Bruce Routledge. Moab in the Iron Age: Hegemony, Polity, Archaeology.

Levy, Thomas E.

BRUCE ROUTLEDGE. Moab in the Iron Age: hegemony, polity, archaeology. xvii+312 pages, 35 figures, 6 tables. 2004. Philadelphia (PA): University of Pennsylvania Press; 0-8122-3801-X hardback $55 & 36 [pounds sterling].

When Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, he knew he would never enter the Promised Land. However, as Deuteronomy 34:1-10 relates, he had already selected Joshua to lead the tribes on the final leg of their journey. It was enough for Moses to look out across the Jordan and view the rich tapestry of awaiting territory from Dan in the north to Beersheva in the south. Like Joshua, Bruce Routledge leads the reader from the traditional confines of historical (biblical) archaeology in one area of the Holy Land, to the most current lofty heights of hard-core theoretical archaeology. The geographic focus of Routledge's study is the territory immediately east of the Dead Sea in modern Jordan, a mostly semi-arid and arid region known since the Iron Age (c. 1200-500 BC) as Moab, containing isolated pockets of relatively well-watered Mediterranean land suitable for rain-fed dry farming. Moab was a very important player--perhaps the most important of the contemporary Transjordan polities (Ammon, Moab and Edom)--that interacted with the emerging Israelite and Judean states west of the Jordan River. With some of the most important extra-biblical inscriptional evidence from a neighbouring polity, the archaeology of Moab provides an important benchmark for testing both historical and anthropological models of the past. For, it is during the Iron Age that the first historical state level societies emerged in the southern Levant (today Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, southern Syria and Lebanon and the Sinai Peninsula).

Routledge's wish is to communicate with two specific audiences: on the one hand, those specialists interested in historical 'Moab', the 'Iron Age' and the southern Levant, and on the other those scholars whose eyes light up when they hear words like 'hegemony', 'polity', 'Hegel' and 'Nietzsche'. In other words, Routledge's broad aims are: 1) to apply some of the most contemporary developments in post-processual archaeology to the archaeological record of the southern Levant; 2) to utilise (providing his own translations) ancient textual data from the region pertinent to the Iron Age; and 3) to arrive at new and insightful anthropological models concerning Iron Age state formation. The question is whether Bruce Routledge achieves this with a stunning victory like Joshua's victories in Canaan, as portrayed in the Book of Joshua; in this scenario, Routledge would vanquish all preceding explanatory models for the rise of the Moabite kingdom. Or are Routledge's achievements in the archaeology of secondary state formation a more subtle victory, like the description of Joshua and the Israelites in the Book of Judges where many of the Canaanites (or processual archaeologists) are left in peace to coexist with the newcomers?

Moab in the Iron Age is bursting with good ideas, excellent summaries of the existing scholarly literature, and new insights on important textual data. However, many of Routledge's ideas are clouded by his adoption of post-modern rhetoric. While reading the book, I found myself asking just how necessary k was for the author to use heavy jargon to convey ideas about the nuances of power negotiation in ancient societies that existed on the periphery of the great empires of the first millennium BC? Just how in debt is Routledge to the ideas of Nietzsche or Gramsci to explain what really happened in Iron Age Moab? What really gives shelf-life to a book concerning archaeology are the data on which models are built. That is why Levantine archaeologists today continue to cite the works of Sir Flinders Petrie. Theories come and go; data has staying power. This book may in fact be the best regional synthesis of Iron Age Moab to date. However, more archaeological data from Moab might have been synthesised and published to bolster the models presented by Routledge. Mapping settlement patterns showing the ranking of sites by size and archaeological period would have helped to demonstrate the nuances in power relations on the ground during the late second-first millennia BC that are at the heart of Routledge's study. This criticism should not deflect from the fact that anyone doing Iron Age archaeology in Jordan will have to read this book.

Rather than a heavy-handed post-processual victory 'creaming' earlier processualist explanatory models for the rise of the Transjordanian Iron Age complex societies, Routledge's achievement is more nuanced. One of the reasons for this is that the application of anthropological models to help explain secondary state formation in Iron Age Jordan (and the southern Levans as a whole) is still in its infancy. In the early 1990s Axel Knauf and then LaBianca & Younker (1995) were amongst the first to suggest the centrality of 'tribalism' in the formation of the Transjordanian Iron Age states. More recently, Bienkowski & van der Veen (2001) fleshed out, for late Iron Age Edom, many of the dements of tribal social relations that may have promoted increases in social complexity. While Routledge argues against such social evolutionary approaches, the jury is still out as to the utility of 'tribal' or what most anthropological archaeologists today would feel more comfortable referring to as 'segmentary society' models of social organisation. When Routledge admirably presents his new translation of the unique ninth century BC Mesha Inscription or 'Moabite Stone' discovered in Transjordan in 1868 and deconstructs it, he relies heavily on the notion of social segmentation that lies at the root of 'tribal' societies. It seems that, in spite of the nuanced environmental differences between the regions of Moab, Ammon and Edom, it is impossible for researchers to ignore the power of social segmentation in these semi-arid and arid lands.

Routledge argues persuasively against slapping social evolutionary models of band-tribe-chiefdom-state on to the archaeological data (something that the processual archaeologists noted above do not, in fact, do) and for the utility of taking an historical contextual approach to Iron Age state formation which parses out some of the unique local variables that shaped social power. Thus, Routledge has in fact brought the Iron Age archaeology of Jordan's Moab region into the Promised Land of global anthropological anthropology. However, like in the Book of Judges, Routledge's theoretical modal will have to coexist with a wide range of competing paradigms concerning the nature of secondary state formation including 'tribal states' (La Bianca & Younker 1995; Levy 2004) 'patrimonial states' (Schloen 2001), 'ethnic states' (Joffe 2002) and others. That said, Bruce Routledge is to be congratulated for producing a book that speaks to both local Levantine archaeologists as well as those scholars on the world scene interested in archaeological theory.

References

BIENKOWSKI, P. & E. VAN DER VEEN. 2001. Tribes, trade, and towns: a new framework for the late Iron Age in southern Jordan and the Negev. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 323: 21-47.

JOFFE, A.H. 2002. The Rise of secondary states in the Iron Age Levant. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 45: 425-67.

LABIANCA, O.S. & R.W. YOUNKER. 1995. The kingdoms of Ammon, Moab and Edom: the archaeology of society in Late Bronze/Iron Age Transjordan (c. 1400-500 BCE), in T.E. Levy (ed.) The archaeology of society in the Holy Land: 399-415. Leicester:. Leicester University Press.

LEVY, T.E. 2004. Some theoretical issues concerning the rise of the Edomite kingdom--searching for 'Pre-Modern Identities', in F. al-Khraysheh (ed.) Studies in the history and archaeology of Jordan, vol. VIII: 63-89. Amman: Department of Antiquities of Jordan.

SCHLOEN, D. 2001. The house of the father as fact and symbol patrimonialism in Ugarit and the ancient Near East. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.

THOMAS E. LEVY

Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, USA