Titlebook: International Relations in the Ancient Near East; Mario Liverani Book 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

奇怪

Universal Controlleast in the Late Bronze age. The interesting problem is logical and classificatory: how were the ancient scribes able to express totality, and consequently total control? The easiest way is to assert authority over a world viewed as an undifferentiated unit. A classical example of this is the Akkad

强制性

The Boundaries of the Worldwhose political borders are identical with the borders of the world. Yet the very concept of ‘border’ or ‘boundary’ is rather complex, in ancient and modern ideologies alike. In texts of the Late Bronze period, some fundamental opposites can be pointed out: on the one hand, linear vs. zonal, fixed v

avarice

BRACE

负担

Functional

The Boundary as a Watershed for Taxationt ‘at the end’. Nor is any detail necessary when the states are many but border tenitories that are inaccessible or uninhabited: mountains, woodlands, steppe and desert, any uncultivated and unsettled area. The territory controlled by the state resembles an ‘oasis’: there is no need for a boundary l

PON

The Boundary as a Watershed for Responsibilitieslusive right to use force inside one’s own borders is recognition of an equal right on the part of kings in adjacent state-formations. In a monocentred political ideology the king of the world will punish rebellions and crimes whatever their character and wherever they take place, not least in the o

著名

Runaways and Extraditionlements’ across borders. This can be exploited in rhetorical and political argument. Thus a major change in the political allegiance of a large country, which, of course, could not move physically, is described as follows by the Hittite king: ‘Now (the people of) Kizzuwatna are Hittite cattle, and h

Vertical

Messengers and ‘Ambassadors’od, the complementarity of the spoken and written message is much more strict than that to which we are accustomed, the letter actually keeping the form of a spoken message.. Moreover its delivery is a rather complicated affair, for the king cannot read and is often ignorant of Babylonian, the ‘dipl

Mangle