611 Reviews of Books sum of the individual stories is greater than the parts; his selection and organization of the sources in this section explore aspects of royal wealth in texts that otherwise might have been judged as unrelated. In sum, Sasson’s From the Mari Archives: An Anthology of Old Babylonian Letters is a welcome addition to the growing collection of ancient Near Eastern sources that are being published in transla- tion. This volume, moreover, is important not only for the treatment of a signifcant number of texts, but also for the clarity and elegance with which it presents them. And with its reasonable price, it can serve as a valuable resource for specialists and non-specialists alike. ADAM E. MIGLIO WHEATON COLLEGE REFERENCES Durand, J.-M. 1997, 1998, 2000. Les documents épistolaires du palais de Mari. Littératures anciennes du Proche Orient, vols. 16, 17, 18. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. . 2004. Peuplement et sociétés à l’époque amorrite (I): Les clans Bensim’alites. In Amurru III: Nomades et sédentaires dans le Proche-Orient ancien. Compte rendu de la XLVI e Rencontre Assyri- ologique International, ed. C. Nicolle. Pp. 111–97. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur le Civilisations. . 2012. La guerre ou la paix? Réfexions sur les implications politiques d’une prophétie. In Leggo! Studies Presented to Frederick Mario Fales on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. G. B. Lanfranchi et al. Pp. 251–72. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Heimpel, Wolfgang. 2003. Letters to the King of Mari: A New Translation with Historical Introduction, Notes, and Commentary. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Tribe and State: The Dynamics of International Politics and the Reign of Zimri-Lim. By ADAM E. MIGLIO. Gorgias Studies in the Ancient Near East, vol. 8. Piscataway: GORGIAS PRESS, 2014. Pp. xvi + 271, maps. $95. In this revised version of his dissertation, A.E. Miglio analyzes eighteenth-century B.C.E. letters from Mari from an interdisciplinary perspective that involves not only Assyriology, but also anthropol- ogy, political science, and social theory. Miglio’s declared aim is to elucidate the role of inter-tribal relations within the diplomatic game of early second-millennium B.C.E. Syria and Mesopotamia. The frst chapter (pp. 1–22) ofers a short historiographical and methodological survey, where the infuence of social theorist A. Giddens is formative (also in the conclusion, pp. 235–39). The book aims to apply Gidden’s model of inter-societal systems to cuneiform evidence and establishes that the socio- political organization of the Mari kingdom was a mixed form of tribal and state-based social organiza- tion, which had a direct impact on the way Mari king Zimrī-Līm conducted politics. Demonstrations of this hypothesis are developed in the following four chapters. Chapter 2 (pp. 23–53) discusses the fundamental concepts of state and tribe. Against a growing trend in Near Eastern Studies to defne social organization according to ancient terminologies (Schloen 2001; Charpin 2004: 299–304; Reculeau 2008: 326–37), Miglio argues for the use of modern sociolog- ical and anthropological concepts. “State” is defned in a strictly Weberian way as based on the king’s “claim to a monopoly of violence” (p. 42), while tribes are addressed through some refections on debates in 1960s-1970s anthropology. Miglio’s opinion is that, in Mari, “an alternative to identifcation by state was identifcation by tribe” (p. 43), and that tribes acted as non-state actors “with substantial degrees of autonomy” (p. 51), like present-day NGOs (pp. 49–50). This is an interesting hypothesis, but the study does not ofer convincing arguments to prefer it to the usual understanding. Chapter 3 (pp. 55–108) discusses at length the title “king[s] of Mari and the Land of Pastoralists/ Sim’al tribe,” understood as defning the king as both a “head-of-state” and a “tribal leader” (p. 237).