Lugalzaggesi, getting news of the attack, left Kish and headed home to destroy this threat to his power. But by now Sargon was unstoppable. He met Lugalzaggesi on the field, captured him, put a yoke around his neck, and marched him as a prisoner to the sacred city of Nippur. At Nippur, he forced the defeated king to go as a captive through the special gate dedicated to Enlil: the god Lugalzaggesi had thanked for his own victories, the god who had given Lugalzaggesi the right to “shepherd” the whole land. It was a bitter mockery. Two decades after the conquest of Lagash, Urukagina’s curse had finally drifted home to roost.
Immediately Sargon took the title of king of Kish. In the same inscription that describes his conquest of Lugalzaggesi, he records that he travelled south, conquered the city of Ur, wiped out Umma, and blew through all remaining Sumerian resistance in an all-conquering march south to the head of the Persian Gulf. There he “washed his weapons in the sea” in a mysterious gesture of victory.
Sargon’s relatively speedy conquest of the entire Mesopotamian plain is startling, given the inability of Sumerian kings to control any area much larger than two or three cities. A combination of his own strength and Sumerian weakness tipped the scale in his favor. His army was stronger than the Sumerian defenders, thanks to their heavy use of bows and arrows. Thanks to a lack of wood, bows were an uncommon weapon in Sumer; Sargon appears to have had a source for yew, suggesting that very early he extended his reach over to the Zagros Mountains, just east of the Gulf. His soldiers also seem to have shifted formation. Where the Stele of Vultures and the Standard of Ur show armed soldiers clustered together, moving in something like the later phalanx, Sargon’s soldiers appear in engravings as lighter, less loaded down, and more mobile, moving freely through the battlefield to attack and re-form at will.7
In addition, the Sumerians were probably crippled by a rift in their cities. Sumerian cities just before the conquest were suffering from an increased gap between elite leadership and the poor laborers. The abuses that Urukagina swore to correct were symptomatic of a society in which aristocrats, allying themselves with the priesthood, used their combined religious and secular power to claim as much as three-quarters of the land in any given city for themselves. Sargon’s relatively easy conquest of the area (not to mention his constant carping on his own non-aristocratic background) may reveal a successful appeal to the downtrodden members of Sumerian society to come over to his side.8
Whatever Sumerian weaknesses played into the conqueror’s success, the outcome was a new thing. Sargon did what no Sumerian king had yet done successfully; he turned a loose coalition of cities into an empire.36
ONCE CONQUERED, the new territory needed to be controlled.
As part of his strategy for ruling far-flung cities, Sargon built a new capital, Agade; it is from the Hebrew spelling of this city’s name, Akkad, that his empire drew its name.37 The remains of Agade have never been found, but the city probably stood on the northern Sumerian plain, possibly near present-day Baghdad, in the bottleneck where Sippar lay. From this position, a little bit north of Kish, Sargon could control river traffic and keep an eye on both ends of his kingdom.
In this kingdom, the Sumerians rapidly found themselves living as foreigners in their own cities. Sargon’s men were Semites from the northern plain. Their dialect, which became known as Akkadian, was Semitic. Their customs and their speech were unlike those of the southern Sumerians. When Sargon took over a city, it became an Akkadian stronghold, staffed with Akkadian officials and garrisoned with Akkadian troops.
Unlike his predecessors, Sargon was willing to run roughshod over the natives. When Lugalzaggesi conquered Kish, he claimed overlordship but didn’t remove the Sumerian officials, the lugals, who ran Kish’s bureaucracy. They were, after all, his countrymen, and he left them in place as long as they were willing to change allegiance. Sargon had no such mildness. When he conquered a city, he replaced its leadership with his own men. “From the sea above to the sea below,” his inscription reads, “the sons of Akkad held the chiefdoms of his cities.” The Semitic Akkadians, long mingling with the Sumerians, now triumphed over them. Agade alone had a standing garrison of fifty-four hundred soldiers who “ate bread daily before” the king. Thousands more were spread throughout Mesopotamia.
13.1 Sargon’s Empire
With the Mesopotamian plain under his control, Sargon set out to build an empire that stretched beyond Mesopotamia. He led these soldiers in campaign after campaign; “Sargon, the king of Kish,” reads one of his tablets, “triumphed in thirty-four battles.”9 He crossed the Tigris and seized land from the Elamites, who in response apparently shifted the center of their kingdom from Awan to the slightly more distant Susa, where the capital remained. He fought his way north to the city of Mari, which he captured, and then pushed even further into the land of another Semitic tribe, wilder and more nomadic than his own Akkadians: the Amorites, who ranged across the land west of the Caspian Sea. Campaigning up the Tigris, he reached and conquered the little northern city of Assur, which had been a center for Ishtar-worship for perhaps three hundred years before Sargon’s birth. After this, he ranged even farther north and asserted his rule over the equally small city of Nineveh, a hundred miles on. Nineveh was a distant outpost; from this northern vantage point, his sons watched out over the wild northern conquests, while Agade remained his eye on the south.10
Sargon may even have invaded Asia Minor. A later story, “Sargon, King of Battle,” describes his journey to the city of Purushkhanda, whose people had sent him a message asking for his help against Nur-daggal, the cruel local king. In the verses that survive, Nur-daggal scoffs at the possibility that Sargon will show up:
He will not come this far.
Riverbank and high water will prevent him,
The massive mountain will make a thicket and tangle in his way.
No sooner had the words left his mouth, when Sargon crashed through his city gate:
Nur-daggal had not spoken,
when Sargon surrounded his city,
and widened the gate by two acres!11
Whether or not Sargon actually reached Purushkhanda, the story is revealing. He must have seemed as unstoppable as a juggernaut, almost magically ever-present all across the known world. He claimed himself to have marched all the way west to the Mediterranean,12 and even boasted of controlling ships from Meluhha (the Indus), Magan (in southeast Arabia), and Dilmun (on the southern coast of the Gulf).
Keeping control of this vast expanse of land required a standing army; the men who “ate bread” in Sargon’s presence daily may have been the first professional soldiers in history. Holding onto the varied peoples under his rule also required a certain amount of religious canniness, which Sargon had in spades. He paid tribute to pretty much every important local god he ran across, built temples at Nippur like a good Sumerian, and made his daughter the high priestess of the moon-god of Ur.
Records from Sargon’s court show that this empire had a bureaucracy far beyond anything developed to this point in Sumer. Sargon tried to standardize weights and measures within his borders; he also put into place an Egyptian-style tax system, run by state officials who managed the empire’s finances.13 And his political strategy encompassed more than taxes and administration. He kept representatives of the old ruling families at his court, in a move which would become standard for much later empires; these representatives, ostensibly hosted by Sargon in honor for their exalted lineage, were hostages for the good behavior of their cities.14
This strategy reveals the continuing fault lines in his empire. This far-flung kingdom was continually on the edge of revolt.
The Sumerian king list credits Sargon with a reign of fifty-six years. Near its end, when he was most likely past seventy, a serious rebellion broke out. Old Babylonian inscriptions record that the “elders of the land,” now deprived of their authority, gathered together and barricaded themselves into the Temple of Inanna, in Kish.
Sargon, naturally, claimed to hav
e crushed the uprising at once. But according to the Old Babylonian records (which, granted, are late and generally anti-Sargon), at least one campaign against the revolutionaries went so poorly that the old man ended up hiding in a ditch while the rebels marched past.15 It is beyond dispute that, almost as soon as Sargon died, his son Rimush had to mount an attack on a five-city coalition of rebels that included Ur, Lagash, and Umma.16 Rimush reigned less than ten years and died suddenly. A later inscription says that his servants assassinated him.
Despite this scuffle after Sargon’s death, his descendants kept the throne of Agade for over a hundred years—far longer than any Sumerian dynasty. The Akkadian empire was held together by more than charisma. Sargon’s bureaucracy and administration, like those of Egypt, had finally provided Mesopotamia with a structure that could hold an empire together even when the throne passed from great father to struggling son.
Chapter Fourteen
The First Planned Cities
Sometime before 2300 BC, the Indus villages have become Harappan cities
THE “MELUHHA” from which ships came to trade with Sargon the Great was India, where a great civilization had grown up. But from this great civilization, not a single personality has survived.
In the seven hundred years between Manu Vishnu and Sargon, the villages along the Indus had turned into a network of cities. The people who lived in these cities were related, not too distantly, to the Elamites. Just as the Amorites and Akkadians were offshoots of the same migrating group of people, so the original inhabitants of the Elamite plain north of the Arabian Sea and the people who built cities along the Indus seem to have come from the same original stock.
This is about all we know. What remains of the Indus city-civilization, generally called the “Harappan civilization” after the city of Harappa (one of its earliest-discovered sites), consists of city ruins, a whole assortment of seals used to identify goods for trading, and brief inscriptions that no one can read, since the script has never been deciphered. The two largest Harappan cities are Harappa itself on a northern branch of the Indus and Mohenjo-Daro, farther to the south.38 With an effort of imagination we can people them with faceless artisans, merchants, and laborers, but the Harappan civilization has no recorded battles, sieges, power struggles, or tales of heroes.
This may not bother anthropologists and archaeologists particularly, but it annoys the historian no end. “[We have] history complete with approximate dates, cities, industries, and arts,” John Keay complains, “but absolutely no recorded events…[and] barring some not very helpful bones, no people.”1 We can speculate that the cities had kings; one of the only distinctive portraits found in the ruins is the statue of a bearded man, wearing an ornate robe and a headpiece, his eyes half closed and his face expressionless. Perhaps he is the king of Mohenjo-Daro, where his portrait was discovered. The city has a series of buildings that appear to be barracks, or servants’ quarters, suggesting that a king or priest-king may have needed a staff to run his affairs.2 But maybe there was no king at all. No clay tablets, texts written on papyrus, or any other examples of record-keeping exist in the Harappan ruins, even though the writing system (whatever it is) seems capable of producing them.3 And it is difficult to see how priests, kings, and bureaucrats could carry on their business without feeling the need to keep track of their doings.
14.1 Harappan Cities
With or without a bureaucracy, the Harappan merchants traded their goods far afield. Harappan seals turn up in the ruins of Ur, dating from the time that Sargon controlled the city. Possibly the two civilizations first met in southeast Arabia, where both bought copper from the mines at Magan, and then began their own direct trade. Ur, close to the head of the Persian Gulf, is a reasonable center for the exchange of Indian and Akkadian goods. Indian merchants could avoid the Kirthar mountain range, which blocked the northern plain, by sailing out of the Indus into the Arabian Sea, up through the Gulf of Oman, north into the Persian Gulf, and from there into the Euphrates. A Harappan trading post has been discovered at Sutkagen Dor, which lies almost within Elamite territory. Presumably the two cultures had at least a working peace.
14.1. Mohenjo-Daro Man. Limestone figure of an Indus valley man, c. 2000 BC. National Museum of Pakistan, Karachi. Photo credit Scala/Art Resource, NY
For some time, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were thought to be the only two Harappan cities. But now over seventy Harappan towns have been uncovered, stretching from the mouth of the Indus almost all the way to its northern streams, ranging from the western Sutkagen Dor over to the Narmada river on the east. The Harappan civilization covered perhaps half a million square miles.4
The cities are low and wide, made of mud brick baked hard in ovens. The houses, rarely more than two stories high, line well-planned streets, wide enough for two oxcarts to pass each other.5 Storage buildings, probably granaries for feeding the populace, stand near the largest cities; Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa could have supported a population of somewhere around thirty thousand people each.
These people apparently put a high value on washing. The streets are equipped with elaborate gutter and drainage systems for waste water; the houses are generally supplied with bathrooms; and among the most distinctive features of the large cities are the enormous swimming-pool-sized baths surrounded by smaller chambers, perhaps for changing clothes. No one can say for certain whether the Harappan desire for cleanliness was religious or simply personal. The ruins of Harappan towns and cities have not provided archaeologists with a single building that they unanimously identify as a temple.
The most distinctive feature of the Harappan cities were the citadels, high sections of buildings surrounded by walls and watchtowers. Generally many more houses sprawled out away from the citadels, mostly to the east. Around the entire city stood another thick mud-brick wall. If this wall were breached, the population could still retreat into the citadel, their last resort of safety.
Which causes us to wonder: what were the Harappans so afraid of that they needed two sets of walls? Neither the Sumerians nor the Elamites ever sent an army quite so far to the east. Nor is there much evidence of savage nomadic tribes in the area. Yet the double walls are high and thick, with ramparts and watchtowers: built to keep out enemies.
Maybe these reinforcements give us a clue to the Harappan character.
It has long been thought that the citadel cities were a natural maturing of the villages that had rooted themselves in the valley nearly a thousand years before. Yet there is another possibility. Thirty miles from Mohenjo-Daro, on the opposite bank of the Indus, stands a town known as Kot Diji. Careful excavation of the layers of settlement show that, in the centuries before the Harappan cities grew to full size, Kot Diji’s walls were reinforced against attack again and again. During the early years of Harappan dominance, they were rebuilt yet again. Then a great fire swept over the city, destroying not only the walls but the city itself. A new city was built overtop of old Kot Diji. This city had wide streets, brick gutters, houses with bathrooms. It was a Harappan city, its pattern unlike that of the town that had stood there before.6
Kot Diji is not the only site that seems to show a forcible takeover during the days of the Harappan cities. At Amri, on the same bank of the Indus as Mohenjo-Daro but a hundred miles south, a very ancient settlement was abruptly abandoned by half of its villagers. Over the old ruins, a Harappan city rose, with wide streets, brick gutters, and houses with bathrooms.
At Kalibangan, up in the north and not so far from Harappa, another old and durable city was deserted by its people. Overtop of the abandoned ruins, a Harappan city rose, with wide streets, brick gutters, and houses with bathrooms.7
Traces of actual warfare are hard to find. Yet the pattern is suggestive; the Harappan civilization, as it spread, was not always an organic development. For at least some cities, the spread was a takeover by a warlike segment of Indians. Judging others by themselves (or perhaps fearing retaliation), they built walls against attack and retribution.
Armed takeover is nothing unique, but the spread of Harappan architecture is very peculiar indeed. Even across half a million square miles of settlement, the Harappan cities are remarkably similar. The general plan of the cities was the same, with the citadel separate from the sprawl of houses and shops, and always to the west. The houses and shops, or “lower village,” were organized around carefully planned streets. Depending on the level of traffic they were expected to bear, they were designed as main arteries (inevitably twenty-four feet wide), streets (eighteen feet wide, or three-quarters of the width of the arteries), or side lanes (twelve feet, or half the width of an artery). They ran, inevitably, directly north-south or east-west, in a planned grid pattern. The cities used standardized weights, which was not so unusual, as Sargon’s Akkadian empire and the Egyptians had begun to move in the same direction; what is a little weirder is that the standardization also extended itself to the mud bricks used for building, which begin to conform to exactly the same dimension: in centimeters, 17.5 x 15 x 30.8
This was eminently practical, as anyone who has built with Legos will testify, but it also testifies to some oddly strong conformity, enforced in some unknown manner. John Keay calls this “obsessive uniformity,” and notes that it even extends to the building tools and artisans’ utensils, which were organized into a “standardised kit” which would have instantly been recognizable from the shore of the Arabian Sea all the way north into the far Punjab.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 12
