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Mesopotamian Politics

I. The Argument
The Narrative

Part IV
Chapter 15

Political Strategies

Marco De Pietri – April 2024

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15.1 The Centripetal Dimension

Institutional structuring was the central factor in the development of human societies.

The ‘empire’ of Akkad (cf. Sections 9 and 12.4) collapsed because it was not able to consolidate and integrate the base. The later period (cf. Section 14) is characterized by a stronger awareness of having to concentrate on centripetal (and integrative) policies rather then centrifugal (potentially disaggregative) ones.

Thus, the internal organization of the state emerged as an indispensable factor for political strategies, aiming at reaching both:

  • a wide capillarity over the territory;
  • a strong link to central authorities.

The king emerged as the central authority present on all the levels of the political administration of the state. Hammurapi of BabylonNote 1 can be seen as a prototype of this figure (involving also features of the kings of Ur), mainly for six reasons:

  1. the formation of a well-articulated protocol (cf. Section 15.2);
  2. the power of the king emerges as a well-defined decisional center (cf. Section 15.3);
  3. the predictive moment of power can be seen as embodied in a ‘law code’ (cf. Section 15.4);
  4. the ideology is inserted in a very explicit way within the policy of integration at the base (cf. Section 15.5);
  5. two administrative measures granted a better control (cf. Section 15.6):
    • the census;
    • an explicit record of territorial boundaries;
  6. a territorial organization on a provincial basis (cf. Section 15.7).

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15.2 The Standardization of Protocol

During the Ur III period (cf. Section 14.2), we can observe a standardization of the scribal protocol, a process already started with the scribal ecumene (cf. Section 8.2). On this level, two facts are significative:

  1. an extraordinary technical coordination among the schools in various cities;
  2. the political power took the responsibility of maintaining vast and efficient chanceries.

The most characteristic center for this period was Puzrish-Dagan/Drehem,Note 2 near Nippur, an administrative city controlling goods coming to Nippur; here, we can observe an extreme accuracy in recording transactions, with monthly and annual reports (similar to those of Ebla in the third millennium BC).

This well-shaped bureucratic system produced different types of documents:

  • records;
  • legal texts;
  • receipts;
  • spreadsheet-like texts.

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15.3 The Decision Making Power

The decisional power of the king and the court in public affairs increased and became more meticulous; this phenomenon can be analyzed through two aspects:

  1. the Babylonian chancery shows an extreme capillary efficiency;
  2. the state assumes very specific powers that affect private rights; this is particularly clear on two points:
    • the confiscation and redistribution of private land;
    • the acquiring of land belonging to the temples (whose functionaries are now regarded as ‘servants of the king’).

What is even more surprising is indeed the direct and personal involvement of the king, as is is clear, e.g., in the correspondence between the kings of Babylon and their functionaries in Larsa: here, there are many instances of face-to-face encounters with the king, which people introduced ‘into the presence’ of the sovereign, in Babylon or even in Sippar (a king’s secondary seat).

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15.4 The Normative Power

Cf. Chapter 5.8.

The normative power is well-exemplified by the formulation of general priciples meant to regulate future decisions; is was the king the person responsible for setting these principles of justice (in Akkadian, kittum u mīšarum, ‘truth and justice’), granting them with its own authority as a judge in charge of resolving conflict situations. The famous ‘law code’ of Hammurapi/Code of HammurapiNote 3 is, in fact, a collection of verdicts (labelled as dīnat mīšarim in Akkadian, i.e. ‘verdicts of justice’ of the king), a document showing a deeply political intent and valence. From this text, we can infer three aspects:

  1. the manifestation of the king as a supreme judge, described as such by the Akkadian term le’ūm, literally ‘capable of obtaining results > qualified’;
  2. a clear sence of justice shows how the king is really in the service of justice, appointed directly by the polyad god Marduk;
  3. further ideological implications on a political level.

More in detail:

  1. The king, as the supreme judge (literally, in Akkadian, šar mīšarim, ‘king of justice,’ acting on behalf of the sun-god Shamash), makes the abstract concept of justice to become incarnate in the category of mīšarī, ‘my (of the king) justice’, and, even more concretely, in the actual form of awāt mīšarim, ‘words of justice’ (of the king).
  2. The form of the ‘law code’ as a collection of verdicts can be considered as a normative document; but in its very form, the ‘law code’ does not present general principles but rather the actual ‘choises’ of the king from which it is possible to gain general rules in a predictive way. Besides this fact, the document is not an anecdotal patchwork, since it shows a fully systematic structure.
  3. The ‘law code’ also has some ideological implications; two of them require teo be further investigated:
    • the prolog of the ‘law code’ integrates the cities of the kingdom into a new great entity subjuct to the pax babylonica granted by the king; so, the verdicts are universally applicable, affirming the solidarity at the base of the Babylonian kingdom;
    • the approach of the king to his people is, in a way, ‘populist’, especially when he states to be the protector of the weak, the widow, and the orphan. In contrast to the earlier kings of Akkad, Hammurapi wanted to portray himself as the ‘shepherd’ of his people.

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15.5 Canonization of Ideology

Hammurapi’s ‘law code’ was also a vehicle for a new imagery of the sovereign perceived as an ideal king. The text of the document was made ‘neverending’ thanks to writing but the king also sought to bring technology back to people: in effect, the text of the ‘law’ code’ was read aloud in a way that it was the king himself (portrayed on the top of the stela) speaking directly to his people. This is another innovative way of controlling communication and media, in a kind of proto-audio/visual approach.

This idea is described by G. Buccellati (Origins, p. 187) in a very effective way: it was an attempt to the “monumentalization of the word” (a phenomenon already started with the previous kings of Akkad), showing a strong concern about public communication. This is the result of a strong political sensibility of the king, aiming at presenting himself more as the ‘father’ and the ‘shepherd’Note 4 of his people, rather then a conqueror or a warrior, only; in this way, the king was eliminating the barriers between the individuals and the structure of the state.

The ideology of the conquest is introduced in the ‘law code’ to emphasize the universal applicability of Hammurapi’s sence of justice. In fact, even in the case of a military conquest (such as that of Malgium, for which cf. Section 14.5), the king presents himself as aiming not at the annihilation of the enemy, but at the foundation of the rivals’ prosperity.

This topos will last in time even after Hammurapi: for instance, Lipit-Ishtar, a king of Isin, boasted that he ‘had brought justice to the land;’ besides the similarities in content, we can observe a further extension of the concept of the ‘king of justice’ even to a hidden level; in effect, Lipit-Istar’s declaration was written on a foundation tablet: in other words, “it was a hidden, not monumental, document, associated with a public work of general utility. The ideology extended to all the levels, even those intended to remain hidden” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 188).

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15.6 Control over the Territory as a Whole

Forms of control of the administrative system over the territory, translanding the local dimension, are represented by:

The latter was specificaly set in place for two aims:

  1. taxation;
  2. military conscription.

For this second form of control, we have many data from Mari. To better understand the importance of the census of the population, we could offer, as a comparison, even later in time and political context, of the census of David (see 2 Sam. 24), where we can observe a differnt situation, implying a pestilence sent by God to punish David for his decision; in this case, being the political situation different, i.e. that of a ‘nation’, the imposition of the census by the king is seen as an act against the ‘functionalization of the territory’ which is, in the case of a ‘national’ state, self-generating, without any imposition by the royal power.

As for the first aforementioned form of control, the definition of boundaries, this political endeavor is a form of control over the state in its topographical dimension; a good example can be found in an inscription of Ur-Namma (king of Ur, ca. 2112-2095 BC; cf. Table 4), where the king clearly states the boundaries of his kingdom.

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15.7 Control over the Territory in its Components

The royal central administration exercised a direct control over its territory, aiming at unifying the different parts of the kingdom by a systematic application of provincial subdivisions of the territory.

Nonetheless, in this period we cannot yet see a true structural innovation on the forms of territorial control: in fact, the provinces were just the result of the amalgamation of pre-existing entities keeping their own physiognomy; this process can be defined as agglutination or aggregation. Therefore, the new acquired territories are not yet provinces, strictly speaking, because they do not reach the ‘functionalization of the territory’ which will be reached only with the Neo-Assyrian empire (cf. Section 22.2).

But Hammurapi brought about another innovation towards this direction: he started a redistribution of the territory in favor of (Babylonian) soldiers in the conquered territories (we have evidence for this in the royal correspondence with the ‘province’ of Larsa); “this was an interference, so to speak, with the native aspect of the territory: the forceful presence of these new ‘settlers’ would certainly have served to reduce, if not overcome, the the sense of belonging to an ancestrally homogeneous territory. It was a move in favor of the wider horizons of a ‘Mesopotamian’ territory, but it was not enough to reconfigure that sense of ‘national’ belonging” (Buccellati, Origins, p. 189).

Hence, the unification did not remain cohesive at the roots and did not survive: after the periods of Ur III and Hammurapi, ‘Mesopotamia, basically spitted (in the second half of the second millennium BC) into two grat macro-regions (on this concept, cf. Section 13.4):

  • Babylon, in the south;
  • Assyria, in the north.

Also in the case of the present ‘Mesopotamian experiment’ (as it happened to the ‘imperial experiment’ of Akkad; cf. Section 9), it remained just that, even without returning to the structure of the nuclear state.

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Notes

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