Book Review: The Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies

The book under review is the result of a workshop held in 2004 in Newcastle, where seven scholars met to discuss and compare seven royal courts in different cultures and periods: the Achaemenid, Argead Macedonian, and Sassanid, early and late imperial Roman, Han Chinese and New Kingdom Egyptian. What these courts have in common, is that they formed the cores (with the exception of pharaonic Egypt) of imperial states.1 The Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies first of all aims at analyzing the political functioning of ancient imperial courts in a comparative perspective. It is furthermore an attempt to assign to the royal court a more central place in the study of ancient states (most of which were, after all, monarchical states) by making use of recent scholarship concerning the court in the early modern period. Ever since the seminal works of Jürgen von Kruedener (1973) and notably Norbert Elias (1969),2 historians studying the cultural and political history of Europe after the Middle Ages have understood the pivotal importance of the court for the functioning of monarchical states, and the number of publications is substantial. In the study of ancient states, the court has played a far less central role.

Given the prevalence of monarchy in the political history of the Ancient World, it is remarkable that royal courts have received such limited attention.