DW | Ancient Babylon
04 – The First Empires

Welcome to the DW World History Series. In the last episode we covered the Early Dynastic Period, from about 2900-2350 B.C. We left off with discussing the differences between northern and southern Babylonia and how the city of Kish functioned as an intermediate point between these two worlds. We begin this episode with the world's first empire: the Akkadian Empire – created by Sargon the Great.
4.1 - Sargon the Great
Born a commoner, according to the Sumerian King List, Sargon rose to power in the city of Kish as a cup-bearer to the king, Ur-Zababa. The royal cup-bearer at this time was in fact a prominent political position, close to the king and with various high level responsibilities not suggested by the title of the position itself. He eventually usurped the throne and moved the center of his rule to Akkad, either an entirely new city, as later sources state, or a place previously of little importance. Although its location is unknown, it certainly was in the very north of Babylonia, perhaps underneath modern Baghdad. This geographical position provided full dominance of the Babylonian heartland and an extensive presence throughout the wider Near East.
Akkad's prominence was attained through its military power. He possibly established a standing army for it was said that “daily 5400 men ate at his presence”. While this does not seem to be the kind of professional army later created by the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III, (as it seems it was neither year-round nor kept in a near constant state of mobilization), it was a great advance over previous armies.
Sargon focused his first conquests in the south of Babylonia, where the city-states of the late Early Dynastic Period had been partly united. He first conquered King Lugal-zagesi, who controlled Uruk, Umma, and several other cities that gave him final control over the entire region. Sargon then set out to build an empire that stretched beyond Mesopotamia. He crossed the Tigris River and defeated the Elamites and then fought his way north to Mari. After conquering this city, he pushed further into the land of the Amorites, taking the city of Ashur, which was only a small location up to this point. Sargon would go on to capture Nineveh before possibly invading Asia Minor and Cyprus. As a gesture of total conquest, he washed his weapons in the sea, thus marking it as a boundary of his realm. This act would be repeated by later conquerors.
During this time, Sargon instituted military practices of combining different types of fighting forces in looser formations (to enable greater mobility and adaptability on the field) which became standard down through the time of Alexander the Great.
In order to maintain power, Sargon placed his best and most trusted men in positions of power throughout the region. The historian author Susan Bauer noted, “In this kingdom, the Sumerians rapidly found themselves living as foreigners in their own cities... When Sargon took over a city, it became an Akkadian stronghold, staffed with Akkadian officials and garrisoned with Akkadian troops.”
Attempting to obtain stability, Sargon installed his daughter as high priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur, where she was made the god's wife. For that function, she received a purely Sumerian name, Enheduanna, “priestess fitting for heaven.” Thus, an Akkadian princess was placed in one of the main Sumerian centers of the south.
As a side note, she would become the author of several literary compositions, making her the first identifiable author in world literature. For the next 500 years, control of the high priesthood of Nanna at Ur would lock in political prominence in Babylonia. Any ruler who could claim authority in Ur installed his daughter there, giving her access to the temple's considerable economic assets. Sargon's grandson, Naram-Sin, expanded this policy by placing several of his daughters as high priestesses of prominent cults in other Babylonian cities, which was a clear attempt to gain a solid foothold throughout the region.
The stability provided by the Akkadian Empire gave rise to the construction of roads, improved irrigation, a wider sphere of influence in trade, as well as developments in the arts and sciences. Sargon standardized weights and measurements for use in trade and daily commerce. He also initiated a system of taxation, in which part of the income of each region was siphoned off and sent to the capital or used to support the local Akkadian administration.
Even with these improvements to the lives of the citizens of Mesopotamia, the people still rebelled against Akkadian rule. Throughout his life, Sargon would continue to encounter uprisings as city-states asserted their autonomy and rose against the empire. Even in his old age, Sargon fought back and won:
“In my old age of 55, all the lands revolted against me, and they besieged me in Agade, but the old lion still had teeth and claws. I went forth to battle and defeated them. I knocked them over and destroyed their vast army. Now any king who wants to call himself my equal, wherever I went, let him go!”
According to the Sumerian King List, Sargon reigned for 56 years and died in old age of natural causes. If he had seemed larger than life to his people during his reign, he assumed an almost god-like status in death.
4.2 - Rimush and Manishtushu
The difficulties experienced by Sargon toward the end of his reign broke out again during the nine year reign of his son Rimush, who fought hard to retain the empire, and was successful until he was assassinated by some of his own courtiers.
Rimush was succeeded by his elder brother, Manishtushu, who led a fleet of ships down the Persian Gulf where thirty-two kings allied to fight him. Manishtushu was victorious and consequently looted their cities and silver mines. During his reign, he also sailed a fleet down the Tigris River and traded with thirty-seven different nations. Like his brother, he too was assassinated by members of his own court and was succeeded by his son, Naram-Sin.
4.3 - Naram-Sin
Once in power, Naram-Sin expanded the Akkadian Empire by defeating the northern hill tribes in the Zagros, Taurus, and Amanus Mountains, thus stretching his boundaries up to the Mediterranean Sea and Armenia. This far-reaching influence of the dynasty had a great effect on how the kings perceived themselves.
Already under Sargon, the traditional title “King of Kish” came to mean “King of the World”. Naram-Sin took such self-glorification to an extreme. First, he introduced a new title, “King of the Four Corners (of the Universe)”. Then, after crushing a major rebellion in Babylonia, which included even Kish, he took the unprecedented step in Mesopotamian history of making himself a god. Earlier Kings had been offered a cult after death, but Naram-Sin received one while still alive.
Naram-Sin's godly status is best revealed in his victory stele, a 2-meter high stone carved in bas-relief depicting the king leading his troops in battle while in the mountains. He dominates the composition in a pose of grandeur, and is much larger than those around him. Wearing the insignia of royalty – bow, arrow, battleaxe – he is also crowned with the symbol of divinity, the horned helmet.
Stylistic changes originating in the reign of Sargon culminated in amazing refinement, naturalism, and spontaneity during Naram-Sin's reign. The copper Bassetki Statue (bearing the text regarding Naram-Sin's deification), for example, shows great naturalism in the representation of the human body. It represents a technological breakthrough too, as it was made through the lost wax technique, a technique long credited to the Classical Greeks.
The Bassetki Statue was found in the 1960s in the village of Bassetki, in northern Iraq. The statue was cast from pure copper with only the lower part of a human figure preserved. An Akkadian inscription on the pedestal indicated that the statue once stood in the doorway of Naram-Sin's palace. This statue was among the many artifacts that were looted from the Iraq Museum during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
During the theft, it was dropped several times, since it weighed 330 pounds, which damaged the floor of the museum. It was listed as #2 on a list of the 30 most wanted antiquities that were stolen. Its recovery came about after the American 812th Military Police Company raided a house and arrested three people in October 2003. They revealed the location of the Bassetki statue, which turned out to be coated in axle grease and hidden in a cesspool. It was subsequently fished out and returned to the Museum.
4.4 - The Decline and Fall of the Akkadian Empire
Opposition to Akkad in Babylonia was a consistent feature of the period, and it may have been the main cause for its failure. The most elaborate description of an uprising was during the reign of Naram-Sin when he was confronted by two coalitions of Babylonian cities: a northern group led by the King of Kish and a southern group led by the King of Uruk. The idea of centralized rule was so intolerable that even the region near the capital participated in the opposition to Akkad. The number of rebel cities was great, not a single major city was absent. Naram-Sin claimed victory, however, in a quick succession of battles.
The real threat to the Akkadian Empire began during the reign of Naram-Sin's son, Sharkalisharri. This came from the mountain people in the east, known as the Gutians, whose homeland was most likely in the Zagros Mountains. In Sharkalisharri's time, they appeared in increasing numbers in Babylonia as settlers, necessitating the appointment of a Gutian interpreter in Adab. While they primarily seem to have entered Babylonia in the process of migration, their arrival there was not always peaceful. Sharkalisharri fought them in an unknown location, and we have at least one letter where they are accused of cattle-rustling.
The combination of internal and external pressures led to a rapid collapse of the Akkadian state during Sharkalisharri's reign. The entire Near East reverted to a system of independent states, some of them now governed by new populations. In Babylonia, the Gutians took over several city-states and presented themselves as the heirs to the Akkadian dynasty. They did not supplant Akkad, however, as several independent city-rulers existed alongside them. Best known is the city of Lagash, where a local dynasty left numerous statues and inscriptions of a king called Gudea, whose images are among the masterpieces of third-millennium Mesopotamian art. In the city of Akkad itself, a local dynasty continued to rule. The situation was so confused that the Sumerian King List exclaims: “Who was king? Who was not king?”
Little is known about the Gutian period. Cuneiform sources from this dark age suggest that the Gutians showed little concern for maintaining agriculture, written records, or public safety. They released all the farm animals to roam about Mesopotamia freely, and soon brought about famine and soaring grain prices.
The return to centralized rule was most likely begun about 40 years after the death of King Sharkalisharri. The governor of Uruk, Utu-hengal, led the cities of Sumer against the last Gutian king, Tirigan. After defeating and expelling the Gutians from southern Babylonia, he established himself as king of Sumer and instantly became one of the greatest heroes of the Sumerian people. He ruled for about seven years until he tragically died in an accident while inspecting a dam. He was succeeded by his son-in-law, Ur-Nammu, the governor of Uruk.
4.5 - Ur-Nammu
Around 2100 B.C., Ur-Nammu established the Third Dynasty of Ur (also known as the Neo-Sumerian Empire). This would be the last Sumerian dynasty to come to power in Mesopotamia, and involved a succession of five generations of rulers from the same family. According to the Sumerian King List, it was the third time that Ur held kingship, thus the modern designation.
Ur-Nammu rose to prominence as a warrior-king when he defeated the ruler of Lagash in Battle, killing the king himself. After this battle, Ur-Nammu seems to have earned the title “king of Sumer and Agade”.
Ur's dominance over the Neo-Sumerian Empire was consolidated with the famous Code of Ur-Nammu, probably the first such law-code for Mesopotamia since that of Urukagina of Lagash centuries earlier. His law code is specifically the oldest known surviving example in the world.
The law code was written on cuneiform tablets in the Sumerian language and provided a list of laws 300 years before the famous Code of Hammurabi. These laws, which are arranged in (crime) then (punishment) format, instituted fines for monetary compensation for bodily damage as opposed to the later 'eye for an eye' principle of Babylonian law. However, murder, robbery, adultery, and rape were capital offenses.
During Ur-Nammu's reign, he ordered the construction of the Great Ziggurat of Ur. He dedicated this massive temple to the Sumerian god Nanna. A quick side note about the god – born to the gods Enlil and Ninlil, Nanna became known to the Semitics as the god Sin. He was the god of the moon who was also the protector of shepherds. To the Semitics, he was later considered the supreme god, the creator of all things.
The Great Ziggurat of Ur measured 210 feet long, 148 feet wide, and roughly 100 feet high. This step pyramid was completed during the reign of Ur-Nammu's son, Shulgi, and served as part of the administrative center for the city.
Ur-Nammu was killed in combat, abandoned by the fleeing army, in yet another battle with the Gutians, but the dynasty he created would last for almost a hundred years.
4.6 - Shulgi
Shortly after his father's death, Shulgi engaged in a series of punitive wars against the Gutians to avenge his father. He would rule for 48 years, and would be best known for his extensive revision of the scribal school's curriculum. In addition to construction of defensive walls against the mountainous tribes and the completion of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, Shulgi spent a great deal of time and resources in expanding, maintaining, and generally improving the roads constructed by his father. He built rest-houses along these roads so that travelers could find a place to rest and sleep for the night. He may have been the first builder of the Inn.
Shulgi also boasted about his ability to run long distances and claimed in his 7th regnal year to have run from Nippur to Ur, a distance of over 100 miles. Author Samuel Kramer refers to Shulgi as “the first long distance running champion” in his book called History Begins at Sumer.
Shulgi appears to have had some difficulty with a few of the temple authorities throughout his empire. The city of Der had been one of the locations he had first promoted in the beginning of his reign. However, in his 20th year, he decided to punish the authorities while claiming that the gods had decided the temple needed to be destroyed. Shulgi proclaimed himself a god in his 23rd regnal year. Early writings about Shulgi criticized his moral character claiming that he had criminal tendencies and had tampered with the religious rites while composing untruthful stelae. The specific details of these accusations remain unknown.
4.7 - Fall of Ur III
With the death of Shulgi, the empire began to decline. His son, Amar-Sin attempted to regenerate the ancient sites of Sumer and worked on the unfinished Ziggurat at Eridu, however, Eridu was abandoned later in his reign due to the agricultural problems in the region. Amar-Sin most likely died from a scorpion bite to his foot and the throne passed to his brother, Shu-Sin. He would build a fortified wall between the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers in his 4th year to hold off the Amorites who began threatening his kingdom. His son, Ibbi-Sin, would succeed him and become the last king of the Ur III Dynasty.
Ibbi-Sin ordered fortifications around the cities of Ur and Nippur in hopes of stalling the Amorite raids, however, this failed, along with his ability to properly lead the empire. As a result, Elam revolted and began to raid the country as well. Due to a possible long-term drought, along with the Amorite raids to the agricultural and irrigation systems, grain prices soared to 60 times the norm. This produced a famine and resulted in an economic collapse of the Empire. In the end, Ibbi-Sin was left with only the city of Ur.
The Elamites and the Zagros mountain tribes sacked the city of Ur and took Ibbi-Sin captive. He was transported to the city of Elam where he was imprisoned and, at an unknown date, died.
After this victory, the Elamites destroyed the kingdom and ruled through a military occupation for the next 21 years. Mesopotamia then fell under Amorite influence through the kings of the dynasty of Isin who formed successor states to the Ur III Dynasty. They managed to drive the Elamites out of Ur, rebuild the city, and return the statue of Nanna that the Elamites had plundered. In the end, Mesopotamia returned to multiple city-states that were spread from western Iran to the Mediterranean coast. Their rulers, all military men, vied for power, joined in ever shifting alliances, and turned against one another.
We'll discuss this period of Mesopotamian history in further detail throughout the next episode.
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