It sometimes seems there are two treatments of ancient Near Eastern law and internationalism: the kind written by ancient historians with little reference to contemporary legal or political-scientific theory; and the kind written by political scientists without much firm grounding in ancient sources and historiography. (This situation is completely understandable, because a mastery of the relevant disciplines would be hard for any one person to command.)

Amnon Altman's book falls squarely into the former category, but stands out for its breadth, factual dependability, and fine prose style. The reader seeking information on anything from the twenty-fifth century BC treatment of war dead in Sumer to Assyro-Phoenician maritime treaties of the seventh century BC, will be rewarded by the information packed into this tidy and even-handed book, covering a great swath of time. The lion's share of attention is given to legal issues related to war and conflict (declaration of war, alliances, rebellion, refugees and prisoners, diplomacy, even theological conceptions of conflict law). This is primarily derived from treaties; more than one quarter of the book is given over to describing such documents. A much smaller portion of the book covers questions of international private and civil law, that is, jurisdiction, extradition, and commerce.

The author is most at home in the Late Bronze Age material he treats in Chapter 4, but is also clearly well equipped to cover and compare legal forms of the preceding and following millennia. The book proposes (without insisting upon) a modest developmental trajectory, in which certain premises of international law were carried forward and elaborated from period to period. The comparative approach is mostly successful, although this is occasionally marred by anachronism. One example comes in his discussion of continuity in declarations of war in the Old Babylonian period (c. 2004–1595 BC) in Chapter 3, for which he turns to astrological omens, the Middle Egyptian Instruction of Merikare, Deuteronomy 25:17–18, and the Anatolian Anum-ḫirbe letter to support his case, but this seems an unusual lapse into anachronism for Altman. For the most part, he is sensitive not only to such historical issues, but also to the influence of law's rhetorical dimension, as when he so nicely writes about a “… growing [Bronze Age] notion that justice is something that man may anticipate not as an act of grace but rather as something to which he is entitled as a basic right” (30).

If the great virtue of the work is its concise presentation of material, what the legal historian might want to know opening up its pages is that it is not framed in legal historical terms. The bibliography is impressive—approximately 450 books and articles are cited—but only 3 works are theoretical or historical works about the discipline of legal history as such. This is then reflected in an absence of terms and ideas related to the political situation of law-in-exercise such as realism and idealism, or consent and custom. This is not a terminological infraction, but a missed opportunity to communicate with other legal historians in disciplinary terms, and to offer a uniquely informed opinion as to the ancient conception of what law did and how it worked. Did law regulate existing conditions? Or did codes and treaties first emerge to bring about the conditions in which law might eventually be effective? Altman is, in the end, explicit that he favors the former point of view (210–11), but this comes much too late in the book to have an effect. (One may wish to read his “Concluding Remarks” first.)

Altman has to work largely from idealizing documents, such as treaties and royal inscriptions, which practically oblige him to provide a narrative focus about a systematized international order. In this, he is sometimes overcredulous, as when he accepts too much at face value Assyrian descriptions of what “rebellion” is (102), or Hammurabi's self-styled “merciful” attitude toward conquered enemies (62). A more systematic comparison of statute and practice would have yielded some useful picture of what the culture wanted of legal devices and what actually worked. Notwithstanding, the author remains vigilant about distinguishing what features he sees as genuinely legal, and what features he believes were merely political (92–99); one wishes only that he made an equally vigorous or imaginative counterfactual case for law as the instrument of autonomous states, and not only as an expression of common cultural values.

The coverage occasionally neglects the genre of sources for particular problems: for example, his treatment of the obligations of Hittite vassals (104–8) derives almost entirely from treaties; the subsequent description of prisoners of war (108–10) comes mostly from letters and administrative documents; accordingly, the legal bases of imperial action in these spheres sound very different. The author is impressively consistent in making counterarguments throughout the book, cautioning about the many ways in which the sources may be misleading, incomplete, or fundamentally not about law; but a brief theoretical statement about the nature of the sources and how they inform what we can see would have been a very helpful guide for the reader.

All these points may seem as if they add up to a heavily qualified endorsement of the book. Not so; I enjoyed reading it, and have already found it useful for my own work. The success of the book is that it rises above a mere catalog or description of texts, and into the stratum where it excites such questions and points as posed, and the author has my thanks for this.