The Iron Age World-System

This article aims to construct an overview of the Near Eastern Iron Age world-system (1150-200 BCE). Utilizing Giovanni Arrighi's conceptualization of the modern world-system, it argues that in contrast to civilizational empires and loosely integrated ecumenes, the Iron Age system exhibited many of the same features - a long-term transformational logic, alternating cycles of hegemony, anarchy and chaos, and the increasing size of the containers of power. To this end, it examines the organization of the Iron Age system by commercially and maritime-oriented Phoenician city-states; its consolidation as a system of territorial states under the hegemony of the Neo-Assyrian Empire; its apex under the Achaemenid Empire, which constructed a territorial empire that covered the entire Near Eastern heartland of this system; its final phase in the form of a Hellenistic condominium of kingdoms that were linked by knowledge networks; and its ultimate dissolution with the rise of a Eurasian trading ecumene, and of new durable civilizations that formed in the Mediterranean and on the Iranian Plateau and effected a core- shift away from the Near East.