During these inconclusive wars, Sumerian aristocrats and retainers were wounded, killed, and enslaved, but the peasants suffered far more. Because they were the basis of any aristocrat’s wealth, they and their livestock were regularly slaughtered by an invading army, their barns and homes demolished, and their fields soaked with blood. The countryside and peasant villages would become a wasteland, and the destruction of harvests, herds, and agricultural equipment often meant severe famine.80 The inconclusive nature of these wars meant that everybody suffered and that there would be no permanent gain for anybody, since today’s winner was likely to be tomorrow’s loser. This would become the besetting problem of civilization, since equally matched aristocracies would always compete aggressively for scarce resources. Paradoxically, warfare that was supposed to enrich the aristocracy often damaged productivity. Already at this very early date it had become apparent that to prevent this pointless and self-destructive suffering, it was essential to hold these competing aristocracies in check. A higher authority had to have the military muscle to impose the peace.
In 2330 a new type of ruler emerged in Mesopotamia when Sargon, a common soldier of Semitic origins, staged a successful coup in the city of Kish, marched to Uruk, and deposed its king. He then repeated this process in one city after another until, for the very first time, Sumer was ruled by a single monarch. Sargon had created the world’s first agrarian empire.81 It was said that with his massive standing army of 5,400 men, he conquered territory in what is now Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. He built Akkad, an entirely new capital city, which may have stood near modern Baghdad. In his inscriptions, Sargon—his name meaning “True and Rightful King”—claimed to have ruled “the totality of lands under heaven,” and later generations would revere him as a model hero, not unlike Charlemagne or King Arthur. For millennia, in his memory, Mesopotamian rulers would style themselves “lord of Akkad.” Yet we know very little about either the man or his empire. Akkad was remembered as an exotic, cosmopolitan city and an important trade center, but its site has never been discovered. The empire has left little archaeological trace, and what we know of Sargon’s life is largely legendary.
Yet his empire was a watershed. The world’s first supraregional polity, it became the model for all future agrarian imperialism, not simply because of Sargon’s prestige but because there seemed to be no viable alternative. Warfare and taxation would be essential to the economy of every future agrarian empire. The Akkadian Empire was achieved by the conquest of foreign territory: subject peoples were reduced to vassals, and kings and tribal chieftains became regional governors, their task to extort taxes in kind from their people—silver, grain, frankincense, metals, timber, and animals—and send them to Akkad. Sargon’s inscriptions claim that he fought thirty-four wars during his exceptionally long reign of fifty-six years. In all later agrarian empires, warfare was not an unusual crisis but became the norm; it was not simply the “sport of kings” but an economic and social necessity.82 Besides gaining plunder and loot, the chief goal of any imperial campaign was to conquer and tax more peasants. As the British historian Perry Anderson explains, “war was possibly the most rational and rapid single mode of economic expansion, of surplus extraction, available for any given ruling class.”83 Fighting and obtaining wealth were inseparable and interconnected: freed from the need to engage in productive work, the nobility had the leisure to cultivate their martial skills.84 They certainly fought for honor, glory, and the sheer pleasure of battle, but warfare was, “perhaps above all, a source of profit, the nobleman’s chief industry.”85 It needed no justification, because its necessity seemed self-evident.
We know so little about Sargon that it is hard to be precise about the role of religion in his imperial wars. In one of his inscriptions he claimed that after he defeated the cities of Ur, Lagash, and Umma, “the god Enlil [did] not let him have a rival, gave him the Lower and the Upper Sea and the citizens of Akkad held [posts of] government.” Religion had always been inseparable from Mesopotamian politics. The city was viable because it fed and served its deities; doubtless, the oracles of these gods endorsed Sargon’s campaigns. His son and successor Naram-Sin (.c 2260–2223), who further extended the Akkadian Empire, was actually known as the “god of Akkad.” As a new city, Akkad could not claim to have been founded by one of the Anunnaki, so Naram-Sin declared that he had become the mediator between the divine aristocracy and his subjects. As we shall see, agrarian emperors would often be deified in this way, and it gave them a useful propaganda device that justified major administrative and economic reforms.86 As ever, religion and politics co-inhered, the gods serving not only as the alter ego of the monarch but also sanctifying the structural violence that was essential to the survival of civilization.
The agrarian empire made no attempt to represent the people or serve their interests. The ruling class regarded the peasant population as virtually a different species. The ruler saw his empire as his personal possession and his army as his own private militia. As long as their subjects produced and relinquished the surplus, the ruling class left them to their own devices, so peasants policed and governed their own communities; premodern communications did not permit the imperial ruling class to impose its religion or culture on the subject peoples. A successful empire supposedly prevented the destructive tit-for-tat warfare that had plagued Sumer, but even so Sargon died suppressing a revolt, and besides constantly subduing would-be usurpers, Naram-Sin also had to defend his borders against pastoralists who had founded their own states in Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine.
After the decline of the Akkadian Empire, there were other imperial experiments in Mesopotamia. From 2113 to 2029, Ur ruled the whole of Sumer and Akkad from the Persian Gulf to the southern Jezirah as well as large parts of western Iran. Then, in the nineteenth century BCE, Sumu-abum, a Semitic-Amorite chieftain, founded a dynasty in the small town of Babylon. King Hammurabi (c. 1792–1750), the sixth in line, gradually gained control of southern Mesopotamia and the western regions of the middle Euphrates. In a famous stele, he is shown standing before Marduk, the sun god, receiving the laws of his kingdom. In his law code, Hammurabi announced that he had been appointed by the gods “to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, that the strong might not oppress the weak.”87 Despite the structural violence of the agrarian state, Middle Eastern rulers would regularly make this claim. Promulgating such laws was little more than a political exercise in which the king claimed that he was powerful enough to bypass the lower aristocrats and become a supreme court of appeal to the oppressed masses.88 His benevolent laws, his code concluded, were the “laws of righteousness, which Hammurabi, the strong king, established.”89 Significantly, he published this code at the end of his career, after he had forcefully oppressed any opposition and established a system of taxation throughout his domains that enriched his capital in Babylon.
But no agrarian civilization could advance beyond a certain limit. An expanding empire always outran its resources, once its requirements exceeded what nature, peasants, and animals could produce. And despite the lofty talk about justice for the poor, prosperity had to be confined to an elite. While modernity has institutionalized change, radical innovation was rare in premodern times: civilization seemed so fragile that it was deemed more important to preserve what had been achieved rather than risk something entirely new. Originality was not encouraged, because any new idea that required too great an economic outlay would not be implemented and this frustration could cause social unrest. Hence novelty was suspect, not out of timidity but because it was economically and politically hazardous. The past remained the supreme authority.90
Continuity was therefore politically essential. Thus the Akitu festival, inaugurated by the Sumerians in the mid-third millennium, was celebrated each year by every Mesopotamian ruler for over two thousand years. Originally performed in Ur in honor of Enlil when Sumer had become militarized, in Babylon these rituals centered on the city’s patron, Marduk.
91 As always in Mesopotamia, this act of worship had an important political function and was essential to the regime’s legitimacy. We shall see in Chapter 4 that a king could be deposed for failing to perform these ceremonies, which marked the start of the New Year, when the old year was dying and the king’s power also waning.92 By ritually rehearsing cosmic battles that had ordered the universe at the beginning of time, the ruling aristocracy hoped to make this powerful surge of sacred energy a reality in their state for another twelve months.
On the fifth day of the festival, the presiding priest would ceremonially humiliate the king in Marduk’s shrine, evoking the terrifying specter of social anarchy by confiscating the royal regalia, striking the king on the cheek, and throwing him roughly onto the ground.93 The bruised and abject king would plead with Marduk that he had not behaved like an evil ruler:
I did not destroy Babylon; I did not command its overthrow; I did not destroy the temple.… Esagil. I did not forget its rites; I did not rain blows on the cheeks of the protected citizen. I did not humiliate them. I watched out for Babylon. I did not smash its walls.94
The priest then slapped the king again, so hard that tears rose to his eyes—a sign of repentance that satisfied Marduk. Thus reinstated, the king now clasped the hands of Marduk’s effigy, the regalia were returned, and his rule was secure for the coming year. The statues of all the patronal gods and goddesses of all the cities in Mesopotamia had to be brought to Babylon for the festival as an expression of cultic and political loyalty. If they were not all present, the Akitu could not be celebrated and the realm would be endangered. The liturgy, therefore, was as crucial for a city’s security as its fortifications, and it had reminded the people, only the day before, of the city’s fragility.
On the fourth day of the festival, priests and choristers filed into Marduk’s shrine for the recitation of Enuma Elish, the creation hymn that recounted Marduk’s victory over cosmic and political chaos. The first gods to emerge from the slimy primal matter (similar to Mesopotamia’s alluvial soil) were “nameless, natureless, futureless,”95 virtually inseparable from the natural world and seen as enemies of progress. The next gods to emerge from the sludge became progressively more distinct until the divine evolution culminated in Marduk, the most splendid of the Anunnaki. In the same way, Mesopotamian culture had developed from rural communities immersed in the natural rhythms of the countryside that were now regarded as sluggish, static, and inert. But the old times could return: this hymn expressed the fear of civilization lapsing back into abysmal nothingness. The most dangerous of the primitive gods was Tiamat, whose name means “Void”; she was the salty sea, which, in the Middle East, symbolized not only primeval chaos but the social anarchy that could bring starvation, disease, and death to the entire population. She represented an ever-present threat that every civilization, no matter how powerful, had to be ready to confront.
The hymn also gave sacred sanction to the structural violence of Babylonian society. Tiamat creates a horde of monsters to fight the Anunnaki, a “growling roaring rout, ready for battle,” suggestive of the danger the lower classes presented to the state. Their monstrous forms represent the perverse defiance of normal categories and the confusion of identity associated with social and cosmic disorder. Their leader is Tiamat’s spouse Kingu, a “clumsy laborer,” one of the Igigi, whose name means “Toil.” The narrative of the hymn is repeatedly punctuated with this pounding refrain: “She has made the Worm, the Dragon, the Female Monster, the Great Lion, the Mad Dog, the Mad Scorpion and the Howling Storm, the Fish-Man, the Centaur.”96 But Marduk defeats them all, casting them into prison and creating an ordered universe by splitting Tiamat’s corpse in two and separating heaven and earth. He then commands the gods to build the city of bab-ilani, “gate of the gods,” as their earthly home and creates the first man by mixing Kingu’s blood with a handful of dust to perform the labor on which civilization depends. “Sons of toil,” the masses are sentenced for life to menial labor and are held in subjection. Liberated from work, the gods sing a hymn of praise and thanksgiving. The myth and its accompanying rituals reminded the Sumerian aristocracy of the reality on which their civilization and privilege depended; they must be perpetually primed for war to keep down rebellious peasants, ambitious aristocrats, and foreign enemies who threatened civilized society. Religion was therefore deeply implicated in this imperial violence and could not be separated from the economic and political realities that sustained any agrarian state.
The fragility of civilization became clear during the seventeenth century BCE, when Indo-European hordes repeatedly attacked the cities of Mesopotamia. Even Egypt now became militarized, when Bedouin tribesmen, whom the Egyptians called Hyksos (“chieftains from foreign lands”), managed to establish their own dynasty in the delta area during the sixteenth century.97 The Egyptians expelled them in 1567, but ever afterward the ruling pharaoh was depicted as a warrior at the head of a powerful army. Empire seemed the best defense, so Egypt secured its frontier by subjugating Nubia in the south and coastal Palestine in the north. But by the middle of the second millennium, the ancient Near East was dominated by foreign conquerors; Kassite tribes from the Caucasus took over the Babylonian Empire (c. 1600–1155); an Indo-European aristocracy created the Hittite Empire in Anatolia (1420–1200); and the Mitanni, another Aryan tribe, controlled Greater Mesopotamia from about 1500 until they were conquered by the Hittites in the mid-fourteenth century. Ashur-uballit I, ruler of the city of Ashur in the eastern Tigris region, who was able to exploit the turbulence that followed the collapse of the Mitanni, made Assyria a new power in the Middle East.
Assyria was not a traditional agrarian state.98 Situated in an area that was not agriculturally productive, since the nineteenth century BCE, Ashur had relied more than other cities on commerce, setting up trading colonies in Cappadocia and planting mercantile representatives in several Babylonian cities. For about a century Ashur was a trading hub, importing tin (crucial for the manufacture of bronze) from Afghanistan and exporting it together with Mesopotamian textiles to Anatolia and the Black Sea. The historical record is so slight, however, that we do not know how this affected the farmers of Ashur or whether commerce mitigated the structural violence of the state. Nor do we know much about Ashur’s religious practices. Its kings built impressive temples to the gods, but we know nothing about the personality and exploits of Ashur, its patronal deity, whose mythology has not survived.
The Assyrians began to dominate the region when their king Adadnirari I (1307–1275) conquered the old Mitanni territories from the Hittites as well as land in southern Babylonia. The economic incentive was always prominent in Assyrian warfare. The inscriptions of Shalmaneser I (1274–45) stressed his martial prowess: he was a “valiant hero, capable of battle with his enemies, whose aggressive battle flashes like a flame and whose weapons attack like a merciless death-trap.”99 It was he who began the Assyrian practice of forcibly moving people around his empire not simply, as was once thought, to demoralize the conquered peoples but principally to stimulate the agricultural economy by replenishing underpopulated regions.100
The reign of his son Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244–1208), who made Assyria the most formidable military and economic power of the day, is better documented. He turned Ashur into the ritual capital of his empire and instituted the Akitu festival there, with the god Ashur in the starring role; it appears that the Assyrians introduced a mock battle reenacting Ashur’s war with Tiamat. In his inscriptions, Tukulti-Ninurta was careful to credit his victories to the gods: “Trusting in Ashur and the great gods, my lord, I struck and brought about their defeat.” But he also makes it clear that warfare was never simply an act of piety:
I made them swear by the great gods of heaven [and] underworld, I imposed upon them the yoke of my lordship, [and then] released them to return to their lands.… Fortified cities I subdued at my feet and imposed corvée. Annually I receive with ceremony their valuable tribute in my city Ashur.101
Assyrian kings too were plagued by internal dissent, intrigue, and rebellion, yet Tiglath-pileser I (c. 1115–1093) managed to expand the empire, maintaining his domination of the region by perpetual campaigning and large-scale deportations, so that his reign was in effect one continuous war. Punctilious as he was in his devotion to the gods and an energetic builder of temples, his strategy was always dictated by economic imperatives. His chief motive for expanding northward into Iran, for instance, was the acquisition of booty, metal, and animals, which he sent home to boost productivity in Syria at a time of chronic crop failure.102
Warfare had become a fact of human life, central to the political, social, and economic dynamics of the agrarian empire, and like every other human activity, it always had a religious dimension. These states would not have survived without constant military effort, and the gods, the alter egos of the ruling class, represented a yearning for a strength that could transcend human instability. Yet the Mesopotamians were not credulous fanatics. Religious mythology may have endorsed their structural and martial violence, but it also regularly called it into question. There was a strong vein of skepticism in Mesopotamian literature. One aristocrat complains that he has always been righteous, joyfully followed the gods’ processions, taught all the people on his estate to worship the Mother Goddess, and instructed his soldiers to revere the king as the gods’ representative. Yet he has been afflicted with disease, insomnia, and terror, and “no god came to my aid or grasped my hand.”103 Gilgamesh too gets no help from the gods as he struggles to accept Enkidu’s death. When he meets Ishtar, the Mother Goddess, he denounces her savagely for her inability to protect men from the grim realities of life: she is like a water-skin that soaks its carrier, a shoe that pinches its wearer, and a door that fails to keep out the wind. In the end, as we have seen, Gilgamesh finds resignation, but the Epic as a whole suggests that mortals have no choice but to rely on themselves rather than the gods. Urban living was beginning to change the way people thought about the divine, but one of the most momentous religious developments of the period occurred at about the same time as Sin-leqi wrote his version of Gilgamesh’s life. It did not happen in a sophisticated city, however, but was a response to the escalation of violence in an Aryan pastoral community.
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