Democracy and a devotion to freedom are hallmarks of modern political thought. These mechanisms of government and associated values have in the past been understood as first appearing in ancient Greece, particularly in the city state of Athens due to reforms begun by Solon in the middle of the sixth century bce. There is nonetheless older evidence both of institutions that resemble democratic ones and also a devotion to aspects of freedom, some of which we shall examine here.
Here what we mean by democracy and democratic is institutions or actions including broad representation of populations. In Athens the terms democracy and democratic meant ‘‘ward-rule’’ and referred to the divisions in the Athenian male population that constituted electoral constituencies. Athenians restricted participation to adult men from old families and excluded newcomers, who eventually exceeded the number of native Athenians in the population. Rome too had a very restricted population who could participate in its representative institutions (Rhodes 2003).
Similar institutions in the Ancient Near East may or may not have included election of representatives and voting by representatives. In most instances for which we have evidence selection of representatives and their functions were informal. But the informality ought not to blind us to the actual power of the institutions.
Here we shall look at instances of such institutions by region and then in chronological order, even though the stories relaying the events may come from later periods and must be used judiciously when depicting earlier times. The earliest mechanism for democratic rule appears to have been the institution of the assembly in the southern Mesopotamian city-states. It was called the u k k i n in Sumerian, and Akkadians translated this eventually as puhrum, a verbal noun from a verb meaning ‘‘to collect together.’’ This shadowy institution seems to have been responsible for running the great literate cities of the south, though how it was selected and what the limits to its powers may have been are not depicted in the archival texts that mention it (Postgate 1992: 8-81).
In the tale of Gilgamesh and Agga, which was copied in Old Babylonian schools around 1800 bce, we hear of Early Dynastic times perhaps as early as 2700 bce in which two advisory groups seemed to influence the conduct of kings (Jacobsen 1987: 345-55). A group of old men advised against offending an overlord, while the young men were all for it. The assembly of young men is not otherwise attested, and it has been argued that its existence in this text was a literary element not reflecting an early reality. The elders as an assembly was otherwise known, though, and the story here may even underline their importance since in order to oppose them the narrator gave Gilgamesh the support of a god (Katz 1987: 108-11). In the Gilgamesh Epic itself, developing out of this material in Akkadian language, best known from Assurbanipal’s library around 700 bce, one hears also of the two groups who advised for and against the rash action of going on a distant adventure. The old men were against it, of course, and the young encouraged it. But an earlier Old Babylonian version of the story had only the old men (George 1999a: 20-2, 112-13).
There are good indications from literary texts that the kings of the Ur III period (2112-2004 bce) were dependent on the approval of the assembly, and two men called heads of the assembly are known (Wilcke 1974: 182-3). The assembly might have been a city organization only, or it might be a representative body from the whole area ruled by the state.
These hints and other literary indications of how the gods made decisions, in great meetings by consensus, may reflect early Mesopotamian political practice and have been taken as a sign of ‘‘primitive democracy’’ (Jacobsen 1943). In most periods the judicial system was predominately democratic. And though the details of how assemblies functioned are not so clear, a first millennium proverb assumes that anyone, or perhaps just free males, could stand in the assembly, but it argues that you must be pretty stupid to do so:
Do not go to stand in the assembly;
Do not stray in the very place of strife.
It is precisely in strife that fate may overtake you;
Besides, you may be made a witness for them
So that they take you along to testify in a lawsuit not your own.
(Jacobsen 1943 [1970]: 160)
More recent translations take ‘‘assembly’’ much more generally to mean ‘‘a law court’’ (Lambert 1960: 101, 31) or just ‘‘a crowd’’ (Foster 1993a: 328, 31), both of which are possible.
In spite of the general tendency of Mesopotamian history to increased centralization of political power, assemblies appeared to be the ultimate seats of sovereignty and even to elect monarchs or decide on war and peace in times of crisis. There was a tendency to make the officers of the assembly, including the war leader, permanent, and this tended over time to favor the growth of the power of the king, who may have originated as the war leader (Jacobsen 1957 [1970]: 138, 149-51).
The Old Babylonian Code of Hammurapi, from around 1760 bce, assumed that the elders of cities would take group responsibility when no one else was available to assume such responsibilities, and other references show that the assembly consisted of judges and witnessed judicial actions (Roth 1995: paragraphs 5, 23, 142, 202, 251).
The record of an Old Babylonian trial for homicide was copied as part of the school curriculum, and it showed who was likely to sit in the assemblies that made judicial decisions. The persons identified by their jobs included various kinds of manual laborers including a bird catcher, a potter, and an orchardman. These men were probably not paid for their work, and it is unclear how they found the time to do this public work as well as their own (Jacobsen 1939a: 134-6; Van De Mieroop 1999b: 146-7). Along with free and presumably prosperous workers, however, there was also a musklenum, a term which probably includes any free lower-class person (Stol 1997). An omen from the same period mentions a woman revealing the business of the assembly; this may mean that women were sometimes in the assembly and that proceedings were secret. But women might learn of business through men, and there is no reason to think all business was secret (Van De Mieroop 1999b: 148).
It has been argued that the way that tribal groups functioned in Old Babylonian Mari was essentially like the democratic forms of rule in Greece. We see this world functioning because the king of Mari claimed also to be a tribal leader and thus had to placate a variety of constituencies, not just the urban leadership to which other Mesopotamian kings looked for support. Elders were important, and so were assemblies. And the strength of democratic traditions appeared to be stronger in older towns (Fleming 2004).
In Assyria there is evidence of communal management in the Old Assyrian period around 1800 bce where the ‘‘harbor’’ or merchant establishment made decisions, perhaps only if the big men agreed to hear the case (Van De Mieroop 1999b: 149, 151). But even later when there were strong kings there is evidence that the king had to pay attention at least to the great families of Assyria (Tadmor 1986).
In the Hittite Old Kingdom around 1650 bce there was an assembly which seems to have functioned as a high judicial council judging very high ranking persons accused of some crimes, but always under the king’s control. The assembly continued to exist into the Empire period (1400-1200 bce), but its role was apparently circumscribed. The term for assembly was panku, related to the English prefix pan-, and sometimes meaning ‘‘all,’’ implying broad representation. But not all citizens sat in it, only some very high officials. Earlier scholarly notions that the assembly might actually have elected the king in the midst of a dynastic crisis seem unlikely; an early edict calls for the assembly’s intervention in dynastic crises, but later, when such crises arose, the assembly was not mentioned (Beckman 1982).
From Israel soon before 900 bce we have the story of the split of the kingdoms which involved three different representative groups (1 Kings 12). Rehoboam, Solomon’s son and a southerner himself, went to the northern city of Shechem to assert his right to the kingship, and there he confronted ‘‘all of the assembly of Israel,’’ not further defined but representing the northerners in asking for relief in their tax and forced labor burdens. Rehoboam put them off for three days and consulted with two other groups, ‘‘the old men who stood before Solomon, his father,’’ and ‘‘the boys who grew up with him.’’ The old men suggested leniency, even saying he should be a slave to the northerners, and they would then be slaves to him. But the young men said he should assert his prerogatives and threaten the northerners with an even greater burden. The king, being young himself, chose their advice. The northerners rejected the deal and constituted a separate kingdom. These ‘‘old men’’ and ‘‘boys’’ were loosely constituted bodies connected to the king’s court since they had traveled north with the king. And there were obviously democratic representational rights that were being asserted by the ‘‘assembly of Israel.’’ This assembly had the power to obey and also to disobey. The two groups of advisors were probably appointed rather than elected, and they constituted here a sort of bicameral senate. Because such stories were told by old men, the wisdom of old men was to be preferred, although later theological reflection declared that God had decided earlier on the split (:15) (Reviv 1989: 99-101; Willis 2001). This bicameralism, like the earlier Sumerian story, may merely be a way of saying that there was broad consultation, and consensus was eventually reached among the courtiers, but not between the northerners and the king.
This story is unique, but there are references throughout the Hebrew Bible to the old men who appeared to be not just informal advisors, but the elders also constituted a steering committee for localities. Their judicial function was foremost (de Vaux 1965 1:137-8, 152-3). The town of Succoth had seventy-seven elders (Judges 8: 14), but there probably could be more or fewer. Perhaps that number may in fact have represented the whole free male population of the village (Wolf 1947: 99). In the judicial cases represented in the Bible it does not seem that there was a huge mass of elders coming to judgment (Ruth 4, Job 29: 7-13). The mentions of the elders were vague throughout the Hebrew Bible and colored by a later historiographic concept that there should have been ‘‘pan-national’’ institutions at an early date (Reviv 1989: 187). Still it seems clear that elders did sometimes take over important functions in the absence of other leadership (39). And when the centralized Israelite states in the north and south fell to outsiders, the elders were the key institution in insuring the continuity of administration at the local level and perhaps even the continuation of national identity where it had been established (190-1). The terms for congregation and assembly appeared mostly in Priestly and Deuteronomic writings, the later strands of the first five books of the Bible. These terms may have designated ‘‘the responsible elements of the nation, the full citizens who have the rights and duties of looking after the affairs of the nation’’ (Pope 1962: 669), but how such bodies functioned was not described. These institutions may have been most important after the Babylonian exile ending around 520 bce when there was no Israelite king, and appointed governors might or might not be responsive to local needs (Liverani 2003: 371-2).
Herodotus conveyed a story, perhaps more relevant to Greek thought than to Persian, but still perhaps of interest in his eastern Mediterranean milieu, in which Persian nobles debated the varieties of types of governments they might choose. They naturally accepted the later king Darius’ argument that monarchy was better than oligarchy or democracy, but they clearly assumed that everyone would want to minimize tyrannical government (Liverani 1993c: 29; Snell 2001: 18; n. 17 to Herodotus 1987 III, 80-2).
In Egypt, though from earliest times the role of the king was paramount, there is clear evidence of the functioning of the assembly, called qnbt in Egyptian, that may have been responsible for administering towns or even whole nomes, or counties.
Initially in the Old Kingdom this assembly may have been made up of high administrators appointed by the king. The assembly fulfilled judicial functions as early as the Eleventh Dynasty, 1975-1940 bce. There seem to have been separate assemblies in temples and in regions. In the New Kingdom there were ‘‘assemblies of notables’’ but also a grand assembly under the vizier himself associated with the king, perhaps one assembly each for Thebes and Heliopolis (Edgerton 1947: 155-6). Certainly in times of weakness of the central authority assemblies of worthies met and made decisions about local issues. We do not know how one became a member of such an assembly or how it worked, but the focus was on administrative and judicial matters (Helck 1980; Trigger et al. 1983: 214). But when we seek what law might have been enforced, we find there was no written collection of the legal norms, perhaps because they could change from king to king (Edgerton 1947: 154). Or it may be that judges in their assemblies had great personal power to make what they regarded as just decisions, and this may explain the lack of a code in Egyptian law (Jin 2003: 273).
In later Egypt the town councils had apparently been abolished under the Ptolemies, 305-30 BCE, but there was a council of elders, perhaps consisting of former magistrates, that persisted. The city of Alexandria petitioned the Roman emperor Augustus (30 bce-14 ce) for a council, and the other big cities also lacked councils; the emperor apparently refused. It was not until Septimus Severus in 200 ce that new grants of councils were made to Alexandria and the other large cities (Bowman and Rathbone 1992: 114-15, 118, 124, 127). Once one had been a member of the council, one apparently remained known as a ‘‘councilor’’ for life, so clearly this was an honor (Lewis 1983: 50.)
Very obscure but suggestive is a letter from the last important Assyrian king to the otherwise unknown ‘‘elders of Elam,’’ meaning the Iranian part of the Mesopotamian basin. The elders had complained of ill-treatment and implied that they were in charge of their area’s political fate (Waters 2002).
Phoenician cities on what is now the Lebanese and Syrian coast were in contact with Greece, and so they are of particular interest in their democratic processes, but the early evidence for them is not good. They were ruled by kings who left royal burial inscriptions, but one Egyptian text may indicate that around 1000 bce there was an assembly which a king consulted (Wilson 1945). The text is the Report of Wen-Amun, which traced the many disappointments that faced an official of a weakened Egypt as he tried to buy wood on the Phoenician coast (Lichtheim 1973-80: 2, 229).
The Phoenicians preceded the Greeks in sending out colonies around the Mediterranean. This diffusion of persons may have diffused royal authority and also opened the way to more democratic decision-making among the immigrants. The situation is unclear, but immigrants still saw themselves as belonging to the communities of the mother cities back on the Lebanese coast. In the Persian period and later (539 bce-) there were assemblies with councilors in Phoenician cities and a mixture ofdemocracy and oligarchy in the best known of the colonies, the north African city of Carthage. At Carthage officials were elected by broad-based assemblies, but the highest offices could be held only by rich men on the grounds that they would have the leisure to perform the official functions (Sommer 1999: 248, 251; Aristotle 1990 II, viii, 1273a).
The influence of decentralized Phoenician rule with democratic elements on the later Greek democracies is disputed now. Some would still say that the Greeks invented the essence of democracy, while others would say that, along with the alphabetic writing system, city government was a borrowing from the Orient. Obviously there were local variations on a theme seen earlier in the Ancient Near East, and one cannot say that institutions are ever completely taken over without modification. This political culture of combining the rule of the rich with the representation at least of influential groups continued to be a mark of European society, some might say even down to the present day (Sommer 1999: 271, 284-5).
The evidence for voting in the Ancient Near Eastern assemblies is slight, and that may have been a Greek innovation (Wolf 1947: 102 n. 27), previous assemblies having relied on consensus. But there is some evidence of voting by groups in Old Assyrian times around 1800 bce (Evans 1958: 7). The passage in a fragmentary decree reads, ‘‘the clerk shall divide them into [three] and they shall settle [the affair]. Where they do not settle [the affair], on assembling both small and great [they shall settle the affair] of their neighbors [at the mouth] of the majority, and... [at the mouth of] the majority they shall settle the affair’’ (Driver and Miles 1975: 377). In Greek the Homeric poems clearly assumed that there would not be voting. As late as Thucydides (460?-404 bce) (1963: 65, I, 87, 2) the Spartans shouted instead of voting. But the reforms of Solon at Athens presupposed voting in the sixth century, and the existence of potsherds inscribed with names apparently in preparation for ostracism argues that in the course of the fifth century at Athens voting became common (Larsen 1949: 164, 168, 170-3). The secret ballot, however, was first mentioned at Rome in the second century bce (Larsen 1949: 180-1).
The advantages of tending toward democracy are universal since such systems promote the feeling among the governed that they participate in the making of decisions and therefore have a stake in the success of policies. Liverani expressed it well: ‘‘Democracy is an effective multiplier of energies, which transforms a quantitative scantiness of resources into a qualitative preeminence, while despotism condemns the oriental empire to an under use of potentialities still present in its immense resources’’ (1993c: 8).1 Any sensible leader can see that that is true, and many sacrificed efficiency for, as we now crassly say, buy-in over the course of history ancient and modern.
World History
