| Summary: | <p>Within Mario Liverani’s enormous range of contributions to ancient Near Eastern studies, Prestige and Interest(Liverani 1990) has been an inspiration to many scholars who have treated relations among peoples and polities of the ancient Near East, especially in the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500–1200 BCE). Moreover, his studies of topics relating to regions on the periphery of his core interests have often been far ahead of what specialists in these areas had achieved. For an Egyptologist such as myself, a striking example is his treatment of the Tale of Wenamunin the same book (Liverani 1990: 247–54), which at the time of its publication could only be matched in any way by an article by an Assyriologist (Bunnens 1978): nothing comparable had come from within Egyptology. In relation to the questions I treat here, I would single out Mario’s presentation in Prestige and Interest of a model of how ancient polities of many types conceptualized relations between themselves and the world beyond the areas they controlled (Liverani 1990: 33–43). Although his formulation is almost abstract, he presents a highly cogent picture that prompts consideration of how the patterns he identifies have a near-universal character and, I suggest for the present essay, what they might mean for spatial contexts in which contacts and negotiations between polities were set.</p>
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