The Jemdet Nasr (around 3100-2900 bce) and Early Dynastic (about 2900-2300 bce) periods are no easier to define in terms of political development. The traditional view is that in the Early Dynastic period Sumer consisted of city-states that likely controlled one or more urban centers and a hinterland. The states appear to have been linked to each other in a league that had a religious aspect, but it is not certain that there were any political affiliations. Each state had divinely sanctioned borders that separated the different polities. In a sense, this made expansion or even unification difficult, since each city-state was divinely ordained. The city ruler was the representative of the city god or goddess. There was thus a strong tradition of small states centered on a capital city and its patron, or matron, deity and associated temple (Hallo 1960).
One of the first discussions about the political situation in prehistoric and Early Dynastic Mesopotamia came from Jacobsen, who argued for a large city-state institution that unified all of Sumer into a single political and religious entity, known as the Kengir League, centered around the city of Nippur. Aside from textual evidence from later Mesopotamian traditions, Jacobsen claimed that a group of texts from Uruk III, Early Dynastic Fara, Abu Salabikh, and Old Babylonian Ur, and so-called ‘‘city seals’’ from Early Dynastic Ur contain many depictions of city names which imply a formal arrangement (Jacobsen 1957: 106-9). Thus, the seals, which are dated to the Early Dynastic I period, may show the existence of a league of neighboring cities centered on Nippur in this period, but this is far from clear (Steinkeller 2002a: 257). Matthews has argued that these seals indicate the existence of a ‘‘cooperative institutionalized grouping of a number of cities,’’ but is unclear as to their nature, although he argues for a formal military and defensive league (1993: 49). Others have seen the seals as indicating a complex system of storehouses or trade associations. A recently published text from Tell Uqair has the same city seal that appears on the Jemdet Nasr documents studied by Matthews (Green 1986). The implication is that the owner may belong to a supra-city-state institution. If this is correct, it would be the first tangible evidence for a Pan-Babylonian organizational scheme in the Uruk III/Jemdet Nasr periods.
Possibly this organization involved a number of cities that were required to provide ritual offerings for the chief deity or deities of Uruk. The fact that Uruk was so big and played a key role in the development of writing and scribal learning should not be surprising. The propagandistic Sumerian King List spread the doctrine that only one Mesopotamian city-state ruled the whole area at any given period. Even though the document created its own fictional past, the document itself has been said to have its own historical integrity, and it should be called the Mesopotamian city list, where cities were the focal point of political and social struggle in the absence of centralized polities (Yoffee 1993a: 305). The city seals were an acknowledgement of this fact (Yoffee 1993b: 66). They may have had nothing to do with political or economic patterns. Certainly it is true that there was a shared sense of Mesopotamian cultural unity, exhibited by a shared standard literary language, pantheon, and textual tradition, which may be the only thing the seals represent.
During the early third millennium BCE northern Mesopotamia had a substantially different political economy from the south. This region, a dry-farming zone depending on rainfall rather than irrigation, was composed of a series of rival complex chiefdoms that controlled the agricultural surpluses (Schwartz 1994: 153). But these states looked to the more urban south for ideological legitimization. Schwartz argues that agricultural intensification in the north, as well as emulation of southern socio-cultural and political forms may have played a key role in the eventual transformation of the chiefdoms of the Ninevite V period, named after the painted incised pottery recovered in the fifth level of the prehistoric sounding at Nineveh from about 3100-2500 BCE. These states changed into urbanized societies later in the third millennium bce, between the period of Uruk colonies and the Ebla state around 2600 BCE (1994: 154).
There is evidence of local urbanization and monumental architecture during the Uruk period at Hamukar, Tell el-Hawa, and Tell Brak, and thus the Ninevite V period exhibits a case of an aborted secondary state formation (Schwartz 1994: 164). The new centers were between 40 and 100 hectares or 99-247 acres in size across northern Mesopotamia and Syria, including Tell Chuera, Tell Brak, Tell Mozan/ Urkesh, Tell Leilan, Tell Taya, and Titris Hoyiik in southeast Anatolia. This period had little evidence for monumental architecture, writing, and urbanization before the mid-third millennium bce, with the exception of Mari and possibly Terqa.
Schwartz (1994) argues that during the Ninevite period, polities in the north were more complex than previously imagined and can be described with the chiefdom model proposed by Service (1975). These chiefdoms are described as regional polities that have a relatively modest degree of social and economic organization, hierarchical administration, and elite control of surpluses. This was manifested in the variation of mortuary furnishings and architecture, large-scale storage of staples in granaries, and the frequency of cylinder seals and impressions.
By the mid-third millennium bce Syria and northern Mesopotamia had become heavily urbanized. Gelb posited a northern Mesopotamian tradition centered around the city of Kish (1981,1992). He argued for a Semitic power in the north at least two centuries before the Sargonic empire, rivaling the Sumerians in the south. Of course, the discoveries at Mari and Ebla have furthered our understanding of the Kish civilization, causing scholars to recognize that it was geographically far reaching, at least to the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. There was thus a highly developed civilization with its own cities, languages, literary traditions, and polities, somewhat apart from the Sumerian south.
According to the Sumerian King List, the first dynasty of Kish held sway over all of Sumer after the world-destroying primordial flood. Other Kish dynasties were mentioned in the list, while kings and the city itself were also mentioned in scattered references in Sumerian royal inscriptions of the third millennium bce. There were also other cities with dynasties, including Akshak and Hamazi. The rulers of these dynasties bore Semitic names (Old Akkadian or Eblaite), and a few had Sumerian names. Though the rulers and dating of king lists are disputed, they may reveal a kernel of historical truth about the domination of Kish over the region. From Kish Gelb dates the earliest texts, which were administrative in nature, to the pre-Fara period (before about 2600 bce). However, they were probably composed by Sumerian scribes.
Ebla and Mari in the north and Kish and Abu Salabikh in the south were linked by scribal contacts. The Early Dynastic Sumerian kings who claimed to have defeated Kish assumed the title King of Kish. These included Mesanepada of Ur (a votive inscription of this king was found at Mari), as well as kings of Lagash and Uruk. Mesalim, described as King of Kish, arbitrated a boundary dispute between Lagash and Umma, possibly around 2500 bce. In fact, except for Mesalim, all of the rulers who assumed this title had a close relationship with Inanna, but not with Enlil, chief god of Sumer (Maeda 1981). Eannatum is the first known Sumerian to have taken the title of King of Kish. It is not certain whether this title was officially recognized at Nippur, the religious center. In sum, there are very few attestations ofrulers who took the title of King of Kish before Sargon. At any rate, the King of Kish was usually described as a mighty ruler able to defeat enemy lands. Sargon’s ‘‘King of the land’’ was a broader title, which marked a dramatic step in the developing political ideology of empire (Maeda 1981: 13).
There is no concrete evidence of a Kish empire, however. Kish, as well as Ebla and Mari, appears to have been an autonomous state. But there were cultural similarities, even in certain aspects of systems of weights and measures, year dates, number systems, month names, religion, and Semitic personal names, but not in the area of material culture, law, or art (Gelb 1981: 72). Gelb has argued that the same Semitic language was used in writing at both Mari and Ebla (1992: 124). It does appear that Mari was the catalyst for the Kish civilization that was transmitted to Ebla and northern Syria (Gelb 1992: 201).
Following Gelb, Steinkeller has even argued that there may have been two different political systems in Mesopotamia, both of which endured to the middle of the second millennium bce (1993). This highly interpretative scenario, however, is very controversial, and has been subject to considerable criticism.
Steinkeller argues that during the Early Dynastic I period, central Mesopotamia was occupied by Semitic proto-Akkadians who created a political and socio-economic system different from that found in the south. For example, there may not have been independent city-states in the north, as in the Sumerian south. It is possible the north at least by Early Dynastic II/III was a single political organism, all the way to Mari, with the focal point at Kish (Steinkeller 1993: 117). There is also a tradition of a war between Uruk and Kish in the literary composition Gilgamesh and Agga, as well as the Sumerian King List, which argues that Kish was the earliest historical dynasty (Steinkeller 1993: 119). Kish was mentioned in Ebla economic texts, while very few other eastern cities were mentioned. Steinkeller argues that this shows a preeminence of Kish. The northerners, according to Steinkeller, also appear to have been more ‘‘secular.’’ The King of Kish was a title that even the southerners coveted, implying an autocratic rule, rather than southern control over the north (Steinkeller 1993: 120). The temple domain appears to have been less important in the north, and private ownership of land flourished and may have spread to the south from there.
In this scenario, pre-Sargonic Ebla is similar to the Kish model, not the Sumerian south. Ebla, as well as Mari, also had a stratified society, like Kish, and it has even been argued that there was an ‘‘urban oligarchy” in the north, spanning more than a millennium (Steinkeller 1993: 124). Thus the traditions of northern Mesopotamia and Syria appeared to share a common origin. It is possible that contact with the north led the Sumerian south to create more powerful royal institutions, with rulers at Ur and then at Lagash attempting to assume ascendancy over neighboring states. This, of course, is very speculative. By Early Dynastic IIIb, Uruk had claimed rule over Ur, and then a limited rule over the entire south, under Lugalzagessi, who was called ‘‘King of the land,’’ implying control of the world outside of Sumer. Lugalzagessi did not create an empire out of the blue, as once thought, but his empire was the product of an evolutionary phenomenon (Charvat 1978). However, it appears that he held primacy within the existing city-state structure. Starting from Umma, he was able to claim rule at Ur and Uruk either by force or dynastic arrangement, and then Lagash, while taking Nippur and its priesthood. He was apparently the first ruler to have unified the whole south, and he claimed rule all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. Because of ideological constraints, he probably never thought of a unified state, although a northerner was to forge such a state soon thereafter. Thus, Steinkeller argues that the Sargonic Empire was not an innovation, since some of the tendencies of Sargon’s state (autocratic rule, centralized government, and ideology of conquest) were already in place (1993: 129).
World History
