Postgate's Early Mesopotamia

And how can one imagine oneself among them

I do not know;

It was all so unimaginably different

And all so long ago.

~~ Louis MacNeice ; Autumn Journal

At first glance, there's not much imagination in Postgate's 'early Mesopotamia'; the commonsensical, British empiricist that Postgate is, coolly assembling the data and calmly and dispassionately drawing logical conclusions from the evidence would not have it otherwise.

But no reader of this book will feel cheated that s/he does not know more about Mesopotamia, c. 3000-1500 BC, than s/he did before -- and this will be as true for specialists as for the students for whom the book is intended.

And many readers will rightly wonder at the narrative skills of the author and how the Mesopotamian past can be so vividly portrayed in these pages.

Postgate's 'method' is direct: pull together the relevant documentary and material evidence in order to delineate the major social and economic institutions of early Mesopotamia.

The result is rewarding, since the copious illustrations and translated texts not only provide a state-of-the-art synthesis of the 'world's earliest urban civilization' (p. xxi); the volume is also filled with original research findings and novel interpretative sketches that cannot be found elsewhere.

No scholar's bookshelves and no course on early Mesopotamian history and archaeology can be without this volume.

Is there a central theme to this book, one that is systematically developed and advocated in opposition to others' views?

Doesn't imagining the past require a dialogue with the present in which the discourse of analysis is reflexively constituted in the theory-laden analyst?

Does Postgate really live and work in Cambridge?

Allow me, good Chippendale, to lay out the contents of this remarkable volume, to debate certain points with the author, and to consider how dispassionate an observer of the past he is.

Part One, 'Setting the Scene,' is divided into three chapters on environment, a historical sequence and writing. These chapters set out the geographic realia of deserts and rivers, mountains and natural routes of travel.

They show that southern Mesopotamia, the 'heartland of cities,' was not a land barren of natural resources, as in many Mesopotamian histories: early Mesopotamians exploited birds, turtles, fish, sheep, goat, cattle, pigs, onions, cucumber, lettuce, apples, pomegranate, dates, willow, tamarisk, poplar. (Postgate is co-editor of the newish journal Bulletin of Sumerian Agriculture, which provides details of these and other natural resources).

One cannot extrapolate from the present despoiled environment of southern Iraq to the Mesopotamian past and one cannot compare Sumerians with Marsh Arabs.

The first dynasties were preceded by small farming villages with modest public architecture and relatively small amounts of social and economic differentiation. While Postgate stresses continuity in the prehistoric sequence -- rightly so, in order to dispute the notion that Sumerians were immigrants into the land -- he unfairly (in my view) underestimates the massive changes in all aspects of Mesopotamian social life at the end of the Uruk period, toward 3000 BC.

At that time, massive city-states were formed, and the characteristic elements of sculpture, cylinder-seals and writing in Mesopotamia appeared. His stress on continuity leads Postgate to endorse Schmandt-Besserat's controversial hypothesis that writing is the end product of a slow evolutionary process.

The evidence and logic to the contrary, however, is that while the first writing owes much to a variety of preceding symbol and communication systems, writing represented a 'punctuated' change and a new semiotic system.

New evidence of early writing in Egypt from W. Kaiser's work at Abydos (Kaiser 1990) also invalidate Postgate's suggestion that the 'idea' of writing spread to Egypt; nor will Indus Valley archaeologists accept that Mesopotamian writing provided the stimulus for the development of the Indus script.

Postgate's outline of political institutions in early Mesopotamia admittedly owes much to Thorkild Jacobsen's pioneering ideas. Thus, Postgate reiterates Jacobsen's notion that a 'Kengir' (Sumerian) amphictyonic league of city-states flourished in the early 3rd millennium BC (see Yoffee 1993).

His analysis of seal-impressions decorated with the names of cities as indicating the existence of such a league, however, is not supported by the evidence of pandemic warfare and the lack of any political unification at that time.

I further take issue with Postgate's picture of Mesopotamian history as one of 'alternation of strong centralized political control with periods of turmoil'; I return to the point anon.

As elsewhere in the volume, this Part One is filled with elegant percuss and excellent illustrations -- original data that allow glimpses of actors, not simply disembodied historical forces in early Mesopotamia.

Part Two, 'Institutions', contains chapters on 'city and countryside', 'household and family', 'temple' and 'palace'. No Mesopotamian history covers these topics in as much depth and with the authority of this volume.

Postgate shows that some aspects of life, such as the production of crafts, are illustrated by reference to the material record, while local political authority of assemblies is known from texts. In order to delineate these institutions, the narrative pace quickens.

The result is that the character of co-resident extended families, marital and funerary rituals and inheritance practices has an air of timelessness to it and the dynamism of social life is thereby occluded. For example, in the Old Babylonian period, c. 2000--1600 BC, there were many sales of property, including houses under which were 'ancestral tombs'.

Presumably the political and economic flux of this period necessitated such sales, which were perhaps local disasters for the unfortunate sellers.

Whereas the chapter on 'the temple' documents the many festivals and journeys of the gods, most of the attention is on the economic role of Mesopotamian religion.

Postgate dismisses the Tempelstadt theory (which held that early citys-tates were theocracies) and shows the powerful presence of temples as land-owners.

Temples supported orphans and unfortunates, temple offices were bought and sold, certain classes of Mesopotamian 'nuns' were the real-estate entrepreneurs of the Old Babylonian period.

The role of the palace is trickier. Postgate argues that palaces were as ancient as (big) temples in early Mesopotamia but at Warka in the late Uruk period, it is unclear that the building called 'palace' is actually the home of royalty or seat of administration.

Indeed, from the Ur III period (c. 2100--2000 BC), the most centralized time in early Mesopotamian history, no palace at Ur has been located. One thinks that palaces were shifted frequently by competing dynasties and new kings while temples, built on hallowed ground, were rebuilt continually.

It was the temple, especially of the patron god of the city-state, that had symbolic importance to kings, not their own residences.

Part Three includes chapters on 'crops and livestock', 'water and land', 'the domestic economy' and 'foreign trade'. The material assembled in these chapters will not be found elsewhere. Crops and agricultural practices, especially irrigation routines, are delineated, and social institutions are measured according to their success in dealing with harsh environmental circumstances.

Similarly, when discussing trade, Postgate presents such titbits as the carrying capacity of boats. The primary message of this section of the book is to show that the palace and temple regularly hired private entrepreneurs to supply goods, both from foreign trade (of, for example, copper from Oman) and local goods (for example, massive quantities of sheep and fish).

The fourth and concluding part has chapters on 'craft and labour', 'war and peace', 'laws and the law' and 'order and disorder'. The discussions on these topics vary from detailed listings of craft workers (for which terms in lexical lists are legion, but without any context in which to put them) and archaeological finds of craft products to general pronouncements that disorder comes from enemies abroad.

Whereas his comments on 'religion', separated from his chapter on 'the temple' by about 150 pages, might be expected to focus on the sacred and belief systems, Postgate declares that 'Mesopotamian religion is politics' (p. 260).

Kings are enthroned in temples, enrich temples, rebuild temples; kings are divinized; kings seek legitimation through the support of the gods and political disasters are ascribed to divine displeasure.

Disputes are settled, however, outside the crown's apparatus by local assemblies and elders.

Legal transactions are accompanied by symbolic acts, such as cutting the hem of a garment, dropping a lump of earth in a canal, passing a pestle.

Law codes are 'prescriptive', meaning that the 'law' is to be 'universally applicable' within a realm, and abstract statements are intended to standardize legal practice.

Although Postgate dismisses concern over whether the law codes are anything more than a species of literature in which justice is the prerogative of royal authority, it is perverse to disarticulate the law code of Hammurabi (for example) from the political deeds of that Babylonian king.

Far from 'standardizing legal practice', Hammurabi ruled conquered territory in southern Mesopotamia with an iron hand, pumped resources to the capital in Babylon, and only overruled his puppet administrators in order to tax the conquered regions more efficiently (typically by granting new lands for subjects to cultivate while their own land was under water).

These conquered territories were ruled for less than 10 years by Hammurabi and broke away from Babylonian control beginning in the ninth year of his successor.

In the final chapter and in the epilogue, Postgate rightly ponders the continuity in Mesopotamian civilization over 3000 years (well beyond the purview of the volume and including north Mesopotamia, Assyria, which is only alluded to occasionally), which is apparent in spite of the many ethnic and linguistic groups in Mesopotamia, the changes of dynasties, and the cycles of local city-state autonomy and brief periods of regional integration.

Characteristically, Postgate presents not only important and interesting data, but also up-to-date and new ideas about social and economic affairs. In particular, he joins a number of workers (including myself) in seeking to delineate the 'overlap between different sectors of society' (p. 303).

That is, Mesopotamian history must eventually be written not solely in terms of institutions, but rather in the interplay of power relations, the multiple roles of individuals as members of several social groups simultaneously and who could manipulate their identities and also be co-opted by others.

In this volume Postgate has not spent much time in developing these points about the intersection and overlap of social roles, and he has not considered how Mesopotamian 'culture' was systematically revised and reproduced over time, resulting in the standardization of cultural forms.

Indeed, the history of Mesopotamian culture stands curiously in contradistinction to the lack of political unity in the land. No one has attempted to write such a Mesopotamian history, and when it is done, perhaps Postgate will be the author.

Meanwhile, we have in this volume a very British imagination of Mesopotamia, one in which the private sector is foregrounded as ensuring the prosperity of the land, but with a conserving ideology of values and social controls guaranteed by the crown, and with social conflict being exceptional and overcome in the end -- and we are glad to have it.

References

Kaiser, W. 1990. Zur Entstehung des gesamtagyptischen Staates, Mitteilung des Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts, Abteilung Kairo 46: 287--99.

Yoffee, N. 1993. The late great tradition in ancient Mesopotamia, in M.E. Cohen, D.C. Snell & D.B. Weisberg (ed.), The tablet and the scroll: Near Eastern studies in honor of William W. Hallo: 300--308. Bethesda (MD): CDL Press.

Review by Norman Yoffee, Antiquity, Sept, 1993

Preview; books.google.com

Shattering The Myth

Myths of the Archaic State:

Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations

Norman Yoffee

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

In this ground-breaking work, Norman Yoffee shatters the prevailing myths underpinning our understanding of the evolution of early civilisations.

He counters the emphasis in traditional scholarship on the rule of ‘godly' and despotic male leaders and challenges the conventional view that early states were uniformly constituted bureaucratic and regional entities.

Instead, by illuminating the role of slaves and soldiers, priests and priestesses, peasants and prostitutes, merchants and craftsmen, Yoffee depicts an evolutionary process centred on the concerns of everyday life.

Drawing on evidence from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica, the author explores the variety of trajectories followed by ancient states, from birth to collapse, and explores the social processes that shape any account of the human past.

This book offers a bold new interpretation of social evolutionary theory, and as such it is essential reading for any student or scholar with an interest in the emergence of complex society.

Online : Google

The Ancient Mesopotamian City

By

Marc Van De Mieroop

Reviewed by Gary Beckman, University of Michigan

Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 1998.10.09

Van De Mieroop's focus here, urbanism, is an ideal topic through which to interest Classicists in the work of researchers into the ancient Near East. After all, the city as both a structure for human social and economic life and as a political form arose in Sumer (southernmost Mesopotamia) around 3400 BCE, and had therefore already existed for around 2500 years in the East before the flowering of the polis. It is no exaggeration to refer to the region's culture, hardly imaginable without its cities (260), as "the most urbanized society of antiquity."

Yet by and large, ancient historians have ignored the towns of ancient Iraq and Syria, at best giving a cursory nod to the Phoenician cities of the first millennium before proceeding with their accounts of Greek developments.

Of course, the alleged irrelevance of Near Eastern socio-economic conditions in general for Classical history owes much to the view at least as old as Aeschylus and Herodotus which contrasts Greek freedom and self-government with the despotism under which Asians lived.

Indeed, the communis opinio among cuneiformists is in essential agreement with this gloomy assessment of the character of Mesopotamian administration through the ages.

Two very influential articles by the Sumerologist Thorkild Jacobsen claiming to demonstrate a progression in Mesopotamian political organization from rule by primeval popular assemblies in the early third millennium to absolute autocracy under the monarchs of the first millennium have gone largely unchallenged, despite the fact that Jacobsen reconstructed the earliest stages of this evolutionary Märchen almost entirely from an exegesis of mythological and epic texts written hundreds of years after the period whose conditions they supposedly reflect.

A major contribution of Van De Mieroop in this book is his presentation of a plausible case that the actual historical course of political development was precisely the reverse of that posited by Jacobsen.

Self-government of urban entities seems to have grown stronger over time, and the late cities of Babylonia (lower Mesopotamia) and Assyria (upper Mesopotamia) may therefore in many respects instructively be compared to the city-states of contemporary Greece.

Starting from a clear summary of the voluminous literature concerning Mesopotamia's "pristine urbanism"(23) and the question of urban origins in general (Chapter 2), the author maintains that the city emerged in early Sumer primarily as a center of redistribution for the foodstuffs and by-products raised or gathered in its surrounding agricultural and pastoral corona.

Concomitantly, the town would have been the locus of manufacturing and of the performance of services by those persons whose subsistence needs were met by the surplus extracted from the hinterland. The city would have been able to play such a role only if it subsumed an agency with the authority to enforce the contributions due from the countryside.

Van De Mieroop's analysis of mid-third-millennium economic documents demonstrates that in earliest urbanized Mesopotamia this task fell to the temple, which far from looking after the people's spiritual needs, "fulfilled primarily a managerial role in the local economy" (24).

The requirements of defense against the depredations of neighboring communities eventually called for the creation of a permanent military establishment. The provisioning of this force under its hereditary leader (the "king") during wars and its maintenance in peacetime was based on an additional center of urban socio-economic power, the palace (Chapter 6).

Thus the public life of the Mesopotamian city came to be dominated by two "great institutions" whose mutual relationship was to evolve throughout the remainder of the region's ancient history: Initially the religious and military establishments were rivals, but the latter gradually assumed predominance, and by the Ur III period (twenty-first century), the temple had become a mere adjunct of royal power.Available records indicate that during the third millennium, temple and palace were the major landholders in Mesopotamia, although few scholars any longer believe that all productive land was concentrated in their hands.

At this time the great institutions played an immediate role in economic administration. Their bureaucrats directly appropriated a significant portion of the land's produce and disbursed it in turn among institutional dependents in the form of rations -- primarily barley, sesame oil, and wool, but also sometimes beer and finished textiles (154-55).

This system is attested not only by innumerable "ration lists" documenting payments, but also by the ubiquitous bowls of standard sizes which have been found in the excavation of most early urban sites in the region.

Later, during the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, this cumbersome economic structure was gradually dismantled as temple and palace gave up the responsibility and risk involved in the collection and storage of primary goods in favor of a regime of tax farming.

In return for payments of silver, entrepreneurs ("merchants") were given the right to collect dues in kind from the producers. These contractors must then have disposed of their perishable goods on the largely undocumented market, since even medium-term storage would have been impossible under Mesopotamian conditions (157-58).

With this change in the mechanism of surplus extraction, rations became a thing of the past. Craftsmen and common laborers in state service now received wages in grain or silver, and there are strong indications that they supplemented their income through free-lance work in the private sector. High-level employees of the great institutions henceforth drew their support from land allotments worked by dependent labor, hirelings, or sharecroppers, over time becoming de facto owners of these properties.

This evolution resulted in greater economic and social independence for at least the entrepreneurs and some other individuals residing in the cities. This elite dealt collectively with the crown through one of their number (the "mayor"), and managed most of their own business and judicial affairs in their assembly.

By the first millennium, when the administration of their far-flung territorial states rested on the network of Mesopotamian cities, Assyrian and Babylonian emperors cultivated the allegiance of urban dwellers by granting them tax exemptions and other privileges, in addition to a large measure of self-government. These privileges were formulated in religious terms, and the temples "became a bulwark of the citizens' power" (120), particularly in the cities of the south.

Much of this analysis had been presented in earlier publications of the author and others. The great value of The Ancient Mesopotamian City lies not in new details, but rather in Van De Mieroop's synthesis of the results of the past thirty or forty years' research in the field of Mesopotamian socio-economic history.

In particular, when considered over the longue durée and in light of comparative evidence, it becomes obvious that the power of the state over the individual in Mesopotamia would have been greatest precisely during the earlier third millennium when temple and palace so dominated the economy of city and country.

In my view, Jacobsen's thesis of an antique "primitive democracy" must now be considered not only undemonstrated but discredited. Beyond the question of political evolution, Van De Mieroop discusses the role of large kinship groups in Mesopotamian society (103-110), the provisioning of cities (Chapter 7), the organization of crafts and commerce (Chapter 8), the function of credit in the economy (Chapter 9), and the town as a center of culture (Chapter 10).

His careful summaries of eastern conditions should prove stimulating to Classical historians constructing models of the societies of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially in regard to areas of life for which their own sources offer little documentation.In his Conclusions (248-63), Van De Mieroop builds his own model of the Mesopotamian city.

Abstracting the essential features of three millennia of unevenly-documented urbanism, and allowing for differences between the ecological and economic conditions of southern and northern urban communities, he judges that the Sumerian/Babylonian/Assyrian town can be accommodated within the parameters of Max Weber's definition of the "ancient city" (257-58), and that in particular it is to be assigned to his ideal type of "consumer city" (255).

But while drawing more resources from its hinterland than it returned, in most periods the Mesopotamian city was not simply parasitic on its rural neighbors. After all, the people of the countryside also benefited from the activities of the hydrological, military, and long-distance trade organizations centered in the town, and they consumed a portion of its craft production as well (256).

In the course of this work Van De Mieroop also touches upon several important methodological questions in current ancient Near Eastern inquiry, such as the limits inherent in our documentation10 and the appropriate geographical and temporal boundaries to be drawn for Mesopotamian history (Chapter 11).

He argues forcefully against decontextualizing the history of the ancient Near East by sundering it from that of succeeding periods and makes a start toward correcting this common fault by sketching the fate of the Mesopotamian city in Hellenistic, Roman, Parthian, Sassanian, and early Islamic times (233-245).

As its author intended, this book is accessible to the reader with no prior acquaintance with Mesopotamia and its languages or with the world of cuneiform studies.

In recent years the gulf between Classical and ancient Near Eastern studies has begun to narrow, particularly in regard to literary questions. May this excellent volume, like those of Oppenheim, contribute to a greater cooperation and exchange of ideas between historians of Mesopotamia and those of Greece and Rome!

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