Mark Chavalas

Our goal here is to describe early Ancient Near Eastern empires, the earliest expansive states in human history. First, it seems imperative that we attempt to define and describe the nature of empires in the context of the Ancient Near East, even though the term has been described as a ‘‘word not fit for scholars’’ (Doyle 1986: 11). The term empire has often been taken for granted as ifit designated something obvious to everyone. Of course, ethnologists argue that ‘‘man is an imperial animal who has an inbuilt need for expansion.’’ Others have said that imperialism and colonialism are as old as the state and they thus define the political process. Of course, if we use these statements, we do not have to give reasons for the expansion of political systems except to say that they are able to expand (Larsen 1979: 98).

Empire comes from Latin imperium, with the root denoting order and command. For the Romans, the term described the executive authority possessed by Roman magistrates. By the modern age the term began to denote an expansive polity that incorporated multiple states. An empire, according to Doyle, is a ‘‘system of interaction between two political entities, one of which, the dominant metropole, exerts political control over the internal and external policy - the effective sovereignty - of the other, the subordinate periphery’’ (1986: 12). Thus, empire is effective control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinated society by an imperial society (Sinopoli 1994: 160).

Empires by definition have an international aspect. They can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, or by economic, social, or cultural dependence (Doyle 1986: 45). Even without consensus or clarity of definition, one should be able to describe the types of empires and how they dealt with subordinate entities. Eisenstadt attempted to distinguish between centralized bureaucratic empires that have well-developed military, political, and financial administrative bureaucracies, which attempt to restructure the political relations with the peripheral areas, and more loosely knit patrimonial states that have limited bureaucracy and little or no restructuring of other polities (Eisenstadt 1963; Sinopoli 1995: 6).

There are some generic aspects of empires: they often exhibit dramatic success at the outset in territorial expansion and consolidation, often beginning because of a period of fragmentation or weakness in their regions. However, many will also experience rapid collapse. They often begin because of the need for protection against external threats, economic goals of security or acquisition of valued resources, ideological factors, or as a result of‘‘natural consequences of power differences between polities.’’ Military conquest is often a last resort and is the most costly, involving the massive disruption of production and lives. Coercive diplomacy with the implied threat of force is often a preferred alternative. Even better is the role of ideology in motivating action, since it provides legitimation and explanations for inequalities in subject populations. Empires often appropriate local beliefs and deities, while imposing new imperial beliefs, gods, rulers, and practices. Wallerstein defines empires as a ‘‘mechanism for collecting tribute, while political empires are a primitive means of economic domination’’ (1974/80, 1990). They are often characterized by massive urban material remains, large-scale monumental art and architecture, road systems, cities, and temples.

Unfortunately, scholars of Ancient Near Eastern studies may very well find it difficult not to have an inferiority complex when it comes to the comparative study of empires, since most general studies altogether ignore the evidence from Mesopotamia, the area of the world that was responsible for creating the first known empires (Eisenstadt 1963; Wittfogel 1957). Moreover, the educated public will no doubt think of the ancient oriental empires of Xerxes, Sennacherib, and Nebuchadnezzar as characterized in Classical and Biblical sources as their datum point for understanding Ancient Near Eastern empires. But most Mesopotamian scholars have rejected old ideas about Mesopotamian states being temple-states or totalitarian states and see the latest empires as outgrowths of earlier states.

Before discussing Ancient Near Eastern empires, one has to come to an understanding of still more basic questions concerning the nature of the ancient state. In other words, we cannot discuss Mesopotamian empires before we understand the concept of the Mesopotamian state. In recent years it has been the anthropologist who has attempted to clarify this problem. Baines and Yoffee define the ancient states in the Near East as ‘‘the specialized political system of the larger cultural entities that we denominate ‘civilization’ ’’ and ‘‘the central governing institution and social form in a differentiated, stratified society in which rank and status are only partly determined through kinship’’ (1998: 199). To complicate matters, some say that, technically speaking, there was no Mesopotamian ‘‘state’’ (Baines and Yoffee 1998: 205). This does not help us in our search for the Mesopotamian ‘‘empire,’’ to say the least.

To compound this problem, there has been no consensus concerning the nature of Mesopotamian empires, if in fact they existed. Some have even argued that the concept should be restricted to the late empires of the first millennium bce (Larsen 1979: 91). However, there has been no substantive attempt to define the term for Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamians, of course, had no term for ‘‘empire,’’ but they had no term for ‘‘religion’’ either. Both, however, were realities. All of the ideas of expansion, domination, and exploitation are to be found at one level or another. Larsen concludes, at least for Mesopotamia, that an empire is a supranational system of political control, and such a system may have either a city-state or a territorial state at its center (1979: 91). This is understandably a political definition. Certainly the difference between Old Akkadian and Late Assyrian empires is one of degree.

The Akkadian state certainly contained elements of empire in which there was a methodical and permanent occupation of conquered territory, military garrisons, and a division of the territory into provinces which were accountable to the center.

According to Larsen, the three basic Mesopotamian political structures were city-state, territorial state, and empire, all of which were related and concerned to some extent with territorial expansion (1979: 92). Over the duration of Mesopotamian history there is a clear trend toward more complex organizations after recurrent political breakdowns. Empires also tended over time toward larger units and stronger centralization. Thus, Larsen sees a system of city-states and loosely organized empires in the third millennium BCE, territorial states and ‘‘federal’’ empires in the second, and imperial systems in the first that covered the entire Near East. The periods in between are seen as ‘‘dark ages,’’ after which reconstruction begins. However, many of these ideas are not in the mainstream any longer in Mesopotamian studies (Michalowski 1993a: 56). In fact, most empires collapsed after only a few generations.

We will be analyzing a number of ‘‘empire’’ periods in Mesopotamian history, including the so-called ‘‘informal empire’’ of Uruk in the fourth millennium bce (about 4150-3100) (Wright and Rupley 2001: 85-122), the Kish and Syrian or Ebla traditions of the early to mid-third millennium, and the centralized states of Akkad and Ur III in the late third millennium. We will then briefly look at the Old Assyrian, Old Babylonian, and Syrian kingdoms of the early second millennium bce, and the states of Hatti, Assyria, Mitanni, and Babylon in the mid-late second millennium BCE, to the break-up of those states (around 1200-900 bce).