From the beginning of its preparation, this book has been built on the notion of studying the large from the small, the nature of ancient society from the particular vantage of the Mari archives. This method does not mean that Mari represents only a secondary interest. On the contrary, I have little to say about ancient political life generally except insofar as the Mari evidence has provoked it. Moreover, I will have failed if this volume offers nothing new to our understanding of the Mari archives and the phenomena found in them. The detailed investigation of a single coherent body of historical evidence demands a responsiveness to the actual that will direct theoretical questions and control theoretical speculation. My conclusions naturally follow the separate levels of my method, and I present them separately, as results relating to Mari's political world, and then as relating to the ancient political world before democracy.

THE POLITICAL WORLD OF THE MARI ARCHIVES

Jean-Marie Durand's team of Assyriologists who have been involved with publication and interpretation of the Mari archives over the last twenty-plus years have made tremendous progress toward understanding their contents and their implications. After their work, all of the classic works on tribes in the society revealed in the Mari evidence are rendered to some extent out of date: Kupper, Luke, Rowton, Matthews, Heltzer, and Anbar. I accept many of the new proposals made by Durand and his colleagues, and it could be said that I have accepted too much.