Some Expressions of Inequality in Late Bronze Age Syria-Palestine

Abstract

The Near East along with the Nile valley are two of the first locations where institutional inequality appeared in the world –in these cases around thelate 4th millennium BCE. Syria-Palestine, as a combined region, was always peripheral to the historical and socio-political processes occurring in LowerMesopotamia and Egypt. Nonetheless, and albeit a little later, economic and political inequality did appear in the region, fully-blown at least by the EarlyBronze Age with the first urban centres. Regarding political inequality, personal relationships within the political communities and towards the exterior(dealing with higher powers) seem to have been the established and regular mode of political behaviour (no evidence of written laws, no evidence of stateapparatuses for controlling the population). Compared to Syria, Palestine possessed a much more modest urban development and less evidence of complexorganisations in the urban sites. Political practice is also conducted through personal relationships. It is therefore possible to argue for the existence of anative political ontology based on personal and hierarchical relationships like patron-client bonds. Politics were profoundly hierarchical (unequal) but alsobound by reciprocity, expressed by an exchange of protection and loyalty. This political ontology informed the divine and cosmological imagination as well:the human realm was incorporated into the divine realm, the Syrian king being the broker between the gods and his community. In Palestine, such brokerageis evidenced only for the human realm.