The Sumerians conceived that a correct and well-organized way of life was possible only in a city, and thus happiness was only conceivable there. According to the myth about the organization of the world the god Enki entrusted to the people ‘‘who have no towns nor houses the job of breeding the herds’’ (Bottero and Kramer 1989: 171, 348-9).
Nomadism was for the Sumerians horrible, especially since they were suffering from invading nomadic Amorite tribes and other uncontrollable peoples. These invaders lived wild and wandered in unknown places, but the delights of the Mesopotamian plain attracted nomads. As the Instructions of Siuruppak (Alster 1974: proverbs 183-4) put it, ‘‘Bread causes the mountaineers to come down; it brings traitors and foreigners along,’’ and in another version (185) ‘‘Bread causes men to come down from the mountains,’’ and elsewhere (198-9) ‘‘Your slave girl who has been brought from the mountains - she brings pleasure, but she also brings damage.’’ The long-lasting tension between the nomads and the sedentary was later stressed in the second chapter of the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun, the North African who settled in Cairo and died in 1406 of our era, who said that the bedouin way of life was to be contrasted with civilization or humanity, which was identical with living in a town (1967).
In the Early Dynastic period in the third millennium before the Akkadian Empire Sumerian cities were in constant hostile contact with each other, even resulting in war. But these wars were not caused by racial or ethnic feelings between nomadic and sedentary peoples (Limet 1994: 27-41).
The citizens of each city took pride in the antiquity of their town and in their temples built and restored through the centuries. The Sumerian city consisted of a main town, with its streets, squares, quarters, and some villages. The town was divided into districts, including residential quarters, industrial areas with workshops, and religious areas, as is obvious in the excavated ruins at Larsa (Huot and Bachelot 1989: 9b). Canals separated the parts of the town and thus divided it into administrative districts, residential quarters, religious quarters, and a harbor (Stone 1995a: 240; Orthmann 1975: 42 figure 4). The town was protected by walls, towers, and gates. All around the cultivated plain stretched orchards of palm groves, swamps, canebrakes, and villages. Along the river or the canal, the town had a harbor, a quay which was also a marketplace. Between the cities, there was the steppe where the shepherds grazed their herds of sheep and goats and beyond the steppe a vast area of uncultivated fields. That was the world of a Sumerian, claiming to be the ‘‘son’’ of his city, and the city was itself considered to be his father or his mother.
The Sumerians and, like them, the Akkadians, accustomed to living in towns, had always mistrusted ‘‘the men of the steppe,’’ meaning the plain, the open country between cities, as opposed to the alum, the ‘‘town,’’ or the ‘‘city.’’ In Assyrian times these nomadic peoples were the Aramaeans, Suteans, the Ahlamu, and already some Arab tribes, people living in tents. They could intrude into the towns and throw out the inhabitants. Among the nomads the social system was patriarchal. A foreigner was denoted as the man of the country he was coming from, as in ‘‘the man from Marhashi.’’
It remains to be seen whether the inhabitant of a Sumerian city was a ‘‘citizen’’ in the legal sense. In Athens and in Rome blood ties prevailed; a child became a citizen because his mother and his father were already citizens. Pericles had the Athenians pass a law in 451 bce by which an Athenian citizen was not allowed to marry a foreign woman. Pericles was the victim of his own law when he wanted to marry Aspasia, who was from Asia Minor. The Hebrews also rejected marriage with foreign women as well as with illegitimate persons (Cassin 1987: 49). Distrust of foreigners was not exceptional. In Mesopotamia in a city or in a vast kingdom the citizen was a free man who was, however, also the subject of the king, using a word elsewhere meaning ‘‘slave.’’
From the end of the fourth millennium bce there were public buildings in the city, temples, a royal palace, big houses for important persons including priests, scholars, and managers of the official services. Besides these buildings, the city was characterized by a wall and a territory.
One may wonder if a wall was effective in military operations to resist a siege, but it was a symbolic boundary line between outside and inside. The wall enabled the authorities to control foreigners as they came in or went out. Through the centuries of Mesopotamian history, it was the symbol of independence, and its destruction meant the loss of freedom. Victorious kings prided themselves on having destroyed the wall of the enemy town. By restoration of the wall a devastated city was supposed to have recovered its strength and freedom. Building a city wall was customary since the Uruk period. The influence of Sumerian culture was to be seen as far away as Habuba Kabira in Syria, where thirty-two towers and a gate were excavated.
In the Early Dynastic Period when the Sumerian cities were flourishing and independent, their boundaries were defended by surrounding ditches and embankments, and often by a stela, a carved stone slab. Jumping over the ditch or knocking down the stela was a cause for war. Sometimes a sanctuary stood on the embankment whose god protected the border and was there to strike religious fear into any invading army. The city was an enclosed world. Inside the city minority groups might be living; they were a kind of guest workers who were well integrated into the population; they did not threaten the citizens in any way, and the citizens did not, it seems, hate them.
World History
