Weavers, Scribes, and Kings review by Josh

I really liked Weavers, Scribes, and Kings. I was surprised at how much we know about the ancient near east based on archeological evidence. It seems like far more written records survive from the Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian empires than from later civilizations. This is in large part because they wrote on stone tablets, an astonishing number of which have survived, whereas later civilizations used paper or papyrus, for most documents which have generally not survived.

For much of history the lives of ordinary people - the 99% who were not among the elite are very difficult to piece together. That's both because the vast majority of people everywhere were illiterate and because the quotidian details of daily life generally don't seem worth recording. But, I thought Podany did an excellent job of illuminating what everyday life was like for people in this period.

She was able to do this in part thanks to letters, records of business dealings and legal rulings, and even some occasional personal narratives. While few of these were written by the members of the lower classes themselves, it's often possible to see their lives reflected in them.

That said, there is inevitably a lot of speculation in a book like this. There is much on which the historical record is silent, and Podany raises many tantalizing questions about what life was like that she acknowledges we simply do not (and often can not) know the answers to.

One small thing that kind of bothered me: Throughout the book Podany refers to extreme religiosity of people in this period. The shared belief that the gods played a critical role in the affairs of humans. This view seems to be supported by the textual evidence which continually refers to the Gods and the various rituals that people performed to keep them happy.

In at least one ancient language (Assyrian, I think) she notes that the names for the Gods were the same as the names for the natural phenomenon they controlled, so you couldn't refer to thunder without referring to the god of thunder or to the sun without referring to the sun god. As such, Atheism or Agnosticism would be more or less incoherent, because to deny the existence of the sun god would be to deny the existence of the sun.

It seems entirely plausible that people in this period were more religious than modern folk. As an explanation for most natural phenomena the gods were, basically, the only game in town. But that doesn't mean, as Podany sometimes seems to imply, that everyone accepted state orthodoxy. The insistence of rulers that they were either appointed by gods or (in later periods) were gods and that the gods essentially had signed off on the existing social order seems like a view that some slaves and poor people might have been quietly skeptical about.

Overall, the picture of the ancient world Podany paints is significantly less dismal than one gets from writers like James Scott (Against the Grain). Though Podany's portrait certainly isn't all rainbows and unicorns, she does argue that at least some of the lower classes probably did manage to live reasonably contented lives. She describes long periods of peace and plenty, punctuated by massive upheavals and great suffering. I think this is not so much a difference of a belief as of emphasis though - Scott is an Anarchist and emphasizes the depredations of the state, while Podany is a historian and paints what's probably a more balance picture.

In any event, I give the book five stars because it's well written and researched, and more interesting and readable (or listenable in my case) than one might expect.