State Correspondence in the Ancient World: From New Kingdom Egypt to the Roman Empire

摘要

This remarkable volume sets out to present the evidence and characteristics of some of the most important corpuses of material to be preserved in manuscript tradition or to have been recovered by archaeology, the royal and imperial correspondences of the great empires of antiquity. The focus is on empires rather than smaller states, a coherent approach which serves well to highlight both similarities and differences among the different administrative systems as well as to put systematic developments in historical perspective. The parameters are set out by Karen Radner in her introductory chapter "Long Distance Communication and the Cohesion of Early Empires". The empires included are the Egyptian New Kingdom and the Hittite, Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Achaemenid, Hellenistic and Roman empires. The range of languages covered by this spread - Egyptian, Hittite, Luwian, Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian), Aramaic, Elamite, Latin and Greek - is impressive enough and hand in hand with this the range of materials on which these texts were recorded is also varied, comprising clay tablets, wooden writing boards, papyrus, leather and stone. The span has its origins in research on royal correspondence of the Assyrian empire from the earlier part of the first millennium bce, so that the cases studied frame this neatly from a chronological perspective. Explicitly not dealt with are, for example, the correspondence of the Ur Ⅲ empire and the myriad letters from the palace bureaucracies of the Old Babylonian period. Although to some degree understandable - the Old Babylonian material in particular is perhaps just too vast - the omission does mean the work does not give quite the complete story. That is however a small point. The work succeeds in achieving its ambition brilliantly. Turning to the specific studies, Jana Mynarova starts with a contribution on "Egyptian State Correspondence in the New Kingdom: The Letters of the Levantine Client Kings in the Amarna Correspondence and Contemporary Evidence". The Amarna correspondence is the record of communications of the Pharaoh both with independent states (the great powers Hattusa, Mittanni, Assyria and Babylonia; also Alashiya and Arzawa) and with the Egyptian client states along the Levant. Only one other New Kingdom royal letter is known, a missive written in hieratic and preserved in two copies on papyrus from the site of Merwer in the southern Fayyum. Mynarova reviews the participants in these exchanges along with associated chancellery practices; the results of the analysis of the clay of the actual tablets are also introduced.