Reyes y `parientes' en la época de El Amarna en Palestina

Abstract

Traditional attempts to gain knowledge from the sociopolitical situation in Palestine during the XIVth Century BC, reflected in the El Amarna correspondence, have mainly focused on the role played by Egypt and its ruling policy on Western Asiatic territory and neglected the indigenous point of view. Mario Liverani, in a known article, has proposed paying closer attention to the clash of ideological conceptions between the Egyptian overlords and their Asiatic subjects' relation. Nevertheless, Liverani's analysis, followed later by Niels Peter Lemche's, did not provide a full comprehensive explanation of the sociopolitical nature behind the Palestinian kinglets' actions. In this paper, following the interpretive road paved by these authors, a reading of the political behavior of the Palestinian kinglets (as presented in the El Armarna letters) from the point of view of the dynamics of patronage societies is proposed. This interpretive strategy can offer us a key to understand why several kinship (personal) terms dwell in a realm of administrative (impersonal) government, as witnessed by the written evidence.