th through the Early 3rd Millennium B.C.E.

Egypt and the Levant: Interrelations from the 4th through the Early 3rd Millennium B.C.E., edited by E. C. M. van den Brink and Thomas E. Levy. London: Leicester University Press, 2002. xxi + 547 pp., 256 figures, 42 tables. Cloth. $210.00.

Since the 1970s, archaeological fieldwork on Predynastic Egyptian sites and south Levantine sites from the Late Chalcolithic-Early Bronze I has provided exciting new information about the formation of the early Egyptian state and its relations with the southern Levant. In 1998, a conference was held at the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem. The conference sought to bring together a variety of scholars interested in this formative period. This well-illustrated and timely volume is the result, and it will be a welcome addition to the library of any researcher interested in interactions between developing pristine states and their less complex neighbors. The book brings together well-written articles on a wide variety of subjects germane to the issue of Egyptian-Canaanite interaction, trade, and the development of social complexity. Chapters devoted to creating an overarching theoretical and chronological framework are followed by contributions from geoarchaeologists and archaeo-biologists. The book examines the nature of interaction in the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages, includes studies on metallurgy and petrography, several short chapters of primary data, and a chapter on Predynastic Egyptian metadata. The nature of interaction along the Mediterranean coast is addressed from archaeological data related to seafaring (Marcus and Gophna) and through the application of a GIS-based settlement model (Yekutieli). Other chapters discuss administrative technology and ideology (Hartung, Watrin, Kaplony, Köhler, and Wilkinson). There is something here to please everyone, although not everyone will be pleased with every contribution, for the conference reached no clear consensus about what the available data mean (not surprising given the variety of data domains examined and the often divergent scholarly traditions of the participants).

Levy and van den Brink...