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Ancient Babylon – Early Dynastic Period

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DW | Ancient Babylon

03 – Early Dynastic Period

 
 

Welcome to the DW World History Series. In the last episode we covered the fourth millennium, roughly between 3500-3000 B.C. with the origins of the city-state. We begin this episode with a focus on Babylonia during the Early Dynastic Period, from 2900-2350 B.C.

 
 

At the end of the Uruk Period, around 3100 B.C., the cultural influence of Babylon over the Near East declined. There was a reversion to local traditions throughout the region and certain skills, such as writing, became rare outside Southern Mesopotamia. In the south itself, however, the written sources increased in number, enabling us to study political and cultural developments in much greater detail than before. Here, the political situation was characterized by the existence of city-states constantly interacting and competing with one another. After several centuries, cultural contacts between Babylonia and the rest of the Near East reemerged.

 

3.1 - Political Developments in Southern Mesopotamia

 

The basic element of the political organization of Babylonia at this time was the city-state: defined as an urban center directly controlling a hinterland with a radius of about 15 kilometers, where people lived in villages. There city-states relied heavily on agriculture, and as a result, had to be near rivers in order to irrigate their crops.


Located primarily along the Euphrates River, they learned to develop relatively short canals in order to expand their needs. Throughout Babylonia about thirty-five city-states existed, more or less evenly divided over the region. The steppe lay between the cultivated and permanently inhabited zones and was used for seasonal animal herding and hunting. This area was only indirectly controlled by the urban centers.


In the early third millennium, Babylonia experienced a general population growth which was possibly accelerated by immigration or by the settling down of semi-nomadic groups. There was a regional trend toward urbanism with the cities and the villages surrounding them becoming larger in size. The smaller hamlets seemed to have disappeared. The city-states at first were located at sufficient distance from one another, but the increased population necessitated an extension of the cultivated areas and the borders began to overlap. This process may have been aggravated by a gradual drying of the climate, causing a lowering of the sea levels and a retrenchment of the rivers into fewer branches.


A fundamental element in the Mesopotamian ideology was the concept that each city was the dwelling place of a particular god or goddess. Cities were thought to have been developed in primordial times for the gods, each of whom acted as their patron deities (ex. Nanna for Ur, Inanna for Uruk, and Enlil for Nippur). This concept was linked to the role of the temple. The temple’s function as collector and distributor of agricultural resources was founded in the ideology that the god received them as gifts and redistributed them to the people. As a result, the head of the temple administration served as leader in the city and the temple became the largest structure, sometimes built on an earthen platform towering over the other buildings.


The gods were imagined as living in a world parallel to that of humans, so each god had a household, spouse, children, and servants. These dependent deities also had smaller temples and shrines in the cities, sized according to their status, and each city had a multitude of temples.


With the expansion of the city-states, competition for the remaining open areas developed and soon led to wars for cultural land. A leader’s military, rather than cultic role, became of primary importance in such situations. As in the later Sumerian stories reflecting on this period, the people granted a war leader authority on a temporary basis only. In a moment of crisis, the popular assembly elected a strong man as leader, while that body controlled his movements. This system has been called “primitive democracy” and may have eventually led to a dynastic system under which rule was passed on from father to son.


In the Early Dynastic Period, we see the first appearance of the palace, identifiable as such by its residential plan. Moreover, documents of the time mention a new central institution – “The Great House” – which in later periods clearly refers to the royal household. This is distinct from the “House of the City of god”, the temple.


The city-state Lagash during this period seems to document the attempt to harmonize the two bases of power. The last independent head of state in the Early Dynastic Period, around 2400 B.C., was a usurper by the name Urukagina. Early in his reign he proclaimed a reorganization of the state, ostensibly removing control over the agricultural land from himself and his family and granting it to the city-god and his family. However, he retained this property, along with other sources of wealth, by changing the household of his wife to the household of the city’s goddess. As king and war leader, Urukagina transferred the ownership of land and estates to the city-god and his family, while in practice, he and his own family members were trying to dominate the god’s estates. The king ruled by divine favor, but he was totally in control of the god’s earthly possessions, so any prior distinction between secular and divine authority had disappeared. Urukagina’s measures turned out to be short-lived, but the merging of divine and earthly authority was not. Later kings all proclaimed that their powers derived from the gods, but they controlled temple property and the actual basis of their power was their military skill.

 
 

3.2 - The Sumerian King List

 

The written sources for the study of this period cover a variety of genres. Administrative documents continue to dominate in number, but we also have political narratives written for some rulers of the period and later literary materials that relate stories about others. Among the later Mesopotamian texts that deal with the Early Dynastic Period, the Sumerian King List is perhaps the most important.

The text is known only from manuscripts dating to the first centuries of the second millennium, almost 700 years after the Early Dynastic Period. It depicts a world in which kingship “descended from heaven” and was passed on from city to city whose local dynasties held temporary rule over the entire region. A typical segment reads as follows:


“At Ur, Mesannepada was king; he ruled 80 years. Meski’agnuna, son

of Mesannepada, was king; he ruled 36 years; Elulu ruled 25 years;

Balulu ruled 36 years; four kings ruled 177 years. Ur was defeated in

battle and its kingship was taken to Awan.”


Chronically, the Sumerian King List addresses the period from the moment kingship first appeared, before the flood, to the dynasty of Isin (about 1900 B.C.). In the segment that covers the Early Dynastic Period, the city-states mentioned are primarily located in Babylonia, giving special attention to the cities Ur, Uruk, and Kish. Also included are three non-Babylonian cities, Awan in the east, Hamazi in the north, and Mari in the west.


From other evidence, we know that some of the kings listed consecutively ruled concurrently. The text enumerates them sequentially because the main ideological focus was that there was only one divinely legitimized ruler at a time, and that this divinely inspired kingship circulated among a restricted number of cities.


Incorporated in it were dynastic lists of kings from different cities and the number of years they ruled. The accuracy of the later parts can be checked against information from dated economic documents. The earlier parts of the Sumerian King List are legendary, however, assigning impossibly long reigns of thousands of years to mythological figures. In its final version, the King List was used by the kings of the Isin Dynasty to legitimize their claim to supreme power in Babylonia, even though they did not politically control the entire area covered by the King List.

 
 

3.3 - The Umma-Lagash Border Conflict

 

The increased competition over land among city-states is first demonstrated in detail during the border conflict between the city-states Umma and Lagash. Over a period of 150 years, from about 2500-2350 B.C., the kings of Lagash provided their accounts of this dispute while portraying themselves as deputies acting on behalf of the gods. According to these Lagash accounts, the chief god Enlil in the distant past had demarcated the border between the two states. The inscriptions acknowledge that the act had historically been performed by a king of Kish called, Mesalim, who would have lived around 2600 B.C. Even at this early time, the two city-states already had competing claims and recourse to outside arbitration. The sequence of events is difficult to establish, as only one view is documented. Whenever Lagash was strong, it tried to enforce its rule over the disputed land. Successive kings stated that the army of Lagash defeated Umma’s rulers, but the conflict persisted over several centuries, which shows how inconclusive these battles really were.


Not all interactions between states were hostile, however. The royal houses communicated with one another as equals and had diplomatic relations, often with the exchange of gifts. These city-states often grouped themselves in various coalitions in order to stand up to one another. Around 2400 B.C., for example, a king of Uruk claimed kingship over Ur, a city 50 kilometers to the south. The process of conquest and unification culminated at the end of the Early Dynastic Period when the king of Umma, Lugal-zagesi, conquered Ur and Uruk and then defeated Urukagina of Lagash, thus taking control of the entire south of Babylonia and creating the first documented kingdom to encompass all of Sumer.


Before losing to Lugal-zagesi, Urukagina may have created the first example of a legal code in recorded history. This code sought to achieve a higher level of freedom and equality among his people and limited the power of the priesthood and large property owners. He states,


“The widow and the orphan were no longer at the mercy of the powerful man.”


Although the actual text has not been discovered, much of its content may be surmised from other references to it that have been found. In this code, Urukagina exempted widows and orphans from taxes, compelled the city to pay for funeral expenses, and forced the rich to use silver when purchasing from the poor while at the same time, denying the rich to force the poor to sell if they did not wish to do so.


There existed an overarching sense of religious unity that joined the cities of Babylon together. This is already attested around 3000 B.C., as discussed in the last episode, when multiple cities looked to the oldest urban center, Uruk, as their religious capital. Here, various cities supported the cult of the goddess Inanna.


At some point in the Early Dynastic Period, the focus of the cult of Uruk shifted to the city of Nippur, in the center of Babylonia. Each Babylonian city was the domain of a god, who resided there with his or her family of deities. These divine families were joined together in a common Babylonian pantheon that, by the Late Early Dynastic Period, was headed by Enlil, patron of the city of Nippur. He had supreme power in the divine world and demarcated, for example, the border between Umma and Lagash according to the descriptions of the war between the two cities. Enlil’s city, Nippur, attained a unique status that was to last until the eighteenth-century B.C. In the late third millennium all Babylonian cities were to provide support for its cult, and in the early second millennium, political control over it gave a king the right to claim sovereign rule. Somehow the priesthood of this militarily unimportant city had the authority to grant a special status to one of the many competitors. They seem to have had this power already in the early dynastic times, when kings of Adab, Kish, Lagash, Umma, and Uruk left short inscriptions at Nippur, suggesting that they sought to curry favor with its priesthood.

 
 

3.4 - Writing and Language

 

During the Early Dynastic Period, the recently invented technology of writing evolved both in its ability to render spoken languages and in the extent of information it could provide. Writing is also the most eloquent indication at this time of the existence of a cultural unity in the Near East inspired by Southern Mesopotamian traditions. Scribal techniques and text genres used throughout the region were all developed in Babylonia. This techniques of writing, called cuneiform, was exported to Syria and Northern Mesopotamia when urban cultures developed there. Northern Babylonian Kish was very important, as was Mari on the middle Euphrates, which may have provided training to Syrian scribes. These people employed the same scribal practices, shaping their clay tablets similarly, writing the same cuneiform signs, and organizing them in the same way. Those from western Syria read the same texts as those in southern Iraq. Although united intellectually, politically they were separate, living in independent city-states.


We can state with certainty that at least two languages were spoken in Babylonia during the Early Dynastic Period: Sumerian and a Semitic language sometimes referred to as Proto-Akkadian. These two languages were very different in character, but they shared some vocabulary, and Sumerian grammar influenced Akkadian, which indicates that the same groups of people used them at the same time. Members of the two linguistic groups lived side by side. Again, this reflects that Babylonia was culturally connected while being politically divided.

 
 

3.5 - Northern Mesopotamia

 

The agricultural regime of Northern Mesopotamia and Syria differed from that of the south in that it relied on rainfall, rather than river irrigation for growing crops. Larger areas had to be cultivated to feed the same number of people, and as a result, the cities in the north tended to be smaller than those in the south, with more of the population living in outlying villages. These cities were also more secular. Unlike in the south, where temples were the central and foremost institutions, palaces usually dominated the cityscapes. These cities were the centers of small states incorporating the surrounding countryside where villagers farmed. Settlements in the states were more spread out than in the south and the hinterlands were larger. They were still in constant contact with one another. Kings and other foreign state representatives were often visitors at temple sacrifices and diplomatic marriages, where gifts were exchanged. Warfare was also a part of these contacts. Ebla had a long-lasting conflict with Mari, probably for control over the trade route to Babylonia, and for some time had to pay a heavy tribute.


The political organization of the north, a much larger area than Babylonia, was still similar to the south in some ways. Urban centers were the seats of power that dominated the surrounding countryside, even if the northern states were geographically larger. The city of Kish, in the far north of Babylonia, functioned as an intermediate point between these two worlds. It maintained closed contacts with both the northern and southern states and may have had a political organization that was based more on secular than on religious power.


It is perhaps unsurprising then, that a man from Kish, Sargon, would rise to power and upset the entire system. We discuss the creation of his empire in the next episode.

 

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