Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations - Weber's neglected masterpiece, which first appeared in German in 1897 and was reissued in 1909 - represents a fascinating and rigorous exercise to bring the newly forged concepts of sociology to bear on civilizations as diverse as Mesopotamia and Egypt, Hebrew society in Israel, the city-states of classical Greece, the Hellenistic empire and, finally, republican and imperial Rome. Blending, throughout the work, description of socio-economic structures with investigation into mechanisms and causes of the rise and decline of social systems, the volume ends with a magisterial explanatory essay on the underlying reasons for the ultimate fall of the Roman Empire