Chapter 7 examines the ways in which coinage was employed by Hieron to bolster his rule. The chapter begins with an introductory survey of the coins struck by the royal mint over the course of Hieron’s reign. It then addresses how variations in the style and types of coins struck at different points in his reign elucidate how Hieron employed coinage to promote an ideology of legitimate kingship and the orderly succession of power.

This chapter compares the Great Revolt of the Thebaid (206–186 BC) and the Maccabean Revolt (starting in the 160s), which took place in a period of important social, economic, and political change. Though the events preceding each revolt differ markedly (the founding of a polis in Jerusalem, for example, has no counterpart in the Thebaid), Honigman and Veïsse emphasize multiple interconnected internal and external factors, including political miscalculations and expensive wars. They observe that it was not domination itself, but the way it was played out at a given moment that triggered revolts, especially a tighter royal control over land and taxation. Though they stressed that using sources of a rather different nature requires caution, their systematic examination of the causes of the revolts, of the ideological discourses, of the reaction of the government, and their aftermaths help to identify different strategies applied by each regime in different regions. They show how history, memories, and the structure of the territory made indirect rule of Judea conceivable for both Seleucid kings and the locals, while it was unthinkable for the Ptolemies and the “rebels” in the Thebaid.

How the Hittite kingdom broke up still eludes us. Current archaeological thinking envisions a deliberate abandonment of the capital Hattusa by its elite. Evidence of migrations pushing eastwards from the west, recent interpretations of the Sea People’s movements in a similar direction, and the emergence of three Great Kings in Hittite fashion after 1200 in inscriptions from the eastern Konya plain (Kızıldağ, Karadağ), at KarahÖyÜk near Elbistan, and several inscriptions from the Malatya area further east may hint at where they went. Did they try to settle down and continue at Tarhuntassa, Karkamish, or elsewhere in that region? Using the fall of Ugarit around 1190 or, as some claim, the end of Emar in the late 1180s as termini post quos for the end of the kingdom one might argue for an awareness of a still existing Hittite kingdom into the early twelfth century bc but we do not know whether that was at Hattusa or already elsewhere.