The Sumerians
Despite the Sumerians' leading role,
the historical role of other races should not be
underestimated. While with prehistory only approximate
dates can be offered, historical periods require a firm
chronological framework, which, unfortunately, has not yet been
established for the first half of the 3rd millennium BC. The basis for the
chronology after about 1450 BC is provided by the data in the
Assyrian and Babylonian king lists, which can
often be checked by dated tablets and the Assyrian lists
of eponyms (annual officials whose names served to
identify each year). It is, however, still uncertain how much time
separated the middle of the 15th century BC from the end of the 1st
dynasty of Babylon, which is therefore variously dated to
1594 BC ("middle"), 1530 BC ("short"), or 1730 BC ("long" chronology). As
a compromise, the middle chronology is used here. From
1594 BC several chronologically overlapping dynasties reach back to the
beginning of the 3rd dynasty of Ur, about 2112 BC. From
this point to the beginning of the dynasty of Akkad (c.
2334 BC) the interval can only be calculated to within 40 to 50 years, via
the ruling houses of Lagash and the rather uncertain
traditions regarding the succession of Gutian viceroys.
With Ur-Nanshe (c. 2520 BC), the first king of the 1st
dynasty of Lagash, there is a possible variation of 70 to
80 years, and earlier dates are a matter of mere guesswork: they depend
upon factors of only limited relevance, such as the computation of
occupation or destruction levels, the degree of development in the script
(paleography), the character of the sculpture,
pottery, and cylinder seals, and their
correlation at different sites. In short, the chronology
of the first half of the 3rd millennium is largely a matter for the
intuition of the individual author. Carbon-14 dates are at present too few
and far between to be given undue weight. Consequently, the turn of the
4th to 3rd millennium is to be accepted, with due caution and
reservations, as the date of the flourishing of the archaic
civilization of Uruk and of the invention of writing.
In Uruk and probably also in other
cities of comparable size, the Sumerians led a city life
that can be more or less reconstructed as follows: temples
and residential districts; intensive agriculture,
stock breeding, fishing, and
date palm cultivation forming the four mainstays
of the economy; and highly specialized industries
carried on by sculptors, seal engravers,
smiths, carpenters, shipbuilders,
potters, and workers of reeds and
textiles. Part of the population was supported with
rations from a central point of
distribution, which relieved people of the necessity of providing their
basic food themselves, in return for their work all day and every day, at
least for most of the year. The cities kept up active trade
with foreign lands.
That organized city life existed is demonstrated
chiefly by the existence of inscribed tablets. The
earliest tablets contain figures with the items
they enumerate and measures with the items
they measure, as well as personal names and,
occasionally, probably professions. This shows the purely
practical origins of writing in
Mesopotamia: it began not as a means of magic or
as a way for the ruler to record his achievements, for
example, but as an aid to memory for an administration
that was ever expanding its area of operations. The earliest examples of
writing are very difficult to penetrate because of their extremely laconic
formulation, which presupposes a knowledge of the context, and because of
the still very imperfect rendering of the spoken word. Moreover, many of
the archaic signs were pruned away after a short period
of use and cannot be traced in the paleography of later
periods, so that they cannot be identified.
One of the most important questions that has to be met
when dealing with "organization" and "city life"
is that of social structure and the form of
government; however, it can be answered only with difficulty, and
the use of evidence from later periods carries with it the danger of
anachronisms. The Sumerian word for
ruler, excellence is lugal,
which etymologically means "big person." The first
occurrence comes from Kish about 2700 BC, since an
earlier instance from Uruk is uncertain because it could
simply be intended as a personal name: "Monsieur Legrand."
In Uruk the ruler's special title was "En".
In later periods this word (etymology unknown), which is also found in
divine names such as Enlil and Enki, has
a predominantly religious connotation that is translated,
for want of a better designation, as "en-priest,
en-priestess." En, as the ruler's title,
is encountered in the traditional epics of the
Sumerians (Gilgamesh is the "en of
Kullab," a district of Uruk) and particularly in
personal names, such as "The-en-has-abundance," "The-en-occupies-the-throne,"
and many others.
It has often been asked if the ruler of Uruk
is to be recognized in artistic representations. A man feeding sheep with
flowering branches, a prominent personality in seal designs,
might thus represent the ruler or a priest
in his capacity as administrator and protector of flocks. The same
question may be posed in the case of a man who is depicted on a stela
aiming an arrow at a lion. These questions are purely speculative,
however: even if the "protector of flocks" were identical
with the en, there is no ground for seeing in the ruler a
person with a predominantly religious function.
Literary and other historical sources
The picture offered by the literary tradition of
Mesopotamia is clearer but not necessarily historically
relevant. The Sumerian king list has long been the
greatest focus of interest. This is a literary composition, dating from
Old Babylonian times, that describes kingship (nam-lugal
in Sumerian) in Mesopotamia from
primeval times to the end of the 1st dynasty of Isin.
According to the theory--or rather the ideology--of this work, there was
officially only one kingship in Mesopotamia, which was
vested in one particular city at any one time; hence the change in
dynasties brought with it the change of the seat of kingship:
Kish-Uruk-Ur-Awan-Kish-Hamazi-Uruk-Ur-
Adab-Mari-Kish-Akshak-Kish-Uruk-Akkad- Uruk-Gutians-Uruk-Ur-Isin.
The king list gives as coming in
succession several dynasties that now are known to have ruled
simultaneously. It is a welcome aid to chronology and history, but, so far
as the regional years are concerned, it loses its value for the time before
the dynasty of Akkad, for here the lengths of reign of
single rulers are given as more than 100 and sometimes even several
hundred years. One group of versions of the king list has
adopted the tradition of the Sumerian Flood story,
according to which Kish was the first seat of kingship
after the Flood, whereas five dynasties
of primeval kings ruled before the Flood in Eridu,
Bad-tibira, Larak, Sippar,
and Shuruppak. These kings all allegedly ruled for
multiples of 3,600 years (the maximum being 64,800 or, according to one
variant, 72,000 years). The tradition of the Sumerian king list
is still echoed in Berosus.
It is also instructive to observe what the
Sumerian king list does not mention. The list lacks all mention
of a dynasty as important as the 1st dynasty of Lagash
(from King Ur-Nanshe to UruKAgina) and
appears to retain no memory of the archaic florescence of
Uruk at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. Besides
the peaceful pursuits reflected in art and writing, the art also provides
the first information about violent contacts: cylinder seals
of the Uruk Level IV depict fettered men lying or
squatting on the ground, being beaten with sticks or otherwise maltreated
by standing figures. They may represent the execution of prisoners of war.
It is not known from where these captives came or what form "war" would
have taken or how early organized battles were fought. Nevertheless, this
does give the first, albeit indirect, evidence for the wars that are
henceforth one of the most characteristic phenomena in the history of
Mesopotamia.
Just as with the rule of man over man, with the rule of
higher powers over man it is difficult to make any statements about the
earliest attested forms of religion or about the
deities and their names without running the risk of anachronism.
Excluding prehistoric figurines, which provide no
evidence for determining whether men or
anthropomorphic gods are represented, the earliest testimony is
supplied by certain symbols that later became the cuneiform signs for
gods' names: the "gatepost with streamers" for
Inanna, goddess of love and war, and the "ringed post"
for the moon god Nanna. A scene on a cylinder
seal--[a shrine with an Inanna symbol and a
"man" in a boat]--could be an abbreviated illustration of a procession of
gods or of a cultic journey by ship. The constant association of the "gatepost
with streamers" with sheep and of the "ringed
post" with cattle may possibly reflect the area
of responsibility of each deity. The Sumerologist Thorkild
Jacobsen sees in the pantheon a reflex of the
various economies and modes of life in
ancient Mesopotamia: fishermen and
marsh dwellers, date palm cultivators,
cowherds, shepherds, and farmers
all have their special groups of gods.
Both Sumerian and non-Sumerian
languages can be detected in the divine names and place-names. Since the
pronunciation of the names is known only from 2000 BC or later,
conclusions about their linguistic affinity are not without problems.
Several names, for example, have been reinterpreted in Sumerian by popular
etymology. It would be particularly important to isolate the
Subarian components (related to Hurrian), whose
significance was probably greater than has hitherto been assumed. For the
south Mesopotamian city HA.A (the noncommittal
transliteration of the signs) there is a pronunciation gloss "shubari,"
and non-Sumerian incantations are known in the language
of HA.A that have turned out to be "Subarian."
There have always been in Mesopotamia
speakers of Semitic languages. This element is easier to
detect in ancient Mesopotamia, but whether people began
to participate in city civilization in the 4th millennium BC or only
during the 3rd is unknown. Over the last 4,000 years, Semites
(Amorites, Canaanites, Aramaeans,
and Arabs) have been partly nomadic, ranging the
Arabian fringes of the Fertile Crescent, and
partly settled; and the transition to settled life can be observed in a
constant, though uneven, rhythm. There are, therefore, good grounds for
assuming that the Akkadians (and other pre-Akkadian
Semitic tribes not known by name) also originally led a nomadic life to a
greater or lesser degree. Nevertheless, they can only have been herders of
domesticated sheep and goats, which
require changes of pasturage according to the time of year and can never
stray more than a day's march from the watering places. The traditional
nomadic life of the Bedouin makes its appearance only
with the domestication of the camel at the turn of the
2nd to 1st millennium BC.
The question arises as to how quickly writing
spread and by whom it was adopted in about 3000 BC or shortly thereafter.
At Kish, in northern Babylonia, almost
120 miles northwest of Uruk, a stone tablet has been
found with the same repertoire of archaic signs as those
found at Uruk itself. This fact demonstrates that
intellectual contacts existed between northern and southern
Babylonia. The dispersion of writing in an unaltered form
presupposes the existence of schools in various cities
that worked according to the same principles and adhered to one and the
same canonical repertoire of signs. It would be wrong to
assume that Sumerian was spoken throughout the area in
which writing had been adopted. Moreover, the use of
cuneiform for a non-Sumerian language
can be demonstrated with certainty from the 27th century BC.
First historical personalities
The specifically political events in
Mesopotamia after the flourishing of the archaic
culture of Uruk cannot be in pointed. Not until about 2700
BC does the first historical personality appear--historical because his
name, Enmebaragesi (Me-baragesi), was
preserved in later tradition. It has been assumed, although the exact
circumstances cannot be reconstructed, that there was a rather abrupt end
to the high culture of Uruk Level IV. The reason for the
assumption is a marked break in both artistic and
architectural traditions: entirely new styles of cylinder
seals were introduced; the great temples (if in
fact they were temples) were abandoned, flouting the rule of a continuous
tradition on religious sites, and on a new site a
shrine was built on a terrace, which was to constitute the lowest
stage of the later Eanna ziggurat. On the other hand,
since the writing system developed organically and was
continually refined by innovations and progressive reforms, it would be
overhasty to assume a revolutionary change in the population.
In the quarter or third of a millennium between
Uruk Level IV and Enmebaragesi, southern
Mesopotamia became studded with a complex pattern of
cities, many of which were the centres of small independent
city-states, to judge from the situation in about the
middle of the millennium. In these cities, the central point
was the temple, sometimes encircled by an oval boundary
wall (hence the term temple oval); but
nonreligious buildings, such as palaces serving
as the residences of the rulers, could also function as
centres.
Enmebaragesi, king of Kish,
is the oldest Mesopotamian ruler from whom there are
authentic inscriptions. These are vase fragments, one of them found in the
temple oval of Khafajah (Khafaji). In the
Sumerian king list, Enmebaragesi is listed as
the penultimate king of the 1st dynasty of Kish; a
Sumerian poem, "Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish,"
describes the siege of Uruk by Agga, son
of Enmebaragesi. The discovery of the original vase
inscriptions was of great significance because it enabled scholars to ask
with somewhat more justification whether Gilgamesh, the
heroic figure of Mesopotamia who has entered world
literature, was actually a historical personage. The
indirect synchronism notwithstanding, the possibility exists that even
remote antiquity knew its "Ninus" and its "Semiramis,"
figures onto which a rapidly fading historical memory projected all manner
of deeds and adventures. Thus, though the historical tradition of the
early 2nd millennium believes Gilgamesh to have been the
builder of the oldest city wall of Uruk, such may not
have been the case. The palace archives of Shuruppak
(modern Tall Fa'rah, 125 miles southeast of
Baghdad), dating presumably from shortly after 2600, contain a
long list of divinities, including Gilgamesh
and his father Lugalbanda. More recent tradition, on the
other hand, knows Gilgamesh as judge of the
nether world. However that may be, an armed conflict between two
Mesopotamian cities such as Uruk and
Kish would hardly have been unusual in a country whose
energies were consumed, almost without interruption from 2500 to 1500 BC,
by clashes between various separatist forces. The great "empires,"
after all, formed the exception, not the rule.
Emergent city-states
Kish must have played a major role
almost from the beginning. After 2500, southern Babylonian
rulers, such as Mesannepada of Ur and
Eannatum of Lagash, frequently called
themselves king of Kish when laying claim to sovereignty
over northern Babylonia. This does not agree with some
recent histories in which Kish is represented as an
archaic "empire." It is more likely to
have figured as representative of the north, calling
forth perhaps the same geographic connotation later evoked by "the
land of Akkad." Although the corpus of inscriptions grows richer
both in geographic distribution and in point of chronology in the 27th and
increasingly so in the 26th century, it is still impossible to find the
key to a plausible historical account, and history cannot be written
solely on the basis of archaeological findings. Unless
clarified by written documents, such findings contain as
many riddles as they seem to offer solutions. This applies even to as
spectacular a discovery as that of the royal tombs of
Ur with their hecatombs (large-scale
sacrifices) of retainers who followed their king and queen to the grave,
not to mention the elaborate funerary appointments with their inventory of
tombs. It is only from about 2520 to the beginnings of the dynasty of
Akkad that history can be written within a framework,
with the aid of reports about the city-state of
Lagash and its capital of Girsu and its
relations with its neighbor and rival, Umma.Sources for
this are, on the one hand, an extensive corpus of inscriptions relating to
nine rulers, telling of the buildings
they constructed, of their institutions and wars,
and, in the case of UruKAgina, of their "social"
measures. On the other hand, there is the archive of some
1,200 tablets--[insofar as these have been published]--from the
temple of Baba, the city goddess of Girsu,
from the period of Lugalanda and UruKAgina
(first half of the 24th century).
For generations, Lagash and
Umma contested the possession and agricultural
usufruct of the fertile region of Gu'edena. To begin
with, some two generations before Ur-Nanshe,
Mesilim (another "king of Kish") had intervened
as arbiter and possibly overlord in dictating to both states the course of
the boundary between them, but this was not effective for long. After a
prolonged struggle, Eannatum forced the ruler of
Umma, by having him take an involved oath to six divinities, to
desist from crossing the old border, a dike. The text that relates this
event, with considerable literary elaboration, is found on the
Stele of Vultures. These battles, favouring now one side, now the
other, continued under Eannatum's successors, in
particular Entemena, until, under UruKAgina,
great damage was done to the land of Lagash and to its
holy places. The enemy, Lugalzagesi, was vanquished in
turn by Sargon of Akkad.
The rivalry between Lagash and
Umma, however, must not be considered in isolation. Other cities,
too, are occasionally named as enemies, and the whole situation resembles
the pattern of changing coalitions and short-lived alliances between
cities of more recent times. Kish, Umma,
and distant Mari on the middle Euphrates
are listed together on one occasion as early as the time of
Eannatum. For the most part, these battles were fought by
infantry, although mention is also made of war chariots
drawn by onagers (wild asses).
The lords of Lagash rarely fail to
call themselves by the title of "ensi", of as yet
undetermined derivation; "city ruler," or "prince,"
are only approximate translations. Only seldom do they call themselves
lugal, or "king," the title given the
rulers of Umma in their own inscriptions. In all
likelihood, these were local titles that were eventually converted,
beginning perhaps with the kings of Akkad, into a
hierarchy in which the lugal took precedence over the
ensi.
Territorial states
More difficult than describing its external
relations is the task of shedding light on the internal
structure of a state like Lagash. For the first
time, a state consisting of more than a city with its surrounding
territory came into being, because aggressively minded rulers had
managed to extend that territory until it comprised not only Girsu,
the capital, and the cities of Lagash and Nina
(Zurghul) but also many smaller localities and even a
seaport, Guabba. Yet it is not clear to
what extent the conquered regions were also integrated
administratively. On one occasion UruKAgina used
the formula "from the limits of Ningirsu [that is, the
city god of Girsu] to the sea," having
in mind a distance of up to 125 miles. It would be unwise to harbour any
exaggerated notion of well-organized states exceeding that size.
For many years, scholarly views were conditioned by the
concept of the Sumerian temple city, which was used to
convey the idea of an organism whose ruler, as
representative of his god, theoretically
owned all land, privately held agricultural land being a
rare exception. The concept of the temple city had its
origin partly in the overinterpretation of a passage in the so-called
reform texts of UruKAgina, that states "on
the field of the ensi [or
his wife and the crown prince], the city god Ningirsu [or
the city goddess Baba and the divine couple's son]"
had been "reinstated as owners." On the other hand, the
statements in the archives of the temple of Baba in
Girsu, dating from Lugalanda and
UruKAgina, were held to be altogether representative. Here is a
system of administration, directed by the ensi's
spouse or by a sangu (head steward of a
temple), in which every economic process,
including commerce, stands in a direct relationship to the temple:
agriculture, vegetable gardening,
tree farming, cattle raising and the
processing of animal products, fishing,
and the payment in merchandise of workers and employees.
The conclusion from this analogy proved to be dangerous
because the archives of the temple of Baba provide
information about only a portion of the total temple
administration and that portion, furthermore, is limited in time.
Understandably enough, the private ector, which of course
was not controlled by the temple, is scarcely mentioned
at all in these archives. The existence of such a sector is nevertheless
documented by bills of sale for land purchases of the
pre-Sargonic period and from various localities. Written
in Sumerian as well as in Akkadian, they
prove the existence of private land ownership or, in the
opinion of some scholars, of lands predominantly held as undivided
family property. Although a substantial part of the population
was forced to work for the temple and drew its pay and
board from it, it is not yet known whether it was year-round work.
It is probable, if unfortunate, that there will never
exist a detailed and numerically accurate picture of the
demographic structure of a Sumerian city. It is
assumed that in the oldest cities the government was in a
position to summon sections of the populace for the performance of public
works. The construction of monumental buildings or the
excavation of long and deep canals could be carried out
only by means of such a levy. The large-scale employment of indentured
persons and of slaves is of no concern in this context. Evidence of male
slavery is fairly rare before Ur III, and even in
Ur III and in the Old Babylonian period
slave labour was never an economically relevant factor. It was
different with female slaves. According to one document,
the temple of Baba employed 188 such women; the temple of
the goddess Nanshe employed 180, chiefly in
grinding flour and in the textile industry, and
this continued to be the case in later times. For accuracy's sake it
should be added that the terms male slave and
female slave are used here in the significance they possessed
about 2000 and later, designating persons in bondage who were bought and
sold and who could not acquire personal property through
their labour. A distinction is made between captured slaves
(prisoners of war and kidnapped persons)
and others who had been sold.
In one inscription, Entemena of
Lagash boasts of having "allowed the sons of Uruk,
Larsa, and Bad-tibira to return to their
mothers" and of having "restored them into the hands" of
the respective city god or goddess. Read in the light of similar but more
explicit statements of later date, this laconic formula
represents the oldest known evidence of the fact that the ruler
occasionally endeavored to mitigate social injustices by means
of a decree. Such decrees might refer to
the suspension or complete cancellation of debts or to
exemption from public works. Whereas a set of
inscriptions of the last ruler from the 1st dynasty of Lagash,
UruKAgina, has long been considered a prime document of
social reform in the 3rd millennium, the designation "reform
texts" is only partly justified. Reading between the lines, it is
possible to discern that tensions had arisen between the "palace"
[the ruler's residence with its annex,
administrative staff, and landed properties] and the "clergy"
[that is, the stewards and priests of the temples].
In seeming defiance of his own interests, UruKAgina, who
in contrast to practically all of his predecessors lists no
genealogy and has therefore been suspected of having been a
usurper, defends the clergy, whose plight he describes
somewhat tearfully.
If the foregoing passage about restoring the
ensi's fields to the divinity is interpreted
carefully, it would follow that the situation of the temple
was ameliorated and that palace lands were assigned to
the priests. Along with these measures, which resemble
the policies of a newcomer forced to lean on a specific party, are found
others that do merit the designation of "measures taken toward the
alleviation of social injustices"--for instance, the granting of
delays in the payment of debts or their outright cancellation and the
setting up of prohibitions to keep the economically or socially more
powerful from forcing his inferior to sell his house, his ass's foal, and
the like. Besides this, there were tariff regulations, such as newly
established fees for weddings and
burials, as well as the precise regulation of the
food rations of garden workers.
These conditions, described on the basis of source
materials from Girsu, may well have been paralleled
elsewhere, but it is equally possible that other archives,
yet to be found in other cities of pre-Sargonic southern
Mesopotamia, may furnish entirely new historical aspects.
At any rate, it is wiser to proceed cautiously, keeping to analysis and
evaluation of the available material rather than making generalizations.
This, then, is the horizon of Mesopotamia
shortly before the rise of the Akkadian empire. In
Mari, writing was introduced at the
latest about the mid-26th century BC, and from that time this city,
situated on the middle Euphrates, forms an important
centre of cuneiform civilization, especially in regard to
its Semitic component. Ebla (and
probably many other sites in ancient Syria) profited from
the influence of Mari scribal schools. Reaching out
across the Diyala region and the Persian Gulf,
Mesopotamian influences extended to Iran,
where Susa is mentioned along with Elam
and other, not yet localized, towns. In the west the Amanus
Mountains were known, and under Lugalzagesi the
"upper sea" [in other words, the
Mediterranean] is mentioned for the first time. To the east the
inscriptions of Ur-Nanshe of Lagash name
the isle of Dilmun (modern Bahrain),
which may have been even then a transshipment point for trade
with the Oman coast and the Indus region,
the Magan and Meluhha of more recent
texts. Trade with Anatolia and Afghanistan
was nothing new in the 3rd millennium, even if these regions are not yet
listed by their names. It was the task of the Akkadian
dynasty to unite within these boundaries a territory that transcended the
dimensions of a state of the type represented by Lagash.
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