These volumes treat economic and social themes of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean; all touch on Egypt, but the volume on Egypt itself limps way behind in both quality and scope. Taking these three volumes together, one has the impression that the unresolved problems of the last five decades of turmoil in archaeological thought have left not merely unhealed scars, but also badly set broken bones.

Egypt was the first great economic and military power of this region and remained so after the Bronze Age Aegean world collapsed. Following Mesopotamia, at the start of the third millennium BC, Egypt pushed the circulation of goods and people. Its influence extended initially to Nubia and the Levant, reaching the Aegean before the first palaces in Crete. For the last millennium of the Bronze Age (until c. 1200 BC), Egypt and the Aegean were firmly linked. Egyptian amethyst was popular in the Mycenaean world, as was Aegean olive oil in Akhenaten's Amarna. These connections are important, and are amply evidenced by a wide variety of indicators, not least material culture. Muhs's book neglects, however, archaeological sources, missing useful examples such as the near contemporaneous imitation of a Minoan Kamares vessel found near the first cataract of the Nile, some 1400km from Knossos, the evidence for Aegean traders in the mid fifteenth-century Theban tombs or a fourteenth-century Egyptian list of Aegean toponyms. Yet Muhs is not alone: in a rare oversight, Murray missed the Cretan transport stirrup jars found in a c. 1200 BC Egyptian harbour west of Alexandria, some 400km from Crete and Memphis alike. Such ungainly jars were normally sent to the mainland and the contents transferred to smaller stirrup jars for export (Murray, pp. 196–97), reaching the Nile Valley and the Levant. Such details add to our understanding, but missing them does not impair it.

By contrast, missing in Muhs's book is the possibility that perhaps some 5000 years ago the Egyptians invented the concept of weighing. This was decisive for the measures enabling those estimations of value that united the trade of the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean, Nubia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, the Gulf and the Indus, visible in the wrecks of Gelidonya and Uluburun (see entries in Murray's index—but not in Muhs's). The balances at Santorini belonged in this tradition and are found as Egyptian hieroglyphs, as well as in Minoan Linear A and Mycenaean Linear B. Far older than weights were seals (leaving impressions identifying personal and institutional responsibility for commodities), another element uniting the Aegean with Egypt and Asia. Initially, the Egyptians used cylinder seals, but then adopted scarabs, later used as amulets. The idea spread and Murray documents hundreds of “inherently low value […] faience scarabs” (p. 267) in Iron Age Hellas.

Stamp seals originated in northern Mesopotamia, and recent work links third-millennium Cretan seals to elite dwellings. This is the background of Anderson's (imprecisely titled) work on Late Prepalatial Crete, aimed at understanding social change and seal symbolism using exotic materials, honing in on the ‘Parading Lions’ (hereafter PL), a small group of exceptional Cretan seals made of hippopotamus ivory around the end of the third millennium. Lions and hippopotami are foreign and demand analysis. Instead, there is a vague assurance that, having ‘arrived’, the creatures were ‘domesticated’ for Cretan usage. Before encountering this observation, we are exposed to post-processual clichés cloaking the author's attempt to “develop a novel understanding of the lived semiotics of seal use” (Anderson, p. 6). She lurches through climatic rupture (judged to be irrelevant, p. 17), mentions possible disturbances in trade (following Manning, p. 18—contradicting her own acute observations, pp. 19, 76), recognises evidence of relatively constant Egyptian influence (e.g. p. 131), with materials “from secure Prepalatial deposits” (p. 76), and a clear artistic rupture whereby the non-Egyptian PL appear in the late third millennium. Anderson is certain that the PL were a break in Cretan tradition, suggesting that: a) foreign-influenced “amulets found on Crete” probably did not have “the self-same symbolic meanings” as they might have had in their foreign context, but rather “the foreign origin […] informed the symbolic meanings” (p. 76); and that b) some Cretans may have known about Egyptian conceptions including “symbolic dimensions of foreign sport” (p. 83).

Anderson involuntarily confronts the issue of diffusion head on: did the objects bear and maintain meanings, or did the objects take on new meanings because they were exotic? We know that the iconography came from Anatolia (p. 88), and the ivory from foreign parts (pp. 82, 94), probably Egypt. But the Anatolian schemes are more than a millennium older (pp. 86–89) than the Cretan PL. Thus the Cretans may have known nothing about the exotic origins; the inspiration was not from a hotspot of iconographic innovation and this should put paid to Anderson's speculations about craftsmen studying lions and glyptic “first hand” (p. 85). Grasping this would have allowed Anderson to pen a most important observation about the nature of diffusion. While masterfully demonstrated, the message is not enunciated. Although Anderson could have written that “*However lions first made their way to inland Crete, once there the exotic beasts were domesticated; improvising and integrating ancient and exotic elements, Cretan craftsmen gave birth to the first distinctly Cretan icon*”, she did not (adapted from pp. 84, 90, 91). The distribution of the Cretan seals seems to confirm that the symbolism was enthusiastically adopted, transcending generic designs and local identities. However imperceptible during the Prepalatial period, within centuries this imaginative transformation of foreign designs and materials would enable Cretan craftsmen to achieve the first historical blossoming of European art. Understanding diffusion as opening the way to creative innovation depends upon appreciating that it is the recipient, not the source, who decides what it becomes.

As the tale of that zenith is not covered in the books under review here, we leap to the collapse—and the ‘dark ages’—whence Greece emerged. After some remarks about various approaches to trade in past times, Murray eschews the role of model-maker. Instead, she presents what evidence she can of maritime trade in a restricted part of Greece between the end of the Mycenaean period and the end of the Geometric. The collapse of Bronze Age Aegean civilisation is documented but not explained. It is clear that one system of aristocratic rule gave way to another between 1300 and 600 BC, and that the birth of Greece in the Archaic period followed dark ages involving demographic change and movement. The economy in the third quarter of the second millennium BC included palatial institutions controlling corners of mainland Greece, coordinating the merchants, smiths, potters, shepherds and the like. Murray recognises that the written documentation of Greece does not hint at international trade, but that trade and inter-palatial gift exchange was common in the contemporaneous written sources from the ancient Near East, and draws on this to propose that the Mycenaeans participated in this trade. In doing so she fails to appreciate the significance of a text she cites (pp. 47, 257). It a) is one of the few references to direct contacts with the Achaeans (Mycenaean Greeks) in the Near Eastern texts; b) refers to copper; and c) confirms that the Achaean is waiting off the coast of Anatolia—and that he will soon depart. I conclude that this cannot be taken as testimony to inter-royal gift exchange (copper being too cheap a material), and that for most of the Bronze Age, Greek traders rarely ventured into the Levantine trading circuits. The lapis lazuli seals in Thebes provide further evidence for this economic imbalance. Too thin to recut yet again for a new owner, the stones were virtually useless, but Murray follows Kopanias, suggesting that the seals “must have been worth a great deal as a commodity” (p. 82). The price for workable lapis lazuli was above the stone's weight in silver, although certainly less for rubbish. All the lapis in the Mycenaean Aegean would weigh less than half a kilogram (i.e. a silver value of a mina or so)—or close to the weight of just one of the blocks circulating in the Near East—and thus nothing in terms of Near Eastern values. These Theban seals are meaningless exceptions (akin to cheap faience in the tomb of Tutankhamun). Furthermore, the Mycenaean use of uqnu, the Akkadian word for lapis for glass paste (Linear B ku-wa-no), demonstrates that the Late Bronze Age Greeks did not understand Near Eastern values.

Yet the palaces did have economic importance. Murray noted that some Cretan oil was a trade good shipped to the Greek mainland, and then transferred to the retail vessels manufactured in the Argolid, but found in Egypt, the Levant and Italy. The Aegean palaces could have been merchandising institutions such as Near Eastern palaces at Alalakh, Mari and Ugarit, where the palace economy included agricultural goods, textiles, craftsmen and merchants playing commercial roles. Further evidence is the Egyptian list of Aegean toponyms (skipped by Muhs) demonstrating that the Egyptians knew the geography of the political powers and ports of the Aegean, as indicated by the prominent position of Mycenae. Aside from its own port, Nauplia, Mycenae is the only Mycenaean city in the list; Troy and Minoan cities or ports (Kydonia, Kythera, Knossos, Phaistos and the like) support what archaeologists have long suspected. Figuratively, Mycenae was prominent on the map, and the palaces linked to trading emporia (as Athens was and would become), but the scale of this exchange demonstrates that the Greek palaces were not part of the Near Eastern elite.

Between the fall of the Geometric period and the rise of Archaic Greece, Murray posits a decline in population leading to an economic contraction, maintaining a lower quantity of imports—an approach neglecting the palaces as nodes of a trading system. In my view, with the collapse, the trading system (symbolised by the control of the olive oil exports) lost its anchor and the economy declined until the Greeks could re-invent themselves as Mediterranean traders. Thus, more important than any potential demographic decline (which is speculative as Murray presents it) is the gradual increase in imports from, and exports to, Italy, beginning already at the end of the Bronze Age. Equally interesting is the trend on Crete, which seems to have enjoyed disproportionately greater contacts when the mainland was undergoing phases of change. Murray also tries to understand how she can fit the available information on iron and bronze into her scheme. Unfortunately, in a book about economics, she disregarded the importance of the swift fall of the price of iron (p. 262). The Iron Age started with the price of iron falling from far above silver to a fraction of that: 1/500 or 1/800. The quality of iron would take a millennium to approach that of bronze, but the cheaper metal substituted not so much for bronze as wood, stone and hemp wherever possible.

Comparing these books, as this review invites, we can say that Murray's data and conceptual grasp (especially the hints at networks) are more persuasive than Anderson's PL and itinerant craftsmen. Muhs's is an altogether poorer work (for detailed criticism, see my own review elsewhere (Warburton Reference Warburton2017)). Although distracted by parochial debates in Aegean archaeology, Murray is trail-blazing in empirically understanding trade. The next step is characterising the respective societies at each stage. Charting the seals—iconography, use, manufacture, distribution—Anderson could soon offer a similarly convincing account of how the craftsmen, materials and elites interacted in Bronze Age Crete. There is reason for optimism here that we can overcome past debates and post-processual agendas, conceiving of economics socially. To do this we must grapple with: a) the social structures dictating how the economies of the ancient world functioned; and b) the relationship between the elites, trade and economics in urban societies flourishing on fundamentally agricultural economies. Trade was not balanced between any two economies within one trading system—there is hardly more Afghani lapis lazuli in the Bronze Age Aegean than Aegean olive oil in contemporaneous Afghanistan, yet all was based on subsistence economy households paying taxes and providing obligatory unremunerated labour for elites. The imperial elites of the Near East shared a conception of power, based on taxation, military conquest and legitimacy through justice. The periphery in Iran and the Aegean understood only prices. Ideologies and legal systems were the preserve of the cores, and these assured that the cores steered world history. Yet the Bronze Age Near Eastern ideologies foundered in the first-millennium world when a new society blossomed and dogmatic messages about justice and value were transformed into discourse. We are coming closer to the origins of the West.