Early Mesopotamia The Presumptive State Past and Present-2012-Richardson-3-49

EARLY MESOPOTAMIA: THE PRESUMPTIVE STATE*
I will proceed with my history, telling the story as I go along of small cities no less than of great . . . Since I know that mans good fortune never abides in the same place, I will make mention of both alike. Herodotus, Histories, I. 5. 3.
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I
INTRODUCTION
Our earliest account of Mesopotamian state origins comes from the Sumerian King List, compiled around 2000 BC, which blandly connes its aetiology to: When kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in the city of Eridu. The time to which it alludes, the Uruk period of more than a thousand years before, saw the simultaneous appearance in southern Mesopotamia of massive urbanism, writing technologies, and institutional political authority the cultural assemblage of an early pristine state. Although modern interpreters of this orescence at rst dened it primarily in ideological terms as, for example, the Sumerian Temple State model the last fty years of scholarship have turned squarely to explanatory models that focus on the synergy of man and his landscape: hydraulic management, storage
* Earlier references to this work were to the title Brush Wars and Bull Wages. I am indebted to Abbas Alizadeh, Dan Arnold, Steven Garnkle, Maynard Maidman, David Owen, Susan Pollock, Eric Slauter and Konrad Volk for their thoughtful comments on and help with earlier drafts. Abbreviations and text sigla (for example CT, Kessler, PRAK, RA, YOS) follow those of The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (Chicago, 19562010), itself hereafter CAD. Other following standard works will be abbreviated as follows: Douglas Frayne, Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Early Periods, iv, Old Babylonian Period (20031595 BC) (Toronto, 1990), hereafter RIME, iv; pertoire ge ographique des textes cune iformes, ii, Die OrtsD. O. Edzard and G. Farber, Re ssernamen der Zeit der 3. Dynastie von Ur (Wiesbaden, 1974), hereafter und Gewa pertoire ge ographique des textes cune iformes, iii, Die RGTC, ii; Brigitte Groneberg, Re ssernamen der altbabylonischen Zeit (Wiesbaden, 1980), hereafter Orts- und Gewa bersetzung (Leiden: RGTC, iii. The series Altbabylonische Briefe in Umschrift und U Brill) is hereafter AbB: editors of the cited volumes are F. R. Kraus, i (1964), iv (1968) and vii (1977); M. Stol, xi (1986); W. H. van Soldt, xii (1990) and xiii (1994); and K. R. Veenhof, xiv (2005). References to CDLI year-names correspond to the website of Marcel Sigrist and Peter Damerow, 5http://cdli.ucla.edu/tools/ yearnames4; ETCSL corresponds to Jeremy A. Black et al., The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (Oxford, 1998 ), 5http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/4.
Past and Present, no. 215 (May 2012) doi:10.1093/pastj/gts009 The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2012
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economies, environmental circumscription, and so forth. There can be no doubt that the built landscape and means of production were chief concerns of early managerial polities, but the rapid development of the technological capacities of these early polities has led to the terminological supposition that something called the state, as idea and entity, had therefore emerged just as suddenly and as permanently. But early states were incomplete. Less than the sum of their attributes, Mesopotamian polities were more aspirational than operational in their geographic, legal and communitarian sovereignty. Notwithstanding, their aspirations to sovereignty were very real from a remarkably early stage, even though state powers remained incipient and unaccomplished for millennia. In this apparent paradox lies the occasion for this essay: even the highly selective types of claims made by early states reveal their simultaneous deployment of both persuasion and force not as fully realized powers, but as a cohering discourse of desire. Although early states were weak, they were presumptive of an integrated sovereign authority not normally held to be conceived of until the modern period.1 In seeing the ambition of ancient states to appropriate and build authority in the very act of claiming it, I argue that early polities can be usefully apprehended in terms normally reserved for modern states, not because their powers were more extensive, integrated or accomplished than has previously been thought they were not but because their aspirations were. The historical periods under discussion are:
Late Uruk Early Dynastic Akkadian Ur III Old Babylonian2 Kassite Middle Babylonian Neo-Babylonian Persian c.35003100 BC c.29002334 BC 23342193 BC 21122004 BC 20041595 BC / 14751155 BC 1155627 BC 626539 BC 539331 BC
1 Modern nation-state sovereignty as accomplished and transhistorical might be equally presumptive, though, given the endurance of regressive problems such as failed states, non-state actors, military and criminal states within states and unresolved borderlines, as well as progressive institutions representing transnational and global interests such as trade organizations, criminal courts and aid groups. 2 Mesopotamian archaeologists subdivide this period into an IsinLarsa phase for the rst two centuries and an Old Babylonian phase for the next two centuries. The meaning of the latter term may thus differ from work to work.
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MAP 1. EARLY MESOPOTAMIA Jack Scott, 2010.
My analysis focuses on the periods during which states rst cohered around large cities in the TigrisEuphrates alluvium (see Map 1). In particular, I look at the Old Babylonian period, which gives us our clearest view of interaction not only between great states, but between great states and middle-tier (minor kingdoms) and lower-tier (non-state actors) political orders. Intercity warfare and the international scene have always enjoyed the lions share of Assyriological attention, but the records of those very same urban states just as often focused on tribal hinterlands and unnamed clusters of villages. Minor kingship and small wars have remained under-conceptualized and largely unexamined, despite their modal positions in the power spectrum and record of conict. A new interpretative strategy focusing on these e quite different from that suggested forms reveals a longue dure by narratives of great-states-in-conict: despite an impressive
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political apparatus of international diplomats, treaties, epistolary protocols, spies and eld armies, the full control of early states over their own rural zones and border marches remained an unnished project more than a millennium after they rst appeared.3 The governing assumption has been that small wars were secondary phenomena produced by major-state warfare, but this is not necessarily warranted. The idea descends from a framework which has, caveats notwithstanding, implicitly modelled ancient state systems as having substantially accomplished uniform territorial control, legally constituted political rule, and political membership identities by the end of the Early Dynastic period (around the twenty-fth century BC). But there is a problem with this model. It is not so much that modernist approaches are inapplicable to antiquity. After all, the points made below about unnished states may equally well apply to the contemporary state system: political scientists have been increasingly uncertain about the position of the state and the nation as transhistorical forms, speaking of the defective or insecure state and of an incomplete modernity,4 even as they recognize governance functions in non-state organizations as exemplied in Hezbollahs organization of the collection of municipal waste, in the semi-autonomy of Brazilian favelas, and in the provision of security by Somali or Afghani warlords.
3 See Seth Richardson, The World of Babylonian Countrysides, in Gwendolyn Leick (ed.), The Babylonian World (London, 2007); cf. Steven Grosby, Borders, Territory and Nationality in the Ancient Near East and Armenia, Jl Econ. and Social Hist. of the Orient, xl (1997), who asserts (p. 26): if certain anachronistic assumptions are laid to rest such as political and legal standards bounded, national entities would in fact be visible in the ancient record, collectivities of nativity founded in (self-/group-)consciousness under which territory is a constitutive referent of that relation. The drawback of this carefully articulated view, in my opinion, is that it tends to accept evidence linking territoriality and identity as descriptive and accomplished, whereas I see it as idealizing and unachieved. 4 Roland Axtmann, The State of the State: The Model of the Modern State and its Contemporary Transformation, Internat. Polit. Science Rev., xxv (2004); Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks, Failed States, or the State as Failure?, Univ. of Chicago Law Rev., lxxii (2005); Stephen J. Del Rosso Jr, The Insecure State: Reections on the State and Security in a Changing World, Daedalus, cxxiv, 2 (1995); Richard Falk, Revisiting Westphalia, Discovering Post-Westphalia, Jl Ethics, vi (2002); Charles Tilly, War Making and State Making as Organized Crime, in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985).
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Instead, the real problem with a model of antiquity that presumes state sovereignty and focuses on international competition has four main defects: it eclipses the substantial, ongoing role of sub- and non-state actors; it ignores the developmental and maintenance issues of conict and consensus in ancient states; it relegates internal state competition and persuasion to the prehistoric era; and it valorizes state-to-state peer competition as the singular concern of historic periods. What does such a model cost us? We miss the slow, millenniumlong development of state systems as they continued to compete internally for clientele, while simultaneously struggling externally to achieve regional primacy and dominance over peer states. The historiographic root of the problem is located in the uncritical reproduction of an ancient analytic binary construction of lands and peoples, with resulting anachronisms when these are mapped onto modern conceptions of territorial competition. At its heart, the disconnect between scholars and their evidence has been a disposition to regard the early state as being instantiated geographically rather than politically, and materially rather than ideologically.5 Accordingly, state relations have been seen as rooted in territorial competition for land rather than in political competition for constituencies. A scarcity of land has at times been argued to have been an important factor in the development of the Greek poleis6
5 Two important attempts to rectify this view are Adam T. Smiths recent Archaeologies of Sovereignty, Ann. Rev. Anthropology, xl (2011), and Henry T. Wrights Early State Dynamics as Political Experiment, Jl Anthropol. Research, lxii (2006). 6 Sarah B. Pomeroy et al., Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (Oxford, 1999), 712, 95; Timothy Howe, Pastoral Politics: Animals, Agriculture and Society in Ancient Greece (Publications of the Association of Ancient Historians, ix, Claremont, Calif., 2008), ch. 4; Franc ois de Polignac, Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago, 1995), 6. These views are tempered, however, by references to socio-economic disparities rather than outright scarcity of resources. Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making, 1200479 BC (London, 1996), ch. 3, however, has challenged the population-pressure thesis, for example p. 88: Dark Age Greece had low population densities, new agricultural land was readily available to those who had the labour available to make use of it, and communities increasingly needed to keep up their size in order to maintain status in a world where competition between individuals and groups was becoming regular. In these circumstances, the fact that people left their home community to settle abroad is not a measure of state power but a measure of the limits to the control rulers could exert. Similarly, see Lin Foxhall, Cultures, Landscapes, and Identities in the Mediterranean World, Mediterranean Hist. Rev., xviii (2003).
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an important comparative case and a concern for borders and sovereignty indeed pervades the Babylonian record.7 But Babylonias surfeit of land and dearth of labour points to political control as being structured primarily by states needs for clients and constituents and for their labour not by a need for land. The local skirmishes of the Old Babylonian period are thus misunderstood when they are viewed as border conicts, mere by-products of competition between territorial states. Rather, they should be seen as a recrudescence of an epochal competition for the allegiance of rural and non-state constituencies which were increasing in number during this time. With a view to developing the foregoing theses, I consider several different historical problems of the Mesopotamian state and land which have not before been treated together. These issues, I suggest, are together revealing of prevailing social formations in early polities, and help make sense of discrepancies in the records which have for decades attracted comment but inadequate explanations from specialists. Thus in section II, I develop a critical historiographic review of a model of territorial sovereignty suggested by the mid third millennium BC Lagas Umma border conict. Here I establish that early states interests and abilities to control territory have been overstated and that we should presume a low-power model for early state sovereignty. In sections IIIV, I move on to address unresolved historical problems best visible in the much later Old Babylonian period (20041595 BC), to argue for early states fundamental competition for clientele (for hearts, minds and bodies) rather than for land. The aim of section III is to reinterpret the nineteenth-/ eighteenth-century BC prosecution of small wars against little kingdoms as normative rather than exceptional; I contend that state control over even very local geography was still unaccomplished deep into the historical period. Building on this observation, section IV juxtaposes the small wars problem with the discourses by which urban states
Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, 206.
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structured their political relationship to small places. The identity of lower-tier political units as both enemies (that is, security threats) and scattered people (that is, clientele to be recruited and organized) represents an ambivalent strategy to herd non-state clients into state orders by both force and persuasion. This properly reorients early state political economy and competition as focused on building clientage, not land holdings. Finally, section V looks at the development of the royal legal voice in the Old Babylonian period as part of a broader discourse of persuasion. This voice included the persuasive mechanisms of promulgated law-codes and the rhetorical claims of the Crown to be the arbiter and guarantor of order and social justice. I also link to these a particular group of edicts for the land, part of the royal pretension to control economic activity legally. This argument would give a larger context to Mesopotamian law, seeing even the ages most famous monument, the Code of Hammurabi, as representative of a set of powers that the state desired and could even develop conceptually to degrees of high complexity and specicity without yet having the ability to operate or impose them. Informing my consideration of all these cases is one basic historiographic premise, that political and ideological forces have been subordinated to economic ones as explanatory devices for the organization of early states, and that a kind of bigotry about political-economic primitivism for antiquity inheres in that subordination. A presumption of political sophistication presents us with rather a different view: we see the early state as ideationally complex and ambitious, despite its limitations of manpower, resources and technologies. Much of this argument is supported by bringing to bear a reading of the cuneiform record that moves away from seeing texts as descriptive of facts and towards a historical view of the evidence as dependable mostly in representing claims. But there is a historical argument here too: state formation was not an event simply accomplished at any one point, but an ongoing project well into the historic periods indeed a project unbroken and unnished between antiquity and modernity. A breaking-up of this distinction, I hope, should help reopen a more nuanced and enriched dialogue about antiquitys place within the historical disciplines.
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II
THE EARLY DYNASTIC PARADIGM
Standing at the opening of the Mesopotamian historical narra Umma Border Conict8 has become emblemtive, the Lagas atic for seeing early state development as an outcome of competition for agricultural land demanded by expanding populations.9 The foundational power of the story derives in part from its position as the earliest continuous account of political events in human history. The narrative can be pieced together from eighteen royal inscriptions preserved on clay cones, stone stelae, statues and boulders from the twenty-fth and the twenty-fourth centuries BC. These show a 150-year-long military conict be and Umma, two adjacent Sumerian city states, for tween Lagas control of a highly productive 50-kilometre borderland centred on a massive eld called the Guedenna (the edge of the steppe). Seven separate battles are documented, of which only the earliest and briefest account does not mention the border as the object of contention. The story is woefully lopsided virtually all our side and steeped in the tendensources come from the Lagas tious language of royal rhetoric, which frames the war in terms of hoary legal precedent, claims of back-rent laid on Umma, and s divine right to the Guedenna. Lagas Competition for sustaining hinterlands is the most common explanation for this conict and many that follow it. Consequently, territorial expansion fuelled by population growth, an essentially bio-environmental model, is most commonly cited as the cause for the rise of the state, and the continuation of regional interstate warfare up until its cessation, c.600 BC indeed, tre. The archaeological model developed its continuing raison de by Robert McCormick Adams by the early 1970s provided apparent conrmation of this position by mapping out Early Dynastic production zones that gradually came to abut one another,
8 Jerrold S. Cooper, Reconstructing History from Ancient Inscriptions: The Lagash Umma Border Conict (Malibu, 1983). 9 Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 90002000 BC, trans. Elizabeth Lutzeier, with Kenneth J. Northcott (Chicago, 1988), 1315; Josef Bauer, Der vorsargonische Abschnitt der mesopotamischen Geschichte, in Josef Bauer, turuk-Zeit und Robert K. Englund and Manfred Krebernik, Mesopotamien: Spa hdynastische Zeit (Freiburg, Switzerland, 1998), 523; John Baines and Norman Fru Yoffee, Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, in Gary M. Feinman and Joyce Marcus (eds.), Archaic States (Santa Fe, 1998), 226.
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11
spurring competition for sustaining hinterlands (see Map 2).10 In Umma episode and the Adams model have become all, the Lagas nearly as one, establishing a kind of historiographic hegemony. At the same time, however, there is also some agreement that what Mesopotamian political economies lacked in most times was not available land, but labour to open it up to cultivation, principally through the extension of canals.11 Water management in all periods played a key role perhaps even constituted the mediating resource between land and labour. In very broad terms, lower Mesopotamia, an area of roughly 110,000 square kilometres, probably possessed a human population of around half a million people in 3000 BC,12 with enough land to give
10 The image of this map has developed an almost talismanic power, despite Adamss demurrals (see n. 11 below); cf. Nissen, Early History of the Ancient Near East, 132 and g. 52: at the [Early Dynastic] times under consideration the supposed areas of inuence were far apart. 11 Those familiar with Adamss writings will know that he was and is averse to categorical statements. His own disposition, however, was to see no discernibly bounded regional units within Babylonia, that population levels were low in relation to the potentially arable area . . . [and] water rather than land was the critical determinant: Robert McC. Adams and Hans J. Nissen, The Uruk Countryside: The Natural Setting of Urban Societies (Chicago, 1972), 89 ff.; similarly, Robert McC. Adams, Land behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains (Chicago, 1965), 19. For a specic illustration, see Adamss estimate in his An Interdisciplinary Overview of a Mesopotamian City and its Hinterlands, Cuneiform Digital Lib. Jl, i (2008) that only around 7 per cent of Ur III Ummas land was ever under institutional cultivation. More directly, see statements by Nissen, Early History of the Ancient Near East, 60, 1412; and Elizabeth C. Stone, The Constraints on State and Urban Form in Ancient Mesopotamia, in Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine (eds.), Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (Peabody Museum Bull., vii, Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 2056, who wrote that the abundance of land in relation to the population forced elites to nd means other than direct coercion in order to maintain the necessary agricultural labor force. Michel Jursa, The Babylonian Economy in the First Millennium BC, in Leick (ed.), Babylonian World, 225, says that a shortage of arable land began only in the seventh century BC. Cf. the position of Johannes Renger, that a cycle of land unavailability resulting from poor irrigation led to limited population growth which, in turn, had repercussions for the amount of manpower available: see his The Economy of Ancient Mesopotamia: A General Outline, in Leick (ed.), Babylonian World, 194. 12 By way of comparison, see Bruce G. Trigger et al., Ancient Egypt: A Social History (Cambridge, 1983), 51, 62, 103, 190, where the authors estimate Egyptian populations of 2, 11.5, 2.94.5 and 77.5 million for Predynastic, Old/Middle Kingdom, late New Kingdom and Hellenistic/Roman Egypt, respectively. The population of the entire world in 3000 BC has been estimated at around 14 million: Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York, 1991); Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (New York, 1978), 34251, as currently accepted by the US Census Bureau. These same sources estimate world populations of 27, 50 and 100 million people by 2000, 1000 and 500 BC. For the Mesopotamian rate/gures, see Ester Boserup, Population
(cont. on p. 12)
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every nuclear family more than 15 ha more than enough for general sustainability.13 This understanding has thus always stood at odds with the image of early city states as expanding multi-cellular bubbles of production and population which began to intrude on one another by the late Early Dynastic period. Umma conict proves to be the wrong model. The Lagas This conict is virtually unique within the corpus of Early Dynastic royal inscriptions, which are primarily concerned with temple-building, the dedication of votive objects, and longdistance trade.14 Of 173 other Early Dynastic royal inscriptions , only ten mention seventeen cases of not from Umma and Lagas intercity warfare: seventeen conicts of which only two do not ; just two cases involve bordering states; and involve Lagas no inscription states casus belli.15 The nine city dynasties that left behind epigraphic evidence mentioned conict only in the barest and rarest terms. Victory seemed inconsequential to any particular issue the hallmark of prestige-raiding, not statebuilding. Our few other references to regional power relations are too vague to infer hegemony, and several show co-ordination as well as competition between city states.16 These comities can be seen in the trade network revealed by the Early Dynastic city-seals indicating co-ordination of trade, defence coalitions, and the regional acceptance of the federate legal authority of
(n. 12 cont.)
and Technological Change: A Study of Long-Term Trends (Chicago, 1981). J. C. Russell, Late Ancient and Medieval Population (Philadelphia, 1958), gives a combined Syro-Palestinian-Mesopotamian population of 6.5 million in the fourth century AD. 13 Cf. Map 3, which assumes minimum subsistence needs of about a quarter of a hectare per person. 14 On trade specically, see Jerrold S. Cooper, Presargonic Inscriptions (New Haven, es inscriptions; La 4.3. 1986), Ad 6; La 1.2 and passim in Ur-Nans 15 conicts: Ki 7: Kis vanquishes Elam; Cooper, Presargonic Inscriptions, non-Lagas and Aks ak. Lagas conicts against states other than Umma: La Uk 4.1: Uruk sacks Kis 1.6: against Ur; La 3.53.9, 3.11: in various combinations, against Elam, Urua, Uruk, ime, Arua, Aks ak, Kis , Subartu and Mari; La 10.2: probably a Ur, Kiutu, Uruaz, Mis and Uruk. Aside from the Lagas Umma conicts, only Lagas s conict between Lagas actions against Ur and Uruk conceivably involved border disputes; all other states were either Elamite principalities or more northerly Mesopotamian city states. The closest ak is simply said statement resembling a casus belli among these inscriptions is that Aks (La 3.53.6), and that both it and several other states were to have attacked Lagas beaten back from the [border-eld] Antasura. 16 Cooper, Presargonic Inscriptions, Ki 3.2; La 5.3, a brotherhood between Uruk and Larsa.
MAP 2. Simulation of Early Dynastic I Period Cultivated Areas, after R. McC. Adams, Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates (Chicago, 1981), 93. Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
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. Thus the Lagas Umma war was an excepKing Mesilim of Kis tion, not a paradigm. It can hardly, then, be an accident that the inuential model of productive lands developed by Adams (again, see Map 2) shows and the area east-north-east of Uruk the region of Lagas Umma as among the most densely settled in all of lower Mesopotamia. Adamss reconstruction has, it must also be said, remained open to question due to its probable overestimation of urban population density, which unduly amplies the supposed pressure on early states to expand production.17 If we employ an algorithm demonstrating subsistence needs and more probable population densities, Early Dynastic production zones take on a much more insular aspect within their hinterlands (see Map 3).18 Most cities of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia were managers of nite patches of land, isolated pockets of production in larger seas of open space, and this remained the case well into the rst millennium BC. Since contiguous territorial states with clearly dened borders were not rmly established within lower Mesopotamia in any period, border disputes and resource competitions were exceptional forms of interstate conict.19 Supposing, then, that competition for land was not the primary cause of early interstate conict, this essay proposes that early states mostly struggled to control local, open space and recruit non-aligned populations; they chased after sovereignty, not yet having grasped it.
Not the least of this criticism is via Adamss own later work: see, for example, his Interdisciplinary Overview of a Mesopotamian City and its Hinterlands, xx9.19.2, 9.4. 18 As in Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, 21, the following postulates resulted in Map 3: populations were estimated at a residential density of 75 persons per hectare; minimal caloric needs per person per annum 250 kg barley; annual production rates 881 kg barley per hectare. Roughly speaking, every hectare of occupied settlement required roughly 21 ha of sustaining area. These gures are closely adapted from the working standards of the Oriental Institutes Modeling Ancient Settlement Systems (MASS) Project, developed by Tony Wilkinson. 19 On what borders there were, see Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, 204; cf. recent thinking on Mesoamerican cases: Charles Stanish and Abigail Levine, War and Early State Formation in the Northern Titicaca Basin, Peru, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sciences, cviii (2011).
17
MAP 3. SIMULATION OF EARLY DYNASTIC-PERIOD CULTIVATED AREAS (IN WHITE) Carrie Hritz, 2009; see also n. 18 above.
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III
LITTLE KINGDOMS AND SMALL WARS
If we are able to establish that Mesopotamian polities from an early date were not built on competition for territory, we must turn our attention to a substantially later time, the Old Babylonian period (20041595 BC), for a better-documented look at the continuing effort to build the state idea against competing lower-order political communities. This period provides a much larger and denser body of evidence than previous ones, as well as plentiful cases of interstate warfare.20 A good deal of this evidence derives from year-names: the convention for dating in this period was to identify years with names celebrating political and civic events (for example Year in which Akusum was destroyed and the army of Kazallu was smitten by weapons fourth -El of Larsa 1891 BC). More than 2,000 such year of King Su mu year-names are known from multiple dynasties. Though openly propagandistic, year-names nevertheless form an important corpus of historical information: they make clear that the Old Babylonian period was an age of major city states at war with each other, and this competition has been the focus of its histories. At no point is the broad spectrum of power-holders more visible than in this time. The four centuries prior to the Old Babylonian period, when intercity warfare became endemic, were dominated by the central hegemonic states of Akkad and Ur. These states seized the ancient imagination as ideal types, and the sources they produced have been privileged by modern historians as paradigmatic. But we must recognize that the 250 years of central-state dominance (or 291 years, counting Babylons brief hegemony) stand out as anomalous within the thousand years of recorded political history between c.2600 and 1600; for 709 of those years, division was the norm. While the direct evidence for warfare among these polities does not suggest they were steeped in a nightmarish, Malthusian state of war-for-survival, the basic political template was a culture of competition.21 The
20 The intervening Akkadian and Ur III states (23342193 and 21122004 BC, respectively) had their own difculties in resolving intercity competition, but since these central states produced monovocal political records, these tensions were deliberately muted in the written evidence. 21 Prior to the rise of Akkad c.2330 BC, the terminal phase of the Early Dynastic period was marked by multiple centres in competition, but our textual information is state, and our archaeological evidence to the more or less limited to the Lagas
(cont. on p. 17)
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heterarchic, competitive landscape of the Old Babylonian period, then, had actually been the norm for centuries,22 but it is the rst period in which this situation coincided with an abundant textual record. The Old Babylonian period post-1900 BC, therefore, provides us with the rst thick description of intercity competition, including conict between mutually recognized peer states. But what we also see is this: as major peer states such as Isin, Larsa and Babylon warred against each other, their year-names more often celebrated with equal fanfare the conquest of village settlements scattered throughout the landscape. States at this late date still contended with their own hinterlands and competed for non-aligned clientele, long after the history/pre-history divide. None of the following conquered places, for instance, had any record of political or military strength corresponding to the larger powers which conquered them: Larsa celebrated the seizure or destruction of Akusum,23 of Sabum and the Euphrates villages,24 Nanna-isa, Ibrat and surrounding towns, Imgur u-S n and Uzarpana; Isin destroyed Gibil, Zibnatum, B t-S Girtab and the Amorite city; and Babylon did the same to the city and villages of Malgium, the cities of the land of Rapiqum alibi, the Tigris banks and the cities of Subartu.25 Even and S
(n. 21 cont.)
circumvallation of cities. And prior to that, we have little indication of cross-scale or peer conict stretching back into the Uruk period and before. This distribution of evidence has, predictably, linked the phenomena of warfare and the state as related developments, but this should not lead us to assume either that prehistoric societies were inherently or structurally peaceful, or that war was somehow a natural, rather than a cultural development. See Doyne Dawson, The Origins of War: Biological and Anthropological Theories, History and Theory, xxxv (1996); Helle Vandkilde, Commemorative Tales: Archaeological Responses to Modern Myth, Politics, and War, World Archaeology, xxxv (2003). 22 Mesopotamian archaeology has begun to integrate the roles of small places and state centres within larger strategic and competitive networks by expanding from a previous focus on elite centres to the documentation of the entire alluvial settlement system: see T. J. Wilkinson, Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East (Tucson, 2003); Carrie Hritz, Landscape and Settlement in Southern Mesopotamia: A GeoArchaeological Analysis, 2 vols. (Univ. of Chicago Ph.D. thesis, 2005). Their work has revealed a natural landscape indisposed to centrally managed engineering, and inclined towards multiple productive centres. 23 Given our knowledge of the fortication of this site by the shadowy Manana dynasty, this may not have been such an insignicant place; the date of that fortication, however, is not known. 24 CDLI year-names: Sabum was also a target of Kisurras kings unplaced year-formulae in BM 28456 and 28458. 25 n-iddinam 5; -el 4, 10, 16; S CDLI year-names (cities in bold): Larsa: Su mu n 17, 18; Isin: Is bi-Erra 4, 8; Babylon: Hammurabi 10, 12, 32, 33. R m-S
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minor states recorded victories over lesser-known or unknown places: Kisurra over Ibarum, Kazallu over the fortress nunna over the Amorites of Ba Ehubba, and Es b-Ibaum,26 27 ur, Unnina, As tabala, MahaBum and Tarnip. Is Next to nothing is known about these defeated groups and toponyms (including their location); they can be dened by their virtual absence from the textual record other than in the year-names, only in their defeat by larger, better-documented hegemons. Of course, territorial wars often entail the tactical seizure of minor settlements in the pursuit of the conquest of other major states, and military conict itself was in no way unusual: Old Babylonian year-names were peppered with references to regional wars beginning around 1914 BC.28 But what is remarkable is that these conquests of villages received equal billing in the celebratory year-names with victories over major foreign states; the attention given to small places stands out in the larger record. The reasons for the recognition of small places in this context are far from clear, but at least one such small place is well known enough to permit some closer examination: that case suggests that small wars of the period were not secondary by-products of peer-state warfare, but cross-scale, local conicts which were in fact more typical of the period as a whole. The village in question was called P -na ra tim, the Mouth of -El, king of Larsa, celebrated a military victhe Canals.29 Su mu tory over this place in 1886 BC, claiming to have destroyed it
26 RGTC, iii, 128 normalizes as Ka-Ibaum, but erroneously transliterates as di-ba-um is correct. KA-di-ba-um(-ma); KA 27 tabala may be the best-attested and most important of these places; most of the As others are unknown outside the year-names themselves. 28 Marcel Sigrist, Isin Year Names (Berrien Springs, 1988); Marcel Sigrist, Larsa Year Names (Berrien Springs, 1990); Malcolm J. A. Horsnell, The Year-Names of the First Dynasty of Babylon, 2 vols. (Hamilton, Ont., 1999). The year-names of the two dynasties of Larsa and Babylon alone mention sixty-ve campaigns in about 350 years, to say nothing of those clashes recorded by other dynasties, and in other text genres such as royal inscriptions and diplomatic correspondence. Documentation of these conicts does not really begin until around a century after the fall of Ur (2004 BC), with the 1914 BC battle between Larsa and Malgium celebrated in the 19th year-name of Gungunum of Larsa; an isolated cluster of conicts between 2014 and 2002 associated bi-Erra of Isin should probably be considered more part of the events surroundwith Is ing the collapse of the Ur III state than with intercity war per se. The southern revolts against Samsuiluna of Babylon in the 1730s may be counted as the termination of this competitive phase. 29 references: CAD, P, s.v. pu A The term evokes cosmic geographies; see Gilgames 9d.
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
19
u . . . hul; to destroy by the hand).30 The victory (Sumerian: s was important enough to provide the subject matter for -Els next two year-names as well.31 Yet, though desSu mu troyed, P -na ra tim once again required seizing (Sumerian: dab5) by a king of Larsa forty-seven years later in 1839 BC n-iq am of Larsa, recorded in his second this time by S s year-name,32 now along with a second place called Nazarum, even though these areas were already within the bounds of his land. The recalcitrant P -na ra tim and Nazarum once more required reconquest by Larsa in 1808 BC, its seizure of them n. again claimed in the 15th year-name of R m-S Where was this little place? Though P -na ra tim was not a unique toponym within Babylonia, this one was almost certainly the one located along the Tigris above the city of Umma, just 34 miles from Larsa (see Map 1 and Appendix 1).33 That puts P -na ra tim directly upstream from Larsa, at a distance close enough to be under its administrative control. It was not, as some have argued, the place with the same name three times as , which would have had greatly different far away, close to Kis implications about Larsas interests: that P -na ra tim would have been a target for prestige raiding at a distance, deep in (and across) enemy territory. But this P -na ra tim was close to Larsa, and that is what makes the point such a different one: a minor settlement within a major states immediate territorial ambit required repeated pacication. It is, of course, not impossible that the town was merely a pawn in a border war with another power.34 But the Tigris branches above
30 d-da ba-(an-)hul; Sigrist, Full year-name text (and variants) here: mu uru(ki) ka- Larsa Year Names, 17. 31 s-sa-types, Year after the year X, and mu-u s-sa-a-bi, Second year As mu-u after X. 32 See Marten Stol, Studies in Old Babylonian History (Leiden, 1976), on this year-name. 33 Piotr Steinkeller, City and Countryside in Third-Millennium Southern Babylonia, in Elizabeth C. Stone (ed.), Settlement and Society: Essays Dedicated to Robert McCormick Adams (Chicago, 2007), 183: in Ur III times, an important relay point in the boat trafc between Umma and the Tigris. 34 Kisurra, either of its own initiative or as a proxy for Uruk, may have occasionally harried P -na ra tim: Dominique Charpin, Histoire politique du Proche-Orient Amorrite (20021595), in Dominque Charpin, Dietz Otto Edzard and Marten Stol, Mesopotamien: die altbabylonische Zeit (Go ttingen, 2004), 75 and n. 244; 112 and n. 464. See also Burkhart Kienast, Die altbabylonischen Briefe und Urkunden aus Kisurra, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1978), ii, 127, nos. 129, 130. It may also be that Larsas intermittent loss of control at the yet more northerly, crucial strategic site of
(cont. on p. 20)
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Umma were rmly under Larsas control as early as 1890 BC, and what contested border towns there were between Larsa, Uruk and Isin were all situated to the west, along the Euphrates. The record of Larsas efforts to control P -na ra tim puts the village in a larger category of unpacied and non-aligned non-state actors, not merely border towns that were traded between major states. Not only the minor political standing of these small places, but also the lack of geographic knowledge on the part of major states about this long list of conquered places deserves independent comment. As noted above, many of these small places are known only from the year-names, since they never appear in texts documenting other kinds of contact with major states. Fifty-three non-royal polities (that is, those with no known independent kingship tradition) were celebrated in year-names as the targets of military action by major states in this period.35 In eight out of fty-three cases, only the personal name of an enemy leader is documented, with no further geographic information;36 in seven cases, the location of the target is given only vaguely (for example the Euphrates villages);37 another ten times, only the ethnonym of the enemy is provided, with little or no indication of location.38
(n. 34 cont.)
kan-s a Mas pir was either a cause or a result of a failure to hold the intermediate site of kan-s a P -na ra tim on the Tigris. Mas pir was lost to Larsas control for an unknown length of time between 1932 and 1860 BC, and then again around 18421830 BC: see Piotr Steinkeller, A History of Mashkan-shapir and its Role in the Kingdom of Larsa, in Elizabeth C. Stone and Paul Zimansky, The Anatomy of a Mesopotamian City: Survey and Soundings at Mashkan-shapir (Winona Lake, 2004), 278. 35 nunna, To clarify, royal polities herein include Isin, Babylon, Larsa, Uruk, Es Kisurra and Kazallu; non-royal polities include those places for which no royal inscriptions or year-names are known, but also a few for which royal materials were only briey or incompletely produced, for example Malgium and Diniktum (two kings each). 36 CDLI year-names (cities in bold): Kisurra: king unknown, year q, aduppum: Hammi-dus ur d, city of S -la-el Alumbiumu; S mu : illi-Adad; Larsa: Su -la-el 18, 25 (both Yahzirel); Babylon: 3, Halambu ( Alumbiumu?); Su mu Ammiditana 17, Arahab, man of the lands; 37 (the wall of Udinim built by the nunna: Iqis u); Es -Tis pak b (Iakun-[ ]). army of Damiq-ilis 37 nunna: Ibal-pi-El II 4, land of MahaBum; Larsa: Su -el 10, Ibid.: Es mu n-iddinam 5, Ibrats surrounding towns; S n-iddinam 6, Euphrates villages; S nunna; Babylon: Hammurabi 10, cities and villages of Malgium; 12, lands of Es cities of the land of Rapiqum and Shalibi; 32, the Tigris bank. 38 nunna: Bilalama b, Amorites of/in the eld of Ibbi-S n; c, Amorites of Ibid.: Es bi-Erra 8, urki; e, Amorites of Ba Is b-Ibaum; h, Amorites; i, Amorites; Isin: Is tar h, Amorites; Babylon: Samsuiluna 9, the Kassite Amorite city; Lipit-Is uh d, Kassites. army; 36, Amorite villages; Abi-es
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An analysis of these memorializations of small wars gives three interesting results. First, hardly any of these conquests mentioned in the year-names were celebrated in parallel fashion in monumental royal inscriptions.39 Allusions to specic wars of all sizes are less common in the latter corpus, so this partly reects generic conventions, but their omission takes on more importance given our second point: small wars in the year-names outnumber peer-state conicts (that is, royal and territorial ones) by about 2:1. Third, a comparison of royal and non-royal targets reveals a very dependable pattern of verbs indicating that, while small places were said to have been physically destroyed or seized (that is, wars of territory), warfare between peer states was marked by the smiting of armies rather than cities (that is, wars of force-reduction).40 The verbs in the year-names consistently indicate that campaigns against smaller places aimed to capture, hold or destroy territory, while major states warred against one another for bragging rights and the attrition of enemy numbers (for a fuller breakdown of the data, see Appendix 2). Little towns were said to have been seized (Sumerian: dab5) or destroyed (hul),41 but when year-names celebrated the defeat of major states by other major states, the formulae almost universally refer to the smiting of the .tukul . . . s `g). army of [place name] with weapons (ugnim gis The pattern is one in which small places were to be cleared, held and then either built or erased, while major cities met each other with armies in open elds of battle, subsequently withdrawing to home territories. The permanent capture of major territorial states by others was a phenomenon restricted to two brief terminal phases of Larsas and Babylons strategic wars for regional dominance (18031794 and 17641755 BC, respectively). The goal of major-state warfare was the reduction of enemy
39 ns inscription, RIME, iv, 2.14.14, which incorporates An exception is R m-S some of the minor places conquered in his Year 1720 alongside victories over Kisurra m and Uruk. Samsuilunas restoration of the various fortresses of the land of Waru which he had destroyed (ibid., 3.7.8) and the Year 24 formula probably both refer to his small war near the Diyala region. 40 In between, note the number of asymmetric wars in which the action of state v. state was supplemented on one or both sides by non-state actors, for example nunna (state), Subartu and Gutium Hammurabi 32, against the armies of Es (non-states). 41 See Sigrist, Isin Year Names; Sigrist, Larsa Year Names; Horsnell, Year-Names of the First Dynasty of Babylon; cf. CDLI year-names for those of the Diyala rulers.
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manpower and/or returns in prestige, not control of territory, which was a continuing objective for warfare against small polities. Babylonian states were simultaneously engaged in peer-state and asymmetric warfare between royal states and non-royal small places. What constituted a small place, and what does it mean for our understanding of early political power? The rhetorical uniformity of Mesopotamian texts often makes it difcult to distinguish between scale and type; both the largest city and the smallest town were normally termed a lu, while the mightiest and pettiest monarru, king. A broad spectrum of ancient arch were both called s state power is thus obscured by these terminologies.42 A functional denition is more helpful: in contrast to royal and territorial major states, small places held no power as hegemons and produced no substantial royal literature (that is, year-names and royal inscriptions). Thus what we see is a spectrum of legitimacy among powerholders down to a vanishing point. The major kings and their ideological concerns are relatively well known in Babylon, nunna but even for these Larsa, Isin, Mari, Uruk and Es states, one-third of their kings have no royal inscriptions preserved.43 Elsewhere, ephemeral little kingships bloomed briey , Sippar, Kisurra, Malgium and Kazallu), but relatively (at Kis little epigraphic material is known.44 At least twenty-six kings left only one year-name,45 and the names of fteen other kings are known only because their deaths were recorded in the
Cf. Dietz Otto Edzard, Die zweite Zwischenzeit Babyloniens (Wiesbaden, 1957), 1 n. 2, referring to all non-private entities regardless of scale as states. 43 There are no surviving royal inscriptions for twenty-eight out of eighty-ve kings of these dynasties: RIME, iv: Isin: 1.81.9, 1.12; Larsa: 2.12.3; Babylon: 3.13.2, nunna: 5.11, 5.165.17, 5.225.24; 3.43.5, 3.11; Uruk: 4.2, 4.44.5, 4.74.9; Es Mari: 6.1, 6.3, 6.66.7, 6.9. 44 The poverty of one such roitelet is demonstrated in the inscriptions of the ephemduni-iarim of Kis (RIME, iv, 8.1.12), who with an army of only three hundred eral As men boasted that for forty days I made the enemy land bow down. 45 Here and in the evidence immediately following, I focus only on Babylonian and Diyalan polities as both sources and subjects; evidence from the Mari region and northern Mesopotamia would tend to magnify, not diminish, this picture of numer arra-s amas : arrum, Ibbi-S , Bu n; Manana ous, small royal polities. Kisurra: S r-S -atar, S Ahi-maraB; Marad: Su mu : allum, Iahzir-el; Sippar: Bunu-tahun-ila; Uruk: nunna: Azuzum, Ibni-Erra; Uzarlulu: Abi-ma3ar; u; Es Ilum-gamil, Nabi-ilis -Tis pak, Ibbi-S n; Tutub: Sumuna-jarim, Tatanum, Nerebtum: Hadati, Iqis aduppum: Is umahum, Taram-Uri, Waqrum; location untas ni, S Yaqim-El; S iqlanum, IBi-su i -abum, Adaki. known: S mu
42
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
23
year-names of other kings.46 The vassal system of kings and kings who followed kings probably extended even further down a continuum of small power-holders through petty kings such as tamar, an Amorite chief, or Ambuna-ahi, merely a Ammi-is chief47 down to those who either did not produce or had not yet produced inscriptional material of any kind. It is unfortunate that minor kingship is poorly conceptualized for Ancient Near Eastern antiquity, though it was arguably widespread and modal. These actors were more numerous than the great kings; the period is characterized by small wars rather than by large ones; and small places played political roles at multiple levels in the tumult of the period. Over half a century ago, D. O. Edzards Die zweite Zwischenzeit Babyloniens xed the character of this period of internecine warfare among small states as a breakdown in normative, traditional political orders.48 More than fty years on, the story of those lower-register polities still seems impossible to write.49 The reasons are obvious, since this subject remains fairly impoverished in terms of evidence. A new interpretative strategy, however, presents itself in the pattern and structure of the laconic year-names. The presumption has been that these centuries saw a devolution from earlier strong central states (as Charpin terms it, a partition of power),50 preceding the modular reassembly of new ones, such as Hammurabis territorial state (which, we may note, survived for less than forty years). But to view these local wars as by-products of statestate competition, as epiphenomenal border conicts, neglects the patterns discerned above: little kingdoms and bush wars were political and military norms, not peripheral exceptions,51 and productive of different ends.
-hiadnu, Kubija; from Uzarlulu: From Isin: Dadbanaya; from Kisurra: Su mu abilil, As tum-la-abum, Iadkur-el, Hadum, Abu-[ ]; from Ili-dihad, Ahsakrurum, S aduppum: Iau-ili, R nunna: An-[ ]-mu; from S pak; Es m-Dagan, Sumu-[ ]-Tis from Tutub: Bali-apuh. 47 RIME, iv, 4.0.1, 4.0.4; the volume includes the inscriptions of twenty otherwise unknown rulers from unidentied cities. 48 Edzard, Die zweite Zwischenzeit Babyloniens: see, especially, the introduction, where the themes of innovation and unrest are discussed. 49 Charpin, Histoire politique du Proche-Orient Amorrite, 78: une histoire `e crire. encore impossible a 50 Ibid., 76: La parcellisation du pouvoir. 51 It would be useful here to compare the political hierarchies of northern s ur) with Syro-Mesopotamia (i.e. the triangle between Aleppo, Mari and As Babylonia. The political landscape of the north featured innumerable small-state
(cont. on p. 24)
46
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The importance of this middle tier of political power has grown for theoreticians over the past generation in a number of disciplines. Small-scale, cross-scale or irregular wars have emerged in the post-Vietnam era as a major focus for military historians and strategists concerned with counter-insurgency and sociopolitical asymmetry, for whom the archetype of homologous peer-state warfare has become less helpful.52 Little kingdoms, meanwhile, have developed as models for post-colonial and subalternist historians for whom the nation-state template has proved ineffective in explaining constructions of regional political power without hegemons, in landscapes characterized by multiple, interacting power-holding units.53 Political scientists, too, have taken an interest in the uneven and incomplete application of the state as a model in the face of both regressive (failed states) and progressive (globalization) postmodern trends. These are useful lenses for reading Mesopotamian history. The early state was not fully edged simply because the historic periods had arrived: ancient states continuously produced and lost their own constituent populations from and to non-state units, warring for control of their own hinterlands, long after they initiated competition with peer-state units. One process did not begin, in other words, because the other was nished. Crucially, in the Old Babylonian case, wars of conquest focused on small places, not on major patches of territory, and especially not over open space. Inversely, conicts between major states were wars of attrition, force-reduction and prestige, not of holding and building. This dynamic was the rule from at least the fall of Ur in 2004
(n. 51 cont.)
and non-state tribal actors who were integrated into larger structures of vassalhood and alliances because of a closer isometry along the power scale. The south, by contrast, featured two discontinuous registers of political authority, large-state and small rural-tribal actors. The two political environments shared many formal features, but they differed in kind because of Babylonias cross-scale structure. 52 Anachronisms notwithstanding, small wars can be characterized as asymmetric (i.e. state v. non-state) commitments of force with no dened battle front . . . they are wars over people. Tactics in small wars are a means of achieving psychological ascendancy, not re superiority or control of terrain. Major Keith F. Kopets, USMC, Why Small Wars Theory Still Matters: The Extension of the Principles on Irregular Warfare and Non-Traditional Missions of the Small Wars Manual to the Contemporary Battlespace, Small Wars Jl, vi (2006), 910. The volumes of the Small Wars Journal provide a good introduction to the subject generally. 53 See, for example, Georg Berkemer and Margret Frenz (eds.), Sharing Sovereignty: The Little Kingdom in South Asia (Berlin, 2003), on little kingdoms in South Asia, c.AD 6001700.
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
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BC to the rise of the Kassite state in the fteenth century BC. The historiographic privilege accorded to two third-millennium centralized states the dynasties of Akkad and Ur III, a subset of all historical power-holders54 obscures the underlying longue e: small conicts between weak entities were the norm dure throughout the rst seventeen centuries of Mesopotamian history, c.32001500 BC, with larger hegemons only temporarily achieving the repression or subordination of bush warfare. The coexistence of internal and cross-scale competition was a persistent and ineradicable feature of early states though they would rather not have admitted it.
IV
ENEMIES AND SCATTERED PEOPLE
If the acquisition and control of territory had never been the goal of early states, for what did they ght? At stake was the simultaneous desire and inability of the state to achieve exclusive control of constituencies occupying open space that is, non-sovereign lands. This desire and inability was articulated through narratives of persuasion and punishment meant to nd fullment in the political dominance of the state form. I have argued above that dual processes of state/state and state/non-state competitions were under way simultaneously during the Old Babylonian period. Non-royal forms and non-urban centres of authority were countervailing trends to urban royal authority, which otherwise holds a near-monopoly on historiographic work on the period. But the evidence that countryside regions were often under only loose state control is evocative of the fragility and insecurity of the state as a whole. Rural space was a haven for both delegitimized others (enemies) and non-enfranchised populations (scattered people) for whose labour and tithes a dozen states continuously competed. One important caution is that we should not be seduced into accepting ancient binary discourses about lands and peoples. Mesopotamian literature painted a dualistic picture of pure order in city life and pure disorder in desolate areas, though proverbs and wisdom literature also reveal a Mesopotamian citizen
54 The Akkadian (23342193 BC) and Ur III (21122004 BC) states together lasted 250 years.
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suspicious of the grasping urban institutions which governed him the palace is a slippery place, ran one much-repeated Sumerian proverb and wary even of his neighbours. (The term citizen is warranted because city-residence was the paramount political and juridical identity for Mesopotamian urbanites.) The inuential concept of ancient states dimorphism, for all its revisionist merits, still reproduces a dichotomy of the desert and the sown inappropriate to the social and economic symbiosis of Mesopotamias historical geographies. To be sure, the anxieties of ancient urbanites located dire horrors out in the wastes: ghosts, murderers and esh-eating jackals roamed this dystopian realm of the imagination. But in reality, Babylonia was quite a varied landscape of elds, marshes, meadowlands and semi-arid steppe, in which equally varied and specialized subsistence strategies and settlements took root. In the Old Babylonian period, the intermediate rural zone between city and steppeland was denoted a ` ma simply ma tum, the land, or s tim, the countryside (literally, the heart of the land). Village life was the norm: from the Early Dynastic through the Middle Babylonian period as late as the eighth century BC, cities steadily occupied less of a percentage of overall settlement area, and villages occupied more of it.55 Old Babylonian letters and administrative documents texts of a practical nature make clear that these intermediate rural areas could indeed be as dangerous as the steppe, and that state power was not always equal to those hazards. Do not go into the country, a man named Gimil-Marduk atly warns in a letter to one Warad-Sigar, rounding off a list of chores and cautions.56 In another letter, a man writes that his servant had been chased away in anger from a region too dangerous for travel, while other servants had been hurt and have been dispersed over the countryside.57 Even an army, another man writes, could nd
55 See Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, esp. 1318; Nissen, Early History of the Ancient Near East, 1301; Marten Stol, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in altbabylonischer Zeit, in Charpin, Edzard and Stol, Mesopotamien, 651 and n. 48. Cf. A, comparing meanings 1 (designating both people and terriCAD, N/1, s.v. namu tory) and 2; the citations amply illustrate the loose authority of the state over semi-nomads in peripheral steppelands, but also the capacity of the closer pastureland populations to be scattered (the verbs sapa hu, ne ruba tu). 56 AbB, xii, no. 124; similarly, ibid., i, no. 71, l. 20; ibid., vii, no. 182, ll. 215, with discussion by Ulla Jeyes, Old Babylonian Extispicy: Omen Texts in the British Museum (Istanbul, 1989), 39. 57 AbB, xiv, no. 148.
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
27
itself in danger away from cities: left all on its own . . . you yourself know (how it is with) the troops which are deep in the countryside.58 Urban administrators sometimes had to rent divine emblems and weapons of the gods from city temples in order to travel into remote rural zones to collect taxes. These and other elaborate journey texts enabled the state to administer its hinterlands, but it required a display of both military and divine power.59 At other times, rural security was judged unproblematic, and travel to such areas was thus thinkable. For instance, one letter directs a man to permit his servant to travel overland (Let [the servant of so-and-so] stay overnight in the open country); it u that he should not worry.60 continues: Say to Marduk-n s A particular trepidation for urbanites had to do with unnamed enemies out in the hinterlands. As you have heard, writes one beleaguered administrator, the country is in confusion and the enemy has settled in the countryside.61 We could not stay overnight in the dimtu-fortress area because of the enemy, another letter laments; while a third writer asks, have you not heard that an enemy is camping in the land?62 Marauders labelled only as enemies sometimes emerged from the countryside to harass more thickly settled areas,63 as they did in AmmiBaduqa of Babylons fteenth year (1631 BC), and then melted back into the hinterlands.64 It is striking to recall that these letters were drafted in the dusty neighbourhoods of cities where, just down the street, the kings in their palaces condently issued boastful
58 Ibid., no. 131, ina zumur ma tim; the translator stresses deep in the countryside over the sense of scattered across the countryside (p. 123 n. 131 d). 59 Rivkah Harris, The Journey of the Divine Weapon, Assyriological Studies, xvi (1965), argued already that virtually all texts of the (cumbersomely named) rental of a journey of the divine weapon variety were geared to the purpose of assisting expeditions to tax remote farming villages and not, say, for military or trading ventures. Note a ` ma among the texts studied there MAH 16147, ana kaskal girrim s tim, where not even the name of the destination is specied, only for a journey into the countryside. 60 AbB, xiii, no. 154; cf. ibid., xii, no. 38, in which Nanna-intuh was unable to commmunicate with business partners because he was travelling in-country. 61 Ibid., xiv, no. 81. 62 TIM 2 107 and TCL 17 27, cited in CAD, N/1, s.v. nakru s. 2b. 63 Warnings of enemies in the countryside include ARM 26/1 140, TCL 17 27, TIM 2 107 and the nine letters warning of danger discussed in Seth Richardson, Trouble in the Countryside, ana tarBi Samsuditana: Militarism, Kassites, and the Fall of Babylon I, in W. H. van Soldt (ed.), Ethnicity in Ancient Mesopotamia (Leiden, 2005), 2735. 64 CAD, L, s.v. libbu 2b-2, the troops dispersed into the hinterland, citing ARM 1 5:36.
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statements of total control over their lands, extending even to the limits of the four quarters of the earth. Unfortunately, the historical identity of these enemies is compromised by the preoccupation of ancient literature, produced in cities, with constructing the dyads city/countryside, order/ disorder65 and citizen/enemy.66 Indeed the Sumerian term -kur (Akkadian nakru), translated as enemies, extends its lu semantic range to less politically encumbered meanings in non-substantival use like strange and different other. We can also differentiate nakru from contemporary usages of Akkadian aja bu, the term reserved for hated military enemies, rarely used in contexts suggesting rural populations. In any event, there are not such numerous or onerous indications of danger associated with the rural lands to warrant depicting them as unrelenting threats to state security or persons and goods in transit. The concept of the countryside as a locus of power can be overstated. The term countrysides, I would rather say, classies a zone of collision between small- and large-scale social interactions, where the states authority over strategic boundaries and control over residence and movement was neither absolutely present nor absent, but incomplete.67 The enemies of the countryside in Old Babylonian parlance were not intractable foes of states, but constituencies that were not clearly organized under state authority untaxed and unregulated, one way of life alongside another, and a threat only to individuals who intruded on those contested peripheries. Countrysides and urban states sometimes presented dangers to each other, but what comes across more strongly is the inability of either domain to substantially dominate the other. In effect, this was a problem of weak states attempting to assert authority over the weak resistance of hinterlands, a balance of low power.
65 See J. N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History (London, 1992), ch. 16. 66 The enemy trope is especially emphasized in divinatory literature identifying the enemy as an agent of apodoses connected to the pars hostilis of the liver. Yet even ulgi (ETCSL, text 3.1.11), rst within the limits of this trope, note a literary letter to S complaining about bandits and brigands of the steppe (Sumerian: edin), but gradually revealing, for narrative reasons, that these peripheral people were conceptualized as having animal pens, camps, workers and hoe-wielding agricultural labourers. 67 For issues related to scale and boundary-making, see Milan Bufon, Borders and Border Landscapes: ATheoretical Assessment, in Marek Koter and Krystian Heffner (eds.), Borderlands or Transborder Regions: Geographical, Social and Political Problems dz , 1998), 714. (Lo
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
29
This was neither a hot nor a cold war, but an epochal, asymmetric and lukewarm conict between states and non-state actors. The single biggest challenge for Old Babylonian states in imposing de facto sovereignty was not, therefore, in providing security from dangers to persons or goods, but in administering settlement, restricting human ight, imposing legal control spatially and recruiting unaligned clientele. Flight from cities to villages has been addressed by Renger and Snell,68 but mainly with respect to individuals tied to the state or its citizens by specic bonds (slaves, dependent workers, feud-holders, etc.). What are not accounted for within the organizational transcript are descriptions of the communities to which eeing citizens decamped. The Old Babylonian period presents repeated cases of kings who spoke of entire undocumented populations as scattered and dispersed. For state authorities, the gathering-in and settling of scattered people the recruitment of free-oating clientele was a project of primary political importance. In all cases, the states concern was voiced as protector of the downtrodden, not punisher of the disobedient. The topos of the scattered people (Sumerian: un-bir-re) shows up more than a dozen times in Old Babylonian royal inscriptions,69 year-names,70 hymns of praise to kings,71 and other ofcial documents72 between c.1860 and 1620 BC. In Sumerian literature of the period, the term scattered people and its similes (for example the people, like a scattered herd of cattle) marked the quintessence of disorder and misfortune in city-laments;73
Johannes Renger, Flucht als soziales Problem in der altbabylonischen Gesellschaft, in D. O. Edzard (ed.), Gesellschaftsklassen im Alten Zweistromland und in den angrenzenden Gebieten (Munich, 1972), esp. 175, is close to exhaustive in discussing terms for persons free of state or private control, but does not discuss scattered people. See also Daniel Snell, Flight and Freedom in the Ancient Near East (Leiden, 2001), 557. 69 Including but not limited to RIME, iv, 1.2.2, 2.8.1, 2.8.34, 2.8.67, 2.9.14, 2.13.6, 2.13.13, 2.13.27, 3.6.2, 3.6.7, 3.7.2, 3.7.8, 3.9.2, 3.10.2. 70 n 12a, S n-muballi3 a, R n 28 (brought in a See CDLI year-names: Apil-S m-S large population and provided them with a quiet resting place), Hammurabi 33, R m-Anum d. 71 For example Gungunum Hymn A (ETCSL, text 2.6.2.1), claiming to bring back the scattered people of Sumer and Akkad. 72 n II, echoing his For example AbB, xiii, no. 53, ll. 19, a letter of R m-S year-name b claiming to gather dispersed people. 73 g (ETCSL, text 2.2.2, l. 304); in the In the Lament for Ur as cattle, with the verb sa Lament for Sumer and Ur as creatures (verb: zag . . . tag) and the open country (verb: g) (ETCSL, text 2.2.3, ll. 24, 130); in the Lament for Nippur as cattle (verb: sa g) and sa
(cont. on p. 30)
68
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such people were the object of heroic ingatherings credited to kings in hymns of praise.74 As with enemies, we are faced with a term which has discouraged investigation because of the dyadic nature of its rhetorical claim. Unlike enemies, however, the term scattered people rarely registers in private as well as public transcripts. The associated terms are largely restricted to royal documents, expressive literature, and omens,75 which might make us think them rhetorical, unveriable and notional. But enough exceptions to this generic distribution may be noted to make us believe in a real need to recruit people to states. From the city of Sippar, close to Babylon, a property division deposition explains rather matter-of-factly that certain goods had been held when . . . we scattered into the country; we did not return to the city (before) the beginning of AmmiBaduqas reign.76 A letter-order from Haradum, near Mari, indicates that a dispersed population had settled in the countryside (ina libbu bu) and must now be resettled.77 The Old Babylonian ma tim was lexicon provides a variety of terms and contexts from which it is apparent that scattering was an opting out of the state order, while resettling marked state-organized programmes.78 Law codes, legal documents, and letters refer to the illegal ight of non-indentured and non-enslaved people from their cities with the verbs aba tu (to ee from) and hala qu (to escape), and the
(n. 73 cont.)
` g, verb: bir) (ETCSL, text 2.2.4, ll. 29, 215); in the Lament for Uruk, all the people (u the settlements (verb: bir) (ETCSL, text 2.2.5, l. 86). See also Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (Atlanta, 1995), Laws Hammurabi, col. 2, l. 49; col. 42, l. 74. 74 Cf. earlier royal hymns, in which scattering and dispersing were pogroms visited on enemy lands by Mesopotamian kings. In the Old Babylonian period, the restoration of scattered peoples to dwelling places was the task of the king: me-Dagan A (ETCSL, text Gungunum Hymn A (ETCSL, text 2.6.2.1, l. 5) and Is 2.5.4.01, l. 274). 75 a See CAD, S, s.v. sapa hu 8b (and by-forms); A, s.v. as bu 35; P, s.vv. para ru 2c, 4a and paha ru 1c; references to scattered people are virtually absent from administrative or epistolatory texts. 76 CT 2 1 1417. 77 ` s, Haradum II: les textes de la pe riode pale o-babylonienne Francis Joanne (Samsu-iluna Ammi-Baduqa) (Paris, 2006), text 11; we may detect a greater administrative concern for scattered people among texts of the Mari corpus, for example ARM 1 91, 26/2 421. 78 a To settle, Akkadian was bu, is thus the very popular counterpoise in praise hymns and royal inscriptions of the Old Babylonian kings; dozens of references are known.
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
31
term munnabu, runaway,79 appears as well.80 The reality of constituents living away from royal power is even reected in allusions to differential jurisdiction within state lands, when the kings authority in non-urban places was constituted less forcefully than in the cities.81 These problems were hardly new: since at least the mid third millennium, accounting for the residence of people in cities and great households and returning them to their assigned places whenever they slipped away to villages were primary concerns of state administrators.82 Stone has opined that episodes of population dispersal in the archaeological record may indicate times when states were less successful in delivering on their promises to provide security and prosperity, with the result that people voted with their feet.83 It is not clear what the motives or identity of those in urban ight might have been; nor should we accept the premise of scattering as indicative of any pre-existing state subscription by these same people. But even the rhetorical glossing of ruralization, ight and resistance as scattering cannot by itself negate the underlying reality that state sovereignty clearly did not encompass all constituencies, even very local ones. Thinking constructively about what little we know, we might rst posit that the vagueness of the terms enemies and scattered peoples betrays a lack of knowledge about rural identities among a scribal class which was otherwise tted out with a substantial battery of ethnonyms, legalisms and geographical names for the identication of others. This vagueness marks the terms as ambivalent designations for any group of people not under royal control as they either resisted or submitted to it; the dyadic
CAD, M/2, s.v. munnabtu s. ab. CAD, A/1, s.v. aba tu B v. 2; H, s.v. hala qu v. 2. The discussion by Daniel E. Fleming, Democracys Ancient Ancestors: Mari and ke nu Early Collective Governance (Cambridge, 2004), 141 ff., of the mus most closely coincides with this idea of a non-dependent/non-aligned rural population. See further discussions in Richardson, Trouble in the Countryside, ana tarBi Samsuditana, 279 82; Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, 1920. A few additional examples from letters: AbB, xi, no. 137, the jurisdiction (d nu ; literally, decisions) of (tribal) Jamutbal; ibid., xii, no. 166: those who live in Larsa belong to the king; those who live in open country . . . [ ] (broken); ibid., xiii, no. 10, local legal standards (again, d nu ) of Jamutbal; ibid., no. 25, referring to the general of the countrys troops; cf. CAD, M/1, s.v. ma tu 1a, citing TCL 17 55:6, do you not know that the land in its entirety belongs to Marduk and to King Samsuiluna? 82 For example Letters from Early Mesopotamia, ed. Erica Reiner, trans. Piotr Michalowski (Atlanta, 1993), nos. 5, 23, 24, 42, 69, and perhaps no. 20. 83 Stone, Constraints on State and Urban Form in Ancient Mesopotamia, 207.
80 81 79
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language demonized and welcomed, as appropriate, exactly the same groups of people as occasion required.84 The second point is to recognize the context of enemies references as defensive these groups rarely threatened cities directly and resettlement motifs as benevolent: the ingatherings endowed the scattered people with peace, abundance and new dwellings. The modulations of the topos alluded to the removal of complaint, the provision of pastures and watering places and the peaceful abodes in which men might sleep soundly.85 Whatever the political realities, resettlement was supposed to sound attractive one of a number of persuasive claims that we have too often read as descriptive of reality and de facto sovereignty. V
PERSUASION: LEGAL VOICE, LAND OF PLENTY
Texts we have become used to reading as historical facts must be reinterpreted as more than idealizing or notional in merely general terms, but more specically with an eye to their persuasive purposes. To this point, I have argued that early polities claimed sovereignty powers on the ground far ahead of their actual abilities, both over territory and constituents. These texts were constructed out of will and desire; early states were talking conjuring themselves into being.86 Already through the centuries, Mesopotamian royal language had adopted multiple
84 Compare with Fleming, Democracys Ancient Ancestors, 13941, developing a u parallel argument that the land (ma tu) and the dependent people (nis ) operate rhetorically as a merism for the population of the kingdom in a vision of benicent rule. 85 Removal of complaint: RIME, iv, 2.8.3, 2.13.21; provision of pastures and -ne-ha / watering places: ibid., 3.6.7, 3.7.2, 3.9.2, 3.10.2; peaceful abodes (ki-tus ubat nehtim): 2.9.14, 2.13.6, 2.13.27, 3.6.2, 3.6.7, 3.7.2, 3.9.2, 3.10.2. I have elses where commented on the authoritarian semantics underlying royal claims of quieting: see Seth Richardson, Writing Rebellion Back into the Record: A Methodologies Toolkit, in Seth Richardson (ed.), Rebellions and Peripheries in the Cuneiform World (New Haven, 2010). With respect to this, Fraynes interpolation is misleading and anachronistic in RIME, iv, 2.8.3, ll. 2630: when he . . . had removed evil (and the cause for any) complaint from it [Ur]; within the frame of royal rhetoric, complaint was itself symptomatic of the disorder the king was to restore. 86 For a similar point of view about the rst-millennium Levant, see Seth L. Sanders, From People to Public in the Iron Age Levant, in Gernot Wilhelm (ed.), Organization, Representation and Symbols of Power in the Ancient Near East (forthcoming), paper given at the 54th annual Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Wu rzburg, July 2008.
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
33
registers of persuasion, arguing by way of theology, history, civic patronage, even a command of style. The contribution of the Old Babylonian period was the perfection of powers legal voice and its promises to protect and provide. Not only did the state rhetorically inate its powers de facto, but its powers de jure as well. By the end of the third millennium, a documentary class of contracts had emerged to effect and document private business practices, but only with the arrival of the twentieth century BC did they come into widespread use loans, sales, pledges, rentals and foreclosures. Royal authorities hurried to meet these developments in private economy with an equally innovative diversity of claims to be able to regulate those exchange practices,87 control aru interest rates,88 offer periodic debt-reliefs (m s ), freedoms (andura ru )89 and occasional equities through royal decrees arrim), standardize weights and measures, protect prop(Bimdat s erty, guarantee due process and, as we shall see below, commoditize prices and wages.90 Palatial households moved rapidly to adopt a legal voice in civil and criminal law, too, but nowhere did they move more aggressively to appropriate authority over any eld of activity than over the sphere of commercial law. Symbolic and inclusive of this legal-rational voice were the Old Babylonian law collections, the most famous of which were the Laws of Hammurabi.91 All these promulgations had antecedents in the twenty-fourth and twenty-rst centuries BC, but the comprehensive reach of the three surviving collections (not counting nunna and Isin marks a radical scribal exercises) from Babylon, Es expansion in the states claimed scope of powers. The authority of these collections is buttressed by a larger number of related text
87 tar, 5 and Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor: Laws Lipit-Is nunna, 1516, 19, 32, 389, 41; Laws Hammurabi, 4951, passim; Laws Es 1008, 11114, gap a, g, z, cc, etc. 88 nunna, 18A, 201; Laws Hammurabi, gap tu, 111. Ibid.: Laws Es 89 nigliche Verfu gungen in altbabylonischer Zeit See, especially, F. R. Kraus, Ko (Leiden, 1984); Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor: Laws Hammurabi, gap z. 90 It is remarkable that the interest of Mesopotamian kings to legally organize trade, commerce and prices belongs primarily to the eras during which they ruled mostly over small city-state and territorial units that is, prior to 1600 BC and not to the large national and imperial states of 1400500 BC, when commerce seems to have been a matter either outsourced or of indifference to the Crown. Cf. J. D. Hawkins, Royal Statements of Ideal Prices: Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hittite, in Jeanny Vorys Canby et al. (eds.), Ancient Anatolia: Aspects of Change and Cultural Development. Essays in Honor of Machteld J. Mellink (Madison, 1986), 93102. 91 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor.
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types: monumental inscriptions, administrative decrees, and a constellation of secondary references to all of the above. It is the intersection of private economy and royal law which draws our attention here, since these documents asserted authority over specic acts and aspects of exchange in the marketplace, and implicitly over the entire sphere of commerce local, overland, riverine and maritime. Yet the Crowns jurisdiction was hardly established. Royal power chased at the heels of an already rich and varied private commercial world, rather having structured that economic life in the rst instance. Evidence supporting the application or citation of royal laws is virtually non-existent: the much-studied royal documents nd little correlation in the practices and processes where we would expect to nd them (in letters, contracts, lawsuits, etc.).92 To give but one example, seemingly the most pressing issue of the famous seventeenth-century BC debt-remission edict of King AmmiBaduqa was the nullication of interestbearing loans yet the edict was issued in a time when interest-clauses were not written into any of the hundreds of known loans. Why remit interest-bearing loans where none existed? Any literate audience would surely have perceived the gap between the powers claimed and the ways in which legal problems were actually solved: that is, without reference or recourse to state authority. Even on their own terms, the law collections were barely interested in policing, almost never specifying where or for whom they held force, whether by geography, court or class, and delegating enforcement with vague references to they: they shall condemn, they shall levy a ne, they shall arrest, etc.93 The laws lack of functionality is patent.
92 An imposition of the Code as statutory for the administration of Babylonian law is positivist speculation in the face of much contrary evidence: pace Dominique Charpin, Writing, Law and Kingship in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, 2010), esp. 7981. Charpin nds three references to the Code of Hammurabi as evidence for an applied code, but these would be buried by the hundreds of contemporary legal texts and procedures which deviate from or ignore the Code altogether. The author discusses AbB, xiii, no. 12 (on p. 73), but the situation represented there in fact does not match the paragraph of the Code to which he refers: in the letter, the thieves are imprisoned under guard, not put to death and hanged in the house. 93 Note also the routine delegation of enforcement to the litigating parties, plaintiff and defendant, and the specication of the palace and the king as courts only of last resort a curiously marginal position for the Crown in royal documents.
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
35
Much recent discussion has been directed to the conclusion that the law promulgations were a type of idealizing royal literature with a scientic character, not actionable jurisprudence.94 K. R. Veenhof, one of the foremost authorities on the gap between statute and procedure, concluded already a decade ago that plaintiffs based their cases not on the citing of laws, but on general statements of the kings righteousness and his duty to redress injustice, which were the generally known ideological basis of both decrees and laws.95 In other words, the written law supported an ideology of the kings innate and personal ability to render wise decisions, the rhetorical basis for actual legal process. But the unication of ideology and process action within a single discourse implied the connection of two conceptual domains under one larger unstated claim, the premise of jurisdiction itself. Something less than unied legal practice and something more like the presumption of sovereignty was the aspiration of the law collections: promises of equity, plenty and protection were supposed to persuade clientele rst to accept the premise of palatial states as legally sovereign, much as they were meant to accept in principle the other objectively unveriable claims to authority those states deployed: favour of the gods, pre-eminent political status, provision of abundance, and so on. Functional explanations for the laws ignore the public and persuasive intent of ideological messaging, but explanations premised on the anti-rationality of the subjects such as those supposing that the laws were intended to construct social order on ritual-magical principles should also be rejected.96 If anything, the power of
94 ro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods For example Jean Botte (Chicago, 1992), ch. 10; for overviews of the debate, see Raymond Westbrook, Introduction, in Raymond Westbrook (ed.), A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2003), i, 1619 (subsection 1.2.4), saying that the codes originated in the sphere of Mesopotamian science rather than in either jurisprudence or propaganda as such. Compare with characterizations by Stol, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in altbabylonischer Zeit, 6548 ( wissenschaftlichen Charakter), and Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 47, who views the strict authority of the laws as an ultimately unanswerable question. 95 K. R. Veenhof, The Relation between Royal Decrees and Law Codes of the Old Babylonian Period, Jaarbericht Ex Oriente Lux, xxxvxxxvi (19972000), esp. 7882, quotation at p. 82. 96 James Q. Whitman, At the Origins of Law and the State: Supervision of Violence, Mutilation of Bodies, or Setting of Prices?, Chicago-Kent Law Rev., lxxi (1995), 415, 824: the laws were an alien archaic effort to control the marketplace . . . in a world of sympathetic magic and ritually ordered social hierarchy. Whitmans contention that the early state was uninterested in regulating feuding and violence
(cont. on p. 36)
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the jurisdiction-sovereignty claim was effected by purposefully ambiguating discourses of legal-rationality and ritualism. Old Babylonian economic regulation thus worked through a deliberate blurring of ability and ideal. Royal claims to regulate various aspects of the economy were not meant to be instrumentally effective in what they purported to do, but used a mixture of persuasion and sanction to create a composite of strategies for different audiences. The legal voice was geared to persuade and to warn politically sophisticated audiences that kings had incipient powers to create jurisdiction over activities, spaces and populations, that they could create an uninterrupted fabric of power across all kinds of elds of action over exchange and the economy just as much as over taxation, war or theology. The incomplete states of the Old Babylonian period (like all jurisgenerative states) created law to anticipate and ideally to precipitate a kind of control that did not yet exist. Their claims rhetorically simulated a rational-choice scenario between the potential peace, security and prosperity of states, and the perilous community of nearby lands and peoples not organized under sovereignty principles. It is fair to say that the contingent non-state outcome to which royal states alluded would have seemed a very real possibility for Mesopotamians, since more and more of Babylonia was organized into precisely the latter kind of stateless landscape in the centuries after 1720 BC. Some attention to the sub-genre of price-and-wage schedules can be instructive on these points precisely because, although the application of their terms was virtually impossible in stricto sensu, they were closely imitative of contemporary practice. At least one Assyrian97 and eight Babylonian kings of the time promulgated price and wage edicts, all but the rst and last within about a hundred-year period (c.18701770 BC). To give one example: n-iddinam of Larsa, the according to a proclamation of King S
(n. 96 cont.)
in the (pre-state) state of nature accords with my understanding that it was essentially unable to do so; his preference to interpret the state as primarily interested in cosmological order seems unnecessarily exoticizing to me. 97 The Assyrian emulation of Babylonian practice is clear: A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC I (1114859 BC) (Royal Inscriptions s ur of Mesopotamia, Assyrian Periods, ii, Toronto, 1991), 47: In this text the As temple is called the Enlil temple and evidence of Babylonian inuence is also apparent in the dialect and form of the inscription.
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
37
1840s BC was a time of plenty in lower Babylonia: his inscription set forth a schedule of low prices and generous wages. A builder amas was to reworking on the temple of the tutelary city god S ceive hundreds of litres of barley per day obviously much more than he could consume as a day-wage in addition to dates, cheese, bran, oil, and food from the sheepfolds. The same text established bounteously low market prices: a mere single shekel of silver in Ur, Larsa and my land would buy more than four times the usual quantity of grain, or similarly bargain quantities of dates, wool, vegetable oil and lard. Several such grand claims were made by the kings of the small territorial states of Larsa, Isin, Babylon, nunna in this period, each jostling for regional Uruk and Es primacy. Since they appear in multiple copies from different ndspots, these price-and-wage schedules have come to seem emblematic of the entire four-hundred-year period and a logical extension of other regulatory or even social-justice measures, but their practical connement to one century, I argue, was hardly accidental. The known schedules are as follows:
King Gungunum98 n99 Nara m-S n-ka id100 S s Nu r-Adad101 n-iddinam A102 S n-iddinam B103 S City Larsa Uruk Uruk Larsa Larsa Larsa Approx. date (BC) 1911 1860s? 1860s 1860s 1848 1847 Prices/Wages Yes/No Yes/No Yes/No Yes/Yes No/Yes Yes/Yes
Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schyen Collection, ed. A. R. George (Cornell Univ. Studies in Assyriology and Sumeriology, xvii, Bethesda, 2011), no. 44 (Schyen MS 2871), trans. A. R. George, pp. 967. While the provenance of the texts published in this volume remains uncertain, their authenticity is not in doubt. 99 n of Uruk: A New King in an Old Shoebox, Jl Eva von Dassow, Nara m-S Cuneiform Studies, lxi (2009), 6871. Regarding the tentative dates, von Dassows ns reign as immediately preceding that of S n-ka id is reconstruction of Nara m-S s partly based on the hypothesis that the similarities of their prices indicate a continuity of local practice. However, three of the four prices in her translation are reconstructed from whole or partial breaks in the text. Though there is no particular reason to disbelieve her dating of this kings reign, the circular logic used to reconstruct the prices in this cone renders them too uncertain to position them in the Tables (see pp. 401 below). 100 RIME, iv, 4.1.8. On the dates, see Charpin, Histoire politique du Proche-Orient Amorrite, 387. 101 RIME, iv, 2.8.7. On the dates, see CDLI year-names: Nu r-Adad Year i. 102 RIME, iv, 2.9.2. 103 Ibid., 2.9.6.
98
38
n-iddinam C104 S n105 Warad-S ams i-Adad I106 S a107 Dadus Hammurabi108
PAST AND PRESENT Larsa Larsa s ur As nunna Es Babylon 1840s 1824 18081776 1770 1750
NUMBER 215 Yes/Yes No/Yes Yes/No Yes/Yes No/Yes
The standardizing mechanism of virtually all these regulations was to set equivalences for labour and products in terms of one shekel of silver. Thus, we can compare and contrast the major features as theoretically commodied (see Tables). At rst sight, we are struck by the relative consistency between commodity equivalences: barley ranges the most, between 600 as promulgation species only 300 and 1,200 litres (Dadus litres), but other products stay within a fairly close range of pri a: 3 kg);109 vegetable oil, 1530 litres cing: wool, 57.5 kg (Dadus a: 12 litres); dates, 3,0003,600 litres. Their consistency (Dadus might suggest that they reect market conditions, but in fact the prices seem to fall between half and a quarter of what the market normally supported. Old Babylonian commercial texts normally valued one shekel of silver as equivalent to around 300 litres of barley,110 against the promulgations average of 850 litres; wool moved in the marketplace for an average of c.2.53 kg per shekel,111 whereas the edicts denoted close to 6 kg per shekel;
104 Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts, ed. George, no. 37 (Schyen MS 5000), trans. Konrad Volk, pp. 5988. 105 RIME, iv, 2.13.21. 106 A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennia BC (to 1115 BC) (Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Assyrian Periods, i, Toronto, 1987), no. 39.1. 107 nunna, 12, Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, Laws Es 711. 108 Ibid., Laws Hammurabi, 2734, but also 239. 109 The price of wool set in the Old Babylonian promulgations, at 1 shekel 5 kg wool, the one gure seeming to correspond to market conditions, may have been due to the states (unique) monopoly over this commodity in the rst place: see Stol, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in altbabylonischer Zeit, 860. 110 Howard Farber, A Price and Wage Study for Northern Babylonia during the Old Babylonian Period, Jl Econ. and Social Hist. of the Orient, xxi (1978), 1721, whose study charts the normal value of a shekel as the equivalent of c.100300 litres of barley; see also Stol, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in altbabylonischer Zeit, 860: The price of barley . . . seemed to remain stable, even in later periods; G. van Driel, Elusive Silver: In Search of a Role for a Market in an Agrarian Environment. Aspects of Mesopotamias Society (Leiden, 2002), 1114. 111 Seth F. C. Richardson, Texts from the Late Old Babylonian Period (Jl Cuneiform Studies Supplemental Ser., ii, Boston, 2010), table 1; similar conclusions were reached by Farber, Price and Wage Study for Northern Babylonia, 24, citing an average of 2.88 kg per shekel.
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
39
sesame oil averaged around 15 litres per shekel in eighteenth- and seventeenth-century BC markets, while the price schedules suggest 25 litres could be bought at that price112 and so on. Even by the internal logic of the pricing schedules, the equivalences do not tally in any operable way. When specifying silver wages, these texts prescribed 13 shekels of silver as a normative monthly rate, permitting workers under their very same pricing schemes to buy each day anywhere up to 120 litres of barley or three full litres of vegetable oil. When paid in staples, workers would be given the equivalent of up to 7.5 shekels worth of goods every month in barley alone,113 irrespective of other goods. At these rates, states would have quickly bankrupted the carrying capacity of their agricultural systems, and workers would have been ridiculously glutted with comestibles. With their round numbers114 and their fabulous exchange rates, the promulgations have for almost a century attracted comment as being too unrealistic and undependable to reect market conditions or any other externally veriable standard of economic activity.115 In the marketplace, these ideal prices would have been too low and the wages too high with a psychological multiplier effect on consumers, who might have been rightly suspicious of extraordinary inations in only one or the other category.116 But the promulgations, like the law collections, were not intended as juridical or regulatory standards; they were intended to persuade. Persuade whom? Of what? Five features lead us towards an answer. The rst clue lies in the modesty of the wage inations and price deations: these were not manipulated to outlandish, fantastical extremes, but merely to the edge of
Farber, Price and Wage Study for Northern Babylonia, 223. n-iddinam As daily barley wage is 300 litres; S n-iddinam Bs price equivalent S for barley is 1,200 litres 1 shekel silver; thus a 30-day wage would supposedly come n-iddinams to 9,000 litres barley, worth 7.5 shekels silver at the stated rate. But S wages are the exception: the other schedules specify wages with a value of 23 shekels. 114 In the notational system of the period, the metric amounts appearing in the Tables are equivalents of whole rounded numbers: 300 litres is the equivalent of 1 gur, 7.5 kg of wool is equal to 15 mana, and so forth. 115 See Hawkins, Royal Statements of Ideal Prices, 94, and bibliography, nos. 1213. See also Walter Scheidel, Real Wages in Early Economies: Evidence for Living Standards from 1800 BCE to 1300 CE, Jl Econ. and Social Hist. of the Orient, liii (2010), who concludes that with a few exceptions, the real incomes of unskilled labourers tended to be very low. 116 Cf. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 6; Babylonians would have seen the greater attraction in the prices rather than the wages.
113 112
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credibility that one could buy at half the normal price, but earn at the high end of the wage-market. The rates were uniformly kept just inside the realm of the conceivable.117 A second clue lies right alongside the rates, in the attending rhetoric of happiness, equity n-ka id concluded his price schedule with the and satisfaction: S s benediction, may his years be years of abundance; Nu r-Adad lyricized, I had my people eat food of all kinds, and drink abunn-iddinam that he removed complaint, pleased dant water; S . . . the host of Larsa, caused rejoicing in my city and let nobody take less or more.118 Every single one of these wage and price inscriptions makes some specic reference to a visibly happy public, and the reception of the advertised wages and prices would have been framed by that context. Third, most of the schedules were occasional in nature, promoted on the building of major civic structures by levied labour teams walls, canals and temples or in royal accession years and jubilees.119 This coincidence meant that mass audiences were on hand for the public dissemination of claims of plenitude, which may have been further enacted through episodes of feasting and the statutes themselves limited to those occasions. Fourth, we should pay some attention to the restricted historical and geographic scope of these inscriptions. The price and wage schedules have often been treated together with a few much older royal claims making much vaguer promises to provide abundance and ensure equity.120 Yet not only are the Old
117 Contra Hawkins, Royal Statements of Ideal Prices, 94, characterizing the Old Babylonian schedules as unreal and ridiculously out of step with current prices. 118 n-ka id, see RIME, iv, 4.1.8, l. 23; for Nu For S s r-Adad, see ibid., 2.8.7, ll. 502; n-iddinam, see ibid., 2.9.2, ll. 602; 2.9.6, ll. 2534; also Cuneiform Royal for S Inscriptions and Related Texts, ed. George, no. 37 (Schyen MS 5000), trans. Volk, ll. 2934. The latter volume includes some similar phrases: Gungunum reported that my b-ak workforce did do its work amid plenty, ugnim-mu nam- hi-a kin-bi hu-mu-ni- i n-iddinams generousi phrase by the (MS 2871, no. 44, ll. 345); note S power of my -em-mi-til (MS 3552/1, people I did complete that task, usu ma-da-mu-ta kin-bi he i describes wages and food no. 48, ll. 634); cf. MS 4765, no. 45, ll. 2433, 447, which rations, but not in specic terms; all three trans. A. R. George. 119 n-ka ids inscription, however, is more sweeping, claiming its prices were in S s ): RIME, iv, 4.1.8, l. 15. effect in the period of his kingship (bala-nam-lugal-la-ka-ne 120 (twenty-fourth century BC) and The so-called reforms of Urukagina of Lagas the code of Ur-Namma of Ur (twenty-rst century) were both allusive to social justice protections, but the former were in fact limited to administrative reforms, and the latter, while more strongly voicing economic protections and guarantees of plenty in general terms, limited its actual statutory clauses to punishments for criminal and civil infractions. See the introduction of Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, for discussion and references.
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Babylonian schedules much more specic in their measures, they are effectively restricted even within the period to only fourteen of its forty centuries (19111770 BC) and to the cities which actively contended for military dominance over Babylonia in that time.121 The temporal and geographic scope is identical to the theatre of operations and time of interstate warfare in the region. The schedules responded to the urgent needs of Babylon, Uruk, nunna in the grip of intense political competition to Larsa and Es recruit manpower for labour and warfare, not to timeless principles of market regulation or a royal ideology of equity. Price schedules were intended to persuade populations to align with specic cities through reputations of justice and magnanimity, to accept the royal protection of and authority over markets in principle, and to enjoy the fruits of states as caretakers they were not to be used as regulatory nancial instruments. Tellingly, following the unifying conquests of Hammurabi, these mechanisms of persuasion were permanently abandoned for the duration of the period (17601595 BC), since they were no longer needed note in the Tables that Hammurabis inscription contains only the barest hint of wage controls. Fifth and nally, we should note the prominent place of a rather plain word littered throughout the schedules and other legal documents: the land (Sumerian: kalam; Akkadian ma tu). In all cases where the schedules specify for whom the prices and wages were promulgated, they specify the land.122 From Babylon alone, nine year-names referring to acts of equity and abundance specied that it was the land that would benet from
121 Note that the earliest known price inscription, the one promulgated by Gungunum of Larsa in 1911 BC, virtually coincides with the rst major peer-state conict of the period, the one between Larsa and Malgium in 1914 BC: see n. 98 above. 122 n-iddinam B (RIME, iv, 2.9.6, ll. 667), where the markets of Note, especially, S ` ma-da-g[a -ka], a ` -uri5ki larsaki u the cities and the countryside are listed serially: ganba s the market value in Ur, Larsa and my land (my emphasis in bold); similarly, n-ka id (ibid., 4.1.8, l. 20): ganba-ma-da-na-ka, the market value of his land; S s a ` -ma-da-ga -ka; less specically, but still emphaNu r-Adad (ibid., 2.8.7, l. 61): ganba-s n-iddinam A (ibid., 2.9.2, ll. 49, 63), and Warad-S n (ibid., 2.13.21, ll. 1012). sized, S nunna Laws omit any reference to the land with connection to markets, but it The Es is possible that unrecovered copies may have contained a prologue and/or epilogue which, like the Hammurabi Laws, specied that all the laws listed were for the land: see Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 801, 133, Laws Hammurabi, Prologue, col. 5, ll. 1424 (concluding sentence), and Epilogue, col. 47, ll. 18 (opening sentence), the sentences bracketing the extensive legal decisions.
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them.123 The royal edicts not only paid heavy attention to the land as well, but also clearly distinguished this domain from the markets and citizens of named cities.124 Royal inscriptions also made a priority of having the kings name pronounced throughout the land.125 I have argued elsewhere that the terms land and people were rhetorically paired to articulate an emergent sovereignty of demesne kingship.126 In other words, the term the land was meant to create the sense of a territorial unity, under which formerly self-regulating polities would become parts of a larger, integrated political super-category, under a rather modernsounding notion of state sovereignty. But the reality was that royal control over the land remained something legally and politically distinct from kingship over individual cities. Babylonian kingship had always been a form of authority over cities. The land, by contrast, was a domain without temples and written traditions, thinly adjudicated by ofcials. The promulgations were directed by urban kings at people settled outside the cities, a rallying cry to the hinterlands from the centre. This audience of scattered people and enemies could not be compelled by force alone to belong, but had also to be persuaded that there was plenty in the kings land that they should come to work, eat and live.127 VI
CONCLUSION
The fragmentary ancient record never directly discloses meaning or context to its historian. The past generation of Assyriological scholarship has stripped away the veneer of historicity from much of the ancient Mesopotamian transcript to lay bare the essential character of many seemingly foundational texts as claims of one kind or another, rather than facts. This of course is much in line with work in other historical elds. What has yet to be done as
123 uh 2, t, ba/bb; CDLI year-names: Hammurabi 2; Samsuiluna 2, 3; Abi-es `R-nene of Uruks year bb. Ammiditana 3, 17, 21; AmmiBaduqa 10; note also I 124 Richardson, Trouble in the Countryside, ana tarBi Samsuditana, 2802. 125 See, for example, RIME, iv, 2.9.14, 2.13.7, 3.7.2. 126 Richardson, Trouble in the Countryside, ana tarBi Samsuditana; Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides. 127 In the long term, this effort would collapse as post-Old Babylonian Mesopotamian cities would increasingly insist on exceptional legal identities, separate from the state, articulated through charters of privileged status (kidinnu tu).
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successfully as this process of exposure, however, is to establish what, exactly, claims like these aimed to accomplish and for whom; and what they may dependably tell us about the past. Indeed, it is only in a particularly conceived larger image in which these topics (sections IIV) which make no obvious reference to each other nd their place as parts of a whole. The ground we have covered begins with a disproof of territorial competition as a primary stimulus for interstate warfare. The low level of territorial power that states exercised over hinterlands in fact required them to clash with non-state small places only a few kilometres away even as international competition connected palatial households in Babylonia to peers on the edge of the Mediterranean, in central Anatolia, and all the way out into the Iranian plateau. The simultaneity of same-scale and cross-scale warfare in turn required Mesopotamian states to employ persuasion as well as force for local governance. New claims of de jure sovereignty in a legal voice were the initial steps in a very modern-sounding discourse about the state as the highest and most thoroughgoing arbiter of every activity within its orbit, with the price and wage schedules as major planks in a persuasive campaign that bound together themes of plenty and protection. What gave these efforts force and meaning were the many indications that complex sovereignty was simultaneously imaginable and unachieved. The ingathering of scattered people, the prosecution of small wars, the promise of plenty to those outside the state order, all sought to build clientele for the simple reason that states remained undersubscribed. In these efforts, the community of the early state was much more fully imagined than established, its insufcient sovereignties the sources of its many wants and wishes. That state-building, indeed the building of even the state idea, continued long into the period when state entities were accomplished facts forces us to think about the old ancientsmoderns debate about state power as a matter of different abilities but also as a matter of very similar desires. Oriental Institute, University of Chicago Seth Richardson
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APPENDIX 1 -NA RA TIM ON THE LOCATION OF PI The writing of the place name P -na ra tim displays some variability.128 In Old Babylonian writings, the place is identied only with the determinative /uru/ in year-name formulae, with other text types omitting it and often even the postpositional /ki/129 that is, it seems barely a town at all by conventional standards. Also, its location is disputed. One recent proposal set P -na ra tim in . This would rely north-central Babylonia near the city of Kis n-iq ams second year-name, a on the understanding that S s double-name formula, referred to a single set of related events: Year the cities of P -na ra tim and Nazarum were taken, and the statues of gods were fashioned and brought to Kazallu.130 It has already been suggested, however, that the year-name was a compound form celebrating two different events.131 It can now be shown that the two halves of the formula (that is, the conquest half and the Kazallu half ) do not appear together in any document, unlinking the argument for geographical proximity.132 In fact, during the period 18861808 BC, when the raids of region was not only disLarsa were carried out, the KazalluKis tant from Larsa (c.120 miles), but in no way adjacent to Larsas borders. Any raid by Larsa would have required either passing through the (hostile) territory of the Isin kingdom and/or an
128 -na-ra-tumki Ur III writings include KA-I7.DA, KA-I7.DA-Ummaki and P A 9d); in Old Babylonian: (uru)KA.I7.DA(ki), KA(RGTC, ii; CAD, P, s.v. pu A , A.S ` p -i-na-ra-timki, URUki KA.I7.DA, na-ra-tum, KA-I7.DIDLI.KI, KA I7.HA (ki) and URUki KA.I7.DA. ` D KA-na-ra-tum, KA.I7.DA(ki).ME.ES BA 129 RGTC, ii, 88 and references: Where the determinative [i.e. ki] is missing, no clear distinction between a place name and an appellative is possible. For instance, the (in the north) menexemplum RA 53 289 ( PRAK 2 t32 D12), a letter from Kis tioning a weir at the mouth of the canals, simply refers to a built feature, not a A ` P settlement; similarly YOS 13 271 identies a eld (A.S -na ra timki); the administrative text from southern Kisurra (Kessler No. 129), however, lists KA.I7.DA as a specic town along with other known settlements such as Sabum and Zurbilum. 130 This conjecture that P -na ra tim was in northern Babylonia is modestly supA ` P ported by a reference to an A.S -na ra timk in YOS 13 271, which would indeed : Rosel Pientka, Die spa taltbabylonische Zeit: Abies uh bis probably be a place near Kis Samsuditana. Quellen, Jahresdaten, Geschichte, 2 vols. (Mu nster, 1998), ii, 368. 131 Stol, Studies in Old Babylonian History, 25. 132 Sigrist, Larsa Year Names, 27, comparing variants bg of year-name 2 B to variants a, and cf. Many other year-formulae are, however, genuine double-names, n-iq ams very next year-name. such as S s
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
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incursion deep into territory belonging to the kingdom of Babylon both unlikely options.133 It is thus much more likely in this case that the area proposed by Steinkeller in 2007,134 close to Umma and only 34 miles from Larsa, is the more plausible identication. The location is conrmed by a later letter of Hammurabi of Babylon, who in the 1750s directed his Larsa ad amas -ha ministrator S zir to take water from P -na ra tim if Larsa and Ur (downstream from Larsa) were in need of it.135 The multiple campaigns against P -na ra tim by Larsa seem more credible at this much closer distance, but have troubling implications for the security of a major state close to its capital city. APPENDIX 2 CROSS-SCALE / SAME-SCALE WARFARE IN OLD BABYLONIAN YEAR-NAMES Among the year-name formulae for royal polities of Babylonia in which references to warfare occur, the majority conform to the following pattern: non-royal enemy polities are said to have been seized (dab5) or destroyed (hul) (Type A), while royal polities are .tukul said to have had their armies defeated in battle (ugnim gis `g; literally, [its] army was smitten with weapons), without . . . s mention of the actions location (Type B). At least eighty-nine year-names referring to inter-polity warfare are known between 2014 and 1714 BC from four major and ve minor dynasties.136 Of these, fty-seven are Type A, thirtyone are Type B, and one case is uncertain. In a few cases the formulae deviate slightly from my typology: occasionally, both
133 See maps in Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near region would East (New York, 1990), 109. At various times, a raid on the KazalluKis have required transgressing as many as four enemy states in order to arrive at a northerly P -na ra tim Uruk, Isin, Marad and perhaps also Babylon. 134 Steinkeller, City and Countryside in Third-Millennium Southern Babylonia, 183. 135 AbB, iv, 80: If there truly is water enough for Larsa and Ur, then do not make any arrangements at the mouth of the canals, as I (previously) specied to you. On the other hand, if there really is no water for Larsa and Ur, then undertake appropriate measures at the mouth of the canals so that water becomes available for Larsa and Ur. 136 nunna; minor dynasties Major dynasties include Larsa, Isin, Babylon and Es aduppum, Uzarlulu, Kazallu and Kisurra. include Ischali, S
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actions are claimed,137 other verbs are used,138 the referent is switched,139 or the setting of the action is within a city, but it is the enemy army which is its object.140 It is relatively clear in most cases, however, which type of action is meant. Among Type A cases, the fty-seven year-names include references to the capture or destruction of seventy-four places or more.141 Among these seventy-four places, more than threequarters (sixty) refer to non-royal polities, and only fourteen to cities with convincing evidence for kingship traditions at the time of conquest.142 It must be emphasized that there is relatively little evidence suggesting that these non-royal polities were allies of major states143 or otherwise involved in statestate conicts. Of those fourteen cases, eight belong to the brief terminal phases of peer-state competitions, the decade of Larsas nal triumph over Isin (18031794 BC) and the nine years in which Hammurabi achieved regional supremacy (17641755 BC). Four of the remaining six campaigns were directed against Kazallu in the nineteenth century BC,144 with two other outlying cases.145
137 -la-el of Babylons 20th year-name (CDLI year-names), the For example Su mu `g) of its troops. Here, it is assumed the destruction (hul) of Kazallu and smiting (s latter action was a subset of the former. 138 nunna says in his Year b formula (CDLI year-names) that he Ipiq-Adad II of Es n of Larsa is said to have piled up ku) the town of Unnina; Warad-S killed (the verb da b) of the army of Emutbal; etc. Other variants include no verb [the corpses] (hu tar of Isin h); ga ` r.dar . . . gar (Hammurabi 30); ugnim me ` . . . s ub (Lipit-Is . . . ra (Samsuiluna 14, 20). (Hammurabi 323); sag.gis 139 -la-el of Babylon reports in year 34 (CDLI year-names) that the city of Su mu Malgium (rather than its army) was smitten with weapons; the wall of Kazallu is destroyed in Sabium of Babylons year 12, not the city per se; etc. 140 bi-Erra of Isins 26th year (CDLI year-names) seizing of an For example Is Elamite army in Ur. 141 Sometimes more than one polity is mentioned, and sometimes some indistinction arises as to how many places are meant, for example the cities and land of alibi in year Hammurabi 11 ( 1782 BC): CDLI year-names. Rapiqum and S 142 has been excluded because the only year-names from it already refer to the Kis overlordship of Babylon. 143 Note that the non-royal polities of Type A, for instance, are hardly ever the ones showing up among multi-army Type B victories as lesser allies of major royal powers. 144 -abum 13, Su -la-el 20, Sabium Three by Babylon (CDLI year-names: Su mu mu n 2). Kazallu seems to have been a 12) and one by Larsa (CDLI year-names: Warad-S borderline case, since it is the only early polity which also appears equally among both A and B types (in the latter category, four times between 1891 and 1836 BC). 145 The anomalous other two names include Erra-imittis 1860s BC destruction of Kisurra and Samsuilunas reconquest of Ur, Larsa and Uruk in 1739 BC: CDLI year-names.
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Among the thirty-one Type B cases, the year-names refer to at least forty-six enemy armies, of which thirty-one belonged to royal, urban powers. Fifteen other armies belonged to tribal powers or places without any known royal kingship tradition. In six of those cases, the enemies were listed as the lesser partners of major states, not the primary focus of the celebratory formula.146 Taking the claims of the year-names at face value, wars of territorial acquisition were more common, and typically directed against smaller, non-royal polities; only during the nal phases of longer, strategic conicts were they mostly aimed at major cities. Wars against royal enemies, however, mostly resulted in force reduction or prestige claims. This prole characterizes the period as one simultaneously experiencing peer-state and asymmetric warfare, and not one in which small wars were mostly by-products of statestate conicts as were border wars or the like.
146 n of Larsas elaborate 14th year-name (CDLI year-names), for instance, R m-S celebrated a victory over Uruk, Isin, Babylon, Sutu, Rapiqum and Uruk. In this company, the forces of Sutu and Rapiqum are clearly window-dressing in a list focused on four much larger state armies.

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EARLY MESOPOTAMIA: THE PRESUMPTIVE STATE*

PAST AND PRESENT

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MAP 1. EARLY MESOPOTAMIA Jack Scott, 2010.

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Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, 206.

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NUMBER 215 Yes/Yes No/Yes Yes/No Yes/Yes No/Yes

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