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History Civilization & Culture

Ancient Mesopotamia
ANCIENT
Life in the Cradle of Civilization
MESOPOTAMIA
Course Guidebook
LIFE IN THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION
Professor Amanda H. Podany
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Amanda H. Podany, PhD
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 Amanda H. Podany, PhD
Professor of History
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

A manda H. Podany is a Professor of History at California State

Polytechnic University, Pomona, where she has taught since 1990. She
earned her BA in Anthropology from the University of California, Los
Angeles (UCLA), after which she obtained her MA in the Archaeology of
Ancient Western Asia from the Institute of Archaeology at the University of
London. Professor Podany returned to UCLA in 1982 and received her PhD
in Ancient Near Eastern History from the school in 1988. Her dissertation
was a study of the history and chronology of the ancient Hana kingdom in
present-day Syria.
Professor Podany has continued to publish her findings about the
Hana kingdom and its contributions to the understanding of the chronology
of the 2nd millennium BCE. She has also published in the fields of scribal
tradition, international relations in the ancient Near East, and ancient legal
practices. Professor Podany has been an invited speaker at several international
symposiums in her field and is working on a study of the relationships between
kings and their subjects in the Late Bronze Age.

In 2013, Professor Podany was the recipient of a fellowship from the

National Endowment for the Humanities to support her research. Her
book Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient
Near East was awarded the Norris and Carol Hundley Award by the Pacific
Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. Professor Podany
is also the author of The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction and
The Land of Hana: Kings, Chronology, and Scribal Tradition. She was the co–
general editor of The World in Ancient Times (with Ronald Mellor), a series
of nine books on ancient history for secondary students. Professor Podany
wrote The Ancient Near Eastern World (along with Marni McGee) for that
series. She has also worked extensively in providing professional development
for teachers and received a certificate of recognition from the California
Department of Education. ■

ii
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION

Professor Biography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i
Course Scope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

LECTURE GUIDES

Lecture 1 Uncovering Near Eastern Civilization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Lecture 2 Natufian Villagers and Early Settlements. . . . . . . . . . 10
Lecture 3 Neolithic Farming, Trade, and Pottery. . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Lecture 4 Eridu and Other Towns in the Ubaid Period. . . . . . 30
Lecture 5 Uruk, the World’s Biggest City. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Lecture 6 Mesopotamia’s First Kings and the Military. . . . . . . . 47
Lecture 7 Early Dynastic Workers and Worshipers. . . . . . . . . . 57
Lecture 8 Lugalzagesi of Umma and Sargon of Akkad. . . . . . 66
Lecture 9 Akkadian Empire Arts and Gods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Lecture 10 The Fall of Akkad and Gudea of Lagash . . . . . . . . . 84
Lecture 11 Ur III Households, Accounts, and Ziggurats . . . . . . 91
Lecture 12 Migrants and Old Assyrian Merchants . . . . . . . . . . 99

iii
Table of Contents

Lecture 13 Royalty and Palace Intrigue at Mari . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

Lecture 14 War and Society in Hammurabi’s Time. . . . . . . . . . 115
Lecture 15 Justice in the Old Babylonian Period . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Lecture 16 The Hana Kingdom and Clues to a Dark Age. . . . . 134
Lecture 17 Princess Tadu-Hepa, Diplomacy, and Marriage. . . 144
Lecture 18 Land Grants and Royal Favor in Mittani . . . . . . . . . 153
Lecture 19 The Late Bronze Age and the End of Peace . . . . . . 161
Lecture 20 Assyria Ascending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Lecture 21 Ashurbanipal’s Library and Gilgamesh . . . . . . . . . . 185
Lecture 22 Neo-Assyrian Empire, Warfare, and Collapse . . . . 195
Lecture 23 Babylon and the New Year’s Festival . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Lecture 24 End of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
Image Credits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246

iv
ANCIENT
MESOPOTAMIA
LIFE IN THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION

I n this course, we’ll explore the Mesopotamian world from the era of the
first settlements more than 12,000 years ago to the earliest cities in the 4th
millennium BCE. We’ll end up in the 6th century BCE, when Mesopotamia
was conquered by the Persian Empire during the reign of Cyrus the Great.
At that point, the people were no longer ruled by a government within
their own land.

1
Course Scope

This course will look at religion—which pervaded everyone’s understanding

of the universe—and at kingship, society, agriculture, trade, justice, literature,
art, warfare, daily life, and more. We’ll encounter some extraordinary
people: kings like Sargon, who created the world’s first empire; Ur-Namma,
who developed the first written laws; and Tushratta, who maintained an
affectionate correspondence with the pharaohs of Egypt.

Others were religious leaders, like Enheduanna, a priestess who survived

an attempt to expel her and wrote hymns about her experiences. We’ll meet
princesses like Kirum of Mari, who was so miserable in her marriage that
she threatened to jump off the roof of her husband’s palace. We’ll also meet
authors like Sin-leqe-unnini, who wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Some of the people who illuminate this era would never have guessed that
they’d be remembered so many thousands of years later. These include
Amat-Shamash, a woman who bequeathed her house to her daughter, only
to have her brothers contest it in court after her death. A written will, spoken
testimony, and justice prevailed on behalf of the younger woman in the face
of her more powerful uncles.

All of these people—and millions of others like them—lived, loved, worried

and celebrated during the long centuries of Mesopotamia’s power. They cared
about the events of their day with the same passion that we have for events
in our own lives.

Each person was an actor in this vast panorama of history, responding to the
events of their time. The documents and objects and buildings that survive
give us a window into their lives. We can read their words, stand in their
houses, admire their sculptures, and try our best to reconstruct their world—
and to understand them. ■

2
UNCOVERING
NEAR EASTERN
1
CIVILIZATION

M esopotamia is the ancient name for what’s now Iraq. People

have often heard of it because it was home to a lot of firsts: the
world’s first cities, the earliest writing, the first written laws, the first
diplomatic relationships—along with a host of other things. That’s all true.
However, Mesopotamia was much more than a place of firsts. Its civilization
was rich and long lasting, surviving for more than 3,000 years. This lecture
starts this course’s work of uncovering ancient Mesopotamia.
Lecture 1  Uncovering Near Eastern Civilization

STUDYING MESOPOTAMIA
bb The study of Mesopotamian history began relatively recently, with the
decipherment of their writing system about 170 years ago. This was
accompanied by a flurry of archaeological excavations in Iraq, Iran, and
Syria—work that has continued ever since. The excavations revealed cities
of great sophistication that thrived in an era long before the Greeks,
Romans, and Israelites.

bb More than a quarter of a million documents have been found—

most of them still unpublished. Many haven’t even been read yet.
Therefore, being a Mesopotamian historian is like being an explorer of
uncharted waters.

bb Luckily, the Mesopotamians wrote on clay. That’s fortunate because paper,

papyrus, and parchment all disintegrate over time. Papyrus documents
typically survive only in desert areas. As a result, there are giant gaps in
our knowledge of ancient civilizations that used organic substances to
document their lives.

bb Although many documents do survive from ancient Egypt, Greece,

Rome, and Israel, these are the ones that were considered so important
that they were copied over and over again. Usually missing are records of
daily life—the letters, administrative lists, contracts, court records, and
so on that would give us a deeper understanding of their cultures. These
are exactly the kinds of documents that we do have in huge numbers
from Mesopotamia.

bb Some ancient clay tablets were baked on purpose, to preserve

them. Others were baked by accident, when buildings burned down.
Baked tablets are usually well preserved. They’re like bricks. Other
tablets were left out in the sun to harden. They might still survive in the
ground, but often they fall apart easily and need to be pieced together
and conserved.

4
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

CUNEIFORM
bb Fortunately, we can read these ancient words relatively easily today. This is
thanks to the efforts of a number of 19th-century scholars who deciphered
cuneiform almost 2,000 years after it was last used. Of course, it’s hard
to decipher a script or language without a bilingual text that includes
the same document in a known language along with an unknown one.

bb For Egyptian hieroglyphs, the key was the Rosetta Stone. This is
a stone inscription from Egypt, bearing the decree of a Ptolemaic king.
It includes the same text in Greek and in two forms of Egyptian so that
all literate Egyptians could read it. The Greek version provided the key
to understanding the hieroglyphic inscription.

bb For cuneiform, one document that served this same purpose was the
Behistun inscription. Unlike the Rosetta Stone, it’s never been located
in a museum. It’s a giant carving on the side of an inaccessible mountain
in Iran.

5 Behistun inscription
Lecture 1  Uncovering Near Eastern Civilization

RAWLINSON AND HINCKS

bb In 1836 and 1837, an intrepid scholar
and adventurer named Henry Rawlinson
climbed the mountain face several times.
He made copies of part of the inscription.
He even made some molds of some sections.
He realized that there were three separate
versions of the text, all in cuneiform. He
guessed—rightly, as it turned out—that
they might be in three different languages.

bb By 1838, Rawlinson and an Irishman named

Edward Hincks had deciphered the easiest
of the three languages, with the help of an
international group of scholars. Hincks
had worked on cuneiform previously, and
Rawlinson used some of his insights. This part
of the Behistun inscription turned out to be
in an ancient version of the Persian language.

bb It used an alphabetic cuneiform script with 43

characters. Old Persian was enough like Middle
and Modern Persian to be understandable. The
text proved to be a royal inscription by the Persian
king Darius I (ca. 550–486 BCE).

bb The second version of the inscription had 131 different characters,

and was in an ancient language called Elamite. It was deciphered later
by a different group of scholars. The last version of Darius’s Behistun
inscription turned out to be in Akkadian, the language that was spoken
and written in Mesopotamia for centuries. It was much harder to decipher.

bb Rawlinson went back to Behistun in 1847 to work on this third version

of the text. However, Edward Hincks had already completed a lot of the
decipherment, using different trilingual inscriptions, also from Iran. It
was known that this form of cuneiform represented a Semitic language.

6
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Hincks recognized that every cuneiform sign could be read as a complete

syllable. Each one could be read as a consonant plus a vowel, or a vowel
plus a consonant, or a combination of consonants and vowels; however,
not one of them represented a consonant all by itself. He was right about
all of this.

bb Though Rawlinson disagreed with Hincks at first, by 1857, Rawlinson

had come around to agreeing with Hincks’s conclusions. They and two
other scholars identified the values of hundreds of cuneiform signs, and
they mastered most of the grammar of the Akkadian language as well.

bb In the same year, the Royal Asiatic Society in London came up with
a test to see if the decipherment
was successful. They gave a newly
discovered cuneiform inscription
to all four men and had them
translate it independently of one
another. Their translations turned
out to be largely the same. The code
had been cracked.

AKKADIAN, SUMERIAN,
AND DOCUMENTS
bb Linguists can’t be sure of every
detail, but Akkadian is enough like
later Semitic languages for scholars
to be pretty confident about how
it sounded. The script regularly
reflects not just the consonants but
also the vowels. In this, it’s different
from Egyptian hieroglyphs and
from later alphabetic scripts like
Phoenician and early Hebrew.

7
Lecture 1  Uncovering Near Eastern Civilization

bb Once Akkadian was deciphered, it was possible to decode some of the

other ancient languages that were written in cuneiform. One of the most
important of these was Sumerian. This was the language of ancient
Sumer, the southern part of Mesopotamia. It was probably the language
of the ancient inventors of the writing system.

bb Sumerian was used in literature and religion long after it had ceased
to be a spoken language. Ancient scribes had long lists of Sumerian
words and their Akkadian equivalents. These helped with the
modern decipherment.

bb Once cuneiform was understood, a great deal of work was done in translating
Mesopotamian documents. This provided a lot of the groundwork for
those who have come after the early scholars. They introduced scholars to
great kings like Sargon of Akkad and Hammurabi of Babylon. They
produced editions of law codes and royal inscriptions.

MESOPOTAMIAN ORDER
bb Despite the longevity of their civilization over thousands of years,
Mesopotamians faced constant threats. These could take the form
of warfare, natural disasters, disease, infections, crop damage,
famine, and deaths of loved ones. The Mesopotamians could control
none of these.

bb Therefore, they treasured what order they could maintain. They had close
communities, and they valued and supported their friends and families.
They developed a judicial system. They expected contracts and treaties
to be upheld and obligations to be met, and they emphasized kindness
and civility in their interactions.

8
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

READINGS
‰‰ Cathcart, “The Earliest Contributions to the Decipherment of
Sumerian and Akkadian.”
‰‰ Chavalas, “Terqa and the Kingdom of Khana.”
‰‰ Robinson, Andrew. Lost Languages.
‰‰ Walker, Cuneiform.

QUESTIONS
ää Why do decipherers usually need a bilingual text in order to
rediscover the meaning of an ancient language?
ää What types of study are possible for Mesopotamia that are
difficult for other ancient cultures, and why?

9
NATUFIAN
VILLAGERS AND
2
EARLY SETTLEMENTS

M ore than 14,000 years ago—in a region that includes parts of

modern Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan—people belonging to what
we call the Natufian culture lived in built shelters and made the best
use of the resources in their region. The area where the Natufians settled got
plenty of rainfall, and was where the wild ancestors of modern wheat, barley,
rye, peas, lentils, sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle resided. This lecture looks at
how their lifestyle shifted from hunting and gathering to farming.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

THE NATUFIANS
bb In some ways, the Natufians were lucky. They had more than just the
makings of a healthy diet; they also had access to a group of species
that they would end up being able to manipulate. Not many animals
are particularly suited to domestication. For example, zebra don’t like to
be ridden, and gazelles don’t follow one another in herds. Therefore, in
some parts of the world, no amount of human intervention would have
succeeded at domestication.

bb But in the eastern Mediterranean area known as the Levant, domestication

wasn’t a problem. Wild sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle were particularly
domesticable. That lay far in the future, however, from the Natufian
world in about 12,500 BCE.

bb Excavations from Natufian sites show that these people created houses
by digging circular pits, building walls of stone or wood, and roofing
them with reeds or hides. Smaller pits dug near the houses were lined
with limestone and allowed the early settlers to store food—such as wild
wheat and barley—for long periods of time. As many as 100 people lived
near one another in villages made up of these round houses.

bb Besides benefitting from the wild grains that grew in the area, villagers
also hunted birds and gazelle. Vast amounts of gazelle bones have been
found at some of the Natufian sites. There seems to have been plenty
to eat.

TOOLS AND CRAFTS

bb In order to hunt and to harvest wild plants, the people developed complex
and beautiful stone tools. This was long before anyone thought up the
technology necessary to make metal tools. The Natufians had not even
invented pottery yet. They had fire for cooking and warmth, but its
potential was still relatively unharnessed. All man-made objects had to
be shaped by hand, and this was an exacting and time-consuming process.

11
Lecture 2  Natufian Villagers and Early Settlements

bb The stoneworkers made tiny f lint blades

one to three centimeters long, with
perfectly straight edges for slicing or fine
serrations for cutting. These are known
as microliths, and they would have been
fitted into bone hafts, or handles, to make
sickles, arrowheads, and knives. Each
shape of blade had a specific purpose. The
Natufian people also made bone tools, such
as hooks for fishing and needles for weaving.

bb The baskets, mats, and fabrics they wove

have long since disintegrated, as all organic
materials do in a humid environment.
However, it’s likely that women and men
developed advanced skills in these areas. Beads
were popular too—especially beads made from
seashells—and these were strung into necklaces,
bracelets, and headdresses. All of this was possible
without farming because the climate was kind and
natural resources were abundant.

DEATH PRACTICES
bb The people might even have had some sort of belief in
a life after death. We can guess this because they buried
their loved ones in cemeteries near their settlements,
accompanied by flowers and, sometimes, dogs. Wolves
were domesticated to become dogs around this time.

bb One dramatic Natufian burial—in a pit inside a cave in Israel—included

the body of a 45-year-old woman who was buried with all sorts of
surprising things, including 50 tortoise shells, the pelvis of a leopard,
and a severed human foot much larger than her own. A ring of stones
surrounded her grave and separated it from 27 others.

12
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The excavator concluded she was probably a shaman—someone who

practiced healing and was viewed as holy in some way. Shamans probably
were effective in their practice. What we now think of as the placebo
effect would have worked well then, too. People who believe they will
get well often do; their bodies rally to fight off infection. The shamans
might also have found cures for pain or illness among the many plants
available to them.

THE SHIFT TO FARMING

bb All in all, life in a Natufian village probably seemed pretty good, at least
for the first couple of thousand years. Food and water were plentiful, and
men and women developed sophisticated skills in making tools, buildings,
clothes, and baskets. They could defend themselves against wild animals
and protect themselves from the elements. They probably told stories in
the evenings, and—being human—sang songs. This must have seemed
to be the way that life had always been and always would continue to be.

bb Eventually, though, there came a shift: The people began to farm. The
fact that they did so is clear. A few thousand years later, the distinctly
transformed shapes of domesticated grains, pulses (like lentils and peas),
and animals show that these species had become dependent on humans
for their existence. Farmers gradually chose and bred plants with bigger
seeds, sheep with longer wool, and so on.

bb Unfortunately, the physical

changes that mark plants and
animals as domesticated
took place a long time
a f ter domest icat ion
started. Therefore, it’s
not possible to mark
an exact date when
the process began.

13
Lecture 2  Natufian Villagers and Early Settlements

THEORIES
bb One popular theory as to why people started to farm is that they were
spurred to do so by a change in the climate. Around 11,000 years ago, the
weather in the Near East became colder and dryer than it had been. The
plants and animals that had reliably appeared in the past became scarcer.

bb Some communities gave up and moved. Others clung on, perhaps

supplementing their diets by beginning to plant the foods that they
depended on or by keeping young animals that would grow and be
useful to them. Some of the animals that were native to this area had
temperaments that lent themselves to being herded—sheep, goats, and
cattle, for example.

bb The process was extremely gradual, according to this theory. Although the
domestication of plants and animals is often referred to as the agricultural
revolution, it happened so slowly that it was probably invisible to the
people living through it.

14
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Another theory is that settlements themselves caused the problem that

ended up being solved (to some extent) by domestication. The villagers
had always focused their attention on the immediate area, which
created environmental stress. Intense foraging and hunting destabilized
the natural environment. In this case, a small trigger could suddenly
limit resources dramatically. This could be a sudden increase in plant
pests, for example. Farming and herding would have helped protect the
villagers against disasters.

bb Perhaps, according to yet another theory, the Natufian villagers were

so successful that they grew too numerous for their local environments.
Continuing to hunt and gather in the immediate vicinity couldn’t support
the growing population, so they might have started farming right where
they lived in order to increase the food supply.

bb A combination of theories is also possible. Perhaps climate change

added to the stress on a population that had grown too large for the
resources available. This population would have already been subject to
destabilization because of the overutilization of the natural resources.

bb Most scholars believe that people didn’t outright choose to be farmers.

Instead, over thousands of years, they came to depend more on the foods
that they nurtured themselves and less on the foods that they gathered
in the wild. No one would have any recollection of what it was like to
be a pure hunter/gatherer by the time they were totally dependent on
farming. Even then, they still hunted and gathered.

GÖBEKLI TEPE
bb For now, it’s impossible to know which of the many theories about the
origins of the domestication of plants and animals is correct. Scholars
disagree. One remarkable piece of recent evidence, though, has shaken
up our image of the hunters and gatherers in the Near East. It turns out
they were not only intelligent, but also organized—and passionate about
their beliefs—in a way that was completely hidden before.

15
Lecture 2  Natufian Villagers and Early Settlements

bb The discovery is at a site called Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey.

About 12,000 years ago—long before farming, when humans were just
beginning to settle in hunting and gathering communities—a group of
people erected a monument at Göbekli Tepe to their gods. It consisted
of huge circles of standing stones.

Göbekli Tepe 16
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb One of the circles is 65 feet across, and the largest of the stones weigh
16 tons. These stones are T-shaped and engraved with images of
predatory and poisonous animals. The engravings are not of the prey
the people of this time hunted. There are no images of gazelles, or
sheep, or goats. Instead, they carved lions, scorpions, vultures, snakes,
and foxes.

bb There doesn’t seem to have been a settlement nearby. According to

the excavators, hundreds of people must have been involved in the
construction. They had to quarry the stones, drag them into position,
and stand them upright. Then they engraved the images and built the
walls. This took organization—someone was in charge. The project must
also have required food and water for the workers, and perhaps shelter.

bb Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist

who directed the excavation,
proposed yet another reason for
the development of agriculture.
He theorized that perhaps in
order to feed the workmen on
this project, it was not enough
to hunt and gather; they needed
a more reliable source of large
amounts of food, perhaps growing
it themselves.

bb Nobody invented writing for

another 7,000 years after Göbekli
Tepe was built, so the people of this era
had no way to tell why the site was built. People
certainly must have visited the site after it was built, perhaps traveling
from hundreds of miles away. There’s archaeological evidence of feasts
taking place—huge stone bowls that would have held 40 gallons of liquid
(perhaps beer) and giant piles of animal bones.

17
Lecture 2  Natufian Villagers and Early Settlements

bb To sum up, farming and herding completely changed the course of

human history, but they didn’t necessarily present an obvious advantage
to the first farmers. Farming also developed independently in China,
the New World, Africa, and other regions. And in each case, it was
probably a lengthy process—all but invisible to each subsequent
generation.  People probably thought they were doing things just the
same way they always had. But after 3,000 years of very slow change,
once agriculture dominated the economy—things began to change
more quickly.

READINGS
‰‰ Akkermans and Schwartz, The Archaeology of Syria,
chapters 2 and 3.
‰‰ Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza, The Neolithic Transition and the
Genetics of Populations in Europe.
‰‰ Bar Yosef and Valla eds., The Natufian Culture in the Levant.
‰‰ Bryner, “Female Shaman’s Grave Loaded with Goodies.”
‰‰ Curry, “Gobekli Tepe.”
‰‰ Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.”

QUESTIONS
ää What would life have been like for Natufian villagers before
farming developed?
ää Which of the theories for the origins of farming do you find most
convincing, and why?
ää What might have been some of the religious beliefs of the
pre-Neolithic peoples, judging from the archaeological remains?

18
NEOLITHIC
FARMING, TRADE,
3
AND POTTERY

T he Neolithic era, which lasted from about 9000 to 5000 BCE, got
its name partly from the sophistication of the stone tools that people
were using. Humans had begun to plant seeds and herd animals, and
they were becoming farmers. This lecture takes a look at lifestyle changes and
trade during this time.
Lecture 3  Neolithic Farming, Trade, and Pottery

COMMUNITIES AND MOVEMENT

bb Early on, farming became common throughout northern Mesopotamia
and the Levant where enough rain fell. This was still before the invention
of pottery, in an era known as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. One remarkable
discovery from the period comes from the site of Jericho.

bb This Neolithic community of about 300 people was built in the desert
next to a gushing spring, which made life possible there. The inhabitants
were able to devise ways to water their crops as well as to use the water
for drinking and washing. They even built a stone wall around their town
that was 9 feet thick and 12 feet high as well as a large tower.

bb Stable and somewhat larger communities like this one developed new
technologies. Extensive contacts between communities spread the
new technologies widely. Examples of the same type of microlithic
stone tools are found in archaeological sites distributed over hundreds
of square miles.

bb Other things were transported far away from their places of origin as well.
Seashells are found hundreds of miles from the sea, and marble bracelets
were popular in many places. Bitumen from Mesopotamia was also traded
across hundreds of miles. Bitumen is a sticky tar substance, like asphalt,
that could be used for waterproofing boats and baskets.

bb DNA studies have shown that 80 percent of Europeans are descended

from ancient Near Eastern farmers. This fact means that ancient Near
Eastern farmers traveled in the Neolithic period and settled in new places,
bringing their sheep, goats, wheat, and barley with them.

bb The DNA of European cattle shows that they, too, had a Near Eastern
origin. Millet—which is a grain or cereal crop—spread from as far
away as China, coming to Eastern Europe at around the same time.
A lot of people were moving around, bringing new technologies, new
domesticated animals, and new ideas with them.

20
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

PLASTER
bb In the Neolithic era, people began using fire to change natural materials
like stone and clay into other forms. The first of these was plaster. The
ancient Pre-Pottery Neolithic people in the Levant discovered this and
used lime plaster to coat floors and walls, which would have been a marked
improvement over mud floors. It could be formed into sculptures, like
the human figures found at the site of Eyn Gazal in Jordan . These are
half-life-size, with painted clothing and hair, and cowrie shells inlaid
for the eyes.

21 Ain Ghazal Statues

Lecture 3  Neolithic Farming, Trade, and Pottery

bb The Neolithic people in the Near East also used plaster to commemorate
the dead. At many sites, archaeologists have found skulls separated from
skeletons, with the facial features reproduced in plaster; and sometimes
with cowrie shells in the eye sockets.

bb They also experimented with making containers out of plaster. These are
called white ware. A white ware vessel is like a stone bowl, but these didn’t
have to be laboriously carved and ground into shape. It could be molded
and left to set. Once dry and solid, it could hold water or other liquids
and foods. But it had a problem—it couldn’t be used for cooking. It was
a good invention, but another one was coming along that was even better.

Neolithic cutlery and foodstuffs 22

 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

POTTERY
bb After plaster, the next great fire-related invention was pottery. This
was truly revolutionary. Pots are fine over flame—they don’t break or
decompose. Whole new culinary possibilities now opened up to the
ancient villagers. People could now make porridge from grain, and they
could make soups and stews. Meat was not just roasted any more. They
also used clay to build beehive-shaped ovens, and they baked flat bread
inside. These ovens—which are called tanurs —are found in ancient
villages and are still used across the Middle East.

bb Pots weren’t just useful for the ancient people; they’re also really useful
for modern archaeologists. Unlike organic materials—like baskets and
bags—potsherds (broken pieces of pots) don’t decompose. Unlike metal
objects (which were invented later), they don’t corrode and they can’t be
melted down and reused.

bb A potsherd found in the ground today looks

almost exactly the same as when it was
thrown away thousands of years ago.
When archaeologists f ind
broken pieces of pottery all
over the ground, in places
where ancient people lived,
they can use these potsherds
to figure out when a site
was occupied.

CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUES
bb Most Neolithic settlements were still small villages, but the villagers
began to experiment with new construction techniques. In the 8000s
BCE, even before pottery was invented, people had begun to use bricks for
construction and built their houses in rectangular shapes. Square corners
allowed more houses to be built next to one another.

23
Lecture 3  Neolithic Farming, Trade, and Pottery

bb An extreme case of this is seen in the city of Çatalhüyük in Turkey.

Çatalhüyük is a remarkable place—a veritable town of maybe hundreds
of inhabitants that thrived around 6000 BCE. That was a time when
most other communities were just the size of villages. Çatalhüyük had
rectangular buildings all jammed up against one another without doors
and without streets in between. People had to enter their homes by using
ladders from the roofs. The ladder was almost always on the south side of
the building, for some reason, with the hearth and oven under the entry
hole in the ceiling.

bb This lack of doors and streets might have been good for the town’s
protection, whether from other people, animals, or the elements. It gets
very cold on the Anatolian plateau in the winter and very hot in the
summer. All those adjacent walls would have served as insulation against
the weather extremes. However, this also meant that people had to learn
how to live peacefully with one another in very close quarters.

Reconstruction of a “shrine” at Çatal

24
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

FARMING SETTLEMENTS
bb Most of Mesopotamia—modern Iraq—was pretty much uninhabited
at this time. It’s just too hot and dry. Some recent excavations, though,
show there were a number of early Neolithic farming settlements in the
far south, around the Persian Gulf. One theory is that what is now the
Persian Gulf wasn’t filled with water until about 14,000 years ago. It
was a deep valley, and ancient hunters and gatherers lived there in the
so-called Gulf Oasis.

bb Then—between 14,000 and 8,000 years ago—sea levels rose and

swamped more than 100,000 square kilometers of land with sea water.
Even after this inundation, there was still much more dry land around
the gulf than today, and Neolithic villages prospered. The cattle that they
herded had local origins, but their sheep had come from farther north.

bb Around 6000 BCE, farmers began to move south from the foothills
into the flood plain of Mesopotamia as they figured out how to dig
irrigation canals to water their crops. The Mesopotamian plain is very
flat. It consists of thousands of years of silt laid down by the floods of
the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This silty soil is rich and fertile when
watered, so the irrigated fields would have produced plenty of food.

bb The situation in ancient Egypt was similar, but with some important
differences. In Egypt, the annual flood arrived right before the sowing
season. As soon as the waters receded, farmers planted their seeds, and
the ground was wet enough to need minimal additional irrigation. The
land produced abundant crops, with little need for human intervention
beyond sowing, tending, and harvesting.

bb Mesopotamian farmers had a much more difficult situation, as they tried

to use the river water to irrigate their fields. One difference from Egypt
is that the Mesopotamian rivers were, in places, higher than the land.
This was an advantage in a way. If farmers breached the natural levee
on either side, some of the river water flowed downhill into their fields.

25
Lecture 3  Neolithic Farming, Trade, and Pottery

Interestingly, the time

period discussed in
this lecture might be
when cats were first
domesticated. They were
drawn to the rodents that
would have populated
human settlements and
began to live comfortably
among humans, even
though the people who
resided there didn’t
necessarily do anything
to encourage them.

bb However, when the annual floods came and river waters spilled over the
banks, there was no guarantee that the river would end up flowing along
the same course as before. If a village was near the banks of a river—
which almost all of them were—villagers could be out of luck if the river
rerouted itself after the flooding receded.

bb Another problem for farmers in Mesopotamia was that the flood came
at the wrong time of year. Seeds needed to be sowed in the spring, but
the flood came in the early summer. The floodwaters would have washed
away the young plants.

bb Therefore, Mesopotamians who moved into the river valleys needed to

find ways to control the rivers. This meant that the villagers needed to
join forces to do some pretty big construction projects, such as reinforcing
and raising levees on both banks of the river, and protecting fields
with dikes and reservoirs. These efforts became a constant feature of
Mesopotamian life.

26
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

THE SAMARRAN CULTURE

bb Some of the earliest communities to spread into central Mesopotamia
from the north belonged to the Samarran culture (which is named after
the site of Samarra where their pottery was first identified). Samarran
pottery is very distinctive, with a matte finish, and it’s often decorated
with drawings of animals and humans in black paint. The Samarran
people also used clay to make figurines.

bb The site of Tell es-Sawwan is probably the best-known Samarran site.

It’s in an area that sometimes had enough rainfall for agriculture, but
the weather was unreliable. Early farmers were able to use the annual
flooding of local streams to supplement the rainfall. Later, they seem to
have dug irrigation canals, and began the long Mesopotamian struggle
to bring their rivers and streams under control.

bb The buildings at Tell es-Sawwan were T-shaped and surprisingly large.

The exterior walls had some niches and buttresses, which later became
characteristic of Mesopotamian architecture. Almost all of these houses
were the same size and shape, probably with one dwelling per family.
There’s no sign that anyone was particularly rich or poor.

bb The people there grew several kinds of wheat as well as barley. Bones
found at the site show they herded sheep and goats (which no doubt
provided wool and milk), and owned cattle. They also hunted wild
gazelle, deer, and boar, and fished as well.

THE HALAF CULTURE

bb A culture that flourished after the Samarran is known as the Halaf. The
Halaf culture flourished across northern Mesopotamia—and even into
Syria and southern Anatolia—from around 5700 to 5000 BCE. This
whole region had enough rainfall for agriculture, so they didn’t need to
irrigate their fields. The Halaf people built both round and rectangular
houses, and mostly lived in small villages, where they farmed the same
crops and herded the same animals that we’ve come across elsewhere in
this lecture.

27
Lecture 3  Neolithic Farming, Trade, and Pottery

bb The Halaf people made incredibly beautiful ceramics. The pots were
handcrafted in elegant shapes, with detailed and meticulous designs.
They seem to have been traded far and wide, or perhaps they were made
by potters who moved from town to town.

bb By 5000 BCE, the farmers of the Neolithic period had spread

right across the Near East. They
also traded with one another over
very long distances for valuable
goods like sea shells for jewelry,
bitumen for waterproofing,
obsidian for stone tools, and
even handmade goods like
beautiful pots.

28
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb A few of the villages grew to the size of towns—such as Jericho and

Çatalhüyük —with hundreds of residents. But most communities were
still relatively small. Although some people must have specialized in
particular crafts, there doesn't seem to have been any distinctions between
rich and poor people yet. That, however, was about to change.

READINGS
‰‰ Akkermans and Schwartz, The Archaeology of Syria,
chapters 3 and 4.
‰‰ Banning, “The Neolithic Period.”
‰‰ Byrd, “The Natufian.”
‰‰ Hodder, The Leopard’s Tale.
‰‰ Moore, “Syria and the Origins of Agriculture.”
‰‰ Peregrine and Ember, eds., The Encyclopedia of Prehistory, volume 8.
‰‰ Rose, “New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian
Gulf Oasis.”
‰‰ Simmons et al., “’Ain Ghazal.”
‰‰ Troy et al., “Genetic Evidence for Near-Eastern Origins of
European Cattle.”
‰‰ Wengrow, “‘The Changing Face of Clay.’”

QUESTIONS
ää In what ways did the Neolithic peoples begin manipulating their
environment, and why might they have done this?
ää What evidence has been found to show that people cooperated
with one another at this time?

29
ERIDU AND
OTHER TOWNS IN
4
THE UBAID PERIOD

T he Mesopotamian people of the Halaf culture lived mostly in small

villages in the 6th millennium BCE. They farmed and used simple
irrigation canals to water their fields. They herded sheep and
goats. They prized exotic goods from far away—things like obsidian and
seashells—and used exquisite pottery and fine stone tools made by highly
skilled craftsmen.
By 6000 BCE, some big changes were taking place, and these continued
for the next 2,000 years. This is what archaeologists call the Ubaid period,
named for the site where the culture was first identified, in the far south
of Mesopotamia.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

ERIDU
bb Scholars first started to understand this period in an area just to the north
of the Persian Gulf, in what is now southern Iraq. One village there was
later known Eridu, and this might already have been its name in 6000
BCE. There was a community at the site since as early as 8000 BCE.

bb When people first settled around Eridu, it was a swampy area where the
fresh water from the Tigris River and Euphrates River spread out into
marshes, not far from the saltier waters of the gulf. Until about 12000
BCE, the area was a wide valley. It flooded gradually—the process took
about 6,000 years—and by 6000 BCE, the gulf was at its highest point,
stretching considerably farther north than today.

bb It used to be thought that towns in this region started to grow because

people discovered how to dig and manage large irrigation canals.
A number of researchers have turned this theory on its head. They think
that extensive farming was made possible by the water already in the
swampy soil, and that this gave rise to larger communities than had been
possible anywhere else.

31
Lecture 4  Eridu and Other Towns in the Ubaid Period

bb In this view, only when the wetlands began to dry out did the people
have to find some other way to keep their fields productive, so as to
feed the large numbers of people who were already living in the new
towns. At that point, communities would have turned to irrigation, which
would’ve required labor- and planning-intensive canals.

bb Eridu must have been an attractive place to live. It had plenty of fields
and food. It was also home to a major god. Perhaps people felt safer
knowing that this god, Enki, was right there
in the community with them. Enki was
viewed as a benevolent, providing god.

bb At the beginning of the Ubaid period,

when Eridu was still a small community,
the shrine to this god was modest—just
a square brick room with an altar at the end,
and an offering stand in the middle. Over
time, as the town got bigger, the temple
was rebuilt on grander scales, but always on
exactly the same sacred spot. Other towns
had temples with similar characteristics.

LIVING SITUATIONS
bb Eridu—home to the beloved god Enki and his temple—was surrounded
by lush fields that must have seemed like a miracle in the dry south. The
community had a thriving, growing population. The men who lived here
would have been called up not just to keep expanding the canal system,
but also to build each new iteration of the temple. The area became
a magnet to merchants and traveling craftsmen who brought goods from
distant places.

bb Houses in Ubaid-period communities like Eridu began to vary in size.

Some were bigger than others. Some graves were richer than others as
well. These are early hints of social stratification: Some people were
clearly wealthier than others.

32
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Any number of causes could have been behind this. Some fields produced
abundant crops because they were closer to the canals, benefitting the
owner more. Some craftsmen made better items and perhaps were able to
bargain for more goods in exchange. Some people began to wield more
power, perhaps because they were serving as foremen on the construction
projects or as priests or priestesses of the gods.

TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES
bb More technological advances accompanied the growth of towns. One was
in the use of copper, which isn’t found in southern Mesopotamia. It had
to come from a great distance—from what is now Turkey in the north or
from Oman in the south—but it was imported this early, and it’s found
in Ubaid period sites like Eridu.

bb The metalworkers seem to have discovered that native copper became

brittle the more they pounded it, and that it became more flexible again
when heated in the fire. This is called annealing. It’s a long way from the
more modern practice of smelting copper out of ore, but perhaps it got
them thinking about how fire might transform other materials, just as it
transformed soft pliable clay into hard pottery.

bb The Ubaid people used clay for a lot of things, not just pottery and bricks.
They formed clay into crescent shapes, baked it hard to give it a sharp
edge, and used the resulting object as a clay sickle for cutting grain. They
also formed the clay into balls, baked them hard, kept these balls in piles,
and used them as weapons in slingshots.

bb The pottery in the Ubaid period was quite

distinctive. This is helpful to scholars because
it allows them to know if a site was occupied
or how to date a level within a site. The pots
weren’t as fine or delicate as earlier Halaf
ceramics had been, but they were attractive.
Ubaid pots of all shapes often had dark
geometric patterns.

33
Lecture 4  Eridu and Other Towns in the Ubaid Period

TRAVELING INNOVATIONS
bb Ubaid-style pottery is found all over the Near East—from Turkey in the
west to Iran in the east, and as far south as southeastern Arabia, in what
is now the United Arab Emirates. Ubaid pots spread over thousands of
miles. Everything from this period that appears far from its point of
origin had to be carried over land or sea and passed from one person to
another. A whole group of innovations seem to have spread as a result of
interactions between people who were traveling farther afield than before.

bb A site called Bahra, in Kuwait, shows a lot of influence from the Ubaid
people of southern Mesopotamia. Their buildings were even similar. Some
archaeologists think that perhaps people moved there from Mesopotamia.
Others believe that the local people admired and imitated Mesopotamian
culture, including its architecture.

bb Another site—called Wadi Debay’an,

farther south in what is now Qatar—
has Ubaid pottery along with some
other remarkable imports, including
obsidian, that came all the way from the
Taurus Mountains in Turkey. Excavators
have found Ubaid pottery at about 60
archaeological sites in the Arabian
Peninsula. The pottery seems
to have been a luxury.

bb Archaeologists have
found that the Ubaid
people of southern
Mesopotamia also had
contact with regions
hundreds of miles to the north
of them. Here, though, the culture
seems, in some ways, to have been even
more sophisticated than in the southern region where the Ubaid culture
was first discovered. This was not a provincial area.

34
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb One of the sites, Tepe Gawra, is near Nineveh, outside modern-day Mosul
in northern Iraq. Tepe Gawra was excavated in the mid-20th century,
and archaeologists working there could see right away how closely it was
related to the Ubaid culture. Its monumental buildings were constructed
with the same design as in the south, with external niches and buttresses
and a tripartite form. The builders at Tepe Gawra even used the same
standard Ubaid cubit of 72 centimeters in their design and construction.

SYRIAN SITES
bb Three sites in Syria, far to the west of Tepe Gawra and far to the north
of Eridu, have given us even more evidence for this period. One is Tell
Zeidan, another is Tell Brak, and the third is Tell Hamoukar.

bb Tell Zeidan is the farthest to the west, on the east bank of the Balih River.
The other two, Brak and Hamoukar, are in a region known as the Habur
Triangle. This is in northern Syria, near what is now the Turkish border.
Many small rivers flow south across a wide triangular region, joining
together to form the Habur River, which flows south to the Euphrates.
The Habur Triangle extends about 100 miles from west to east. It gets
enough rainfall for agriculture, but the rivers provide added irrigation
water when needed, so it has always been a rich, productive area.

bb All three sites were occupied during the Ubaid period, and have Ubaid-
style pottery and architecture. However, they weren’t dependent on the
south for inspiration. Tell Zeidan, for instance, has some of the earliest
evidence of copper smelting. This set the stage for the enormously
important development of bronze.

bb Copper is too soft for weapons and for most tools, but once someone
smelts copper from ore, rather than just hammering native copper into
shape, it’s a much smaller step to add arsenic to the mix to make a harder
metal, called arsenic bronze. Later, arsenic was replaced with tin. Tin was
more difficult to obtain because it came from farther away but, unlike
arsenic, it wasn’t toxic when smelted.

35
Lecture 4  Eridu and Other Towns in the Ubaid Period

bb By 5000 BCE, the people of Tell Zeidan had built a big wall around
their settlement. The town grew to be as large as Eridu—30 acres. That’s
about the size of five and a half city blocks in New York City. Zeidan is
estimated to also have had about the same population as Eridu: 3,000
inhabitants. This was immeasurably bigger and more complex than the
villages that preceded it.

bb Two other finds from Zeidan give a sense of this complexity. One is the
discovery of eight large kilns for firing pottery. These were
probably owned by a town institution—perhaps the
temple—for firing very large quantities of pots.

bb Even more notable was the discovery of stamp

seals and sealings. These weren’t used in the south
yet, but were found at Tell Zeidan, Tell Brak,
and Tell Hamoukar. Each seal probably was used
by an important person, and was stamped into
lumps of clay to seal goods or doorways. A sealed
doorway wasn’t necessarily locked, but it couldn’t
be opened without breaking the seal, so people
would know that someone had been in the room.

bb Seals of this kind are found as early as 7000 BCE

in the north, but they were unknown at this point
in the south. Perhaps the towns of the north had
more complex administrations and hierarchies.

bb Luxury goods came to these northern sites

through trade. The people were importing copper and obsidian from
Anatolia and bitumen from Iraq. A particularly fine example of an object
made from imported materials was found at Tell Brak.

bb It came from a context that the excavators date to around 4000 BCE,
towards the end of the Ubaid period. They called it a chalice because
of its tall, elegant, fluted shape. It had a black obsidian cup on a white
marble base, with the two pieces cemented together with the sticky tar
substance, bitumen.

36
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Bitumen at the top might have cemented a gold inlay into a groove,
but the gold (if that’s what it was) was missing by the time the
excavators recovered the chalice. It is an example of a very high level
of workmanship. In contrast, many of the pots and plates found at Tell
Brak were crudely made. The excavators see this as clear evidence of
social stratification.

READINGS
‰‰ Bahrani, “The Search for Origins.”
‰‰ Carter, “Boat Remains and Maritime Trade in the Persian Gulf
during the Sixth and Fifth Millennia BC.”
‰‰ Charvát, Mesopotamia Before History.
‰‰ Kubba, “The Ubaid Period.”
‰‰ Lawlor, “Report of Oldest Boat Hints at Early Trade Routes.”
‰‰ Nieuwenhuyse et al., eds., Interpreting the Late Neolithic of
Upper Mesopotamia.
‰‰ Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East.
‰‰ Oates et al., “Early Mesopotamian Urbanism.”
‰‰ Rothman, “Tepe Gawra.”
‰‰ Wilford, “Civilization’s Cradle Grows Larger.”

QUESTIONS
ää What were some of the possible reasons for the growth of Eridu
and other early towns?
ää Why might social stratification have begun to be more pronounced
during this era?

37
URUK, THE WORLD’S
BIGGEST CITY
5
T his lecture covers a crucial moment in human history: the early
development of urban civilization. The place to start exploring this
era is the city of Uruk, not far from Eridu in southern Mesopotamia.
Scholars generally agree that by 3500 BCE, it was the biggest city in the
world. It was surrounded by an immense brick wall that enclosed about
642 acres, the size of a big university. That doesn’t sound big for a city today,
but it was huge for its time.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

THE LAYOUT AND LIFESTYLE OF URUK

bb Uruk had two major temple precincts, with a temple at the center of each
and surrounding courtyards and buildings. One was dedicated to the
goddess Inanna (who was the goddess of love). The other was dedicated
to Anu (the god of the heavens).

bb The number of people called on to build these temples must have been
enormous. One theory suggests that the temples took about 100 years to
build and were immediately rebuilt as soon as they were finished to keep
the population constantly employed.

bb As many as 25,000 people lived in the city of Uruk at this time. The whole
economy was based on farming, and most of the citizens would have
owned, or worked on, farmland around the city. This was true throughout
Mesopotamian history. Most Mesopotamian city dwellers walked out to
the fields in the morning, spent their days farming, and returned to the
city when it got dark.

bb The efficiency of farming improved during the Uruk period, with the
invention of the plow. No longer did farmers have to dig holes in the
ground and poke seeds into these openings in the earth. The blade on
a plow—drawn by an ox or donkey—could turn the soil much more
effectively, and the farmer could plant the seeds as he walked behind.

bb Canals had also improved since the Ubaid period, which had lasted from
about 6500 BCE to 3800 BCE. Now, the Mesopotamians could build
canals big enough to sail boats in. The soil in the fields was naturally
fertile—it was made up of silt that had washed down the Euphrates River
over the eons. With effective irrigation and the plow, the fields became
even more productive.

bb Uruk peoples also improved bronze production, and invented wheel-made

pottery, wheeled transport, the cylinder seal, and a writing system. They
also created an effective system of centralized government, though they
still don’t seem to have been ruled by kings.

39
Uruk,
LectureIraq
5  Uruk, the World’s Biggest City

GOVERNMENT AND WRITING

bb Perhaps the two most important developments of the Uruk period were
the creation of a form of government capable of administering a state
and the invention of writing. Unfortunately, we don’t know all that much
about the government, other than that it existed and that it used the new
writing system extensively to keep records.

bb There are no paintings or statues of kings, but there are some small
sculptures of bearded men wearing belts. They don’t seem to be gods.
Gods almost always wore horned helmets in Mesopotamian art. They
might well be priests, and perhaps they were in charge of Uruk.

bb Powerful men might have been in charge of each of the major cities that
were growing during this period, but these men may well have ruled as
representatives of the gods, rather than as kings. Each city had a particular
god that was believed to live there and watch over it. Perhaps the rulers
had a close tie to the city god.

40
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Writing was a real breakthrough. The first written signs weren’t attempts
to represent language. They seem to have been memory aids. Just as
a cylinder seal could give evidence of the identity of a man who had sent
off a shipment, a picture of a cow or a bushel of wheat could record what
was in that shipment.

bb Two marks next to a picture of a cow could indicate that two cows were
sent, and so on. For hundreds of years—from about 3200 BCE onwards—
this was the type of writing that was done. There’s no way to know what
language was being represented. A picture of a cow could be read as the
word cow in any language at all.

PROTO-CUNEIFORM
bb With a way to keep track of numbers and commodities, the administration
could record taxes, or tribute to the temples, or rations—anything that
was coming in or going out from places of storage. This form of script is
known as proto-cuneiform, and it was written down on the same material
that had long been used for impressing seals: lumps of clay. The signs
were drawn into the clay, using a sharp stick or reed.

bb The earliest proto-cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia were well

made, divided neatly into rectangles with straight lines and filled with
the carefully drawn signs that represented
numbers and commodities. Faced
with the impossible task of
memorizing mind-numbing
sequences of objects and
numbers, people invented
a tool that eliminated the
need for memorization. With
writing, they had an easy
method with which to recall
these things.

41
Lecture 5  Uruk, the World’s Biggest City

bb One problem, though, was that the writing system initially couldn’t record
the names of people. An ingenious solution was to use the rebus principle,
which is an allusional device. Someone’s name could be broken up into
syllables, with each syllable represented
by a picture of the thing that
had that name. For example,
if a person’s name in English
was Barbie, they could write
the name with a picture of
a bar and of a bee.

bb The Sumerian language—

which was common in
Sumer, the southern part
of Mesopotamia —happens
to be supremely well suited
to writing this way because
almost all the words were one
syllable in length. This principle
made it possible to write just about
every word in Sumerian.

bb With signs for sounds—as well as signs for whole words—the writing
system could be used to list commodities, record who sent them, what
was still owed, and who had fulfilled a work obligation. It covered all the
details that helped a newly urban society to run smoothly. That, for ages,
was enough for writing to do. Centuries passed before anyone thought of
writing for a more literary purpose.

CONSISTENCY AND ABSTRACTION

bb Throughout Mesopotamian history, most people never learned how to
write. A particular group of professionals, scribes, mastered the process
and were employed in keeping records for the leaders of the community.
It must have become clear early on that writing needed to be consistent.

42
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Each scribe couldn’t invent their own sign for cow, so someone must have
chosen among the signs that had been created and streamlined the system,
rejecting many signs and bringing uniformity. Over many generations,
writing did become consistent.

bb It also became more abstract. Gradually, the early picture-signs evolved

into simpler signs made up of straight lines with wedges at the ends, which
could be written much more quickly. Scribes made the wedge-shaped
lines by pressing a reed with a rectangular end into the clay at a slight
angle. The Latin word for a wedge is cuneus. This is why scholars called
the Mesopotamian writing system cuneiform.

bb Any cuneiform sign could be read as a syllable or as representing a whole

word, called a logogram. Early writing didn’t have any punctuation,
and scribes didn’t put spaces between words. Cuneiform was originally
written in rectangular boxes, each of which contained a phrase or coherent
unit, such as a number and a commodity. This form of writing included
hundreds of signs, each of which had several possible values, depending
on the context.

bb The scribes seem also to have made their own writing materials: Each
scribe needed to know where to obtain fine, consistent clay, and how to
cleanse it so not the smallest impurity would get in the way of the tiny
cuneiform signs to be impressed on the tablet surface. He also needed
to know how to shape the clay into tablets that would be just the right
size for his work, and how to determine the exact moment when it was
still soft enough to write on, but not so soft that it would end up covered
with fingerprints.

TRAINING
bb Faced with the need to master this vast amount of knowledge and skill,
someone must have thought of creating schools in which scribes would
be trained. This was probably initially a type of apprenticeship. Just as
boys learned from their fathers or from an expert how to farm or make
tools, some boys now learned how to write in cuneiform.

43
Lecture 5  Uruk, the World’s Biggest City

bb Very early on, a shared curriculum with the same texts was used in cities
from Syria to the Persian Gulf. Long lists of words were put together,
forming the core of what each scribe needed to learn in school. These
lexical lists have been found in many archaeological excavations, often
with the words in exactly the same order. The lexical lists also provide us
with a window into the Mesopotamian conception of knowledge. The
words defined the world, society, and the universe.

bb They were not organized alphabetically—there was no standard order

for cuneiform signs. However, some lists were organized based on
sound: Words that sounded the same in Sumerian (yet might have had
different meanings) were grouped together. Other words
that started with signs that looked similar were also
grouped together. A third type of list had a conceptual
framework, grouping words in categories.

EXPANSION
bb Archaeologists have found a remarkable fact
about this period: The ancient people from
around Uruk seem to have set up colonies right
across Syria, Iran, and Turkey. There are sites in
these distant lands with Uruk-style architecture
and pottery, as well as cylinder seals and tools.

44
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Unlike the typical interaction in the earlier Ubaid period—when people

were merely influenced by one another—the Uruk people seem to have
physically moved and settled in the new colonies. They were not building
an empire. That didn’t happen for centuries.

bb Instead, these early colonies were probably designed to facilitate

trade—to get obsidian, copper, lapis lazuli, wood, building stone,
and so on—back to the southern Mesopotamian people who really
needed it. Three different types of colonies developed. Some southern
Mesopotamians built settlements in unoccupied areas. Others conquered
existing settlements, and yet others lived peaceably with locals in the
places they moved to.

bb Hamoukar—an Ubaid-period town in Syria—was one of the places

conquered by Uruk people from the south. Archaeologists have found
evidence of buildings that were burned down and walls that toppled.
An excavator described the scene vividly. He said: “The attack must
have been swift and intense. Buildings collapsed, burning out of control,
burying everything in them under vast piles of rubble.” The excavator noted
that this is the earliest-known evidence of organized warfare, and that it
helped the Uruk people take over. New buildings were built in the Uruk
style on top of all that debris.

bb Amazingly, the Uruk people seem even to have been in contact with
Egypt, hundreds of miles away. Around this time, Egyptian tombs were
built using the Mesopotamian niche-and-buttress style of architecture.
Egyptians also began to use cylinder seals, and Mesopotamian boats
appeared in Egyptian art. Egypt was rich in gold, which might have
made it an appealing place to Mesopotamian traders. It’s unlikely that
the Uruk people tried to set up a colony there, but they do seem to have
been in contact.

bb For some reason, this brief flurry of contact ended quickly. For centuries
after the Uruk period, the Egyptians and Mesopotamians appear to have
been weirdly unaware of one another’s existence.

45
Lecture 5  Uruk, the World’s Biggest City

READINGS
‰‰ Akkermans. and Schwartz, The Archaeology of Syria, chapter 6.
‰‰ Algaze, The Uruk World System.
‰‰ ———, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization.
‰‰ Collon, First Impressions.
‰‰ Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians.
‰‰ Glassner, The Invention of Cuneiform.
‰‰ Lawlor, “The Everlasting City.”
‰‰ Rothman, ed., Uruk Mesopotamia and Its Neighbors.
‰‰ Walker, Cuneiform.

QUESTIONS
ää Why do you think so many technological innovations accompanied
the growth of major cities?
ää What might explain why writing was used only for administration
when it was first invented?

46
MESOPOTAMIA’S
FIRST KINGS AND
6
THE MILITARY

T he world’s first kings ruled in the ancient Near East, in Mesopotamia

or Egypt. It’s hard to tell which because both happened around
the same time. If Egypt had the first kings, then perhaps the
Mesopotamians borrowed the idea. After all, they were in touch with Egypt
in the period immediately before the first kings during the Uruk era, from
about 3800 BCE to 3100 BCE. Perhaps the influence went the other way.
Regardless, this lecture looks at those early kings as well as military activities
and diplomacy.
Lecture 6  Mesopotamia’s First Kings and the Military

NEW POWERS IN CHARGE

bb Before the first kings, priests seem to have been in charge of organizing
the population in the earliest cities. This makes sense: They were thought
to represent the gods, and so it stood to reason that they could figure out
what the gods wanted.

bb That begs the question: How did someone without that special relationship
come to be in charge? One theory is that the earliest kings held the
post for only brief periods of time, and only when they were needed for
military campaigns. Perhaps a strong, charismatic man led the troops to
battle against some neighboring city, and stepped down when he was no
longer needed.

bb If the battles became more frequent, then perhaps the king didn’t feel
the need to step down. Perhaps he took the lead in negotiating with the
enemy. Perhaps his troops felt a special loyalty to him, different from
what was felt towards the priests. Perhaps the king’s son took the role
from him because that’s what sons did
in the ancient world: They took the
same jobs and responsibilities as
their fathers.

bb This is guesswork, but it does

seem as though there were kings in
Mesopotamia by around 2900 BCE.
Once the role of king was invented,
it became an inherited position,
and never went away—at least not
until modern times. People came to
expect the rule of kings; they were as
much a part of life as one’s family and
one’s gods. The man with the most
convincing claim on the position was
the son—usually the eldest son—of
the previous king.

48
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The time of Mesopotamia’s earliest kings is known as the Early

Dynastic period. It lasted for about 600 years, from around 2900 BCE.
Unfortunately, scribes didn’t really start writing anything useful about
kingship until about 400 years after the first kings started to rule. The
Mesopotamians had a writing system, but before 2500 BCE, they used
it almost entirely to keep track of accounts.

KINGLY ACTIVITIES
bb By the end of the Early Dynastic period, the king’s duties would have
included, among other duties, planning and leading military campaigns,
levying taxes, identifying the best men to serve as officials, planning
building programs, and forging alliances with neighboring states. They
also had to choose the ideal wife, who had the most strategically useful
father, and make useful marriage alliances for their daughters. It was
a lot to learn.

bb Monarchs in all eras have shared one additional concern: maintaining

a relationship with their subjects that provided the best odds that they
would be able to stay on the throne. In the modern world, this mostly
entails being popular.

bb In the ancient Near East, the relationship between ruler and ruled
was more complicated. No one doubted that there should be kings.
The tension they experienced was between accepting the rule of one
particular monarch and supporting someone who wanted to overthrow
him. The reigning king had to maintain a relationship with his subjects
that discouraged rebellion and made any usurper seem less attractive.

bb The king had only two choices. He could terrify his people into submission,
or he could win them over by providing for them, protecting them, and
convincing them that he was on their side. Either way—whether he was
feared or loved, or a bit of both—a king had a two-way relationship with
his subjects.

49
Lecture 6  Mesopotamia’s First Kings and the Military

bb Subjects had to provide for their king, just as he provided for them. They
had to pay their taxes, and they were required to show up not just for
military service but also for corvée labor duty, a type of national service
work done by free men when canals needed to be dug or maintained, or
buildings needed to be constructed. The subjects had to follow the king’s
directives and obey his orders as well as those of his officials.

KINGDOMS
bb In the Early Dynastic period, the kingdoms in Mesopotamia were
relatively small. They’re often described as city-states. Each king ruled
a small state with one or two major cities and a number of smaller towns
and villages.

Temple Oval 50
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb They were all located along rivers—either the Tigris or the Euphrates,
or a tributary—because the people needed the river water for everything:
irrigation, transportation, drinking, bathing, fishing, and so on. Around
the cities and villages were fields and orchards that produced crops.
Beyond those were steppe lands that supported herds of sheep and goats.
These were the basis of the economy.

bb In each city-state, the king and his family lived in the capital, which was
also home to the local god. For example, the moon god Nanna lived in
the city of Ur, and the goddess Inanna lived in the city of Uruk. The god
or goddess had a grand temple, usually near the center, not far from the
king’s palace. The god was believed to literally be present, taking the
form of a statue.

bb Each god was believed to be in at least two places at once. The sun god,
for example, was up in the sky—visible to everyone—but also present in
human form, in his statue in the city of Larsa. He needed all the things
a human ruler needed—a home, clothing, food, and adulation. His home
was the temple. Clothing and food were presented to each of the gods on
a regular basis. The priests and priestesses provided all of these, along
with incantations and hymns of praise.

bb The kings of the Early Dynastic city-states credited the city gods with
their prosperity, and with their victories over neighbors. However, they
and their subjects didn’t think the gods of the other cities were false.
They believed in the power of all Mesopotamian gods. They also all
recognized the superior power of the king of the gods, Enlil, who lived
in the city of Nippur.

UR-NANSHE
bb The lecture now turns to a particular king—Ur-Nanshe—and his
successors. Around 2500 BCE, Ur-Nanshe founded a dynasty that ruled
the city-state of Lagash, in southern Mesopotamia. Lagash was rich not
just because of its crops and herds but also because it was located on a trade
route that led to the powerful land of Susa in the east.

51
Lecture 6  Mesopotamia’s First Kings and the Military

bb We know from images of King Ur-Nanshe that he shaved off his hair and
beard. This bald, clean-shaven look was common among Mesopotamian
priests at this time, though Ur-Nanshe wasn’t a priest. King Ur-Nanshe,
in his most famous relief sculpture, is shown with a basket of bricks on his
head. This relief is made of limestone, and it’s now in the Louvre, in Paris.
It’s unlikely the king actually carried bricks, but he used this image to
remind people that he was a builder. This sculpture was probably created
when he was dedicating a shrine to the city-god Ningirsu.

bb King Ur-Nanshe’s reign wasn’t entirely peaceful. He fought and defeated

the kings of two neighboring city-states: Ur and Umma. These battles
were the start of a long series of conflicts that carried on after Ur-Nanshe’s
death, especially with the land of Umma. Ur-Nanshe’s successors
controlled Lagash for almost 200 years. Nine of his descendants ruled
the region, one after another, in a remarkably stable dynasty. And almost
all of them ended up fighting against Umma.

52
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

CONFLICT
bb Lagash and Umma each claimed the right to control a territory in between
their two city-states called the Gu’edena. Most surviving inscriptions are
from excavations of buildings that belonged to Lagash. As a result, we
have a rather one-sided story about this dispute. No doubt, the kings of
Umma felt equally righteous about their cause, and felt that their god
supported them and wanted them to control the Gu’edena.

bb One of Ur-Nanshe’s successors—a king named Eanatum, who came to

power around 2450 BCE—memorialized his victory over Umma with
an impressive stone inscription, known as the Stela of the Vultures. It’s
largely broken, but we can still make out some of the main features.

bb One side shows what seem to be historical events. At the top, the king
is leading his troops into battle on foot. The soldiers are equipped with
identical pikes, shields, and helmets. They’re lined up in a phalanx
formation, with their shields protecting them. This isn’t a primitive band
of warriors, but a well-trained, well-equipped, and coordinated army. The
king probably didn’t actually stand in front of the warriors—he would
have been far too vulnerable—but it’s likely he did fight with them.

bb In the second register, the victory seems to have been achieved, and the
soldiers might be marching in a victory parade with Eanatum in a chariot
as their leader. The third register is broken, but it seems to show a pile
of dead soldiers and a bull. The bull was probably about to be sacrificed.

bb The back of the stela shows the religious interpretation of this historical
victory. The god Ningirsu holds a huge net full of dead enemies from
Umma. The king is giving credit for his victory to the god of his city-
state—Lagash.

bb The text of the inscription is even more interesting. It gives a historical

account of past conflicts with Umma, along with details of the recent
battle—Eanatum’s victory. The border between Umma and Lagash was
reestablished as a result of this war. The Gu’edena region was once again
inside the borders of Lagash.

53
Lecture 6  Mesopotamia’s First Kings and the Military

bb Eanatum didn’t kill the king of Umma. Instead, he forced him to swear
an oath. The religious object—in front of which the oath was sworn—
was the “battle net of Enlil.” Enlil was a greater god than either the city
god of Umma or the city god of Lagash—a fact both kings would have
acknowledged. When the king of Umma swore to Enlil that he wouldn’t
dispute the border, Eanatum might have had some hope that the border
would last.

LATER EVENTS
bb A later king—Eanatum’s nephew, Entemena—continued to have
problems with Umma. In one inscription, he mentions that he sent envoys
to the king of Umma to negotiate. Here again, relations were complicated
between these enemy countries. The kings negotiated truces at the end of
each round of battles and spoke to one another through envoys.

bb Entemena also had other troubles. He was worried about the king of
another city-state—Lugalkiginedudu of Uruk—who had conquered
a previous enemy of Lagash in the form of the city-state of Ur.
Lugalkiginedudu seemed to be trying to take control of much of southern
Mesopotamia. Entemena perhaps worried about whether Lagash would
be the next city-state to be attacked by Lugalkiginedudu.

bb Entemena worked to make sure this didn’t happen. In several inscriptions,

he boasts that he was able to conclude a treaty of “brotherhood”—that is,
an alliance—with Lugalkiginedudu of Uruk. This is one of the earliest
peace treaties that we know of.

bb It wasn’t only in the south that kings made treaties with one another
and sent envoys to negotiate. In Syria—hundreds of miles northwest of
Lagash—kings of a city-state named Ebla did many of the same things.
Ebla, too, had a long-lasting rivalry with a neighboring country. In this
case, it was Mari, downstream along the Euphrates. The two kingdoms
went to war over and over again, but they also made treaties with one
another and other cities.

54
 Ebla, Syria
Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

EARLY DIPLOMACY
bb As soon as the Mesopotamians had kings—and as those kings started
engaging in organized wars against one another—they also created
a formal way of engaging in diplomacy. Early diplomacy had five
specific components:

cc The first was the regular exchange of messengers.

cc The second was the agreement to abide by treaties that governed

relations between the city-states (including treatment of the
messengers).

cc The third was the exchange of letters between the kingdoms; these
were carried by messengers.

cc The fourth was giving luxury goods to one another in the form of
gifts that the messengers brought almost every time they went to
a foreign court. These gifts could be in answer to specific requests.

cc The fifth was the tradition of marrying an ally’s daughter, or a king

sending his own daughter to marry an ally or a vassal.

55
Lecture 6  Mesopotamia’s First Kings and the Military

bb These five conventions helped create orderly international relations for

more than 1,000 years.

READINGS
‰‰ André-Salvini, “Tello (Ancient Girsu).”
‰‰ Archi, “Ebla Texts.”
‰‰ ———, “The Royal Archives of Ebla.”
‰‰ ———, “Trade and Administrative Practice.”
‰‰ Aruz, ed., Art of the First Cities.
‰‰ Cooper, “International Law in the Third Millennium.”
‰‰ ———, Reconstructing History from Ancient Inscriptions.
‰‰ Magid, Glenn. “Sumerian Early Dynastic Royal Inscriptions.” in
Chavalas 2006, 4-16.
‰‰ Matthiae, Paolo. “Ebla.”
‰‰ ———, “Ebla and the Early Urbanization of Syria.”
‰‰ Michalowski, Piotr. “Sumerian King List.” in Chavalas 2006,
81-85.
‰‰ ———, “Third Millennium Contacts.”
‰‰ Milano, “Ebla.”

QUESTIONS
ää How and why did the Early Dynastic city-states go to war, and
what alternatives were there to warfare?
ää How did kings justify their right to rule?

56
EARLY DYNASTIC
WORKERS AND
7
WORSHIPERS

T he world must have seemed very different to people who lived 5,000
years ago.
Many things in life and nature were completely chaotic and
sometimes terrifying. Crippling disease or infection could kill a loved one
with no explanation, death at childbirth was somewhat common, and
natural disasters could take crops or homes. Since the natural world was
almost unbearably unpredictable, it seems as though people didn’t want
their personal lives to be unpredictable. The early Mesopotamians created
an orderly social world in which people could count on others to behave in
predictable and civil ways. Almost everyone seems to have followed unwritten
rules. This love of order pervaded everyday life in the Early Dynastic period,
from around 2900 to 2300 BCE.
Lecture 7  Early Dynastic Workers and Worshipers

RELIGIOUS BELIEFS
bb One place where the desire for order was apparent was in religious beliefs.
The Mesopotamians believed the gods had control over chaos and
order in the universe. The natural world might have seemed completely
unpredictable, but they could explain this. They believed that gods and
goddesses—wildly powerful individuals who shared our human virtues
but had our weaknesses as well—were in charge of all of it.

bb When the gods were angry, they could wreak havoc, causing all manner
of natural disasters. When they were happy they could be stable—maybe
even loving. When the gods were content, crops were abundant, herds of
sheep expanded, women gave birth to healthy babies, and the rivers rose
predictably and didn’t overflow their banks. It was up to human beings
to try to keep the gods happy.

bb Being like humans—but on a much bigger scale in every way—the gods

needed houses, food, drink, and gifts. Yet there were no guarantees.
According to the Mesopotamian flood story, the king of the gods—whose
name was Enlil—decided to wipe out human beings because they were
just too noisy, and he couldn’t sleep. (He wasn’t successful. Another god,
Enki, saved humankind by telling a man to build a boat to escape the
flood with his family.)

bb One of the Mesopotamians’ firmly held beliefs was that cosmic order
was written on a document—a clay tablet—in the realm of the gods. It
was known as the Tablet of Destinies. On the fabled tablet (presumably
written in cuneiform) were written different aspects of cosmic order,
which they called the me.

bb So long as a wise god like Enlil controlled the Tablet of Destinies, all
was well with the world. On the other hand, chaos broke loose when
the tablet ended up in the hands of an evil deity. Several myths describe
how the good gods would get it back. The Mesopotamians just longed
for structure and predictability in their lives, and prayed that the tablet
would stay safely in the hands of the father of the divine family.

58
 Cemetery
Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of at Ur
Civilization

bb The Mesopotamian religion wasn’t congregational and wasn’t dogmatic.

People didn’t gather together to worship. They didn’t expect to get
spiritual guidance in a temple, and religious leaders didn’t preach.
Normal people worshiped the gods privately, in their houses or in small
neighborhood shrines. Families were devoted to particular gods, and
each individual believed that he or she had a personal god and goddess
to watch over them.

bb Mesopotamians didn’t go to big-city temples to pray. A temple was the

residence of a god. Where the god actually lived—that is, the sanctuary
in the heart of the temple, where his or her statue was located—was as
private as the house of the king. It was off-limits to almost everyone except
for the high priests and priestesses.

WORK AND FOOD

bb One thing many people did do in a temple was work. By the Early
Dynastic period, the temples to the great gods had turned into economic
powerhouses. They owned vast estates, with fields, orchards, and herds
of sheep and goats. The priests hired hundreds of workers to farm the
lands and herd the animals. Other workers processed the harvested wheat
and barley into bread and beer. Many women worked for the temples to
turn wool into textiles.

59
Lecture 7  Early Dynastic Workers and Worshipers

bb Textiles produced by women working in the temples and palaces became

some of Mesopotamia’s most important exports. In the Early Dynastic
period and for thousands of years after that, people were willing to pay
high prices for Mesopotamian fabrics. In Plutarch’s Life of Cato the Elder,
there’s a reference to a Mesopotamian tapestry in Roman times.

bb Workers were paid in rations of barley, oil, and wool—

enough to support not just the worker but his or her
family as well. The workers would use some of the
barley to make bread and beer, and some of the
wool to make clothes, rugs, and blankets for their
families. Vegetable oil was used for eating and
for light (this was before candles—they had only
oil lamps).

bb Sometimes, the workers would have

rations left over after using what their
families needed. They could use this
surplus to trade with other people for
things they needed, like salt, cooking
utensils, and tools.

bb Although grain was the only type of food they

received in their rations, the Mesopotamian
workers’ diet didn’t consist solely of bread.
They also ate vegetables from their gardens.
We know from later recipes that they were
particularly fond of onions. They also fished
in the rivers and made stews of the meat of
wild birds. At religious festivals they might
eat beef or goat meat, though a goat, sheep,
or ox was more useful alive than dead.
Dates from date palms, which grow across
Mesopotamia, were the sweetest items in
their diets. The Mesopotamians cooked
dates in bread to make dessert.

60
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Mesopotamians drank beer all the time. It was safer than drinking water
because the fermentation process sterilized it. The beer had calories—that
is, a source of energy—and a low alcohol content. It was considered to
be one of the most important aspects of civilization. People sometimes
drank this beer through straws from big communal pots at banquets. The
straws helped people avoid the sediment, barley husks, or even insects
that might have fallen in.

bb Women were often involved in brewing throughout Mesopotamian

history. The female innkeeper was a common figure in Mesopotamian
life. All in all, women could work in a number of professions. One of the
most important roles was as a priestess. A high priestess had many duties,
and most of them weren’t religious. She could be responsible for running
an entire temple estate.

bb Just as large numbers of people worked in the great temples of the

gods, many were also employed in the royal palaces and estates.
The king of each city-state had a palace in his capital city. He owned
extensive agricultural land and herds of sheep and goats. His wife did
as well.

WARS
bb Sometimes, wars between the cities broke out, and men were called up
to fight. There was no standing army at this time, so battles were fought
during the months between harvest and planting, when farmers could
leave their fields to fight.

bb The palaces drew up lists of men recruited for military service; sometimes
these were lists of whole towns. They standardized arms and armor,
and organized a hierarchical system of generals. They even invented the
phalanx formation thousands of years before the Greeks used it. This
probably took away the possibility of individual acts of heroism but made
the army stronger.

61
Lecture 7  Early Dynastic Workers and Worshipers

bb Mesopotamian artworks that depict warfare from the Early Dynastic

period shows that everything (at least on the winning side) seems to be
going according to plan. Identical soldiers line up with their identical
shields, helmets, and spears, presenting a united front to the enemy.
The enemies are always shown in disarray. They’re bleeding, naked, and
trampled under the feet of the victors.

bb In reality, a Mesopotamian battle wouldn’t have looked like this, with

one side robbed of all their clothing and dead or captured and the other
still in perfect formation and unscathed. Battles would have been brutal,
with many casualties inflicted on both sides. Deaths in battle and deaths
afterwards from infected wounds added to ancient fears of chaos. War
wasn’t inevitable, though: The elaborate diplomatic system provided a way
to try to solve crises without bloodshed.

UNCOVERING THE PAST

bb Unfortunately, the lives of ancient commoners can be hard to reconstruct.
They were almost always illiterate, so they didn’t leave records, and their
homes have rarely been excavated. Archaeologists have traditionally
focused more on temples and palaces.

bb The structures are never complete—and that’s true of all buildings.

Usually, excavators find only the bottoms of walls or foundations. The
buildings were abandoned at some point, and the owners almost always
removed any valuable goods inside so that only trash was left on the
floors. Then the walls fell down, the whole thing was eventually leveled,
and a new building was constructed on top of the ruins. This happened
over and over, so archaeologists usually find layers of ancient floors,
foundations, hearths, broken pots, and food debris.

bb Fires did preserve some evidence. When a building burned down, fire
would bake clay tablets, so every written document in a burned building
is left just as it was. The fire also carbonized wood and other organic
materials. Sometimes, there’s evidence of wooden doorposts or baskets.

62
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

Pots and food waste of everyday life are often left there, too, just where
they were when the fire happened.

bb Another window into ancient life appears when archaeologists uncover

a tomb that hasn’t been robbed. People were often buried with things
they thought would be useful in the afterlife. Often, they were dressed
in their finest clothes and jewelry.

AN EXCAVATION
bb Late in 1922, a British archaeologist named Sir Leonard Woolley began
leading an excavation at the city of Ur, about midway between modern-
day Baghdad and the Persian Gulf. Woolley had a giant team of workmen,
and they found evidence of some extraordinary tombs from the Early
Dynastic period, as well as buildings and temples from later periods of
Mesopotamian history.

63 Tomb at Ur
Lecture 7  Early Dynastic Workers and Worshipers

bb By 1927, the team had discovered about 1,850 burial pits of commoners,
and 17 much more elaborate and rich tombs. They were from the Early
Dynastic period—maybe around 2600 BCE. Somehow, they had gone
unnoticed by tomb robbers for thousands of years, so they were found with
everything exactly as it had been when the burials took place.

bb These elaborate tombs are very mysterious. According to Woolley, some

of the tombs weren’t for just one person. He recounted one with “6 men
on the entrance side and 68 women in court dress.” These people were
attendants who had either killed themselves or been killed to be buried
with the main person in the tomb. There were 17 of these “royal tombs,”
as Woolley called them. Each one,
he wrote, was the “resting place of
the semi-divine ruler.”

bb After the death of the leader,

a large pit was dug, and a one-room
building was constructed at one end.
Inside the building, the body of the
leader was placed and surrounded
with luxury goods. Outside the tomb
building, the doomed attendants
walked down a ramp into the pit,
standing in orderly lines. In some
cases, a wagon was backed down
the ramp, accompanied by soldiers
in helmets and armor. These
attendants were all killed, after
which the pit was covered up.

bb The objects buried in the tomb

would have been worth a fortune,
even back then. There were musical
instruments—mostly lyres and
harps—and chariots, armor, weapons, sculptures, and bowls. Many
objects were made from luxury materials that had been imported.

64
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb All of this suggests the Mesopotamians had a belief in the type of afterlife
that the Egyptians also looked forward to, one in which people could be as
rich and powerful after death as they were in life. Perhaps the attendants
believed they were going to a glorious afterlife with their leader. At this
early time, there were no written records of what the Mesopotamians
believed about the afterlife, but it’s interesting to note that later legends
did not make it out to be a pleasant place at all.

READINGS
‰‰ Bottero, The Oldest Cuisine in the World.
‰‰ Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians.
‰‰ Damerow, “Sumerian Beer.”
‰‰ Foster, “A New Look at the Sumerian Temple State.”
‰‰ Hansen, “Royal Building Activity at Sumerian Lagash in the Early
Dynastic Period.”
‰‰ Moorey, Ur “of the Chaldees.”
‰‰ Nemet-Nejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia.
‰‰ Pollock, “Ur.”
‰‰ Woolley, “The Royal Graves of Ur.”

QUESTIONS
ää How might the Mesopotamians’ belief that they existed only to
serve the gods have influenced their view of life?
ää Why might attendants have been willing to die and be buried with
their leaders?

65
LUGALZAGESI
OF UMMA AND
8
SARGON OF AKKAD

T he ancient Mesopotamian king Lugalzagesi of Umma, who came to

the throne around 2350 BCE, was perhaps the most ambitious ruler
the world had seen up to that time. His successor, Sargon, was even
more powerful and set the model for being an emperor. This lecture takes
a look at these two important rulers.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

LUGALZAGESI’S RULE
bb At the time Lugalzagesi ascended to power, the city-state of Umma had
been feuding with the neighboring kingdom of Lagash for generations. In
stone inscriptions, one Lagash king after another boasted of his victories
over Umma.

bb Lugalzagesi changed that. A later writer described how Lugalzagesi

swept into Lagash and attacked 20 temples, shrines, and palaces. He set
fire to seven of the buildings and did major damage to 12 others. He also
looted their treasuries.

bb Lugalzagesi wasn’t done after his conquest of Lagash. He was out to

rule what he called “the Land”—not just a couple of city-states. At this
point, there was no word for all of Mesopotamia because it had never
been politically united. It was just “the Land.” Later, it would be known
as Sumer and Akkad. Then, the Greeks called it Mesopotamia. Today,
we know it as Iraq.

bb Until Lugalzagesi, the only type of king who existed in Mesopotamia

was the king of a city-state. Lugalzagesi had bigger ideas.
When he said he was king of “the land,” he was claiming to rule all
the city-states. Lugalzagesi made this statement in an inscription on
a vase found in Nippur, which was thought of as the religious capital
of Mesopotamia.

bb Interestingly, he doesn’t mention conquests in this inscription. Although

a writer describes him as having destroyed Lagash, Lugalzagesi doesn’t
brag about his military power in the inscription commissioned for him.
Instead, he goes on and on about all the gods who supported him—13
of them. He’d been given the kingship by Enlil himself, he said. And
the god of heaven, An, watched him with “a steadfast eye.” The god
Enki had given him understanding. The sun god Utu had pronounced
his name, and so on. He then says that everyone he ruled was happy, and
in good cheer.

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Lecture 8  Lugalzagesi of Umma and Sargon of Akkad

bb The final part of the inscription is a blessing and prayer, asking Enlil
to watch over him and his people, and asking for peace and prosperity.
Lugalzagesi calls himself the “shepherd” of his people—not the victorious
conqueror. Perhaps he didn’t want to mention the destructive side of
his actions.

bb Some scholars think this suggests that he was a good diplomat who had
managed to bring at least six city-states together as a confederation,
without conquering them all. Others think the inscription just wasn’t
the place where one would mention conquests, because it commemorated
the peaceful quality of the kingdom he’d created. Either way, Lugalzagesi
had done something important for the history of Mesopotamia.
He’d thought of a state that was bigger than his home city and the land
around it.

bb The last known mention of Lugalzagesi is very different from his

impressive portrayal in the earlier inscriptions. An even more powerful
king brought Lugalzagesi’s reign to an end. This was King Sargon, whose
royal inscription states:

Sargon, king of Agade, solicitor of Ishtar, king of the universe,

anointed priest of An, king of the Land, governor of Enlil.

He won in battle with Uruk…. He conquered the city, and tore down
its walls.

And he captured Lugalzagesi, king of Uruk, in battle, and led him

in a neck-stock to the gate of the temple of Enlil.
bb This was an ignominious end for Lugalzagesi—to be brought in a neck-
stock as a prize of war, completely humiliated. Still, King Lugalzagesi
had set a precedent by claiming to rule from the Upper Sea to the
Lower Sea, even if he didn’t actually achieve it. He’d united a group of
city-states under his rule. His successor seems to have been influenced
by this. Perhaps he wanted to accomplish what Lugalzagesi had only
bragged about.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

SARGON
bb Sargon said he was king of Agade.
This was a new city, somewhere
to the north of Sumer, in
the region where the Tigris
River and Euphrates River
f low closest together.
Archaeologists haven’t found
the city of Agade yet. This
area of Mesopotamia came to be
called Akkad.

bb The main language spoken

there was Akkadian, which was
different from the Sumerian
spoken in the south. Akkadian
is a Semitic language, related
to modern Arabic and Hebrew.
Akkadian began to be written
down in Sargon’s time, using the
same cuneiform script also used to
write Sumerian.

bb Sargon was a warrior king who

spoke Akkadian. The inscription
calls him “king of the Land”—which
was the same title that Lugalzagesi
had taken. However, he also called Bronze head of
himself something even more an Akkadian king
impressive. It can be translated as
“king of the universe. ” There’s some debate about the translation, but
regardless, the term meant something bigger than “the Land.”

bb Sargon also states that he had relationships with three gods. Here, he
makes some fairly conventional claims. The gods had chosen him to rule
his land, and he served them in religious and political roles.

69
Lecture 8  Lugalzagesi of Umma and Sargon of Akkad

bb It’s notable that Sargon says nothing about his father. If he had inherited
the throne, presumably he would have said so. His name, Sargon, means
“the king is legitimate” or “true king.” This suggests that it wasn’t his
birth name.

SARGON’S EMPIRE
bb Sargon wasn’t the kind of ruler who’d be celebrated in the modern world,
if he appeared today. Modern states and their subjects don’t approve of
leaders who stage coups, take power and make unprovoked attacks on
their neighbors. However, Sargon was remembered by later generations
as a great king. The later Mesopotamians seem to have almost completely
forgotten Lugalzagesi—and all the other Sumerian kings of Lagash
and Umma—but Sargon’s name and reputation were passed down for
thousands of years.

70
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb In his inscription, Sargon described the cities he conquered as he headed

beyond Uruk. First, there was Ur, where he tore down the walls. Ur had
been where the rulers were buried with much of their wealth, and with
sacrificed men and women to serve them in the afterlife. Then, he went
on to Lagash, and continued “down to the sea.” This was the Lower
Sea—the Persian Gulf.

bb When he got there, he states that he “washed his weapons in the sea.”
This was such a symbolic gesture that it captured the imagination of
Sargon’s successors. From this time on, a king who claimed to rule all of
Mesopotamia often said that he had washed his weapons in both seas.

bb Sargon used much the same wording as Lugalzagesi to describe why

he’d been successful. He said that “Enlil did not give him a rival, but
he gave him indeed the Upper Sea and the Lower Sea.” This took 34
battles, apparently.

bb After all his conquests, Sargon was ruler of an empire. Strictly speaking,
this was the world’s first empire. The Egyptian kings had ruled an area
almost this extensive—at least in length, though not in square miles—
for hundreds of years. But Egypt was one country. The people there
all spoke the same language, worshiped the same gods, and shared the
same culture. The Nile was a natural unifying feature, and ever since
about 3000 BCE, the default situation in Egypt was that it was ruled by
a single king.

bb This was never true in Mesopotamia, which tended to break up into

smaller kingdoms. Sargon’s empire was full of people with different
traditions, different languages, and a long history of independence. The
people Sargon conquered wouldn’t have felt automatic allegiance to him.
Their loyalty was to their local kingdom.

bb They don’t even seem to have thought of themselves as Sumerian, or

Mesopotamian, or Syrian. They thought of themselves as citizens of Mari,
Lagash, or Ur. That brings up the question: Why should they submit to
a foreign war leader who had come in and destroyed their buildings and
city walls, and then asked them to pay taxes to him?

71
Lecture 8  Lugalzagesi of Umma and Sargon of Akkad

bb Sargon had to come up with some mechanisms to make this new system
work to ensure that he didn’t spend his entire reign leading troops from
one place to another, endlessly putting down rebellions. The ideas that
he came up with set a pattern for all later Mesopotamian empires, and,
after that, for the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman empires that ruled
this same region.

SARGON’S ACTIONS
bb Marlies Heinz, a German archaeologist at the University of Frieburg,
has looked at Sargon’s reign as a classic example of a successful rebellion
against an established order. He did a number of things that a rebel leader
often does. He moved fast in his early conquests, not giving people time to
fully realize what was going on. He was quick to put previously powerful
leaders into embarrassing and humiliating situations—like dragging
Lugalzagesi home in a neck-stock.

bb He took away some of the land that traditionally had belonged to

temples and sold it or used it as gifts to reward people who supported
him. He resettled some people whom he had conquered in new areas.
These people might have rebelled against Sargon if they were left in
their homelands, but in their new settlements, they would have to focus
on making a living, so they wouldn’t have much energy left to form
a resistance movement.

bb Sargon created a new capital that didn’t have any old allegiances or
traditions. Power was now focused in just one place—his capital city of
Agade—and he could demand the goods he wanted from around the
empire as taxes and tribute, rather than paying for them. This was one of
the great advantages of his new system—at least to him and his officials.
Enormous amounts of wealth flowed in, and not much flowed out.

bb In each region that he conquered, Sargon said the local god had given him
control there, even if he also admitted he’d fought for it. This probably
wasn’t entirely cynical. He likely believed it himself.

72
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb His very success proved his legitimacy, and demonstrated all the divine
support that he had. Only if the gods had chosen him to build the empire
could he possibly have succeeded. The people probably believed this, as
well. It might have made rebelling a little riskier—the gods might be
against rebels.

MORE MOVES BY SARGON

bb Sargon put one of his family members in an important religious post
in the south. Ur was one of the greatest of all cities, and home to the
moon god, whose name was Nanna in Sumerian (and Sin in Sargon’s
Akkadian language). The temple of the moon god was huge and wealthy,
and headed by a powerful high priestess. Ur might well have become
a center of resistance against Sargon’s new imperial system.

bb Sargon appointed his daughter to be the new high priestess of the moon
god at Ur. She could keep an eye on things for him politically, while
also working to keep the moon god on his side. We don’t know what
the daughter’s original name was, but it would have been an Akkadian
name. In Ur, she adopted a Sumerian name, Enheduanna, matching the
language of the people there.

bb Another of Sargon’s strategies for dominating was to have a group of

soldiers available year-round. Up until this time, battles were fought
when people weren’t farming. The men called up for military service
were farmers, and they needed to be at home for most of the year. For
a few months, though—between harvest and the planting season—they
could serve the king.

bb Wars, therefore, tended to be fairly short. This was acceptable for a ruler
battling with the neighboring city-state over where the border should
be drawn, but not very helpful if a ruler wanted to put down a distant
rebellion. In one of Sargon’s inscriptions, after listing a series of conquests,
he wrote that “5,400 men daily eat in his presence.” Historians have
speculated that these men were his elite troops, supported (and fed) by
the king.

73
Lecture 8  Lugalzagesi of Umma and Sargon of Akkad

SARGON’S LEGACY
bb There’s a debate among scholars about whether Sargon’s conquests really
constituted an empire. However, a historian at Yale University, Benjamin
Foster, has made a convincing argument that it was an empire. For one
thing, Sargon and his successors attempted to standardize a number of
things, including the writing system, and he introduced the same type
of record keeping across the empire.

bb Foster also looked at the place names that show up on clay tablets from sites
like Lagash. Before Sargon’s time, these tablets mostly mentioned local
places in Sumer, and they referred to some diplomatic contact with lands
to the east like Elam. After Lagash was conquered by Akkad, all kinds
of new places are mentioned in the tablets—cities as far away as western
Syria and Iran, and the countries of Dilmun, Magan, and Meluhha.

bb Syria and Iran were within the Akkadian Empire, but

Dilmun, Magan, and Meluhha were distant
lands that Sargon claimed to have ties to.
The tablets found in the ground back
up Sargon’s claims for his wide
conquests and contacts. What he
and his successors achieved really
was unprecedented.

bb After Sargon’s death, he was

succeeded by two sons, one after
the other. The first one, Rimush,
was faced with rebellions all over
the empire, which he had to put
down. This was a fairly common
occurrence in the ancient world.
The transfer of power between
kings seems to have been an
ideal time to break away from
their control.

74
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Rimush’s brother, Manishtushu, took over next. He, too, was a fighter.
He put together a fleet of ships and campaigned in Magan—modern
Oman. He claimed in an inscription that 32 cities of Magan “assembled
for war, and he vanquished [them] and smote their cities. He felled their
rulers and captured their fugitives as far as the silver mines.” Sargon’s
successors kept right on fighting, trying to expand their areas of control.
As founder of the empire, Sargon had created the mold for what it meant
to be emperor.

READINGS
‰‰ Allen, “Egypt and the Near East in the Third Millennium B.C.”
‰‰ Foster, The Age of Agade.
‰‰ Franke, “Kings of Akkad.”
‰‰ Heinz, “Sargon of Akkad.”
‰‰ Kramer, The Sumerians.
‰‰ Maeda, “Royal Inscriptions of Lugalzagesi and Sargon.”
‰‰ Morgan, Christopher. “Late Traditions Concerning Sargon and
Naram-Sin.”
‰‰ Powell, “The Sin of Lugalzagesi.”
‰‰ Westenholz, “Heroes of Akkad.”

QUESTIONS
ää How did Sargon attempt to overcome the problems of controlling
an empire?
ää In what ways was Sargon different from Lugalzagesi, who ruled
before him?

75
AKKADIAN EMPIRE
ARTS AND GODS
9
T he Akkadian period, from about 2350 BCE to 2150 BCE, was a time of
great innovation in many different aspects of life. The kings of ancient
Mesopotamia and their officials were trying new ways of governing.
Contacts with distant lands introduced exotic goods and new ideas. Artisans
and craftsmen experimented with more naturalistic depictions of humans
and the natural world. Authors wrote about the gods with new emotion and
devotion. This was a classical period for the arts in Mesopotamia, and also
an interesting time for religion.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

THE CITY OF AGADE AND RELIGION

bb The Akkadian Empire’s capital city of Agade must have been an impressive
place. A later literary text describes it as having been almost impossibly
wealthy. The boats it mentions were from many places, including distant
lands. There were boats from Dilmun—modern-day Bahrain—bringing
copper, ivory, tin, and timber. From Magan—modern-day Oman—came
copper and an igneous rock known as diorite for sculpture.

bb Many people living within the empire—people like soldiers, traders, and
administrators—would have been exposed to new ideas, new fashions,
new languages, and even new and surprising animals. One thing that
probably made an impression on them was the difference in the religious
beliefs they encountered. But they didn’t conclude that the foreign beliefs
were false.

bb When Mesopotamians met people who worshiped different gods from

them, they assumed that these were real gods, too. They just hadn’t
known about them before. Some of the gods might be useful and could
be absorbed into their own culture and worshiped. Others were evidently
the same gods they already worshiped, but under different names. For
example, there’s only one sun, so, logically, there’s only one sun god. The
Sumerians called him Utu, the Akkadians called him Shamash, and the
Egyptians called him Re or Ra, but he was the same god.

bb The safest way to live was to believe in all of the gods and to give offerings
and say prayers to the ones with the biggest impact on a person’s life. If
a person moved to a distant land, or even traveled through a land with
different gods, the obvious thing was to worship those gods along with
the person’s own.

bb The Mesopotamians were obviously not in charge of the universe—the

gods were. If the people’s job was to take care of the gods’ needs, as they
believed, then that’s what they would do. Their religion wasn’t about
spirituality or heaven or righteousness; it was about keeping the gods
happy and living to see another day.

77
Lecture 9  Akkadian Empire Arts and Gods

bb This doesn’t mean that the Mesopotamians were especially pessimistic

or glum. They loved banquets and parties, and had close friendships
and loving families. They had something of a carpe diem attitude, and
they made sure to make the best of things. Part of this attitude seems to
have included an appreciation for beautiful art, such as elaborate textiles
and jewelry.

MESOPOTAMIAN ART
bb The quality of art and craftsmanship changed
considerably during the time of the Akkadian
Empire. Before Sargon’s time, Sumerian art
of the Early Dynastic period, around 2900
to 2350 BCE, was initially highly stylized.
Stone statues were blocky and squat. The
figures had large, pointed noses and big,
staring eyes that were usually inlaid with
dark stones.

bb The artists don’t seem to have been

aiming for naturalism. Instead, they had
mastered a distinct style to represent the
human form, and they used it widely. At least
at the beginning of the era, the faces and
bodies were all much the same, though they
changed the figures’ hairstyles and clothing.

bb During the Early Dynastic period, reliefs,

mosaics, and even the scenes on cylinder
seals were organized in registers, with the
figures standing or walking along a line
that marked the bottom of the scene. Here
again, there seems to have been a standard
formula for portraying offering-givers,
soldiers, and so on.

78
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Artists during the Akkadian period broke with these traditions. It would
be fascinating to know what inspired them. The artwork made during
this period is seen as some of the finest of any Mesopotamian era, but we
don’t know who the artists were. The identity of an individual artist was
unimportant. The important factor was the king who commissioned his
work, or the god whom it was designed to appeal to.

bb Art seems to have been somewhat magical to the Mesopotamian mind.

A representation of a person or a god was called an image—which was
salmu in Akkadian—and it took on some part of the thing it depicted,
almost at though it had captured a bit of the person’s soul. In sculpting
the rock or the clay into a human figure, the artist gave it a kind of life.
A ritual called “opening of the mouth” completed this transformation.

bb Just as a statue of a god kept in the god’s temple was the god, a statue
of a king or even a commoner was, in some way, part of that person.
A statue of a man or woman set up in front of a statue of a god could pray
to the god on the person’s behalf. We know this because of inscriptions
on the statues.

bb A statue of a king could act on the king’s behalf as well. Like a statue of
a commoner, it could be set up in a temple to pray to the gods for the king’s
well being. Many royal statues were in temples and received offerings. The
statue could also help the king rule, enforcing his power and making sure
the people obeyed him. In later eras, and possibly during the Akkadian
period as well, people swore oaths in front of the statue of a king (just as
they did in front of statues of the gods). They believed they’d be punished
if they broke their oath.

SCULPTING BREAKTHROUGHS
bb In the Akkadian era, an important technological breakthrough came into
play: the lost wax technique of bronze casting, in which molten metal is
poured into a mold formed from a wax model. Under this process, a clay
core was covered with wax and sculpted to the shape of the desired object.

79
Lecture 9  Akkadian Empire Arts and Gods

bb Then, the core and the wax sculpture were encased in another layer
of clay, and baked in a kiln. The wax melted and was poured out, and
molten copper was added. When the metal cooled, it had assumed the
shape of the wax model inside the clay shell. The clay shell was then
chipped away.

bb The sculpture was hollow, and much lighter than a solid copper
object of the same size would have been. It could be larger, too. The
earliest lost wax sculptures in the world were made in Mesopotamia.
Some really extraordinary sculptures began to be created. They tend to
be referred to as bronzes, even though—strictly speaking—they were
copper alloys.

bb Akkadian sculptors were able to make bronzes that were much more
naturalistic than the Early Dynastic sculptures had been. They managed
the same naturalism when carving in stone.

bb A regal bronze head of a king is probably the best-known piece from this
era. We don’t know which king it was. It was perhaps Manishtushu, who
ruled from about 2269 to 2255 BCE, or Naram-Sin, who ruled after him.
Unfortunately there’s no inscription to tell us.

bb Unlike earlier Sumerian sculptures, this one seems to have been an

attempt to portray a real man, with his detailed hair and beard, smooth
skin, and realistic and determined expression. It’s almost life size, and
would have had inlaid eyes made of stone.

bb Artists were just as attentive in their creations of stone sculptures.

There’s a truly extraordinary statue of Manishtushu, wearing a long plain
skirt. Unfortunately, the whole top half of the king’s body and his head
are missing . But the skirt seems to be swaying with his movement. The
soft folds have been carved perfectly naturalistically, curving around his
legs. This was achieved in spite of the fact that the statue is carved from
one of the hardest stones—diorite.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

CYLINDER SEALS
bb The makers of cylinder seals were also breaking
new ground at this time. Cylinder seals were very
small—usually only an inch or two high—and had
to be made meticulously. Tiny figures were carved
carefully in relief and laid out so that the scene
exactly filled the cylindrical surface, sometimes
even including minute details of faces and muscles.

bb These seals were carved with the

most creative and eye-catching
images. They depicted boats,
goats and their herdsmen, oxen,
mythical scenes, and so on. The
Akkadian artists seem to have
been particularly interested in
scenes of intense struggle, often
between heroes and animals
or monsters. They frequently
included inscriptions, written in reverse—that is, in mirror writing—so
that when rolled on clay, the inscriptions turned out the right way. These
gave the name of the owner of the seal and his titles.

MYTHS AND LEGENDS

bb The Akkadian period also provides the first glimpses of the myths and
legends that inspired the Mesopotamians. We know about these literary
works because apprentice scribes copied the stories down in school.

bb The world’s first author came from this time period. This was Enheduanna,
the daughter of Sargon who became high priestess of the moon god. She
wrote hymns and identified herself as their author, something that hadn’t
been done before. The writers of previous hymns, myths, and legends
were all anonymous.

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Lecture 9  Akkadian Empire Arts and Gods

bb Enheduanna didn’t put her name on the cover page, per se. She was part
of the action of the hymn. For example, in one poem she wrote this:

Yes, I took up my place in the sanctuary dwelling,

I was high priestess, I, Enheduanna …

I am Enheduanna, let me speak to you in prayer,

My tears flowing like some sweet intoxicant.

bb Enheduanna clearly was very powerful. A lesser priestess probably
wouldn’t have used her name over and over in a hymn. Curiously, the three
hymns attributed to her aren’t
directed to the god
she served—the
moon god. They’re
addressed to the
deity that her family
seems to have been
especially dedicated
to: the goddess
Inanna, who was
also known by her
Ak kadian name,
Ishtar.

bb Enheduanna seems to
have turned to Inanna
in a time of crisis. For
example, she wrote in
a hymn that a man named
Lugalanne was the source of
her problems. This particular
individual tried to drive her out of the
office of high priestess.

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bb Typically for this era, Enheduanna would have seen her difficulties as
the gods’ doing rather than as an act of the people. Maybe she had to go
into exile. So she prayed to the goddess Inanna—the Sumerian goddess
of war and love—to help her.

bb By the end of the composition, things had apparently been sorted out: “The
almighty queen who presides over the priestly congregation, she accepted
her prayer.” This means that the goddess responded to Enheduanna’s
prayer. The text continues and states that “Inanna’s sublime will was for
her restoration” to her position in the temple.

READINGS
‰‰ Aruz, ed., Art of the First Cities.
‰‰ Bahrani, “Art of the Akkadian Dynasty.”
‰‰ Black and Green, Gods, Demons, and Symbols of
Ancient Mesopotamia.
‰‰ Bottéro, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia.
‰‰ Collon, First Impressions.
‰‰ Potts, “Distant Shores.”
‰‰ ———, “The Gulf, Dilmun and Magan.”
‰‰ Schneider, An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion.
‰‰ Stieglitz, “Long-Distance Seafaring in the Ancient Near East.”

QUESTIONS
ää How did the Mesopotamian people view their own gods and those
of other cultures? Why might this have been true?
ää How did technological advances perhaps influence changes in the
artwork during this period?

83
THE FALL OF
AKKAD AND GUDEA
10
OF LAGASH

T he Akkadian Empire of ancient Mesopotamia is of particular interest

to historians because it was the world’s first empire, and its kings—
Sargon and Naram-Sin—have been remembered for thousands of
years. The Mesopotamians themselves were sure the gods were behind the
eventual collapse of the empire, around 2150 BCE. In their eyes, the gods were
responsible for absolutely everything.
The fact is that the capital city of Agade was attacked, and its rule over
Mesopotamia came to an end. This must have seemed incomprehensible
at the time. The Akkadian Empire was a huge power; its king was believed
to be a god. Yet the empire collapsed, and the land ended up being divided
into smaller kingdoms.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

BLAME
bb A later poem called “The Curse of Agade” blamed King Naram-Sin for
angering the gods and bringing about the empire’s destruction. Naram-
Sin was the grandson of Sargon, and—like his grandfather—Naram-Sin
spent a lot of time fighting, putting down rebellions, and trying to keep
the empire together. Unlike some earlier kings, Naram-Sin didn’t want
to be remembered as a shepherd of his people. He preferred to be feared.

bb According to the authors of the poem, Naram-Sin broke all kinds of

taboos, including destroying a temple. Naram-Sin had destroyed the old
temple, but he did so as part of a magnificent renovation project. He
built a brand-new temple in its place, decorated with incredible amounts
of gold, silver, and copper statues and fittings. It was an act of devotion,
not sacrilege.

bb But the poem’s authors believed the god Enlil was furious at what Naram-
Sin had done. They wrote “Enlil, because his beloved Ekur [temple] had
been destroyed, what should he destroy in turn for it?” They believed
that the answer was that Enlil decided to punish King Naram-Sin by
destroying his capital city of Agade.

bb Specifically, the authors said the god summoned foreigners—Gutians—

from the mountains to swarm down into the Mesopotamian river valley.
Other records confirm the attack on Agade was indeed by the Gutians
who came from the Zagros Mountains. However, it didn’t happen until
quite a while after the reign of Naram-Sin, which ended around 2218
BCE. Additionally, the Gutians weren’t the barbarians that the poem
described. They had an organized military and a king to lead them.

bb Of course, modern historians don’t think the empire fell because Enlil
was angry. Something else is required to adequately explain things.
Even though every empire eventually falls, each one does so for different
reasons. When examining the Akkadian Empire, the reasons for its
failure are fascinating to explore.

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Lecture 10  The Fall of Akkad and Gudea of Lagash

THE COLLAPSE
bb Rebellions were quite common throughout the time of the Akkadian
Empire, and some are well known. King Naram-Sin himself boasted
about putting one of them down. Therefore, loyalty to the empire was
probably always limited. The provincial leaders would have been unlikely
to fight on behalf of the Akkadian kings if those kings seemed weak.

bb In 1993, an archaeologist at Yale University named Harvey Weiss

published an important article in the journal Science. Weiss and six co-
authors proposed a new explanation for the collapse of the Akkadian
Empire. They had been working at Akkadian-period sites in northern
Syria—an area where ancient farming was based on rainfall.

bb They found that many cities there had been abandoned starting around
2200 BCE because of a period of intense drought. They believed as
many as 100,000 people might have become refugees because of this
climatic change, and these people presumably would have moved south
into Mesopotamia.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Weiss and his colleagues also proposed that the Akkadian Empire was
dependent for much of its grain on this region of north Syria, and that
the drought could have had a powerful economic impact on the imperial
administration. Even the Gutian invasion might have occurred due to the
Gutians being affected by the drought and being forced to move away
from their dust bowl farms.

bb Even more striking was the authors’ suggestion that this drought didn’t
just cause the end of the Akkadian Empire. It might also have brought
an end to the Old Kingdom in Egypt and the Harappan civilization in
the Indus River Valley. It could have caused the collapse of states in the
Aegean region and the southern Levant as well.

bb There’s plenty of evidence for the drought now. It definitely happened

between 2200 and 1900 BCE. Since the time the article came out,
researchers have studied sediment cores from the Gulf of Oman, the
Persian Gulf, the Dead Sea, and other bodies of water, and they’ve found
a spike in wind-blown dust during this period. Wind-blown dust would
have been a symptom of a loss of vegetation, which would have been
caused by the drought.

bb A big question, though, is: What caused the drought? In the original article,
the scientists described evidence of volcanic dust and glass at a number
of sites in Syria. An analysis showed parallels to dust from volcanoes to
the north, in what is now Turkey. A big volcanic eruption can change the
local climate for decades, and this might be what happened.

bb In any event, most archaeologists and historians who study the

ancient Near East are united in thinking that the many states that
collapsed around 2200 BCE might have had environmental crises
to deal with, not just political ones. We are still left with questions,
but research has gone in many different directions in recent years, and
historians and archaeologists are working closely with scientists. More
evidence will no doubt emerge and will help researchers understand what
was going on.

87
Lecture 10  The Fall of Akkad and Gudea of Lagash

FRAGMENTED TERRITORY
bb In creating an empire, Sargon and his descendants were in uncharted
territory, and it’s hardly surprising that the state they created was rather
fragile. Perhaps the surprise isn’t that this civilization fell, but that it had
survived for any length of time at all before falling.

bb After the reign of Shar-kali-sharri—the last of the Mesopotamian kings—

and the invasion of the Gutians around 2100 BCE, it’s unclear who ruled
in the region around Agade. When the dust settled, the region was no
longer unified, but a much smaller kingdom was still centered on Agade
and was ruled by a king named Dudu. The Gutians had a separate state.
Other independent kingdoms dotted the region that had previously been
subject to Agade.

bb At the end of the Akkadian Empire, the drought in the north certainly
made life more difficult in that region, but the same doesn’t seem to have
been true in the south. If anything, the people of southern Mesopotamia
seem to have been better off economically towards the end of the Akkadian
period than they’d been during its height. New leaders came to power
and life went on.

LAGASH
bb One such dynasty of new leaders came to power in the southern kingdom
of Lagash in the 22nd century BCE. It’s known as the second dynasty of
Lagash to distinguish it from the previous time when Lagash had been
dominant, which was between around 2500 and 2300 BCE. The capital
by this time wasn’t the city of Lagash but another city called Girsu.

bb One of the kings who ruled during the second Lagash dynasty is
particularly well known to modern scholars. His name was Gudea.
To describe himself, he didn’t use the term king—which was lugal in
Sumerian. He called himself ensi—governor. It’s not that he was subject
to a greater king. He was in charge. But he was a very pious man, and he
saw his main role as being the representative on earth of his god Ningirsu.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Statues of Gudea are in lots of museums around

the world. Almost all of them are beautifully
sculpted out of the shiny black stone called diorite.
They show the king standing or seated, in the
prime of life. He’s portrayed as having a large
head on a fairly short body. The most famous is
known as Statue B.

bb Dozens of other Gudea statues have also

been found, and he was said to have built
innumerable temples. Researchers know
of 30 temples that he claimed to have
built in just the city of Girsu. He also
commissioned buildings in many other
cities, including in Ur, Nippur, and Uruk.
Gudea must have controlled quite a lot of
southern Mesopotamia.

bb Gudea ruled for perhaps 20 years, after which

his son, Ur-Ningirsu, took the throne. Only
a few statues of Ur-Ningirsu survive. Soon
after his reign, the second dynasty of Lagash
was conquered by a king who had taken power
in the city of Ur. He founded a powerful royal
family, the third dynasty of Ur.

bb Gudea is important because he was so

different in the way he presented himself to
his subjects from the Akkadian kings who
came before him. He didn’t try to seem
terrifying. He didn’t claim to be the king
of the universe. He didn’t tear down city
walls. He wanted to protect his subjects,
and he loved his gods. This is a model of
rule that seems to have influenced many
kings who came after him.

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Lecture 10  The Fall of Akkad and Gudea of Lagash

READINGS
‰‰ Bahrani, “Gudea.”
‰‰ Hansen, “A Sculpture of Gudea.”
‰‰ Jacobsen, The Harps that Once.
‰‰ Klein, “From Gudea to Šulgi.”
‰‰ McMahon, “The Akkadian Period.”
‰‰ Rubio, “From Sumer to Babylonia.”
‰‰ Weiss et al., “The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North
Mesopotamian Civilization.”
‰‰ Yoffee, “The Evolution of Fragility.”

QUESTIONS
ää How do ancient explanations for the fall of the Akkadian Empire
differ from modern explanations? Why are they so different?
ää What are some of the benefits of having scientists, historians, and
archaeologists working together on a problem like the reasons for
the end of the Akkadian Empire?

90
UR III HOUSEHOLDS,
ACCOUNTS, AND
11
ZIGGURATS

T he cuneiform writing system is among the most important cultural

contributions of Mesopotamian society. The number of cuneiform
documents surviving from the Early Dynastic period—the time of
the earliest city-states, from around 2900 to 2350 BCE—is relatively small.
More survive from the time of the Akkadian Empire and the second dynasty
of Lagash, which followed. But when we come to the next major era of
Mesopotamian history, the documentation positively explodes. This was
a period when Mesopotamia was dominated by a dynasty that ruled from
the city of Ur, in the southern part of modern-day Iraq. It’s known as the third
dynasty of Ur—the Ur III period, for short—and it lasted a little more than
a century, from around 2112 to 2004 BCE. That dynasty is the subject of
this lecture.
Lecture 11  Ur III Households, Accounts, and Ziggurats

ADMINISTRATIVE RECORDS
bb Not many of the Ur III–period cuneiform texts record poems or hymns
or myths. Instead, most are administrative. A huge number of them come
from the Ur III period. Studied as a large group,
these documents reveal amazing details
about the economy and administration
of the era. In fact, more than 120,000
cuneiform tablets written during
the time are estimated to have
been found so far.

bb The Ur III texts reveal that

thousands of men and women
worked for different aspects
of the central and provincial
administrations in some way or
another. They worked in the military
or as builders, farmers, herdsman,
religious functionaries, officials, scribes,
artisans, or servants.

bb Each province in the kingdom paid taxes to the central government,

but the provinces didn’t all owe their taxes the same day. Instead, each
province was responsible for paying during a particular month. These
taxes supported the government for that month. In the next month, it
was the turn of another province. This meant that wealth was coming
in year-round.

bb Taxes were paid in goods, not in silver. The administration built a whole
town to cope with the goods coming in and the goods going out. It was
called Puzrish-Dagan, and was close to the religious capital city of Nippur.
A huge number of tablets survived from the main offices there. Boats were
constantly being unloaded, herds of animals shepherded around, and
granaries filled and emptied. Every item that arrived or left Puzrish-
Dagan was recorded, and these records were filed and later compiled.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

KINGS
bb Although the third dynasty of Ur was a time when a lot of changes took
place, the kings didn’t rule with an iron hand. They had to work within
an existing system that included powerful temples and governors with
whom the king’s administration negotiated.

bb The first king of the Ur III dynasty was named

Ur-Namma. He and his son Shulgi built an empire.
It was the first one since the Akkadian Empire,
which had been built by King Sargon in the
24th century BCE. Ur-Namma and Shulgi took
over much of southern and central Mesopotamia and
extended the borders of their land to the region around
the ancient city of Susa, in what is now western Iran.

bb Mesopotamia wasn’t easily unified, and each aspiring

emperor had difficulties in maintaining control of the
lands he conquered. Ur III kings didn’t boast about
territorial conquests, and in this they were nothing like
King Sargon. Instead, the Ur III kings claimed that they
“liberated” the lands they took over.

bb They promoted this image by creating a new kind

of royal inscription that was probably displayed in
public. It’s usually called a law code in history books,
but it wasn’t called a law code when first created. It
started with a prologue, all about King Ur-Namma
and his great achievements. The statement ended this
way: “I eliminated enmity, violence, and cries for justice.
I established justice in the land.”

bb The king emphasized how good he was to his people. Then, he added
a new type of statement to the inscription. Immediately after the prologue,
he wrote: “At that time, if a man commits a homicide, they shall kill that
man.” And a few lines later: “If a man divorces his first-ranking wife, he
shall weigh and deliver 60 shekels of silver.” These are laws.

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Lecture 11  Ur III Households, Accounts, and Ziggurats

bb The Ur III kings also tried other new things to claim their legitimate
right to rule, without terrorizing the population as the Akkadian kings
had done. It’s during this period that a compilation of the names of kings
and the cities they ruled from, known as the Sumerian King List, seems
to have been written. It isn’t historically accurate, presenting an idealized
past in which Mesopotamia was always unified.

STANDARDIZATION AND BUILDING

bb Ur-Namma boasts in the prologue to his laws that he standardized
weights and measures. This was another way to promote order and unity
across the land and make the kingdom run more smoothly.

bb In their drive to standardize things, the central administration even seems

to have unified building techniques. There were standardized types and
sizes of bricks, and innovations in the construction of public buildings.
The builders started baking bricks for the exterior walls, instead of just
drying them in the sun. They added strategic holes in the structures to
allow the interior bricks, which were sun dried, to continue to dry out
even after the building was constructed.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The kings sponsored the construction of huge, pyramid-shaped temple

towers in many cities. These were called ziggurats and were constructed
next to the great temples of the gods. Each ziggurat was a solid
mass of brick built in four or five giant steps, probably with a small shrine
on the top. They were built on a scale that had never been seen before
in Mesopotamia.

HOUSEHOLDS AND DIVINE KINGS

bb In trying to convince the population to support them, the Ur III kings
reinstituted an idea that had begun with Sargon’s grandson, King Naram-
Sin of Akkad. Starting with King Shulgi, rulers had scribes write a divine
symbol in front of their names because they wanted to be viewed as gods.
They even claimed to have superhuman powers.

bb Even though the Ur III kings supposedly were divine, they still had to
work with all the other parts of government and society to make things
run smoothly. They didn’t simply proclaim commands and assume they
would be done. Mesopotamia didn’t work that way.

bb Mesopotamia, at the time, was a conglomeration of households. At the

family level, the household is easy to conceive of. A typical Mesopotamian
household consisted of a married couple and their children living together.
With them were elderly relatives along with unmarried aunts and maybe
some servants. The oldest male relative—the grandfather or father of the
family—was the head of the household.

bb The house was an economic unit, not just a social one. If the family
owned fields or animals, then those provided food. If the family
was involved in some other profession—as artisans, scribes, or
merchants—then the work was often performed in the home. Even
officials who worked for the court seem to have done at least some of
their work at home, rather than in an office at the palace.

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Lecture 11  Ur III Households, Accounts, and Ziggurats

bb Governors of provinces were also patriarchs of their own households—their

palaces and the estates. A governor had considerable autonomy in ruling
his province and was perceived as the father of this giant household.

MERCHANTS
bb Holding a lot of this economy together, in an interesting way, was
a group of merchants. There were at least 20 of them at the city of
Umma during the Ur III period. They worked directly for the governor’s
administration. They traveled, acquired valuable goods in distant lands,
and brought them back to Umma.

bb They also had other important responsibilities. They seem to have

been in charge of collecting and processing fruits, vegetables, and
fish for the governor. In the hot climate of southern Mesopotamia—
without refrigeration—these foodstuffs would have gone bad very
quickly. It seems that merchants were particularly adept at getting
perishables from the farm or the river to the consumer as fast as possible.

bb The merchants also were willing to make loans to private individuals.

Banking hadn’t been invented, but people sometimes needed to borrow
grain to sow their crops or to borrow silver to buy something. Merchants
had extra grain and silver on hand and could fill this need.

bb One merchant who lived in Ur towards the end of the Ur III period was
named Lu-Enlilla. He was employed by the temple of the moon god and
regularly traveled by boat all the way to Magan (which is now Oman) to
buy copper. This was a well-established trade route. He took wool and
textiles to pay for the metal.

DIPLOMATIC TIES
bb The land of Magan might have been a diplomatic partner of the kings
of Ur. Until the Ur III period, the exchange of envoys and peace treaties,

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

dynastic marriages, and diplomatic correspondence seem to have taken

place only among states within Mesopotamia and Syria.

bb However, King Shulgi received a gift of gold dust from the king of Magan,
according to an administrative text. Luxury gifts were often a sign of
diplomacy. Another clue is found in a slightly later text mentioning the
arrival of someone named Wedum, who is described as the courier of the
governor of Magan.

bb The Ur kings had close contacts with the lands to the east of Mesopotamia.
They directly controlled the city of Susa and had diplomatic ties with other
population centers in the same general area of Elam in southwestern Iran.
The names of Elamite envoys show up in the administrative texts. They
received gifts and attended important festivals. Additionally, princesses
from Ur were sent to marry Elamite kings to cement the alliances.

bb The city of Ur was a cosmopolitan place. Envoys, merchants, and other

visitors from distant lands were not an uncommon sight on the streets.
In one text, it sounds as though there might even have been south
Asians who lived together and worked alongside native Mesopotamians.
They are described as men from a “Meluhha village.” Meluhha was the
Indus Valley.

CONCLUSION
bb The Ur III kings tried a different approach to running their empire than
had been seen before. The extended-household economy flourished and
was well organized and effective. In addition, the Ur III rulers created
something of a cult of the kings. They emphasized their greatness and
encouraged people to believe that the kings were on their side.

bb Even in modern times, there’s been a tendency to see Shulgi as one of the
great kings of Mesopotamian history. As it turned out, the empire lasted
for little more than a century. The Ur III kings had trouble holding onto
their empire in the end.

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Lecture 11  Ur III Households, Accounts, and Ziggurats

READINGS
‰‰ Averbeck, Studevent-Hickman, and Michalowski,
“Late Third Millennium BCE Sumerian Texts.”
‰‰ Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts (BDTNS),
http://bdts.filol.csic.es/
‰‰ Englund, “Hard Work.”
‰‰ Garfinkle, “Was the Ur III State Bureaucratic?”
‰‰ Lafont, “Women at Work and Women in Economy and Society
during the Neo-Sumerian Period.”
‰‰ Michalowski, The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur.
‰‰ ———, “The Ur III Literary Footprint and the Historian.”
‰‰ Nemet-Nejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia.
‰‰ Nissen, Damerow, and Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping.
‰‰ Oppenheim, “The Seafaring Merchants of Ur.”
‰‰ Parpola, Parpola, and Brunswig Jr., “The Meluhha Village.”
‰‰ Potts, “Distant Shores.”
‰‰ Snell, Life in the Ancient Near East.
‰‰ Van De Mieroop, “Democracy and the Rule of Law, the Assembly,
and the First Law Code.”

QUESTIONS
ää How did the kings of the Ur III period try to convince their
subjects of their legitimate right to rule?
ää Why are so many cuneiform tablets found from the Ur III period?

98
MIGRANTS AND
OLD ASSYRIAN
12
MERCHANTS

M esopotamia was a place where people spoke many languages.

It started with Sumerian, which was dominant in the south, and
Akkadian, which was spoken more often in the center and north.
The early people of Ebla in modern-day Syria spoke a language that we refer
to as Eblaite, and there was also a large population of people in northern Syria
who spoke a language called Hurrian. Akkadian and Eblaite were Semitic
languages. Then, down from the Zagros Mountains came the Gutians, who
invaded at the end of the Akkadian Empire. They spoke yet another language,
as did the Elamites, who lived in what is now Iran, to the east. The point is,
Mesopotamia was a big melting pot of people who came from different parts
of the Near East and spoke different languages. This lecture looks at some
of those groups.
Lecture 12  Migrants and Old Assyrian Merchants

NEW ARRIVALS
bb Sometimes, when a new group showed up speaking an unknown
language, they were viewed with suspicion at first. Take the Gutians,
who were even described in literary works as not quite human. However,
they almost always ended up settling down and becoming part of the
culture, and often they took leading roles and headed new dynasties.
Quite quickly, they stopped being viewed as foreigners and became part
of the community.

bb One of these new groups started showing up during the Ur III period in
the late 3rd millennium BCE. By the end of that dynasty, the kings of
Ur seem to have been increasingly worried about them. The new arrivals
were called the Amorites. A high official wrote to one of the last Ur III
kings, named Shu-Sin, that “The Amorites have repeatedly raided the
territory” in the north.

bb He reminded the king of what he had been instructed to do: “You ordered
me to rebuild the fortification, to cut off their infiltration route, to prevent
them from swooping down on the fields through a breach in the defenses
between the Tigris and Euphrates.”

bb King Shu-Sin did build a wall to keep the Amorites out, just as the
official described. The wall might have been erected at the point where
the Tigris and Euphrates flow closest together, but it doesn’t seem to
have been successful. Immigrants continued to move into Mesopotamia
from different regions.

BLAME AND ATTACKS

bb The Mesopotamians believed that the Amorites had started out as
nomads rather than farmers, traveling seasonally with their sheep and
goats. Scholars thought for some time that the conflict in the late Ur III
period was a result of these nomadic Amorites wanting to settle in the
agricultural lands of Mesopotamia.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb However, this doesn’t seem to have any basis in fact. There were
some Amorites who were nomads, but there were others who seem to
have always lived in cities. The Amorites were blamed by some later
Mesopotamians for the end of the Ur III kingdom, but the real situation
was much more complex. Even before any invasions, there was a famine
that severely affected the kingdom.

bb Inflation seems to have skyrocketed, and people were desperate for food.
A high official named Ishbi-Erra took advantage of the weakness of
Ibbi-Sin, the last Ur king. This official, Ishbi-Erra, stopped working
for the king and set himself up as an independent leader in the southern
city of Isin.

bb Then, around 2004 BCE, Ur was invaded, but not by Amorites. Instead,
the attack came from Elam, to the east. First, the Elamites took over the
city of Susa. This was an economic blow to the Ur III kingdom, since
Susa and the lands in that eastern region were important for the trade
routes that flourished there. The Ur III kings had already overextended
themselves and broken important diplomatic ties.

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Lecture 12  Migrants and Old Assyrian Merchants

bb A few years later, the Elamites destroyed the capital of Ur and took King
Ibbi-Sin as a hostage back to Elam. For a few years, the Elamites ruled
Ur, but they were forced out in the end by Ishbi-Erra, that former official
who had set up his own kingdom in Isin.

bb Ishbi-Erra did found his own dynasty in Isin, but he didn’t control all of
the territory that had been subject to the Ur III kings. Instead, it splintered
into a number of smaller kingdoms. In some ways, the beneficiaries of
the dissolution of the Ur III kingdom ended up being the Amorites, even
though they weren’t the ones who had caused it.

AFTER THE DYNASTY

bb The two centuries that followed the end of the third dynasty of Ur were
full of wars. The new kingdoms each had a king who ruled from a major
city and who was supported by a number of vassal kings in smaller cities.
Their armies fought one another frequently. The various kings made
alliances, broke them, and made new alliances, only to break these, too.

bb During these turbulent times, people seem to have looked back on the third
dynasty of Ur as a long-lost period of peace and comfort. Lamentations
were written about the destruction of the great cities of Ur, Uruk, Nippur,
and Eridu that had happened at the end of the Ur III period.

bb In these lamentations, the destruction wasn’t blamed on the Elamite

invaders. Instead, the people, as always, blamed the gods, and thought
that the invaders had simply been carrying out the will of the gods.
They even thought that the city god of Ur—the moon god Nanna—was
responsible for the destruction. Nanna had abandoned his people, and
that was why the Elamites had been successful.

bb Right after the Ur III dynasty, the people might have thought that their
civilization was coming to an end. However, this wasn’t an end at all. It
was the prelude to a time of prosperity and renewed vitality, known as
the Old Babylonian period.

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AMORITE KINGS
bb During the era of widespread warfare that followed the Ur III period,
many cities had new kings on the throne; these were kings who founded
new dynasties. Many of these dynasties were of Amorite descent. These
Amorite kings were especially common in the center and northwest
of Mesopotamia.

bb One Amorite dynasty began to rule the previously unimportant city

of Babylon and successfully passed the throne from father to son for
centuries. Among the kings of Babylon was the famous Hammurabi,
who ruled from about 1792 to 1750 BCE. Other important kingdoms
of the era were Qatna and Yamhad in the west, Mari in the northwest,
Ekallatum in the north east, Eshnunna in the east, and Isin and Larsa
to the south of Babylon. These eight kingdoms were the squabbling
successors to the third dynasty of Ur.

bb Yamhad was the biggest of them. Its capital city was in Aleppo, in the
north of modern-day Syria near Turkey. Aleppo has been continuously
occupied since ancient times, so the Old Babylonian remains lie under the
debris of all the intervening periods: the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Persian
Empire, Hellenistic Greek empire of Alexander the Great, Roman
Empire, the early Islamic period, right up to the present day.

103 Citadel of Aleppo, Syria

Lecture 12  Migrants and Old Assyrian Merchants

MERCHANTS
bb One group of Mesopotamian merchants has left us an amazing record
of their lives and their businesses. Oddly enough, their records weren’t
found in Mesopotamia. They were found in Turkey.

bb In the early 20th century, a number of cuneiform tablets began appearing on

the worldwide antiquities market. They included letters that had clearly
been written by Assyrian merchants from the city of Assur and were said
to have been found in Turkey, at the site of an ancient city called Kanesh.

bb Turkish archaeologists went to dig there beginning in 1948. Their

excavations uncovered no cuneiform tablets at all. Finally, a villager gave
away the secret: The tablets that other villagers had found and sold hadn’t
come from the mound at all, but from a particular place in the fields
nearby. The excavators turned their attention there.

bb This area turned out to be a sort of suburb of the main city—a

neighborhood of private houses. Its inhabitants called it the karum. Many
houses in the karum belonged to these Assyrian traders, and they kept
their records stored in the houses. For example, one house excavated
in 1993 contained 178 letters, 69 loan contracts, 38 records of legal
proceedings, and 102 personal accounts. In total, 17,700 tablets have come
out of the excavations, and almost 5,000 more came from the site before
the excavations started. These tablets give us a vivid picture of what life
was like for an Assyrian merchant in the 20th and 19th centuries BCE.

A NEW SYSTEM
bb Unlike merchants of earlier times, these men weren’t representing
a temple, or a king, or any other major institution. The government of
Assur hadn’t sent them, and the king seemed to have almost no control
over them. Instead, the traders were organized as families, and these
merchant families acted largely on their own. The merchants even drew
up a treaty with the king of Kanesh, which protected both parties and
facilitated trade between them.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The merchants were insured against theft: The king of Kanesh pledged
to replace stolen goods if a thief couldn’t be found (but only if the
merchant was willing to swear an oath that he’d been robbed). The
king of Kanesh had to swear that he wouldn’t try to take their goods
or to force them to sell the goods cheaply to him. On the other hand,
the merchants pledged to pay taxes to him—one-tenth of what they
were selling.

bb It seems to have been a good arrangement, and they all benefited. The
Assyrians lived among the Anatolians with the blessing and support of the
local king, and no violence seems to have been involved in the Assyrians’
occupation in Kanesh.

bb The Assyrians didn’t have to invade. They had goods for sale that
the Anatolians wanted, so they were welcome. The most desirable
items they sold were tin and textiles. In exchange, the Anatolians had
a ready supply of silver. The Assyrians needed silver because it had
become the medium of exchange throughout Mesopotamia and because
there were no known mineral resources or metal ores in Mesopotamia
at the time.

bb The Assyrians hadn’t come to impose their culture. They were just long-
term visitors. However, some of them did marry Anatolian wives. Most
Assyrian men had just one wife, but a trader living away from home was
allowed to have two wives, one in each city, so long as the families were
kept separate.

bb The women of the merchant families were often very involved in trade.
They didn’t just do some of the weaving; they also often helped run the
business when their husbands were away.

bb Not all the merchants stayed in Kanesh once they arrived. Some of them
went on to other towns and cities in Anatolia, selling their textiles and
tin wherever they went. The silver that they were paid weighed very little,
even though it was so valuable. They didn’t need donkeys to ship the silver
back home, so they sold the donkeys as well.

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Lecture 12  Migrants and Old Assyrian Merchants

bb The return journey to Assur must have been faster and easier than the
journey to get there. The silver acquired in Anatolia was then put to use
in paying for business expenses and in buying a whole new shipment
of goods to send back. This trading cycle continued for more than
100 years.

READINGS
‰‰ Günbatti, “Two Treaty Texts found at Kultepe.”
‰‰ Larsen, The Old Assyrian City-State and Its Colonies.
‰‰ ———, “The Old Assyrian Merchant Colonies.”
‰‰ Michel, “Women of Aššur and Kaniš.”
‰‰ ———, “Women Work, Men are Professionals in the Old Assyrian
Archives.”
‰‰ Stratford, A Year of Vengeance.
‰‰ Veenhof, Aspects of Old Assyrian Trade and its Terminology.
‰‰ ———, “Kanesh.”

QUESTIONS
ää Why might the Ur III kings have been unsuccessful in keeping
immigrants from moving into Mesopotamia?
ää How might our understanding of Mesopotamian history be
different if it were possible to excavate the early levels of settlement
in Aleppo?
ää What might have been some of the advantages to the Assyrians of
trading as far away as the Anatolian plateau?

106
ROYALTY AND
PALACE INTRIGUE
13
AT MARI

A powerful king named Shamshi-Adad was able to build a short-

lived empire in northern Mesopotamia and Syria during the early
18th century BCE, after the Near East had been in turmoil for some
time. Seven or eight major kingdoms had been fighting one another: battling
over borders, maneuvering to gain alliances, and stealing one another’s
vassals. Early in his reign, his land of Ekallatum had been conquered by
a neighboring kingdom, forcing Shamshi-Adad to flee to exile in Babylon.
He was able to recapture Ekallatum not long after, and then kept going,
taking over the city of Assur, which was home to the Assyrian merchants
who traded in Anatolia. He went on to the Habur River and managed to
conquer the kingdom of Mari on the Euphrates in Syria. This lecture picks up
Shamshi-Adad’s story there.
Lecture 13  Royalty and Palace Intrigue at Mari

SHAMSHI-ADAD’S EMPIRE
bb Shamshi-Adad’s empire extended from the Euphrates River to the Tigris
River, just to the south of what is now Turkey. This included some rich
agricultural land.

bb Shamshi-Adad had a rather grandiose sense of his own importance.

Instead of giving a name to his empire, he took the title of king of the
universe. In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of Sargon and
the other great Akkadian kings who came before him, even though his
empire was considerably smaller.

bb Shamshi-Adad’s older son was named Ishme-Dagan, and the younger

one was Yasmah-Addu. They were already adults when Shamshi-Adad
had completed his empire, and their father decided to bring them into
his administration to help him rule. He would be the great king, but his
sons would be kings as well.

bb Each son was set up in a palace in a major city. Ishme-Dagan’s palace was
in Ekallatum, the dynasty’s original capital. This was in the Tigris region.
Yasmah-Addu’s palace was in Mari. Shamshi-Adad created a new capital
city for himself—between the other two cities, and to the north of them.
He called it Shubat-Enlil. All three kings, in turn, had vassal kings who
answered to them. This was a new approach to ruling an empire, but it
wasn’t entirely successful.

bb Yasmah-Addu was in a position to help his father with an important ally—

the king of Qatna, a kingdom to the west, near the Mediterranean. Yasmah-
Addu would wed the king of Qatna’s daughter in a diplomatic marriage.

bb In Yasmah-Addu’s case, we can see the actual stages of the marriage.

A whole sequence of letters was found in the palace at Mari about his
marriage to Princess Beltum of Qatna. It seems that Yasmah-Addu didn’t
have a lot of say in the matter. It was all arranged by his father, Shamshi-
Adad, and by Beltum’s father, the king of Qatna.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

CO-REGENCY
bb One problem with the co-regency was that Beltum’s father-
in-law, Shamshi-Adad, tended to micromanage his sons’
administrations. Researchers can guess that this was true for the elder
son Ishme-Dagan in Ekallatum, but scholars don’t have those letters.
The letters to Yasmah-Addu show that Shamshi-Adad sent messengers
to Mari all the time, and that he could be very demanding. He wanted to
know why an official hadn’t been replaced, or to complain about servants
who had fled the palace, and so on.

bb Shamshi-Adad worried that Yasmah-Addu was immature and

that the young king started projects without giving them enough
thought. He also accused Yasmah-Addu of spending too much
time “drinking and dancing” with servants. He even made sure that
particular officials were present when the letters he sent were read aloud
to his son. However, there’s no sign that Yasmah-Addu was disloyal to
his father.

bb Ishme-Dagan, on the other hand, was much more like his father. Like
Shamshi-Adad, the older son was often on campaign. Shamshi-Adad
sometimes shamed Yasmah-Addu by pointing out that he should be more
like his older brother.

CAMPAIGNS AND DIPLOMACY

bb Throughout virtually all of Shamshi-Adad’s reign, the great king’s
armies were out campaigning against neighboring kingdoms and
fighting to maintain control of the region he’d already claimed. It wasn’t
a stable empire and wouldn’t survive long after Shamshi-Adad died in
1776 BCE. Ishme-Dagan became the great king in his father’s place,
but he had to immediately organize campaigns against Aleppo in the
west and Eshnunna in the east.

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Lecture 13  Royalty and Palace Intrigue at Mari

bb Although scholars don’t know what happened to Yasmah-Addu, soon

after Shamshi-Adad died, the local dynasty took control of Mari again.
The new king, Zimri-Lim, took up residence in the palace, though he
kept some of Yasmah-Addu’s letters in the archives. Archaeologists found
them there, still in Zimri-Lim’s archive room, when they excavated the
Mari palace centuries later.

bb Ishme-Dagan proved to be less brilliant than he’d seemed to his father. He

made some clumsy mistakes, including a ham-fisted attempt at diplomacy
with the king of Qatna. He asked his younger brother’s father-in-law for
two horses. It was quite normal to ask for gifts—as a king, it was a way
of getting luxury goods that one needed. Then, the king would send
something of equal value in exchange.

bb The king of Qatna sent the two horses. In return, Ishme-Dagan sent back
20 pounds of tin, apparently thinking this was a fair exchange. However,
the king of Qatna was furious. The horses were worth vastly more than
the tin. He wrote a devastating letter, telling Ishme-Dagan that “when
you sent me this paltry amount of tin, you had no desire to have honorable
discourse with me.”

bb Ishme-Dagan’s career didn’t improve, and his kingdom shrank. The

ultimate humiliation was that Zimri-Lim—the king who took over
control of Mari, which had been one of Ishme-Dagan’s provinces—was
now higher up in the pecking order than Ishme-Dagan himself. Ishme-
Dagan was now a minor king.

MARI
bb Zimri-Lim took the throne in Mari in 1775 BCE and established a new
administration. The palace at Mari has been excavated—it’s one of the
most important excavations in Syria and one of the most important finds
for this whole era. In its time, it was famous for being a particularly
spectacular royal residence. The palace had been conquered and burned,
so the mud bricks in the walls were baked hard from the fire, and the walls
still stood as much as 13 feet tall when the archaeologists found them.

110
 Mari
Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle palace, Syria
of Civilization

bb We get an amazing glimpse of what royal life was like during the Old
Babylonian period not just from the Mari palace, but also from the objects
and cuneiform tablets found in it. The palace was vast. It had more than
260 rooms, divided up into sectors. There were workshops, storerooms,
private apartments, kitchens, public spaces, offices, archives, a throne
room, bathrooms, and even a temple.

bb At the heart of the palace was a courtyard—planted with palm trees—and

beyond it, the throne room where King Zimri-Lim received visitors and
messengers. The walls were painted brightly with murals. One showed
a procession of sacrificial animals accompanied by high officials. Another
showed an investiture scene, in which the king stood in front of the
goddess Ishtar to receive the symbols of his authority—a rod and a ring.

bb King Zimri-Lim ruled for only 13 years, from 1775 to 1762 BCE, but
the 22,000 cuneiform tablets found in his archives make it one of the
best-known eras in all of Mesopotamian history. The king was constantly
in touch with his officials, governors, and family members. Letters were
dictated by the king, written down by scribes, and carried across the
kingdom by messengers. Letters that arrived in reply were read aloud to
him and then archived.

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Lecture 13  Royalty and Palace Intrigue at Mari

bb Unfortunately, the letters weren’t dated, so it can be challenging to

reconstruct the order of the events they describe. However, the overall
impression they give is that Zimri-Lim was a careful diplomat, a strong
commander, a meticulous administrator, and a caring husband and father.

THE ROYAL WOMEN OF MARI

bb Unlike Yasmah-Addu, the previous ruler of the Mari region, King Zimri-
Lim was away on campaign often. The wars of Shamshi-Adad’s time
hadn’t come to an end. When Zimri-Lim was gone, his wife, Queen
Shiptu, was in charge of the palace affairs, and she wrote frequently to
her husband to let him know anything of importance that took place.

bb Zimri-Lim in turn wrote to the queen, asking her in some letters to take
care of various administrative needs and in others to consult prophets or
oracles, or to meet him at a different city in the kingdom. It’s clear that the
queen was not just his wife but also a highly trusted advisor and surrogate.

bb Zimri-Lim was surrounded by women during his lifetime. He had several

wives and at least 11 daughters. No sons are mentioned in the letters.
Many of the daughters were married off to Zimri-Lim’s allies and vassals,
along with high officials like governors and controllers. He counted on
his daughters to be loyal to him and to keep him up to date with news.

bb Two of the king’s daughters were thoroughly unhappy in their marriages

and not at all afraid to tell their father about it. They dictated frank letters
to their messengers to be carried to the king. Princess Inib-sharri, for
example, was first married off to a tribal leader, who soon died. Then,
she was married to another of her father’s vassals. Her letters are full
of the misery of her life because her second husband neglected her and
preferred another wife.

bb Another of Zimri-Lim’s daughters, Kirum, was married to a violent and

reckless king who threatened to kill her. This husband was also married to
another of Zimri-Lim’s daughters, whom he much preferred. As Kirum’s
situation worsened, even her servants were taken away.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb It’s unclear whether Zimri-Lim ever rescued her. He certainly tried at

least once, but a letter about it says her husband refused to release her.
One can only hope that both of the unhappy princesses, Inib-sharri and
Kirum, obtained divorces and eventually returned to the safety of Mari.

HAMMURABI
bb Among Zimri-Lim’s allies was King Hammurabi of Babylon. Zimri-
Lim and Hammurabi shared common enemies and sometimes sent
troops to support one another. However, Hammurabi was becoming
more aggressive to his neighbors, and Zimri-Lim began to worry about
his motives.

bb Zimri-Lim wrote a letter to Shiptu asking her to consult with the various
prophets and diviners at the palace to find out about Hammurabi’s intent
and future. Shiptu’s answer was somewhat reassuring. She said that she’d
had a man take a potion, and he’d had
a revelation from the gods, which
indicated Hammurabi would fall.

bb Unfortunately for both Shiptu

and Zimri-Lim—and for
the whole land of Mari—
this prediction was wrong:
Hammurabi led his troops to
Mari and conquered the city.
He seems to have robbed the
palace thoroughly, sending
the jewelry, textiles, statues,
and other valuable goods
back home. He even had his
men go through the palace
archives, removing many of
the letters that pertained to
his own affairs.

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Lecture 13  Royalty and Palace Intrigue at Mari

bb Then, the palace was set on fire. The wooden roof beams, door and
window frames, and the remaining textiles burned readily. The walls
of the upper story collapsed, and the great palace was abandoned. It
gradually was covered with windblown dirt and sand and was left
untouched until 1933, when some local villagers discovered a statue there.
A French team of archaeologists excavated the site for decades, gradually
bringing Zimri-Lim and his world back to life.

READINGS
‰‰ Fleming, Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors.
‰‰ Heimpel, Letters to the King of Mari.
‰‰ Lafont, “The Women of the Palace at Mari.”
‰‰ Margueron, Jean-Cl. “Mari” in Aruz 2008, 27-33.
‰‰ Sasson, Jack M. From the Mari Archives.
‰‰ ———, “Thoughts of Zimri-Lim”
‰‰ ———, “Texts, Trade, and Travelers.”
‰‰ Villard, “Shamshi-Adad and Sons.”

QUESTIONS
ää Why might Shamshi-Adad’s system of using viceroys to rule parts
of his empire have been unsuccessful in the long run?
ää How did Queen Shiptu help in the administration of the palace
at Mari?
ää Was it an advantage or a disadvantage to Zimri-Lim that he had so
many daughters?

114
WAR AND
SOCIETY IN
14
HAMMURABI’S TIME

H ammurabi of Babylon claimed that by fighting, he brought peace. He

was a king who built an empire by conquering neighboring lands in
the 18th century BCE. He described himself as a ruler who “spreads light
over the lands of Sumer and Akkad, king who makes the four regions obedient.”
To the ancient Mesopotamians, the “four regions” constituted the whole world.
The reign of Hammurabi is an interesting time to look at in the context of
war and diplomacy between states, and personal relationships between
common people, because so many documents from this era are available
for study.
Lecture 14  War and Society in Hammurabi’s Time

HAMMURABI’S REIGN
bb Hammurabi used both war and diplomacy in his relationships with
neighboring lands. He had messengers and diplomats constantly on the
move around Mesopotamia, visiting other courts, delivering and receiving
letters and gifts, making deals, and negotiating treaties. However, he also
led large armies on military campaigns, and he seems to have had a gift
for inspiring people.

bb Hammurabi came to power in Babylon in the usual way: inheriting the

throne from his father. At the time, the kingdom wasn’t extensive. It was
one of several medium-sized states in Mesopotamia and Syria. Like all
Mesopotamian kings, he proclaimed a new name for the year. It would
now be called “the year Hammurabi became king.”

bb After that, every year of Hammurabi’s long reign had a different name,
and each of the year names mentioned some great thing that he had
achieved in the previous year. These year names help scholars to follow
the events of his reign and the events that he thought were important
to commemorate.

bb Hammurabi’s second year was the one in which he “established justice in

the land.” Hammurabi has a reputation as a lawgiver, so one might think
this was the year in which he issued his law code, but that didn’t come
until much later.

bb The act of establishing justice that Hammurabi referred to was different.

In Akkadian, the term is mesharum. It’s a type of decree that releases
people from their debts. This was a popular thing for kings to do. A lot
of debts were owed to temples, and interest rates could be crushing—as
high as 33 percent a year.

bb For the next four years of his reign, Hammurabi’s year names
commemorated religious acts and building projects. He restored walls
and made thrones for gods. Then, between years 7 and 11, he became
more militaristic, campaigning against neighboring lands.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb After that, things settled down. For the

next 18 years, Hammurabi bragged in his
year names that he commissioned statues,
dug canals, rebuilt city walls, and had
various objects made for the deities. He
engaged in no fighting worthy of a year
name. His messengers were busy
corresponding and negotiating with
neighboring lands, and Babylonian
merchants were busy with trade.

A CHANGE
bb Hammurabi was on the throne
for 30 years before events brought
a complete change to his reign and
ambitions. When he was in his 50s, or
maybe older, his kingdom came under
attack by a powerful neighbor to the
east: the army of the king of Elam and
a mass of Elam’s allies.

bb Hammurabi was able to defeat this formidable foe. The name he gave to
the year took up lines and lines of writing. Hammurabi saw his victory
as evidence that the gods were on his side. This might have given him
confidence to go on the offensive against an old rival, Larsa, a kingdom
just to the south of Babylon.

bb Hammurabi’s subsequent victory in Larsa gave him even more

momentum. He started going on annual campaigns to overthrow one
former ally after another, including Zimri-Lim of Mari. In just nine
years, he built an empire that extended from the Persian Gulf north to
Mari, encompassing virtually all of what is now Iraq and part of eastern
Syria. It was the biggest empire since the time of Sargon of Akkad in
the 23rd century BCE.

117
Lecture 14  War and Society in Hammurabi’s Time

bb Hammurabi lived for several more years after conquering his empire.
Ultimately, he ruled for 43 years, having taken Babylon from its status as
one of several kingdoms to an empire that had conquered many of them.
In spite of his military conquests, he still cast himself in the mold of
earlier kings like Ur-Namma or Gudea. He portrayed himself as a pious
shepherd of his people who brought peace and justice, not an oppressor
who tore down their walls.

bb Toward the end of his reign, he proclaimed the laws for which he’s so
famous. He had them carved on several stone stelas and set them up in
a number of places across his empire.

Code of Hammurabi 118

 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

LIFE IN HAMMURABI’S TIME

bb Documents from this era give a vivid view of how most people lived
in Hammurabi’s time. Although different social classes existed
in ancient Mesopotamia, it can be hard to figure out the class of
a particular individual. The classes mentioned in the texts are awilum,
mushkenum, and wardum, with the awilum being the highest and wardum
the lowest.

bb The term wardum is usually translated as “slave,” but Mesopotamian

slavery was different from slavery in other lands. Unlike in Rome,
the slaves were not put to work on large agricultural estates.
They could be bought and sold and were often enslaved as prisoners
of war.

bb The term mushkenum is often translated as “commoner,” but that

makes it sound as though awilums were rich. Sometimes they weren’t.
The difference might be that an awilum owned property, even a small
house or field, while a mushkenum was a renter, a tenant farmer, or
a hired laborer.

bb In any event, the class system wasn’t very rigid. There were no rules
against intermarriage, for example. The laws suggest that society and
the courts might have been generous to the poorer people. A physician
was expected to charge patients on a sliding scale, charging less to
a mushkenum than to an awilum. A fine owed by a mushkenum was
often less than a fine owed by an awilum.

FAMILIES
bb Throughout the lives of Mesopotamians, their families were their
first priorities. Within a family, children grew up with routines. In
farming families (which constituted the vast majority), boys worked
alongside their parents from an early age, sowing seeds, weeding,
harvesting, and tending domestic animals.

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Lecture 14  War and Society in Hammurabi’s Time

bb Each day, girls helped their mothers grind flour, bake bread, spin wool,
weave cloth, and take care of their siblings. These children learned, early
on, what was and what was not permitted within the household—and,
by extension, in society.

bb By the time a girl reached adolescence, arrangements would have begun

for her marriage. Boys grew up knowing that they would eventually
become the heads of households of their own. They emulated the men in
their families and began learning a trade or profession (usually the same
one as their father) as soon as they could.

bb Many babies and children died of illness, but those who survived were
crucial to the economy of a family. Couples who were unable to have
biological children were quick to adopt. In the adoption contracts that
were drawn up, the parents swore that their adopted son had the same
rights that a biological son would have had.

bb When and if parents reached old age, their grown children were expected
to support them. Even after death, children were important—they
continued to provide gifts and prayers at the parents’ tomb.

bb Families were close, but not all relatives lived in the same house. In
a couple’s immediate household were their children, unmarried sisters,
and perhaps the husband’s parents, if they were still alive. Plenty of other
relatives were usually close by.

LAWS AND ARCHIVES

bb Family archives from this era are fascinating. Most likely, a family archive
was originally kept in a pot or a basket in a storage room, and could
include various documents to be saved for the future. These could include
personal letters, name lists, or school exercises, but mostly they were made
up of contracts. Examples include wills, marriage contracts, contracts
from when servants were hired or slaves were bought, a canceled loan
contract, the contract for the purchase of the house, or other contracts
for the purchase or lease of fields or orchards.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb All of these were legally binding, and drawing them up required witnesses
who were listed at the end of the document. Usually, each person was
identified by his profession or the name of his father. These witness
lists are full of brothers and
neighbors of the main parties
to the contracts. Sometimes,
sons are listed too.

bb It’s rare, though, to find

a man’s father named as
a witness. That’s probably
because few people lived to
old age, though some reached
90 or 100 years of age. Life,
for most adults, was cut short
by forces beyond the control
of the Mesopotamians:
disease, infection, accident,
childbirth, or disaster.
A man who had the good
fortune to live a long life
was respected and retained
his position as head of the
household until his death.

bb The power of the father was limited, though, because of law and custom.
He couldn’t, for example, decide to disown one of his sons simply
because he was annoyed with the boy, or because he felt like it. Two of
Hammurabi’s laws make sure that the son was treated fairly.

bb Men and women alike owned property, and a woman’s property remained
her own even after she got married. When either parent died, their wealth
was divided up as equally as possible among their children, with the oldest
son getting an extra share. Adopted children received the same proportion
as biological children. So did the children of concubines if their father
acknowledged them as his own.

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Lecture 14  War and Society in Hammurabi’s Time

bb If a daughter married before her parents died, she received her inheritance
early, as a dowry. For all children, their inheritance was often in the form
of fields, a house, farm animals, or furniture. Owning such things made it
possible for a young man to marry and support a household. That might
have been impossible while his father was still alive.

bb The division of an estate could get messy and emotional. Sometimes,

scribes were hired to negotiate among the grown children to make sure
the inheritance division was fair. Still, people also often went to court to
contest what they’d been awarded.

LIFE FOR WOMEN

bb Old Babylonian documents show that the
Mesopotamian world was patriarchal. Men
were the leaders of almost all institutions,
including private households. Women
didn’t get to choose their husbands, or at
least not their first husbands. Women were
expected to run their households and obey
their husbands. However, compared with
many other ancient cultures, they had
surprising freedoms.

bb Women could own property and pass

it on to their children. They didn’t
have to wear a veil and had active lives
outside the home. They could give evidence
in court and serve as witnesses, especially if the case involved another
woman. They could own businesses and work for the palace or the temple
as independent employees, quite separate from the men of their families.

bb Women were listed in administrative texts as beer-makers, textile weavers,

animal keepers, cooks, and wool spinners, among other positions, and
they received salaries in their own names. This compensation came in
the form of rations of wool, oil, and flour.

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bb Priestesses and queens were some of the most powerful people in the
land, and they administered extensive estates and workshops. Women
could also dedicate themselves to the service of the gods by taking on
a number of religious roles.

bb A woman could get a divorce under some circumstances, in which case

she had a right to her original dowry. If a woman’s first husband died,
she could marry again, choosing her second husband. Even in arranged
marriages, the ideal was that love would develop between the husband
and wife. Proverbs, lullabies, and letters attest to the love that parents
had for their children.

READINGS
‰‰ Charpin, Hammurabi of Babylon.
‰‰ Horsnell, The Year-Names of the First Dynasty of Babylon.
‰‰ Soltysiak, “Antemortem Cranial Trauma in Ancient
Mesopotamia.”
‰‰ Van De Mieroop, King Hammurabi of Babylon.
‰‰ Van Koppen, “Old Babylonian Period Inscriptions.”

QUESTIONS
ää Why might the early Old Babylonian kings have avoided
mentioning their military successes in their inscriptions?
ää Why might the kings have chosen to name the years of their reigns,
rather than numbering them?
ää In what ways were families central to Mesopotamian society?
What roles did they play?

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JUSTICE IN THE
OLD BABYLONIAN
15
PERIOD

S cholars have much evidence for how the legal system functioned during
the Old Babylonian period, from around 1900 to 1600 BCE. There are
many records of court cases, several collections of laws, and thousands
of legal contracts. Plenty of personal letters also refer to litigation. There’s
even a story of a woman named Nin-dada, whose murder case was decided
by the men of the Assembly of Nippur. Turning on her silence as evidence
of guilt in her husband’s murder, the case resulted in the death penalty.
This lecture takes a look at other workings of the justice system in the Old
Babylonian period.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

RECORDS
bb The Mesopotamians and Syrians in the Old Babylonian period kept
copious records of their legal activities. If someone bought or sold
something important—like a house, orchard, field, or slave—he or she
often had a written contract drawn up that listed all the terms of the sale
along with the witnesses who were present.

bb The same was true when a child was adopted, a marriage was negotiated,
a servant was hired, or a loan was made. These contracts, written on clay
tablets, were kept in the person’s house and were available to be consulted
later if anyone challenged the terms or claimed to have a right to the
property. If someone did contest a contract, then the legal system kicked
in. Because the Mesopotamians kept so many records, often researchers
get a sense of what happened.

bb For example, take an inheritance dispute in the city of Sippar. In

that city, there was an extensive temple complex dedicated to the sun
god Shamash. The complex was home to a group of religious women
known as naditus. The naditus prayed to the sun god for the welfare of
their families.

bb One such woman, Amat-Shamash, owned a very small house in the

temple complex. When she died, the house passed to her adopted
daughter. This was typical and uncomplicated. However, Amat-Shamash
was also survived by two brothers who claimed that her daughter—their
niece—had no right to the house.

COURT PROCEEDINGS
bb The men went to court. Their claim was that “Amat-Shamash did not
bequeath to you any house whatever, and executed no document in your
favor; upon her death, you yourself drew up such a document.” In other
words, they were asserting that the will was fake.

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Lecture 15  Justice in the Old Babylonian Period

bb The daughter had kept her

mother’s will, which, like
all contracts, was written
on a clay tablet. In it, her
mother had bequeathed
the house to her. She
also had the names
of witnesses who had
been present when the
document was drawn up.
When she found them,
she asked them to come
to the trial.

bb The court record reveals

that when the day arrived,
the trial took place in the
Shamash temple complex
where the daughter
lived. She probably
walked a short distance
from her home to the proceedings, taking with her the inscribed clay
tablet on which the will had been written out long before. Her witnesses
were in attendance, along with her uncles and a panel of five judges, led
by the chief judge of Sippar.

bb After the uncles made the assertion that their niece had fabricated the
will, the judges no doubt looked at the cuneiform document. They
wondered: Did it show any signs of having been written just recently?

bb The judges then had three holy objects brought into court from their
shrines—two symbols of the sun god Shamash and one of the goddess
Ishhara. These would have been made of precious metals, and they
substituted for the god and goddess in cases like these. Shamash was
the god of justice and Ishhara was the goddess of oaths. Both could be
expected to know who was telling the truth.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The men and women who had witnessed the contract being drawn up
were asked to swear an oath in the presence of these powerful symbols.
They had to swear that Amat-Shamash “while still alive had bequeathed
the house to the defendant and drawn up the document.” The men and
women did so willingly.

bb This fact alone doomed the uncles’ case. The Mesopotamians believed
the gods would punish anyone who swore a false oath. At the same time,
swearing honestly about something that one had witnessed kept one in
the good favor of the gods.

bb Evidently, the uncles had no witnesses to back up their claim. The judges
decided in the woman’s favor and told the men that they couldn’t bring
the complaint again. This ruling also applied to any other brothers who
might have similar ideas of cheating their niece out of the house. The
house now officially belonged to the daughter of Amat-Shamash.

bb It’s interesting to note what was not mentioned in the court record. There
were no lawyers and no jury. Those roles hadn’t yet been invented. No
fine appears to have been imposed on the men who brought the case—no
one was punished.

bb As was often the case in Mesopotamian court records, the judges decided
not in favor of the more powerful party (the uncles). Instead, the judges
supported the weaker party—the adopted daughter. Their concern seems
to have been on the side of truth and justice, not of power or political favor.

bb There’s also no reference to the judges consulting the law codes. The
witnesses and the written contract, and the presence of the gods, were
enough to decide the case. In fact, there are almost no references in Old
Babylonian court records to the judges consulting written laws. The
laws played an ambiguous role in the judicial system. Written laws were
less important, at the time, than the judges, evidence, courts, contracts,
and lawsuits.

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Lecture 15  Justice in the Old Babylonian Period

HAMMURABI’S LAWS
bb Hammurabi of Babylon wasn’t the first
lawgiver, though people often have
the impression he was. The honor is
actually held by King Ur-Namma,
who ruled several centuries earlier.
However, Hammurabi’s laws are the
best known from Mesopotamia. In
part, this is because he inscribed the
laws on an impressive seven-foot-
high polished stone stela, with an
eye-catching depiction at the top of
himself with the god Shamash.

bb This stela was placed in a public

square for all to see. Hammurabi
wrote in the inscription that he’d
established the laws because the
god Marduk told him to, and
doing so would bring “appropriate
behavior” and “enhance the
well-being of the people.” That
was his goal—the protection of
well-behaved people.

bb The monument was later stolen by

the neighboring Elamites when
they sacked Babylonia. Thousands
of years later, it was excavated
by French archaeologists in the
Elamite city of Susa, in modern-
day Iran. It ended up in the
Louvre Museum.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Of the approximately 282 preserved laws that Hammurabi proclaimed,

many deal with circumstances that can’t really be described as crimes at all.
They govern such circumstances as:

cc When a divorce was permitted.

cc Compensation for property losses resulting from storms or negligence.

cc Who could ransom a captured soldier.

cc What to do if an ox gored someone.

cc What the punishment should be for failing to pollinate a date orchard

when hired to do so.

MORE SERIOUS INFRACTIONS

bb Only 25 of the laws—about nine percent of Hammurabi’s collection—
address violent crimes. Of these, 10 are the often-quoted “eye for an eye”
laws that pertain to a man breaking another man’s bone, striking a man’s
cheek, blinding an eye, or knocking out a tooth. Most of these sound like
the results of fistfights, and no weapons are mentioned.

bb Interestingly, the accused is always assumed to be a member of the upper

class, called an awilum. If one of these men broke the bone of a member
of his own class, then his own bone would be broken, as well. This is
the so-called lex talionis—the law of retaliation—which is also found in
the Bible.

bb However, if the aggressor broke the bone of a commoner—that is,

a mushkenum—then the upper-class man had to pay a fine. This
sounds as though it’s unfair: Why did the commoner receive silver
instead of having the pleasure of knowing that his assailant’s bone had
been broken?

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Lecture 15  Justice in the Old Babylonian Period

bb However, a commoner would probably want the money more than

vengeance. The amount that a commoner received from his attacker was
60 shekels of silver. Since a laborer earned around one shekel a month,
this was five years’ salary. It’s doubtful that most commoners thought
this was an unfair deal.

bb Six of Hammurabi’s laws address punishments for striking a pregnant

woman and causing a miscarriage or the woman’s death—probably as
a result of domestic violence. One law directly addresses a son striking
his father, for which his hand was supposed to be cut off. Researchers
don’t know of any case in which this was actually enacted.

bb Five of the laws punish

what we would call
rape, though in
only one of them is
the woman clearly
described as the
unwilling victim. In
that case, she was not
to be punished. Her
rapist, on the other
hand, was to be put
to death for his crime.
The other four laws
dealt with sexual
assaults in a family:
A man was punished
for having sexual
relations with his
daughter, mother,
or son’s fiancée. The
woman probably was
unwilling in these
cases as well, but
that isn’t specified.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Two other laws address deaths during crimes. In one, a victim was beaten
to death while detained by a creditor. In another, someone was killed
during the course of a robbery. Finally, a single law concerns premeditated
murder when a woman had her husband killed because she was having
an affair with another man.

GAPS AND SYSTEMS

bb Hammurabi didn’t include a law to determine what happened when a man
murdered another man, or if a man murdered a woman, or if a woman
murdered a man for a reason other than an affair. These scenarios
aren’t covered.

bb There are many gaps like this. The laws don’t even try to be comprehensive.
They appear, instead, to be a collection of past legal decisions that the
king wished to support. Judges might use them for guidance, perhaps,
but they don’t exactly represent a code of law.

bb Clearly, people worried about marriage and sex. Many of the laws governed
what happened, for example, when someone accused a woman of adultery;
or when a man wanted to take a second wife, if he’d been unable to have
children with his first wife; or when a man had debts before marriage
and hadn’t paid them off; or when a man broke off his engagement.
Hammurabi also included plenty of rules about inheritance—who had
the right to inherit, and who didn’t.

bb The court records tell much the same story. There was a great deal of
litigation about property and inheritance and divorce, but not much
mention of criminal behavior. Very few known court cases ended in
capital punishment. The judges tended to be more lenient than the laws
might lead one to expect.

bb There were no prison sentences because there was no concept of prison

as we have it today. For the most part, if someone could continue to
participate in society, he was fined. If he was a danger to society, he
was killed.

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Lecture 15  Justice in the Old Babylonian Period

OTHER LAWS AND LEGACY

bb Hammurabi’s laws provide intriguing insights into the legal system. Several
of them mention the “River Ordeal.” This was a way of determining the
truth if there were no witnesses to put under oath, a situation when only
the gods could know who was telling the truth. For example, “If a man’s
wife should have a finger pointed against her in accusation involving
another male, although she has not been seized lying with another male,
she shall submit to the River Ordeal for her husband.”

bb In theory, the accused woman would be required to jump into the river. If
she drowned, then the gods were showing that she was guilty of adultery.
If she survived, the gods had saved her because she was innocent. She
was not bound in any way, so if she could swim, she stood a good chance
of survival.

bb In practice, the mere threat of the River Ordeal was often enough to reveal
the truth. An innocent person would agree to it readily, knowing she
would survive. A guilty person would rather confess than be drowned in
the river—the penalty the gods would undoubtedly impose. Therefore, the
person’s reaction to being sent to the river was often enough to prove guilt
or innocence. They didn’t necessarily have to be subjected to the ordeal.

bb Other laws in Hammurabi’s collection deal with the issue of taking an

oath. If someone was willing to swear an oath—to give evidence “before
the god”—it was considered proof that the person wasn’t lying. No one
would be crazy enough to lie in front of the gods because they were
believed to be so powerful. The oaths and the River Ordeal reflect the
deep faith that the Mesopotamian people had in their gods, and they
helped the judges determine the truth of a case.

bb The laws were all conditional in structure. None simply stated that one
should not do something (that would be an absolute law). They all noted
that if someone did a particular thing, then a certain punishment would
be imposed. They reflect a basically law-abiding community, in which
people sometimes gave in to their baser instincts, but in which everything
could be worked out.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The laws and the courts in Mesopotamia were designed to reach just
decisions, and to allow even the weak in society to obtain justice. It was
an effective system that lasted hundreds of years. It also inspired many
later legal systems around the world.

READINGS
‰‰ Barmash, “Blood Feud and State Control.”
‰‰ Charpin, Writing, Law, and Kingship in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia.
‰‰ Harris, Ancient Sippar.
‰‰ Jacobsen, “An Ancient Mesopotamian Trial for Homicide.”
‰‰ Nakata, “Economic Activities of naditum-Women of Šamaš
Reflected in the Field Sale Contracts.”
‰‰ Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor.
‰‰ ———, “Mesopotamian Legal Traditions and the Laws of
Hammurabi.”
‰‰ Westbrook, A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law, volume 1.

QUESTIONS
ää What are the main differences between the trial of Nin-dada and
the trial of Amat-Shamash in the ways in which a decision was
reached? What might account for these differences?
ää What were the roles of oaths, witnesses, and the River Ordeal in
court trials?

133
THE HANA
KINGDOM AND
16
CLUES TO
A DARK AGE

I n the 250 years after King Hammurabi of Babylon died in 1750 BCE, the
Near East changed a great deal. By 1500 BCE, new peoples—speaking
languages called Hittite, Hurrian, and Kassite—were playing important
roles. There were big, new imperial kingdoms and capital cities. Yet the whole
region was also coming out of a mysterious dark age—about 100 years long—
when it appears few records were kept. This dark age is fascinating; it’s an era
that leaves us with more questions than answers. Researchers do know that
the lands that dominated the Near East at the end of this era inherited many
traditions of the Old Babylonian period while also making many changes.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

THREE PEOPLES
bb The Kassites were immigrants who were mentioned periodically through
five generations—and 150 years—of Hammurabi’s successors. Some
scholars think they came from the mountains northeast of Mesopotamia,
though that’s debated. A dynasty of Kassite kings took control in
southern Mesopotamia and had a remarkably successful regime that
lasted centuries.

bb Their language is unlike any other Mesopotamian tongue. The only

things that seem to have been written in their own language were personal
names and gods’ names. A lot of their names end in “ash.” The names
of some of their kings show this: Abi-rattash, Burna-buriash, Gandash,
Kara-hardash, Kashtiliash, and so on. These names are distinctive, and
clearly not native to Mesopotamia.

bb The Hittites lived in what is now Turkey—ancient Anatolia—and they

were the inheritors of the Anatolian civilization that had existed for
hundreds of years in that region. The Hittites’ ancestors had traded with
the Assyrians of northern Mesopotamia for textiles and tin, providing
silver in exchange.

bb Hittite was one of the Indo-European family of languages, so it’s related

to English, German, French, Latin, and so on, as well as to some Indian
languages like Sanskrit. The Hittites adopted the cuneiform writing
system late in the Old Babylonian period, around 1650 BCE, and—unlike
the Kassites—they did use it to write their own language.

bb A third new powerful group of people spoke Hurrian, which wasn’t

Semitic or Indo-European, and wasn’t related to Sumerian either. In other
words—like Kassite—Hurrian wasn’t related to the dominant languages
of Mesopotamia. However, it had been spoken in northern Syria for
centuries. Hittites, Hurrians, and Kassites are all mentioned in texts
from the later years of King Hammurabi’s dynasty, though they weren’t
playing major roles yet.

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Lecture 16  The Hana Kingdom and Clues to a Dark Age

END OF AN EMPIRE
bb Hammurabi had built an empire that extended north beyond what is now
the border between Iraq and Syria. The kingdom of Mari, in the eastern
part of Syria, seems to have marked the northern limit of this empire.
Hammurabi’s successors struggled to maintain it.

bb While dealing with rebellions, Hammurabi’s son lost a lot of land to

the south of Babylon. However, he was victorious against a Kassite
incursion. When he chose the name for his ninth year on the throne,
he commemorated this victory. Still, during the years leading up to
1595 BCE, the empire shrank considerably.

bb After the end of Hammurabi’s empire, scholars are confronted with

something of a mystery. Mesopotamian scholars are dependent on
cuneiform texts to provide evidence of the historical events of each era.
If tablets aren’t found in the ground, they simply can’t know what was
going on.

bb That’s the situation for the 16th century BCE. In Mesopotamia and in
Syria, very, very few documents have been discovered that can be dated
to the period from 1595 to 1500 BCE. It’s a classic dark age.

THE HANA KINGDOM

bb By the end of this dark age, many things had changed. It wasn’t just that
the Kassites were now ruling Mesopotamia; there were also two powerful
new empires in the north. The empire of the Hittites was growing in
Anatolia. An empire called Mittani—dominated by the Hurrians—was
expanding across northern Mesopotamia and Syria.

bb By 1500 BCE, even the Egyptians had become imperialistic. Previously,

they had largely kept to the Nile Valley, but now they started campaigning
into the Levant. That brings up the question: How did everything change?
This lecture attempts to answer that through the perspective of the Hana

136
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

kingdom. It was one of the few kingdoms that seems to have managed to
survive from the later years of Hammurabi’s dynasty, through the dark
age, and into the time of the new empires that followed.

bb Hana was centered on the city of Terqa on the Euphrates River in Syria. In
the time of the Old Babylonian kingdom of Mari, during the 18th century
BCE, Terqa was one of Mari’s provincial capitals. So for now, here’s some
of what we know about Hana, and how it fits into the big picture.

bb After Hammurabi’s reign—and just to the north of his imperial border—

some local kings ruled Hana, which was about the same size as Mari’s
old kingdom and included much of the same territory. These kings ruled
from Terqa, their capital.

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Lecture 16  The Hana Kingdom and Clues to a Dark Age

LIFE IN TERQA
bb Scholars know from the contracts and letters found in the houses that life
in Terqa, at this time, was a lot like life in Hammurabi’s empire. People
bought and sold houses and fields. They lived near their relatives. They
farmed and took out loans. They worshiped gods in local shrines.

bb During the reign of Hammurabi’s son, Samsuiluna, they seem to have

been attacked by the Babylonian forces. Afterward, a king with a foreign
name took the throne at Terqa. He was named Kashtiliashu. This is
definitely a Kassite name, but it was about 200 years after this that the
Kassites took control of Babylon.

bb On this basis, many historians have speculated that Terqa was home
to a Kassite kingdom ruled by Kashtiliashu, while Hammurabi’s
successors were still ruling in Babylon. However, that claim is shaky.
That’s because among all the names in the Hana documents that survive
from his time, Kashtiliashu had the only Kassite name. Everyone else
had Amorite and Akkadian names. If this had been a Kassite kingdom,
one would expect at least some other Kassite people to have lived there
besides the king.

bb This course’s theory is that he was a local king who admired the Kassites
and took the name of one of their war leaders. After all, the Kassites had
recently been giving trouble to the king of Babylon, and the people of
Hana probably supported them, since they’d also fought against Babylon.

A NEW THREAT
bb By 1650 BCE, just a few decades after the reign of Kashtiliashu, there
was a new threat on the horizon. Maybe the people of Hana were aware
of it. North up the Euphrates from Terqa was the kingdom of Yamhad,
with its capital city of Aleppo, in Syria. Quite suddenly, around 1630
BCE, Aleppo was attacked from the north by a Hittite king and his
troops. Yamhad was able to repulse the attacks, but the people there were
no doubt worried.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The next Hittite king tried again to conquer Aleppo, and, unlike his
father, he was successful. This must have been a terrifying time for the
Mesopotamians and the Syrians. They were familiar with one another’s
kingdoms. They fought one another from time to time, but they
understood the rules of combat and the reasons for the battles. They also
had diplomatic relationships and treaties.

bb The Hittites, however, weren’t part of the diplomatic system. Hana wasn’t
that far away from Yamhad, so the people there almost certainly had heard
about the Hittite attacks on Aleppo.

bb The next move by the Hittites changed Near Eastern history. The same
king who’d destroyed Aleppo now launched an offensive right down the
Euphrates. It was the attack that brought an end to Hammurabi’s dynasty.

139 Hadad Temple, Syria

Lecture 16  The Hana Kingdom and Clues to a Dark Age

bb The Hittite king raided the city, presumably destroyed lots of buildings,
and went back home, taking the statues of the city gods with him.
He left a power vacuum behind. The Kassites ended up filling this
power vacuum.

bb With the conquest of Babylon in 1595 BCE came the aforementioned

dark age. It wasn’t until around 1450—150 years later—that cuneiform
documents started being written again in any significant numbers.
By then, the Kassites had been ruling central Mesopotamia for ages. From
around the same time, scholars have documents from the new Hurrian
kingdom of Mittani in the north.

RELATIONS
bb One inscription supposedly tells scholars something about what went on
toward the beginning of the Kassite dynasty, during the dark age. The
inscription is credited to a king named Agum. The problem with this
inscription is that it’s known from a much, much later copy, and some
scholars think it was a fake—made by a later king to justify his control
of certain lands.

bb However, it could also be a genuine copy of an inscription from the time of

Agum. There are some details in the inscription that later scribes almost
certainly wouldn’t have known about.

bb Agum celebrates in his inscription because he brought about the return of

the statues of the god Marduk and his divine wife to Babylon. This would
have been a huge achievement and a way to convince the Babylonians to
view him as a true successor to the dynasty of Hammurabi. When the
statues were away in the land of the Hittites, the Babylonians would have
felt their city was missing its gods. A king who could bring them back
must have had the gods’ support.

bb Meanwhile, the Hittites would have been respectful to the Babylonian

statues while they had them. Like the Mesopotamians, the Hittites

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

thought the gods lived inside their statues, and they definitely would
have believed in the power of Marduk.

bb Agum says he sent an ambassador to negotiate for the return of the

statues. His negotiations were successful, and arrangements were made
for the statues to be returned. Curiously, he didn’t say that this emissary
went to the Hittite capital. Instead, he says, “I sent to a far-off land,
to the land of the Hanaeans, and Marduk and Sarpanitum did they
conduct to me.”

bb Therefore, they came back not from the land of the Hittites but
from the land of the Hanaeans—meaning Hana. Unfortunately,
researchers don’t know which of the Hana kings was involved in these
negotiations. However, the inscription seems to confirm the idea that
Hana continued to thrive during the dark age, since Agum lived during
that time.

bb One striking thing about this episode is that the Kassite King Agum used
long-distance diplomacy to get the statues back, and he probably initially
had to negotiate with the Hittites.

bb The Hittites hadn’t been part of the diplomatic network up to this point.
Afterward, they took to diplomacy in a big way. The Hittites adopted
all the diplomatic techniques that the Mesopotamians and Syrians
had developed over hundreds of years. They used messengers, treaties,
diplomatic letters, gifts, dynastic marriages, and so on.

MITTANI AND IMPERIALISTIC AIMS

bb Another great new power, the kingdom of Mittani, also began to emerge
in the dark age. Mittani dominated northern Mesopotamia for about
150 years, starting around 1500 BCE. It had a largely Hurrian-speaking
population. By the end of the dark age, Mittani was a powerful empire,
ruling an area that eventually stretched about 500 miles from east to
west. It ran from the eastern edge of northern Iraq across much of Syria,
reaching to what is now southeast Turkey.

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Lecture 16  The Hana Kingdom and Clues to a Dark Age

bb By 1500 BCE, the kings of Mittani and their troops were aggressively
fighting in both the east and west. Around this time,
a Mittanian king caused problems for a minor
western king named Idrimi. He ruled from Aleppo
around the end of the dark age and was forced
into exile when the city was attacked, though it’s
unclear who the attackers were.

bb Idrimi ended up as a vassal of the Mittani

king and swore an oath to support him. This
story might have been typical of the time of
expansion in Mittani. Former enemies of
the empire were willing to become vassals
because they were allowed to raid and loot
in the areas where they fought.

bb Before this time, the area that Idrimi

ruled and raided had been controlled by
the Hittites. The Hittites were now in
a weak position and had lost quite a bit
of land to Mittani, though they would
gain strength again.

bb However, Mittani had another enemy

as well—one that seemed to come
out of nowhere. In 1504 BCE,
according to records from Egypt,
Egyptian troops charged into Mittani,
fighting all the way to the Euphrates River. Egyptian forces had never
made it this far north before.

bb By 1500 BCE, there were four major powers in the Near East—the
Hittites, Egyptians, Mittanians, and Kassite Babylonians—and three
of them had imperialistic aims. Only the Kassites seem to have been
uninterested in expanding their kingdom. Worse yet, the Hittites,
Mittanians, and Egyptians all wanted to control the same coastal area of
western Syria. They all had strong armies and powerful kings.

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bb It’s unclear where Hana was in all of this. It might have been a vassal state
of Mittani or perhaps a vassal of Babylon. Maybe it was hanging on as
an independent power. Hana had survived through the dark age, but it
never again seems to have played an important role in international affairs.
Hopefully, more evidence about Hana’s fate will emerge in the future.

READINGS
‰‰ Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites.
‰‰ Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati, “Terqa.”
‰‰ Cancik-Kirschbaum and Brisch, Constituent, Confederate, and
Conquered Space.
‰‰ Eidem, “International Law in the Second Millennium.”
‰‰ Hunger and Pruzsinszky, eds., Mesopotamian Dark Age Revisited.
‰‰ Lafont, “International Relations in the Ancient Near East.”
‰‰ Paulus, “Foreigners under Foreign Rulers.”
‰‰ Podany, “The Conservatism of Hana Scribal Tradition.”
‰‰ ———, The Land of Hana.
‰‰ Richardson, “The Many Falls of Babylon and the Shape of
Forgetting.”

QUESTIONS
ää What might account for the huge decrease in the number of
cuneiform tablets during the 16th century BCE?
ää What factors might have contributed to the Hittites’ success in
conquering Babylon in 1595 BCE?
ää How did the Mittanian kings expand their empire?

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PRINCESS
TADU-HEPA,
17
DIPLOMACY, AND
MARRIAGE

A round 1500 BCE, toward the beginning of what is known as the Late
Bronze Age, the major Near Eastern powers were at war with one
another. Hatti had expanded south to the Syrian coast. Mittani had
expanded east to fight for control over that same region. The Egyptians had
begun to take over the Levant and to raid lands ruled by Mittani. The armies
of all these great powers were fighting for control of the same area on the
Mediterranean coast. This lecture looks at how diplomacy came into play in
this and other situations.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

AMBASSADORS
bb The Egyptian kings claimed in their royal inscriptions that, after they
had raided Mittani, several ambassadors from distant lands showed
up in Egypt with gifts for the king. This had never happened before.
These ambassadors came from Hatti, Assyria, and Babylonia, among
other places.

bb These kingdoms had, for a  long time, enjoyed diplomatic

relationships with one another (even during times of war), and now
they were trying to tame the new imperial power—Egypt. They didn’t
want Egypt to raid and conquer into their own territories, but they could
see that Egypt was rich and powerful. Amazingly, their diplomatic
efforts worked.

bb By about 1420 BCE, Egyptian raids to the north had stopped and
peace treaties seem to have been negotiated on all sides. First, the
pharaoh probably agreed to peace with Mittani, then with Hatti and
Babylonia. These four, centered in what are now Turkey, Syria, Iraq,
and Egypt, were the great powers of the time. They were largely equal
in military and economic power but, for now, incapable of conquering
one another.

bb The truly remarkable aspect of Egypt’s agreement to join the international

community is that the Egyptian kings were willing to adopt the Syro-
Mesopotamian diplomatic system as a whole, just as it already existed.
They didn’t demand to be viewed as greater than the other kings (even
though Egypt was arguably the richest of the great powers).

bb However, the pharaohs did resist one detail of the diplomatic system:
They would accept foreign princesses as wives, but they would never
send any of their daughters away from Egypt to marry another king.
Amenhotep III put it this way: “From of old, a daughter of the king of
Egypt has never been given to anyone.” The other kings seem to have
grudgingly accepted it.

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Lecture 17  Princess Tadu-Hepa, Diplomacy, and Marriage

1420 TO 1200 BCE

bb The era from around 1420 to 1200 BCE is remarkable for the long periods
of time when the great powers were at peace with one another as a result
of the diplomatic relationships and marriages between them. There
were some military conf licts, but fewer than in most other eras.
The kings seem to have thrived in this atmosphere. They enjoyed
peace and diplomatic relations with their allies and sent envoys and letters
to one another regularly.

bb Researchers know about all this because they can read and analyze letters
written by the kings themselves. Many letters from rulers of the great
kingdoms of Mittani, Babylonia, Hatti and Egypt were saved in the
archives of Pharaoh Akhenaten in his capital city at Amarna in Egypt.
This era is often called the Amarna period.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The great kings’ letters to one another were full of gripes and
insinuations, but, at least in the early years of this era, they never
threatened military action. Their main concerns were the value of the gifts
they sent and received, the treatment of their messengers, and the details
of the marriages they arranged between their families.

KING TUSHRATTA
bb One of these kings, Tushratta, played a big role internationally. He was
a king of Mittani in the mid-14th century BCE. One letter from Tushratta
to the pharaoh showed that he’d had a tough childhood. His father had
been king of Mittani for some time and, after his father died, Tushratta’s
brother became king.

bb This brother was soon murdered, and the assassin took control of
the country. He didn’t try to make himself king; instead, he placed
young Tushratta on the throne as his puppet. The assassin became the
regent, so he made the rules. Tushratta seems to have had no choice but to
obey. One of the demands was that Tushratta had to cut off connections
with his allies, including the king of Egypt.

bb The Egyptian king was married to Tushratta’s sister (along

with many, many other women), so he might well have been
alarmed when diplomatic letters stopped coming from Mittani.
Eventually, Tushratta grew up and was able to get his revenge on his
brother’s assassin.

bb After killing his enemy, Tushratta had to deal with an attack by the
Hittites. Tushratta and his army were victorious, and the Hittites
retreated. That was when Tushratta decided to re-establish his alliances
with other great powers, his father’s former allies. He reached out to
Amenhotep III in Egypt, and he may have written to the king of
Babylon as well.

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Lecture 17  Princess Tadu-Hepa, Diplomacy, and Marriage

A ROYAL MARRIAGE
bb His first letter to Amenhotep III didn’t ask for much, just a renewal
of diplomatic ties. Soon after that first contact, though, the two kings
started negotiations for a royal marriage.

bb One of the Amarna documents

is now in the Vorderasiastische
Museum in Berlin, and
it contains a letter from
Tushratta to Amenhotep
III around this time. It’s
a fascinating document that
reveals a great deal about
the international situation
of the time, and also about
the ways that ambassadors
made the whole diplomatic
system work.

bb Tushratta had a daughter

named Tadu-Hepa, who was
engaged to marry Amenhotep
III. The couple had never
met. The whole engagement
had been arranged by letter,
with a lot of help from the
Egyptian ambassador.

bb This was how it had

happened: Some time
before, the pharaoh had sent
a letter asking the Mittanian king if he could marry one of the Mitannian
princesses, and King Tushratta had been delighted. He’d agreed at once:
What could be better than to be related by marriage to his ally, the king
of Egypt?

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

DIPLOMATIC MANEUVERS
bb The Mittanian king was not quite ready to send the princess to Egypt.
A high-ranking Egyptian ambassador named Mane had arrived from
Egypt to pick her up. King Tushratta composed a letter to send back to
the pharaoh in order to try to buy himself a little more time. This is the
letter that’s preserved in Berlin.

bb He had good news and bad news. He began the letter with some of
the good news: The Egyptian ambassador Mane, who had traveled
back and forth between Egypt and Mittani before, had arrived safely
in the capital city of Mittani! Hearing this must have been a relief to
the pharaoh.

bb King Tushratta gave the pharaoh some more good news. Amenhotep III
had included some instructions in a letter Mane took to Tushratta, and
the Mittanian king promised to “carry out every word of my brother that
Mane brought to me.”

bb He continued, “In this very year, now, I will hand over my brother’s
wife, the mistress of Egypt, and they will bring her to my brother.”
Note that a princess who moved away to marry a foreign king had
important roles to play. She represented her father in her husband’s court.
She sometimes wrote letters to her father with information about his
ally, she symbolized the uniting of the two lands, and she might even
be the mother of the next king in that land.

bb However, Amenhotep III, had a lot of wives. Not only was he

already married to the sister of the Mittanian king, he also had married
daughters of a number of his allies and vassals. The pharaoh wasn’t
particularly good at keeping track of his wives. He wrote one very
defensive letter to the king of Babylon who wanted to know if his sister
had died. She was married to Amenhotep III; surely he must know
whether or not she was alive.

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Lecture 17  Princess Tadu-Hepa, Diplomacy, and Marriage

bb Amenhotep III blustered about in his letter, blaming the Babylonian king
for not sending an ambassador who actually knew the Babylonian princess
and could recognize her. The pharaoh had presented the Babylonian
envoys with his wives and left it up to them to figure out which one the
Babylonian princess might be.

BAD NEWS
bb King Tushratta eventually had to share some bad news in his letter: Not
everything was ready for the princess’s departure. It would be another six
months before he was ready to send her because, he said, of all the work he
still had to do on her dowry and on the gifts for the pharaoh. This meant
that he had to detain Mane, the ambassador. As the Mittanian king put
it, “because of this, Mane will be delayed for a bit.”

bb The Mitannian king tried to soften the blow. He

switched the topic in his letter to talk about his
daughter. She wasn’t a child anymore. “She has
become very matured,” he said, and the pharaoh
“will desire her. She is formed according to my
brother’s desire.” Plus, he would be sending
many gifts.

bb However, King Tushratta wasn’t done with the

bad news. This letter is fairly typical of diplomatic
correspondence of this era, tipping back and forth
between reasons for celebration, excuses for not
fulfilling requests, boasts, and
complaints. The king’s letters
were full of assurances of love for
his brother king in Egypt, but
there was always one thing that
was really bothering him. Almost
always, it had to do with gifts.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb King Tushratta had asked the pharaoh for a great deal of gold when he
last sent a messenger to Egypt, and he obviously anticipated the awe
that the gold would inspire in his attendant guests. However, when the
packages were cut open, there was something wrong with the gold. The
guests looked at the supposedly lavish gifts and said, somewhat snidely,
“Are all of these truly of gold?”

bb He included this embarrassing episode in his letter to the pharaoh for

a reason. He really wanted gold, and he wanted the pharaoh to know that
whatever had been sent from Egypt was just not enough. Much of this
was about appearances: King Tushratta badly wanted all of the officials
and foreign guests around him to be impressed.

bb Finally, he reminded the pharaoh of the basic rules of diplomacy. He

wrote: “May I fulfill my brother’s heart’s desire forever. And may my
brother fulfill my own heart’s desire.” He was saying that each side would
send what the other wanted. This was what made the whole diplomatic
system valuable to all sides—it made them rich and impressive and gave
them things they could get no other way.

bb This letter was one of many diplomatic letters found in Egypt from this
period, and it reveals so much about the diplomatic system of the time: the
types of letters that passed back and forth between kings, the gifts that
were expected to accompany them, and the way that the kings thought of
themselves as brothers and were determined to be treated as equals. It also
reveals the choice of Akkadian as the language of correspondence, even
when (as in the case of Mittani and Egypt) it wasn’t the native language of
either king; the sparring over gifts and perceived slights; and the princess
who, like so many other princesses, made the one-way journey to live in
the land of her father’s ally as his wife.

bb The story of the royal marriage ends happily. When Princess Tadu-Hepa
finally left for Egypt, the amount of wealth that changed hands would
have been truly staggering.

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Lecture 17  Princess Tadu-Hepa, Diplomacy, and Marriage

READINGS
‰‰ Bryce, Letters of the Great Kings of the Ancient Near East.
‰‰ Cohen and Westbrook, eds., Amarna Diplomacy.
‰‰ Greene, The Role of the Messenger and Message in the Ancient
Near East.
‰‰ Holmes, “The Messengers of the Amarna Letters.”
‰‰ Kozloff et al., Egypt’s Dazzling Sun.
‰‰ Liverani, International Relations in the Ancient Near East.
‰‰ Moran, The Amarna Letters.
‰‰ Podany, Brotherhood of Kings.
‰‰ Rainey, The El-Amarna Correspondence.
‰‰ Sayce, “The Discovery of the Tel El-Amarna Tablets.”
‰‰ Wilhelm, “The Kingdom of Mitanni in Second Millennium
Upper Mesopotamia.”

QUESTIONS
ää What might have inspired the great kings of Hatti, Egypt,
Babylonia, and Mittani to agree to peace between one
another, rather than continuing to fight? What were
the benefits of peace?
ää What were some of the roles of the ambassadors and envoys
in maintaining the peaceful relationships between the
great powers?

152
LAND GRANTS
AND ROYAL FAVOR
18
IN MITTANI

T he kingdom of Mittani—controlling most of what is now northern

Iraq and Syria— was at its height from around 1450 to 1350 BCE.
This lecture takes a look at diplomacy and political machinations
during this time.
Lecture 18  Land Grants and Royal Favor in Mittani

A LETTER
bb At some point during this time, a Mittanian king wrote a letter to one
of his vassals in the eastern part of the empire. It concerned a queen
named Amminaia. He began the letter like this: “To Ithiya, speak.
So says the king: [With regard to the district of] Paharrashe, which
I previously gave to [Queen] Amminaia, now from its confines I have
assigned a town to Ugi.”

bb The king skipped the usual niceties that he’d use if he’d been writing to
a great king like himself. He had given a district known as Paharrashe
to someone, and he was now reassigning a town within that district to
someone else. This practice of giving land to high officials was common
in this period. The great king could take the land away as easily as he
had given it.

bb Another point of interest is that the land had been given to a woman
from the local royal family—Amminaia. The letter was found in her
house, so scholars know quite a bit about her. In the letter, the king
goes on to say that he’d instructed an official to determine the new
boundaries of the land held by Queen Amminaia and of the land given
to the man named Ugi.

bb The letter ends with a notice of how Amminaia would be compensated

for the loss of her land to the man named Ugi. The king wrote that he
had told another local official: “Your own town I have assigned to the
district of Amminaia.” She would still have control of the same number
of towns. The king was just switching one for another.

QUEEN AMMINAIA
bb Amminaia lived in a kingdom called Arrapha in the eastern part of the
Mittani kingdom. Its capital city lies under the modern city of Kirkuk,
Iraq, so it can’t be excavated.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Arrapha was closer to Assur than to the heart of Mittani. Later, it would
be part of the kingdom of Assyria, but during this period—the late
15th and early 14th century BCE—Assyria was subject to the Mittanian
empire. A king named Saushtatar had probably been responsible for
conquering the region.

bb Amminaia apparently didn’t live in the capital city of Arrapha, at least not
all the time. She had a house in the small, nearby town of Nuzi, which
was home to about 1,600 people. Archaeologists excavated Nuzi from
1925 to 1931, and uncovered about 5,000 cuneiform tablets. These have
provided wonderful details about this era.

bb The situation in the kingdom of Arrapha was somewhat typical for the
Mittanian empire. It was a relatively peaceful era, so there are few records
in Nuzi of any military activity. Arrapha was a wealthy kingdom. Even
the mayor of Nuzi had an opulent palace, with more than 100 rooms.

155
Lecture 18  Land Grants and Royal Favor in Mittani

bb Archaeologists have noticed that there was a significant divide between

rich and poor in Nuzi, and in some of the other vassal kingdoms of
Mittani. Vast houses shared neighborhoods with the much smaller
dwellings of the poor.

bb Not all of Mittani’s small kingdoms were like this. Some cities were
not dominated by palaces, and in those cities, there was less of a divide
between rich and poor—the houses are much more similar to one another
in size. Several sites near the Euphrates in Syria are like this.

LAND GRANTS
bb Scholars have records of many royal land grants in this era, and not just
in Mittani. Back in the Old Babylonian period, between about 1900 and
1595 BCE, kings had provided some of their officials and soldiers with
fields so that they could support their families. During the following
era, the Late Bronze Age, royal gifts of land to officials got much bigger,
including whole towns and the lands around them. Most of these land
holdings were much larger than any one household would need.

bb The stage between these two extremes can be seen in some of the
documents from the kingdom of Hana, in eastern Syria. In the period
between about 1600 and 1450 BCE, before the time of Amminaia’s
archive, quite a few contracts have been found in Hana that record royal
grants of land. Some of these are for many fields, but some are just for
a small property—a single house, in one case.

bb There were a number of clauses to these land grant contracts. They started
with a description of the land itself—its size, where it was located, and
who owned the lands around it. The land around the fields being given
by the king is often described as belonging to the palace. The kings
seem to have been claiming control of more and more of the land in the
kingdom. It was probably less possible than before for private individuals
to buy and sell property.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The next clause noted who owned the land. In a private sale, this is where
one would find the name of the seller. In the land grants, however, the
current owner was the king. He wasn’t the sole owner—the scribe listed
the king and a number of local gods as the owners. Then, there was an
oath sworn in the names of these same gods.

bb This was followed by a threat of punishment

on anyone who broke the contract. These
types of punishments were almost
always found on contracts for the
sale of land in the Hana kingdom.
This protected the buyer from
the seller denying the legality of
their transaction.

bb The list of witnesses came next, and

these were almost all high officials,
often with the king’s son as the
first witness. One final detail is
that the Hana kings always sealed
the land grant contracts with their
elaborate royal cylinder seals. That
means the kings probably were
physically there when the contract
was drawn up, which would’ve
involved a ceremony.

bb Starting around 1500 BCE, kings

from several other kingdoms
adopted this same idea of granting
extensive lands to important civil
servants and religious leaders.
Grants like this happened in
Hatti, Mittani, and Babylonia.

157
Lecture 18  Land Grants and Royal Favor in Mittani

MITTANI’S LIFE CYCLE

bb Mittani thrived for more than a 150 years, but toward the middle of
the 14th century, things started to go downhill. We get a glimpse of
this in the correspondence of King Tushratta of Mittani with the kings
of Egypt.

bb Tushratta’s daughter, Tadu-Hepa, had married the pharaoh Amenhotep

III. At that time, Tushratta asked a favor of his Egyptian ally. He wanted
a gold statue of Tadu-Hepa. This request for a statue of his daughter
had a precedent. When Amenhotep III had married a Babylonian
princess, he’d sent a statue of that princess to her father, the king of
Babylon. Perhaps the statue could serve as a physical confirmation of the
marriage relationship between the two kings.

bb Later, Tushratta added to the request. Now he wanted a statue of himself

as well as one of his daughter Tadu-Hepa. Scholars know from royal letters
found in the late 19th century in Amarna, in Egypt, that Amenhotep III
had the statues made. He made sure that the Mittanian diplomatic corps
saw them and could attest to their existence. However,
the pharaoh didn’t get around to sending them
before he died.

bb At the time of his death, Amenhotep III

had been married to Tadu-Hepa for only
two years. His son Akhenaten inherited
the throne and some of his father’s
wives. Akhenaten married Tadu-
Hepa, which meant that Tushratta
was still the father-in-law of the
king of Egypt. Tushratta hoped that
their relationship would be just as
close as the bond he’d had with
Akhenaten’s father. He expressed
this repeatedly in his letters.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Akhenaten turned out not to be a reliable

ally or correspondent. For Tushratta, the
big change in their relationship was all
wrapped up with the issue of the gold
statues. Akhenaten simply didn’t send
them. The gift that was eventually
transmitted was something less than the
Mittanian king had been anticipating.

bb Tushratta described what happened.

“[Akhenaten] sent me statues [made] of
wood.” They were gold plated, but they
weren’t solid gold statues, which is what
Amenhotep III had promised. He wrote
to Egypt over and over to complain about
how he’d been snubbed. He even wrote
to Akhenaten’s mother, Tiye, asking her
to put in a word with her son to convince
him to send the gold statues.

bb Tushratta was obsessed with Akhenaten’s failure to send the statues, not
because he just wanted more gold, but because he clearly felt himself to
be slipping out of Egyptian favor. He depended on his alliances. The
physical proof of them was seen in the regular exchange of letters, gifts,
and messengers.

bb As far as researchers know, the gold statues never arrived. Mittani’s

relationship with Egypt never returned to the warm friendship Tushratta
had shared with Amenhotep III. Akhenaten was no longer interested in
maintaining close ties with Mittani.

bb Meanwhile, the Hittites were gaining in power and becoming more

aggressive. They had never been friendly with Mittani, even at the best
of times. Tushratta was getting worried, and he was right to. Mittani’s
days as a great power were almost over.

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Lecture 18  Land Grants and Royal Favor in Mittani

READINGS
‰‰ Feldman, Diplomacy by Design.
‰‰ Liverani, “The Late Bronze Age.”
‰‰ Maidman, “Nuzi.”
‰‰ Morrison, “The Family of Šilwa-Tešub Mâr Sarri.”
‰‰ Owen and Wilhelm, Nuzi at Seventy-Five.
‰‰ Paulus, “The Babylonian Kudurru Inscriptions and their Legal
and Sociohistorical Implications.”
‰‰ Podany, The Land of Hana.
‰‰ Sassmannshausen, “The Adaptation of the Kassites to the
Babylonian Civilization.”
‰‰ Sommerfeld, “The Kassites of Ancient Mesopotamia.”
‰‰ Stein, “A Reappraisal of the ‘Saustatar Letter’ from Nuzi.”
‰‰ ———, “Nuzi.”
‰‰ Wilhelm, “The Kingdom of Mitanni in Second Millennium
Upper Mesopotamia.”

QUESTIONS
ää What might have been some advantages to the system of royal
land grants in the Late Bronze Age?
ää Why might palace-based cities in Mittani have had a wider
distinction between rich and poor than was found in cities
without palaces?
ää Why might Tushratta have reacted so strongly when he wasn’t
sent the gold statues by Akhenaten?

160
THE LATE BRONZE
AGE AND THE
19
END OF PEACE

M ore than 3,000 years ago, a ship left the island of Cyprus with 20
tons of cargo and royal gifts. It was probably heading for Greece.
The wooden craft was 49 feet long and sturdily built, but off the
coast, at a place now known as Uluburun in Turkey, the crew faced a crisis
and the ship sank. It stayed on the sea floor until underwater archaeologists
discovered it in 1982. Over the next decade, the archaeologists were able
to recover many objects from the wreck and to begin to piece together
a surprisingly vivid picture of ancient Near Eastern trade. This lecture looks
at what the Uluburun shipwreck and other discoveries reveal.
Lecture 19  The Late Bronze Age and the End of Peace

THE SHIPWRECK
bb The shipwrecked crew’s possessions consisted of objects from all over the
place, including an Egyptian gold scarab, Mycenaean pots from Greece,
and sets of Canaanite weights. The ship’s hold was packed with 10 tons
of copper from Cyprus, in the form of 354 ingots. There was no obvious
single source for the goods onboard.

bb The director of the excavation concluded that the crew was probably
mostly from Syria and Canaan. Four of the passengers appeared to be
merchants who brought along sets of balance weights so that they could
weigh gold and silver payments or bulk goods that they might be buying.
Someone—presumably the captain of the ship—had a Canaanite sword.

bb The boat wasn’t just a trading vessel, though. Two other men on board
appear to have been ambassadors. Some of the goods in the hold might
have been luxury gifts for their king in Greece, perhaps received from the
king of Alashiya in what is now Cyprus. This was during the Mycenaean
period in Greece, hundreds of years before the classical era.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The ship must have picked up some goods in Canaan—things like

terebinth, tin, and glass ingots—and then moved on to Cyprus. There,
perhaps, the Mycenaean ambassadors joined the crew after having visited
the Alashiyan court, and the boat was loaded with copper. The vessel
was probably on its way to Greece when it sank.

bb It’s unclear if the crew, the merchants, and the envoys survived. No
skeletons were found, and the boat was only 60 yards from shore, so
perhaps they did.

THE WORLD DURING THE SHIPWRECK

bb The Uluburun shipwreck is like a time capsule, frozen the way it was
before sinking. Researchers know from letters between kings of this time
that vast amounts of gold, copper, and other luxury goods were regularly
sent from one court to another, and the shipwreck shows how some of
these goods were transported.

bb The Akkadian language of Mesopotamia was the lingua franca of the

age, and letters written in Akkadian passed regularly between the courts
of the Near Eastern kings. Only a tiny fraction of what was written
has survived, and just a couple of shipwrecks have been found, but they
hint at a time of unprecedented international cooperation.

bb The Uluburun shipwreck provides a clue that the Mycenaean Greeks

were part of this diplomatic world. The ship and its passengers were
probably taking a circular route around the eastern Mediterranean.
After unloading the goods and letting off the ambassadors in Greece, the
vessel would have gone on to Crete, then across the Mediterranean to
Egypt, and back along the coast eastwards to Canaan.

bb Ships on this route probably also stopped at the city of Ugarit, on the north
Syrian coast. This was one of the great international ports of the Late
Bronze Age, the period from around 1600 to 1200 BCE.

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Lecture 19  The Late Bronze Age and the End of Peace

bb Ugarit was in the orbit of Egyptian power, but it wasn’t a vassal of Egypt.
Its people didn’t pay tribute. Documents found there are written in almost
all the languages of the region: Akkadian, Egyptian, Hurrian, Hittite,
Cypro-Minoan, and Ugaritic. This indicates that people who lived and
worked there came from many locations.

bb The international system of trade and diplomacy between independent

states worked smoothly for centuries. If someone wanted glass, they got
it from Canaan or Egypt. Silver came from Anatolia. Copper came from
Cyprus, which was ancient Alashiya. Horses came from Mittani, in Syria.
The best textiles came from Babylonia, in what is now Iraq; olive oil and
perfume came from Greece; ivory and ebony arrived from Africa; incense
originated from Arabia; and gold came from Egypt. However, this system
did not thrive forever.

Royal Palace of Ugarit, Syria 164

 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

PROBLEMS BEGIN
bb One of the first things to go wrong with the international system
didn’t end up destroying it, but was still a shock. In Anatolia during
the 14th century BCE, a Hittite prince named Suppiluliuma swore
allegiance to his brother, who was king, and then had his brother killed
so that he could take the throne. This was a heinous crime—not just
the murder, but also the fact that Suppiluliuma had broken an oath to
the gods.

bb Suppiluliuma was a  contemporary of King Tushratta in

Mittani, the pharaoh Akhenaten in Egypt, and a king named
Burna-buriash I in Babylonia. He eventually launched a military
campaign that devastated some of Mittani’s cities, though he was unable
to capture the capital.

bb The whole campaign upended the assumptions that populations

in small cities and vassal kingdoms had about their safety. The
leaders of the port city of Ugarit decided to side with him rather than
risk invasion.

bb Tushratta of Mittani died soon after this, killed by one of his sons.
A relative then claimed the throne, while another of Tushratta’s sons fled
to Suppiluliuma for help. The Hittite king agreed and gave him troops
to help him seize the throne. After his victory, though, this Mittanian
prince was no longer independent.

bb The western half of Mittani now belonged to Hatti, and the eastern
half declared its independence as the kingdom of Assyria. Then,
things began to settle down somewhat. The new king of Assyria
made an alliance with the king of Babylon, and, as usual, negotiated
a diplomatic marriage. Assyria replaced Mittani as a great power in the
brotherhood of kings.

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Lecture 19  The Late Bronze Age and the End of Peace

UNUSUAL EVENTS
bb An unusual diplomatic marriage almost happened at around this
same time. A queen of Egypt wrote to Suppiluliuma, stating that her
husband had died and she had no sons to succeed him. She’d heard that
Suppiluliuma had many sons, and asked him to send her one to become
her husband.

bb Scholars can’t be sure of the Egyptian queen’s name, but she was probably
the widow of Tutankhamen or Akhenaten. This request was totally
unprecedented. She would have viewed anyone outside the royal family
as a servant. That was something of a problem, because, as she explained,
she didn’t want to marry “a servant.”

bb The Hittites were allies, and she must have decided that a Hittite
prince would do. Suppiluliuma was so shocked that he sent an envoy
to Egypt to find out answers to questions like: Did the Egyptian
queen really want to marry a Hittite prince? Would his son really
become pharaoh?

bb The Hittite envoy returned several months later with a curt reply
from the queen: Any Hittite prince that Suppiluliuma sent would
become king of Egypt. Suppiluliuma chose his son Zannanza and,
presumably, organized bridal gifts and the wedding party, then sent them
off to Egypt.

bb On the way, though, Zannanza was murdered. Relations between Egypt

and Hatti collapsed. Suppiluliuma sent troops into a part of Canaan that
Egypt controlled. Earlier in his reign, he’d sworn by the gods to abide by
a peace treaty with Egypt, so Suppiluliuma was breaking another oath.

bb In taking prisoners of war and riches from Canaan, Suppiluliuma got

something else: The prisoners he captured were infected with plague.
The illness spread terribly through Hatti, eventually killing the
king himself.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb To ancient eyes, the reason for this was obvious: Suppiluliuma had broken
his oaths to the gods. Of course, the gods would kill him. This was what
Suppiluliuma’s son wrote in a prayer to the gods in hopes of making the
plague go away. He pleaded with them to spare the rest of the people.
Too many had died. Eventually, the plague did end.

A BATTLE AND ITS FALLOUT

bb Through all of this, tensions stayed high between Egypt and Hatti until
their armies met in battle in 1274 BCE. This was at Qadesh, located
on the border between their empires, in the western part of Syria. The
Egyptian king now was Ramses II, who went on to rule for more than
60 years. In his account of the battle, he claimed the Egyptians were
completely victorious, but the Hittites also claimed to have won.

bb The Hittites kept control of the city of Qadesh, but mostly it was
a stalemate. Neither side was going to gain the upper hand. After a while,
in 1258 BCE, the two sides agreed to an alliance and cemented it—
as always—with a peace treaty and a diplomatic marriage. Ramses II
married a Hittite princess. From that time on, Egypt and Hatti had
a peaceful relationship, right up until both empires came to an end about
a century later.

167 The Battle of Qadesh

Lecture 19  The Late Bronze Age and the End of Peace

END OF THE LATE BRONZE AGE

bb The reason the Late Bronze Age ended has been discussed a great deal
because it was so dramatic. Once things started going wrong, it was like
a domino effect. The Late Bronze Age, from around 1600 to 1200 BCE,
had been stable and prosperous. The empires of Hatti and Egypt and the
Kassite kingdom of Babylonia lasted much longer than most previous
kingdoms. Soon, it was all gone. The Hittite empire completely collapsed
by 1185 BCE, and the citadel of the capital city burned down.

bb A few years later, in 1155 BCE, the Babylonian kingdom was invaded by
the Elamites of modern-day Iran. The kingdom of Assyria—which had
expanded when Mittani was conquered—shrank back to an area around
the capital city of Assur. Egypt’s long, stable period came to an end as
well by 1070 BCE, after more than 400 years.

bb Besides the big kingdoms, the smaller kingdoms of the Mediterranean

region also suffered. Several Mycenaean cities of Greece were destroyed.
After the cities along the coast of Syria and Canaan gained independence
from Hatti and Egypt, many of them were destroyed as well.

THE SEA PEOPLES

bb There aren’t many clues as to what happened in texts from this time.
In most places, it seems that documents just stopped being written.
However, in the Syrian trade port of Ugarit, archaeologists found some
letters that seem to have been written right before the city was destroyed
by invaders.

bb In one letter, the king of Ugarit, Ammurapi, wrote urgently to the king
of another city. He said that there were “ships of the enemy” visible at sea,
and he needed help. It’s not immediately clear who these enemies were,
and his ally didn’t send reinforcements. The enemy ships did enormous
damage to rich, unprotected Ugarit.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb King Ammurapi survived and was still in Ugarit when a letter arrived
from the island of Cyprus. This was from the king of Alashiya, who was
asking him for help. Alashiya was also being attacked. Ammurapi wrote
back that he couldn’t be of any assistance.

bb These unidentified enemies seem to have continued south along the

coast, destroying and looting as they went. Their destination seems to
have been Egypt, the richest of all the Mediterranean lands. Fortunately
for researchers, the Egyptian king recorded the invaders’ attack, and
his response.

bb This was Ramses III, who later claimed to have achieved a glorious
victory over the intruders. He covered the walls of his mortuary temple
with relief sculptures and descriptions of the events. His story indicated
the invaders were from islands:

The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. … No

land could stand before their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish,
Arzawa, and Alashiya on, being cut off at one time. …Their
confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, and
Weshesh, lands united.
bb The enemy invaders have come to be known as the Sea Peoples. The
Egyptian army and navy were able to repulse the foreigners, and some
settled just to the north of Egypt on the coast of Canaan. The group known
as the Peleset show up in the Bible as the Philistines, and gave their name
to that area of the Levant: Palestine.

bb Many archaeologists agree the origin of the Sea Peoples was, indeed, across
the sea. Some of the Sea Peoples were probably Mycenaean Greeks. Others
were probably from Cyprus and southern Anatolia.

bb That still leaves the question: Why were they on the move? One possibility

is that drought or earthquakes sent them on the move. There's some
evidence for a drought not just in Greece but across the northern
Mediterranean, which may have damaged food production and caused
people to flee.

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Lecture 19  The Late Bronze Age and the End of Peace

OTHER FACTORS
bb Another explanation for the fall of the Late Bronze Age is that the
extreme gap between the rich and poor of the time might have resulted
in the poor rising up. The elites in the Late Bronze Age lived in great
luxury and depended on the poor to provide much of their wealth. Some
people do seem to have resisted the amount of work they were called
upon to perform for the palaces and temples. In Canaan, there was
a group of outlaws known as the habiru who seem to have abandoned
urban life.

bb Another factor was that in peace treaties of the time, one of the main
concerns was always with the extradition of fugitives who left one
land and tried to live in another. This wouldn’t have been a major
negotiating point if it hadn’t been an ongoing problem. A significant
number of people must have fled their cities and debts—and the demands
the state put on them—to try to live somewhere else.

bb The destruction of palaces and citadels at some sites might have been the
work of unhappy local subjects rather than invaders. There’s no confirmation
of this, but it would help explain why some cities were destroyed, while
others had no destruction at all, and why in some cities only the citadel
was destroyed while private houses were untouched.

bb Once the seeds of rebellion were sown—or an armed migration of refugees

was unleashed—it seems that other things began to break down. It’s not
that the Sea Peoples showed up everywhere, but instead that similar types
of destruction spread across the region.

bb For example, there’s no sign that the Sea Peoples made it to Hatti,
even though the palaces of the Hittite capital were destroyed.
The capital city was far inland, hundreds of miles from the route of
the Sea Peoples. The attackers of the Hittite capital might have come
from closer to home—perhaps the neighboring Gasga people. This
destruction might also have been a result of social unrest among the
Hittite population.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The Sea Peoples didn’t directly cause the reversals in Assyria and
Babylonia, either. The likely cause of events is that many things got out
of balance. Whatever the first trigger was—whether drought, rebellion,
earthquakes, or all three—the system began to disintegrate.

DISINTEGRATION
bb Some people took to the roads or to the sea to pursue life elsewhere.
Raiders looted and burned buildings. People couldn’t travel safely to
trade or deliver messages any longer. Great kings lost contact with one
another and had no source for the expensive foreign goods they wanted.
Ships like the one found at Uluburun no longer could peacefully tie up at
ports around the Mediterranean and expect a civil welcome.

bb All around the Mediterranean coast, small states now replaced the
big empires. In Greece, for example, people were much poorer than
before—with simple grave goods replacing elaborate ones. Overseas
trade seems to have stopped. The Mycenaeans had used a writing system
that modern scholars call Linear B, but it too was forgotten. All over
the place, there were fewer big cities and many more people living in
the countryside.

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Lecture 19  The Late Bronze Age and the End of Peace

bb Battles took place regularly between the various small kingdoms. This
period—from about 1155 to 972 BCE—is often referred to as a dark age
because not much documentation survives to help scholars understand
what was going on.

bb In spite of all the gaps in knowledge about this era, there is one giant
source of information for history in the Levant during this time, and that’s
the Hebrew Bible. This era
was when the kingdom of
Israel formed. It was the
time of Israel’s battles
against the Philistines and
the Canaanites, and of its
first kings.

bb Regardless, the long era

of peace and international
cooperation between major
kingdoms had come to
an end. Once the system
started to break down,
it was impossible to save
it. The old empires were
divided up into smaller
squabbling kingdoms. If
these kingdoms kept many
records, they don’t seem to
have survived.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

READINGS
‰‰ Astour, “Ugarit and the Great Powers.”
‰‰ Bass, “A Bronze Age Shipwreck at Ulu Burun (Kas.)”
‰‰ Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts.
‰‰ Beckman, “Hittite Treaties and the Development of the Cuneiform
Treaty Tradition.”
‰‰ Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World.
‰‰ Cline, 1177 B.C.
‰‰ Koehl, “Aegean Interactions with the Near East and Egypt during
the Late Bronze Age.”
‰‰ Podany, Brotherhood of Kings.
‰‰ Pulak, “The Uluburun Shipwreck and Late Bronze Age Trade.”
‰‰ Van De Mieroop, The Eastern Mediterranean in the Age of
Ramesses II.
‰‰ Yon, The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra.

QUESTIONS
ää Why is a shipwreck like the one at Uluburun particularly
informative for our understanding of international relations
in the Late Bronze Age?
ää In what ways did the reign of Suppiluliuma mark a break
with the past?
ää Why might the great powers of the Late Bronze Age have been
unable to recover from the disruptions of the 12th century BCE?

173
ASSYRIA ASCENDING
20
T he empire of the Assyrians was centered on the Tigris River in
northern Mesopotamia. The Sumerians and Akkadians of southern
Mesopotamia would be forgotten for thousands of years—they had
to be rediscovered in the 19th century—but the Bible and Greek and Roman
authors immortalized the Assyrians. They were never forgotten. When
archaeologists first started digging in Iraq during the mid-19th century, it was
evidence of the Assyrian Empire that they were looking for. They found it, and
it was just as impressive as they had imagined.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

BACKGROUND ON ASSYRIA
bb Assyria existed long before the time of the Bible. Until the 14th century
BCE, it was just one state among many in Mesopotamia. In fact,
through much of the 15th and 14th centuries BCE, Assyria was
subject to the kingdom of Mittani, the great power that dominated
northern Mesopotamia. However, western Mittani was subsumed
into the Hittite empire around the 1330s BCE, and Assyria gained
its independence.

bb For the next 700 years—until the end of the 7th century BCE—Assyria
played a huge role in Mesopotamian history. It was led by one of the most
stable dynasties in all of history, with the throne passing from father to
son over and over again.

bb Eventually, the Assyrians created an empire on a huge scale. It set the

basic model for how an empire should be run. All later ancient empires
in the Near East and Mediterranean regions—the Babylonians, Persians,
Greeks, and Romans—all learned from the Assyrians.

bb The Assyrians called

their country Assur.
Their capital city was also
known as Assur. The god
of the city and land of Assur
was also named Assur. The
god Assur wasn’t a cosmic god; he was
physically present in the city of Assur
as the rock formation on top of which his
temple was built, towering above the river.

bb The people of Assur absolutely believed in the power and

supremacy of their god. They still worshiped the whole pantheon of
Mesopotamian of gods, but in their minds, Assur—not Enlil—was
the most powerful of the gods. In any event, to make things a little
less confusing, scholars now refer to their country as Assyria rather
than Assur.

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Lecture 20  Assyria Ascending

THE LANDS
bb The heartland of Assyria—that is, the area that always remained subject
to this long dynasty of kings—was mostly located along the Tigris River.
Its southern edge was in the area around the city of Assur. Assur remained
the religious capital of Assyria even after the political capital was moved
farther north up the Tigris River, first to the city of Kalhu and ultimately
to Nineveh.

bb Nineveh was next to present-day Mosul, and north of Assur by about 60

miles. It marked the northern edge of the heartland. In the east, closer to
the Zagros Mountains, was the city of Arbela, about 60 miles northeast
from Assur and 50 miles east of Nineveh. People who lived anywhere in
this triangle at any time through the 7th century BCE were in the land
of Assyria.

bb The lands beyond the triangle were sometimes under the control of other
kingdoms, but there was no obvious boundary to Assyria. It didn’t have
a coastline and wasn’t right next to a mountain range, so the Assyrian
kings always felt vulnerable to attack.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

PERIODS OF ASSYRIA
bb The era of the Assyrian kingdom that thrived during the late second
millennium BCE is known as the Middle Assyrian period. It was at its
height from around 1365 to 1076 BCE. This was around 500 years after
the end of the Old Assyrian period, when Assyrian merchants traded and
set up colonies in what is now Turkey. That period lasted from around
1974 to 1807 BCE.

bb The Middle Assyrian period is also distinct from the later Neo-Assyrian
period, which lasted from around 911 to 610 BCE, when the Assyrians
built a truly vast empire. The Middle Assyrian kings managed to expand
their kingdom all the way to the Euphrates River in the west. In a way,
the Middle Assyrian kings were the ones who created the mold for later
rulers to follow.

bb The Middle Assyrian army had a large infantry and a smaller force of
chariots. Most of the soldiers were Assyrian farmers who were free to fight
only about three months a year. This was during the summer, between the
harvest and the sowing season. That changed in later centuries, when
kings eventually created a standing army. The army’s organization stayed
much the same over time, with divisions of 10, 50, and 100 men.

bb Middle Assyrian military leaders also came up with the idea of deporting
conquered peoples from one part of the empire to another. Although
this was probably incredibly unpopular with the people being deported,
it wasn’t a death march. The deportees were given shoes and provisions,
and, when they arrived at their destinations, they were also given land.
Deportation was a way to settle people in under-populated parts of the
empire that could be opened up for farming.

bb It was also a benefit, in the kings’ minds, to integrate the population so

that the newly conquered peoples might begin to think of themselves
as Assyrian. Of course, these peoples were less likely to rebel if they
were busy making new lives for themselves far away from their
original homelands.

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Lecture 20  Assyria Ascending

TRACKING EVENTS
bb The Assyrian kings didn’t name the years of their reigns after their
glorious successes, as the southern Mesopotamian kings had done for
centuries. Instead, each year was named for an official, called a limmu.
The man who held the post of limmu during the year had the whole
year named after him. Scholars use these year names to figure out when
events happened.

bb Assyrian lists of limmu names and lists of kings have helped historians
count backward from known dates, so that they can assign BCE dates
to historical events. From the 12th century BCE onward, historians can
be pretty sure that the dates are correct for the main Mesopotamian
kingdoms. Dates before that are less certain.

THE NEO-ASSYRIAN PERIOD

bb The end of the Middle Assyrian period was a turbulent time. Between
1200 and 1100 BCE, the kingdom of Hatti collapsed, Egypt went into
decline, and Assyria suffered, too. Many lands that had been ruled by the
Middle Assyrian kings gained their independence, and Assyria shrank
back to its heartland. However, the Assyrian people didn’t forget about
their glorious past.

bb In the late 10th century BCE, an Assyrian king named Adad-nirari II

came to the throne. Throughout his reign, he set about reconquering
the lands in Syria that Assyria had lost control of more than 200 years
before. Every summer, his troops went off on campaign to fight, and
raid, and conquer.

bb If a land rebelled against him, then the troops would show up again and
put down the rebellion. Earlier Mesopotamian kings fought only when
they needed to. Adad-nirari II started the tradition of campaigning every
single year. Adad-nirari II began the period when Assyria was its most
powerful—the Neo-Assyrian period. It lasted for almost exactly 30  years.

178
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

ASHURNASIRPAL II
bb Adad-ninari’s grandson was one of the most influential of all Assyrian
kings. His name was Ashurnasirpal II, and he ruled from 883 to 859
BCE. Ashurnasirpal II moved the capital city from Assur up the Tigris
to Kalhu, which is better known by its modern name of Nimrud. He
didn’t move the temple of Assur; its home in the city of Assur was sacred.
Regardless, the Assyrian government never returned to Assur after the
reign of Ashurnasirpal II.

bb Assyrian architects, builders, and sculptors worked for 15 years to

transform Kalhu into the most impressive city anyone could imagine.
A new city wall enclosed almost 900 acres. This urban center had nine
new temples, along with a giant pyramid-shaped stepped tower—the city’s
ziggurat—and several palaces. In the center of the city, Ashurnasirpal
had his workers construct a new citadel. In an inscription, he claimed the
foundations underneath it were very deep: 120 layers of brick.

bb The city’s crowning achievement was the king’s palace, which is

known today as the Northwest Palace. It covered at least seven acres.
Ashurnasirpal came up with a plan for decorating the walls of his palace
that surpassed all earlier attempts. In the public areas of the palace, all
the brick walls were faced with giant stone panels made of a type of
local gypsum.

179
Lecture 20  Assyria Ascending

bb Each panel was as much as 14 feet in length and 8 feet high. Quarrying this
stone and getting it into place would have been quite a feat. Many of the
panels weigh a ton each. The panels were then decorated with elaborately
detailed relief sculptures that were brightly painted. Unfortunately, the
paint is long gone; only tiny fragments of it survive.

bb Some of the relief sculptures show the king being protected by the gods.
Other reliefs showed life-sized images of people bringing tribute to the
king. These lined the palace walls near where actual dignitaries would
have walked, bringing their own gifts.

bb There are many scenes of the king hunting lions and of the king and his
army fighting enemies. These progress like a graphic novel, from one
panel to the next. A visitor to the palace could follow what happened in
a war by walking along beside the sculptures.

THE STANDARD INSCRIPTION

bb Across every stone panel, there’s a cuneiform inscription. This is almost
always the same one. It’s known as Ashurnasirpal’s Standard Inscription.
It proclaims the king’s greatness, the support he had from the gods, and
the victories he achieved in battle.

bb When his palace was complete, Ashurnasirpal threw a huge party to

celebrate. He invited almost 70,000 people from across Assyria and
from lands beyond the empire. His guests were given food, beer, and
wine, and they were entertained for 10 days. Among the guests, 16,000
were citizens of Kalhu itself. These people had all moved there from
around the empire.

bb Meanwhile, the Assyrian Empire had been expanding. The Standard

Inscription, written all over the palace, describes how this was achieved.
The relief sculptures show details of tactics that the Assyrian military
used for battles and sieges.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The language Ashurnasirpal II used to describe himself was very

different from that of some of the earlier Mesopotamian kings. He wasn’t
a kind shepherd to his subjects like the 18th-century-BCE Babylonian
king Hammurabi. He didn’t try to make sure that weak people were
protected from strong people like the 22nd-century-BCE Sumerian king
Ur-Namma.

bb Here’s what Ashurnasirpal said about himself: He had “no rival among
the princes of the four quarters” and he was “a strong male who treads
upon the necks of his foes, trampler of all enemies, he who smashes the
forces of the rebellious.”

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Lecture 20  Assyria Ascending

ASSYRIAN MIGHT
bb Ashurnasirpal’s successors followed this same model. They also described
themselves as tramplers, smashers, and subduers. They increased
the Assyrian military might. Soon, they had standing armies that were
available to campaign year-round. They recruited men with military
expertise from across the empire, so that normal Assyrian farmers
weren’t called up to serve any more (though they still had to work on
imperial building projects).

bb In a way, the army became a reflection of the empire. The men spoke
different languages and carried different local types of weapons and
armor. Military divisions were stationed near the borders, ready to
campaign at any time.

bb Fighting techniques improved as well. For hundreds of years,

the Assyrian army had consisted of foot soldiers and chariot soldiers.
Now, the Assyrians added cavalry. The chariots got bigger and bigger,
until four horses were needed to pull each one. Up to four men rode
in each.

bb After Ashurnasirpal, later Neo-Assyrian kings also decorated the walls

of their palaces with relief sculptures of military campaigns. The reliefs
often show attacks on cities. The warriors had battering rams that they
could thrust against gates. The Assyrian attackers also set up siege
towers. They tunneled under city walls or sapped the walls to weaken
them. They rained arrows and threw flaming torches.

bb However, sieges were long, and tough, and expensive, so the generals
often tried to negotiate with the people of a rebellious city. If diplomacy
didn’t work, the Assyrians would terrify citizens by impaling prisoners
on stakes, in public view. If those efforts didn’t work, Assyrian
soldiers were willing to spend months camped around a city, until the
people inside were starving and sick.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

REBELLIONS, TERROR, AND LIFE

bb The Assyrian army was quite successful, but it wouldn’t have been
very popular. People in the provinces had to pay taxes and tribute.
They had to fight for the Assyrian army, and they would have heard
about the brutal ways the army treated rebels. In fact, the people who
were subject to Assyria stood almost no chance of being able to rebel, and
gain their independence.

bb The Israelites tried to break free of the empire, but their rebellions were
put down repeatedly. Eventually, according to the Bible, most of the
Israelites were deported to other parts of the empire. The Judeans saw
the Assyrians as harsh oppressors.

bb The whole idea of how to maintain an empire was now very different
than it had been in earlier times. Kings like Hammurabi, Shamshi-
Adad, and Tushratta hadn’t tried to terrify their subjects into submission.
The Assyrians used terror frequently.

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Lecture 20  Assyria Ascending

bb However, in spite of the Assyrians’ reputation for brutality, it was

entirely possible for someone to live a happy life under Assyrian rule.
Thousands of everyday documents from this era show that. The Assyrians
developed a form of empire that was stable and successful, even though
their tactics for ruling it are shocking today.

READINGS
‰‰ Artzi, “The Rise of the Middle-Assyrian Kingdom.”
‰‰ Bahrani, “Kassite and Assyrian Art at the End of the Bronze Age.”
‰‰ Barnett, Assyrian Palace Reliefs in the British Museum.
‰‰ Curtis et al., eds., Art and Empire.
‰‰ Garfinkle, “The Assyrians.”
‰‰ Lamprichs, “Aššur.”
‰‰ Oded, Mass Deportations and Deportees in the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
‰‰ Radner, Ancient Assyria, A Very Short Introduction.
‰‰ “Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period,”
http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/
‰‰ Scurlock, “Neo-Assyrian Battle Tactics.”

QUESTIONS
ää How might the structure and tactics of the Assyrian army have
contributed to their success in empire building?
ää What might be some difficulties in reconstructing the
chronology of ancient Near Eastern history? Why is
chronology so important?
ää What might have been the logic behind the palace wall
decorations in Kalhu?

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ASHURBANIPAL’S
LIBRARY AND
21
GILGAMESH

O ne of the last great kings of the Neo-Assyrian Empire was

Ashurbanipal, who ruled from 668 to around 630 BCE. He was
militaristic, but Ashurbanipal was also intellectual. He collected
vast numbers of literary and religious works and organized them in a number
of rooms in his palace at Nineveh, in the northern part of modern-day Iraq.
This collection is considered to be one of the earliest libraries ever created.
Since the documents were written on clay tablets, they survived for more
than 2,500 years. This lecture looks at the contents of Ashurbanipal’s library
and a particularly important item found there, a copy of the poem known
as the Epic of Gilgamesh. When the library was rediscovered—during mid-
19th-century excavations—the writings within provided modern scholars with
an extraordinary window into the intellectual world of the Neo-Assyrians.
Lecture 21  Ashurbanipal’s Library and Gilgamesh

THE LIBRARY
bb Ashurbanipal was deeply
interested in scholarly
learning. As a result, he
was singularly focused on
the creation of his library. It
was a collection of written
works for the king’s use
and for his court. Note that
it didn’t include much of
what one might expect in
a library, like works about
history, current events, or
scientific discoveries.

bb Still, the shelves of

Ashurbanipal ’s librar y
were lined with tablets
representing the most
advanced knowledge at the
time—knowledge useful
to the king. There were
tablets with long lists of
words, used by scribes
in school, and copies of
royal inscriptions from
the past. There were rituals
and hymns, some of them in the
dead language of Sumerian. There were texts
describing medical conditions and the ways to treat them.

bb Also present were thousands of omen texts, which listed a particular

unusual event or sign and explained what supposedly would happen as
a result of that sign. Only a few of the texts were what we would recognize
as literary—stories about heroes and gods.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

DISCOVERY
bb The discovery of Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh in the 1850s created
front-page headlines once its contents began to be revealed. The two
archaeologists who excavated there were Hormuzd Rassam and Austen
Henry Layard. Rassam was born in Iraq and educated at Oxford. Layard
was a British lawyer, archaeologist, and diplomat.

bb Layard, described the discovery

of the library this way: “To the
height of a foot or more from
the f loor [the rooms] were
entirely filled with [cuneiform
documents]; some entire, but the
greater part broken into many
fragments.”

bb Unfortunately, the archaeologists

didn’t really know what to do with
so many cuneiform tablets. It was
the first time that such a large
collection of tablets had been
uncovered, and the archaeologists
didn’t think to make notes of which
ones were found in each location. They put the tablets in boxes and
shipped them back to the British Museum. In the process, the library
tablets got mixed up with others that had been found in the palaces
at Nineveh.

bb Once the tablets arrived in the British Museum, scholars set to work
as if on a jigsaw puzzle—finding broken fragments that fit together
and reconstructing the tablets. This work continues today. They also
began to translate them. Cuneiform had only recently been deciphered,
and there was—and still is—a lot of interest in what was written on
these tablets.

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Lecture 21  Ashurbanipal’s Library and Gilgamesh

bb One man who made a big contribution

to this effort was a  British
Assyriologist named George
Smith. In December 1872—about
20 years after Ashurbanipal’s
library was re-discovered—
George Smith addressed the
Society of Biblical Archaeology
at the British Museum. He had
astounding news: While working
on mythological texts from
Nineveh, he’d found 80 fragments
from a single long poem, written
on 11 tablets.

bb On tablet number 11, he discovered

an account of a flood that was almost
identical to the one in the Bible.
Although the flood story got most of the press at the time, it was part
of the remarkable poem called the Epic of Gilgamesh. The poem is very
long. Modern translations cover at least 40 pages. It’s also the best-known
work of literature from Mesopotamia. Researchers now have many more
copies of it from other ancient sites, but it was first identified in the
library at Nineveh.

THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH

bb The epic’s author was a man named Sin-leqe-unninni, who lived
around 1200 BCE. Like the later Greek poet Homer, Sin-leqe-unninni
took legends that had been passed down orally along with some
earlier written versions of the epic. He rewrote them and put them
together into a literary masterpiece. His work was copied over and over
again and ended up in Ashurbanipal’s library some 500 years later.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Gilgamesh probably was a real king, who would have lived almost 2,000
years before Ashurbanipal. No evidence of him survives from his own
time, but some people mentioned as being with Gilgamesh in various
tales were real, so he probably was, too.

bb The epic wasn’t the only literary work to mention Gilgamesh. Already,
in older stories, he was something of a superhero. They said that he was
victorious over not just human enemies but monsters as well. He was
thought to have had some divine blood. He even had conversations with
gods, but he was still fundamentally seen as human. In early versions, his
story had nothing to do with a flood.

bb The Mesopotamians had told tales about a great flood, though, which
they thought had happened tens of thousands of years in the past. The
Mesopotamians’ flood story was always similar to the one in the Bible.
In earlier versions, the hero of the tale didn’t always have the same name.
Sometimes he was Atrahasis. Sometimes he was Ziusudra. By the time
the Epic of Gilgamesh was written, he was named Utnapishtim.

bb Sin-leqe-unninni took the Gilgamesh stories and the flood story, and
combined them into a single epic. His hero, Gilgamesh, was haunted by
one of the great human dilemmas. He realized that he was going to die,
and he didn’t want to. Gilgamesh also had plenty of flaws. He was brash
and arrogant, and the people he ruled—in the city of Uruk, in southern
Mesopotamia—were tired of him.

ENKIDU AND GILGAMESH

bb At the beginning of the story, the citizens of Uruk ask the gods for relief
from his demands, and the gods comply. They create a man who would
be a match for the king. His name is Enkidu. After fighting to a draw
with Gilgamesh, Enkidu becomes the king’s close friend, and they go off
together on further adventures.

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Lecture 21  Ashurbanipal’s Library and Gilgamesh

bb The two companions imagine that they will make names for themselves
and gain immortality. They decide to do this by defeating a ferocious
creature named Humbaba, drawing the attention
of the gods.

bb After a long battle, the heroes manage to

defeat Humbaba. This makes the gods take
notice. Gilgamesh even attracts the attentions
of the goddess Ishtar, who was known for her
passions. However, Gilgamesh rejects her.

bb Ishtar is furious about Gilgamesh’s rejection.

She asks her father, the god Anu, to send
a creature called the Bull of Heaven to punish
Gilgamesh. Again, Gilgamesh and Enkidu
prevail and are able to kill the Bull of Heaven.
They cut out its heart and take it to the sun
god. Now, Ishtar is even madder than before.

bb The two heroes have become too self-confident.

At this point, Sin-leqe-unninni changes the mood
of his story, and shows how Gilgamesh and Enkidu
will be punished for their hubris. Enkidu wakes up one morning, and
tells Gilgamesh about a disturbing dream he’s had. It was a vision of the
afterlife, which he describes as dull and unpleasant.

bb The Mesopotamians believed that dreams came from the gods, so clearly
Enkidu has received a premonition of his own death. Sure enough,
he grows weaker and sicker, and a few days later he dies. Gilgamesh
is devastated, not only because his friend is dead, but also because it’s
apparent he can suffer the same fate.

bb Still, Gilgamesh is undeterred. He has a plan. There’s one mortal man

he’s heard of who has managed to live forever. If Gilgamesh can find this
man, he will learn the secret of immortality. The man is Utnapishtim,
the hero from the story of the flood.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

THE FLOOD
bb Eventually a woman who’s a tavern keeper and a man who ferries people
on boats help Gilgamesh find the distant land where Utnapishtim lives
with his wife. This brings the story to the 11th tablet and the story of the
flood. Although this had previously been a completely separate story,
Sin-leqe-unninni now brings it into the epic as part of Gilgamesh’s search
for eternal life.

bb Gilgamesh disappears from the narrative at this point, and Utnapishtim

becomes the storyteller. The flood tale is told in his words; it’s about how
he survived in his boat. At the end—quite unlike the story of Noah—the
god who’d caused the flood in the first place decides to give eternal life
to Utnapishtim and his wife.

bb Gilgamesh has heard this whole story, but how is it supposed to help
him? Another flood isn’t about to happen. Gilgamesh can’t duplicate
Utnapishtim’s experience. In fact, he can’t even stay awake for more than
a day. Utnapishtim tests him, and Gilgamesh fails. If he can’t keep sleep
away, how can he possibly defeat death?

bb Gilgamesh is disconsolate. After all that searching, he has nothing to

show for it. He says to the central character of this epic narrative:

O Utnapishtim, what should I do and where should I go?

A thief has taken hold of my flesh!

For there in my bed-chamber Death does abide,

And wherever I turn, there too will be death.

bb Utnapishtim then presents Gilgamesh with an incredible gift—directions
for finding a plant that will make him young again: the Plant of
Heartbeat. Gilgamesh dives into the ocean to get the plant.

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Lecture 21  Ashurbanipal’s Library and Gilgamesh

bb However, Gilgamesh is careless. Before eating the

plant, he leaves it by a pond while bathing. It’s stolen
by a snake, which sheds its skin and becomes
young, while Gilgamesh is condemned to die,
just as before.

bb This seems like a tragedy. The moral of the

story seems to be that everyone will die—
even a hero who could kill divine monsters.
However, there’s a note of optimism at
the end.

bb Gilgamesh describes the city he rules,

Uruk, and apparently with pride. His city
was founded by the gods, and it was
a wonder to behold—three and half square
miles in extent and made of baked bricks.
In Gilgamesh’s time, it was the largest
and most modern city on the planet.
In making this speech, Gilgamesh
seems to have reconciled himself to
his earthly and mortal existence as
a king of an impressive kingdom.
He can stop wandering the earth,
looking for immortality.

OTHER TEXTS
bb King Ashurbanipal kept more than
one copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh
in his library, but most of the
library texts were more practical.
The  majority of them were records of omens and divination. When almost
anything happened in the night sky—such as an eclipse of the moon—
scholars consulted the omen texts to find out what this portended.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb By the time of Ashurbanipal, priests had kept accurate diaries of the

movements of planets and stars for about a century. They were even
able to predict when eclipses would take place (though not where they
would be observed), and where the planets would appear in the sky.
The Mesopotamians believed that the gods were sending messages
that way.

bb If the king wanted an answer to a particular question, he could ask his

diviners to practice extispicy. This was figuring out the will of the gods
by reading the internal organs of sacrificed sheep and goats.

bb The diviners of Mesopotamia couldn’t just make things up. Their

discoveries were believed to be predictable and scientific. They had to look
up old reference tablets to find out what had happened in the past when
the same signs had been observed. Priests and officials often cited omens
and oracles when they wrote to the king. It’s quite possible that they
consulted the royal library when they did so.

bb Some tablets in the library had belonged to Ashurbanipal’s father and

grandfather. Others were copied in Nineveh by scribes employed by
Ashurbanipal himself. Some were copied from tablets seized in Babylonia,
or they were written by Babylonian scribes who had been captured.
Ashurbanipal also commissioned scribes in other cities to copy texts and
send them to him.

bb Assyrians were interested in big questions of human existence. They

systematically collected and organized knowledge, and made accurate
astronomical observations. Their endeavors moved people a step closer
to what we now know as philosophy and science. As king, Ashurbanipal
seems to have been determined to have access to as much written
knowledge as he possibly could—even while he also tried to rule according
to the wishes of the gods.

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Lecture 21  Ashurbanipal’s Library and Gilgamesh

READINGS
‰‰ Frahm, “Royal Hermeneutics.”
‰‰ Frame and George, “The Royal Libraries of Nineveh.”
‰‰ George, The Epic of Gilgamesh.
‰‰ Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennia BC.
‰‰ Larsen, The Conquest of Assyria.
‰‰ Layard, Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon.
‰‰ Livingstone, “Ashurbanipal: Literate or Not?”
‰‰ Pedersen, Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East.
‰‰ Pongratz-Leisten, Religion and Ideology in Assyria.
‰‰ Robson, “Reading the Libraries of Assyria and Babylonia.”
‰‰ Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing.
‰‰ Smith, Assyrian Discoveries.
‰‰ Zamazalová, “The Education of Neo-Assyrian Princes.”

QUESTIONS
ää Why and how did Ashurbanipal collect so many written works
for his palace library?
ää What similarities do you see between the Epic of Gilgamesh
and later epic poems and hero stories? What might account
for these similarities?

194
NEO-ASSYRIAN
EMPIRE, WARFARE,
22
AND COLLAPSE

K ing Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria might originally have been a rebel, or

he might have been someone who suppressed rebels who were trying
to usurp the legitimate dynasty. Either way, he hadn’t been directly in
line for the throne, and he benefited from a rebellion that broke out in the
mid-8th century BCE. This chaotic time ultimately resulted in the legitimate
king being deposed, and Tiglath-Pileser III taking the throne.
By this time, the Neo-Assyrian Empire was the biggest empire the world
had ever known. It extended across Mesopotamia, Syria, and the Levant,
and included parts of Anatolia as well. However, the imperial structure was
in some disarray. It had been set up more than a century earlier by one of
Tiglath-Pileser’s predecessors—King Ashurnasirpal II—and it now badly
needed a reboot. This lecture looks at that reboot and subsequent events.
Lecture 22  Neo-Assyrian Empire, Warfare, and Collapse

REBELLIONS AND ADMINISTRATION

bb By the mid-8th century BCE, provincial governors had become quite
independent, and rebellions had been occurring in many places. Once
Tiglath-Pileser III took power, he instigated many changes, and the
Assyrian administration finally mastered the running of an empire.

bb The new king redrew the boundaries of provinces, making them smaller.
His governors, who were now less powerful, depended on him for
their positions. The king also created a fast system of communication,
so that messages were passed between couriers riding on horseback.
The messenger and his horse could rest after a day of riding, but the
message continued on with a new carrier, so the messenger never had
to pause.

The Neo-Assyrian Empire at its greatest

196 extent.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Tiglath-Pileser III also expanded the empire into areas that had never
been subject to Assyria before. And he forced these lands to pay tribute.
The economies of these vassal states were streamlined so that resources
were used efficiently.

bb With these reforms during the mid-8th-century BCE, the Assyrian

Empire reached a period when it was at the height of its power.
Then, only 135 years after Tiglath-Pileser III came to power, the
empire fell.

BABYLONIA
bb One of the foreign lands that Tiglath-Pileser took control of was
Babylonia. The Babylonians didn’t like being ruled by Assyria. They
had been a great power for such a long time—more than 1,000 years
by the time of Tiglath-Pileser—that they didn’t think much of being
subject to outsiders.

bb From the time that Tiglath-Pileser took over, the Babylonian throne
changed hands 20 times in 100 years. That’s an average reign of just five
years. Plus, the Babylonians had more than just the Assyrians to worry
about. A group of people in the far south, called the Chaldeans, also
often tried to take over Babylon.

SENNACHERIB
bb Events came to a head during the reign of a king named Sennacherib,
who ruled Assyria from 704 to 681 BCE. Although Sennacherib started
out ruling Babylonia directly, the Babylonians might never have viewed
him as legitimate.

bb After repeated power struggles, in 690 BCE, Sennacherib took a huge

army and attacked the capital city of Babylon. When the Babylonians
didn’t give up, the Assyrians set up a siege around the city.

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Lecture 22  Neo-Assyrian Empire, Warfare, and Collapse

bb In 689 Sennacherib’s forces entered Babylon. Assyrians destroyed

temples, houses, and palaces, and they redirected the river so that
water swamped parts of the city. They even took the statue of the god
Marduk away from Babylon. This wasn’t just seen as a statue. It was the
god himself.

bb The Babylonians saw the Assyrians’ attack on the temples as blasphemy.

Even some Assyrians would have worried; they worshiped Babylonian
gods too. Soon after this, the Assyrians began rebuilding the city of
Babylon, but the relationship between the two kingdoms was damaged.
The Elamites were now aligned against Assyria, as well.

bb Sennacherib had accomplishments besides invading. He’d moved the

capital to the ancient city of Nineveh, near the modern city of Mosul,
and sponsored a massive building program there, doubling the size of
the city. Nineveh was absolutely enormous for an ancient city. It covered
about 1,750 acres, and its population might have been as much as 230,000.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

ESARHADDON
bb In 681 BCE, Sennacherib was assassinated by one of his sons. The
prince who took over the throne wasn’t one of the deceased king’s oldest
sons, and he wasn’t one of the assassins, either. He was the son of one of
Sennacherib’s favorite wives, Naqia, and he’d been named crown prince
before the assassination.

bb His name was Esarhaddon, and he had to fight his brother for the throne
in a brief civil war, with the Assyrian army divided against itself. It was
a foretaste of things to come. In the coming decades, civil wars in Assyria
would become more frequent.

bb Esarhaddon decided to expand his empire to its largest extent yet by

conquering Egypt. Through thousands of years of civilization up to
this time, Egypt had been one of the richest places in the world. It had
abundant natural resources, including gold—which everyone else in the
region wanted—and its fields produced vast amounts of grain.

bb The Assyrians controlled much of the Levant already. Israel had been
conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, and many of its people had been
deported across the empire. This is recorded in the Bible as well as in the
Assyrian records. However, the Assyrians’ attempt to bring Egypt into
the empire didn’t go well.

bb The first conquest, in 671, was successful, and Esarhaddon gave new
Assyrian names to the Egyptian cities. The Assyrians sacked the northern
capital city of Memphis, and a northern Egyptian ruler took on the role of
being a vassal to Assyria. The southern part of Egypt wasn’t happy with
the arrangement, and soon after Esarhaddon left, there were rebellions.

bb Esarhaddon and the Assyrian army headed back to Egypt in 669. At this
point, Esarhaddon became ill and died en route. The Assyrians didn’t
keep going, and Egypt soon left the empire. Perhaps it was just too far
away for the Assyrians to control.

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Lecture 22  Neo-Assyrian Empire, Warfare, and Collapse

bb Although the end of the Neo-Assyrian Empire was still 60 years

in the future, seeds of its failure were sown. The Egyptian
campaigns had been expensive. More importantly, they had been
unsuccessful. Assyria  had 
always seemed unstoppable before
this. The Egyptian achievement in breaking away must have given hope
to some people in the various provinces that perhaps they, too, might be
able to successfully rebel.

UNHAPPINESS ELSEWHERE
bb Meanwhile, the lands of Babylonia and Elam were unhappy with
their situation. They had been attacked brutally by the Assyrian
army in Sennacherib’s time. Even though Esarhaddon spent a lot
of wealth and manpower in rebuilding Babylon, the Assyrians still
had enemies there. Furthermore, the civil war between princes when
Esarhaddon took over had set a precedent.

bb In planning his own succession, Esarhaddon made one of his sons,

Ashurbanipal, crown prince. Another son, Shamash-shuma-ukin, was
made the viceroy in Babylon. When Esarhaddon died, Ashurbanipal
became king of Assyria. Shamash-shuma-ukin was king of Babylonia,
but in a subordinate role to his brother.

bb For 17 years, this system worked quite well. During this time,
Ashurbanipal built up his library at Nineveh and attended to other issues
in the northern parts of the empire. Even the Elamites were at peace with
Assyria. However, in 653 BCE, Ashurbanipal went to war against his
eastern neighbors and was victorious.

bb A relief sculpture in his palace shows the king in a garden, relaxing

on a couch. His wife is next to him, and they’re both having a drink.
Servants fan them, and birds are flying overhead. It all looks very tranquil
except for a decapitated head hanging in the tree next to them. That head
belonged to the Elamite king.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb A year after the war, the Assyrian king of Babylon, Shamash-shuma-

ukin, launched a rebellion against his brother Ashurbanipal. The
Elamites helped. Civil war erupted again, ending with Ashurbanipal’s
troops besieging Babylon for two years.

bb Babylon finally fell in 648, and Shamash-shuma-ukin died. At this

point, there’s a problem: The records begin to dry up. Scholars don’t
even know the date of the end of Ashurbanipal’s reign. It was probably
around 630 BCE.

BABYLON AND THE MEDES

bb In 612 BCE, 18 years later, Nineveh was conquered by a coalition
of Babylonians and a people from Persia called the Medes. There
aren’t any Assyrian records to tell scholars what happened. The
Babylonian sources aren’t very helpful, either. The Medes seem to come
out of nowhere.

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Lecture 22  Neo-Assyrian Empire, Warfare, and Collapse

bb It does seem as though peace was restored after Ashurbanipal triumphed

in the war against his brother. However, once Ashurbanipal died, yet
another civil war erupted between two princes who both wanted to
rule Assyria. There was a struggle for the throne in Babylonia as well.
This was between two Babylonians, and the man who won was named
Nabopolassar. He wasn’t a member of the previous royal family.

bb In Assyria, the prince who was victorious was Sin-shar-ishkun, a son of

Ashurbanipal. Sin-shar-ishkun and Nabopolassar went to war against one
another. By now, these civil wars and wars between Assyria and Babylonia
had been going on for more than 100 years.

WAR IN ASSYRIA
bb In all this time, whenever Babylonia and Assyria had been at war, the
battles had always taken place in Babylonia. The Assyrian heartland
hadn’t been threatened. Eventually, the Assyrians had always won.

bb However, in 617 BCE, Nabopolassar moved his army north up the

Euphrates. He didn’t threaten the Assyrian heartland yet, but he was
able to conquer regions Assyria controlled in the west of the empire. For
the Assyrians, this was even worse than losing Egypt because Egypt had
only been under Assyrian control for a very short time. In comparison,
the region on the Euphrates had been in the empire for centuries.

bb Three years later, the Medes—from what is now Iran—went on the

offensive in the Assyrian heartland. They attacked the big cities—Assur,
Kalhu, and Nineveh—and they conquered Assur, which had been the
religious capital of Assyria for more than 1,000 years. The effect on the
Assyrians was probably devastating.

bb The Medes then joined forces with the Babylonians and the Elamites,
and kept pushing into Assyria. Two diplomatic letters survive from this
time, written by Sin-shar-ishkun of Assyria and Nabopolassar of Babylon.
They show that the Assyrians were in a very bad position.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb Nineveh fell in 612 BCE, after a siege of only three months. The Assyrian
army held on and made its last stand in the Syrian city of Harran three years
after Nineveh fell. Regardless, the end of the Neo-Assyrian Empire is
usually dated to 612 BCE, with the destruction of Nineveh.

bb The way the conquerors treated Assyria was horrific. Cities across the
heartland were looted, burned, and leveled. Populations were killed, or
they fled, and most cities weren’t reoccupied for decades, if ever. That
includes the great capital cities of Assur, Kalhu, and Nineveh. It was
much worse than the way the Assyrians had treated Babylon in the time
of Sennacherib.

REASONS FOR THE FALL

bb Sarah Melville, a Clarkson University scholar who studies this period,
has made a new interpretation of this. She notes that the Babylonian
records state that the devastation in Assyria wasn’t the fault of
the Babylonians. Rather, it was done by the Medes. The Babylonians
claimed that they were shocked by how the Medes had treated
the Assyrians.

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Lecture 22  Neo-Assyrian Empire, Warfare, and Collapse

bb This might have been true. The Babylonians and Assyrians shared the
same culture, religion, and language. They had a long and complicated
relationship, but they respected one another. Melville believes they
also shared some rules about combat and about treatment of defeated
enemies. These rules wouldn’t have included destroying everything in
sight. The Medes, however, didn’t share their culture and didn’t follow
the Mesopotamian rules.

bb As for why Assyria fell, Melville argues that the Assyrians simply
weren’t prepared to fight defensively. After centuries of being
on the offensive, they made mistakes. They didn’t switch to
fighting defensively until it was too late. Their cities weren’t designed
for the change in tactics. Those wide city gates hadn’t been built to keep
a foreign army out.

bb There were other reasons for the fall of Assyria. The Assyrians were
unpopular with many of their subjects, and the long history of Assyrian
efforts to control Babylonia gave the Babylonians a good reason to go on
the attack.

bb It also looks as though the Assyrian government was spending much

more than it was taking in by this time. Expensive undertakings like
the attempt to conquer Egypt and all the civil wars had sucked up a lot
of wealth. It even looks as though the population was shrinking, which
would have reduced tribute and taxes.

bb The very fact that Assyria had started losing wars might also
have worsened morale. As long as the Assyrians were always
victorious, people probably believed that the god Assur simply couldn’t
be defeated.

bb In the end, the Assyrian Empire wasn’t mourned much. Some writers
in the Bible were obviously thrilled to see it fall. People in other lands
might have said similar things, but most of those lands that had been subject
to Assyria didn’t suddenly gain their independence. The beneficiary of
the fall of Assyria ended up being Babylonia.

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bb Nabopolassar—the Babylonian king—took control of much of the

former Assyrian Empire. He and later rulers of the Neo-Babylonian Empire
were the last indigenous rulers of Mesopotamia for hundreds of years.

READINGS
‰‰ Brinkman et al., eds., The Cambridge Ancient History,
volume 3, part 2.
‰‰ Collins, Assyrian Palace Sculptures.
‰‰ Dalley, “Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens and the Identification
of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Resolved.”
‰‰ Fuchs, “Assyria at War.”
‰‰ Melville, “The Last Campaign, the Assyrian Way of War, and
the Collapse of the Empire.”
‰‰ Melville, The Campaigns of Sargon II.
‰‰ Stronach and Lumsden, “UC Berkeley’s Excavations at Nineveh.”
‰‰ Ur, Jason. “Sennacherib’s Northern Assyrian Canals.”
‰‰ Van De Mieroop, “Revenge, Assyrian Style.”
‰‰ Waters, “Elam, Assyria, and Babylonia in the Early First
Millennium BC.”

QUESTIONS
ää How was Tiglath-Pileser III able to strengthen the empire
of Assyria?
ää Why do you think the Assyrians and Babylonians had such a
complicated and contentious relationship at this time?
ää What do you find convincing about the various theories for
the fall of the Assyrian Empire?

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BABYLON AND
THE NEW YEAR’S
23
FESTIVAL

F or a Neo-Babylonian king to be considered legitimate in the 7th and 6th

centuries BCE, he had to go through a ritual called “taking the hand
of Marduk.” Marduk was the patron god of the city of Babylon. In this
ritual, the king apparently held the hand of the sacred statue of Marduk while
standing next to it. This showed that the god and the king ruled together.
This shows that Babylonian rituals—the subject of this lecture—were
quite important.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

MARDUK
bb The god Marduk and his wife Sarpanitum lived in a vast temple called the
Esagil, at the center of Babylon. However, in 689 BCE—when invading
Assyrians sacked Babylon—the troops of the Assyrian king Sennacherib
removed the statue of Marduk and took it to Assyria. Marduk wasn’t
returned home until 668 BCE. Babylon was a city without a god for 21 years.

bb Babylonians felt that the whole orderly functioning of the universe was
at risk when Marduk was away. In order to understand all of this, it
helps to know about the Babylonian new year’s festival, called the Akitu
festival. It was the big religious event of the Babylonian year and lasted
for 12 days, but it could take place only when Marduk and the Babylonian
king were both in town.

bb The kings of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which lasted from 912 to 612 BCE,

were high priests of the god Assur—heads of the government and of the
religion. Assur was the great god of the Assyrian pantheon, equivalent
to Marduk in Babylonia.

THE FESTIVAL
bb In Babylonia, the king wasn’t a priest, but he still had a vital role to play
in the Akitu festival. No one else could replace him. Most of the events
of the festival were kept secret—Babylonian citizens weren’t directly
involved—but they trusted that the proper ceremonies were taking place.

bb On the first days—deep in the most sacred halls of the Esagil temple—
priests purified themselves, recited prayers, and sang hymns to Marduk
and Sarpanitum while standing right in front of their statues.

bb A crucial moment of the Akitu festival was when the high priest recited out
loud the entire text of the Babylonian creation epic. This was on the third
day of the festival. The priest stood alone in the presence of the god,
reminding him—by reciting the epic—of the history of the world,
Marduk’s greatness, and his role in maintaining cosmic order.

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bb In a Babylonian creation story, Marduk, after

ending a period of chaos, gave separate gods their
various realms. They built the city of Babylon
and then had a banquet. They swore an oath to
support Marduk. The very act of reciting this
story to the statue of Marduk helped restore
order to the universe. Doing so every new
year assured that chaos wouldn’t sneak in.

THE RITUAL
bb The Akitu festival continued after the
creation epic was recited. More
purifications took place, more prayers
were recited, and hymns were sung. Then,
a really strange ritual took place.

bb The king of Babylonia washed his hands

and came to the temple of Marduk, where
he was greeted by the high priest. Only
the two of them were present for this very important part of the festival.

bb The priest was required to take away the king’s scepter, circle, and sword,
and put them on a chair in front of the god. These were the symbols of
kingship. Then, the priest came back to the room where the king was
waiting and struck him on the cheek. After that, the priest dragged the
king into the holy room where Marduk’s statue was located.

bb Next, the king bowed on the ground, groveling in front of the god.
He swore an oath that he had been good to Marduk and to his city and
his temple. He even swore that he hadn’t humiliated people who were
his subordinates, which covered everyone.

bb After that, the priest gave a speech in which he asked Marduk

to bless  the king and destroy his enemies. The king got back his
scepter, circle, and sword, but he wasn’t done with being abused.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

The priest had to hit him in the face again, very hard this time. The king
had to cry, which assured the continued order of the universe.

bb The moment when the king literally took the hand of Marduk came
after this, on the eighth day of the festival. This is when the public part
of the proceedings started. The statue of Marduk was brought out of the
temple, and the king grasped his hand.

bb Somehow, the god spoke and announced his plans for the year, though
it’s unclear how this happened. This was followed by a huge procession.
At the front, Marduk and the king rode in a chariot. They were followed
by other gods, along with musicians, singers, dancers, priests, officials,
and royal family members.

bb Marduk and the other gods were all taken by boat to a special Akitu
temple outside the city. There, they were placed together in a room to
meet. Some of the gods had traveled to Babylon from other cities. Their
presence confirmed that Babylon was the greatest city and Marduk was
the greatest god.

bb A day later, the procession came back to Babylon. Marduk made another
speech (however he did that) and returned to his temple, and the other
gods went home. The world was seen as safe.

LATER EVENTS
bb When the statue of Marduk was in Assyria after Sennacherib’s conquest
of Babylon, the ritual couldn't happen. That must have been disorienting
for the people: What awful things would take place if the Akitu festival
was canceled?

bb Fortunately, the statue of Marduk was returned to Babylon in

the reign of the Neo-Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal, during the
7th century BCE.  The Akitu festival resumed. Fifty years after
that—when the Assyrian Empire fell in 612 BCE—the Babylonians
credited Marduk with their success.

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Lecture 23  Babylon and the New Year’s Festival

bb The Babylonian king Nabopolassar was on the throne at the time.

He had a son named Nebuchadnezzar II, who was a very successful
general during the war against Assyria. When Nabopolassar died
in 605, Nebuchadnezzar took over the Babylonian throne. He enjoyed
a long reign of 43 years and was responsible for many of Babylon’s
subsequent successes.

bb Nebuchadnezzar continued to fight through most of his reign. Many

regions of what had been the Neo-Assyrian Empire resisted being
absorbed into the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Some of them, especially in
the west, allied themselves with Egypt.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The kingdom of Judah in the Levant was one of these. The authors of the
Bible wrote about it in detail. The kings of Judah stopped paying their
tribute to Babylon, but Egypt didn’t end up helping them. The Babylonian
army showed up in Judah in response to a rebellion. In 587 BCE, Judah
was conquered.

bb Vast numbers of Jews were now taken captive to Babylon. The

Babylonians put a king on the throne in Judah, who was supposed to be
loyal to them, but he rebelled as well. The Babylonians came back and
besieged Jerusalem. More people were deported.

ANCIENT BABYLON
bb Nebuchadnezzar used the same kinds of strategies that the Assyrians had
used before him. However, unlike the Assyrian kings, Nebuchadnezzar
didn’t brag about his conquests in his royal inscriptions. Mostly, he
bragged about his building activities. Nebuchadnezzar wanted Babylon
to be extraordinary.

bb The wall that surrounded the city was about 10 miles long. Babylon
was bigger than Nineveh had been, and it was the biggest city that ever
existed in that region up to that time. It continued to be the biggest until
Rome, centuries later.

bb The temple complex of Marduk was as big as two football fields. It was
near the river that flowed through the middle of the city. There were
two courtyards. In one was the huge, stepped ziggurat, and in the other
was the lower temple.

bb The main statues of Marduk and Sarpanitum were in the lower temple,
the Esagil. That’s where the private ceremonies of the Akitu festival
took place. The statues might have been made of solid gold, but
some scholars think that the statues might actually have been made of
wood with gold plating. Either way, they were certainly spectacular.The
statues’ eyes and hair would have been inlaid with other materials like
shell, lapis lazuli, and carnelian, and they wore clothes that were finely
woven and embroidered.

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Lecture 23  Babylon and the New Year’s Festival

bb North from the Esagil was the processional way—the road that the
gods took during the Akitu festival parade. It was wide, and the walls
on both sides were tiled with glazed bricks in bands of bright blue
and yellow, with white rosettes. A wide middle band of turquoise
bricks provided the background for images of striding, growling lions,
colored white, brown, and black.

bb At the end of the processional way stood the Ishtar Gate. This gateway
building was deep blue, with borders in white and yellow and relief
sculptures of bulls and dragons arranged in rows. It was entirely covered
in glazed bricks, so it shone in the sun like a giant jewel.

Ishtar gates in Babylon 212

 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb When German archaeologists excavated in Babylon during the early

20th century, they dismantled the Ishtar Gate and packed it up to take
with them to Berlin. It was meticulously reconstructed in the Pergamon
Museum . The gate is 50 feet high, and the original foundations extended
another 45 feet underground.

NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S DWELLING AND HABITS

bb Off to the west of the Ishtar Gate was one wall of Nebuchadnezzar’s
palace. The palace was the size of many city blocks, built around five
huge courtyards and surrounded with thick fortification walls. The
layout looks like the palaces of the Assyrian kings—like a labyrinth, with
vast numbers of offices, workshops, storage rooms, kitchens, domestic
apartments, and so on.

bb However, it would have been a different experience to visit. Take the

throne room: Although the walls were brightly colored, they weren’t
decorated with battle scenes. The same type of glazed brick reliefs that
decorated the Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate were used in the
palace, as well.

bb They featured stylized palm trees, rosettes, palmettes, naturalistic lions,

and other motifs from nature. Even the cuneiform inscriptions on the
walls were carved onto glazed bricks, and pieced together in the right
places by the builders.

bb Nebuchadnezzar doesn’t seem to have been interested in being surrounded

by sculptures of himself. Presumably, he looked like other Assyrian and
Babylonian kings, with a long beard and elaborate robes. However, statues
of him haven’t been found.

bb As Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt Babylon, he made a point of restoring

buildings from centuries before rather than knocking them down. Some
scholars have called the Neo-Babylonian kings the sponsors of the world’s
first archaeology. When they found sculptures and objects from the past
as they dug, they treated them carefully and put them in their palaces.

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Lecture 23  Babylon and the New Year’s Festival

bb In classical times, Babylon was best known for its city wall, which was
listed in one version of the seven wonders of the ancient world. This was
another of Nebuchadnezzar’s achievements. The main wall was so wide
that one could ride a chariot along the top.

bb In most parts of the city, three lines of these walls ran parallel to
one another, along with a moat on the outside. The Euphrates River
f lowed right through the center of the city, with the two halves
connected by a wooden bridge on top of stone piers. That was quite an
engineering feat.

LIFE IN BABYLON
bb People in Babylon must have felt that they were living in a modern,
extraordinary place. Even though individual houses and the lives of
average citizens were much the same as they had always been, the city as
a whole was on a scale unlike any other.

bb People from all over the world (or at least the world they knew) lived
there. Many of them had been deported from other parts of the empire.
However, most of them weren’t slaves, and the records show that many
of them thrived.

bb Some documents found in Mesopotamian cities include Jewish names.

These confirm that Jews from Judah were living there in exile, as the Bible
said. There are even cuneiform records of the Judean king and his sons
receiving plenty of rations from the Babylonian administration.

bb The Babylonians didn’t think of themselves as living in the ancient

world. They looked back to their distant past for inspiration in art,
architecture, and tradition—to them, that was the ancient world. They
saw themselves as modern, living right at the most recent moment that
had ever existed.

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READINGS
‰‰ Bahrani, “Babylonian Art.”
‰‰ Frame, Babylonia 689­­– 627 B.C.
‰‰ MacGinnis, “Herodotus’s Description of Babylon.”
‰‰ Oates, Babylon.
‰‰ Oshima, “The Babylonian God Marduk.”
‰‰ Pearce, “New Evidence for Judeans in Babylonia.”
‰‰ Schneider, An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion.
‰‰ Van De Mieroop, “Reading Babylon.”

QUESTIONS
ää Why do you think the Babylonian king was willing to go through
ritual humiliation during the Akitu festival?
ää How does the Babylonian creation story compare with
creation stories from other religious traditions? What does
this imply about the beliefs of the Babylonians?
ää Why do you think Herodotus was so impressed with Babylon?

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END OF THE NEO-
BABYLONIAN
24
EMPIRE

I n 562 BCE, a Mesopotamian king died. His name was Nebuchadnezzar II,
and he’d ruled over an era of almost unprecedented wealth: a time when
all of Mesopotamia, and much of the rest of the Near East, had been
united within the Neo-Babylonian Empire. This lecture looks at the end of
that empire.
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

DIFFERENT GROUPS
bb Partly because of conquest, partly because of trade, and partly because
of immigration, many populations were on the move during the reign of
Nebuchadnezzar II. The contacts between peoples had a profound effect
on the history of this region.

bb One influential group was the Arameans. They spoke a Semitic language
called Aramaic, and they’d been growing in influence for several centuries.
The Aramaic language had gradually replaced Akkadian and other
languages across north and northwestern Mesopotamia. Aramaic would
continue to be a major language in the Near East for hundreds of years.

bb Another group of people, known as the Medes, had burst onto the scene
toward the end of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. They helped bring that
empire to an end with their fierce attacks on the city of Nineveh in
612 BCE. The Medes were based in what is now northwestern Iran.

bb Still another group of people, the Persians, lived farther south, on the
Iranian Plateau. For now, they were subject to the Medes. The Medes
and Persians spoke Indo-European languages, and had different religious
beliefs from their neighbors in Mesopotamia and Elam, in what is now
southwest Iran.

bb There were Jews living in Babylon, as well. They were there because of
the deportations that Nebuchadnezzar II imposed when the Hebrew state
of Judah was conquered in 587 BCE.

bb The bigger era in which these contacts were taking place is sometimes
known as the Axial Age. It started in the 8th century and lasted until around
200 BCE. This wasn’t just in the Near East; it was a phenomenon that
reached all across Eurasia. Many new ideas were spreading, as though
society had reached a collective turning point.

bb Some philosophers and prophets stopped thinking only about local,

pragmatic issues and started wondering about more abstract things.
They asked questions like: What constitutes good government? How
can people be virtuous? What is the meaning of life?

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Lecture 24  End of the Neo-Babylonian Empire

NEW ANSWERS
bb In cities like Babylon, new ideas would have been shared between people
from different places. One of the earliest of the innovative thinkers
was a Persian prophet named Zarathustra, also known as Zoroaster. No
one’s sure exactly when he lived, but his ideas were increasingly popular
around the time of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. His followers are known
as Zoroastrians.

bb He taught that all of human experience can be seen as a battle

between good and evil. Zoroastrians believed that the good gods in
every civilization were incarnations of Ahura Mazda, their great god
of goodness. Anyone worshiping any god was, in a way, worshiping
Ahura Mazda.

Ahura Mazda 218

 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb This was also the time when the Jewish religion became more universal,
with the monotheistic belief that there is just one God. Beyond the Near
East, all kinds of ideas were developing, like Confucianism and Taoism
in China, classical Hinduism and Jainism in India, and philosophy in
Greece. These thinkers were all asking similar questions, but coming up
with different answers.

bb Even the ancient polytheistic religion of the Mesopotamians was beginning

to develop some new ideas. Toward the end of the Neo-Assyrian period,
around the 7th century BCE, there had been some syncretism. Some texts
mention the idea that perhaps two or more gods were actually the same
god under different names.

bb In this era, the Babylonian belief that their god Marduk was the king of
all gods might have been shakier than it seemed on the surface. Certainly,
the Jews in Babylon wouldn’t have agreed. Nor would the Assyrians, who
were still devoted to Assur. Nor would any Persian or Mede who had
settled in the capital city.

NABONIDUS
bb Into this multiethnic, multireligious environment came a king who had
some new, radical religious ideas. His name was Nabonidus, and he wasn’t
related to the Babylonian kings who came before him. One of those
predecessors, Nebuchadnezzar II, had overseen a stable reign, but his
son and successor was deposed after just two years. After two more very
short reigns, Nabonidus then took over.

bb He was an unlikely king. Not only was he not a member of the royal
family, but he may have owed his position to his remarkable mother.
Her name was Adad-guppi, and she wrote an autobiography. She
probably had quite a bit of help from her son in composing it. After all,
it finishes after her death, and it helps make the case for Nabonidus’s
right to be king.

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Lecture 24  End of the Neo-Babylonian Empire

bb At some point, Adad-guppi had a dream that her son Nabonidus would
restore the temple of Sin, the moon god, in Harran. Nabonidus himself
had a similar dream, recorded in a surviving inscription. Sin told him that
he should rebuild the temple in Harran, and then he would become king.

bb When all the chaos erupted after the death of Nebuchadnezzar, perhaps
Nabonidus thought that Sin wanted him to become king and restore
order. He managed to take the throne in 556 BCE. He dutifully had the
temple in Harran reconstructed, and he commissioned a new statue of
the god, since the old one seems to have been destroyed.

NABONIDUS IN EXILE
bb Nabonidus started out his reign venerating all the
Mesopotamian gods. He went through with the new
year’s festival—the Akitu event—in Babylon. He
swore to the Babylonian god Marduk that he would
support him. In his second year, he seems to have
proposed a religious transformation, with the moon
god Sin being raised to a higher position than Marduk
as king of the gods.

bb Nabonidus made his son Belshazzar coregent with him.

Soon after this, Nabonidus went off on a campaign to
the west. He didn’t come back for 10 years, settling in
a city called Tema, in northern Arabia. Belshazzar was
in power in Babylon, but Belshazzar couldn’t stand in
for Nabonidus in the new year’s festival. Sources from
this period are in agreement that the Akitu festival
didn’t happen for a whole decade.

bb The priests of Marduk were incensed. They would have

devoutly believed that the continued functioning of the
whole universe depended on Marduk’s veneration and on
the restoration of the Akitu festival. They would have wanted
Nabonidus out of power. Then, the outside world intervened.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

CYRUS
bb While Nabonidus lived in exile from 553 to 543 BCE, a king
named Cyrus was busily changing the political face of the Near East.
He took the throne in Persia in 559, before Nabonidus was even king.
Cyrus at that time was a coregent with his father, and Persia was
a small kingdom, under the control of the Medes. After eight years, his
father had died, and Cyrus became the sole king of Persia. Right away,
he rebelled against his overlord. He was able to conquer the army of the
Medes in 550.

bb Cyrus kept going. He turned his attention to the kingdom of Lydia,

in what is now Turkey, and attacked. Cyrus was victorious there
as well, and by 546 BCE he had taken control of the Lydian capital
of Sardis.

bb Cyrus now moved his troops back towards the Persian heartland.
At this point, Nabonidus may have started to get nervous. The
Persian Empire was expanding, and Cyrus was repeatedly victorious.
Finally, Nabonidus returned from Tema to Babylon, during his 13th
year on the throne. Right away, he removed many high officials from
their positions and replaced them. They probably had disapproved of his
religious reforms.

bb In 540 BCE, Cyrus attacked Persia’s western neighbor, Elam. The Persian
Empire was getting dangerously close to Babylon—the Elamite capital of
Susa was only 160 miles east of the Tigris River.

bb Hearing that Elam was under attack by the Persians seems to have
worried Nabonidus. He called for all Mesopotamian city gods to be
brought into Babylon. He might have done this to protect them, or
perhaps he wanted their help in protecting his city. Either way, the
absence of the divine statues left the people in their cities feeling as
though they’d been abandoned. It doesn’t seem to have made Nabonidus
any more popular.

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Lecture 24  End of the Neo-Babylonian Empire

CYRUS TARGETS BABYLONIA

bb Now that Elam was brought under Persian control, Cyrus’s next obvious
target was Babylonia. There was a battle between the Babylonians and
the Persians at the site of Opis, north of Babylon, and the Persians won.
After that, according to some accounts, the Babylonians don’t seem to
have tried very hard to keep the Persians out.

bb In 539 BCE, Cyrus took Babylon. According to his own account,

he did it without a fight. The people of Babylon welcomed him. In
his words, they “bowed to him and kissed his feet.” Soon after this,
Cyrus had a royal inscription drawn up and distributed to describe his
Babylonian conquest.

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 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb In his account, Cyrus makes good use of the unpopularity of Nabonidus.

He describes things getting worse before he arrived—the gods being sent
to Babylon, for example, and Nabonidus requiring forced labor. According
to this account, Cyrus took over control in Babylon because Marduk had
asked him to. That is, Marduk chose Cyrus to rescue the Babylonians
from the heresies of Nabonidus.

bb Though it was propaganda, Cyrus was wise to use the Babylonians’

language for this inscription, and to use phrases that were familiar
from previous Mesopotamian inscriptions. Cyrus was also wise to
declare himself completely devoted to Marduk, even though Marduk
wasn’t a Persian god.

CYRUS IN POWER
bb Cyrus was good to other people who lived in Babylon, as well. The Bible
records that the Jews living in exile were allowed to return to Jerusalem
after Cyrus took power.

bb Right from the start, Cyrus created his empire in a different way from the
kings who came before him. He hadn’t depended on creating fear in the
population. He seems to have wanted to be loved. When he’d conquered
the Medes 12 years earlier, he let the king live, and he even married the
Median king’s daughter. It was as though he was joining the Medes rather
than oppressing them.

bb His inscription, known as the Cyrus Cylinder, has been described as the
earliest expression of a king consciously attempting to rule a society of
different nationalities and faiths. In terms of the Babylonians, he made
it clear that he understood their frustrations with Nabonidus and that he
could solve the problem. Marduk would be happy again. The order of the
universe would be restored.

bb Babylon did continue to be a stable and prosperous place. Plenty of

documents survive from the period of Persian rule showing that life went
on pretty much as before. Only gradually did the Mesopotamian gods
begin to fall out of favor.

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Lecture 24  End of the Neo-Babylonian Empire

bb The cuneiform writing system was used less and less. New cities replaced
some of the old Mesopotamian capitals. The Persian kings stopped
coming to Babylon for the new year’s festival. Babylon became one
of many provincial cities paying tribute to the great Persian kings, who
lived far away, ruling over the biggest empire the world had ever seen
to that point. It extended all the way from the Indus River Valley to
the Aegean Sea.

bb Mesopotamian culture had lasted for more than 3,000 years, but by
around the year 1, it was gone. It wasn’t until cuneiform was deciphered
in the 19th century that the amazing ancient history of Mesopotamia
began to be rediscovered.

LEGACY OF THE MESOPOTAMIANS

bb The Mesopotamians left an incredible legacy to the world. They invented
the very idea of writing and built the world’s first cities. They wrote down
the earliest laws, and created a judicial system that prized evidence and
fairness, a system that still influences us today.

bb They created mechanisms of diplomacy that never stopped being used.

Looking to the stars, they figured out how to calculate the dates of
eclipses and anticipated the movements of the planets.

bb Many achievements credited to the Greeks had their origins long before
in Mesopotamia, like the calculation of the sides of a right angle triangle.
The innovation of the phalanx formation in battle and the names of the
constellations were also owed to the Mesopotamians.

bb One Mesopotamian innovation has an impact on our lives every single day.
Mesopotamian mathematics was based on the number 60. For example,
their system of weights had 60 shekels in a mina, which weighed about
a pound, and 60 minas in a talent. This was convenient because 60 divides
up easily into many different fractions. That influence remains today in
the form of 360 degrees in a circle, 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes
in an hour.

224
 Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

bb The hundreds of thousands of documents that have survived since

the Mesopotamians’ time allow us a window into their world. In the
future, as more documents are found and translated, we will continue to
learn more about the men and women who first tackled the dilemmas
of urban life.

READINGS
‰‰ Beaulieu, “Nabonidus the Mad King.”
‰‰ ———, The Reign of Nabonidus.
‰‰ Bryce, Babylonia.
‰‰ Finkel, ed., The Cyrus Cylinder.
‰‰ Kuhrt, “Cyrus the Great of Persia.”
‰‰ Waters, Ancient Persia.
‰‰ Zawadzki, “Nabonidus and Sippar.”

QUESTIONS
ää How might people have been personally affected by
the amount of migration that took place within the
Neo-Babylonian Empire? How might their worldview
have changed?
ää What were some of the reasons why the Neo-Babylonian
Empire fell? Which of these factors might have had the
strongest impact?

225
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