Ancient Iraq

by Georges Roux

  If the kings of Mesopotamia ceased early to be ‘substitute gods’ they always retained some of their priestly functions. Yet the general trend throughout history was towards a gradual separation of the Palace from the Temple, and this development began in Early Dynastic times. Already in about 2400 B.C. Entemena, ensi of Lagash, was no longer high priest of that city, for on a beautiful silver vase which he dedicated to Ningirsu an inscription expressly mentions: ‘In those days Dudu was priest (sanga) of Ningirsu.’ There were even times when the ruler and the priests were, it seems, in open conflict. About a century after Entemena, Uruinimgina (formerly called Urukagina), the last prince of Lagash, tells us in a famous inscription24 how he, as champion of the gods, put an end to the abuses that existed before his reign: inspectors of the ruler interfered in all affairs, fantastic taxes were levied on burials and, apparently, on weddings, houses were bought below their price by rich officials, corruption was rife and the poor suffered much; but, more important, the ensi was building up vast estates, his ‘onion and cucumber gardens’ encroached on the best fields of the gods and were tilled by oxen and asses belonging to the temples. Uruinimgina revoked many officials, reduced taxation and ‘reinstated Ningirsu’ in the buildings and fields of the ruler:

  He freed the citizens of Lagash from usury, monopoly, hunger, theft and assault; he established their freedom.

  But these reforms, if they were applied at all, had no lasting effect, for it was under Uruinimgina's reign that Lagash and the rest of Sumer fell into non-Sumerian hands.

  Outline of History

  To reconstruct the sequence of events during the Early Dynastic period is not an easy task. Not only are historical texts proper extremely rare and usually concise, but the co-existence of several local ‘dynasties’ and the part played by some rulers not mentioned in the King List add considerably to the difficulty. We shall therefore aim at nothing more than a brief outline of Early Dynastic history, warning the reader that many points in our reconstruction are highly controversial.

  This history is essentially one of wars between city-states and against foreigners. Many of these wars undoubtedly had economic causes that are seldom mentioned, such as the appropriation of land or the control of trade routes and irrigation canals, but some had geopolitical or religious motives. Thus Kish lay in the heart of a Semitic area – even though most of its rulers bore good Sumerian names* – and to conquer it meant to unite the two main ethno-linguistic groups of Sumer under the same rule. The title ‘King of Kish’ therefore seems to have been more coveted than any other, being almost synonymous with ‘King of Sumer and Akkad’ or ‘King of the (whole) Country’ which occur later in royal inscriptions. Another goal worthy of any prince, whether Sumerian or Semite, was to possess Nippur, or at least to be recognized by its ensi and clergy. Contrary to Kish, Uruk and Ur, Nippur never gained nor claimed ascendancy over other city-states and does not even figure among the ‘dynasties’ of the Sumerian King List, but it was the seat of Sumer's supreme god, Enlil, and the religious capital, the Rome or Mecca of the Sumerians. In consequence, lugals and ensis competed in sending to Enlil's shrine the most valuable gifts; those who could include Nippur in their kingdom restored or rebuilt its temples, and at the end of the third millennium the words ‘chosen by Enlil in Nippur’ became part of the standard royal titles. Did this attitude towards Nippur merely reflect religious fervour, or was it – as the supporters of the ‘primitive democracy’ believe – a survival of the times when, faced with the threat of foreign invasion, delegates from all city-states met in Nippur to elect a common war leader? Or again, did the priests and theologians of Nippur exert upon the kings some strong, if untold, political influence, as did the priests of Heliopolis in Egypt? As with so many questions in ancient history, these have no definite answer.

  Mebaragesi (c. 2700 B.C.) is the first Early Dynastic king authenticated by two inscriptions, but these give us only his name and title, whereas the Sumerian King List yields the interesting information that ‘he carried away as spoil the weapons of Elam’. This is the first mention, though probably not the first episode, of a very long conflict between Mesopotamia and Elam which had its roots in prehistoric times and was to last for almost three thousand years. When Mebaragesi's son, Agga, surrendered to Gilgamesh, the age-old First Dynasty of Kish came to an end, and for a century (c. 2660 – 2560 B.C.) Gilgamesh's seven successors – unfortunately mere names on the King List – reigned over both Uruk and Kish. Soon after that period, however, we have three short inscriptions from a prince of unknown origin named Mesalim, who calls himself ‘King of Kish’ but seems to have had close links with Lagash, where he erected a temple to Ningirsu and arbitrated a border dispute between that city and Umma (Tell Jokha, twenty-nine kilometres to the west of Girsu), setting up his stele as a boundary stone.

  During that time, maritime trade with the East had immensely enriched the city and rulers of Ur (which was then a port near the mouth of the Euphrates),25 as shown by the treasures buried with Meskalamdug and Akalamdug in the famous ‘Royal’ Cemetery (c. 2600 B.C.). Who the ancestors and descendants of those two kings were we do not know, but c. 2560 B.C., Mesannepadda (‘hero chosen by An’) – whom we have already met – founded the First Dynasty of Ur. He was soon powerful enough to overthrow the last king of Uruk as well as his contemporary, Mesalim of Kish. Nippur appears to have been in his possession, since he and his second successor, Meskiagnunna, rebuilt there a temple called Tummal which had been originally erected by Mebaragesi but which had ‘fallen into ruin for the first time’. Lagash was then at peace with Umma, and its prince Ur-Nanshe was busy building temples, digging canals, importing wood from Dilmun and having himself portrayed on a well-known wall-plaque with his wife, his seven sons and three of his officials. Even relations with distant Mari were friendly, if we judge from the finding in Mari of a hoard of precious objects apparently offered by Mesannepadda to one of its kings.26 This pax sumerica under the aegis of Ur lasted about one hundred years, but ended in disaster. Kish, probably lost early to the local rulers of its Second Dynasty, was briefly occupied by people from Hamazi, a town or a country probably located beyond the Tigris, between the Diyala and the Lesser Zab, whilst hordes of Elamites came from the district of Awan (probably around modern Shushtar) and imposed their law over part of Sumer. And as though this was not enough, Lagash became very troublesome under one of its rulers – a ruler who has left us some of the most extensive and detailed historical records of the entire Early Dynastic period.

  Like his grandfather Ur-Nanshe, Eannatum,* ensi of Lagash (c. 2455 – 2425 B.C.), was a great builder of temples and digger of canals; circumstances also made of him a great warrior. He purged Sumer from the Elamite bands and protected its eastern flank by conquering if not, as he claims, ‘Elam the great mountain that strikes terror, in its entirety’, at least several towns on the border of Elam. He overthrew Ur and Uruk and ‘added to the princeship (nam-ensi) of Lagash and the kingship of Kish’. But the war about which we are best informed is a localized conflict, the war against Umma.27 The bone of contention was a certain field called Gu-edin which lay at the border between the two states and was claimed by both; but now:

  The ensi of Umma, at the command of his god, raided and devoured the Gu-edin, the irrigated land, the field beloved of Ningirsu… He ripped out the stele (set up by Mesalim) and entered the plain of Lagash.

  The infantry of Lagash, armed with long spears and protected by heavy shields, met in battle the soldiers of Umma. Eannatum won:

  By the word of Enlil, he hurled the great net upon them and heaped up piles of their bodies in the plain… The survivors turned to Eannatum, they prostrated themselves for life, they wept…

  The fight ended in a peace treaty. The ensi of Lagash ‘marked off the boundary with Enakalli, the ensi of Umma; he restored Mesalim's stele to its former place' and levied on Umma a heavy tax in barley. Eannatum's victory – or rather the victory of Ningirsu, the god of Lagash, over Shara, the god
of Umma, as the texts present it – was commemorated by a masterpiece of early Sumerian sculpture, unfortunately found in fragments: the stele ‘of the Vultures’, so called because of the birds of prey that tear up the corpses of the vanquished. Towards the end of his reign, Eannatum had to fight a coalition of the men of Kish and Mari led by Zuzu (or Unzi), King of Akshak.28 Although he claimed victory, there is little doubt that this war marked the end of the small empire he had built.

  Only a few years ago, very little was known about the history of the kingdom of Mari during the Early Dynastic period. Mari figures on the Sumerian King List with six kings totalling 136 years of reign, but only one or two names are legible. Two inscriptions from Ur mention an otherwise unknown Ilshu, king of Mari, and four of the statues of worshippers found at Mari itself bear inscriptions giving their name (Ikun-Shamash, Lamgi-Mari, Iblul-Il, Ishkun Shamagan), but there is no means of knowing in which order they reigned. But now, some light has been shed on the subject by the Ebla archives, and notably by a letter from a certain Enna-Dagan, en of Mari, to an unnamed en of Ebla, reminding him of a series of successful military campaigns led in northern Syria by three of his predecessors and in particular Iblul-Il who seems to have devastated or occupied a large number of towns belonging to the Ebla kingdom.29 The purpose of this letter is not stated, but there can be little doubt that Enna-Dagan was trying to put some pressure on his rival and keep some kind of control over Ebla. This seems to be supported by administrative documents from Ebla which suggest that the rulers of this kingdom regularly sent large ‘gifts’ (read: tribute) of gold and silver to the court of Mari, at least until the reign of Ebrium, the most powerful king of Ebla.30 Other documents of this type also show that Mari and Ebla were not always on bad terms: many artisans and artists from Mari actually worked in Ebla, and these two cities exchanged a variety of goods, either for their own use or acting as ‘trading ports’ between the Mediterranean coast and Anatolia at one end and lower Mesopotamia and beyond at the other.31

  When exactly the Mari-Ebla wars took place is impossible to say for lack of synchronisms between the rulers of these kingdoms and those of the Sumerian city-states, and also because of the uncertainties attached to the order and duration of their reign, the meaning cf their title and indeed the existence of some of them. However, for reasons which cannot be developed here, it seems that Iblul-Il of Mari, Arennum of Ebla and Eannatum of Lagash were more or less contemporary (c. 2460 – 2400 B.C.).

  The century following Eannatum's death (c. 2425) is rather confused. It appears that En-shakush-anna, King of Uruk, and Lugal-anne-mundu, King of Adab (nowadays Bismaya, twenty-six kilometres north of Tell Fara32), successively occupied Kish and Nippur and were recognized as suzerains of Sumer. In Lagash, under Eannatum's nephew Entemena* war broke out again with Umma. In a long inscription on two clay cylinders Entemena recalls what happened in the past, tells us how he ‘slew the Ummaite forces up into Umma itself’, then stood firm against the pretensions of the new ensi of Umma, ‘that plunderer of fields and farms, that speaker of evil’, and dug a boundary ditch as a permanent frontier between the two rival cities. We also know from other sources that Entemena concluded a ‘brotherhood pact’ with his powerful neighbour Lugal-kinishe-dudu of Uruk, who had united Uruk and Ur into a single kingdom, and that his reign ended in peace and prosperity. But a few years later the situation deteriorated again in Lagash. The priests of Ningirsu seized the throne and occupied it for about two decades, enlarging, as we have seen, their personal properties at the expense of the gods. They were overthrown by Uru-inimagina, famous for his social reforms, but the victor reigned only for eight years. An energetic and ambitious ensi of Umma, Lugalzagesi*, marched against Girsu, took it and destroyed it, thus avenging two centuries of defeat. On the smouldering ruins of the city, an unknown scribe sat later to write a lamentation which has come down to us:33

  The men of Umma have set fire to the (temple) Antasurra, they have carried away the silver and the precious stones… They have shed blood in the temple E-engur of the goddess Nanshe; they have carried away the silver and the precious stones… The men of Umma, by the despoiling of Lagash, have committed a sin against the god Ningirsu… As for Lugal-zagge-si, ensi of Umma, may his goddess Nidaba make him bear his mortal sin upon his head!

  But the curse had no immediate effect. After Lagash, Lugalzagesi took Uruk and established himself as king of that city. He then proceeded to conquer the rest of Sumer and apparently succeeded. Indeed, on a vase dedicated to Enlil in Nippur he claims conquests embracing the whole of Mesopotamia as well as Syria:

  When Enlil, king of sovereign countries, had given him the kingship over the nation (Sumer), had directed upon him the eyes of the nation, made all sovereign countries wait upon him, and made (everyone) from where the sun rises to where the sun sets submit to him; then he drew toward himself the feet of (everybody) from the Lower Sea (Arabo-Persian Gulf) (along) the Tigris and the Euphrates to the Upper Sea (Mediterranean). From where the sun rises to where the sun sets, Enlil lets him have no opponent. All sovereign countries lay (as cows) in pasture under him; the nation was watering (its fields) in joy under him; all the dependent rules of Sumer and the ensis of all independent countries bowed to him before his arbitral office in Uruk.34

  It is difficult to believe that Lugalzagesi possessed in fact such an empire. Perhaps this is no more than a piece of grandiloquence; perhaps the King of Uruk had managed to obtain the submission or the alliance of the Semites of Mari, who, in turn, might have held the Semites of Syria under their political influence. In any case, the ‘Sumerian Empire’ of Lugalzagesi lasted no longer than his reign: twenty-four years (c. 2340-2316). A newcomer, a Semitic prince, Sargon of Akkad, gave it the fatal blow.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE AKKADIANS

  We have previously seen that in the Early Dynastic period Sumer exerted a considerable cultural influence outside its natural boundaries, particularly along the Euphrates from Kish to Mari and from Mari to Ebla, whereas the Tigris valley, for some unknown reason, seems to have been relatively neglected. However, there is nothing to suggest that the dissemination of Sumerian arts, writing and literature was achieved by armed forces. If the Sumerian rulers fought during four centuries, it was more to repel invaders from the East and to establish their supremacy over other city-states than to conquer foreign lands. However, towards the end of the twenty-fourth century B.C. the fulgurant campaign of Lugalzagesi heralded a policy of territorial expansion and domination which was almost immediately taken up by Semitic princes from central Iraq. Not only did Sargon and his successors subdue all the Sumerian city-states, but they conquered the entire Tigris–Euphrates basin as well as parts of the adjacent countries, embarked upon expeditions in the Persian Gulf and built the first great Mesopotamian kingdom. For the first time since the prehistoric Ubaid period the two halves of Mesopotamia, till then connected only by loose cultural ties, were bound together as one large domain extending from the Taurus to the ‘Lower Sea’, from the Zagros to the Mediterranean. To the people of those days this territory appeared immense; it encompassed ‘the Four Regions of the World’, it was ‘the Universe’. The Sargonic empire was to last for about two hundred years and to collapse under the combined pressure of the Zagros tribes and internal rebellion, but it had set an example never to be forgotten. To reconstruct the unity of Mesopotamia, to reach what we would call its natural limits became the dream of all subsequent monarchs, and from the middle of the third millennium until the fall of Babylon in 539 B.C. the history of ancient Iraq consists of their attempts, their successes and their failures to achieve this aim.

  Who then were these Semites who made such a brilliant entry into history?

  The Semites

  The adjective ‘Semitic’ was coined in 1781 by a German scholar, Schlözer, to qualify a group of closely related languages, and subsequently the people who spoke these languages were called ‘Semites’. Both words come from Shem, son of Noah, father of Ashur
, Aram and Heber (Genesis x. 21 – 31) and alleged ancestor of the Assyrians, Aramaeans and Hebrews. Among the Semitic languages Arabic is today the most widely spoken; then come Ethiopic and Hebrew, the latter recently revived in script. Others, like Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian) or the Canaanite dialects are dead, while Aramaic survives, much altered, in the liturgic tongue of some Oriental Churches (Syriac) and in the dialects spoken by small, isolated communities in the Lebanon and northern Iraq. All these languages have many points in common and form a large and coherent family. One of their main characteristics is that almost all the verbs, nouns and adjectives derive from roots usually composed of three consonants. The insertion of long or short vowels between these consonants gives precision and actuality to the concept expressed by the root in a general way. Thus in Arabic the radical ktb conveys the vague idea of ‘writing’, but ‘he wrote’ is kataba, ‘he writes’ yiktib, ‘writer’ kâtib, etc. Languages of this type are called inflected and contrast with languages, such as Sumerian, which are of the agglutinative type.