II. The Late Bronze Age

A state is what Weber defined as the “human community [the political group] which within a certain territory […] claims for itself […] the monopoly of the legitimate physical coercion.”[1] The logics presented in this work imply that —besides of the Weberian concept— the political unit called the “state” is able to “claim” such a monopoly due to its dominant position within its internal political system. In this sense, it is possible to talk of “states” during the Late Bronze Age (1500 to 1200 bc) in the Near East. Egypt, Hatti, Mitanni, Assyria, Babylon… all of them had already reached a level of concentration of political power such as to be able to 1) exert dominion over rival units and 2) establish a monopoly of legitimate physical coercion. Since the Copper Age, the state had already appeared in the region.

They [local inhabitants] were trapped into a particular social and territorial relationships, forcing them to intensify those relationships rather than evade them. This led to opportunities to develop both collective and distributive power. Civilization, social stratification, and the state resulted.[2] 

By the Late Bronze Age, the “[…] state[s] first emerged, […] tiny city-state[s]” whose “[…] power resources were concentrated upon its center rather than under extensive control[,]”[3] had already evolved into territorial states which expanded over other states in the shape of empires.

In the late period of the Bronze Age, a fully functional international (interstate) political system had already been created from the integration of the political units of the Near East into a web of power interdependence. The Mesopotamian states engaged in a continuous struggle for domination among them throughout the whole region. Thus, as Liverani says,

[Despite that the current study of international politics] is limited to the modern and contemporary worlds […][,][…] the subject of the discipline, can be applied to every society —wherever located in time and space— after the rise of “states.”[4]

As it is well known, the first to use the term “state” —“lo stato”— was Machiavelli; nonetheless, before such a name was given, the phenomenon already existed and had been present since, at least, six thousand years before. The cases examined in this work, despite its age, are justified to be contrasted under the light of the theory of the ascension in revisionism. Thus, the results of such an exercise are valid for the testing of the theory analyzed here.