The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (76 page)

The term for “father’s brother” appears in Sumerian cuneiform texts. This suggests to Adams that one of the preferred types of marriage might have been between a man and his father’s brother’s daughter. Anthropologists call this “patrilateral parallel cousin marriage,” and it is still common today in parts of the Near East.

Sumerian marriages, like those of the less complex societies seen in earlier chapters, required gifts between the bride’s and groom’s relatives. Exchanges of gifts could go on for months. Marriage was considered a legally binding contract, and divorce could cost the husband a fee in silver. Owing to sexism, it was harder for women to get a divorce.

It is probably from the Sumerians that later Near Eastern societies, including the Aramaic-speaking authors of the Old Testament, got the notion that marriage should be restricted to one man and one woman. The flexible marriage partnerships of egalitarian societies, which came in six or seven varieties, had been arbitrarily reduced to a legal contract between a man and a woman. Nothing could be allowed to make a man worry that his male heir was the result of someone else’s “seed.”

Let us return now to the relationship between social groups and land. Among the wealthiest landowners were the temples, of which there were several in each city. One category of temple land, called
níg-en-na,
was cultivated by temple employees. Its products were (1) distributed as rations or wages to the plowmen, millers, weavers, cooks, and brewers who worked for the temple; (2) stored as a safeguard against droughts or famines; (3) traded by the
dam-gar,
or temple agents, for imported goods; and (4) used to feed the priests, scribes, and other officials of the temple.

Two other categories of temple land were
gán-shukura,
or prebend (a British term for the land set aside to support the staff of a cathedral) and
gán-apin-lá,
or tenant fields. The latter were lands sharecropped by commoners, who turned over to the temple a percentage of the harvest.

Thousands of people in Sumer, of course, were landless, and their numbers grew as time went on. Sometimes referred to as
gurush,
or serfs, at least some of these people were fugitives from other districts or regions. Others had simply lost their land through debt or misfortune. As aristocratic families acquired more and more land, serfs increasingly sharecropped or worked for standard rations.

Finally, there were the slaves owned by rulers, temples, and private citizens. Slave women, more numerous than their male counterparts, worked mainly at spinning, weaving, cooking, and brewing. Male slaves were used as farm laborers and burden carriers. Most slaves were war captives, but late in Sumerian history, some impoverished families resorted to selling their children into slavery.

Slaves could engage in business, borrow money, and even buy their freedom. On the other hand, if they tried to escape they could be branded, flogged, or even killed. Some, in fact, had already been blinded when they were captured in combat.

RULES, ORDER, AND RITUAL PURITY

In the language of every society there are abstract terms that underlie many of the logical premises. The Polynesians had mana, the Merina hasina, and the Egyptians ma’at. For their part, the Sumerians had
me
and
nam.

Me, sometimes translated as “order,” referred to the rules that the gods had established so that society would run smoothly. In the words of epigrapher Benno Landsberger, me “emanated from gods and temples in a mystic manner, was imagined as a substance, was symbolized by emblems, and could be transferred from one god to another.” The task of a human ruler was to make sure that the rules of his city’s god were obediently carried out, and that the society he commanded was sufficiently orderly. Much of the order was achieved by appointing overseers for every activity and keeping extensive written documents.

Nam has been translated as “fate,” but its meaning was more subtle than that. In earlier chapters we learned that names could be magic. In Sumer, Landsberger explains, the name defining the essence of a thing determined its life trajectory and destiny. Temples, people, animals, plants, and bodies of water had names and, ultimately, fates pronounced by the gods.

In contrast to Egypt, where rulers were divine, the Early Dynastic ruler was essentially an aristocratic mortal who did his god’s bidding. Whether or not he was a relative of the previous ruler, he found it difficult to succeed without the support of the Council of Elders and the other aristocrats. Even at the peak of his power, an early Sumerian ruler did not claim descent from a deity. His inscriptions might portray him as “beloved” by a series of major and minor deities; he might even claim that the city’s patron god had chosen him to rule. But not until the reign of a ruler named Naram-Sin did Mesopotamian kings begin regularly to portray themselves as divine.

The need to please the gods made ritual purity a major concern in Sumer. As early as the Uruk period, some temple precincts had been walled off from the secular parts of the city. Before entering the temple, even a Sumerian ruler had to perform ritual ablution, washing away the pollution of the secular world.

Perhaps no archaeological discovery reveals more clearly the importance of ritual purity than the oval temple enclosure at the ancient city of Tutub. During Early Dynastic II, Tutub was one of two major cities on the Diyala River between the Tigris and the Zagros Mountains. Its ruins today are known as Tell Khafajah.

Excavations by Pinhas Delougaz determined that occupation at Tutub began at least 5,100 years ago. Over the centuries, house upon house, street upon street, the remains of secular human settlement accumulated. By Early Dynastic II, the mounded debris stood 26 feet high.

At this point the ruler of Tutub, perhaps in response to a divine order encrypted in a dream, decided to build a great temple. This “mansion of the god” was to occupy an oval precinct, walled off from the secular part of the city. There was just one problem: the place chosen for the temple had been polluted by centuries of secular houses and human waste.

The ruler’s solution was to have his workers dig down 26 feet to the underlying sterile soil, removing all traces of human settlement over an area of 7.4 acres. This excavation was then filled with 64,000 cubic meters (2,260,160 cubic feet) of clean sand. Now it was sufficiently free of pollution to support a temple.

The Temple Oval of Tutub was given two concentric walls (
Figure 66
). The high priest’s residence, tucked into a corner between the inner and outer walls, resembled a palace. Roughly 130 by 98 feet in extent, it was entered by a small door that led the visitor past a guard room to a narrow corridor. Off this corridor were two antechambers; one was flanked by a bath and toilet, where the priest and his visitors could purify themselves before proceeding further. Once their ablutions were complete, they could enter the building’s central court, perhaps pouring libations at its offering table.

The central court was a hub for traffic within the residence. To its south lay the priest’s reception room, complete with a divan on which he could receive his visitors. Behind the reception room were his archive for cuneiform tablets and his dressing/sleeping room. East of the court was a dining room and behind it a pantry with access to the servants’ quarters. To the north of the central court lay a storage room and the priest’s private chapel.

Just as the British monarch is titular head of the Church of England, Sumerian rulers were keepers of the faith. The me, or divine rules of society, however, were established by gods and not by kings. The ruler’s duty was to see that a pious and orderly society was maintained.

FIGURE 66.
   Ritual purity was very important in Early Dynastic Sumer. Before this oval temple enclosure at ancient Tutub could be built, workers had to remove the impure debris of human settlement from an area of 7.4 acres and replace it with clean sand. The high priest’s residence (shown in detail below) was tucked into a space between the inner and outer enclosure walls.

POLITICAL HIERARCHY

Like ancient Egypt, Sumer was made up of numerous provinces. These provinces, each of which had a capital city and a hierarchy of towns, large villages, and small villages, have been compared by Diakonoff to
nomes
(the Greek word for the hesps of Egypt). The comparison is apt in the sense that each Sumerian province had a governor, like the
nomarchs
of Egyptian nomes.

While the nome is not a perfect analogy, we prefer it to the term “city-state,” which has often been applied to Sumerian provinces. This term strikes us as an inappropriate comparison to the Classical Greek city-state, or
polis.
We are not convinced that the polis, whose leaders were elected by the populace, closely resembles any other society of the ancient world.

During the Early Dynastic period, the capital cities of Sumerian provinces fell into three clusters. In the south were Ur, Eridu, Larsa, Bad-Tibira, Uruk, Umma, and Lagash. Farther upstream were Nippur, Adab, and Shuruppak. And still farther upstream, where the Tigris and Euphrates more closely approach each other, lay Kish and Akshak.

While the Sumerian language was dominant from Nippur to Ur, there are words in the cuneiform texts of Kish that reflect a second language, Akkadian. Early epigraphers recognized Akkadian as a Semitic language, part of the family to which later languages such as Hebrew and Arabic belong. Semitic languages apparently extended from the Mediterranean Sea to northern Iraq. Some speakers of Semitic languages lived in settled communities; others were pastoral people, who spread their language widely while traveling with their herds.

We have one long, largely mythological list of early Sumerian kings, plus shorter king lists from individual provinces. Obviously we know much more about those provinces where thousands of cuneiform tablets are available. One of the best-documented provinces was headed by the city of Lagash, which lay not far from the Persian Gulf.

The population of the province of Lagash has been estimated at 100,000 “free citizens” (that is, excluding slaves). Some 36,000 of those free citizens may have lived at Lagash itself. The ruins of Lagash, known today as Tell al-Hiba, cover 1,284 acres.

In Level 2 of the administrative hierarchy below Lagash were two smaller cities, Girsu and Nina. Girsu, whose ruins are known as Tell Luh, covered 914 acres and may have been home to 19,000 free citizens. Nina, whose ruins are known as Tell Shurgal, covered 370 acres. Both Girsu and Nina were already occupied 6,000 years ago. Lagash became large in the Early Dynastic period and eventually subordinated the two smaller cities. In Level 3 of the hierarchy were settlements with names like Urú, E-Ninmar, Kinunir, and Guaba. We do not know the names of the Level 4 villages. We also do not know the full extent of the province of Lagash, but its irrigated fields alone covered 772 square miles. A 28-mile-long stretch of irrigated land on the border between the provinces of Lagash and Umma was, as we shall see, under dispute for centuries.

Lagash featured at least ten temple estates, the largest of which belonged to the patron deity Ningirsu and his divine wife, Bau. Among the smaller temple estates were those dedicated to Utu (Sun) and Nanshe (that skilled interpreter of dreams). Temple estates may have covered more than 200 square miles of the province and employed 5,000 to 12,000 free citizens.

At the apex of a province’s political hierarchy was its king, for whom two Sumerian words existed. One of those words,
ensí,
is the older, and it incorporates the word
en,
“lord” or “spiritual leader.” This derivation of the word may reflect the fact that early Sumerian rulers had a degree of ritual authority.

A second word,
lugal
(from
lu,
“man,” and
gal,
“big”), appeared later, and in several contexts it seems to outrank ensí. Diakonoff notes that one ensí of Lagash changed his title to lugal when he embarked on an ambitious campaign of conquest. Rulers claiming control of more than one province sometimes referred to themselves as “lugal of the land” or “lugal of the universe.” Few rulers, Diakonoff feels, would dare to assume the title of lugal if their own province was claimed by a “lugal of the universe.”

Unlike a typical ensí, a powerful lugal may have felt that he could ignore the Council of Elders and the Popular Assembly. This, according to Diakonoff, made him a forerunner of the more despotic kings of later times.

A lugal’s Level 2 cities were usually run by ensís. For his part, the ensí delegated many tasks to a vizier like that of Egypt. The temple estates of the province were run by overseers called
sanga.
In the complex hierarchy of Sumer, aristocratic administrators supervised commoner foremen, who in turn supervised gangs of plowmen, weavers, and burden carriers. Wages and products were listed by scribes on clay tablets, to be stored eventually in archives.

KINGS, PALACES, AND ROYAL TOMBS

The Sumerians believed that kingship had descended from heaven during mythological times. The first two kings of Eridu are said to have ruled for a total of 64,800 years. Three later kings of Bad-Tibira ruled for 108,000. In Shuruppak one king ruled for 18,600.