State Correspondence in the Ancient World: From New Kingdom Egypt to the Roman Empire (Oxford Studies in Early Empires)

by X .

This book introduces the reader to the state correspondences of centralized states and empires of the Mediterranean and the Middle East from the 15th century BC to the 6th century AD, and analyses their role in ensuring the success and stability of these geographically extensive state systems. Letters play an important role in the cohesion of early empires, by enabling reliable and confidential long-distance communication and by facilitating the successful delegation of power from the central administration to the provinces -- challenges that in the absence of major technological advances remain constants of government throughout this long period. State Correspondence in the Ancient World brings together primary sources from New Kingdom Egypt, the Hittite kingdom, the Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid empires, the Hellenistic world and the Imperium Romanum. This study's goals are Firstly, to describe the available material and its original context and what do we have and what don't we have -- and why? And, secondly, to highlight these correspondences' role in maintaining empires, using a comparative approach in order to draw out similarities and differences. The volume is an edited collection of nine chapters written by established scholars with first-hand expertise in working with the source papyri, clay tablets, inscriptions and law codices written in Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian), Aramaic, Egyptian, Greek, Hittite and Latin. This unique collection will be enormously useful to students and scholars of ancient Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

"X" is a pseudonym used by different authors.

* "X" is pseudonym used by Edward E. Beals

Reviews

[Iset · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first thing to note is that the optimisation for Kindle is not good. I know this is a small point, not pertinent to the actual quality of content – but when a book is difficult to read, it really does impact on the enjoyment of the reader, even if the writing is great and the topic is interesting. Kindle formatting aside, here we have an edited collection of chapters from some of the foremost contributors in their field, writing in a style that clearly aims to be both to a professional academic standard and accessible to a less knowledgeable audience. It strikes the balance well, and succeeds in that aim in my estimation.