I absolutely enjoyed this book. From Amanda Podany I already read her 'Very short introduction to the ancient history of the Near East' and that was a rather boring book. This, on the other hand, gives a vivid insight into the psychology of the monarchs of the time, roughly the period between 2300 and 1300 BCE. In that period there was a relatively intense correspondence between the kings of the different Mesopotamian, Northern Syrian and Egyptian empires. And with correspondence you must indeed imagine very heavy, rather large clay tablets with Cuneiform inscriptions, almost always in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the time. This communication was not so much formalistic, on the contrary, the tone and content of the messages reveal quite a bit about the power relations and psychological attitude of those involved. More on that in my History account on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3545877952 ( )

Not ‘just’ about diplomacy but rather tells the history of the ancient Near East through the successes and failures of diplomacy, instead of with the focus on conflicts, as our history-writing often chooses.

The record only begins when diplomacy was already up and running; it is older than we can establish.

As she says in her intro, the kings who feature here are quite obscure – her story hinges on three Syrian royals most of us have never heard of – whose common endeavour of diplomacy, although a world first, has not remained in historical memory. It was early forgotten, in fact, so that Irkad-damu of Ebla, Zimri-Lim of Mari and Tushratta of Mittani are not celebrated ‘with marble busts at the entrance to the United Nations’ or taught like the makers of the Magna Carta. But to know that diplomacy is as ancient as war, she does not hesitate to suggest, might yet influence us today.

One thing that stood out for me was how individual personalities affected the system. One war-minded king can spoil happily existing arrangements for everybody else. We have churlish kings and affectionate ones, cheats and the conscientious. But even aggressors and posturers were drawn into the system because there was more profit for less exertion: it was a robust tradition.

Queens held their own converse, with messengers separate to those who went between the kings; and the exchange of royal daughters was a major strategy. These were differently treated in different states, but women’s voices are not absent here.

It’s a pity her three Syrian kings don’t have busts at the UN as inventors of the international peace treaty. I became fond of King Tushratta, whose emotionality comes out in his letters – letters he couldn’t shut up in, so that his clay tablets weighed much more than the average for kingly correspondence at the time. ( )

This was one of the more fascinating books I've read in the last few years...our society has a tendency to think of those who lived before the age of the car and the television as two-dimensional.

One thing that Podany does magnificently is to make the characters--the kings and diplomats and even the societies themselves, the cities, the militaries, the institutional structures--pop out of the page. They come alive because their emotions and their rationality are considered together to give an accurate portrayal of how diplomacy developed and emerged (at least for the purposes of historical record) in this period from 2350-1350 BC.

I should add, briefly, that for a book covering such an ancient period, it has a decidedly modern feel in all the best ways, and, as a reader, I very much appreciated that Podany developed her history chronologically. It is very much noted. ( )