Rulership in the Making: Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant, 12th–6th cent. BC

Abstract

This dissertation revisits from a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective one of the most vexed questions of Iron Age Mediterranean history – the re-emergence of polities after the Late Bronze Age systems collapse. This question is commonly addressed in field-specific narratives rather than as part of a broader picture, with the result that research on political development in the Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean is overall more oriented to emphasizing particularisms than common trends. Inspired by the search for structural dynamics in Mediterranean history launched by P. Horden and N. Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea (2000) and C. Broodbank’s The Making of the Middle Sea (2013), I challenge the idea that political fragmentation and diversity in the Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean do not leave scope for a unitary analysis of political phenomena. I combine political developments in Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant across the Late Bronze and the Iron Age into a single overarching narrative, showing that they took similar trajectories when ruling elites and political complexity re-emerged after the collapse of the palaces. Post-palatial political actors in these regions had similar backgrounds and experimented with similar ways of wielding power. Two alternative models of rulership emerged. One looked back to the Late Bronze Age traditional monarchies but was confined to a limited number of communities: pre-existing political terminology and ideologies were retained by ruling elites who survived the crisis, or were purposefully revived by new political actors. The other model, more widespread, was introduced by individuals with tenuous connections to the palaces, tended to be characterized by a degree of institutional ambiguity, and rested on new forms of legitimation. The main outcome of this dissertation is the identification of common denominators in political development across Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant: these consist of structural dynamics which underpinned political action in these regions during the Iron Age, and offer a new interpretive framework for the study of political history in the Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean.