12.1 Battling Cities of Sumer and Elam
The Sumerian king list is missing quite a few names, and since it tends to list kings of different cities who reigned simultaneously as though they followed each other, it’s not easy to construct an exact chronology. We do know that sometime after Gilgamesh’s son inherited his father’s kingdom, the city of Uruk was conquered by Ur, and that Ur was then “defeated in battle, and its kingship was carried off to Awan.” This seems to indicate an Elamite invasion of great strength; and indeed the kings of Kish’s next dynasty have Elamite names.
Not all of Sumer’s cities fell under Elamite rule by any means. Sometime after the Elamite invasion, the Sumerian king of another city, Adab—almost in the exact center of the Mesopotamian plain—gathered his men around him and challenged their supremacy.
This king, Lugulannemundu, ruled sometime around 2500 BC. To drive out the Elamites, he fought an enormous coalition of thirteen Elamite-dominated cities. According to his own victory inscription, he triumphed; he calls himself the “king of the four quarters” (the whole world, in other words) and declares that he “made all the foreign lands pay steady tribute to him [and] brought peace to the peoples…[he] restored Sumer.”1
If he did indeed carry out these conquests, he put together a temporary empire much larger than Gilgamesh’s. But Lugulannemundu’s exploits, which may have rescued Sumer from the Elamites and preserved its existence as an independent culture for a little while longer, didn’t fire the imagination of his contemporaries. No epic poems elaborate on this conquest. Nor did his kingdom last any longer than Gilgamesh’s. The next incident of note on the Sumerian plain is a border dispute between the cities of Lagash and Umma; a boring, run-of-the-mill quarrel over an undistinguished piece of land which would eventually bring the Sumerian culture to an end.
THE INSCRIPTIONS which record the start of the argument were written only two or three generations after Lugulannemundu’s rule, but his kingdom had already disintegrated. Sumerian kings ruled by force of arms and charisma. Their kingdoms had no settled bureaucracy to sustain them. When the crown passed from the dynamic warrior to the less talented son, the kingdoms inevitably crumbled.
Lugulannemundu’s kingdom had crumbled so quickly that his home city of Adab was no longer even a power on the Sumerian scene. When Lagash and Umma quarrelled, another king—the king of Kish, which had once again risen into prominence—stepped in. The two cities, which lay about fifty miles apart, had been trespassing on each other’s land. Kish’s king, Mesilim, intervened and announced that Sataran, the Sumerian judge-god, had shown him the proper border for both cities to observe. He put up a stele (inscribed stone) to mark the line: “Mesilim, the king of Kish,” says an inscription commemorating the event, “measured it off in accordance with the word of Sataran.”2 Both cities apparently agreed to this judgment; the claim that a god had spoken directly to you was as hard to refute then as now.
However, the agreement didn’t last long. After Mesilim’s death, the new king of Umma knocked the stele down and annexed the disputed land (which suggests that fear of Mesilim, rather than respect for the god Sataran, had imposed the temporary peace). Umma held the land for two generations; then a military-minded king of Lagash named Eannatum took it back.
We know more about Eannatum than many other Sumerian kings because he was much inclined to inscriptions and monuments. He left behind him one of the most famous monuments of Sumer, the Stele of Vultures. On this stone slab, scenes carved comic-strip style show Eannatum’s victory over Umma. Rank on rank of Eannatum’s men march, helmeted and armed with shields and spears, over the bodies of the dead. Vultures pick at the strewn corpses and fly off with their heads. “He heaped up piles of their bodies in the plains,” an inscription clarifies, “and they prostrated themselves, they wept for their lives.”3
12.1. Stele of Vultures. Vultures carry away heads of the conquered on the Stele of Vultures, carved to celebrate the triumphs of the king of Lagash. Louvre, Paris. Photo credit Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY
The Stele of Vultures shows an advanced state of warfare. Eannatum’s men are armed not only with spears, but with battle-axes and sickle-swords; they are armed identically, showing that the concept of an organized army (as opposed to a band of independent warriors) had gained ground; they are marching in the tightly packed phalanx that would later prove so deadly to the countries that lay in the path of Alexander the Great; and Eannatum himself is shown riding in a war-chariot, pulled by what appears to be a mule.31
Eannatum of Lagash used this well-organized army to fight not only with Umma but with practically every other city on the Sumerian plain. He fought with Kish; he fought with the city of Mari; on the side, he fought with invading Elamites. After a lifetime of war he was apparently killed in battle. His brother took the throne in his place.
For the next three or four generations, Lagash and Umma fought over the exact placement of their boundary line, a bitter and bloody domestic squabble occasionally interrupted by the odd band of trespassing Elamites. The next king of Umma burned the steles, both Mesilim’s and the strutting Stele of Vultures; this was basically pointless, since both were stone, but may have relieved his feelings. Eannatum’s brother passed the throne of Lagash on to his son, who was then overthrown by a usurper.4
A hundred years or so after the quarrel began, it was still going on. Lagash was now ruled by a king named Urukagina. Urukagina, the Jimmy Carter of the ancient Middle East, was the first Sumerian king with a social conscience. This great strength was also his weakness.
War with Umma was not the sole problem facing Lagash. A series of inscriptions from Urukagina’s reign describes the state into which the city had fallen. It was entirely run by corrupt priests and the rich, and the weak and poor lived in hunger and in fear. Temple land, which was supposed to be used on behalf of Lagash’s people, had been taken by unscrupulous temple personnel for their own use, like national parklands seized by greedy rangers. Workmen had to beg for bread, and apprentices went unpaid and scrabbled in the rubbish for scraps of food. Officials demanded fees for everything from the shearing of white sheep to the interment of dead bodies (if you wanted to bury your father, you needed seven pitchers of beer and 420 loaves of bread for the undertaker). The tax burden had become so unbearable that parents were forced to sell their children into slavery in order to pay their debts.5 “From the borders to the sea, the tax collector was there,” one inscription complains, an expression of frustration that has a rather contemporary ring.6
Urukagina got rid of most of the tax collectors and lowered the taxes. He cancelled fees for basic services. He forbade officials and priests to seize anyone’s land or possessions in payment of debt, and offered amnesty to the debtors. He slashed Lagash’s bureaucracy, which was bloated with pork-barrel positions (these included the head boatman, the inspector of fishing, and the “supervisor of the store of the cereals”). He also, apparently, took authority away from the priests by dividing religious and secular functions, thus preventing exactly the kind of authority that had allowed Mesilim to set up his stele by the authority of the god Sataran: “Everywhere from border to border,” his chronicler tells us, “no one spoke further of priest-judges…. The priest no longer invaded the garden of the humble man.”7
Urukagina’s intent was to return Lagash to the state of justice intended by the gods. “He freed the inhabitants of Lagash from usury…hunger, theft, murder,” the chronicler writes. “He established amagi. The widow and the orphan were no longer at the mercy of the powerful: it was for them that Urukagina made his covenant with Ningirsu.”8 Amagi: the cuneiform sign seems to stand for freedom from fear, the confidence that the life of Lagash’s citizens can be governed by a certain and unchanging code and not by the whims of the powerful. This is, debatably, the first appearance of the idea of “freedom” in human written language; amagi, literally “return to the mother,” describes Urukagina’s desire to return the city of Lagash to an earlier, pure
r state. Urukagina’s Lagash would be a city that honored the wishes of the gods, particularly the city-god Ningirsu. It would be Lagash the way it had once been, back in an idealized past. From the very earliest times, nostalgia for a shining and nonexistent past goes hand in hand with social reform.32
There wasn’t much in this of benefit to Urukagina himself. It is impossible, at a distance of nearly five thousand years, to know what was in the man’s mind, but his actions show a man possessed by a piety that overruled any thought of political gain. Urukagina’s moral rectitude proved to be political suicide. His curtailment of priestly abuses made him unpopular with the religious establishment. More seriously, his actions on behalf of the poor made him unpopular with the rich men of his own city. Every Sumerian king ruled with the help of the double-barrelled assembly of elder and younger men, and the elder assembly was inevitably stuffed with the rich landed men of the city. These very men, the lugals (“great householders”) of Lagash, had been severely criticized in Urukagina’s inscriptions for abusing their poorer neighbors.9 They were unlikely to have suffered this public chastisement without resentment.
Meanwhile, the throne of Lagash’s old enemy Umma had been inherited by a greedy and ambitious man named Lugalzaggesi. He marched on Lagash, and attacked it, and Urukagina’s city fell.
The conquest apparently went swimmingly, with very little resistance from the city. “When Enlil, king of all the lands, had given the kingship of the land to Lugalzaggesi,” the victory inscription announces, “[and] had directed to him the eyes of the land from the rising of the sun to the setting of the sun, [and] had prostrated all the peoples for him…the Land rejoiced under his rule; all the chieftains of Sumer…bowed down before him.”10 The language of this inscription suggests that the priests not only of Lagash, but also of Nippur, the sacred city of Enlil, were cooperating with the conqueror.11 The powerful priests of Nippur were not likely to have been thrilled by the curtailment of priestly power down to the south; it set a very bad precedent. And if the assembly of elders did not actually aid in Urukagina’s overthrow, certainly they did not fight vigorously on his behalf. His reforms had brought his political career, and possibly his life, to a violent end.
An account written by a scribe convinced of Urukagina’s righteousness, promises that the good king will be avenged: “Because the Ummaite destroyed the bricks of Lagash,” the scribe warns, “he committed a sin against Ningirsu; Ningirsu will cut off the hands lifted against him.” The record ends with a plea to Lugalzaggesi’s own personal deity, asking that even this goddess visit on Lugalzaggesi the consequence of his sin.12
Encouraged by his easy victory over Lagash, Lugalzaggesi cast his net wider. He spent twenty years fighting his way through Sumer. By his own account, his domain stretched “from the Lower Sea, along the Tigris and Euphrates to the Upper Sea.”13 To call this an empire is probably an exaggeration. Lugalzaggesi’s boast to reign as far as the Upper Sea is probably a reference to the odd raiding party that made it all the way up to the Black Sea.14 But there is no question that Lugalzaggesi made the most ambitious effort yet to bring the scattered cities of Sumer under his control.
While Lugalzaggesi was surveying his new empire, with his back turned to the north, retribution arrived.
Chapter Thirteen
The First Military Dictator
In Sumer, between 2334 and 2279 BC, the cupbearer Sargon builds an empire
IN THE CITY OF KISH, a cupbearer named Sargon was laying his own plans to build an empire.
Sargon was a man of absences and disappearances. In the inscription that chronicles his birth, the voice of Sargon speaks:
My mother was a changeling, my father I knew not,
The brother of my father loved the hills,
My home was in the highlands, where the herbs grow,33
My mother conceived me in secret, she gave birth to me in concealment.
She set me in a basket of rushes,
she sealed the lid with tar.34
She cast me into the river, but it did not rise over me,
The water carried me to Akki, the drawer of water,
He lifted me out as he dipped his jar into the river,
He took me as his son, he raised me,
He made me his gardener.1
This birth story tells us nothing about Sargon’s origins. We do not know his race or his childhood name. The name “Sargon” doesn’t help us out, since he gave it to himself later on. In its original form, Sharrum-kin, the name simply means “legitimate king” and (like most protestations of legitimacy) shows that he was born to no lawful claim whatsoever. 35
If he came from the highlands, he may well have been a Semite rather than Sumerian. Semites from the west and south had mingled with Sumerians on the Mesopotamian plain since the beginning of settlement; as we noted earlier, dozens of Semitic loanwords appear in the very earliest Sumerian writing, and the earliest kings of Kish had Semitic names.
Nevertheless, there was a real division between the Sumerians of the south and the Semites, who lived mostly in the north. The two races traced their ancestry back to different tribes who had wandered into Mesopotamia, long before, from different parts of the globe. A Semitic language, related to the later tongues of Israel, Babylon, and Assyria, was spoken in the north; in the south, the Sumerian cities spoke and wrote Sumerian, a language unrelated to any other that we know. Even in the areas where Sumerians and Akkadians had mingled, a racial divide of some sort still existed. When, a century and a half earlier, Lugulannemundu of Adab drove out the Elamites and temporarily asserted himself over the “four quarters” of Sumer, the thirteen city chiefs who united against him all boasted Semitic names.2
But Sargon’s story doesn’t confirm his Semitic origins, because the man was careful to obscure the details of his parentage. He claims no knowledge of his father, which neatly removes the problem of a low or traitorous ancestry. The “changeling” mother is just as elusive. Presumably she had changed her own identity at some point. Maybe she rejected a secular life for a religious role (some translators choose to render the word “priestess”), or managed to rise from a low class to a higher one, or settled among people of another race.
Whatever her place in life, the changeling mother did not share it with her son. By abandoning him on the river, she left his own identity to chance. The very act of being pulled from the water carried then the same resonance that echoes later in the writings of both Hebrews and Christians; Sumerians thought that a river divided them from the afterlife, and that passing through the water brought an essential change of being. Drawn from the water, Sargon took on the persona of his adopted parent. The man who rescued him, Akki, bears a Semitic name; Sargon became a Semite. Akki was employed in the palace of the king of Kish; he raised his adopted son to be the king’s gardener.
By the time Sargon was a grown man, he had risen much higher. According to the Sumerian king list, he had become “the cupbearer of Ur-Zababa,” the Sumerian king of Kish.3
Ancient cupbearers were not merely butlers. The Sumerian inscriptions do not describe the cupbearer’s duties, but in Assyria, not too long afterwards, the cupbearer was second only to the king. According to Xenophon, the cupbearer not only tasted the king’s food but also carried the king’s seal, which gave him the right to bestow the king’s approval. He was the keeper of the king’s audiences, which meant he controlled access to the king; the cupbearer of the Persian kings, writes Xenophon in The Eduation of Cyrus, “had the office of introducing…those who had business with [the king], and of keeping out those whom he thought it not expedient to admit.”4 The cupbearer had so much authority that he was required to taste the king’s wine and food, not to protect the king from random poisoners (the cupbearer was too valuable an official to use as a human shield), but so that the cupbearer himself might not be tempted to increase his own power by poisoning his master.
While Sargon was serving Ur-Zababa in Kish, Lugalzaggesi was busy sending out raiding parti
es and adding bits of Sumerian territory to his kingdom. While Sargon carried the king’s cup, Lugalzaggesi attacked Lagash and drove Urukagina out; he besieged Uruk, Gilgamesh’s old home, and added it to his realm. Then, as every Sumerian conqueror did, Lugalzaggesi turned his eyes towards Kish, the jewel-city of the plain.
A fragment of an account tells us what happened then. “Enlil,” the fragment announces, “decided to remove the prosperity of the palace.” In other words, Lugalzaggesi was the aggressor; Enlil was his special deity. Ur-Zababa, learning that the army of the conqueror was approaching his city, grew so frightened that he “sprinkled his legs.” In the face of the coming attack, he was “afraid like a fish floundering in brackish water.”5
This aimlessness was aggravated by Ur-Zababa’s growing suspicions of his cupbearer. Something in Sargon’s bearing had made him wonder (with justification) whether his trusted second was in fact on his side. So he sent Sargon to Lugalzaggesi with a message on a clay tablet. The message, ostensibly an effort to come to terms, instead bore a request that his enemy might murder the bearer. Lugalzaggesi declined the assignment and kept on marching towards Kish.
This part of the story may be apocryphal. Stories of Sargon were much embroidered by later Assyrian kings, who claimed him as their great progenitor; certainly the next part of the tale, in which Lugalzaggesi’s wife welcomes Sargon by offering “her femininity as a shelter,” falls into a very long tradition of portraying great conquerors as sexually irresistible. However, the attack on Kish itself suggests that Sargon was not fully behind his king. Lugalzaggesi marches triumphantly into Kish while Ur-Zababa is forced to flee. Sargon, presumably Ur-Zababa’s right-hand man, is nowhere in sight.
Apparently, while Lugalzaggesi was revelling in his victory, Sargon was collecting an army of his own (perhaps culled from Ur-Zababa’s forces through careful recruiting, over the previous years) and marching towards Uruk; we can deduce this because accounts of the battle reveal that Lugalzaggesi was absent, when Sargon first hove into view on the horizon, and his city was taken by surprise. “He laid waste the city Uruk,” Sargon’s victory inscription tells us, “destroyed its wall and fought with the men of Uruk and conquered them.”6
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 11