Podany, Amanda H. Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
I’ve been on an Ancient Near East kick recently, specifically the history of Mesopotamia before its conquest and Hellenization at the hands of Alexander of Macedon and his successors. Many of the works I’ve come across in the past couple years have been fairly introductory, either written in more sensational style by non-historians or simply framed for an audience of those new to the subject matter. Shopping over Christmas 2023, however, finally brought something different. Amanda Podany’s Weavers, Scribes, and Kings, from one of the premier academic presses in the world, promised a new way of relating the history of human life in the Cradle of Civilization, focusing on the personal stories of individuals we know of in the historical record and crafting the relevant historical record through a series of case studies. I was wary that this approach might lose the forest for the trees and devolve into a series of anecdotes in place of a true general history of the region. Figuring that even this would be interesting in its own right, I tried it out—and was very glad to be proven wrong.
Rather than a procession of microhistories, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings is really a general history that not only devotes more attention than usual to the context and nature of our available sources for each period—something we could use much more of, especially in works of ancient history—but emphasizes the humanity in all the individuals who generated those sources, treating them as much as possible as human beings with hopes, fears, desires, and personal foibles that are all too often lost across the millennia separating them from Podany’s twenty-first century audience. Understandably, those details can be fairly light in the earlier sections as Podany covers the very beginnings of her narrative in the fourth millennium BC, but as she approaches more illuminated eras these snapshots evolve into fully fleshed-out portraits constructed from extensive archival material and archeological excavations. In this manner the profound changes and similarities of Mesopotamian history across the centuries are beautifully explicated and expanded upon in ways that feel natural and, unsurprisingly, fully lived.
While Podany deftly avoided my initial reservation towards her approach, she did fall prey into one fairly small but interesting weakness of analysis: an odd naivete in certain situations that resulted in a slightly rosier depiction of the ancient past than I believe is warranted. Whether arguing that the movement of textile workers between different temple workshops indicates they were not enslaved (as if slaves could not be moved, bought, and sold between different owners or workplaces) or saying that the wife of a violently deposed king “probably” escaped to safety with her parents in a neighboring kingdom, Podany often falls prey to glossing over the more grisly realities of life in the ancient world either through optimism or logical fallacy. It may very well be that there are concrete reasons for these conclusions that aren’t discussed, but in a book that is otherwise so extensive in its sourcework, that would make for uncharacteristic omissions.
By and large, however, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings is exactly the kind of history I’d been searching for—approachable, yet deep, academic, and (for the most part) eminently responsible in its methodology. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the distant past, whether specialist or initiate. We could all do with a bit more vivid humanity bringing the ancient world to life.