After the new situation due to the change in the course of the river had arisen, the settlement of Umma, which lay between the old spheres of influence, could at first develop unhindered, without intruding upon the claims of anyone else. However, the point when considerable encroachment occurred must have arrived, at the latest, when Umma reached a size similar to the previously mentioned places and could thus lay claim to a sphere of influence of a similar size. The emergence of conflict zones was thus preordained, since the territory available between the original areas was not large enough to grant Umma the sphere of influence that was its due.
The validity of this hypothesis depends on whether we can successfully define the rather vague term “sphere of influence.” If we look more closely at maps of the country around Uruk (fig. 20), we notice that the dispersion of settlements over the whole hinterland is uneven, but that almost concentrically around Uruk, at a distance of twelve to fifteen kilometers, there is a strip two to three kilometers wide with no trace of settlements at all (roughly represented by the strip between the two shaded areas around Uruk in fig. 52). This zone is especially important because the situation of the settlements in the area between Uruk and the strip changed in a different way from that of those beyond the strip. Here we can refer to what was said above in connection with the concentration of the settlements (pp. 70–72). On closer examination, this development toward fewer, but larger, settlements cannot be confirmed for the whole hinterland, but only for the area outside the strip mentioned above. In contrast, in the area between Uruk and the strip, the number of settlements did decrease, but the remaining settlements did not become any larger. Instead, the center, Uruk, reached the greatest size of its entire history in the course of the Early Dynastic I period (see fig. 22a–b).
The difference between the areas on the two sides of the strip can probably be traced back to the differing strength of relationships with the center. The fact that a strip that was empty of settlements marked the separation provides us with further evidence for this. Such situations are not unknown to settlement geography; they occur where specific competing central influences have affected noncentral settlements.
If such a settlement lies within the “force field” of two neighboring centers, this can have positive as well as negative effects on the settlement. The opportunities for exploiting the competitive situation in the economic sphere are completely positive, since a lower price for goods that are needed or a better offer for one’s own products can be sought. From this point of view it is advantageous if facilities for transportation are, wherever possible, equally good in both directions. The ideal case is when the settlement is situated exactly midway between the two centers.
It is a different matter if questions of administration or political power have a role to play, because then a settlement situated midway between two centers would very soon find itself being torn apart. In such a case, the creation of an unequivocal relationship with one center alone would be the only solution. To put it concretely, the settlement must not be at a site in the area between two centers if both centers can lay claim to the site: it should be in an area that clearly belongs to one center. If the main emphasis of the relationship between center and hinterland is preponderantly in the administrative or political sphere, a zone empty of settlements emerges.
Figure 52. Southern Babylonia at the transition from the Early Dynastic I to the Early Dynastic II period. The closely hatched area around Uruk stands for the zone of direct influence, the widely hatched area for the zone of indirect influence. Author’s original.
In the case of Uruk, we are not faced with exactly the same situation, in that the development outside the strip that was empty of settlements was not caused by another center. However, the situation is comparable, in that the development in the outer region, with the formation of larger settlements and, thus, the creation of new potential centers of power, did not really correspond to the intentions of the original center. This development did not, after all, take place within the narrow sphere of influence of the old center. Thus, the areas both inside and outside the strip that was empty of settlements can now be called a zone of closer or direct influence and a zone of indirect influence. It was clearly important for the inhabitants to relate unequivocally to one or the other area; in contrast, the area where relations were not clearly defined was avoided.
This results in our being able to fix on two statements. There was clearly such a thing as a sphere of influence, whose borders, in the case we are dealing with, may have lain between twelve and fifteen kilometers away from the center. Beyond this, there was a sphere of less direct influence. At the same time, this special ordering of the settlements in the hinterland of Uruk shows us that in the relationship between center and surrounding area, the administrative or political component plays an important, if not the most important, role.
The creation of spheres of influence was, of course, not restricted to Uruk, but took place automatically as settlements grew to sizes comparable with those of Uruk and other older centers. Thus it was obvious that this process should also accompany the growth of Umma. Restrictions on the spheres of influence and thus an increase in sources of conflict must then have affected relations with, in particular, the old center of Girsu. This is true above all if we imagine an area of external influence around Umma and Girsu like the one around Uruk (fig. 52). In contrast, the potential of the relationship between Umma and Uruk for conflict would have been much smaller. Because of the change in the course of the river that led to Umma’s rise, Uruk itself had declined considerably in importance, and since it did not lie on the same river course as Umma, contacts between them also did not have to be especially close.
The relationship between Umma and Girsu, whose surroundings were, for the most part, irrigated by the same eastern arm of the Euphrates, led to permanent conflict between these two cities. According to the written sources of the later Early Dynastic period, it was a question of borderlands and border canals. This conflict, which continued to surface throughout many generations, was thus brought about by the changes in water supply and settlement structure. It is tempting to assume that all the other numerous conflicts between Babylonian cities mentioned in texts from the Early Dynastic III period can be traced back to similar causes. At that time, Girsu was, after all, only the main center of the city-state of Lagash, which took its name from a more ancient main center buried to the southeast of Girsu in the al-Hiba mound of ruins. The rulers who lived in Girsu continued to call themselves rulers of Lagash right down to a much later period.
We do not, it is true, have any evidence about other such long-lasting conflicts, and we have only isolated reports about individual disagreements, but this is certainly because it was only in the case of Umma and Girsu that the conflict caused by the new situation took on such dimensions that it seemed worthwhile to record in writing.
The changes in the distribution of water, such as those concentrated at the end of the Early Dynastic I period, can thus broadly be regarded as the cause of a qualitative change in ways of political coexistence. In spite of all our reservations, we must concede that a new phase does commence with the beginning of the Early Dynastic II period. From now on, conflicts between individual centers were incorporated in the political system of Babylonia.
Wars and conflicts between these centers, which, judging from the written sources of the Early Dynastic III period, must have had a determining influence on the character of this period, should not be seen as merely the work of power-hungry rulers. That it was not possible to solve these conflicts by military expeditions is indicated by the fact that at the end of the Early Dynastic period the whole political system changed completely, which seems to be the logical outcome of the development we have described.
Unfortunately, we have practically no written evidence available to us from the Early Dynastic II period, the period in which the above mentioned conflicts arose. An inadequate number of finds, not a decrease in the use of wr
iting, is clearly responsible for this. On the other hand, the visible effects of these political changes probably ended up below the level of what is archaeologically tangible to us. When the great find of tablets from Fara, ancient Shuruppak, comes into view at the end of the Early Dynastic II period, the forms and use of written signs so clearly represent a further development of writing from the group of tablets we know from Ur in the Early Dynastic I period that we must assume that writing and its uses developed further during the Early Dynastic II period (cf. fig. 31b). They are not such comprehensive changes as took place at the outset of the development of writing, but an acceleration of the tendency, already noted, toward making writing easier and more universally useful (fig. 53). A further reduction in the number of signs, along with further abstraction in their form, is part of this process. Although it may appear as if the signs from the Fara texts had become more complicated—and in fact they do, at times, use more impressions of the stylus in order to write a sign—these individual impressions all lie within a narrow segment of the possible directions the writing stylus could, theoretically, take on the tablet. This restriction means that as few changes of direction as possible are demanded of the hand doing the writing.
Thus the alleviation of the task of writing lay in the fact that impressions requiring considerable twisting of both tablet and stylus were replaced by ones that lay in a more consistent direction. This meant that the speed of writing could be increased, in spite of the fact that from time to time the scribe had to make a larger number of impressions. The appearance of the writing as a whole can be seen as indirect evidence of the fact that the demand for scribes had increased. Though there are variations in the way the individual signs are written, their number grows markedly fewer vis-à-vis earlier periods. This very uniform writing technique, which distinguished in each case between certain deeply impressed wedges, others that completed the outline of a sign, and the very light impressions drawn within the sign, must, as a whole, have been the result of a very highly formalized and strict training of scribes. This, in its turn, points to the necessity of making the training course more rigid in order to make it accessible to more students.
Figure 53. Development of some signs of the Babylonian cuneiform script. Author’s original.
However, the process described above may be seen in yet another context. Up until that point, the words necessary for transmitting a piece of information could be placed next to one another in a random fashion. The texts from Shuruppak ushered in a development that, a short time later in the Early Dynastic III period, led to writing that reproduced the whole flow of speech exactly, so that now historical, political, or religious factual content could be transmitted. For this, two changes in the system of writing were necessary. One was the extension of the existing capacity to reduce signs for whole words to signs for syllables, and the other was the use of these not only, as previously, to write further words for which there was no special sign but also for the rendering of grammatical elements. If, previously, “sentences” had consisted of a stringing together of nouns, with possibly a few verbs, where the reader had to derive the syntax from the context, now it was possible for the first time to represent syntactical relationships in their entirety. Whereas previously—in order to avoid too great an ambiguity—writing had had to restrict itself to indicating simple syntactical relationships (and in recording economic processes there are hardly any others), now it was possible to fix for the reader in an unmistakable way the complicated speech structures, such as attributes, apposition, relative clauses, and so forth, that were of course present in the spoken language.
Starting with the most ancient texts, moreover, we find the remarkable fact that within a case representing the smallest sense unit, the signs used to express the information could be written down in an order that was clearly not yet fixed. Even in the texts from Shuruppak, which are the first in which grammatical elements are written down, this can still be seen to a certain extent; more developed are the inscriptions of the ruler Ur-Nanshe of Lagash shortly after the period of the Shuruppak texts. (These are the earliest texts of the type we call “royal inscriptions,” in which, from then on, rulers give us lengthy, but certainly not always complete, reports of their deeds.) The tradition of writing words and grammatical elements according to their spoken order first began in the period of Eannatum of Lagash, a younger son of Ur-Nanshe. It was only after this step had been taken that writing was able to convert all aspects of language to written form. It is no wonder that from this time on more and more fields of spoken language were drawn upon and fixed in writing. Writing, which by then, about 2500 B.C., already had a six-hundred-year history behind it, was only made into the universally useful instrument we know by these changes.
Figure 54. Obverse and reverse of an economic text from the end of the Early Dynastic II period, unknown provenience. Private collection; copyright of the author.
In attempting to answer the question of why these changes in writing took place precisely at this time, we come across another phenomenon: although written in the language we call Sumerian, certain texts contemporary with those from Fara, but which come from the site of Abu Salabikh near Nippur in central Babylonia, were composed by scribes who mostly had Semitic names. Now, notwithstanding that the language of the early texts was, for the most part, Sumerian, it also contained elements of one or several other languages. Like Sumerian itself, these languages cannot at present be defined with regard to their origins or relationships. However, one thing that is certain is that Semitic languages did not play any role in this. Yet here we suddenly find people who clearly belong to a Semitic group in positions that were probably the prerogative of the leading classes in the community at that time. Thus, a Semitic population—perhaps only in certain areas of Babylonia—must have won for itself an important position in society in the period shortly before these texts were written. For the time being, the political aspect of this is not our main interest, but only the fact that from now on the necessity arose to write down the totally different sort of language spoken by this new group. As was also the case in such situations later on, the writing system was, to a certain extent, able to cope with this task without any great changes. Signs representing whole words were simply read and pronounced in the Semitic language rather than in Sumerian. However, not only is this process more difficult when words are written syllabically (that is, with the aid of several syllable signs), but the totally different construction of the Semitic language also required a new organization of writing.
Whereas, in agglutinative Sumerian, the word stem always remains the same and specifications such as person or time are expressed by the use of prefixes or suffixes, the Semitic languages are inflected and can also change their word stems. They are therefore highly dependent on syllabic writing.
As noted, syllables were already being depicted in writing, probably because from the beginning the script was under pressure to do more than reproduce only Sumerian. When it now became necessary to transcribe yet another new language, this part of the writing system could be rapidly expanded. The use of syllable signs liberated from word meanings now formed an important part of the writing system. It is not difficult to see this development, together with the expansion in writing’s capacity to reproduce speech, as a direct consequence of the fact that writing had to be capable of being used for the reproduction of languages other than the one for which it was originally developed.
Economic texts, which now become slightly more explicit, and the category of word lists, which are also well known at an earlier date, can henceforth be set beside historical and literary texts and what we subsume under the heading of legal documents. Now, for the first time, we hear something about the succession of rulers, about the extent and importance of their realms, about conflicts between these realms, and about changes in the power structure within the country as a whole, as well as about the way conflicts were resolved both between the individual realms and the inhabitants of di
fferent towns or cities. We receive substantial details about political, religious, and economic conditions and the changes that occurred in them. However, we learn almost nothing about one of the most severe conflicts, which was at least in the offing, and probably in full swing, in this period: the conflict between central and noncentral power. At times we might be tempted to call this a conflict between “religious” and “secular” power, were it possible to use this pair of concepts at all.
The evidence to support the thesis of such a conflict between “king” and “priests” seems to be very clear, because in the texts of the later Early Dynastic period there are several terms for the highest representative of a political structure. There is the title en, or, somewhat later, ensi, whose bearer can be shown in every case to have had a strong relationship to the gods of each of the centers in question. In addition to this, there was the lugal—literally speaking, “the great man”—for whom this unequivocal relationship to the gods does not seem to have existed. For reasons to be discussed later, it was formerly assumed that in the early period the whole city, its inhabitants, and all the land that belonged to it were the property of the supreme god of the city, and that it was administered by the high priest or high priestess of the god. Thus it seemed plausible to see this representative of the god in the en, who in fact generally proves to have been the high priest of a city god, and who would thus simultaneously have been the highest political figure. On the other hand, the lugal would have been, first and foremost, the man in charge of military operations in a dispute with another power structure: this role was at first presumably restricted to a particular occasion but would then have been established as an independent and permanent function. This conception is reflected in normal translation, in which en is rendered as “priest-ruler” and lugal as “king.” This general definition seems to be in accord with the observation that only sometime after the appearance of monumental architecture buildings were encountered that cannot unequivocally be called temples, and to which then the term “palace” had been imposed upon. A further hint at a secondary appearance of a power distinct from the temple was seen in the fact that in Sumerian the term for palace was differentiated as é-gal—“great house”—from the general é, meaning “house” and “temple.”
The Early History of the Ancient Near East (9000-2000 BC) Page 16
