Introduction
The ancient Near East was home to the world’s earliest empires emanating from the great centers of civilization in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. The earliest empires date to the end of the third millennium BCE when Sargon of Akkad and his dynasty (c. 2350–2193 BCE), and later the kings from the Third Dynasty of Ur (2111–2004 BCE), integrated large parts of Mesopotamia and projected their influence even further. The second millennium BCE saw the rise and fall of a number of smaller empires that were often vying for political, military, and economic advantage. The Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE) in particular saw continuous competition for territory and power between the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Mitanni, and Egypt. The collapse of the economic and political system at the end of the Late Bronze Age brought a period of economic and political reshuffling that would eventually give way to the classic “world empires” of the first millennium BCE: the Neo-Assyrian...
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Further Readings
Alcock, S.E., T.N. D’Altroy, K.D. Morrison, and C.M. Sinopoli, eds. 2001. Empires: Perspectives from archaeology and history. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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Smith, M.E., and L. Montiel. 2001. The archaeological study of empires and imperialism in pre-Hispanic central Mexico. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20: 245–284.
Tyson, C.W. and V.R. Herrmann. 2018. The periphery in the neo-Assyrian period. Boulder: University of Colorado Press.
Van De Mieroop, M. 2007. A history of the ancient near east ca. 3000–323. 2nd ed. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
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Tyson, C.W. (2018). Empire in the Ancient Near East, Archaeology of. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_2298-2
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