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This paper examines the formation of states during the Iron Age of the eastern Mediterranean, with particular emphasis on the Levantine states of Israel, Judah, Ammon, and Moab. Using archaeology and texts it proposes that the formation of secondary states was fundamentally different from that of early states such as in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Secon...
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ایران شناسی: اساطیر و نمادهای آیینی آریایی=Iranian Studies. Mythology and Aryan religious symbols
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Persian mythology are traditional tales and stories of ancient origin, all involving ex...
Tell Abil el-Qameh is a prominent Bronze and Iron Age archaeological mound in the north of Israel, some 6.5 km northwest of Tel Dan and 30 km north of Hazor. It is approximately 10 ha in area with a prominent upper tell in the north and a flat lower tell in the south. From its vantage point overlooking the northern end of the Hula Valley, Abel Beth...
Citations
... Putting this into geopolitical context, the change occurred at the same time that new political formations that had begun to develop earlier crystallized into full-blown, national territorial states, with the establishment of centralized and institutionalized urban centers (e.g. Finkelstein 1988;Joffe 2002;Sergi 2015). 6 Rather than discrete events, both these developments were components of long, gradual processes. ...
... They help us avoid anachronistic notions of feudalism and vassalage, often used in Biblical and Assyriological studies. Patronage terminology clarifies questions of political belonging and territorial identity, questions often blurred by assumptions that in the Iron Age II period, for example, we find definable borders of "ethnic" or "national" states in the southern Levant (Buccellati 1967(Buccellati : 75-135, 2013Joffe 2002;Liverani 2002). The notion of defined borders and ethno-national states has been influenced, both explicitly and implicitly, by interpretations of the biblical narratives related to Jacob and his twelve sons and of Joshua's stories of conquest and land distribution. ...
... Temples, palaces, public buildings and writing are among the material manifestations that constituted cities and states. Broadly stated, it was a time preoccupied with the development of managerial and administrative apparatuses (Gilboa 2014;Greenberg 2019;Joffe 2002). ...
In this paper, we discuss the occurrence of lions, bears and leopards in south Levantine archaeological assemblages between the last glacial maximum (c. 25,000 years ago) and the Iron Age (c. 2500 years ago). We argue that the occurrence of these large carnivores constitutes a significant long-term cultural feature that begins with the first settled hunter-gatherer communities of the Natufian culture. Importantly, we show that carnivoran species representation in the archaeological record shifts through time, with leopards common during the Neolithic and lions and bears during the Bronze and Iron ages. These shifts, we suggest, are best understood as reflecting the interplay between costly signalling and symbolism as they interacted through processes of increasing socio-political complexity.
... The Iron Age IIA represents a transition from a set of politically and socially independent settlements and nomadic pastoralists to small, regional territories under centralized rule (Joffe, 2002;Hardin et al., 2014). While this is a broad simplification of the Iron IIA, the political landscape in the southern Levant underwent a complex reshaping and coalescence towards a few regional-based entities across the Near East. ...
... The site acted as a peripheral node located at an ideal locale for dynamic political and economic interactions in a larger political web that emerges in the Iron Age IIB. These findings indicate there was a period of internal growth leading toward the formation of territorial and or tribal kingdoms that typify the southern Levant during the Iron Age IIA and into likely secondary states in the Iron Age IIB, challenging previous characterizations of the Greater Hesi region during the Iron Age IIa as a void of political interaction and growth (Taylor, 2000;Finkelstein, 2002;Joffe, 2002;Stager, 2003;Rainey and Notley, 2006). ...
Isotopic analyses can be a useful tool in identifying animal exploitation patterns and herding strategies in the southern Levant. Here, carbon, oxygen, and strontium isotope analyses of domestic animal tooth enamel are used to investigate herd management at the Iron Age IIA site of Khirbet Summeily in Israel. The site was located in a prime ecological and political locale along the fringes of the emerging polity (potentially Judah), which ascended to regional significance by the Iron Age IIB. In order to understand the diets and movement of sheep, goats and cattle, we undertook intra-tooth sequential sampling and isotopic analyses of mandibular molars (n = 20). Results suggest that the livestock recovered at Khirbet Summeily were raised in different locations with varied management patterns. Variation in the dietary intake of sheep and goats indicates that they were pastured in different ecological zones. While some goats were mobile across long-distances, the majority of livestock were from local and regionally managed herds. Alongside material evidence of exotic goods from nearby polities, our findings lend further support to the idea that Khirbet Summeily acted as a resource allocation outpost strategically located on the edge of a political entity (potentially Judah), suggesting a trend towards increased economic complexity during the Iron Age IIA.
... The same can be found in the critical philosophies of Socrates and Plato, not to mention the Pythagorean cult and, implicitly, the rise of natural history. Paradoxically, the vacuum left by the breakdown in states freed up a lot of resources once destined to flow to distant political centers, and along with urbanization and foreign trade, led to a growing middle class in many locations (Joffe 2002). A new material base upon which religious entrepreneurs could gradually free themselves from the yoke of political dependence emerged. ...
... The same can be found in the critical philosophies of Socrates and Plato, not to mention the Pythagorean cult and, implicitly, the rise of natural history. Paradoxically, the vacuum left by the breakdown in states freed up a lot of resources once destined to flow to distant political centers, and along with urbanization and foreign trade, led to a growing middle class in many locations (Joffe 2002). A new material base upon which religious entrepreneurs could gradually free themselves from the yoke of political dependence emerged. ...
... The same can be found in the critical philosophies of Socrates and Plato, not to mention the Pythagorean cult and, implicitly, the rise of natural history. Paradoxically, the vacuum left by the breakdown in states freed up a lot of resources once destined to flow to distant political centers, and along with urbanization and foreign trade, led to a growing middle class in many locations (Joffe 2002). A new material base upon which religious entrepreneurs could gradually free themselves from the yoke of political dependence emerged. ...
... The same can be found in the critical philosophies of Socrates and Plato, not to mention the Pythagorean cult and, implicitly, the rise of natural history. Paradoxically, the vacuum left by the breakdown in states freed up a lot of resources once destined to flow to distant political centers, and along with urbanization and foreign trade, led to a growing middle class in many locations (Joffe 2002). A new material base upon which religious entrepreneurs could gradually free themselves from the yoke of political dependence emerged. ...
... 59-60). Joffe (2002), for example, defined the Iron Age kingdoms of the southern Levant as 'ethnic states' but suggested that their integration followed rather than preceded state formation, which began as a strategy of emergent elites from the ninth century bc onward. In turn, Osborne (2013) argued that the rulers of polities in the northern Levant were seldom able to exercise their full authority over the territory they claimed. ...
Our understanding of the earliest Iron Age on Cyprus has long remained somewhat obscure. This is the result of both a relative lack of material evidence and the fact that scholarly attention has focused more on the preceding Late Bronze Age and on the subsequent Cypro-Archaic period. As more, and more varied, data have accumulated, there have been calls for a more theoretically informed approach to considering the social changes involved, and even for prehistorians to extend their work into the Cypriot Iron Age. As a response to this, the present study considers a broad range of material and documentary evidence, attempts to reconstruct the political economy, and offers an interpretative framework based on social understandings of Complex Adaptive Systems theory. Using this approach, the authors conclude that, while the enduring realities of Cyprus—its geography, copper resources and long tradition of agropastoralism—continued to shape Cypriot culture, the Iron Age is not simply a continuation of its Bronze Age sociopolitical forms. We argue instead that the earliest Iron Age involved social actors negotiating new politico-economic agendas in response to changing conditions in the Iron Age eastern Mediterranean.
... There is nevertheless something significant here to offer to comparative considerations of secondary state formation, which Fried (1960, 713;1967, 240-42) distinguished from primary state formation based on influences from other, more complex polities (see also Price 1978). Detailed case studies in secondary state formation exist for early India (Seneviratne 1981), medieval North Africa (Boone, Myers, and Redman 1990), the Levant (Knauf 1992;Joffe 2002), Nubia and Egypt (Smith 1998), early China (Schelach and Pines 2006), and the Aegean . Since the 1960s and 1970s, however, there has been little attempt at large-scale comparison or synthesis in secondary state formation as a topic of anthropological interest. ...
Situated at the disciplinary boundary between prehistory and history, this book presents a new synthesis of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Greece, from the rise and fall of Mycenaean civilization, through the "Dark Age," and up to the emergence of city-states in the Archaic period. This period saw the growth and decline of varied political systems and the development of networks that would eventually expand to nearly all shores of the Middle Sea. Alex R. Knodell argues that in order to understand how ancient Greece changed over time, one must analyze how Greek societies constituted and reconstituted themselves across multiple scales, from the local to the regional to the Mediterranean. Knodell employs innovative network and spatial analyses to understand the regional diversity and connectivity that drove the growth of early Greek polities. As a groundbreaking study of landscape, interaction, and sociopolitical change, Societies in Transition in Early Greece systematically bridges the divide between the Mycenaean period and the Archaic Greek world to shed new light on an often-overlooked period of world history.
