Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient States
Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient States

Author: Janet Richards

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-12-07

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 9780521776714

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Three terms, Order, Legitimacy and Wealth, delineate a comparative approach to ancient civilizations initially developed by John Baines, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford, and Norman Yoffee, Professor of Archaeology and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan, in 1992. In an influential paper, they compared and contrasted the nature of social and political power in Egypt and Mesopotamia. This was the first analysis of the impact of wealth and high culture on the development of states. The contributors to the present book, first published in 2000, apply the classic Baines/Yoffee model to a range of ancient states around the world, providing documentary and archaeological evidence on the production and uses of 'high culture', literature and monumental architecture. There are chapters on Mesoamerica, the Andes, the Indus Valley, the Han Dynasty of China, and Greece during the Roman empire, while others expand on the original Egypt-Mesopotamia comparison.

Archaic States
Archaic States

Author: Gary M. Feinman

Publisher: School of American Research Ad

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13:

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In this volume, the authors highlight the diversity and instability of ancient states and how widely they have varied through time and across space. Archaic States presents new comparative studies of early states in the Old and New Worlds, including the Near East, India and Pakistan, Egypt, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. In the process, it helps to define key avenues for research and discussion in the decades ahead.

Writing and the Ancient State
Writing and the Ancient State

Author: Haicheng Wang

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-05-12

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 1107785871

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Writing and the Ancient State explores the early development of writing and its relationship to the growth of political structures. The first part of the book focuses on the contribution of writing to the state's legitimating project. The second part deals with the state's use of writing in administration, analyzing both textual and archaeological evidence to reconstruct how the state used bookkeeping to allocate land, police its people, and extract taxes from them. The third part focuses on education, the state's system for replenishing its staff of scribe-officials. The first half of each part surveys evidence from Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Maya lowlands, Central Mexico, and the Andes; against this background the second half examines the evidence from China. The chief aim of this book is to shed new light on early China (from the second millennium BC through the end of the Han period, ca. 220 AD) while bringing to bear the lens of cross-cultural analysis on each of the civilizations under discussion.

Social Theory in Archaeology and Ancient History
Social Theory in Archaeology and Ancient History

Author: Geoff Emberling

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-11-24

Total Pages: 638

ISBN-13: 1316453553

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At a time when archaeology has turned away from questions of the long-term and large scale, this collection of essays reflects on some of the big questions in archaeology and ancient history - how and why societies have grown in scale and complexity, how they have maintained and discarded aspects of their own cultural heritage, and how they have collapsed. In addressing these long-standing questions of broad interest and importance, the authors develop counter-narratives - new ways of understanding what used to be termed 'cultural evolution'. Encompassing the Middle East and Egypt, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, the American Southwest and Mesoamerica, the fourteen essays offer perspectives on long-term cultural trajectories; on cities, states and empires; on collapse; and on the relationship between archaeology and history. The book concludes with a commentary by one of the major voices in archaeological theory, Norman Yoffee.

In the House of Heqanakht
In the House of Heqanakht

Author: M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-11-28

Total Pages: 625

ISBN-13: 9004459537

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In the House of Heqanakht: Text and Context in Ancient Egypt gathers Egyptological articles in honor of James P. Allen, Charles Edwin Wilbour Professor of Egyptology at Brown University.

State and Economy in Ancient Egypt
State and Economy in Ancient Egypt

Author: David Warburton

Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13:

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Combining philological investigation and theoretical reasoning, this book offers a completely new interpretation of the economic role of the state in ancient Egypt. The first part provides background outlining the relevance of Keynes General Theory to the ancient Egyptian economy. The central part uses ancient Egyptian texts as the foundation of an analysis of words commonly assumed to relate to taxation during the New Kingdom (c. 15401070 B.C.E.). The conclusions summarize the philological results and explore the role of the temples in the ancient Egyptian state during the New Kingdom. The result places ancient Egyptian taxation and state economic activity in a market context, opening a new path to the understanding of the ancient Egyptian economy based on an analysis of primary sources.

Marx's Ghost
Marx's Ghost

Author: Thomas C. Patterson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-06

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1000185052

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How did our current society come into being and how is it similar to as well as different from its predecessors? These key questions have transfixed archaeologists, anthropologists and historians for decades and strike at the very heart of intellectual debate across a wide range of disciplines. Yet scant attention has been given to the key thinkers and theoretical traditions that have shaped these debates and the conclusions to which they have given rise. This pioneering book explores the profound influence of one such thinker - Karl Marx - on the course of twentieth-century archaeology. Patterson reveals how Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe in the late 1920s was the first to synthesize discourses from archaeologists, sociologists, and Marxists to produce a corpus of provocative ideas. He analyzes how these ideas were received and rejected, and moves on to consider such important developments as the emergence of a new archaeology in the 1960s and an explicitly Marxist strand of archaeology in the 1970s. Specific attention is given to the discussion arenas of the 1990s, where archaeologists of differing theoretical perspectives debated issues of historic specificity, social transformation, and inter-regional interaction. How did the debates in the 1990s pave the way for historical archaeologists to investigate the interconnections of class, gender, ethnicity, and race? In what ways did archaeologists make use of Marxist concepts such as contradiction and exploitation, and how did they apply Marxist analytical categories to their work? How did varying theoretical groups critique one another and how did they overturn or build upon past generational theories?Marxs Ghost: Conversations with Archaeologists provides an accessible guide to the theoretical arguments that have influenced the development of Anglophone archaeology from the 1930s onwards. It will prove to be indispensable for archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, and social and cultural theor

The State in Ancient Egypt
The State in Ancient Egypt

Author: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-09-05

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1350075019

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This book presents a new analysis of the organization, structure and changes of the pharaonic state through three millennia of its history. Moreno García sheds new light on this topic by bringing to bear recent developments in state theory and archaeology, especially comparative study of the structure of ancient states and empires. The role played by pharaonic Egypt in new studies often reiterates old views about the stability, conservatism and 'exceptionalism' of Egyptian kingship, which supposedly remained the same across the Bronze and Iron Ages. Ancient Egypt shared many parallels with other Bronze and Iron Age societies as can be shown by an analysis of the structure of the state, of the limits of royal power, of the authority of local but neglected micro-powers (such as provincial potentates and wealthy non-elite), and of the circulation and control of wealth. Furthermore, Egypt experienced deep changes in its social, economic, political and territorial organization during its history, thus making the land of the pharaohs an ideal arena in which to test applications of models of governments and to define the dynamics that rule societies on the longue durée. When seen through these new perspectives, the pharaonic monarchies appear less exceptional than previously thought, and more dependent on the balance of power, on their capacity to control the kingdom's resources and on the changing geopolitical conditions of their time.

Ancient Perspectives on Egypt
Ancient Perspectives on Egypt

Author: Roger Matthews

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-16

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1315434911

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The allure of Egypt is not exclusive to the modern world. Egypt also held a fascination and attraction for people of the past. In this book, academics from a wide range of disciplines assess the significance of Egypt within the settings of its past. The chronological span is from later prehistory, through to the earliest literate eras of interaction with Mesopotamia and the Levant, the Aegean, Greece and Rome. Ancient Perspectives on Egypt includes both archaeological and documented evidence, which ranges from the earliest writing attested in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC, to graffiti from Abydos that demonstrate pilgrimages from all over the Mediterranean world, to the views of Roman poets on the nature of Egypt. This book presents, for the first time in a single volume, a multi-faceted but coherent collection of images of Egypt from, and of, the past.