Zaccagnini, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Here and in the following, dates are intended as , if not stated otherwise.1 Fargher et al., "Wealth Inequality, Social Stratification, and the Built Environment" (2020); McAnany, "Approaching the Archaeopo-this perspective, political authority is always performative, people-oriented, and negotiated in public. In archaeological terms, an archaeopolitical perspective focuses on public space to apprehend the negotiation of power between rulers and other civic community members. 2 In ancient Near Eastern studies, text-oriented scholars are currently rediscovering a similar interest in non-royal institutions and the politics of consensus. 3 litical" (2018); Martin, "Reflections on the Archaeopolitical" (2016). Central to this approach is collective action theory, as theorized in the social sciences since the 1990s. Essentially, collective action theory postulates that governance works through cooperation and bargain rather than coercion and mystification. One of its tenets is that "the more principals (rulers) depended on the populace for labor, tribute, or other revenues, the greater the agency (or "voice") a population had in negotiating public benefits." (De Marrais and Earle, "Collective Action Theory" [2017]: 183). Daniel Fleming has used collective action theory to interpret the social landscape of Emar, Mari, and Israel: Fleming, Legacy of Israel (2012), Democracy's Ancient Ancestors (2004) and Time at Emar (2000).2 "Civic community" is here intended to mean every community of persons bound together by a sense of belonging to a specific urban place, following Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia (1964), 95.3 E.g., the essays on collective governance in Wilhelm, Organization, Representation, and Symbols of Power (2012), 85-225, the session on "the world of politics" in Rollinger and van Dongen, Mesopotamia and the Ancient World (2015), 413-86, and Martin and Snell, "Democracy and Freedom" (2005).Rural Community [1976], 103) or 22,000-29,000 individuals (Liverani, "Histoire" [1979], who distinguishes between 20,000-25,000 villagers and 2,000-4,000 individuals affiliated with royal estates). Adding 6,000-8000 city dwellers, the total population of the kingdom was thus estimated at 28,000-36,000 individuals. According to these calculations, city dwellers would have amounted to 16%-29% of the total population. Based on the newly published administrative list RS 94.2411, Vidal recently proposed a lower estimate for the rural population of 11,000-14,000 individuals, organized in 200 villages, with, on average, fourteen families per village with four to five members per family (Vidal, "On the Demography of Ugaritian Villages" [2014]). If this were true, the total population of the kingdom would drop to 17,000-22,000 individuals, with a considerably higher percentage of city dwellers (27%-47%). Vidal's new estimate, however, should be emended by adding the personnel of the royal farms (Ug. gt) and vineyards, shepherds employed fulltime by th...
