For any complex society the set of social concerns that find articulation in cultural products and the way that they do so are unpredictable. Most of our texts that directly illustrate royal relations with a king’s subjects were the internal records of palace or temple administrative hierarchies. But civic institutions provided social experiences of political power that fit with the imaginative experiences identified above even though civic institutions were relatively less well documented (Van De Mieroop 1999b). I will first examine the ways in which the king intervened in the civic life of his subjects. I will then turn to the long-term sociological processes that illuminate the differences between the projections of royal intervention to a cosmic level found on Old Babylonian tablets and those on first millennium ones.
Royal intervention in civic life
Throughout Mesopotamian history the sources regularly highlighted the king’s role as the head of extensive palace or temple administrative hierarchies. At the core of royal authority, however, was the king’s representation of his community’s sense of self. He provided one means of transcending internal jurisdictional and property divisions and mobilizing resources from the whole community. A king’s intervention in the lives of his subjects was mainly of two kinds: judicial and fiscal. Judicially the king was the highest court of appeal. Fiscally the king had the right to exact contributions from the citizens, both in kind and in labor. At the same time, a number of those citizens expected such extractions to be canceled. This could be done either retrospectively, through the cancellation of arrears owed, or prospectively, through the grant of exemption from future exactions. In the case of prospective exemptions, the king could have been credited with either acting on his own volition or merely confirming divine will or immemorial custom.
There were significant differences in these civic experiences of royal power between the Old Babylonian period and the first millennium. Old Babylonian cities looked to their kings to cancel their obligations both retrospectively and prospectively. Thus, for retrospective exemptions we possess a number of references in Old Babylonian sources to the king’s ‘‘establishing justice.’’ From extant texts of the actual decrees, we can see that this action canceled private debts, debt bondage, and arrears of taxes owed to tax farmers. The costs of the tax cancellation were borne by the crown rather than the tax farmer (Charpin 1990). In prospective exemptions we have a number of royal claims to innovative exempting. The kings of Isin, for example, were especially careful of the feelings of the most prestigious cities in their realm. Thus the prologue to the Laws of Lipit-Ishtar boasted of reducing their forced labor burdens:
At that time, I liberated the sons and daughters of the city of Nippur, the sons and daughters of the city of Ur, the sons and daughters of the city of Isin, the sons and daughters of the lands of Sumer and Akkad, who were subjugated by the yoke(?), and I restored order. (Roth 1997: 25)
In contrast, first millennium retrospective cancellations were rarely attested, while prospective ones were seen as confirmatory rather than innovative on the king’s part. Already in the preceding Kassite period we hear of an institution called kidenutu, meaning ‘‘protection,’’ whereby cities claimed to be under divine protection and thus free from royal impositions. During the Neo-Assyrian period we know of Nippur, Sippar, Borsippa, and Babylon in the south and Assur and Harran in the north enjoying these privileges (Reviv 1988). The implications of kidenutu were spelled out in the so-called Advice to a Prince:
If (the king) called up the whole of Sippar, Nippur, and Babylon to impose forced labor on the peoples aforesaid, requiring of them service at the recruiter’s cry, Marduk, sage of the gods, deliberative prince, will turn (the king’s) land over to his foe so that the forces of his land will do forced labor for his foe. Anu, Enlil, and Ea, the great gods who dwell in heaven and earth, have confirmed in their assembly the exemption of these (people from such obligations). (Foster 1993a: 761)
The citizens of Babylon, in a letter to their joint Assyrian suzerains Assurbanipal and his brother Siamas-sum-ukin, loftily claimed that within the limits of their city even a dog shared in these privileges (Pfeiffer 1935: 55-6). Assyrian kings often pandered to the desire of Babylonian cities for tax exemptions, but seem to have garnered little credit for their efforts. Whatever a king’s claims, it seems likely that the citizens saw him as simply confirming their traditional privileges. Moreover, these were privileges that were perceived as constantly threatened by a royal potential for intervention that provoked bitter resistance (Brinkman 1984: 22-3; Frame 1992: 35-6).
The term kidenutu itself was not attested after the Neo-Assyrian period. Nevertheless, the basic issue of city autonomy seems to have persisted into later times. Tradition remembered the end of the short-lived Neo-Babylonian dynasty as due to the estrangement between its final king Nabonidus and the citizens of his own capital, conceptualized as royal transgressions against Marduk and his temple (Beaulieu 1989: 149-203; Kuhrt 1990). In contrast to both the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires, the Achaemenid and Seleucid regimes were far more comfortable with a decentralized structure in which individual cities and regions could enjoy considerable autonomy (Kuhrt and Sherwin-White 1987).
The social relations in the Mesopotamian state
Old Babylonian civic leaders reacted positively, if nervously, to the king’s intervention and acquiesced in the projection of it to the cosmic level, but the first millennium leaders evaluated similar interventions less positively. This was probably due to changes in society. Twin long-term developmental processes of territorial integration and elite differentiation provided the context for literate urban elites’ increasing feelings of estrangement from royal government.
Before the Old Babylonian period political developments had seen an oscillation between independent city-states and hegemonies such as the Akkad and Ur III ‘‘empires.’’ Under these latter regimes a number of Mesopotamian city-states were subsumed into larger polities. However, there was little in the way of direct rule. Authority was delegated to client princes who, whether local or central in origin, were always liable to rebel or defect. Each city-state retained enough sense of its political identity to reemerge when centralized control lapsed. In the early second millennium, after the fall of the Ur III dynasty, however, we begin to see the emergence of integrated regional states larger than the old city-states. This territorial integration was accompanied by elite differentiation. Thus, within southern Mesopotamia, both Rim-Sin of Larsa and Hammurabi of Babylon resisted leaving significant conquests in the hands of subordinate kings. Although Hammurabi’s dynasty only controlled the whole of Babylonia for a short time, its decline saw the region split into two subregions rather than fragment back into city-states.
Also a number of Old Babylonian dynasties identified themselves in terms not so much of their capitals as with a specific ethnic group, the Amorites. This people had spread over much of the Near East by the early second millennium transcending the boundaries of the individual city-states (Kamp and Yoffee 1980).
Nevertheless, there seems to have been no deep structural division between king and elites. While Old Babylonian kings themselves may have cultivated an air of ethnic distinction from their urban subjects, they were happy enough to employ them in the administration of their realm. Moreover, by the late Old Babylonian period, if not earlier, the kings of Babylon had essentially ‘‘privatized’’ much of their administrative machinery through a form of tax farming (Charpin 1982; Yoffee 1977: 143-51).
Elite involvement in royal administration in the first millennium was rather different. After the Old Babylonian period the process of territorial consolidation had continued. Southern Mesopotamia came to be seen as a single land with Babylon as its natural center. Similarly, in northern Mesopotamia, the former city-state of Assur became the center of the territorial state of Assyria, ‘‘the land of Assur.’’
Particularly in the south, however, this consolidation was accompanied by a degree of social differentiation. Kings of Babylonia often claimed different ethnic status from their subjects as Kassites, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Persians, and finally Macedonians. In the later second millennium, both Assyrian and Kassite rulers periodically moved their capitals from traditional urban centers to new cities. Both Tukulti-Ninurta II of Assyria and Kurigalzu of Babylon founded new capital cities that they named after themselves. First millennium rulers tended to have their seats of government in established centers, although both Assur and Babylon were seldom actual centers of government in the first millennium. The Assyrian capital was moved to Kalhu under Assurnasirpal II (883-859 bce). Sargon II (721-705) mimicked some of his second millennium predecessors and built the entirely new capital of Dur-Sharukin, ‘‘Fortress of Sargon.’’ His son and successor Sennacherib (704-681) abandoned this new site and ruled from the old established city of Nineveh. In the south, Babylonia was effectively under Assyrian domination from the mid-eighth century to the late seventh. The situation was reversed and political power was restored to Babylon with the Neo-Babylonian empire. Not only was this period short-lived, it also included the bizarre episode of the last Neo-Babylonian king, Nabonidus, residing in the North Arabian oasis of Teima for a decade and allegedly ignoring the traditional capital. Subsequently, both Babylonia and Assyria were ruled by foreign dynasties, the Persian Achaemenids, and the Greco-Macedonian Seleucids from a variety of cities outside the traditional circle of Mesopotamian capitals: Susa in south western Iran, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris between Assyria and Babylonia, and Antioch in Syria.
The urban elite of the old established cities probably maintained some connections with royal administrations. But mainly they seem to have found expression for their sense of political identity in the priestly hierarchies of their cities’ temples. Tellingly, the walls that protected Old Babylonian cities generally had names that glorified kings. By the first millennium, such names usually glorified gods (George 1996: 368-9).
World History
