The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (78 page)

Umma felt that the settlement favored Lagash, so the dispute continued. During the reigns of Ur-Nanshe and Akurgal of Lagash, there were acts of defiance by Umma. At one point the border stela was ripped out, and Umma began to grow barley on land claimed by Lagash.

Eannatum of Lagash (2454–2425
B.C.
) attacked and defeated Umma and established a new border treaty with its ruler Enakale. He improved the canal that irrigated Gu’edena and, to lessen the likelihood of war, established a no-man’s-land on Umma’s side of the frontier. To sanctify the new agreement, Eannatum built chapels to the gods Enlil, Ninhursaga, Ningirsu, and Utu. He also forced Enakale to swear oaths on several deities, agreeing that any barley Umma had managed to grow at Gu’edena would be considered an interest-bearing loan from Lagash. The ensí of Umma also had to swear that his people would not trespass on Gu’edena, destroy the new border stela, or modify the course of the canal.

At the city of Girsu, a Level 2 center in the province of Lagash, Eannatum erected a great stone stela to commemorate his victory over Umma. One side depicted Eannatum and his troops marching over the bodies of his enemies, while vultures made off with portions of the victims’ corpses. (This scene has given the monument its name, the Stela of the Vultures.) The opposite side of the stela featured a metaphoric scene in which Eannatum cast the Great Net of Enlil over the men of Umma.

Despite the fact that Eannatum was wounded by an arrow, he claimed that his army killed 3,600 enemies, so many that their heaped-up corpses required 20 funerary mounds to cover. It should be noted that calculations in Sumerian math were based on units of 60, so any claim of 3,600 (60 × 60) is probably an idealized number.

Eannatum’s victory did not end the dispute over Gu’edena. Urluma, a later ruler of Umma, began to divert water from the Gu’edena canal in violation of his predecessor’s oaths. Urluma is said to have recruited foreign mercenaries to smash the boundary stela, destroy the chapels Eannatum had built, and invade what Lagash regarded as “Ningirsu’s land.” The new ruler of Lagash, Enanatum I (2424–2405
B.C.
), went to war against Urluma; the latter fled the battlefield but was tracked down and killed in Umma.

Finally, after decades of being soundly thumped by Lagash, Umma had its moment in the sun. While Urukagina of Lagash (2351–2342
B.C.
) was busy implementing his reforms, new rulers arose in Umma. The son of one ensí of Umma, a man named Lugal-zagesi, had ambitions beyond his native city.

Lugal-zagesi came to power in 2340
B.C.
He managed to conquer Girsu, which allowed him to seize Gu’edena and move the frontier closer to Lagash. One by-product of Umma’s victory was that its engineers were able to divert water from the canal watering Gu’edena.

According to Robert McC. Adams, this diversion of water interrupted the flow to the city of Lagash itself, which was an even greater tragedy than the loss of barley. In desperation, Lagash tried to dig an alternative canal from the Tigris, which was not a viable long-term solution.

For his part, Lugal-zagesi extended his conquests. He soon added Ur and Uruk to his possessions, virtually isolating Lagash, and went on to be considered “irresistible in all lands.” An inscription at Nippur, far to the north, claims that the god Enlil had made Lugal-zagesi king of all Mesopotamia, from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean.

Here, then, is another legacy of the Sumerians. Once a piece of land is disputed by two Near Eastern groups, the conflict never really ends. No oath taken in the name of a deity, no cease-fire, no mediation by a third party, and no amount of bloodshed is enough to convince either party to let the matter drop.

STEPS IN THE CREATION OF EMPIRE

See if this story sounds familiar. No one knows who his parents were, though his mother is rumored to have been a priestess. To conceal her pregnancy, she gave birth to her son in secret. She placed him in a wicker basket, waterproofed it with pitch, and set it afloat in a river. A gardener drawing water from the river noticed the basket, rescued the little boy, and raised him as his own. Working his way up the social ladder, the boy rose to become a major historic figure.

An alternative version of Moses’s birth? No, it is the legendary origin of Sargon of Akkad, the ruler most often credited with unifying all of Mesopotamia. Just as the Sumerians had the myth of a Great Flood long before the authors of the Old Testament, they also had the legend of the Boy in the Basket before it was applied to Moses.

The fact that we have no plausible account of Sargon’s birth suggests that he may have been a usurper. Epigraphers are sure that his native tongue was Akkadian, but they cannot tell us his actual name. “Sargon” is simply our version of the title Sharru-kin, “the true king.” He claimed to be from Azupiranu, a city on the banks of the Euphrates, but no archaeologist knows exactly where that is. Because much of Sargon’s early life was spent in Kish, we assume that his home city must lie somewhere nearby.

It was allegedly a gardener named Akki who fished baby Sargon from the Euphrates, sometime around 2300
B.C.
Following in his adoptive father’s footsteps, the boy became an apprentice gardener. He showed enough talent and intelligence to lift himself up by his own sandal straps. Eventually he was appointed cupbearer to Ur-Zababa, the king of Kish.

Cupbearer was a position of trust, one that placed young Sargon in close proximity to the ruler. One night, or so the legend goes, Sargon had a terrifying dream in which he saw the goddess Inanna (or Ishtar, as she was called in Akkadian) drowning Ur-Zababa in a river of blood. Ur-Zababa heard Sargon cry out in his sleep and asked him to describe the dream the next day.

A cuneiform tablet from Uruk, translated by Jerrold Cooper and Wolfgang Heimpel, explains what happened next. Ur-Zababa’s interpretation of Sargon’s dream was that the goddess Inanna was planning to replace him with Sargon. The author of the tablet describes Ur-Zababa’s fear in colorful terms:

King Ur-Zababa … he was frightened in that residence,

Like a lion, he was dribbling urine, filled with blood and pus, down his legs,

He struggled like a floundering salt-water fish, he was terrified there.

Distressed that Inanna was planning to replace him, Ur-Zababa asked his chief metalsmith to assassinate Sargon. But Inanna protected Sargon from harm, forcing Ur-Zababa to try an alternative strategy. He dispatched Sargon to Uruk with a sealed letter to Lugal-zagesi, the mightiest king of Mesopotamia. The letter implored Lugal-zagesi to kill Sargon. Once again, the goddess intervened and Sargon was spared.

Legend aside, it does appear that Sargon usurped the throne of Ur-Zababa at roughly 2270
B.C.
Sargon later moved his capital to a city called Akkad, which has given its name to his native language. Unfortunately, archaeologists do not know which ancient mound represents the ruins of Akkad, although they suspect that it lay not far from Kish.

With all due respect to the goddess Inanna, it is unlikely that the adopted son of a gardener could have usurped the throne of Kish without support from the high priests and many other influential aristocrats. No currently available inscription reveals what Sargon did to deserve such support; the 20 years leading up to his usurpation are a blank.

Some anthropologists, however, are willing to bet that Sargon actually rose through the military, and that the tales of support from Inanna were simply an attempt to legitimize him after the fact. Sargon’s later conquests display a military expertise uncharacteristic of gardeners and cupbearers. Ur-Zababa’s fear of Sargon makes the latter seem more like a renowned warrior than a palace attendant.

Whatever the case, we know that Sargon set out to bring all of Mesopotamia under his control. He was not, of course, the first ruler to attempt this. Whoever pulled off Southern Mesopotamia’s conquest of Tell Hamoukar in the Late Uruk period was attempting to unify several provinces. The Early Dynastic ruler Mesalim of Kish exercised hegemony beyond his own province. Royal inscriptions were left by the kings of Kish at distant places such as Adab, Girsu, Nippur, and the Diyala basin. Ur-Nanshe, who ruled Lagash between 2494 and 2465
B.C.
, defeated the ruler of Ur and captured Pabilgaltuk, the ruler of Umma. According to Cooper, Eannatum of Lagash also assumed the kingship of Kish.

Then came two rulers who desired nothing less than the total unification of Mesopotamia. A man named Enshakushana, calling himself “King of Sumer,” came close to unifying the entire region between 2432 and 2403
B.C.
He conquered Kish and Akshak and dedicated war booty to the god Enlil at Nippur. Some 63 years later, as we have already seen, Lugal-zagesi claimed to have controlled all of Mesopotamia from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Truth be told, his may have been Mesopotamia’s first empire.

Had Lugal-zagesi put Sargon to death, as Ur-Zababa is said to have requested, there might have been no Akkadian empire. Instead, Sargon wound up leading an army against Lugal-zagesi, whose capital was now Uruk. Sargon conquered Uruk and claimed in his inscriptions that he brought Lugal-zagesi back with his neck in a stock. Now it was Sargon’s turn to expand his territory.

Most accounts of Sargon’s imperialism were written long after his death. While we do not have many details, we know what some of his policies were. For one thing, he made Akkadian the official language of his realm. For another, he sent an Akkadian governor to rule each province of Sumer after he had conquered it.

Another of Sargon’s policies was to create a council of diplomats and military officers, described as numbering 5,400, who “ate bread before him.” The figure 5,400 may be another exaggeration based on units of 60, but archaeologist J. Nicholas Postgate argues that it constitutes Mesopotamia’s first mention of a permanent military establishment. Sargon’s armies moved south through Uruk, Ur, Umma, and Lagash. He then made a point of washing his weapons in the waters of the Persian Gulf, symbolizing his total conquest of Sumer.

Sargon, however, was just getting warmed up. By the 11th year of his reign, according to one account, his conquests had reached the Mediterranean coast. Akkadian armies marched to the cedar forests of Lebanon and the copper and silver mines of Turkey. Sargon expanded east into Elam, making the king of Susa his vassal. He boasted that he was now “the Lord of the Four Quarters”: Subartu (north), Sumer (south), Elam (east), and Martu (west).

Sargon allegedly ruled until 2215
B.C.
, at which point some scholars estimate that he would have been 85 years old. In the 55th year of his life, when his enemies assumed that his grip would be weakening, many territories rebelled against him. Sargon, however, put down every revolt. Toward the end of his life, he took stock of his career and asked whether any future ruler could equal his conquests:

Whatsoever king shall be exalted after me … let him govern the black-headed peoples; mighty mountains with axes of bronze let him destroy; let him ascend the upper mountains, let him break through the lower mountains; the country of the sea let him besiege three times; Dilmun [Bahrain] let him capture.…

Clearly, Sargon considered himself the greatest ruler of all time. About the only thing he did not claim is that he could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

Sargon is generally credited with creating Mesopotamia’s first empire—that is, a macro-state, each province of which had once been a kingdom in its own right. It would be wrong, however, to ignore the possibility that earlier rulers such as Mesalim, Enshakushana, and especially Lugal-zagesi established the agenda for Sargon.

We have previously seen that Kamehameha received credit for the unification of Hawai’i, although it was begun by ‘Umi and Alapai. For his part, Shaka received credit for the unification of Natal begun by Dingiswayo. The story of Sargon is analogous. His unification of Mesopotamia was spectacular and significant, but it may simply have been the most successful attempt in a long sequence that began with the assault on Tell Hamoukar.

CYCLING IN MESOPOTAMIAN STATES

The dynasty established by Sargon of Akkad lasted nearly 200 years. Sargon was succeeded by his sons Rimush and Manishtu and then by his grandson Naram-Sin, perhaps the first Mesopotamian ruler whose monuments portray him as divine. As so often happens, however, later Akkadian rulers lacked the talent and motivation of the dynastic founder and found it impossible to deal with recurrent famines and rebellious provinces. Eventually many of Sargon’s territories were overrun by swarms of Gutians from the Zagros Mountains, people regarded by the Akkadians as barbarians. What followed was a half-century “dark age” for which written documentation is inadequate.

If the states created in the Late Uruk period were first-generation states, any new state of the Early Dynastic period could be considered a second-generation state, making Sargon’s empire a third-generation state. Sargon’s realm differed from a first-generation state in that it was created not from a group of rank societies but from a group of preexisting kingdoms, including Lugal-zagesi’s expansionist state. And there would be a fourth-generation state: out of the ashes of the dark age brought on by the Gutians, a Sumerian-speaking ruler named Ur-Nammu would rise to power in 2112
B.C.
His state, modeled on those of earlier rulers, would be known as the Third Dynasty of Ur. Unfortunately, this fourth-generation state would suffer a fate similar to that of its predecessor: its later kings would have trouble hanging on to the territory put together by Ur-Nammu.

The problems facing Ur were both external and internal. External pressure came from a foreign ethnic group known as the Amurru, or “Amorites.” The Amorites spoke a Semitic language, and their homeland seems to have been in the arid region west of the Euphrates. Ur-Nammu’s successor, King Shulgi, invested in a 150-mile wall to keep out the Amurru. This wall proved ineffective, giving rise to prophecies of doom for the people of Ur.

The fifth and last king of the dynasty was a man named Ibbi-Sin, who ruled from 2028 to 2004
B.C.
His many problems are reflected in the cuneiform tablets of his reign, including actual palace documents. Ibbi-Sin faced not only Amorite invasions but disloyalty and usurpation among his own subjects.