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 the
late 4th millennium BCE. Syria-Palestine, as a combined region, was always peripheral to the historical and socio-political processes occurring in Lower
Mesopotamia and Egypt. Nonetheless, and albeit a little later, economic and political inequality did appear in the region, fully-blown at least by the Early
Bronze 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 state
apparatuses for controlling the population). Compared to Syria, Palestine possessed a much more modest urban development and less evidence of complex
organisations in the urban sites. Political practice is also conducted through personal relationships. It is therefore possible to argue for the existence of a
native political ontology based on personal and hierarchical relationships like patron-client bonds. Politics were profoundly hierarchical (unequal) but also
bound 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 brokerage
is evidenced only for the human realm.