In Writing and the Ancient State, Haicheng Wang takes up a very ambitious project. Apparently in this revised version of his award-winning dissertation of the same name, Wang's goal is nothing less than a “comparative study of the use of writing to create and maintain order in early states” (p. 1).

Beginning with the “early state,” a long-standing topic of debate in archaeology, Wang asserts that “our modern state is only a late variant of the model” (p. 1), though this is quite far from the consensus view in contemporary archaeological theory. What follows is an understanding of “the state” that follows such authors as John Baines and Norman Yoffee, James C. Scott, Benedict Anderson, and Max Weber.Footnote ¹ “Early states” (because they were states) were rational, ordering institutions, creating legitimacy through a common imagined community (predicated on king lists, royal ideologies, and administrative texts) needing the legibility of census and land register to generate wealth. Wang does note that Scott, Anderson, and Weber were all explicitly describing historical processes that led to modern nation-states out of previous political forms, but argues against their modern specificity.

Beginning with the assumption that ancient polities were fundamentally the same as modern ones, writing naturally becomes central to “the state's” creation of “legibility.” Unsurprisingly, then, Wang focuses on writing as a taxonomic exercise. From this all else follows—king lists legitimize the position of the king by (re)producing a discursive taxonomic hierarchy in the past and present; administrative texts list and order people and things, allowing “the state” to extract wealth and administer order. Lists also served a prominent role in education with sign lists not only serving as the basis for literacy acquisition, but also reinforcing and perpetuating the royal ideology encapsulated in the king lists. Thus scribes served not only the administrative but also the ideological needs of “the state” while at the same time growing autonomous over time and exerting influence through their putative role in educating the rulers (as is proposed to be the case with the Mandate of Heaven).

Beyond the introduction, Writing and the Ancient State is divided into three sections: the first on the role of king lists in the creation of early state legitimacy; the second on the role of census and land registers in the generation of wealth in early states; and the third on the role of lexical lists in scribal education and role of the latter in shaping early states. Each section is divided into two—the Near East and the Americas, and China respectively. In each section, Wang follows his thesis across a staggering array of secondary literature, much of which is presented in blocks of text and images from these secondary sources. In some cases, a lack of historical context makes these sources not obviously well integrated with Wang's thesis, occasionally seeming to take the place of the argumentation they are meant to support. The breadth of coverage, though impressive on the one hand, sometimes is more problematic when, on the other, under strong universalizing assumptions, absence of evidence from one historical context is overturned by the presence of evidence from some other context.

Any work of such scope provokes an inevitable skepticism concerning the assertions of a nonspecialist working in areas beyond his or her expertise. To what extent are the author's choices of literature or interpretations of them tendentious? It is of course difficult to know without expert knowledge of all of the societies and historical periods in question, and Wang has clearly read a great deal. For his own area of expertise, one might have expected less reliance on translations of primary classical and preclassical Chinese texts, and his use of primary texts occasionally can be questioned, such as where he uses the classical Chinese definition of xue as “school” to understand the meaning of the word(s) transcribed as xue in the oracle bones, and when he translates duo zi, “the many princes/many lineage chiefs,” as the “many children” based on the “common-sense” linkage of schooling with children. Such common-sense formalism allows him to make strong, universal assumptions about states, writing systems, and literacy, use evidence from one historical context to argue for its likely existence in another, and overlook relevant literature on early complex polities in anthropological archaeology.