Book Review: Ancient Economies, Modern Methodologies

Bryn Mawr Classical Review (Reviewed by Alex Gottesman)

Peter F. Bang, Mamoru Ikeguchi, Harmut G. Ziche, Ancient Economies, Modern Methodologies: Archaeology, Comparative History, Models and Institutions. Bari: Edipuglia, 2006.

This may sound like an odd book to include in an Egyptology blog, but there is an article focusing on Ptolemaic Egypt included in the book (Sitta von Reden, "The Ancient Economy and Ptolemaic Egypt"), and it is always good to see books focusing on the economic mechanisms that drive societies. It would be nice to see more work focusing explicity on the economic processes that took place from the Old Kingdom onwards in Egypt.

This volume is the product of an international conference of economic historians and archaeologists held in 2002 at the University of Cambridge. The editors invited participants "to check the pulse of ancient economic history" (8). The metaphor immediately suggests two things: that ancient economic history can be compared to a single body, and that it might be ailing. To judge from the volume's interesting and wide-ranging contributions, neither is the case. If the spate of recent edited volumes on the subject is any indication, ancient economic history is thriving, though somewhat prone to self-examination. As a consequence, its boundaries are in flux, both in terms of geographic and temporal parameters and in terms of disciplinary interaction and hierarchy. The tensions of this flux are apparent in this volume, despite the editors' attempts to massage them away in their introduction. Perhaps paradoxically, these unresolved tensions make the volume a rather informative snapshot of the state of the field. In what follows, I shall review the essays somewhat selectively, highlighting the ones I found either interesting on their own terms or in terms of the tensions they reveal.

See the above page for the entire review, together with a table of contents.