2012 Presumptive State

EARLY MESOPOTAMIA: THE
PRESUMPTIVE STATE*
I will proceed with my history, telling the story as I go along of small cities
no less than of great . . . Since I know that mans good fortune never abides
in the same place, I will make mention of both alike.
Herodotus, Histories, I. 5. 3.
* Earlier references to this work were to the title Brush Wars and Bull Wages. I am
indebted to Abbas Alizadeh, Dan Arnold, Steven Garfinkle, Maynard Maidman,
David Owen, Susan Pollock, Eric Slauter and Konrad Volk for their thoughtful comments on and help with earlier drafts.
Abbreviations and text sigla (for example CT, Kessler, PRAK, RA, YOS) follow
those of The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
(Chicago, 19562010), itself hereafter CAD. Other following standard works will
be abbreviated as follows: Douglas Frayne, Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Early
Periods, iv, Old Babylonian Period (20031595 BC) (Toronto, 1990), hereafter RIME, iv;
D. O. Edzard and G. Farber, Repertoire geographique des textes cuneiformes, ii, Die Ortsund Gewassernamen der Zeit der 3. Dynastie von Ur (Wiesbaden, 1974), hereafter
RGTC, ii; Brigitte Groneberg, Repertoire geographique des textes cuneiformes, iii, Die
Orts- und Gewassernamen der altbabylonischen Zeit (Wiesbaden, 1980), hereafter
bersetzung (Leiden:
RGTC, iii. The series Altbabylonische Briefe in Umschrift und U
Brill) is hereafter AbB: editors of the cited volumes are F. R. Kraus, i (1964), iv
(1968) and vii (1977); M. Stol, xi (1986); W. H. van Soldt, xii (1990) and xiii
(1994); and K. R. Veenhof, xiv (2005). References to CDLI year-names correspond
to the website of Marcel Sigrist and Peter Damerow, 5http://cdli.ucla.edu/tools/
yearnames4; ETCSL corresponds to Jeremy A. Black et al., The Electronic Text
Corpus of Sumerian Literature (Oxford, 1998 ),5http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/4.
Past and Present, no. 215 (May 2012)
doi:10.1093/pastj/gts009
! The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2012
Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on May 18, 2012
INTRODUCTION
Our earliest account of Mesopotamian state origins comes from

the Sumerian King List, compiled around 2000 BC, which blandly
confines its aetiology to: When kingship descended from heaven,
the kingship was in the city of Eridu. The time to which it alludes,
the Uruk period of more than a thousand years before, saw the
simultaneous appearance in southern Mesopotamia of massive
urbanism, writing technologies, and institutional political authority the cultural assemblage of an early pristine state.
Although modern interpreters of this florescence at first defined
it primarily in ideological terms as, for example, the Sumerian
Temple State model the last fifty years of scholarship have
turned squarely to explanatory models that focus on the synergy
of man and his landscape: hydraulic management, storage
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
Late Uruk
Early Dynastic
Akkadian
Ur III
Old Babylonian2
Kassite
Middle Babylonian
Neo-Babylonian
Persian
c.35003100 BC
c.29002334 BC
23342193 BC
21122004 BC
20041595 BC
/ 14751155 BC
1155627 BC
626539 BC
539331 BC
1
Modern nation-state sovereignty as accomplished and transhistorical might be
equally presumptive, though, given the endurance of regressive problems such as
failed states, non-state actors, military and criminal states within states and unresolved borderlines, as well as progressive institutions representing transnational and
global interests such as trade organizations, criminal courts and aid groups.
2
Mesopotamian archaeologists subdivide this period into an IsinLarsa phase for
the first two centuries and an Old Babylonian phase for the next two centuries. The
meaning of the latter term may thus differ from work to work.
economies, environmental circumscription, and so forth. There

can be no doubt that the built landscape and means of production
were chief concerns of early managerial polities, but the rapid
development of the technological capacities of these early polities
has led to the terminological supposition that something called
the state, as idea and entity, had therefore emerged just as suddenly and as permanently.
But early states were incomplete. Less than the sum of their
attributes, Mesopotamian polities were more aspirational than
operational in their geographic, legal and communitarian sovereignty. Notwithstanding, their aspirations to sovereignty were very
real from a remarkably early stage, even though state powers remained incipient and unaccomplished for millennia. In this apparent paradox lies the occasion for this essay: even the highly
selective types of claims made by early states reveal their simultaneous deployment of both persuasion and force not as fully realized powers, but as a cohering discourse of desire. Although
early states were weak, they were presumptive of an integrated
sovereign authority not normally held to be conceived of until the
modern period.1 In seeing the ambition of ancient states to appropriate and build authority in the very act of claiming it, I argue
that early polities can be usefully apprehended in terms normally
reserved for modern states, not because their powers were more
extensive, integrated or accomplished than has previously been
thought they were not but because their aspirations were.
The historical periods under discussion are:
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
My analysis focuses on the periods during which states first

cohered around large cities in the TigrisEuphrates alluvium
(see Map 1). In particular, I look at the Old Babylonian period,
which gives us our clearest view of interaction not only between
great states, but between great states and middle-tier (minor kingdoms) and lower-tier (non-state actors) political orders. Intercity
warfare and the international scene have always enjoyed the lions
share of Assyriological attention, but the records of those very
same urban states just as often focused on tribal hinterlands
and unnamed clusters of villages. Minor kingship and small
wars have remained under-conceptualized and largely unexamined, despite their modal positions in the power spectrum and
record of conflict. A new interpretative strategy focusing on these
forms reveals a longue duree quite different from that suggested
by narratives of great-states-in-conflict: despite an impressive
MAP 1. EARLY MESOPOTAMIA ! Jack Scott, 2010.
PAST AND PRESENT
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3
See Seth Richardson, The World of Babylonian Countrysides, in Gwendolyn
Leick (ed.), The Babylonian World (London, 2007); cf. Steven Grosby, Borders,
Territory and Nationality in the Ancient Near East and Armenia, Jl Econ. and
Social Hist. of the Orient, xl (1997), who asserts (p. 26): if certain anachronistic assumptions are laid to rest such as political and legal standards bounded, national
entities would in fact be visible in the ancient record, collectivities of nativity founded
in (self-/group-)consciousness under which territory is a constitutive referent of that
relation. The drawback of this carefully articulated view, in my opinion, is that it tends
to accept evidence linking territoriality and identity as descriptive and accomplished,
whereas I see it as idealizing and unachieved.
4
Roland Axtmann, The State of the State: The Model of the Modern State and its
Contemporary Transformation, Internat. Polit. Science Rev., xxv (2004); Rosa
Ehrenreich Brooks, Failed States, or the State as Failure?, Univ. of Chicago Law
Rev., lxxii (2005); Stephen J. Del Rosso Jr, The Insecure State: Reflections on the
State and Security in a Changing World, Daedalus, cxxiv, 2 (1995); Richard Falk,
Revisiting Westphalia, Discovering Post-Westphalia, Jl Ethics, vi (2002); Charles
Tilly, War Making and State Making as Organized Crime, in Peter B. Evans,
Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In
(Cambridge, 1985).
political apparatus of international diplomats, treaties, epistolary protocols, spies and field armies, the full control of early
states over their own rural zones and border marches remained
an unfinished project more than a millennium after they first
appeared.3
The governing assumption has been that small wars were secondary phenomena produced by major-state warfare, but this is
not necessarily warranted. The idea descends from a framework
which has, caveats notwithstanding, implicitly modelled ancient
state systems as having substantially accomplished uniform territorial control, legally constituted political rule, and political
membership identities by the end of the Early Dynastic period
(around the twenty-fifth century BC). But there is a problem with
this model. It is not so much that modernist approaches are inapplicable to antiquity. After all, the points made below about
unfinished states may equally well apply to the contemporary
state system: political scientists have been increasingly uncertain
about the position of the state and the nation as transhistorical
forms, speaking of the defective or insecure state and of an
incomplete modernity,4 even as they recognize governance
functions in non-state organizations as exemplified in Hezbollahs organization of the collection of municipal waste, in the
semi-autonomy of Brazilian favelas, and in the provision of
security by Somali or Afghani warlords.
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
5
Two important attempts to rectify this view are Adam T. Smiths recent
Archaeologies of Sovereignty, Ann. Rev. Anthropology, xl (2011), and Henry T.
Wrights Early State Dynamics as Political Experiment, Jl Anthropol. Research, lxii
(2006).
6
Sarah B. Pomeroy et al., Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History
(Oxford, 1999), 712, 95; Timothy Howe, Pastoral Politics: Animals, Agriculture and
Society in Ancient Greece (Publications of the Association of Ancient Historians, ix,
Claremont, Calif., 2008), ch. 4; Francois de Polignac, Cults, Territory, and the Origins
of the Greek City-State, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago, 1995), 6. These views are tempered, however, by references to socio-economic disparities rather than outright scarcity of resources. Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making, 1200479 BC (London, 1996),
ch. 3, however, has challenged the population-pressure thesis, for example p. 88:
Dark Age Greece had low population densities, new agricultural land was readily
available to those who had the labour available to make use of it, and communities
increasingly needed to keep up their size in order to maintain status in a world where
competition between individuals and groups was becoming regular. In these circumstances, the fact that people left their home community to settle abroad is not a measure of state power but a measure of the limits to the control rulers could exert.
Similarly, see Lin Foxhall, Cultures, Landscapes, and Identities in the Mediterranean World, Mediterranean Hist. Rev., xviii (2003).
Instead, the real problem with a model of antiquity that presumes state sovereignty and focuses on international competition
has four main defects: it eclipses the substantial, ongoing role of
sub- and non-state actors; it ignores the developmental and maintenance issues of conflict and consensus in ancient states; it relegates internal state competition and persuasion to the prehistoric
era; and it valorizes state-to-state peer competition as the singular
concern of historic periods.
What does such a model cost us? We miss the slow, millenniumlong development of state systems as they continued to compete
internally for clientele, while simultaneously struggling externally
to achieve regional primacy and dominance over peer states.
The historiographic root of the problem is located in the uncritical reproduction of an ancient analytic binary construction of
lands and peoples, with resulting anachronisms when these
are mapped onto modern conceptions of territorial competition.
At its heart, the disconnect between scholars and their evidence
has been a disposition to regard the early state as being instantiated geographically rather than politically, and materially rather
than ideologically.5
Accordingly, state relations have been seen as rooted in territorial competition for land rather than in political competition for
constituencies. A scarcity of land has at times been argued to have
been an important factor in the development of the Greek poleis6
PAST AND PRESENT
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Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, 206.
an important comparative case and a concern for borders

and sovereignty indeed pervades the Babylonian record.7 But
Babylonias surfeit of land and dearth of labour points to political control as being structured primarily by states needs for
clients and constituents and for their labour not by a need
for land. The local skirmishes of the Old Babylonian period
are thus misunderstood when they are viewed as border conflicts, mere by-products of competition between territorial
states. Rather, they should be seen as a recrudescence of an
epochal competition for the allegiance of rural and non-state
constituencies which were increasing in number during this
time.
With a view to developing the foregoing theses, I consider
several different historical problems of the Mesopotamian state
and land which have not before been treated together. These
issues, I suggest, are together revealing of prevailing social formations in early polities, and help make sense of discrepancies in
the records which have for decades attracted comment but inadequate explanations from specialists. Thus in section II, I develop a critical historiographic review of a model of territorial
sovereignty suggested by the mid third millennium BC Lagas
Umma border conflict. Here I establish that early states interests and abilities to control territory have been overstated and
that we should presume a low-power model for early state
sovereignty.
In sections IIIV, I move on to address unresolved historical
problems best visible in the much later Old Babylonian period
(20041595 BC), to argue for early states fundamental competition for clientele (for hearts, minds and bodies) rather than for
land. The aim of section III is to reinterpret the nineteenth-/
eighteenth-century BC prosecution of small wars against little
kingdoms as normative rather than exceptional; I contend that
state control over even very local geography was still unaccomplished deep into the historical period.
Building on this observation, section IV juxtaposes the small
wars problem with the discourses by which urban states
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
structured their political relationship to small places. The

identity of lower-tier political units as both enemies (that is,
security threats) and scattered people (that is, clientele to be
recruited and organized) represents an ambivalent strategy
to herd non-state clients into state orders by both force and
persuasion. This properly reorients early state political economy
and competition as focused on building clientage, not land
holdings.
Finally, section V looks at the development of the royal legal
voice in the Old Babylonian period as part of a broader discourse
of persuasion. This voice included the persuasive mechanisms of
promulgated law-codes and the rhetorical claims of the Crown to
be the arbiter and guarantor of order and social justice. I also link
to these a particular group of edicts for the land, part of the royal
pretension to control economic activity legally. This argument
would give a larger context to Mesopotamian law, seeing even
the ages most famous monument, the Code of Hammurabi, as
representative of a set of powers that the state desired and
could even develop conceptually to degrees of high complexity
and specificity without yet having the ability to operate or
impose them.
Informing my consideration of all these cases is one basic historiographic premise, that political and ideological forces have
been subordinated to economic ones as explanatory devices for
the organization of early states, and that a kind of bigotry about
political-economic primitivism for antiquity inheres in that subordination. A presumption of political sophistication presents us
with rather a different view: we see the early state as ideationally
complex and ambitious, despite its limitations of manpower, resources and technologies. Much of this argument is supported by
bringing to bear a reading of the cuneiform record that moves
away from seeing texts as descriptive of facts and towards a historical view of the evidence as dependable mostly in representing
claims. But there is a historical argument here too: state formation
was not an event simply accomplished at any one point, but an
ongoing project well into the historic periods indeed a project
unbroken and unfinished between antiquity and modernity. A
breaking-up of this distinction, I hope, should help reopen a
more nuanced and enriched dialogue about antiquitys place
within the historical disciplines.
10
PAST AND PRESENT
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II
THE EARLY DYNASTIC PARADIGM
8
Jerrold S. Cooper, Reconstructing History from Ancient Inscriptions: The Lagash
Umma Border Conflict (Malibu, 1983).
9
Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 90002000 BC, trans.
Elizabeth Lutzeier, with Kenneth J. Northcott (Chicago, 1988), 1315; Josef Bauer,
Der vorsargonische Abschnitt der mesopotamischen Geschichte, in Josef Bauer,
Robert K. Englund and Manfred Krebernik, Mesopotamien: Spaturuk-Zeit und
Fruhdynastische Zeit (Freiburg, Switzerland, 1998), 523; John Baines and Norman
Yoffee, Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, in Gary
M. Feinman and Joyce Marcus (eds.), Archaic States (Santa Fe, 1998), 226.
Standing at the opening of the Mesopotamian historical narrative, the LagasUmma Border Conflict8 has become emblematic for seeing early state development as an outcome of
competition for agricultural land demanded by expanding populations.9 The foundational power of the story derives in part from
its position as the earliest continuous account of political events
in human history. The narrative can be pieced together from
eighteen royal inscriptions preserved on clay cones, stone stelae,
statues and boulders from the twenty-fifth and the twenty-fourth
centuries BC. These show a 150-year-long military conflict between Lagas and Umma, two adjacent Sumerian city states, for
control of a highly productive 50-kilometre borderland centred
on a massive field called the Guedenna (the edge of the steppe).
Seven separate battles are documented, of which only the earliest
and briefest account does not mention the border as the object
of contention. The story is woefully lopsided virtually all our
sources come from the Lagas side and steeped in the tendentious language of royal rhetoric, which frames the war in terms of
hoary legal precedent, claims of back-rent laid on Umma, and
Lagass divine right to the Guedenna.
Competition for sustaining hinterlands is the most common
explanation for this conflict and many that follow it. Consequently, territorial expansion fuelled by population growth, an
essentially bio-environmental model, is most commonly cited
as the cause for the rise of the state, and the continuation of regional interstate warfare up until its cessation, c.600 BC indeed,
its continuing raison detre. The archaeological model developed
by Robert McCormick Adams by the early 1970s provided apparent confirmation of this position by mapping out Early Dynastic production zones that gradually came to abut one another,
11
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
10
10
The image of this map has developed an almost talismanic power, despite
Adamss demurrals (see n. 11 below); cf. Nissen, Early History of the Ancient Near
East, 132 and fig. 52: at the [Early Dynastic] times under consideration the supposed
areas of influence were far apart.
11
Those familiar with Adamss writings will know that he was and is averse to
categorical statements. His own disposition, however, was to see no discernibly
bounded regional units within Babylonia, that population levels were low in relation
to the potentially arable area . . . [and] water rather than land was the critical determinant: Robert McC. Adams and Hans J. Nissen, The Uruk Countryside: The Natural
Setting of Urban Societies (Chicago, 1972), 89 ff.; similarly, Robert McC. Adams, Land
behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains (Chicago, 1965), 19. For a
specific illustration, see Adamss estimate in his An Interdisciplinary Overview of a
Mesopotamian City and its Hinterlands, Cuneiform Digital Lib. Jl, i (2008) that
only around 7 per cent of Ur III Ummas land was ever under institutional cultivation.
More directly, see statements by Nissen, Early History of the Ancient Near East, 60,
1412; and Elizabeth C. Stone, The Constraints on State and Urban Form in Ancient
Mesopotamia, in Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine (eds.), Urbanization and
Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (Peabody Museum Bull., vii, Cambridge,
Mass., 1999), 2056, who wrote that the abundance of land in relation to the population forced elites to find means other than direct coercion in order to maintain the
necessary agricultural labor force. Michel Jursa, The Babylonian Economy in the
First Millennium BC, in Leick (ed.), Babylonian World, 225, says that a shortage of
arable land began only in the seventh century BC. Cf. the position of Johannes Renger,
that a cycle of land unavailability resulting from poor irrigation led to limited population growth which, in turn, had repercussions for the amount of manpower available: see his The Economy of Ancient Mesopotamia: A General Outline, in Leick
(ed.), Babylonian World, 194.
12
By way of comparison, see Bruce G. Trigger et al., Ancient Egypt: A Social History
(Cambridge, 1983), 51, 62, 103, 190, where the authors estimate Egyptian populations of 2, 11.5, 2.94.5 and 77.5 million for Predynastic, Old/Middle Kingdom,
late New Kingdom and Hellenistic/Roman Egypt, respectively. The population of the
entire world in 3000 BC has been estimated at around 14 million: Clive Ponting, A
Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New
York, 1991); Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History
(New York, 1978), 34251, as currently accepted by the US Census Bureau. These
same sources estimate world populations of 27, 50 and 100 million people by 2000,
1000 and 500 BC. For the Mesopotamian rate/figures, see Ester Boserup, Population
(cont. on p. 12)
spurring competition for sustaining hinterlands (see Map 2). In

all, the LagasUmma episode and the Adams model have become
nearly as one, establishing a kind of historiographic hegemony.
At the same time, however, there is also some agreement that
what Mesopotamian political economies lacked in most times
was not available land, but labour to open it up to cultivation,
principally through the extension of canals.11 Water management
in all periods played a key role perhaps even constituted the
mediating resource between land and labour. In very broad
terms, lower Mesopotamia, an area of roughly 110,000 square
kilometres, probably possessed a human population of around
half a million people in 3000 BC,12 with enough land to give
12
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
(n. 12 cont.)
and Technological Change: A Study of Long-Term Trends (Chicago, 1981). J. C. Russell,

Late Ancient and Medieval Population (Philadelphia, 1958), gives a combined
Syro-Palestinian-Mesopotamian population of 6.5 million in the fourth century AD.
13
Cf. Map 3, which assumes minimum subsistence needs of about a quarter of a
hectare per person.
14
On trade specifically, see Jerrold S. Cooper, Presargonic Inscriptions (New Haven,
1986), Ad 6; La 1.2 and passim in Ur-Nanses inscriptions; La 4.3.
15
Cooper, Presargonic Inscriptions, non-Lagas conflicts: Ki 7: Kis vanquishes Elam;
Uk 4.1: Uruk sacks Kis and Aksak. Lagas conflicts against states other than Umma: La
1.6: against Ur; La 3.53.9, 3.11: in various combinations, against Elam, Urua, Uruk,
Ur, Kiutu, Uruaz, Misime, Arua, Aksak, Kis, Subartu and Mari; La 10.2: probably a
conflict between Lagas and Uruk. Aside from the LagasUmma conflicts, only Lagass
actions against Ur and Uruk conceivably involved border disputes; all other states were
either Elamite principalities or more northerly Mesopotamian city states. The closest
statement resembling a casus belli among these inscriptions is that Aksak is simply said
to have attacked Lagas (La 3.53.6), and that both it and several other states were
beaten back from the [border-field] Antasura.
16
Cooper, Presargonic Inscriptions, Ki 3.2; La 5.3, a brotherhood between Uruk
and Larsa.
every nuclear family more than 15 ha more than enough for

general sustainability.13 This understanding has thus always
stood at odds with the image of early city states as expanding
multi-cellular bubbles of production and population which
began to intrude on one another by the late Early Dynastic period.
The LagasUmma conflict proves to be the wrong model.
This conflict is virtually unique within the corpus of Early
Dynastic royal inscriptions, which are primarily concerned with
temple-building, the dedication of votive objects, and longdistance trade.14 Of 173 other Early Dynastic royal inscriptions
not from Umma and Lagas, only ten mention seventeen cases of
intercity warfare: seventeen conflicts of which only two do not
involve Lagas; just two cases involve bordering states; and
no inscription states casus belli.15 The nine city dynasties that
left behind epigraphic evidence mentioned conflict only in the
barest and rarest terms. Victory seemed inconsequential to any
particular issue the hallmark of prestige-raiding, not statebuilding. Our few other references to regional power relations
are too vague to infer hegemony, and several show co-ordination
as well as competition between city states.16 These comities can
be seen in the trade network revealed by the Early Dynastic
city-seals indicating co-ordination of trade, defence coalitions,
and the regional acceptance of the federate legal authority of
MAP 2. Simulation of Early Dynastic I Period Cultivated Areas, after

R. McC. Adams, Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use
on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates (Chicago, 1981), 93. Courtesy of
the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
14
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
17
Not the least of this criticism is via Adamss own later work: see, for example, his
Interdisciplinary Overview of a Mesopotamian City and its Hinterlands, xx9.19.2,
9.4.
18
As in Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, 21, the following postulates resulted in Map 3: populations were estimated at a residential density of 75
persons per hectare; minimal caloric needs per person per annum 250 kg barley;
annual production rates 881 kg barley per hectare. Roughly speaking, every hectare
of occupied settlement required roughly 21 ha of sustaining area. These figures are
closely adapted from the working standards of the Oriental Institutes Modeling
Ancient Settlement Systems (MASS) Project, developed by Tony Wilkinson.
19
On what borders there were, see Richardson, World of Babylonian
Countrysides, 204; cf. recent thinking on Mesoamerican cases: Charles Stanish
and Abigail Levine, War and Early State Formation in the Northern Titicaca
Basin, Peru, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sciences, cviii (2011).
King Mesilim of Kis. Thus the LagasUmma war was an exception, not a paradigm.
It can hardly, then, be an accident that the influential model of
productive lands developed by Adams (again, see Map 2) shows
the area east-north-east of Uruk the region of Lagas and
Umma as among the most densely settled in all of lower
Mesopotamia. Adamss reconstruction has, it must also be said,
remained open to question due to its probable overestimation
of urban population density, which unduly amplifies the supposed pressure on early states to expand production.17 If we
employ an algorithm demonstrating subsistence needs and
more probable population densities, Early Dynastic production
zones take on a much more insular aspect within their hinterlands
(see Map 3).18
Most cities of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia were managers of
finite patches of land, isolated pockets of production in larger seas
of open space, and this remained the case well into the first millennium BC. Since contiguous territorial states with clearly defined
borders were not firmly established within lower Mesopotamia
in any period, border disputes and resource competitions were
exceptional forms of interstate conflict.19 Supposing, then,
that competition for land was not the primary cause of early interstate conflict, this essay proposes that early states mostly struggled
to control local, open space and recruit non-aligned populations; they chased after sovereignty, not yet having grasped it.
MAP 3. SIMULATION OF EARLY DYNASTIC-PERIOD CULTIVATED

AREAS (IN WHITE) ! Carrie Hritz, 2009; see also n. 18 above.
16
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
III
LITTLE KINGDOMS AND SMALL WARS
20
The intervening Akkadian and Ur III states (23342193 and 21122004 BC,
respectively) had their own difficulties in resolving intercity competition, but since
these central states produced monovocal political records, these tensions were deliberately muted in the written evidence.
21
Prior to the rise of Akkad c.2330 BC, the terminal phase of the Early Dynastic
period was marked by multiple centres in competition, but our textual information is
more or less limited to the Lagas state, and our archaeological evidence to the
(cont. on p. 17)
If we are able to establish that Mesopotamian polities from

an early date were not built on competition for territory, we
must turn our attention to a substantially later time, the Old
Babylonian period (20041595 BC), for a better-documented
look at the continuing effort to build the state idea against competing lower-order political communities. This period provides a
much larger and denser body of evidence than previous ones, as
well as plentiful cases of interstate warfare.20 A good deal of this
evidence derives from year-names: the convention for dating in
this period was to identify years with names celebrating political
and civic events (for example Year in which Akusum was destroyed and the army of Kazallu was smitten by weapons fourth
year of King Sumu-El of Larsa 1891 BC). More than 2,000 such
year-names are known from multiple dynasties. Though openly
propagandistic, year-names nevertheless form an important
corpus of historical information: they make clear that the Old
Babylonian period was an age of major city states at war with
each other, and this competition has been the focus of its histories.
At no point is the broad spectrum of power-holders more
visible than in this time. The four centuries prior to the Old
Babylonian period, when intercity warfare became endemic,
were dominated by the central hegemonic states of Akkad and
Ur. These states seized the ancient imagination as ideal types, and
the sources they produced have been privileged by modern historians as paradigmatic. But we must recognize that the 250 years
of central-state dominance (or 291 years, counting Babylons
brief hegemony) stand out as anomalous within the thousand
years of recorded political history between c.2600 and 1600; for
709 of those years, division was the norm. While the direct evidence for warfare among these polities does not suggest they were
steeped in a nightmarish, Malthusian state of war-for-survival,
the basic political template was a culture of competition.21 The
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
17
(n. 21 cont.)
circumvallation of cities. And prior to that, we have little indication of cross-scale or

peer conflict stretching back into the Uruk period and before. This distribution of
evidence has, predictably, linked the phenomena of warfare and the state as related
developments, but this should not lead us to assume either that prehistoric societies
were inherently or structurally peaceful, or that war was somehow a natural, rather
than a cultural development. See Doyne Dawson, The Origins of War: Biological and
Anthropological Theories, History and Theory, xxxv (1996); Helle Vandkilde,
Commemorative Tales: Archaeological Responses to Modern Myth, Politics, and
War, World Archaeology, xxxv (2003).
22
Mesopotamian archaeology has begun to integrate the roles of small places and
state centres within larger strategic and competitive networks by expanding from a
previous focus on elite centres to the documentation of the entire alluvial settlement
system: see T. J. Wilkinson, Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East (Tucson, 2003);
Carrie Hritz, Landscape and Settlement in Southern Mesopotamia: A GeoArchaeological Analysis, 2 vols. (Univ. of Chicago Ph.D. thesis, 2005). Their work
has revealed a natural landscape indisposed to centrally managed engineering, and
inclined towards multiple productive centres.
23
Given our knowledge of the fortification of this site by the shadowy Manana
dynasty, this may not have been such an insignificant place; the date of that fortification, however, is not known.
24
CDLI year-names: Sabum was also a target of Kisurras kings unplaced
year-formulae in BM 28456 and 28458.
25
CDLI year-names (cities in bold): Larsa: Sumu-el 4, 10, 16; Sn-iddinam 5;
Rm-Sn 17, 18; Isin: Isbi-Erra 4, 8; Babylon: Hammurabi 10, 12, 32, 33.
heterarchic, competitive landscape of the Old Babylonian period,

then, had actually been the norm for centuries,22 but it is the first
period in which this situation coincided with an abundant textual
record. The Old Babylonian period post-1900 BC, therefore, provides us with the first thick description of intercity competition,
including conflict between mutually recognized peer states.
But what we also see is this: as major peer states such as Isin,
Larsa and Babylon warred against each other, their year-names
more often celebrated with equal fanfare the conquest of
village settlements scattered throughout the landscape. States at
this late date still contended with their own hinterlands and competed for non-aligned clientele, long after the history/pre-history
divide. None of the following conquered places, for instance, had
any record of political or military strength corresponding to the
larger powers which conquered them: Larsa celebrated the seizure or destruction of Akusum,23 of Sabum and the Euphrates
villages,24 Nanna-isa, Ibrat and surrounding towns, ImgurGibil, Zibnatum, Bt-Su-Sn and Uzarpana; Isin destroyed
Girtab and the Amorite city; and Babylon did the same to the
city and villages of Malgium, the cities of the land of Rapiqum
and Salibi, the Tigris banks and the cities of Subartu.25 Even
18
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
26
RGTC, iii, 128 normalizes as Ka-Ibaum, but erroneously transliterates as
di-ba-um is correct.
KA-di-ba-um(-ma); KA
27
Astabala may be the best-attested and most important of these places; most of the
others are unknown outside the year-names themselves.
28
Marcel Sigrist, Isin Year Names (Berrien Springs, 1988); Marcel Sigrist, Larsa
Year Names (Berrien Springs, 1990); Malcolm J. A. Horsnell, The Year-Names of the
First Dynasty of Babylon, 2 vols. (Hamilton, Ont., 1999). The year-names of the two
dynasties of Larsa and Babylon alone mention sixty-five campaigns in about 350 years,
to say nothing of those clashes recorded by other dynasties, and in other text genres
such as royal inscriptions and diplomatic correspondence. Documentation of these
conflicts does not really begin until around a century after the fall of Ur (2004 BC), with
the 1914 BC battle between Larsa and Malgium celebrated in the 19th year-name of
Gungunum of Larsa; an isolated cluster of conflicts between 2014 and 2002 associated
with Isbi-Erra of Isin should probably be considered more part of the events surrounding the collapse of the Ur III state than with intercity war per se. The southern revolts
against Samsuiluna of Babylon in the 1730s may be counted as the termination of this
competitive phase.
29
The term evokes cosmic geographies; see Gilgames references: CAD, P, s.v. pu A
9d.
minor states recorded victories over lesser-known or unknown

places: Kisurra over Ibarum, Kazallu over the fortress
Ehubba, and Esnunna over the Amorites of Bab-Ibaum,26
Isur, Unnina, Astabala, MahaBum and Tarnip.27
Next to nothing is known about these defeated groups and
toponyms (including their location); they can be defined by
their virtual absence from the textual record other than in the
year-names, only in their defeat by larger, better-documented
hegemons. Of course, territorial wars often entail the tactical seizure of minor settlements in the pursuit of the conquest of other
major states, and military conflict itself was in no way unusual:
Old Babylonian year-names were peppered with references to
regional wars beginning around 1914 BC.28 But what is remarkable is that these conquests of villages received equal billing in the
celebratory year-names with victories over major foreign states;
the attention given to small places stands out in the larger record.
The reasons for the recognition of small places in this context are
far from clear, but at least one such small place is well known
enough to permit some closer examination: that case suggests
that small wars of the period were not secondary by-products
of peer-state warfare, but cross-scale, local conflicts which were in
fact more typical of the period as a whole.
The village in question was called P-naratim, the Mouth of
the Canals.29 Sumu-El, king of Larsa, celebrated a military victory over this place in 1886 BC, claiming to have destroyed it
19
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
30
30
Full year-name text (and variants) here: mu uru(ki) ka-d-da ba-(an-)hul; Sigrist,
Larsa Year Names, 17.
31
As mu-us-sa-types, Year after the year X, and mu-us-sa-a-bi, Second year
after X.
32
See Marten Stol, Studies in Old Babylonian History (Leiden, 1976), on this
year-name.
33
Piotr Steinkeller, City and Countryside in Third-Millennium Southern
Babylonia, in Elizabeth C. Stone (ed.), Settlement and Society: Essays Dedicated to
Robert McCormick Adams (Chicago, 2007), 183: in Ur III times, an important relay
point in the boat traffic between Umma and the Tigris.
34
Kisurra, either of its own initiative or as a proxy for Uruk, may have occasionally
harried P-naratim: Dominique Charpin, Histoire politique du Proche-Orient
Amorrite (20021595), in Dominque Charpin, Dietz Otto Edzard and Marten
Stol, Mesopotamien: die altbabylonische Zeit (Gottingen, 2004), 75 and n. 244; 112
and n. 464. See also Burkhart Kienast, Die altbabylonischen Briefe und Urkunden aus
Kisurra, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1978), ii, 127, nos. 129, 130. It may also be that Larsas
intermittent loss of control at the yet more northerly, crucial strategic site of
(cont. on p. 20)
(Sumerian: su . . . hul; to destroy by the hand). The victory

was important enough to provide the subject matter for
Sumu-Els next two year-names as well.31 Yet, though destroyed, P-naratim once again required seizing (Sumerian:
dab5) by a king of Larsa forty-seven years later in 1839 BC
this time by Sn-iqsam of Larsa, recorded in his second
year-name,32 now along with a second place called Nazarum,
even though these areas were already within the bounds of his
land. The recalcitrant P-naratim and Nazarum once more
required reconquest by Larsa in 1808 BC, its seizure of them
again claimed in the 15th year-name of Rm-Sn.
Where was this little place? Though P-naratim was not a
unique toponym within Babylonia, this one was almost certainly
the one located along the Tigris above the city of Umma, just 34
miles from Larsa (see Map 1 and Appendix 1).33 That puts
P-naratim directly upstream from Larsa, at a distance close
enough to be under its administrative control. It was not, as
some have argued, the place with the same name three times as
far away, close to Kis, which would have had greatly different
implications about Larsas interests: that P-naratim would have
been a target for prestige raiding at a distance, deep in (and
across) enemy territory.
But this P-naratim was close to Larsa, and that is what makes
the point such a different one: a minor settlement within a major
states immediate territorial ambit required repeated pacification.
It is, of course, not impossible that the town was merely a pawn in
a border war with another power.34 But the Tigris branches above
20
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
(n. 34 cont.)
Maskan-sapir was either a cause or a result of a failure to hold the intermediate site of
P-naratim on the Tigris. Maskan-sapir was lost to Larsas control for an unknown
length of time between 1932 and 1860 BC, and then again around 18421830 BC: see
Piotr Steinkeller, A History of Mashkan-shapir and its Role in the Kingdom of Larsa,
in Elizabeth C. Stone and Paul Zimansky, The Anatomy of a Mesopotamian City: Survey
and Soundings at Mashkan-shapir (Winona Lake, 2004), 278.
35
To clarify, royal polities herein include Isin, Babylon, Larsa, Uruk, Esnunna,
Kisurra and Kazallu; non-royal polities include those places for which no royal inscriptions or year-names are known, but also a few for which royal materials were only
briefly or incompletely produced, for example Malgium and Diniktum (two kings
each).
36
CDLI year-names (cities in bold): Kisurra: king unknown, year q,
Alumbiumu; Saduppum: Hammi-dusur d, city of S: illi-Adad; Larsa: Sumu-la-el
3, Halambu ( Alumbiumu?); Sumu-la-el 18, 25 (both Yahzirel); Babylon:
Ammiditana 17, Arahab, man of the lands; 37 (the wall of Udinim built by the
army of Damiq-ilisu); Esnunna: Iqis-Tispak b (Iakun-[ ]).
37
Ibid.: Esnunna: Ibal-pi-El II 4, land of MahaBum; Larsa: Sumu-el 10,
Euphrates villages; Sn-iddinam 5, Ibrats surrounding towns; Sn-iddinam 6,
lands of Esnunna; Babylon: Hammurabi 10, cities and villages of Malgium; 12,
cities of the land of Rapiqum and Shalibi; 32, the Tigris bank.
38
Ibid.: Esnunna: Bilalama b, Amorites of/in the field of Ibbi-Sn; c, Amorites of
Isurki; e, Amorites of Bab-Ibaum; h, Amorites; i, Amorites; Isin: Isbi-Erra 8,
Amorite city; Lipit-Istar h, Amorites; Babylon: Samsuiluna 9, the Kassite
army; 36, Amorite villages; Abi-esuh d, Kassites.
Umma were firmly under Larsas control as early as 1890 BC, and
what contested border towns there were between Larsa, Uruk
and Isin were all situated to the west, along the Euphrates. The
record of Larsas efforts to control P-naratim puts the village in a
larger category of unpacified and non-aligned non-state actors,
not merely border towns that were traded between major states.
Not only the minor political standing of these small places,
but also the lack of geographic knowledge on the part of major
states about this long list of conquered places deserves independent comment. As noted above, many of these small places are
known only from the year-names, since they never appear in texts
documenting other kinds of contact with major states. Fifty-three
non-royal polities (that is, those with no known independent
kingship tradition) were celebrated in year-names as the targets
of military action by major states in this period.35 In eight out of
fifty-three cases, only the personal name of an enemy leader is
documented, with no further geographic information;36 in seven
cases, the location of the target is given only vaguely (for example
the Euphrates villages);37 another ten times, only the ethnonym
of the enemy is provided, with little or no indication of location.38
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
21
39
An exception is Rm-Sns inscription, RIME, iv, 2.14.14, which incorporates
some of the minor places conquered in his Year 1720 alongside victories over Kisurra
and Uruk. Samsuilunas restoration of the various fortresses of the land of Warum
which he had destroyed (ibid., 3.7.8) and the Year 24 formula probably both refer to
his small war near the Diyala region.
40
In between, note the number of asymmetric wars in which the action of state v.
state was supplemented on one or both sides by non-state actors, for example
Hammurabi 32, against the armies of Esnunna (state), Subartu and Gutium
(non-states).
41
See Sigrist, Isin Year Names; Sigrist, Larsa Year Names; Horsnell, Year-Names of
the First Dynasty of Babylon; cf. CDLI year-names for those of the Diyala rulers.
An analysis of these memorializations of small wars gives three

interesting results. First, hardly any of these conquests mentioned
in the year-names were celebrated in parallel fashion in monumental royal inscriptions.39 Allusions to specific wars of all sizes
are less common in the latter corpus, so this partly reflects generic
conventions, but their omission takes on more importance given
our second point: small wars in the year-names outnumber
peer-state conflicts (that is, royal and territorial ones) by about
2:1. Third, a comparison of royal and non-royal targets reveals a
very dependable pattern of verbs indicating that, while small
places were said to have been physically destroyed or seized
(that is, wars of territory), warfare between peer states was
marked by the smiting of armies rather than cities (that is, wars
of force-reduction).40
The verbs in the year-names consistently indicate that campaigns against smaller places aimed to capture, hold or destroy
territory, while major states warred against one another for bragging rights and the attrition of enemy numbers (for a fuller breakdown of the data, see Appendix 2). Little towns were said to have
been seized (Sumerian: dab5) or destroyed (hul),41 but when
year-names celebrated the defeat of major states by other major
states, the formulae almost universally refer to the smiting of the
army of [place name] with weapons (ugnim gis.tukul . . . s`g).
The pattern is one in which small places were to be cleared, held
and then either built or erased, while major cities met each other
with armies in open fields of battle, subsequently withdrawing to
home territories. The permanent capture of major territorial
states by others was a phenomenon restricted to two brief terminal phases of Larsas and Babylons strategic wars for regional
dominance (18031794 and 17641755 BC, respectively).
The goal of major-state warfare was the reduction of enemy
22
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
42
Cf. Dietz Otto Edzard, Die zweite Zwischenzeit Babyloniens (Wiesbaden, 1957),
1 n. 2, referring to all non-private entities regardless of scale as states.
43
There are no surviving royal inscriptions for twenty-eight out of eighty-five kings
of these dynasties: RIME, iv: Isin: 1.81.9, 1.12; Larsa: 2.12.3; Babylon: 3.13.2,
3.43.5, 3.11; Uruk: 4.2, 4.44.5, 4.74.9; Esnunna: 5.11, 5.165.17, 5.225.24;
Mari: 6.1, 6.3, 6.66.7, 6.9.
44
The poverty of one such roitelet is demonstrated in the inscriptions of the ephemeral Asduni-iarim of Kis (RIME, iv, 8.1.12), who with an army of only three hundred
men boasted that for forty days I made the enemy land bow down.
45
Here and in the evidence immediately following, I focus only on Babylonian and
Diyalan polities as both sources and subjects; evidence from the Mari region and
northern Mesopotamia would tend to magnify, not diminish, this picture of numerous, small royal polities. Kisurra: Sarra-sarrum, Ibbi-Samas, Bur-Sn; Manana:
Ahi-maraB; Marad: Sumu-atar, S: allum, Iahzir-el; Sippar: Bunu-tahun-ila; Uruk:
Ilum-gamil, Nabi-ilisu; Esnunna: Azuzum, Ibni-Erra; Uzarlulu: Abi-ma3ar;
Nerebtum: Hadati, Iqis-Tispak, Ibbi-Sn; Tutub: Sumuna-jarim, Tatanum,
Yaqim-El; Saduppum: Istasni, Sumahum, Taram-Uri, Waqrum; location uni
known: Siqlanum, IBi-sumu-abum, Adaki.
manpower and/or returns in prestige, not control of territory,

which was a continuing objective for warfare against small polities. Babylonian states were simultaneously engaged in peer-state
and asymmetric warfare between royal states and non-royal small
places.
What constituted a small place, and what does it mean for our
understanding of early political power? The rhetorical uniformity
of Mesopotamian texts often makes it difficult to distinguish between scale and type; both the largest city and the smallest town
were normally termed alu, while the mightiest and pettiest monarch were both called sarru, king. A broad spectrum of ancient
state power is thus obscured by these terminologies.42 A functional definition is more helpful: in contrast to royal and territorial
major states, small places held no power as hegemons and produced no substantial royal literature (that is, year-names and
royal inscriptions).
Thus what we see is a spectrum of legitimacy among powerholders down to a vanishing point. The major kings and their
ideological concerns are relatively well known in Babylon,
Larsa, Isin, Mari, Uruk and Esnunna but even for these
states, one-third of their kings have no royal inscriptions preserved.43 Elsewhere, ephemeral little kingships bloomed briefly
(at Kis, Sippar, Kisurra, Malgium and Kazallu), but relatively
little epigraphic material is known.44 At least twenty-six kings
left only one year-name,45 and the names of fifteen other kings
are known only because their deaths were recorded in the
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
23
46
46
From Isin: Dadbanaya; from Kisurra: Sumu-hiadnu, Kubija; from Uzarlulu:
Ili-dihad, Ahsakrurum, Sabilil, Astum-la-abum, Iadkur-el, Hadum, Abu-[ ]; from
Esnunna: An-[ ]-mu; from Saduppum: Iau-ili, Rm-Dagan, Sumu-[ ]-Tispak;
from Tutub: Bali-apuh.
47
RIME, iv, 4.0.1, 4.0.4; the volume includes the inscriptions of twenty otherwise
unknown rulers from unidentified cities.
48
Edzard, Die zweite Zwischenzeit Babyloniens: see, especially, the introduction,
where the themes of innovation and unrest are discussed.
49
Charpin, Histoire politique du Proche-Orient Amorrite, 78: une histoire
encore impossible a` ecrire.
50
Ibid., 76: La parcellisation du pouvoir.
51
It would be useful here to compare the political hierarchies of northern
Syro-Mesopotamia (i.e. the triangle between Aleppo, Mari and Assur) with
Babylonia. The political landscape of the north featured innumerable small-state
(cont. on p. 24)
year-names of other kings. The vassal system of kings and kings

who followed kings probably extended even further down a continuum of small power-holders through petty kings such as
Ammi-istamar, an Amorite chief, or Ambuna-ahi, merely a
chief47 down to those who either did not produce or had
not yet produced inscriptional material of any kind. It is unfortunate that minor kingship is poorly conceptualized for Ancient
Near Eastern antiquity, though it was arguably widespread and
modal. These actors were more numerous than the great kings;
the period is characterized by small wars rather than by large ones;
and small places played political roles at multiple levels in the
tumult of the period.
Over half a century ago, D. O. Edzards Die zweite Zwischenzeit
Babyloniens fixed the character of this period of internecine warfare among small states as a breakdown in normative, traditional
political orders.48 More than fifty years on, the story of those
lower-register polities still seems impossible to write.49 The reasons are obvious, since this subject remains fairly impoverished in
terms of evidence. A new interpretative strategy, however, presents itself in the pattern and structure of the laconic year-names.
The presumption has been that these centuries saw a devolution
from earlier strong central states (as Charpin terms it, a partition
of power),50 preceding the modular reassembly of new ones,
such as Hammurabis territorial state (which, we may note, survived for less than forty years). But to view these local wars as
by-products of statestate competition, as epiphenomenal border
conflicts, neglects the patterns discerned above: little kingdoms
and bush wars were political and military norms, not peripheral
exceptions,51 and productive of different ends.
24
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
(n. 51 cont.)
and non-state tribal actors who were integrated into larger structures of vassalhood
and alliances because of a closer isometry along the power scale. The south, by contrast, featured two discontinuous registers of political authority, large-state and small
rural-tribal actors. The two political environments shared many formal features, but
they differed in kind because of Babylonias cross-scale structure.
52
Anachronisms notwithstanding, small wars can be characterized as asymmetric
(i.e. state v. non-state) commitments of force with no defined battle front . . . they are
wars over people. Tactics in small wars are a means of achieving psychological ascendancy, not fire superiority or control of terrain. Major Keith F. Kopets, USMC, Why
Small Wars Theory Still Matters: The Extension of the Principles on Irregular Warfare
and Non-Traditional Missions of the Small Wars Manual to the Contemporary
Battlespace, Small Wars Jl, vi (2006), 910. The volumes of the Small Wars Journal
provide a good introduction to the subject generally.
53
See, for example, Georg Berkemer and Margret Frenz (eds.), Sharing
Sovereignty: The Little Kingdom in South Asia (Berlin, 2003), on little kingdoms in
South Asia, c.AD 6001700.
The importance of this middle tier of political power has grown

for theoreticians over the past generation in a number of disciplines. Small-scale, cross-scale or irregular wars have emerged
in the post-Vietnam era as a major focus for military historians
and strategists concerned with counter-insurgency and sociopolitical asymmetry, for whom the archetype of homologous
peer-state warfare has become less helpful.52 Little kingdoms,
meanwhile, have developed as models for post-colonial and subalternist historians for whom the nation-state template has
proved ineffective in explaining constructions of regional political
power without hegemons, in landscapes characterized by multiple, interacting power-holding units.53 Political scientists, too,
have taken an interest in the uneven and incomplete application
of the state as a model in the face of both regressive (failed states)
and progressive (globalization) postmodern trends.
These are useful lenses for reading Mesopotamian history. The
early state was not fully fledged simply because the historic
periods had arrived: ancient states continuously produced and
lost their own constituent populations from and to non-state
units, warring for control of their own hinterlands, long after they
initiated competition with peer-state units. One process did not
begin, in other words, because the other was finished. Crucially,
in the Old Babylonian case, wars of conquest focused on small
places, not on major patches of territory, and especially not over
open space. Inversely, conflicts between major states were wars of
attrition, force-reduction and prestige, not of holding and building. This dynamic was the rule from at least the fall of Ur in 2004
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
25
BC to the rise of the Kassite state in the fifteenth century BC. The
historiographic privilege accorded to two third-millennium centralized states the dynasties of Akkad and Ur III, a subset of all
historical power-holders54 obscures the underlying longue
duree: small conflicts between weak entities were the norm
throughout the first seventeen centuries of Mesopotamian history, c.32001500 BC, with larger hegemons only temporarily
achieving the repression or subordination of bush warfare.
The coexistence of internal and cross-scale competition was a
persistent and ineradicable feature of early states though
they would rather not have admitted it.
ENEMIES AND SCATTERED PEOPLE
If the acquisition and control of territory had never been the goal
of early states, for what did they fight? At stake was the simultaneous desire and inability of the state to achieve exclusive control of
constituencies occupying open space that is, non-sovereign
lands. This desire and inability was articulated through narratives
of persuasion and punishment meant to find fulfilment in the
political dominance of the state form. I have argued above that
dual processes of state/state and state/non-state competitions
were under way simultaneously during the Old Babylonian
period. Non-royal forms and non-urban centres of authority
were countervailing trends to urban royal authority, which otherwise holds a near-monopoly on historiographic work on the
period. But the evidence that countryside regions were often
under only loose state control is evocative of the fragility and
insecurity of the state as a whole. Rural space was a haven for
both delegitimized others (enemies) and non-enfranchised
populations (scattered people) for whose labour and tithes a
dozen states continuously competed.
One important caution is that we should not be seduced into
accepting ancient binary discourses about lands and peoples.
Mesopotamian literature painted a dualistic picture of pure
order in city life and pure disorder in desolate areas, though proverbs and wisdom literature also reveal a Mesopotamian citizen
54
The Akkadian (23342193 BC) and Ur III (21122004 BC) states together lasted
250 years.
IV
26
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
55
See Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, esp. 1318; Nissen, Early
History of the Ancient Near East, 1301; Marten Stol, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in
altbabylonischer Zeit, in Charpin, Edzard and Stol, Mesopotamien, 651 and n. 48. Cf.
CAD, N/1, s.v. namu A, comparing meanings 1 (designating both people and territory) and 2; the citations amply illustrate the loose authority of the state over
semi-nomads in peripheral steppelands, but also the capacity of the closer pastureland
populations to be scattered (the verbs sapahu, nerubatu).
56
AbB, xii, no. 124; similarly, ibid., i, no. 71, l. 20; ibid., vii, no. 182, ll. 215, with
discussion by Ulla Jeyes, Old Babylonian Extispicy: Omen Texts in the British Museum
(Istanbul, 1989), 39.
57
AbB, xiv, no. 148.
suspicious of the grasping urban institutions which governed

him the palace is a slippery place, ran one much-repeated
Sumerian proverb and wary even of his neighbours. (The
term citizen is warranted because city-residence was the paramount political and juridical identity for Mesopotamian urbanites.) The influential concept of ancient states dimorphism, for
all its revisionist merits, still reproduces a dichotomy of the desert
and the sown inappropriate to the social and economic symbiosis
of Mesopotamias historical geographies. To be sure, the anxieties
of ancient urbanites located dire horrors out in the wastes: ghosts,
murderers and flesh-eating jackals roamed this dystopian realm of
the imagination. But in reality, Babylonia was quite a varied landscape of fields, marshes, meadowlands and semi-arid steppe, in
which equally varied and specialized subsistence strategies and
settlements took root. In the Old Babylonian period, the intermediate rural zone between city and steppeland was denoted
simply matum, the land, or sa` matim, the countryside (literally,
the heart of the land). Village life was the norm: from the Early
Dynastic through the Middle Babylonian period as late as the
eighth century BC, cities steadily occupied less of a percentage
of overall settlement area, and villages occupied more of it.55
Old Babylonian letters and administrative documents texts
of a practical nature make clear that these intermediate rural
areas could indeed be as dangerous as the steppe, and that state
power was not always equal to those hazards. Do not go into the
country, a man named Gimil-Marduk flatly warns in a letter to
one Warad-Sigar, rounding off a list of chores and cautions.56 In
another letter, a man writes that his servant had been chased
away in anger from a region too dangerous for travel, while
other servants had been hurt and have been dispersed over the
countryside.57 Even an army, another man writes, could find
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
27
58
Ibid., no. 131, ina zumur matim; the translator stresses deep in the countryside
over the sense of scattered across the countryside (p. 123 n. 131 d).
59
Rivkah Harris, The Journey of the Divine Weapon, Assyriological Studies, xvi
(1965), argued already that virtually all texts of the (cumbersomely named) rental of a
journey of the divine weapon variety were geared to the purpose of assisting expeditions to tax remote farming villages and not, say, for military or trading ventures. Note
among the texts studied there MAH 16147, ana kaskal girrim sa` matim, where not even
the name of the destination is specified, only for a journey into the countryside.
60
AbB, xiii, no. 154; cf. ibid., xii, no. 38, in which Nanna-intuh was unable to
commmunicate with business partners because he was travelling in-country.
61
Ibid., xiv, no. 81.
62
TIM 2 107 and TCL 17 27, cited in CAD, N/1, s.v. nakru s. 2b.
63
Warnings of enemies in the countryside include ARM 26/1 140, TCL 17 27,
TIM 2 107 and the nine letters warning of danger discussed in Seth Richardson,
Trouble in the Countryside, ana tarBi Samsuditana: Militarism, Kassites, and the
Fall of Babylon I, in W. H. van Soldt (ed.), Ethnicity in Ancient Mesopotamia
(Leiden, 2005), 2735.
64
CAD, L, s.v. libbu 2b-2, the troops dispersed into the hinterland, citing ARM 1
5:36.
itself in danger away from cities: left all on its own . . . you yourself
know (how it is with) the troops which are deep in the countryside.58 Urban administrators sometimes had to rent divine emblems and weapons of the gods from city temples in order to
travel into remote rural zones to collect taxes. These and other
elaborate journey texts enabled the state to administer its hinterlands, but it required a display of both military and divine
power.59 At other times, rural security was judged unproblematic, and travel to such areas was thus thinkable. For instance, one
letter directs a man to permit his servant to travel overland (Let
[the servant of so-and-so] stay overnight in the open country); it
continues: Say to Marduk-nsu that he should not worry.60
A particular trepidation for urbanites had to do with unnamed
enemies out in the hinterlands. As you have heard, writes one
beleaguered administrator, the country is in confusion and the
enemy has settled in the countryside.61 We could not stay overnight in the dimtu-fortress area because of the enemy, another
letter laments; while a third writer asks, have you not heard that
an enemy is camping in the land?62 Marauders labelled only as
enemies sometimes emerged from the countryside to harass
more thickly settled areas,63 as they did in AmmiBaduqa of
Babylons fifteenth year (1631 BC), and then melted back into
the hinterlands.64 It is striking to recall that these letters were
drafted in the dusty neighbourhoods of cities where, just down
the street, the kings in their palaces confidently issued boastful
28
PAST AND PRESENT
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65
See J. N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History
(London, 1992), ch. 16.
66
The enemy trope is especially emphasized in divinatory literature identifying the
enemy as an agent of apodoses connected to the pars hostilis of the liver. Yet even
within the limits of this trope, note a literary letter to Sulgi (ETCSL, text 3.1.11), first
complaining about bandits and brigands of the steppe (Sumerian: edin), but gradually revealing, for narrative reasons, that these peripheral people were conceptualized
as having animal pens, camps, workers and hoe-wielding agricultural labourers.
67
For issues related to scale and boundary-making, see Milan Bufon, Borders and
Border Landscapes: ATheoretical Assessment, in Marek Koter and Krystian Heffner
(eds.), Borderlands or Transborder Regions: Geographical, Social and Political Problems
(Lodz, 1998), 714.
statements of total control over their lands, extending even to the

limits of the four quarters of the earth.
Unfortunately, the historical identity of these enemies is compromised by the preoccupation of ancient literature, produced
in cities, with constructing the dyads city/countryside, order/
disorder65 and citizen/enemy.66 Indeed the Sumerian term
lu-kur (Akkadian nakru), translated as enemies, extends its
semantic range to less politically encumbered meanings in
non-substantival use like strange and different other. We
can also differentiate nakru from contemporary usages of
Akkadian ajabu, the term reserved for hated military enemies,
rarely used in contexts suggesting rural populations. In any
event, there are not such numerous or onerous indications of
danger associated with the rural lands to warrant depicting
them as unrelenting threats to state security or persons and
goods in transit. The concept of the countryside as a locus of
power can be overstated. The term countrysides, I would
rather say, classifies a zone of collision between small- and
large-scale social interactions, where the states authority over
strategic boundaries and control over residence and movement
was neither absolutely present nor absent, but incomplete.67
The enemies of the countryside in Old Babylonian parlance
were not intractable foes of states, but constituencies that
were not clearly organized under state authority untaxed and
unregulated, one way of life alongside another, and a threat only
to individuals who intruded on those contested peripheries.
Countrysides and urban states sometimes presented dangers to
each other, but what comes across more strongly is the inability of
either domain to substantially dominate the other. In effect, this
was a problem of weak states attempting to assert authority over
the weak resistance of hinterlands, a balance of low power.
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
29
68
Johannes Renger, Flucht als soziales Problem in der altbabylonischen
Gesellschaft, in D. O. Edzard (ed.), Gesellschaftsklassen im Alten Zweistromland und
in den angrenzenden Gebieten (Munich, 1972), esp. 175, is close to exhaustive in discussing terms for persons free of state or private control, but does not discuss scattered people. See also Daniel Snell, Flight and Freedom in the Ancient Near East
(Leiden, 2001), 557.
69
Including but not limited to RIME, iv, 1.2.2, 2.8.1, 2.8.34, 2.8.67, 2.9.14,
2.13.6, 2.13.13, 2.13.27, 3.6.2, 3.6.7, 3.7.2, 3.7.8, 3.9.2, 3.10.2.
70
See CDLI year-names: Apil-Sn 12a, Sn-muballi3 a, Rm-Sn 28 (brought in a
large population and provided them with a quiet resting place), Hammurabi 33,
Rm-Anum d.
71
For example Gungunum Hymn A (ETCSL, text 2.6.2.1), claiming to bring back
the scattered people of Sumer and Akkad.
72
For example AbB, xiii, no. 53, ll. 19, a letter of Rm-Sn II, echoing his
year-name b claiming to gather dispersed people.
73
In the Lament for Ur as cattle, with the verb sag (ETCSL, text 2.2.2, l. 304); in the
Lament for Sumer and Ur as creatures (verb: zag . . . tag) and the open country (verb:
sag) (ETCSL, text 2.2.3, ll. 24, 130); in the Lament for Nippur as cattle (verb: sag) and
(cont. on p. 30)
This was neither a hot nor a cold war, but an epochal, asymmetric and lukewarm conflict between states and non-state
actors. The single biggest challenge for Old Babylonian states
in imposing de facto sovereignty was not, therefore, in providing
security from dangers to persons or goods, but in administering
settlement, restricting human flight, imposing legal control spatially and recruiting unaligned clientele. Flight from cities to villages has been addressed by Renger and Snell,68 but mainly with
respect to individuals tied to the state or its citizens by specific
bonds (slaves, dependent workers, feud-holders, etc.). What are
not accounted for within the organizational transcript are descriptions of the communities to which fleeing citizens decamped.
The Old Babylonian period presents repeated cases of kings who
spoke of entire undocumented populations as scattered and
dispersed. For state authorities, the gathering-in and settling
of scattered people the recruitment of free-floating clientele
was a project of primary political importance. In all cases, the
states concern was voiced as protector of the downtrodden, not
punisher of the disobedient.
The topos of the scattered people (Sumerian: un-bir-re)
shows up more than a dozen times in Old Babylonian royal inscriptions,69 year-names,70 hymns of praise to kings,71 and other
official documents72 between c.1860 and 1620 BC. In Sumerian
literature of the period, the term scattered people and its similes
(for example the people, like a scattered herd of cattle) marked
the quintessence of disorder and misfortune in city-laments;73
30
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
(n. 73 cont.)
the people (u`g, verb: bir) (ETCSL, text 2.2.4, ll. 29, 215); in the Lament for Uruk, all
the settlements (verb: bir) (ETCSL, text 2.2.5, l. 86). See also Martha T. Roth, Law
Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (Atlanta, 1995), Laws Hammurabi, col.
2, l. 49; col. 42, l. 74.
74
Cf. earlier royal hymns, in which scattering and dispersing were pogroms
visited on enemy lands by Mesopotamian kings. In the Old Babylonian period, the
restoration of scattered peoples to dwelling places was the task of the king:
Gungunum Hymn A (ETCSL, text 2.6.2.1, l. 5) and Isme-Dagan A (ETCSL, text
2.5.4.01, l. 274).
75
See CAD, S, s.v. sapahu 8b (and by-forms); A, s.v. asabu 35; P, s.vv. pararu 2c, 4a
and paharu 1c; references to scattered people are virtually absent from administrative
or epistolatory texts.
76
CT 2 1 1417.
77
Francis Joanne`s, Haradum II: les textes de la periode paleo-babylonienne
(Samsu-iluna Ammi-Baduqa) (Paris, 2006), text 11; we may detect a greater administrative concern for scattered people among texts of the Mari corpus, for example
ARM 1 91, 26/2 421.
78
To settle, Akkadian wasabu, is thus the very popular counterpoise in praise
hymns and royal inscriptions of the Old Babylonian kings; dozens of references are
known.
such people were the object of heroic ingatherings credited to

kings in hymns of praise.74 As with enemies, we are faced with
a term which has discouraged investigation because of the dyadic
nature of its rhetorical claim. Unlike enemies, however, the term
scattered people rarely registers in private as well as public transcripts. The associated terms are largely restricted to royal documents, expressive literature, and omens,75 which might make us
think them rhetorical, unverifiable and notional.
But enough exceptions to this generic distribution may be
noted to make us believe in a real need to recruit people to
states. From the city of Sippar, close to Babylon, a property
division deposition explains rather matter-of-factly that certain
goods had been held when . . . we scattered into the country; we
did not return to the city (before) the beginning of AmmiBaduqas
reign.76 A letter-order from Haradum, near Mari, indicates that
a dispersed population had settled in the countryside (ina libbu
matim wasbu) and must now be resettled.77 The Old Babylonian
lexicon provides a variety of terms and contexts from which it is
apparent that scattering was an opting out of the state order,
while resettling marked state-organized programmes.78 Law
codes, legal documents, and letters refer to the illegal flight of
non-indentured and non-enslaved people from their cities with
the verbs abatu (to flee from) and halaqu (to escape), and the
31
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
79
80
79
CAD, M/2, s.v. munnabtu s. ab.

CAD, A/1, s.v. abatu B v. 2; H, s.v. halaqu v. 2.
The discussion by Daniel E. Fleming, Democracys Ancient Ancestors: Mari and
Early Collective Governance (Cambridge, 2004), 141 ff., of the muskenu most closely
coincides with this idea of a non-dependent/non-aligned rural population. See further
discussions in Richardson, Trouble in the Countryside, ana tarBi Samsuditana, 279
82; Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, 1920. A few additional examples from letters: AbB, xi, no. 137, the jurisdiction (dnu; literally, decisions)
of (tribal) Jamutbal; ibid., xii, no. 166: those who live in Larsa belong to the king; those
who live in open country . . . [ ] (broken); ibid., xiii, no. 10, local legal standards
(again, dnu) of Jamutbal; ibid., no. 25, referring to the general of the countrys troops;
cf. CAD, M/1, s.v. matu 1a, citing TCL 17 55:6, do you not know that the land in its
entirety belongs to Marduk and to King Samsuiluna?
82
For example Letters from Early Mesopotamia, ed. Erica Reiner, trans. Piotr
Michalowski (Atlanta, 1993), nos. 5, 23, 24, 42, 69, and perhaps no. 20.
83
Stone, Constraints on State and Urban Form in Ancient Mesopotamia, 207.
80
81
term munnabu, runaway, appears as well. The reality of constituents living away from royal power is even reflected in allusions to differential jurisdiction within state lands, when the
kings authority in non-urban places was constituted less forcefully than in the cities.81
These problems were hardly new: since at least the mid third
millennium, accounting for the residence of people in cities and
great households and returning them to their assigned places
whenever they slipped away to villages were primary concerns
of state administrators.82 Stone has opined that episodes of population dispersal in the archaeological record may indicate times
when states were less successful in delivering on their promises to
provide security and prosperity, with the result that people voted
with their feet.83 It is not clear what the motives or identity of
those in urban flight might have been; nor should we accept the
premise of scattering as indicative of any pre-existing state subscription by these same people. But even the rhetorical glossing of
ruralization, flight and resistance as scattering cannot by itself
negate the underlying reality that state sovereignty clearly did not
encompass all constituencies, even very local ones.
Thinking constructively about what little we know, we might
first posit that the vagueness of the terms enemies and scattered
peoples betrays a lack of knowledge about rural identities among
a scribal class which was otherwise fitted out with a substantial
battery of ethnonyms, legalisms and geographical names for the
identification of others. This vagueness marks the terms as ambivalent designations for any group of people not under royal
control as they either resisted or submitted to it; the dyadic
32
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
V
PERSUASION: LEGAL VOICE, LAND OF PLENTY
Texts we have become used to reading as historical facts must be

reinterpreted as more than idealizing or notional in merely general terms, but more specifically with an eye to their persuasive
purposes. To this point, I have argued that early polities claimed
sovereignty powers on the ground far ahead of their actual abilities, both over territory and constituents. These texts were constructed out of will and desire; early states were talking
conjuring themselves into being.86 Already through the centuries, Mesopotamian royal language had adopted multiple
84
Compare with Fleming, Democracys Ancient Ancestors, 13941, developing a
parallel argument that the land (matu) and the dependent people (nisu) operate
rhetorically as a merism for the population of the kingdom in a vision of benificent
rule.
85
Removal of complaint: RIME, iv, 2.8.3, 2.13.21; provision of pastures and
watering places: ibid., 3.6.7, 3.7.2, 3.9.2, 3.10.2; peaceful abodes (ki-tus-ne-ha /
subat nehtim): 2.9.14, 2.13.6, 2.13.27, 3.6.2, 3.6.7, 3.7.2, 3.9.2, 3.10.2. I have elsewhere commented on the authoritarian semantics underlying royal claims of
quieting: see Seth Richardson, Writing Rebellion Back into the Record: A
Methodologies Toolkit, in Seth Richardson (ed.), Rebellions and Peripheries in the
Cuneiform World (New Haven, 2010). With respect to this, Fraynes interpolation is
misleading and anachronistic in RIME, iv, 2.8.3, ll. 2630: when he . . . had removed
evil (and the cause for any) complaint from it [Ur]; within the frame of royal rhetoric,
complaint was itself symptomatic of the disorder the king was to restore.
86
For a similar point of view about the first-millennium Levant, see Seth L.
Sanders, From People to Public in the Iron Age Levant, in Gernot Wilhelm (ed.),
Organization, Representation and Symbols of Power in the Ancient Near East (forthcoming), paper given at the 54th annual Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale,
Wurzburg, July 2008.
language demonized and welcomed, as appropriate, exactly the

same groups of people as occasion required.84 The second point
is to recognize the context of enemies references as defensive
these groups rarely threatened cities directly and resettlement
motifs as benevolent: the ingatherings endowed the scattered
people with peace, abundance and new dwellings. The modulations of the topos alluded to the removal of complaint, the provision of pastures and watering places and the peaceful abodes
in which men might sleep soundly.85 Whatever the political realities, resettlement was supposed to sound attractive one of a
number of persuasive claims that we have too often read as descriptive of reality and de facto sovereignty.
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
33
87
Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor: Laws Lipit-Istar, "5 and
passim; Laws Esnunna, ""1516, 19, 32, 389, 41; Laws Hammurabi, ""4951,
1008, 11114, gap ""a, g, z, cc, etc.
88
Ibid.: Laws Esnunna, ""18A, 201; Laws Hammurabi, gap ""tu, "111.
89
See, especially, F. R. Kraus, Konigliche Verfugungen in altbabylonischer Zeit
(Leiden, 1984); Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor: Laws
Hammurabi, gap "z.
90
It is remarkable that the interest of Mesopotamian kings to legally organize trade,
commerce and prices belongs primarily to the eras during which they ruled mostly over
small city-state and territorial units that is, prior to 1600 BC and not to the large
national and imperial states of 1400500 BC, when commerce seems to have been a
matter either outsourced or of indifference to the Crown. Cf. J. D. Hawkins, Royal
Statements of Ideal Prices: Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hittite, in Jeanny Vorys Canby
et al. (eds.), Ancient Anatolia: Aspects of Change and Cultural Development. Essays in
Honor of Machteld J. Mellink (Madison, 1986), 93102.
91
Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor.
registers of persuasion, arguing by way of theology, history, civic

patronage, even a command of style. The contribution of the Old
Babylonian period was the perfection of powers legal voice and
its promises to protect and provide. Not only did the state rhetorically inflate its powers de facto, but its powers de jure as well.
By the end of the third millennium, a documentary class of
contracts had emerged to effect and document private business
practices, but only with the arrival of the twentieth century BC did
they come into widespread use loans, sales, pledges, rentals
and foreclosures. Royal authorities hurried to meet these developments in private economy with an equally innovative diversity
of claims to be able to regulate those exchange practices,87 control
interest rates,88 offer periodic debt-reliefs (msaru), freedoms
(anduraru)89 and occasional equities through royal decrees
(Bimdat sarrim), standardize weights and measures, protect property, guarantee due process and, as we shall see below, commoditize prices and wages.90 Palatial households moved rapidly
to adopt a legal voice in civil and criminal law, too, but nowhere
did they move more aggressively to appropriate authority over any
field of activity than over the sphere of commercial law.
Symbolic and inclusive of this legal-rational voice were the Old
Babylonian law collections, the most famous of which were the
Laws of Hammurabi.91 All these promulgations had antecedents
in the twenty-fourth and twenty-first centuries BC, but the comprehensive reach of the three surviving collections (not counting
scribal exercises) from Babylon, Esnunna and Isin marks a radical
expansion in the states claimed scope of powers. The authority of
these collections is buttressed by a larger number of related text
34
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
92
An imposition of the Code as statutory for the administration of Babylonian law

is positivist speculation in the face of much contrary evidence: pace Dominique
Charpin, Writing, Law and Kingship in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, trans. Jane
Marie Todd (Chicago, 2010), esp. 7981. Charpin finds three references to the
Code of Hammurabi as evidence for an applied code, but these would be buried
by the hundreds of contemporary legal texts and procedures which deviate from or
ignore the Code altogether. The author discusses AbB, xiii, no. 12 (on p. 73), but the
situation represented there in fact does not match the paragraph of the Code to which
he refers: in the letter, the thieves are imprisoned under guard, not put to death and
hanged in the house.
93
Note also the routine delegation of enforcement to the litigating parties, plaintiff
and defendant, and the specification of the palace and the king as courts only of last
resort a curiously marginal position for the Crown in royal documents.
types: monumental inscriptions, administrative decrees, and a

constellation of secondary references to all of the above. It is the
intersection of private economy and royal law which draws our
attention here, since these documents asserted authority over
specific acts and aspects of exchange in the marketplace, and
implicitly over the entire sphere of commerce local, overland,
riverine and maritime.
Yet the Crowns jurisdiction was hardly established. Royal
power chased at the heels of an already rich and varied private
commercial world, rather having structured that economic life in
the first instance. Evidence supporting the application or citation
of royal laws is virtually non-existent: the much-studied royal
documents find little correlation in the practices and processes
where we would expect to find them (in letters, contracts, lawsuits, etc.).92 To give but one example, seemingly the most pressing issue of the famous seventeenth-century BC debt-remission
edict of King AmmiBaduqa was the nullification of interestbearing loans yet the edict was issued in a time when
interest-clauses were not written into any of the hundreds of
known loans. Why remit interest-bearing loans where none
existed? Any literate audience would surely have perceived the
gap between the powers claimed and the ways in which legal
problems were actually solved: that is, without reference or
recourse to state authority. Even on their own terms, the law
collections were barely interested in policing, almost never
specifying where or for whom they held force, whether by geography, court or class, and delegating enforcement with vague references to they: they shall condemn, they shall levy a fine,
they shall arrest, etc.93 The laws lack of functionality is patent.
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
35
94
For example Jean Bottero, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods
(Chicago, 1992), ch. 10; for overviews of the debate, see Raymond Westbrook,
Introduction, in Raymond Westbrook (ed.), A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law,
2 vols. (Leiden, 2003), i, 1619 (subsection 1.2.4), saying that the codes originated in
the sphere of Mesopotamian science rather than in either jurisprudence or propaganda as such. Compare with characterizations by Stol, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
in altbabylonischer Zeit, 6548 ( wissenschaftlichen Charakter), and Roth, Law
Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 47, who views the strict authority of the
laws as an ultimately unanswerable question.
95
K. R. Veenhof, The Relation between Royal Decrees and Law Codes of the
Old Babylonian Period, Jaarbericht Ex Oriente Lux, xxxvxxxvi (19972000), esp.
7882, quotation at p. 82.
96
James Q. Whitman, At the Origins of Law and the State: Supervision of
Violence, Mutilation of Bodies, or Setting of Prices?, Chicago-Kent Law Rev., lxxi
(1995), 415, 824: the laws were an alien archaic effort to control the marketplace . . .
in a world of sympathetic magic and ritually ordered social hierarchy. Whitmans
contention that the early state was uninterested in regulating feuding and violence
(cont. on p. 36)
Much recent discussion has been directed to the conclusion

that the law promulgations were a type of idealizing royal literature with a scientific character, not actionable jurisprudence.94
K. R. Veenhof, one of the foremost authorities on the gap between
statute and procedure, concluded already a decade ago that
plaintiffs based their cases not on the citing of laws, but on general statements of the kings righteousness and his duty to redress
injustice, which were the generally known ideological basis of
both decrees and laws.95 In other words, the written law supported an ideology of the kings innate and personal ability to
render wise decisions, the rhetorical basis for actual legal process.
But the unification of ideology and process action within a
single discourse implied the connection of two conceptual domains under one larger unstated claim, the premise of jurisdiction
itself. Something less than unified legal practice and something
more like the presumption of sovereignty was the aspiration of the
law collections: promises of equity, plenty and protection were
supposed to persuade clientele first to accept the premise of
palatial states as legally sovereign, much as they were meant to
accept in principle the other objectively unverifiable claims to
authority those states deployed: favour of the gods, pre-eminent
political status, provision of abundance, and so on. Functional
explanations for the laws ignore the public and persuasive intent
of ideological messaging, but explanations premised on the
anti-rationality of the subjects such as those supposing that
the laws were intended to construct social order on ritual-magical
principles should also be rejected.96 If anything, the power of
36
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
(n. 96 cont.)
in the (pre-state) state of nature accords with my understanding that it was essentially
unable to do so; his preference to interpret the state as primarily interested in cosmological order seems unnecessarily exoticizing to me.
97
The Assyrian emulation of Babylonian practice is clear: A. Kirk Grayson,
Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC I (1114859 BC) (Royal Inscriptions
of Mesopotamia, Assyrian Periods, ii, Toronto, 1991), 47: In this text the Assur
temple is called the Enlil temple and evidence of Babylonian influence is also apparent in the dialect and form of the inscription.
the jurisdiction-sovereignty claim was effected by purposefully

ambiguating discourses of legal-rationality and ritualism.
Old Babylonian economic regulation thus worked through a
deliberate blurring of ability and ideal. Royal claims to regulate
various aspects of the economy were not meant to be instrumentally effective in what they purported to do, but used a mixture of
persuasion and sanction to create a composite of strategies for
different audiences. The legal voice was geared to persuade and
to warn politically sophisticated audiences that kings had incipient powers to create jurisdiction over activities, spaces and populations, that they could create an uninterrupted fabric of power
across all kinds of fields of action over exchange and the economy just as much as over taxation, war or theology. The incomplete states of the Old Babylonian period (like all jurisgenerative
states) created law to anticipate and ideally to precipitate a
kind of control that did not yet exist.
Their claims rhetorically simulated a rational-choice scenario
between the potential peace, security and prosperity of states, and
the perilous community of nearby lands and peoples not organized under sovereignty principles. It is fair to say that the contingent non-state outcome to which royal states alluded would
have seemed a very real possibility for Mesopotamians, since
more and more of Babylonia was organized into precisely the
latter kind of stateless landscape in the centuries after 1720 BC.
Some attention to the sub-genre of price-and-wage schedules
can be instructive on these points precisely because, although the
application of their terms was virtually impossible in stricto sensu,
they were closely imitative of contemporary practice. At least one
Assyrian97 and eight Babylonian kings of the time promulgated
price and wage edicts, all but the first and last within about a
hundred-year period (c.18701770 BC). To give one example:
according to a proclamation of King Sn-iddinam of Larsa, the
37
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
King
City
Approx. date (BC)
Prices/Wages
Gungunum98
Naram-Sn99
Sn-kasid100
Nur-Adad101
Sn-iddinam A102
Sn-iddinam B103
Larsa
Uruk
Uruk
Larsa
Larsa
Larsa
1911
1860s?
1860s
1860s
1848
1847
Yes/No
Yes/No
Yes/No
Yes/Yes
No/Yes
Yes/Yes
98
Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schyen Collection, ed. A. R.
George (Cornell Univ. Studies in Assyriology and Sumeriology, xvii, Bethesda, 2011),
no. 44 (Schyen MS 2871), trans. A. R. George, pp. 967. While the provenance of the
texts published in this volume remains uncertain, their authenticity is not in doubt.
99
Eva von Dassow, Naram-Sn of Uruk: A New King in an Old Shoebox, Jl
Cuneiform Studies, lxi (2009), 6871. Regarding the tentative dates, von Dassows
reconstruction of Naram-Sns reign as immediately preceding that of Sn-kasid is
partly based on the hypothesis that the similarities of their prices indicate a continuity
of local practice. However, three of the four prices in her translation are reconstructed
from whole or partial breaks in the text. Though there is no particular reason to disbelieve her dating of this kings reign, the circular logic used to reconstruct the prices in
this cone renders them too uncertain to position them in the Tables (see pp. 401
below).
100
RIME, iv, 4.1.8. On the dates, see Charpin, Histoire politique du
Proche-Orient Amorrite, 387.
101
RIME, iv, 2.8.7. On the dates, see CDLI year-names: Nur-Adad Year i.
102
RIME, iv, 2.9.2.
103
Ibid., 2.9.6.
1840s BC was a time of plenty in lower Babylonia: his inscription

set forth a schedule of low prices and generous wages. A builder
working on the temple of the tutelary city god Samas was to receive hundreds of litres of barley per day obviously much more
than he could consume as a day-wage in addition to dates,
cheese, bran, oil, and food from the sheepfolds. The same text
established bounteously low market prices: a mere single shekel
of silver in Ur, Larsa and my land would buy more than four times
the usual quantity of grain, or similarly bargain quantities of dates,
wool, vegetable oil and lard. Several such grand claims were made
by the kings of the small territorial states of Larsa, Isin, Babylon,
Uruk and Esnunna in this period, each jostling for regional
primacy.
Since they appear in multiple copies from different findspots,
these price-and-wage schedules have come to seem emblematic
of the entire four-hundred-year period and a logical extension of
other regulatory or even social-justice measures, but their practical confinement to one century, I argue, was hardly accidental.
The known schedules are as follows:
38
PAST AND PRESENT

Sn-iddinam C104
Warad-Sn105
Samsi-Adad I106
Dadusa107
Hammurabi108
Larsa
Larsa
Assur
Esnunna
Babylon
1840s
1824
18081776
1770
1750
NUMBER 215
Yes/Yes
No/Yes
Yes/No
Yes/Yes
No/Yes
104
Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts, ed. George, no. 37 (Schyen MS
5000), trans. Konrad Volk, pp. 5988.
105
RIME, iv, 2.13.21.
106
A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennia BC (to 1115 BC)
(Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Assyrian Periods, i, Toronto, 1987), no. 39.1.
107
Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, Laws Esnunna, ""12,
711.
108
Ibid., Laws Hammurabi, ""2734, but also "239.
109
The price of wool set in the Old Babylonian promulgations, at 1 shekel 5 kg
wool, the one figure seeming to correspond to market conditions, may have been due
to the states (unique) monopoly over this commodity in the first place: see Stol,
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in altbabylonischer Zeit, 860.
110
Howard Farber, A Price and Wage Study for Northern Babylonia during the
Old Babylonian Period, Jl Econ. and Social Hist. of the Orient, xxi (1978), 1721,
whose study charts the normal value of a shekel as the equivalent of c.100300 litres
of barley; see also Stol, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in altbabylonischer Zeit, 860:
The price of barley . . . seemed to remain stable, even in later periods; G. van Driel,
Elusive Silver: In Search of a Role for a Market in an Agrarian Environment. Aspects of
Mesopotamias Society (Leiden, 2002), 1114.
111
Seth F. C. Richardson, Texts from the Late Old Babylonian Period (Jl Cuneiform
Studies Supplemental Ser., ii, Boston, 2010), table 1; similar conclusions were
reached by Farber, Price and Wage Study for Northern Babylonia, 24, citing an
average of 2.88 kg per shekel.
The standardizing mechanism of virtually all these regulations

was to set equivalences for labour and products in terms of one
shekel of silver. Thus, we can compare and contrast the major
features as theoretically commodified (see Tables).
At first sight, we are struck by the relative consistency between
commodity equivalences: barley ranges the most, between 600
and 1,200 litres (Dadusas promulgation specifies only 300
litres), but other products stay within a fairly close range of pricing: wool, 57.5 kg (Dadusa: 3 kg);109 vegetable oil, 1530 litres
(Dadusa: 12 litres); dates, 3,0003,600 litres. Their consistency
might suggest that they reflect market conditions, but in fact the
prices seem to fall between half and a quarter of what the market
normally supported. Old Babylonian commercial texts normally
valued one shekel of silver as equivalent to around 300 litres of
barley,110 against the promulgations average of 850 litres; wool
moved in the marketplace for an average of c.2.53 kg per
shekel,111 whereas the edicts denoted close to 6 kg per shekel;
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
39
112
Farber, Price and Wage Study for Northern Babylonia, 223.

Sn-iddinam As daily barley wage is 300 litres; Sn-iddinam Bs price equivalent
for barley is 1,200 litres 1 shekel silver; thus a 30-day wage would supposedly come
to 9,000 litres barley, worth 7.5 shekels silver at the stated rate. But Sn-iddinams
wages are the exception: the other schedules specify wages with a value of 23 shekels.
114
In the notational system of the period, the metric amounts appearing in the
Tables are equivalents of whole rounded numbers: 300 litres is the equivalent of
1 gur, 7.5 kg of wool is equal to 15 mana, and so forth.
115
See Hawkins, Royal Statements of Ideal Prices, 94, and bibliography, nos.
1213. See also Walter Scheidel, Real Wages in Early Economies: Evidence for
Living Standards from 1800 BCE to 1300 CE, Jl Econ. and Social Hist. of the Orient,
liii (2010), who concludes that with a few exceptions, the real incomes of unskilled
labourers tended to be very low.
116
Cf. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 6; Babylonians
would have seen the greater attraction in the prices rather than the wages.
113
sesame oil averaged around 15 litres per shekel in eighteenth- and

seventeenth-century BC markets, while the price schedules suggest 25 litres could be bought at that price112 and so on.
Even by the internal logic of the pricing schedules, the equivalences do not tally in any operable way. When specifying silver
wages, these texts prescribed 13 shekels of silver as a normative
monthly rate, permitting workers under their very same pricing
schemes to buy each day anywhere up to 120 litres of barley
or three full litres of vegetable oil. When paid in staples, workers
would be given the equivalent of up to 7.5 shekels worth of goods
every month in barley alone,113 irrespective of other goods. At
these rates, states would have quickly bankrupted the carrying
capacity of their agricultural systems, and workers would have
been ridiculously glutted with comestibles. With their round
numbers114 and their fabulous exchange rates, the promulgations
have for almost a century attracted comment as being too unrealistic and undependable to reflect market conditions or any other
externally verifiable standard of economic activity.115 In the
marketplace, these ideal prices would have been too low and
the wages too high with a psychological multiplier effect on
consumers, who might have been rightly suspicious of extraordinary inflations in only one or the other category.116
But the promulgations, like the law collections, were not intended as juridical or regulatory standards; they were intended to
persuade. Persuade whom? Of what? Five features lead us towards an answer. The first clue lies in the modesty of the wage
inflations and price deflations: these were not manipulated
to outlandish, fantastical extremes, but merely to the edge of
42
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
117
Contra Hawkins, Royal Statements of Ideal Prices, 94, characterizing the Old
Babylonian schedules as unreal and ridiculously out of step with current prices.
118
For Sn-kasid, see RIME, iv, 4.1.8, l. 23; for Nur-Adad, see ibid., 2.8.7, ll. 502;
for Sn-iddinam, see ibid., 2.9.2, ll. 602; 2.9.6, ll. 2534; also Cuneiform Royal
Inscriptions and Related Texts, ed. George, no. 37 (Schyen MS 5000), trans. Volk, ll.
2934. The latter volume includes some similar phrases: Gungunum reported that my
workforce did do its work amid plenty, ugnim-mu nam- hi-a kin-bi hu-mu-ni-b-ak
i
(MS 2871, no. 44, ll. 345); note Sn-iddinams generousi phrase by the
power of my
people I did complete that task, usu ma-da-mu-ta kin-bi he-em-mi-til (MS 3552/1,
i describes wages and food
no. 48, ll. 634); cf. MS 4765, no. 45, ll. 2433, 447, which
rations, but not in specific terms; all three trans. A. R. George.
119
Sn-kasids inscription, however, is more sweeping, claiming its prices were in
effect in the period of his kingship (bala-nam-lugal-la-ka-ne): RIME, iv, 4.1.8, l. 15.
120
The so-called reforms of Urukagina of Lagas (twenty-fourth century BC) and
the code of Ur-Namma of Ur (twenty-first century) were both allusive to social
justice protections, but the former were in fact limited to administrative reforms,
and the latter, while more strongly voicing economic protections and guarantees of
plenty in general terms, limited its actual statutory clauses to punishments for criminal
and civil infractions. See the introduction of Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia
and Asia Minor, for discussion and references.
credibility that one could buy at half the normal price, but earn
at the high end of the wage-market. The rates were uniformly kept
just inside the realm of the conceivable.117 A second clue lies right
alongside the rates, in the attending rhetoric of happiness, equity
and satisfaction: Sn-kasid concluded his price schedule with the
benediction, may his years be years of abundance; Nur-Adad
lyricized, I had my people eat food of all kinds, and drink abundant water; Sn-iddinam that he removed complaint, pleased
. . . the host of Larsa, caused rejoicing in my city and let nobody
take less or more.118 Every single one of these wage and price
inscriptions makes some specific reference to a visibly happy
public, and the reception of the advertised wages and prices
would have been framed by that context. Third, most of the
schedules were occasional in nature, promoted on the building
of major civic structures by levied labour teams walls, canals
and temples or in royal accession years and jubilees.119 This
coincidence meant that mass audiences were on hand for the
public dissemination of claims of plenitude, which may have
been further enacted through episodes of feasting and the statutes themselves limited to those occasions.
Fourth, we should pay some attention to the restricted historical and geographic scope of these inscriptions. The price and
wage schedules have often been treated together with a few
much older royal claims making much vaguer promises to provide
abundance and ensure equity.120 Yet not only are the Old
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
43
121
Note that the earliest known price inscription, the one promulgated by
Gungunum of Larsa in 1911 BC, virtually coincides with the first major peer-state
conflict of the period, the one between Larsa and Malgium in 1914 BC: see n. 98 above.
122
Note, especially, Sn-iddinam B (RIME, iv, 2.9.6, ll. 667), where the markets of
the cities and the countryside are listed serially: ganba sa`-uri5ki larsaki u` ma-da-g[a-ka],
the market value in Ur, Larsa and my land (my emphasis in bold); similarly,
Sn-kasid (ibid., 4.1.8, l. 20): ganba-ma-da-na-ka, the market value of his land;
Nur-Adad (ibid., 2.8.7, l. 61): ganba-sa`-ma-da-ga-ka; less specifically, but still emphasized, Sn-iddinam A (ibid., 2.9.2, ll. 49, 63), and Warad-Sn (ibid., 2.13.21, ll. 1012).
The Esnunna Laws omit any reference to the land with connection to markets, but it
is possible that unrecovered copies may have contained a prologue and/or epilogue
which, like the Hammurabi Laws, specified that all the laws listed were for the land:
see Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 801, 133, Laws
Hammurabi, Prologue, col. 5, ll. 1424 (concluding sentence), and Epilogue, col.
47, ll. 18 (opening sentence), the sentences bracketing the extensive legal decisions.
Babylonian schedules much more specific in their measures, they

are effectively restricted even within the period to only fourteen of
its forty centuries (19111770 BC) and to the cities which actively contended for military dominance over Babylonia in that
time.121 The temporal and geographic scope is identical to the
theatre of operations and time of interstate warfare in the region.
The schedules responded to the urgent needs of Babylon, Uruk,
Larsa and Esnunna in the grip of intense political competition to
recruit manpower for labour and warfare, not to timeless principles of market regulation or a royal ideology of equity. Price
schedules were intended to persuade populations to align with
specific cities through reputations of justice and magnanimity, to
accept the royal protection of and authority over markets in principle, and to enjoy the fruits of states as caretakers they were not
to be used as regulatory financial instruments. Tellingly, following the unifying conquests of Hammurabi, these mechanisms of
persuasion were permanently abandoned for the duration of the
period (17601595 BC), since they were no longer needed note
in the Tables that Hammurabis inscription contains only the
barest hint of wage controls.
Fifth and finally, we should note the prominent place of a rather
plain word littered throughout the schedules and other legal
documents: the land (Sumerian: kalam; Akkadian matu). In
all cases where the schedules specify for whom the prices
and wages were promulgated, they specify the land.122 From
Babylon alone, nine year-names referring to acts of equity and
abundance specified that it was the land that would benefit from
44
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
123
VI
CONCLUSION
The fragmentary ancient record never directly discloses meaning

or context to its historian. The past generation of Assyriological
scholarship has stripped away the veneer of historicity from much
of the ancient Mesopotamian transcript to lay bare the essential
character of many seemingly foundational texts as claims of one
kind or another, rather than facts. This of course is much in line
with work in other historical fields. What has yet to be done as
123
CDLI year-names: Hammurabi 2; Samsuiluna 2, 3; Abi-esuh 2, t, ba/bb;
Ammiditana 3, 17, 21; AmmiBaduqa 10; note also I`R-nene of Uruks year bb.
124
Richardson, Trouble in the Countryside, ana tarBi Samsuditana, 2802.
125
See, for example, RIME, iv, 2.9.14, 2.13.7, 3.7.2.
126
Richardson, Trouble in the Countryside, ana tarBi Samsuditana; Richardson,
World of Babylonian Countrysides.
127
In the long term, this effort would collapse as post-Old Babylonian
Mesopotamian cities would increasingly insist on exceptional legal identities, separate
from the state, articulated through charters of privileged status (kidinnutu).
them.
The royal edicts not only paid heavy attention to the
land as well, but also clearly distinguished this domain from the
markets and citizens of named cities.124 Royal inscriptions also
made a priority of having the kings name pronounced throughout
the land.125 I have argued elsewhere that the terms land and
people were rhetorically paired to articulate an emergent sovereignty of demesne kingship.126 In other words, the term the land
was meant to create the sense of a territorial unity, under which
formerly self-regulating polities would become parts of a larger,
integrated political super-category, under a rather modernsounding notion of state sovereignty.
But the reality was that royal control over the land remained
something legally and politically distinct from kingship over individual cities. Babylonian kingship had always been a form of
authority over cities. The land, by contrast, was a domain without temples and written traditions, thinly adjudicated by officials. The promulgations were directed by urban kings at people
settled outside the cities, a rallying cry to the hinterlands from
the centre. This audience of scattered people and enemies
could not be compelled by force alone to belong, but had also
to be persuaded that there was plenty in the kings land that
they should come to work, eat and live.127
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
45
Oriental Institute, University of Chicago
Seth Richardson
successfully as this process of exposure, however, is to establish

what, exactly, claims like these aimed to accomplish and for
whom; and what they may dependably tell us about the past.
Indeed, it is only in a particularly conceived larger image in
which these topics (sections IIV) which make no obvious
reference to each other find their place as parts of a whole.
The ground we have covered begins with a disproof of territorial
competition as a primary stimulus for interstate warfare. The low
level of territorial power that states exercised over hinterlands in
fact required them to clash with non-state small places only a few
kilometres away even as international competition connected
palatial households in Babylonia to peers on the edge of the
Mediterranean, in central Anatolia, and all the way out into the
Iranian plateau. The simultaneity of same-scale and cross-scale
warfare in turn required Mesopotamian states to employ persuasion as well as force for local governance. New claims of de jure
sovereignty in a legal voice were the initial steps in a very
modern-sounding discourse about the state as the highest and
most thoroughgoing arbiter of every activity within its orbit,
with the price and wage schedules as major planks in a persuasive campaign that bound together themes of plenty and
protection.
What gave these efforts force and meaning were the many indications that complex sovereignty was simultaneously imaginable and unachieved. The ingathering of scattered people, the
prosecution of small wars, the promise of plenty to those outside the state order, all sought to build clientele for the simple
reason that states remained undersubscribed. In these efforts,
the community of the early state was much more fully imagined
than established, its insufficient sovereignties the sources of
its many wants and wishes. That state-building, indeed the
building of even the state idea, continued long into the period
when state entities were accomplished facts forces us to think
about the old ancientsmoderns debate about state power as a
matter of different abilities but also as a matter of very similar
desires.
46
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 215
APPENDIX 1
RA
TIM
ON THE LOCATION OF PI-NA
128
Ur III writings include KA-I7.DA, KA-I7.DA-Ummaki and P-na-ra-tumki
(RGTC, ii; CAD, P, s.v. pu A 9d); in Old Babylonian: (uru)KA.I7.DA(ki), KA , A.SA
` p-i-na-ra-timki, URUki KA.I7.DA,
na-ra-tum, KA-I7.DIDLI.KI, KA I7.HA
ki
ki
`
BA D KA-na-ra-tum, KA.I7.DA( ).ME.ES( ) and URUki KA.I7.DA.
129
RGTC, ii, 88 and references: Where the determinative [i.e. ki] is missing, no
clear distinction between a place name and an appellative is possible. For instance, the
exemplum RA 53 289 ( PRAK 2 t32 D12), a letter from Kis (in the north) mentioning a weir at the mouth of the canals, simply refers to a built feature, not a
` P-naratimki); the adminissettlement; similarly YOS 13 271 identifies a field (A.SA
trative text from southern Kisurra (Kessler No. 129), however, lists KA.I7.DA as a
specific town along with other known settlements such as Sabum and Zurbilum.
130
This conjecture that P-naratim was in northern Babylonia is modestly sup` P-naratimk in YOS 13 271, which would indeed
ported by a reference to an A.SA
probably be a place near Kis: Rosel Pientka, Die spataltbabylonische Zeit: Abiesuh bis
Samsuditana. Quellen, Jahresdaten, Geschichte, 2 vols. (Munster, 1998), ii, 368.
131
Stol, Studies in Old Babylonian History, 25.
132
Sigrist, Larsa Year Names, 27, comparing variants bg of year-name 2 B to
variants a, and cf. Many other year-formulae are, however, genuine double-names,
such as Sn-iqsams very next year-name.
The writing of the place name P-naratim displays some variability.128 In Old Babylonian writings, the place is identified only with
the determinative /uru/ in year-name formulae, with other text
types omitting it and often even the postpositional /ki/129 that
is, it seems barely a town at all by conventional standards. Also, its
location is disputed. One recent proposal set P-naratim in
north-central Babylonia near the city of Kis. This would rely
on the understanding that Sn-iqsams second year-name, a
double-name formula, referred to a single set of related events:
Year the cities of P-naratim and Nazarum were taken, and the
statues of gods were fashioned and brought to Kazallu.130 It
has already been suggested, however, that the year-name was a
compound form celebrating two different events.131
It can now be shown that the two halves of the formula (that is,
the conquest half and the Kazallu half ) do not appear together in
any document, unlinking the argument for geographical proximity.132 In fact, during the period 18861808 BC, when the raids of
Larsa were carried out, the KazalluKis region was not only distant from Larsa (c.120 miles), but in no way adjacent to Larsas
borders. Any raid by Larsa would have required either passing
through the (hostile) territory of the Isin kingdom and/or an
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
47
incursion deep into territory belonging to the kingdom of

Babylon both unlikely options.133 It is thus much more likely
in this case that the area proposed by Steinkeller in 2007,134 close
to Umma and only 34 miles from Larsa, is the more plausible
identification. The location is confirmed by a later letter of
Hammurabi of Babylon, who in the 1750s directed his Larsa administrator Samas-hazir to take water from P-naratim if Larsa
and Ur (downstream from Larsa) were in need of it.135 The multiple campaigns against P-naratim by Larsa seem more credible
at this much closer distance, but have troubling implications for
the security of a major state close to its capital city.
CROSS-SCALE / SAME-SCALE WARFARE IN OLD

BABYLONIAN YEAR-NAMES
Among the year-name formulae for royal polities of Babylonia in
which references to warfare occur, the majority conform to the
following pattern: non-royal enemy polities are said to have been
seized (dab5) or destroyed (hul) (Type A), while royal polities are
said to have had their armies defeated in battle (ugnim gis.tukul
. . . s`g; literally, [its] army was smitten with weapons), without
mention of the actions location (Type B).
At least eighty-nine year-names referring to inter-polity warfare are known between 2014 and 1714 BC from four major and
five minor dynasties.136 Of these, fifty-seven are Type A, thirtyone are Type B, and one case is uncertain. In a few cases the
formulae deviate slightly from my typology: occasionally, both
133
See maps in Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near
East (New York, 1990), 109. At various times, a raid on the KazalluKis region would
have required transgressing as many as four enemy states in order to arrive at a northerly P-naratim Uruk, Isin, Marad and perhaps also Babylon.
134
Steinkeller, City and Countryside in Third-Millennium Southern Babylonia,
183.
135
AbB, iv, 80: If there truly is water enough for Larsa and Ur, then do not make
any arrangements at the mouth of the canals, as I (previously) specified to you. On
the other hand, if there really is no water for Larsa and Ur, then undertake appropriate
measures at the mouth of the canals so that water becomes available for Larsa and
Ur.
136
Major dynasties include Larsa, Isin, Babylon and Esnunna; minor dynasties
include Ischali, Saduppum, Uzarlulu, Kazallu and Kisurra.
APPENDIX 2
48
NUMBER 215
PAST AND PRESENT

137
138
137
For example Sumu-la-el of Babylons 20th year-name (CDLI year-names), the
destruction (hul) of Kazallu and smiting (s`g) of its troops. Here, it is assumed the
latter action was a subset of the former.
138
Ipiq-Adad II of Esnunna says in his Year b formula (CDLI year-names) that he
killed (the verb daku) the town of Unnina; Warad-Sn of Larsa is said to have piled up
[the corpses] (hub) of the army of Emutbal; etc. Other variants include no verb
(Lipit-Istar of Isin h); ga`r.dar . . . gar (Hammurabi 30); ugnim me` . . . sub
(Hammurabi 323); sag.gis . . . ra (Samsuiluna 14, 20).
139
Sumu-la-el of Babylon reports in year 34 (CDLI year-names) that the city of
Malgium (rather than its army) was smitten with weapons; the wall of Kazallu is
destroyed in Sabium of Babylons year 12, not the city per se; etc.
140
For example Isbi-Erra of Isins 26th year (CDLI year-names) seizing of an
Elamite army in Ur.
141
Sometimes more than one polity is mentioned, and sometimes some indistinction arises as to how many places are meant, for example the cities and land of
Rapiqum and Salibi in year Hammurabi 11 ( 1782 BC): CDLI year-names.
142
Kis has been excluded because the only year-names from it already refer to the
overlordship of Babylon.
143
Note that the non-royal polities of Type A, for instance, are hardly ever the ones
showing up among multi-army Type B victories as lesser allies of major royal powers.
144
Three by Babylon (CDLI year-names: Sumu-abum 13, Sumu-la-el 20, Sabium
12) and one by Larsa (CDLI year-names: Warad-Sn 2). Kazallu seems to have been a
borderline case, since it is the only early polity which also appears equally among both
A and B types (in the latter category, four times between 1891 and 1836 BC).
145
The anomalous other two names include Erra-imittis 1860s BC destruction of
Kisurra and Samsuilunas reconquest of Ur, Larsa and Uruk in 1739 BC: CDLI
year-names.
actions are claimed,

other verbs are used,
the referent is
switched,139 or the setting of the action is within a city, but it is
the enemy army which is its object.140 It is relatively clear in most
cases, however, which type of action is meant.
Among Type A cases, the fifty-seven year-names include references to the capture or destruction of seventy-four places or
more.141 Among these seventy-four places, more than threequarters (sixty) refer to non-royal polities, and only fourteen to
cities with convincing evidence for kingship traditions at the time
of conquest.142 It must be emphasized that there is relatively little
evidence suggesting that these non-royal polities were allies
of major states143 or otherwise involved in statestate conflicts.
Of those fourteen cases, eight belong to the brief terminal phases
of peer-state competitions, the decade of Larsas final triumph
over Isin (18031794 BC) and the nine years in which Hammurabi
achieved regional supremacy (17641755 BC). Four of the remaining six campaigns were directed against Kazallu in the nineteenth century BC,144 with two other outlying cases.145
EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
49
146
Rm-Sn of Larsas elaborate 14th year-name (CDLI year-names), for instance,
celebrated a victory over Uruk, Isin, Babylon, Sutu, Rapiqum and Uruk. In this company, the forces of Sutu and Rapiqum are clearly window-dressing in a list focused on
four much larger state armies.
Among the thirty-one Type B cases, the year-names refer to at

least forty-six enemy armies, of which thirty-one belonged to
royal, urban powers. Fifteen other armies belonged to tribal
powers or places without any known royal kingship tradition. In
six of those cases, the enemies were listed as the lesser partners of
major states, not the primary focus of the celebratory formula.146
Taking the claims of the year-names at face value, wars of territorial acquisition were more common, and typically directed
against smaller, non-royal polities; only during the final phases
of longer, strategic conflicts were they mostly aimed at major
cities. Wars against royal enemies, however, mostly resulted
in force reduction or prestige claims. This profile characterizes
the period as one simultaneously experiencing peer-state and
asymmetric warfare, and not one in which small wars were
mostly by-products of statestate conflicts as were border wars
or the like.

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EARLY MESOPOTAMIA: THE

! The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2012

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Our earliest account of Mesopotamian state origins comes from

PAST AND PRESENT

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economies, environmental circumscription, and so forth. There

My analysis focuses on the periods during which states first

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MAP 1. EARLY MESOPOTAMIA ! Jack Scott, 2010.

PAST AND PRESENT

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PAST AND PRESENT

Richardson, World of Babylonian Countrysides, 206.

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an important comparative case and a concern for borders

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structured their political relationship to small places. The

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spurring competition for sustaining hinterlands (see Map 2). In

PAST AND PRESENT

and Technological Change: A Study of Long-Term Trends (Chicago, 1981). J. C. Russell,

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every nuclear family more than 15 ha more than enough for

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MAP 2. Simulation of Early Dynastic I Period Cultivated Areas, after

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MAP 3. SIMULATION OF EARLY DYNASTIC-PERIOD CULTIVATED

PAST AND PRESENT

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If we are able to establish that Mesopotamian polities from

circumvallation of cities. And prior to that, we have little indication of cross-scale or

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heterarchic, competitive landscape of the Old Babylonian period,

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minor states recorded victories over lesser-known or unknown

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(Sumerian: su . . . hul; to destroy by the hand). The victory

PAST AND PRESENT

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An analysis of these memorializations of small wars gives three

PAST AND PRESENT

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manpower and/or returns in prestige, not control of territory,

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year-names of other kings. The vassal system of kings and kings

PAST AND PRESENT

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The importance of this middle tier of political power has grown

ENEMIES AND SCATTERED PEOPLE

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PAST AND PRESENT

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suspicious of the grasping urban institutions which governed

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PAST AND PRESENT

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