2012 Presumptive State

EARLYMESOPOTAMIA: THEPRESUMPTIVE STATE*

Iwill proceed withmy history, telling the story as I go along of small citiesno less than of great . . . Since I know thatmans good fortune never abidesin the same place, I will make mention of both alike.

Herodotus, Histories, I. 5. 3.

I

INTRODUCTION

Our earliest account of Mesopotamian state origins comes fromtheSumerianKingList, compiled around2000 BC,whichblandlyconfines its aetiology to: When kingship descended fromheaven,the kingshipwas in the city of Eridu. The time towhich it alludes,the Uruk period of more than a thousand years before, saw thesimultaneous appearance in southern Mesopotamia of massiveurbanism, writing technologies, and institutional political au-thority the cultural assemblage of an early pristine state.Although modern interpreters of this florescence at first definedit primarily in ideological termsas, for example, the SumerianTemple State model the last fifty years of scholarship haveturned squarely to explanatory models that focus on the synergyof man and his landscape: hydraulic management, storage

* Earlier references to this work were to the title BrushWars and BullWages. I amindebted to Abbas Alizadeh, Dan Arnold, Steven Garfinkle, Maynard Maidman,David Owen, Susan Pollock, Eric Slauter and Konrad Volk for their thoughtful com-ments 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 willbe abbreviated as follows: Douglas Frayne, Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, EarlyPeriods, iv,OldBabylonianPeriod (20031595BC) (Toronto, 1990), hereafterRIME, iv;D. O. Edzard and G. Farber, Repertoire geographique des textes cuneiformes, ii,Die Orts-und Gewassernamen der Zeit der 3. Dynastie von Ur (Wiesbaden, 1974), hereafterRGTC, ii; Brigitte Groneberg, Repertoire geographique des textes cuneiformes, iii, DieOrts- und Gewassernamen der altbabylonischen Zeit (Wiesbaden, 1980), hereafterRGTC, iii. The series Altbabylonische Briefe in Umschrift und Ubersetzung (Leiden: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); andK. R. Veenhof, xiv (2005). References to CDLI year-names correspondto the website of Marcel Sigrist and Peter Damerow,5http://cdli.ucla.edu/tools/yearnames4; ETCSL corresponds to Jeremy A. Black et al., The Electronic TextCorpus of Sumerian Literature (Oxford, 1998 ),5http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/4.

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economies, environmental circumscription, and so forth. Therecan be no doubt that the built landscape andmeans of productionwere chief concerns of early managerial polities, but the rapiddevelopment of the technological capacities of these early politieshas led to the terminological supposition that something calledthe state, as idea and entity, had therefore emerged just as sud-denly and as permanently.But early states were incomplete. Less than the sum of their

attributes, Mesopotamian polities were more aspirational thanoperational in their geographic, legal and communitarian sover-eignty.Notwithstanding, theiraspirationstosovereigntywereveryreal from a remarkably early stage, even though state powers re-mained incipient and unaccomplished for millennia. In this ap-parent paradox lies the occasion for this essay: even the highlyselective types of claimsmadebyearly states reveal their simultan-eous deployment of both persuasion and force not as fully re-alized powers, but as a cohering discourse of desire. Althoughearly states were weak, they were presumptive of an integratedsovereign authority not normally held to be conceived of until themodern period.1 In seeing the ambition of ancient states to ap-propriate and build authority in the very act of claiming it, I arguethat early polities can be usefully apprehended in terms normallyreserved for modern states, not because their powers were moreextensive, integrated or accomplished than has previously beenthought they were not but because their aspirations were.The historical periods under discussion are:

Late Uruk c.35003100 BCEarly Dynastic c.29002334 BCAkkadian 23342193 BCUr III 21122004 BCOld Babylonian2 20041595 BCKassite / 14751155 BCMiddle Babylonian 1155627 BCNeo-Babylonian 626539 BCPersian 539331 BC

1 Modern nation-state sovereignty as accomplished and transhistorical might beequally presumptive, though, given the endurance of regressive problems such asfailed states, non-state actors, military and criminal states within states and unre-solved borderlines, as well as progressive institutions representing transnational andglobal interests such as trade organizations, criminal courts and aid groups.

2 Mesopotamian archaeologists subdivide this period into an IsinLarsa phase forthe first two centuries and an Old Babylonian phase for the next two centuries. Themeaning of the latter term may thus differ from work to work.

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My analysis focuses on the periods during which states firstcohered 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 betweengreat states, but between great states andmiddle-tier (minor king-doms) and lower-tier (non-state actors) political orders. Intercitywarfare and the international scene have always enjoyed the lionsshare of Assyriological attention, but the records of those verysame urban states just as often focused on tribal hinterlandsand unnamed clusters of villages. Minor kingship and smallwars have remained under-conceptualized and largely unexam-ined, despite their modal positions in the power spectrum andrecord of conflict. A new interpretative strategy focusing on theseforms reveals a longue duree quite different from that suggestedby narratives of great-states-in-conflict: despite an impressive

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political apparatus of international diplomats, treaties, epistol-ary protocols, spies and field armies, the full control of earlystates over their own rural zones and border marches remainedan unfinished project more than a millennium after they firstappeared.3

The governing assumption has been that small wars were sec-ondary phenomena produced by major-state warfare, but this isnot necessarily warranted. The idea descends from a frameworkwhich has, caveats notwithstanding, implicitly modelled ancientstate systems as having substantially accomplished uniform ter-ritorial control, legally constituted political rule, and politicalmembership identities by the end of the Early Dynastic period(around the twenty-fifth century BC). But there is a problem withthis model. It is not so much that modernist approaches are in-applicable to antiquity. After all, the points made below aboutunfinished states may equally well apply to the contemporarystate system: political scientists have been increasingly uncertainabout the position of the state and the nation as transhistoricalforms, speaking of the defective or insecure state and of anincomplete modernity,4 even as they recognize governancefunctions in non-state organizations as exemplified in Hezbol-lahs organization of the collection of municipal waste, in thesemi-autonomy of Brazilian favelas, and in the provision ofsecurity by Somali or Afghani warlords.

3 See Seth Richardson, The World of Babylonian Countrysides, in GwendolynLeick (ed.), The Babylonian World (London, 2007); cf. Steven Grosby, Borders,Territory and Nationality in the Ancient Near East and Armenia, Jl Econ. andSocial Hist. of the Orient, xl (1997), who asserts (p. 26): if certain anachronistic as-sumptions are laid to rest such as political and legal standardsbounded, nationalentitieswould in fact be visible in the ancient record, collectivities of nativity foundedin (self-/group-)consciousness under which territory is a constitutive referent of thatrelation.Thedrawback of this carefully articulated view, inmyopinion, is that it tendsto accept evidence linking territoriality and identity as descriptive and accomplished,whereas I see it as idealizing and unachieved.

4 RolandAxtmann, The State of the State: TheModel of theModern State and itsContemporary Transformation, Internat. Polit. Science Rev., xxv (2004); RosaEhrenreich Brooks, Failed States, or the State as Failure?, Univ. of Chicago LawRev., lxxii (2005); Stephen J. Del Rosso Jr, The Insecure State: Reflections on theState and Security in a ChangingWorld,Daedalus, cxxiv, 2 (1995); Richard Falk,Revisiting Westphalia, Discovering Post-Westphalia, Jl Ethics, vi (2002); CharlesTilly, 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 pre-sumes state sovereignty and focuses on international competitionhas four main defects: it eclipses the substantial, ongoing role ofsub- andnon-state actors; it ignores the developmental andmain-tenance issues of conflict and consensus in ancient states; it rele-gates internal state competition and persuasion to the prehistoricera; and it valorizes state-to-state peer competition as the singularconcern of historic periods.What does such amodel cost us?Wemiss the slow,millennium-

long development of state systems as they continued to competeinternally for clientele, while simultaneously struggling externallyto achieve regional primacy and dominance over peer states.The historiographic root of the problem is located in the uncrit-ical reproduction of an ancient analytic binary construction oflands and peoples, with resulting anachronisms when theseare mapped onto modern conceptions of territorial competition.At its heart, the disconnect between scholars and their evidencehas been a disposition to regard the early state as being instan-tiated geographically rather than politically, andmaterially ratherthan ideologically.5

Accordingly, state relations have been seen as rooted in terri-torial competition for land rather than in political competition forconstituencies. A scarcity of land has at times been argued to havebeen an important factor in the development of the Greek poleis6

5 Two important attempts to rectify this view are Adam T. Smiths recentArchaeologies 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 andSociety in Ancient Greece (Publications of the Association of Ancient Historians, ix,Claremont, Calif., 2008), ch. 4; Francois de Polignac, Cults, Territory, and the Originsof the Greek City-State, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago, 1995), 6. These views are tem-pered, however, by references to socio-economic disparities rather than outright scar-city of resources. RobinOsborne,Greece in theMaking, 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 readilyavailable to those who had the labour available to make use of it, and communitiesincreasingly needed to keep up their size in order to maintain status in a world wherecompetition between individuals and groups was becoming regular. In these circum-stances, the fact that people left their home community to settle abroad is not a meas-ure 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 Medi-terranean World,Mediterranean Hist. Rev., xviii (2003).



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an important comparative case and a concern for bordersand sovereignty indeed pervades the Babylonian record.7 ButBabylonias surfeit of land and dearth of labour points to pol-itical control as being structured primarily by states needs forclients and constituents and for their labour not by a needfor land. The local skirmishes of the Old Babylonian periodare thus misunderstood when they are viewed as border con-flicts, mere by-products of competition between territorialstates. Rather, they should be seen as a recrudescence of anepochal competition for the allegiance of rural and non-stateconstituencies which were increasing in number during thistime.With a view to developing the foregoing theses, I consider

several different historical problems of the Mesopotamian stateand land which have not before been treated together. Theseissues, I suggest, are together revealing of prevailing social for-mations in early polities, and help make sense of discrepancies inthe records which have for decades attracted comment but in-adequate explanations from specialists. Thus in section II, I de-velop a critical historiographic review of a model of territorialsovereignty suggested by the mid third millennium BC LagasUmma border conflict. Here I establish that early states inter-ests and abilities to control territory have been overstated andthat we should presume a low-power model for early statesovereignty.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 competi-tion for clientele (for hearts, minds and bodies) rather than forland. The aim of section III is to reinterpret the nineteenth-/eighteenth-century BC prosecution of small wars against littlekingdoms as normative rather than exceptional; I contend thatstate control over even very local geography was still unaccom-plished deep into the historical period.Building on this observation, section IV juxtaposes the small

wars problem with the discourses by which urban states

7 Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, 206.



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structured their political relationship to small places. Theidentity of lower-tier political units as both enemies (that is,security threats) and scattered people (that is, clientele to berecruited and organized) represents an ambivalent strategyto herd non-state clients into state orders by both force andpersuasion. This properly reorients early state political economyand competition as focused on building clientage, not landholdings.Finally, section V looks at the development of the royal legal

voice in theOldBabylonianperiod as part of a broader discourseof persuasion. This voice included the persuasive mechanisms ofpromulgated law-codes and the rhetorical claims of the Crown tobe the arbiter and guarantor of order and social justice. I also linkto these a particular group of edicts for the land, part of the royalpretension to control economic activity legally. This argumentwould give a larger context to Mesopotamian law, seeing eventhe ages most famous monument, the Code of Hammurabi, asrepresentative of a set of powers that the state desired andcould even develop conceptually to degrees of high complexityand specificity without yet having the ability to operate orimpose them.Informing my consideration of all these cases is one basic his-

toriographic premise, that political and ideological forces havebeen subordinated to economic ones as explanatory devices forthe organization of early states, and that a kind of bigotry aboutpolitical-economic primitivism for antiquity inheres in that sub-ordination. A presumption of political sophistication presents uswith rather a different view: we see the early state as ideationallycomplex and ambitious, despite its limitations of manpower, re-sources and technologies.Much of this argument is supported bybringing to bear a reading of the cuneiform record that movesaway from seeing texts as descriptive of facts and towards a his-torical view of the evidence as dependable mostly in representingclaims. But there is a historical argument here too: state formationwas not an event simply accomplished at any one point, but anongoing project well into the historic periods indeed a projectunbroken and unfinished between antiquity and modernity. Abreaking-up of this distinction, I hope, should help reopen amore nuanced and enriched dialogue about antiquitys placewithin the historical disciplines.



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II

THE EARLY DYNASTIC PARADIGM

Standing at the opening of the Mesopotamian historical narra-tive, the LagasUmma Border Conflict8 has become emblem-atic for seeing early state development as an outcome ofcompetition for agricultural land demanded by expanding popu-lations.9 The foundational power of the story derives in part fromits position as the earliest continuous account of political eventsin human history. The narrative can be pieced together fromeighteen royal inscriptions preserved on clay cones, stone stelae,statues and boulders from the twenty-fifth and the twenty-fourthcenturies BC. These show a 150-year-long military conflict be-tween Lagas and Umma, two adjacent Sumerian city states, forcontrol of a highly productive 50-kilometre borderland centredon amassive field called theGuedenna (the edge of the steppe).Seven separate battles are documented, of which only the earliestand briefest account does not mention the border as the objectof contention. The story is woefully lopsided virtually all oursources come from the Lagas side and steeped in the tenden-tious language of royal rhetoric, which frames the war in terms ofhoary legal precedent, claims of back-rent laid on Umma, andLagass divine right to the Guedenna.Competition for sustaining hinterlands is the most common

explanation for this conflict and many that follow it. Conse-quently, territorial expansion fuelled by population growth, anessentially bio-environmental model, is most commonly citedas the cause for the rise of the state, and the continuation of re-gional interstatewarfare up until its cessation, c.600 BC indeed,its continuing raison detre. The archaeological model developedby Robert McCormick Adams by the early 1970s provided ap-parent confirmation of this position bymapping out EarlyDynas-tic production zones that gradually came to abut one another,

8 Jerrold S. Cooper, Reconstructing History from Ancient Inscriptions: The LagashUmma Border Conflict (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,Robert K. Englund and Manfred Krebernik, Mesopotamien: Spaturuk-Zeit undFruhdynastische Zeit (Freiburg, Switzerland, 1998), 523; John Baines and NormanYoffee, Order, Legitimacy, andWealth in Ancient Egypt andMesopotamia, in GaryM. Feinman and Joyce Marcus (eds.), Archaic States (Santa Fe, 1998), 226.



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spurring competition for sustaining hinterlands (seeMap 2).10 Inall, theLagasUmmaepisode and theAdamsmodel havebecomenearly 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 timeswas not available land, but labour to open it up to cultivation,principally through the extension of canals.11Water managementin all periods played a key role perhaps even constituted themediating resource between land and labour. In very broadterms, lower Mesopotamia, an area of roughly 110,000 squarekilometres, probably possessed a human population of aroundhalf a million people in 3000 BC,12 with enough land to give

10 The image of this map has developed an almost talismanic power, despiteAdamss demurrals (see n. 11 below); cf. Nissen, Early History of the Ancient NearEast, 132 and fig. 52: at the [Early Dynastic] times under consideration the supposedareas of influence were far apart.

11 Those familiar with Adamss writings will know that he was and is averse tocategorical statements. His own disposition, however, was to see no discerniblybounded regional units within Babylonia, that population levels were low in relationto the potentially arable area . . . [and] water rather than land was the critical deter-minant: RobertMcC. Adams andHans J. Nissen,The Uruk Countryside: The NaturalSetting of Urban Societies (Chicago, 1972), 89 ff.; similarly, RobertMcC.Adams,Landbehind Baghdad: AHistory of Settlement on the Diyala Plains (Chicago, 1965), 19. For aspecific illustration, see Adamss estimate in his An InterdisciplinaryOverviewof aMesopotamian City and its Hinterlands, Cuneiform Digital Lib. Jl, i (2008) thatonly around 7 per cent of Ur IIIUmmas landwas ever under institutional cultivation.More directly, see statements by Nissen, Early History of the Ancient Near East, 60,1412; andElizabethC. Stone, TheConstraints onState andUrbanForm inAncientMesopotamia, in Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine (eds.), Urbanization andLand 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 popu-lation forced elites to find means other than direct coercion in order to maintain thenecessary agricultural labor force. Michel Jursa, The Babylonian Economy in theFirst Millennium BC, in Leick (ed.), Babylonian World, 225, says that a shortage ofarable 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 popu-lation growth which, in turn, had repercussions for the amount of manpower avail-able: see his The Economy of Ancient Mesopotamia: A General Outline, in Leick(ed.), Babylonian World, 194.

12 Byway of comparison, see BruceG.Trigger et al.,Ancient Egypt: A Social History(Cambridge, 1983), 51, 62, 103, 190, where the authors estimate Egyptian popula-tions of 2, 11.5, 2.94.5 and 77.5 million for Predynastic, Old/Middle Kingdom,late NewKingdom andHellenistic/Roman Egypt, respectively. The population of theentire world in 3000 BC has been estimated at around 14 million: Clive Ponting, AGreenHistory of theWorld: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (NewYork, 1991); Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History(New York, 1978), 34251, as currently accepted by the US Census Bureau. Thesesame sources estimate world populations of 27, 50 and 100 million people by 2000,1000 and 500 BC. For the Mesopotamian rate/figures, see Ester Boserup, Population

EARLYMESOPOTAMIA 11

(cont. on p. 12)



every nuclear family more than 15ha more than enough forgeneral sustainability.13 This understanding has thus alwaysstood at odds with the image of early city states as expandingmulti-cellular bubbles of production and population whichbegan to intrudeonone another by the lateEarlyDynastic period.The LagasUmma conflict proves to be the wrong model.

This conflict is virtually unique within the corpus of EarlyDynastic royal inscriptions, which are primarily concerned withtemple-building, the dedication of votive objects, and long-distance trade.14 Of 173 other Early Dynastic royal inscriptionsnot from Umma and Lagas, only ten mention seventeen cases ofintercity warfare: seventeen conflicts of which only two do notinvolve Lagas; just two cases involve bordering states; andno inscription states casus belli.15 The nine city dynasties thatleft behind epigraphic evidence mentioned conflict only in thebarest and rarest terms. Victory seemed inconsequential to anyparticular issue the hallmark of prestige-raiding, not state-building. Our few other references to regional power relationsare too vague to infer hegemony, and several show co-ordinationas well as competition between city states.16 These comities canbe seen in the trade network revealed by the Early Dynasticcity-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 combinedSyro-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 ahectare per person.

14 On trade specifically, see Jerrold S. Cooper, Presargonic Inscriptions (NewHaven,1986), Ad 6; La 1.2 and passim in Ur-Nanses inscriptions; La 4.3.

15 Cooper,Presargonic Inscriptions, non-Lagas conflicts: Ki 7: Kis vanquishes Elam;Uk4.1:Uruk sacksKis andAksak. Lagas conflicts against states other thanUmma:La1.6: againstUr; La 3.53.9, 3.11: in various combinations, against Elam,Urua,Uruk,Ur, Kiutu, Uruaz, Misime, Arua, Aksak, Kis, Subartu andMari; La 10.2: probably aconflict betweenLagas andUruk.Aside fromtheLagasUmmaconflicts, onlyLagassactions againstUr andUrukconceivably involvedborderdisputes; all other stateswereeither Elamite principalities or more northerlyMesopotamian city states. The closeststatement resembling a casus belli among these inscriptions is that Aksak is simply saidto have attacked Lagas (La 3.53.6), and that both it and several other states werebeaten back from the [border-field] Antasura.

16 Cooper, Presargonic Inscriptions, Ki 3.2; La 5.3, a brotherhood between Urukand Larsa.



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MAP 2. Simulation of Early Dynastic I Period Cultivated Areas, afterR. McC. Adams,Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use

on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates (Chicago, 1981), 93. Courtesy ofthe Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.



King Mesilim of Kis. Thus the LagasUmma war was an excep-tion, not a paradigm.It can hardly, then, be an accident that the influential model of

productive lands developed by Adams (again, see Map 2) showsthe area east-north-east of Uruk the region of Lagas andUmma as among the most densely settled in all of lowerMesopotamia. Adamss reconstruction has, it must also be said,remained open to question due to its probable overestimationof urban population density, which unduly amplifies the sup-posed pressure on early states to expand production.17 If weemploy an algorithm demonstrating subsistence needs andmore probable population densities, Early Dynastic productionzones take on amuchmore insular aspect within their hinterlands(see Map 3).18

Most cities of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia were managers offinite patches of land, isolated pockets of production in larger seasof open space, and this remained the case well into the first mil-lenniumBC.Sincecontiguous territorial stateswithclearlydefinedborders were not firmly established within lower Mesopotamiain any period, border disputes and resource competitions wereexceptional forms of interstate conflict.19 Supposing, then,that competition for landwas not the primary cause of early inter-state conflict, this essayproposes that early statesmostly struggledto control local, open space and recruit non-aligned popula-tions; they chased after sovereignty, not yet having grasped it.

17 Not the least of this criticism is via Adamss own later work: see, for example, hisInterdisciplinary Overview of a Mesopotamian City and its Hinterlands, xx9.19.2,9.4.

18 As in Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, 21, the following postu-lates resulted in Map 3: populations were estimated at a residential density of 75persons per hectare; minimal caloric needs per person per annum 250kg barley;annual production rates881 kg barley per hectare. Roughly speaking, every hectareof occupied settlement required roughly 21 ha of sustaining area. These figures areclosely adapted from the working standards of the Oriental Institutes ModelingAncient Settlement Systems (MASS) Project, developed by Tony Wilkinson.

19 On what borders there were, see Richardson, World of BabylonianCountrysides, 204; cf. recent thinking on Mesoamerican cases: Charles Stanishand Abigail Levine, War and Early State Formation in the Northern TiticacaBasin, Peru, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sciences, cviii (2011).



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MAP 3. SIMULATION OF EARLY DYNASTIC-PERIOD CULTIVATEDAREAS (INWHITE) ! Carrie Hritz, 2009; see also n. 18 above.



III

LITTLE KINGDOMS AND SMALLWARS

If we are able to establish that Mesopotamian polities froman early date were not built on competition for territory, wemust turn our attention to a substantially later time, the OldBabylonian period (20041595 BC), for a better-documentedlook at the continuing effort to build the state idea against com-peting lower-order political communities. This period provides amuch larger and denser body of evidence than previous ones, aswell as plentiful cases of interstate warfare.20 A good deal of thisevidence derives from year-names: the convention for dating inthis period was to identify years with names celebrating politicaland civic events (for example Year in which Akusum was des-troyed and the army of Kazallu was smitten byweapons fourthyear ofKing Sumu-El of Larsa1891 BC).More than 2,000 suchyear-names are known from multiple dynasties. Though openlypropagandistic, year-names nevertheless form an importantcorpus of historical information: they make clear that the OldBabylonian period was an age of major city states at war witheachother, and this competitionhasbeen 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 OldBabylonian period, when intercity warfare became endemic,were dominated by the central hegemonic states of Akkad andUr.These states seized the ancient imagination as ideal types, andthe sources they produced have been privileged by modern his-torians as paradigmatic. Butwemust recognize that the 250 yearsof central-state dominance (or 291 years, counting Babylonsbrief hegemony) stand out as anomalous within the thousandyears of recorded political history between c.2600 and 1600; for709 of those years, division was the norm. While the direct evi-dence for warfare among these polities does not suggest theyweresteeped 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 difficulties in resolving intercity competition, but sincethese central states produced monovocal political records, these tensions were delib-erately muted in the written evidence.

21 Prior to the rise of Akkad c.2330 BC, the terminal phase of the Early Dynasticperiod was marked by multiple centres in competition, but our textual information ismore or less limited to the Lagas state, and our archaeological evidence to the

16 PASTAND PRESENT NUMBER 215

(cont. on p. 17)



heterarchic, competitive landscape of theOldBabylonian period,then, had actually been the norm for centuries,22 but it is the firstperiod in which this situation coincided with an abundant textualrecord. TheOld Babylonian period post-1900 BC, therefore, pro-vides us with the first thick description of intercity competition,including conflict 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-namesmore often celebrated with equal fanfare the conquest ofvillage settlements scattered throughout the landscape. States atthis late date still contended with their own hinterlands and com-peted for non-aligned clientele, long after the history/pre-historydivide. None of the following conquered places, for instance, hadany record of political or military strength corresponding to thelarger powers which conquered them: Larsa celebrated the seiz-ure or destruction of Akusum,23 of Sabum and the Euphratesvillages,24 Nanna-isa, Ibrat and surrounding towns, Imgur-Gibil, Zibnatum, Bt-Su-Sn and Uzarpana; Isin destroyedGirtab and the Amorite city; and Babylon did the same to thecity and villages of Malgium, the cities of the land of Rapiqumand Salibi, the Tigris banks and the cities of Subartu.25 Even

(n. 21 cont.)

circumvallation of cities. And prior to that, we have little indication of cross-scale orpeer conflict stretching back into the Uruk period and before. This distribution ofevidence has, predictably, linked the phenomena of warfare and the state as relateddevelopments, but this should not lead us to assume either that prehistoric societieswere inherently or structurally peaceful, or that war was somehow a natural, ratherthan a cultural development. SeeDoyneDawson, TheOrigins ofWar: Biological andAnthropological Theories, History and Theory, xxxv (1996); Helle Vandkilde,Commemorative Tales: Archaeological Responses to Modern Myth, Politics, andWar,World Archaeology, xxxv (2003).

22 Mesopotamian archaeology has begun to integrate the roles of small places andstate centres within larger strategic and competitive networks by expanding from aprevious focus on elite centres to the documentation of the entire alluvial settlementsystem: see T. J.Wilkinson,Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East (Tucson, 2003);Carrie Hritz, Landscape and Settlement in Southern Mesopotamia: A Geo-Archaeological Analysis, 2 vols. (Univ. of Chicago Ph.D. thesis, 2005). Their workhas revealed a natural landscape indisposed to centrally managed engineering, andinclined towards multiple productive centres.

23 Given our knowledge of the fortification of this site by the shadowy Mananadynasty, this may not have been such an insignificant place; the date of that fortifica-tion, however, is not known.

24 CDLI year-names: Sabum was also a target of Kisurras kings unplacedyear-formulae in BM 28456 and 28458.

25 CDLI year-names (cities in bold): Larsa: Sumu-el 4, 10, 16; Sn-iddinam 5;Rm-Sn 17, 18; Isin: Isbi-Erra 4, 8; Babylon: Hammurabi 10, 12, 32, 33.



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minor states recorded victories over lesser-known or unknownplaces: Kisurra over Ibarum, Kazallu over the fortressEhubba, and Esnunna over the Amorites of Bab-Ibaum,26

Isur, Unnina, Astabala, MahaBum and Tarnip.27

Next to nothing is known about these defeated groups andtoponyms (including their location); they can be defined bytheir virtual absence from the textual record other than in theyear-names, only in their defeat by larger, better-documentedhegemons.Of course, territorialwars often entail the tactical seiz-ure of minor settlements in the pursuit of the conquest of othermajor states, and military conflict itself was in no way unusual:Old Babylonian year-names were peppered with references toregional wars beginning around 1914 BC.28 But what is remark-able is that these conquests of villages received equal billing in thecelebratory year-names with victories over major foreign states;the attention given to small places stands out in the larger record.The reasons for the recognitionof small places in this context arefar from clear, but at least one such small place is well knownenough to permit some closer examination: that case suggeststhat small wars of the period were not secondary by-productsof peer-statewarfare, but cross-scale, local conflictswhichwere infact more typical of the period as a whole.The village in question was called P-naratim, the Mouth of

the Canals.29 Sumu-El, king of Larsa, celebrated a military vic-tory over this place in 1886 BC, claiming to have destroyed it

26 RGTC, iii, 128 normalizes as Ka-Ibaum, but erroneously transliterates asKA-di-ba-um(-ma); KA di-ba-um is correct.

27 Astabalamaybe the best-attested andmost important of these places;most of theothers are unknown outside the year-names themselves.

28 Marcel Sigrist, Isin Year Names (Berrien Springs, 1988); Marcel Sigrist, LarsaYear Names (Berrien Springs, 1990); Malcolm J. A. Horsnell, The Year-Names of theFirst Dynasty of Babylon, 2 vols. (Hamilton, Ont., 1999). The year-names of the twodynasties ofLarsa andBabylon alonemention sixty-five campaigns in about 350years,to say nothing of those clashes recorded by other dynasties, and in other text genressuch as royal inscriptions and diplomatic correspondence. Documentation of theseconflicts does not really begin until arounda century after the fall ofUr (2004BC),withthe 1914 BC battle between Larsa and Malgium celebrated in the 19th year-name ofGungunumofLarsa; an isolatedcluster of conflicts between2014and2002associatedwith Isbi-Erra of Isin should probably be consideredmore part of the events surround-ing the collapse of the Ur III state than with intercity war per se. The southern revoltsagainst Samsuiluna of Babylon in the 1730smay be counted as the termination of thiscompetitive phase.

29 The term evokes cosmic geographies; seeGilgames references: CAD, P, s.v. puA9d.



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(Sumerian: su . . . hul; to destroy by the hand).30 The victorywas important enough to provide the subject matter forSumu-Els next two year-names as well.31 Yet, though des-troyed, P-naratim once again required seizing (Sumerian:dab5) by a king of Larsa forty-seven years later in 1839 BC this time by Sn-iqsam of Larsa, recorded in his secondyear-name,32 now along with a second place called Nazarum,even though these areas were already within the bounds of hisland. The recalcitrant P-naratim and Nazarum once morerequired reconquest by Larsa in 1808 BC, its seizure of themagain claimed in the 15th year-name of Rm-Sn.Where was this little place? Though P-naratim was not a

unique toponym within Babylonia, this one was almost certainlythe one located along the Tigris above the city of Umma, just 34miles from Larsa (see Map 1 and Appendix 1).33 That putsP-naratim directly upstream from Larsa, at a distance closeenough to be under its administrative control. It was not, assome have argued, the place with the same name three times asfar away, close to Kis, which would have had greatly differentimplications about Larsas interests: that P-naratim would havebeen a target for prestige raiding at a distance, deep in (andacross) enemy territory.But this P-naratim was close to Larsa, and that is what makes

the point such a different one: a minor settlement within a majorstates immediate territorial ambit required repeatedpacification.It is, of course, not impossible that the townwasmerely a pawn ina borderwarwith another power.34 But theTigris branches above

30 Full year-name text (and variants) here:mu uru(ki) ka-d-da ba-(an-)hul; Sigrist,Larsa Year Names, 17.

31 As mu-us-sa-types, Year after the year X, and mu-us-sa-a-bi, Second yearafter X.

32 See Marten Stol, Studies in Old Babylonian History (Leiden, 1976), on thisyear-name.

33 Piotr Steinkeller, City and Countryside in Third-Millennium SouthernBabylonia, in Elizabeth C. Stone (ed.), Settlement and Society: Essays Dedicated toRobert McCormick Adams (Chicago, 2007), 183: in Ur III times, an important relaypoint in the boat traffic between Umma and the Tigris.

34 Kisurra, either of its own initiative or as a proxy for Uruk, may have occasionallyharried P-naratim: Dominique Charpin, Histoire politique du Proche-OrientAmorrite (20021595), in Dominque Charpin, Dietz Otto Edzard and MartenStol, Mesopotamien: die altbabylonische Zeit (Gottingen, 2004), 75 and n. 244; 112and n. 464. See also Burkhart Kienast, Die altbabylonischen Briefe und Urkunden ausKisurra, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1978), ii, 127, nos. 129, 130. It may also be that Larsasintermittent loss of control at the yet more northerly, crucial strategic site of

EARLYMESOPOTAMIA 19

(cont. on p. 20)



Ummawere firmly under Larsas control as early as 1890 BC, andwhat contested border towns there were between Larsa, Urukand Isin were all situated to the west, along the Euphrates. Therecord of Larsas efforts to control P-naratim puts the village in alarger category of unpacified 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 majorstates about this long list of conquered places deserves independ-ent comment. As noted above, many of these small places areknown only from the year-names, since they never appear in textsdocumenting other kinds of contact withmajor states. Fifty-threenon-royal polities (that is, those with no known independentkingship tradition) were celebrated in year-names as the targetsof military action by major states in this period.35 In eight out offifty-three cases, only the personal name of an enemy leader isdocumented, with no further geographic information;36 in sevencases, the location of the target is given only vaguely (for examplethe Euphrates villages);37 another ten times, only the ethnonymof the enemy is provided, with little or no indication of location.38

(n. 34 cont.)

Maskan-sapir was either a cause or a result of a failure to hold the intermediate site ofP-naratim on the Tigris. Maskan-sapir was lost to Larsas control for an unknownlength of time between 1932 and 1860 BC, and then again around 18421830 BC: seePiotr Steinkeller, AHistory ofMashkan-shapir and its Role in theKingdomofLarsa,in ElizabethC. Stone andPaulZimansky,TheAnatomy of aMesopotamianCity: Surveyand Soundings at Mashkan-shapir (Winona Lake, 2004), 278.

35 To clarify, royal polities herein include Isin, Babylon, Larsa, Uruk, Esnunna,Kisurra and Kazallu; non-royal polities include those places for which no royal in-scriptions or year-names are known, but also a few for which royal materials were onlybriefly or incompletely produced, for example Malgium and Diniktum (two kingseach).

36 CDLI year-names (cities in bold): Kisurra: king unknown, year q,Alumbiumu; Saduppum: Hammi-dusur d, city of S: illi-Adad; Larsa: Sumu-la-el3, Halambu ( Alumbiumu?); Sumu-la-el 18, 25 (both Yahzirel); Babylon:Ammiditana 17, Arahab, man of the lands; 37 (the wall of Udinim built by thearmy of Damiq-ilisu); Esnunna: Iqis-Tispak b (Iakun-[ ]).

37 Ibid.: Esnunna: Ibal-pi-El II 4, land of MahaBum; Larsa: Sumu-el 10,Euphrates villages; Sn-iddinam 5, Ibrats surrounding towns; Sn-iddinam 6,lands of Esnunna; Babylon: Hammurabi 10, cities and villages of Malgium; 12,cities of the land of Rapiqum and Shalibi; 32, the Tigris bank.

38 Ibid.:Esnunna: Bilalama b, Amorites of/in the field of Ibbi-Sn; c, Amorites ofIsurki; e, Amorites of Bab-Ibaum; h, Amorites; i, Amorites; Isin: Isbi-Erra 8,Amorite city; Lipit-Istar h, Amorites; Babylon: Samsuiluna 9, the Kassitearmy; 36, Amorite villages; Abi-esuh d, Kassites.



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Ananalysis of thesememorializations of smallwars gives threeinteresting results. First, hardly anyof these conquestsmentionedin the year-names were celebrated in parallel fashion in monu-mental royal inscriptions.39 Allusions to specific wars of all sizesare less common in the latter corpus, so this partly reflects genericconventions, but their omission takes on more importance givenour second point: small wars in the year-names outnumberpeer-state conflicts (that is, royal and territorial ones) by about2:1. Third, a comparison of royal and non-royal targets reveals avery dependable pattern of verbs indicating that, while smallplaces were said to have been physically destroyed or seized(that is, wars of territory), warfare between peer states wasmarked by the smiting of armies rather than cities (that is, warsof force-reduction).40

The verbs in the year-names consistently indicate that cam-paigns against smaller places aimed to capture, hold or destroyterritory, while major states warred against one another for brag-ging rights and the attrition of enemy numbers (for a fuller break-down of the data, see Appendix 2). Little towns were said to havebeen seized (Sumerian: dab5) or destroyed (hul),

41 but whenyear-names celebrated the defeat of major states by other majorstates, the formulae almost universally refer to the smiting of thearmy of [place name] with weapons (ugnim gis.tukul . . . s`g).The pattern is one in which small places were to be cleared, heldand then either built or erased, while major cities met each otherwith armies in open fields of battle, subsequently withdrawing tohome territories. The permanent capture of major territorialstates by others was a phenomenon restricted to two brief ter-minal phases of Larsas and Babylons strategic wars for regionaldominance (18031794 and 17641755 BC, respectively).The goal of major-state warfare was the reduction of enemy

39 An exception is Rm-Sns inscription, RIME, iv, 2.14.14, which incorporatessome of theminor places conquered in his Year 1720 alongside victories overKisurraand Uruk. Samsuilunas restoration of the various fortresses of the land of Warumwhich he had destroyed (ibid., 3.7.8) and the Year 24 formula probably both refer tohis 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 exampleHammurabi 32, against the armies of Esnunna (state), Subartu and Gutium(non-states).

41 See Sigrist, Isin Year Names; Sigrist, Larsa Year Names; Horsnell, Year-Names ofthe 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 poli-ties. Babylonian states were simultaneously engaged in peer-stateand asymmetricwarfare between royal states andnon-royal smallplaces.What constituted a small place, andwhat does it mean for our

understanding of early political power? The rhetorical uniformityof Mesopotamian texts often makes it difficult to distinguish be-tween scale and type; both the largest city and the smallest townwere normally termed alu, while the mightiest and pettiest mon-arch were both called sarru, king. A broad spectrum of ancientstate power is thus obscured by these terminologies.42 A func-tional definition ismore helpful: in contrast to royal and territorialmajor states, small places held no power as hegemons and pro-duced no substantial royal literature (that is, year-names androyal inscriptions).Thus what we see is a spectrum of legitimacy among power-

holders down to a vanishing point. The major kings and theirideological concerns are relatively well known in Babylon,Larsa, Isin, Mari, Uruk and Esnunna but even for thesestates, one-third of their kings have no royal inscriptions pre-served.43 Elsewhere, ephemeral little kingships bloomed briefly(at Kis, Sippar, Kisurra, Malgium and Kazallu), but relativelylittle epigraphic material is known.44 At least twenty-six kingsleft only one year-name,45 and the names of fifteen other kingsare known only because their deaths were recorded in the

42 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-five kingsof these dynasties: RIME, iv: Isin: 1.81.9, 1.12; Larsa: 2.12.3; Babylon: 3.13.2,3.43.5, 3.11; Uruk: 4.2, 4.44.5, 4.74.9; Esnunna: 5.11, 5.165.17, 5.225.24;Mari: 6.1, 6.3, 6.66.7, 6.9.

44 The poverty of one such roitelet is demonstrated in the inscriptions of the ephem-eral Asduni-iarim ofKis (RIME, iv, 8.1.12), whowith an armyof only three hundredmen 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 andDiyalan polities as both sources and subjects; evidence from the Mari region andnorthern Mesopotamia would tend to magnify, not diminish, this picture of numer-ous, small royal polities. Kisurra: Sarra-sarrum, Ibbi-Samas, Bur-Sn; Manana:Ahi-maraB; Marad: Sumu-atar, S:allum, Iahzir-el; Sippar: Bunu-tahun-ila; Uruk:Ilum-gamil, Nabi-ilisu; Esnunna: Azuzum, Ibni-Erra; Uzarlulu: Abi-ma3ar;Nerebtum: Hadati, Iqis-Tispak, Ibbi-Sn; Tutub: Sumuna-jarim, Tatanum,Yaqim-El; Saduppum: Istasni, Suma

ihum, Taram-Uri, Waqrum; location un-

known: Siqlanum, IBi-sumu-abum, Adaki.



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year-names of other kings.46The vassal systemof kings and kingswho followed kings probably extended even further down a con-tinuum of small power-holders through petty kings such asAmmi-istamar, an Amorite chief, or Ambuna-ahi, merely achief47 down to those who either did not produce or hadnot yet produced inscriptional material of any kind. It is unfortu-nate that minor kingship is poorly conceptualized for AncientNear Eastern antiquity, though it was arguably widespread andmodal. These actors were more numerous than the great kings;the period is characterizedby smallwars rather thanby large ones;and small places played political roles at multiple levels in thetumult of the period.Over half a century ago,D.O.EdzardsDie zweite Zwischenzeit

Babyloniens fixed the character of this period of internecine war-fare among small states as a breakdown in normative, traditionalpolitical orders.48 More than fifty years on, the story of thoselower-register polities still seems impossible to write.49 The rea-sons are obvious, since this subject remains fairly impoverished interms of evidence. A new interpretative strategy, however, pre-sents itself in the pattern and structure of the laconic year-names.The presumption has been that these centuries saw a devolutionfrom earlier strong central states (as Charpin terms it, a partitionof power),50 preceding the modular reassembly of new ones,such as Hammurabis territorial state (which, we may note, sur-vived for less than forty years). But to view these local wars asby-products of statestate competition, as epiphenomenal borderconflicts, neglects the patterns discerned above: little kingdomsand bush wars were political and military norms, not peripheralexceptions,51 and productive of different ends.

46 From Isin: Dadbanaya; from Kisurra: Sumu-hiadnu, Kubija; fromUzarlulu:Ili-dihad, Ahsakrurum, Sabilil, Astum-la-abum, Iadkur-el, Hadum, Abu-[ ]; fromEsnunna: An-[ ]-mu; from Saduppum: Iau-ili, Rm-Dagan, Sumu-[ ]-Tispak;from Tutub: Bali-apuh.

47 RIME, iv, 4.0.1, 4.0.4; the volume includes the inscriptions of twenty otherwiseunknown rulers from unidentified 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 histoireencore impossible a` ecrire.

50 Ibid., 76: La parcellisation du pouvoir.51 It would be useful here to compare the political hierarchies of northern

Syro-Mesopotamia (i.e. the triangle between Aleppo, Mari and Assur) withBabylonia. The political landscape of the north featured innumerable small-state

EARLYMESOPOTAMIA 23

(cont. on p. 24)



The importance of thismiddle tier of political power has grownfor theoreticians over the past generation in a number of discip-lines. Small-scale, cross-scale or irregular wars have emergedin the post-Vietnam era as a major focus for military historiansand strategists concerned with counter-insurgency and socio-political asymmetry, for whom the archetype of homologouspeer-state warfare has become less helpful.52 Little kingdoms,meanwhile, have developed as models for post-colonial and sub-alternist historians for whom the nation-state template hasproved ineffective in explaining constructions of regional politicalpower without hegemons, in landscapes characterized by mul-tiple, interacting power-holding units.53 Political scientists, too,have taken an interest in the uneven and incomplete applicationof the state as a model in the face of both regressive (failed states)and progressive (globalization) postmodern trends.These are useful lenses for readingMesopotamian history. The

early state was not fully fledged simply because the historicperiods had arrived: ancient states continuously produced andlost their own constituent populations from and to non-stateunits, warring for control of their own hinterlands, long after theyinitiated competition with peer-state units. One process did notbegin, in other words, because the other was finished. Crucially,in the Old Babylonian case, wars of conquest focused on smallplaces, not on major patches of territory, and especially not overopen space. Inversely, conflicts betweenmajor stateswerewars ofattrition, force-reduction and prestige, not of holding and build-ing. 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 vassalhoodand alliances because of a closer isometry along the power scale. The south, by con-trast, featured two discontinuous registers of political authority, large-state and smallrural-tribal actors. The two political environments shared many formal features, butthey 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 defined battle front . . . they arewars over people. Tactics in small wars are ameans of achieving psychological ascend-ancy, not fire superiority or control of terrain. Major Keith F. Kopets, USMC, WhySmallWarsTheory StillMatters:TheExtension of the Principles on IrregularWarfareand Non-Traditional Missions of the Small Wars Manual to the ContemporaryBattlespace, Small Wars Jl, vi (2006), 910. The volumes of the Small Wars Journalprovide a good introduction to the subject generally.

53 See, for example, Georg Berkemer and Margret Frenz (eds.), SharingSovereignty: The Little Kingdom in South Asia (Berlin, 2003), on little kingdoms inSouth Asia, c.AD 6001700.



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BC to the rise of the Kassite state in the fifteenth century BC. Thehistoriographic privilege accorded to two third-millennium cen-tralized states the dynasties of Akkad andUr III, a subset of allhistorical power-holders54 obscures the underlying longueduree: small conflicts between weak entities were the normthroughout the first seventeen centuries of Mesopotamian his-tory, c.32001500 BC, with larger hegemons only temporarilyachieving the repression or subordination of bush warfare.The coexistence of internal and cross-scale competition was apersistent and ineradicable feature of early states thoughthey would rather not have admitted it.

IV

ENEMIES AND SCATTERED PEOPLE

If the acquisition and control of territory had never been the goalof early states, for what did they fight? At stake was the simultan-eous desire and inability of the state to achieve exclusive control ofconstituencies occupying open space that is, non-sovereignlands.This desire and inability was articulated through narrativesof persuasion and punishment meant to find fulfilment in thepolitical dominance of the state form. I have argued above thatdual processes of state/state and state/non-state competitionswere under way simultaneously during the Old Babylonianperiod. Non-royal forms and non-urban centres of authoritywere countervailing trends to urban royal authority, which other-wise holds a near-monopoly on historiographic work on theperiod. But the evidence that countryside regions were oftenunder only loose state control is evocative of the fragility andinsecurity of the state as a whole. Rural space was a haven forboth delegitimized others (enemies) and non-enfranchisedpopulations (scattered people) for whose labour and tithes adozen 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 pureorder in city life and pure disorder in desolate areas, though prov-erbs and wisdom literature also reveal a Mesopotamian citizen

54 The Akkadian (23342193 BC) andUr III (21122004 BC) states together lasted250 years.



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suspicious of the grasping urban institutions which governedhim the palace is a slippery place, ran one much-repeatedSumerian proverb and wary even of his neighbours. (Theterm citizen is warranted because city-residence was the para-mount political and juridical identity for Mesopotamian urban-ites.) The influential concept of ancient states dimorphism, forall its revisionistmerits, still reproduces a dichotomyof the desertand the sown inappropriate to the social and economic symbiosisofMesopotamias historical geographies.Tobe sure, the anxietiesof ancient urbanites located dire horrors out in thewastes: ghosts,murderers andflesh-eating jackals roamed this dystopian realmofthe imagination. But in reality, Babylonia was quite a varied land-scape of fields, marshes, meadowlands and semi-arid steppe, inwhich equally varied and specialized subsistence strategies andsettlements took root. In the Old Babylonian period, the inter-mediate rural zone between city and steppeland was denotedsimplymatum, the land, or sa`matim, the countryside (literally,the heart of the land). Village life was the norm: from the EarlyDynastic through the Middle Babylonian period as late as theeighth century BC, cities steadily occupied less of a percentageof overall settlement area, and villages occupied more of it.55

Old Babylonian letters and administrative documents textsof a practical nature make clear that these intermediate ruralareas could indeed be as dangerous as the steppe, and that statepower was not always equal to those hazards. Do not go into thecountry, a man named Gimil-Marduk flatly warns in a letter toone Warad-Sigar, rounding off a list of chores and cautions.56 Inanother letter, a man writes that his servant had been chasedaway in anger from a region too dangerous for travel, whileother servants had been hurt and have been dispersed over thecountryside.57 Even an army, another man writes, could find

55 See Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, esp. 1318; Nissen, EarlyHistory of the Ancient Near East, 1301; Marten Stol, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft inaltbabylonischer Zeit, inCharpin, Edzard and Stol,Mesopotamien, 651 and n. 48.Cf.CAD, N/1, s.v. namu A, comparing meanings 1 (designating both people and terri-tory) and 2; the citations amply illustrate the loose authority of the state oversemi-nomads in peripheral steppelands, but also the capacity of the closer pasturelandpopulations to be scattered (the verbs sapahu, nerubatu).

56 AbB, xii, no. 124; similarly, ibid., i, no. 71, l. 20; ibid., vii, no. 182, ll. 215, withdiscussion by Ulla Jeyes, Old Babylonian Extispicy: Omen Texts in the British Museum(Istanbul, 1989), 39.

57 AbB, xiv, no. 148.



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itself in danger away fromcities: left all on its own . . . you yourselfknow (how it is with) the troops which are deep in the country-side.58 Urban administrators sometimes had to rent divine em-blems and weapons of the gods from city temples in order totravel into remote rural zones to collect taxes. These and otherelaborate journey texts enabled the state to administer its hin-terlands, but it required a display of both military and divinepower.59 At other times, rural security was judged unproblem-atic, and travel to such areaswas thus thinkable. For instance, oneletter directs a man to permit his servant to travel overland (Let[the servant of so-and-so] stay overnight in the open country); itcontinues: Say to Marduk-nsu that he should not worry.60

A particular trepidation for urbanites had to do with unnamedenemies out in the hinterlands. As you have heard, writes onebeleaguered administrator, the country is in confusion and theenemy has settled in the countryside.61 We could not stay over-night in the dimtu-fortress area because of the enemy, anotherletter laments; while a third writer asks, have you not heard thatan enemy is camping in the land?62 Marauders labelled only asenemies sometimes emerged from the countryside to harassmore thickly settled areas,63 as they did in AmmiBaduqa ofBabylons fifteenth year (1631 BC), and then melted back intothe hinterlands.64 It is striking to recall that these letters weredrafted in the dusty neighbourhoods of cities where, just downthe street, the kings in their palaces confidently issued boastful

58 Ibid., no. 131, ina zumur matim; the translator stresses deep in the countrysideover 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 ajourney of the divine weapon variety were geared to the purpose of assisting expedi-tions to tax remote farming villages and not, say, for military or trading ventures. Noteamong the texts studied thereMAH16147, ana kaskal girrim sa`matim, where not eventhe name of the destination is specified, only for a journey into the countryside.

60 AbB, xiii, no. 154; cf. ibid., xii, no. 38, in which Nanna-intuh was unable tocommmunicate 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 theFall 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 ARM15:36.



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statements of total control over their lands, extending even to thelimits of the four quarters of the earth.Unfortunately, the historical identity of these enemies is com-

promised by the preoccupation of ancient literature, producedin cities, with constructing the dyads city/countryside, order/disorder65 and citizen/enemy.66 Indeed the Sumerian termlu-kur (Akkadian nakru), translated as enemies, extends itssemantic range to less politically encumbered meanings innon-substantival use like strange and different other. Wecan also differentiate nakru from contemporary usages ofAkkadian ajabu, the term reserved for hated military enemies,rarely used in contexts suggesting rural populations. In anyevent, there are not such numerous or onerous indications ofdanger associated with the rural lands to warrant depictingthem as unrelenting threats to state security or persons andgoods in transit. The concept of the countryside as a locus ofpower can be overstated. The term countrysides, I wouldrather say, classifies a zone of collision between small- andlarge-scale social interactions, where the states authority overstrategic boundaries and control over residence and movementwas neither absolutely present nor absent, but incomplete.67

The enemies of the countryside in Old Babylonian parlancewere not intractable foes of states, but constituencies thatwere not clearly organized under state authority untaxed andunregulated, one way of life alongside another, and a threat onlyto individuals who intruded on those contested peripheries.Countrysides and urban states sometimes presented dangers toeach other, but what comes acrossmore strongly is the inability ofeither domain to substantially dominate the other. In effect, thiswas a problem of weak states attempting to assert authority overthe weak resistance of hinterlands, a balance of low power.

65 See J. N. Postgate,EarlyMesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History(London, 1992), ch. 16.

66 The enemy trope is especially emphasized indivinatory literature identifying theenemy as an agent of apodoses connected to the pars hostilis of the liver. Yet evenwithin the limits of this trope, note a literary letter to Sulgi (ETCSL, text 3.1.11), firstcomplaining about bandits and brigands of the steppe (Sumerian: edin), but grad-ually revealing, for narrative reasons, that these peripheral peoplewere conceptualizedas having animal pens, camps, workers and hoe-wielding agricultural labourers.

67 For issues related to scale and boundary-making, seeMilan Bufon, Borders andBorderLandscapes: ATheoretical Assessment, inMarekKoter andKrystianHeffner(eds.), Borderlands or Transborder Regions: Geographical, Social and Political Problems(Lodz, 1998), 714.



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This was neither a hot nor a cold war, but an epochal, asym-metric and lukewarm conflict between states and non-stateactors. The single biggest challenge for Old Babylonian statesin imposing de facto sovereignty was not, therefore, in providingsecurity from dangers to persons or goods, but in administeringsettlement, restricting human flight, imposing legal control spa-tially and recruiting unaligned clientele. Flight from cities to vil-lages has been addressed by Renger and Snell,68 but mainly withrespect to individuals tied to the state or its citizens by specificbonds (slaves, dependent workers, feud-holders, etc.). What arenot accounted for within the organizational transcript are de-scriptions of the communities towhichfleeing citizensdecamped.The Old Babylonian period presents repeated cases of kings whospoke of entire undocumented populations as scattered anddispersed. For state authorities, the gathering-in and settlingof scattered people the recruitment of free-floating clientele was a project of primary political importance. In all cases, thestates concern was voiced as protector of the downtrodden, notpunisher of the disobedient.The topos of the scattered people (Sumerian: un-bir-re)

shows up more than a dozen times in Old Babylonian royal in-scriptions,69 year-names,70 hymns of praise to kings,71 and otherofficial documents72 between c.1860 and 1620 BC. In Sumerianliterature of the period, the term scattered people and its similes(for example the people, like a scattered herd of cattle) markedthe quintessence of disorder and misfortune in city-laments;73

68 Johannes Renger, Flucht als soziales Problem in der altbabylonischenGesellschaft, in D. O. Edzard (ed.), Gesellschaftsklassen im Alten Zweistromland undin den angrenzenden Gebieten (Munich, 1972), esp. 175, is close to exhaustive in dis-cussing terms for persons free of state or private control, but does not discuss scat-tered 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 SeeCDLI year-names: Apil-Sn 12a, Sn-muballi3 a, Rm-Sn 28 (brought in alarge population and provided them with a quiet resting place), Hammurabi 33,Rm-Anum d.

71 For exampleGungunumHymnA (ETCSL, text 2.6.2.1), claiming to bring backthe scattered people of Sumer and Akkad.

72 For example AbB, xiii, no. 53, ll. 19, a letter of Rm-Sn II, echoing hisyear-name b claiming to gather dispersed people.

73 In theLament for Ur as cattle, with the verb sag (ETCSL, text 2.2.2, l. 304); in theLament for Sumer andUr as creatures (verb: zag . . . tag) and the open country (verb:sag) (ETCSL, text 2.2.3, ll. 24, 130); in theLament forNippur as cattle (verb: sag) and

EARLYMESOPOTAMIA 29

(cont. on p. 30)



such people were the object of heroic ingatherings credited tokings in hymns of praise.74 As with enemies, we are faced witha termwhich has discouraged investigation because of the dyadicnature of its rhetorical claim.Unlike enemies, however, the termscattered people rarely registers in private as well as public tran-scripts. The associated terms are largely restricted to royal docu-ments, expressive literature, and omens,75 which might make usthink them rhetorical, unverifiable and notional.But enough exceptions to this generic distribution may be

noted to make us believe in a real need to recruit people tostates. From the city of Sippar, close to Babylon, a propertydivision deposition explains rather matter-of-factly that certaingoods had been held when . . . we scattered into the country; wedid not return to the city (before) the beginning of AmmiBaduqasreign.76 A letter-order from Haradum, near Mari, indicates thata dispersed population had settled in the countryside (ina libbumatim wasbu) and must now be resettled.77 The Old Babylonianlexicon provides a variety of terms and contexts from which it isapparent that scattering was an opting out of the state order,while resettling marked state-organized programmes.78 Lawcodes, legal documents, and letters refer to the illegal flight ofnon-indentured and non-enslaved people from their cities withthe verbs abatu (to flee from) and halaqu (to escape), and the

(n. 73 cont.)

the people (u`g, verb: bir) (ETCSL, text 2.2.4, ll. 29, 215); in theLament for Uruk, allthe settlements (verb: bir) (ETCSL, text 2.2.5, l. 86). See also Martha T. Roth, LawCollections 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 pogromsvisited on enemy lands by Mesopotamian kings. In the Old Babylonian period, therestoration of scattered peoples to dwelling places was the task of the king:Gungunum Hymn A (ETCSL, text 2.6.2.1, l. 5) and Isme-Dagan A (ETCSL, text2.5.4.01, l. 274).

75 SeeCAD,S, s.v. sapahu8b (andby-forms);A, s.v. asabu35;P, s.vv. pararu2c, 4aand paharu1c; references to scatteredpeople are virtually absent fromadministrativeor epistolatory texts.

76 CT 2 1 1417.77 Francis Joanne`s, Haradum II: les textes de la periode paleo-babylonienne

(Samsu-ilunaAmmi-Baduqa) (Paris, 2006), text 11; wemay detect a greater admin-istrative concern for scattered people among texts of the Mari corpus, for exampleARM 1 91, 26/2 421.

78 To settle, Akkadian wasabu, is thus the very popular counterpoise in praisehymns and royal inscriptions of the Old Babylonian kings; dozens of references areknown.



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termmunnabu, runaway,79 appears aswell.80 The reality of con-stituents living away from royal power is even reflected in allu-sions to differential jurisdiction within state lands, when thekings authority in non-urban places was constituted less force-fully than in the cities.81

These problems were hardly new: since at least the mid thirdmillennium, accounting for the residence of people in cities andgreat households and returning them to their assigned placeswhenever they slipped away to villages were primary concernsof state administrators.82 Stone has opined that episodes of popu-lation dispersal in the archaeological record may indicate timeswhen states were less successful in delivering on their promises toprovide security and prosperity, with the result that people votedwith their feet.83 It is not clear what the motives or identity ofthose in urban flight might have been; nor should we accept thepremise of scattering as indicative of any pre-existing state sub-scription by these same people. But even the rhetorical glossing ofruralization, flight and resistance as scattering cannot by itselfnegate the underlying reality that state sovereignty clearly did notencompass all constituencies, even very local ones.Thinking constructively about what little we know, we might

first posit that the vagueness of the terms enemies and scatteredpeoples betrays a lack of knowledge about rural identities amonga scribal class which was otherwise fitted out with a substantialbattery of ethnonyms, legalisms and geographical names for theidentification of others. This vagueness marks the terms as am-bivalent designations for any group of people not under royalcontrol as they either resisted or submitted to it; the dyadic

79 CAD, M/2, s.v. munnabtu s. ab.80 CAD, A/1, s.v. abatu B v. 2; H, s.v. halaqu v. 2.81 The discussion by Daniel E. Fleming, Democracys Ancient Ancestors: Mari and

Early Collective Governance (Cambridge, 2004), 141 ff., of the muskenu most closelycoincideswith this idea of a non-dependent/non-aligned rural population. See furtherdiscussions in Richardson, Trouble in theCountryside, ana tarBi Samsuditana, 27982; Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, 1920. A few additional ex-amples from letters: AbB, xi, no. 137, the jurisdiction (dnu; literally, decisions)of (tribal) Jamutbal; ibid., xii, no. 166: thosewho live inLarsa belong to the king; thosewho live in open country . . . [ ] (broken); ibid., xiii, no. 10, local legal standards(again,dnu) of Jamutbal; ibid., no. 25, referring to the general of the countrys troops;cf. CAD,M/1, s.v.matu 1a, citing TCL 17 55:6, do you not know that the land in itsentirety belongs to Marduk and to King Samsuiluna?

82 For example Letters from Early Mesopotamia, ed. Erica Reiner, trans. PiotrMichalowski (Atlanta, 1993), nos. 5, 23, 24, 42, 69, and perhaps no. 20.

83 Stone, Constraints on State and Urban Form in Ancient Mesopotamia, 207.



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language demonized and welcomed, as appropriate, exactly thesame groups of people as occasion required.84 The second pointis to recognize the context of enemies references as defensivethese groups rarely threatened cities directly and resettlementmotifs as benevolent: the ingatherings endowed the scatteredpeople with peace, abundance and new dwellings. The modula-tions of the topos alluded to the removal of complaint, the pro-vision of pastures and watering places and the peaceful abodesin which men might sleep soundly.85 Whatever the political real-ities, resettlement was supposed to sound attractive one of anumber of persuasive claims that we have too often read as de-scriptive of reality and de facto sovereignty.

V

PERSUASION: LEGAL VOICE, LAND OF PLENTY

Texts we have become used to reading as historical facts must bereinterpreted as more than idealizing or notional in merely gen-eral terms, but more specifically with an eye to their persuasivepurposes. To this point, I have argued that early polities claimedsovereignty powers on the ground far ahead of their actual abil-ities, both over territory and constituents. These texts were con-structed out of will and desire; early states were talking conjuring themselves into being.86 Already through the cen-turies, Mesopotamian royal language had adopted multiple

84 Compare with Fleming, Democracys Ancient Ancestors, 13941, developing aparallel argument that the land (matu) and the dependent people (nisu) operaterhetorically as a merism for the population of the kingdom in a vision of benificentrule.

85 Removal of complaint: RIME, iv, 2.8.3, 2.13.21; provision of pastures andwatering places: ibid., 3.6.7, 3.7.2, 3.9.2, 3.10.2; peaceful abodes (ki-tus-ne-ha /subat 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 else-where commented on the authoritarian semantics underlying royal claims ofquieting: see Seth Richardson, Writing Rebellion Back into the Record: AMethodologies Toolkit, in Seth Richardson (ed.), Rebellions and Peripheries in theCuneiform World (New Haven, 2010). With respect to this, Fraynes interpolation ismisleading and anachronistic inRIME, iv, 2.8.3, ll. 2630: when he . . . had removedevil (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 first-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 (forthcom-ing), paper given at the 54th annual Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale,Wurzburg, July 2008.



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registers of persuasion, arguing by way of theology, history, civicpatronage, even a command of style. The contribution of the OldBabylonian period was the perfection of powers legal voice andits promises to protect and provide. Not only did the state rhet-orically inflate 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 businesspractices, but only with the arrival of the twentieth century BC didthey come into widespread use loans, sales, pledges, rentalsand foreclosures. Royal authorities hurried to meet these devel-opments in private economy with an equally innovative diversityof claims tobe able to regulate those exchangepractices,87 controlinterest rates,88 offer periodic debt-reliefs (msaru), freedoms(anduraru)89 and occasional equities through royal decrees(Bimdat sarrim), standardize weights andmeasures, protect prop-erty, guarantee due process and, as we shall see below, com-moditize prices and wages.90 Palatial households moved rapidlyto adopt a legal voice in civil and criminal law, too, but nowheredid theymovemore aggressively to appropriate authorityover anyfield 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 theLaws of Hammurabi.91 All these promulgations had antecedentsin the twenty-fourth and twenty-first centuries BC, but the com-prehensive reach of the three surviving collections (not countingscribal exercises) fromBabylon,Esnunna and Isinmarks a radicalexpansion in the states claimed scope of powers. The authority ofthese collections is buttressed by a larger number of related text

87 Roth,LawCollections fromMesopotamia and AsiaMinor: Laws Lipit-Istar, "5 andpassim; Laws Esnunna, ""1516, 19, 32, 389, 41; Laws Hammurabi, ""4951,1008, 11114, gap ""a, g, z, cc, etc.

88 Ibid.: Laws Esnunna, ""18A, 201; Laws Hammurabi, gap ""tu, "111.89 See, especially, F. R. Kraus, Konigliche Verfugungen in altbabylonischer Zeit

(Leiden, 1984); Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor: LawsHammurabi, gap "z.

90 It is remarkable that the interest ofMesopotamian kings to legally organize trade,commerceandprices belongsprimarily to the eras duringwhich they ruledmostlyoversmall city-state and territorial units that is, prior to 1600 BC and not to the largenational and imperial states of 1400500 BC, when commerce seems to have been amatter either outsourced or of indifference to the Crown. Cf. J. D. Hawkins, RoyalStatements of Ideal Prices: Assyrian, Babylonian, andHittite, in Jeanny Vorys Canbyet al. (eds.), Ancient Anatolia: Aspects of Change and Cultural Development. Essays inHonor 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 aconstellation of secondary references to all of the above. It is theintersection of private economy and royal law which draws ourattention here, since these documents asserted authority overspecific acts and aspects of exchange in the marketplace, andimplicitly 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 privatecommercial world, rather having structured that economic life inthe first instance. Evidence supporting the application or citationof royal laws is virtually non-existent: the much-studied royaldocuments find little correlation in the practices and processeswhere we would expect to find them (in letters, contracts, law-suits, etc.).92 To give but one example, seemingly the most press-ing issue of the famous seventeenth-century BC debt-remissionedict of King AmmiBaduqa was the nullification of interest-bearing loans yet the edict was issued in a time wheninterest-clauses were not written into any of the hundreds ofknown loans. Why remit interest-bearing loans where noneexisted? Any literate audience would surely have perceived thegap between the powers claimed and the ways in which legalproblems were actually solved: that is, without reference orrecourse to state authority. Even on their own terms, the lawcollections were barely interested in policing, almost neverspecifying where or for whom they held force, whether by geog-raphy, court or class, and delegating enforcement with vague ref-erences to they: they shall condemn, they shall levy a fine,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 lawis positivist speculation in the face of much contrary evidence: pace DominiqueCharpin, Writing, Law and Kingship in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, trans. JaneMarie Todd (Chicago, 2010), esp. 7981. Charpin finds three references to theCode of Hammurabi as evidence for an applied code, but these would be buriedby the hundreds of contemporary legal texts and procedures which deviate from orignore the Code altogether. The author discusses AbB, xiii, no. 12 (on p. 73), but thesituation represented there in fact does not match the paragraph of the Code to whichhe refers: in the letter, the thieves are imprisoned under guard, not put to death andhanged in the house.

93 Note also the routine delegation of enforcement to the litigating parties, plaintiffand defendant, and the specification of the palace and the king as courts only of lastresort a curiously marginal position for the Crown in royal documents.



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Much recent discussion has been directed to the conclusionthat the law promulgations were a type of idealizing royal litera-ture with a scientific character, not actionable jurisprudence.94

K.R.Veenhof, one of the foremost authorities on the gapbetweenstatute and procedure, concluded already a decade ago thatplaintiffs based their cases not on the citing of laws, but on gen-eral statements of the kings righteousness and his duty to redressinjustice, which were the generally known ideological basis ofboth decrees and laws.95 In other words, the written law sup-ported an ideology of the kings innate and personal ability torender wise decisions, the rhetorical basis for actual legal process.But the unification of ideology and process action within a

single discourse implied the connection of two conceptual do-mains under one larger unstated claim, the premise of jurisdictionitself. Something less than unified legal practice and somethingmore like the presumption of sovereigntywas the aspiration of thelaw collections: promises of equity, plenty and protection weresupposed to persuade clientele first to accept the premise ofpalatial states as legally sovereign, much as they were meant toaccept in principle the other objectively unverifiable claims toauthority those states deployed: favour of the gods, pre-eminentpolitical status, provision of abundance, and so on. Functionalexplanations for the laws ignore the public and persuasive intentof ideological messaging, but explanations premised on theanti-rationality of the subjects such as those supposing thatthe lawswere intended to construct social order on ritual-magicalprinciples should also be rejected.96 If anything, the power of

94 For example Jean Bottero, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods(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 inthe sphere of Mesopotamian science rather than in either jurisprudence or propa-ganda as such. Compare with characterizations by Stol, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaftin altbabylonischer Zeit, 6548 ( wissenschaftlichen Charakter), and Roth, LawCollections fromMesopotamia and AsiaMinor, 47, who views the strict authority of thelaws as an ultimately unanswerable question.

95 K. R. Veenhof, The Relation between Royal Decrees and Law Codes of theOld 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 ofViolence, Mutilation of Bodies, or Setting of Prices?, Chicago-Kent Law Rev., lxxi(1995), 415,824: the lawswere an alien archaic effort to control themarketplace . . .in a world of sympathetic magic and ritually ordered social hierarchy. Whitmanscontention that the early state was uninterested in regulating feuding and violence

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(cont. on p. 36)



the jurisdiction-sovereignty claim was effected by purposefullyambiguating discourses of legal-rationality and ritualism.Old Babylonian economic regulation thus worked through a

deliberate blurring of ability and ideal. Royal claims to regulatevarious aspects of the economy were not meant to be instrumen-tally effective in what they purported to do, but used amixture ofpersuasion and sanction to create a composite of strategies fordifferent audiences. The legal voice was geared to persuade andto warn politically sophisticated audiences that kings had incipi-ent powers to create jurisdiction over activities, spaces and popu-lations, that they could create an uninterrupted fabric of poweracross all kinds of fields of action over exchange and the econ-omy just as much as over taxation, war or theology. The incom-plete states of the Old Babylonian period (like

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