How then can we draw together these data on the Mesopotamian city? The typical Mesopotamian family consisted of a male head of household, his wife, sons, their wives and children, and unmarried daughters. The family was supported by the ownership of a small orchard plot or office-holding or work as an artisan. I suggest that the grown sons, who had no independent economic existence until their father died, might have been those who were listed as receiving rations from the temple or palace. Put a pig in the courtyard and the family should have been able to acquire the pottery, grinding stones, terracotta plaques, and copper and bronze tools which are so ubiquitous a feature of residential districts.
There is only rare evidence for political competition within the family - and that is mostly between brothers following its breakup at the time of the death of the father - but such competition existed at all other levels within the city. The heads of households were engaged in a struggle for dominance in the neighborhood and in the larger urban assemblies, with kinship, clientage, and possibly even scribal education all playing a role. Rivalry also existed between the private sector and the public sector and, in at least some instances, between the temple and the palace. Beyond the urban framework contention between city-states was rampant during the early to mid-third millennium and certainly played a significant role in the intermediate periods between the times when Akkad, Ur, and Babylon dominated the southern plain. But even during times of secure imperial rule, it seems likely that the city-states still competed over the general population, tempting some to change allegiance by building new canals and opening up new land.
I would argue that this competition over people and resources drove the high levels of social mobility seen in our texts. It would have been the ability of people to move between lifestyles and from one city to another that resulted in the lack of evidence for extreme poverty and exploitation in either the textual or archaeological record. Apart from the slaves, who never formed a large sector of the population, people could vote with their feet. The evidence that they did so is seen both in the pattern of shifting settlement documented by Adams in his regional surveys and by changes in urban density and occupation documented for Nippur and Uruk (Gibson 1992; Finkbeiner 1991). When things worked well, this process served to make Mesopotamian cities some of the wealthiest and most successful in the ancient world, but if competition amongst elites resulted in an abandonment of their obligations to their clients and kinsmen, urban flight by the latter was the likely result. It seems probable that a combination of these factors and long-term degradation of arable land led to the periods of turmoil that intervened between the prosperity associated with the Akkadian, Ur III, and Old Babylonian periods.
World History
