Mesopotamia’s Separations & Centralizations of Power
Norman Yoffee reveals What Really Happened to Governance
Norman Yoffee wrote:
Introductions:
… Studies of Mesopotamian written tablets (which exist in the hundreds of thousands) and new research in Mesopotamian archaeology reveal substantial political instability in Mesopotamian states. Instances of internal struggle among various social and economic groups in Mesopotamian cities and states have been identified, especially in the ethnolinguistic mix that characterized Mesopotamian civilization.
Furthermore, we can demonstrate how arrogant decisions by mighty leaders led to overextension and the fall of their states. If one “rule” of political stability/instability can be risked, it is that the more centralized the government, the larger the bureaucracy, and the larger the army in a state, the less stable is the government and the more drastic and comprehensive is the fall of the state …
States and Social Transformations in Assyria:
The chronology of Assyria can be broken down into three periods:
Old Assyrian period (ca. 1920–1780): time of merchant colonies
Middle Assyrian period (ca. 1450–1000): birth of an Assyrian expansionist state
Neo-Assyrian period (ca. 1000–612): the Assyrian empire …
The Old Assyrian Period:
… During the Old Assyrian period Assyrian family firms moved goods from where they were plentiful to where they were scarce and made huge profits from their ability to market these goods. Assyrian merchants got gold and silver from Anatolia, which they bought with tin and luxurious textiles that they transported from Assyria. Assyrian merchants negotiated long-term business contracts to amass the capital needed to buy the tin and textiles, and the Assyrian kings and state made it their business to keep trade routes open by campaigning selectively and by negotiating treaties with polities. But for the most part it was left to Assyrian merchants to bring goods via donkey caravans to Anatolia; they paid bribes to highwaymen and taxes to the local princes in Anatolia, where they had founded their colonies. These were colonies in the absence of colonialism, since Kanesh and other settlements of various sizes were under the control of Anatolian palaces and royalty.
… Although there were kings, administrators, and armies in Assyria, there were also councils of “great and small” men and a “city hall” that shared power with the crown in Assyria and its bureaucracy. The elite consisted of eminent traders and landowners.
Figure 7.5, which to an extent is necessarily hypothetical, depicts the social and political hierarchy of Assyrian society in the Old Assyrian period.
Figure 7.5 Schematization of Old Assyrian hierarchy.
The diagram shows three interrelated hierarchical branches. In the center there is the government, consisting of the army, the bureaucracy, and the land and workers under the governmental administration. On the right it depicts the temple estates, with priests and administrators. In Mesopotamia temples owned property in order to feed and clothe the gods. The Mesopotamian word for temple is “house of the god”, and the god’s “house” (or, better, the god’s household estate) included those who ministered to him (or her), performing ceremonies, as well as administrators and workers who produced and prepared food and rich garments for the god. The gods (and there were many of them) needed large estates and many dependents for their households. When the (statue of the) god finished consuming the meal prepared for him (or her) and, dressed in fine raiment, departed the ritual meal chamber, the leftovers were given to priests and workers.
In the third branch of this hierarchy, on the left side of the diagram, is shown the councils, consisting of traders and gentry, their kinsmen, and their villages. The councils enjoyed real power in Assur (and in the Assyrian colonies in Anatolia). Lawsuits were decided in councils, payments by merchants to the council were set, and in Anatolia taxes were collected to be given to the local rulers who suffered the Assyrian colonies to exist in their midst.
Note especially in this diagram that the workers in villages, soldiers, and laborers on all the agricultural estates were Assyrians. Toward the end of the Old Assyrian period, about 1820 B.C.E., Shamshi-Adad, a usurper king, originally from the Middle Euphrates area, conquered Assur and incorporated it in his realm. This conquest, to be sure, affected events in Assyria, leading to increased centralization of royal power …
… When the artificial state imposed by Shamshi-Adad collapsed after his death, the Old Assyrian political and economic system seems to have been reduced essentially to the rural countryside that was its original base. If we look at the diagram, it was essentially only the governmental system that collapsed soon after the reign of Shamshi-Adad. The association of local elites, now without the traders but still consisting of traditional Assyrian gentry and workers, survived, and so did, as far as we can tell, the temples and their landholdings.
The Middle Assyrian Period:
From the end of the Old Assyrian period, about 1750 B.C.E., for 300 years we know practically nothing about Assyria. No texts are known from this period, which as a result is called a dark age; only later lists of kings and chronicles reflect something of an oral tradition that remembered – and constructed – a line of monarchs that may or may not have existed during this time. In the fourteenth century, however, Assyria experienced a political renaissance substantially in response to new states and military campaigns that impinged on its borders. To combat these enemies, which included the Kassite state in Babylonia to the south, the neighboring state of Mitanni to the west, and the Hittites in Anatolia to the north, Middle Assyrian kings began to centralize their power and create an effective military resistance that soon turned into an expansionist army.
Figure 7.6 Schematization of Middle Assyrian hierarchy
The structure of this newly centralized state in Assyria is depicted in Figure 7.6. Comparing this with the diagram of the Old Assyrian empire, you can see that the councils of the Old Assyrian period that shared power with the king and the palace establishment have disappeared. In fact, the centralizing program of the Middle Assyrian kings was intended to displace the traditional powers of the Assyrian nobility.
However, the nobility was far from toothless and contested their subordination in the administration of the Middle Assyrian state … There’s a moral here: ancient states, like more recent ones, were characterized by factions, parties, and politicians. Any attempt to reduce ancient states to vague and undifferentiated “societies” (as in “how societies choose to fail or succeed”) disregards the very pulse of the past.
In our diagram of the Middle Assyrian state and society, we may note how Middle Assyrian kings, again in contrast to the Old Assyrian system, attempted to streamline and simplify the administration of the land, bringing the army, temples, gentry, and local villagers under their direct control. Although royal power was resisted by the Assyrian nobility, this power of the kings grew in this period. Whereas events around 1200 B.C.E. in which regional warfare, piracy, and movements of foreign and displaced peoples disrupted the plans of the Assyrian kings, the process of centralization in Assyria soon resumed and continued into the first millennium B.C.E.
The Neo-Assyrian Period:
Neo-Assyrian kings, beginning in earnest in the early ninth century B.C.E., transformed the army into an expeditionary force, one that was enormous, professionalized, and battle-toughened. The army began to campaign yearly, to the north into Anatolia, east into Iran, and west to Syria and the Levantine coast. The highpoint of the Neo-Assyrian expansion was shortly after 700 B.C.E., when Assyrian hegemony extended to the Mediterranean coast, Egypt, Babylonia, and southern Iran.
The highpoint of the Assyrian empire, however, was short lived, and conquered territories soon won their freedom. The Assyrian army became bogged down in adventures … With the exception of a few outposts and individuals named in later Babylonian documents, the existence of both an Assyrian political system and most Assyrian social and cultural institutions vanished.
Why did the Assyrian state collapse, and more importantly, why did it not regenerate – as had so many other defeated and “collapsed” Mesopotamian states? One salient reason was the policy of the Assyrian kings themselves. In Figure 7.7 we can see some of the policies of extreme centralization that Assyrian kings pursued, including the construction of new capitals and the promotion of generals into offices close to the king.
Figure 7.7 Schematization of Neo-Assyrian hierarchy.
In the terms of those who study the formal properties of systems, the three upper levels of the hierarchy were closely coupled horizontally, while the vertical bonds connecting the upper levels to the lower ones were increasingly loosely coupled. That is, the close interconnections of the place, the army, and the elites, who no longer owed their status to their place in the traditional Assyrian kinship system and landholding traditions, but whose rank and power derived solely from their state offices, made the top levels of the system “disarticulated” and vulnerable to being wholly erased. It was not simply the government that disappeared, as in the Old Assyrian period, but the upper three levels of Assyrian society as well (in this hierarchical rendering).
But the lower levels of the Neo-Assyrian hierarchy were changed even more profoundly than the upper levels. Beginning in the Middle Assyrian period, but increasing at an enormous rate in the Neo-Assyrian times, kings deported conquered peoples – like the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel – into the new and old imperial cities, where they worked constructing magnificent palaces and works of art. Deported peoples were also moved into the countryside as agricultural workers and canal laborers. Indeed, much of the countryside was in the hands of generals who were rewarded by the king for their military successes. Workers on these newly created estates were not Assyrians and did not speak Assyrian (but overwhelmingly spoke Aramaic, the main language of Syria/Palestine/Israel). These workers knew little and presumably cared less about Assyrian culture and history.
These laborers – to use again the terminology of our diagram above – were strongly coupled horizontally, kinsmen, and cultural neighbors – but only loosely connected vertically to the upper levels of the Assyrian hierarchy. Normally, in Mesopotamian collapses, when the top level of the hierarchy was removed, it would be rebuilt, as it were, by the lower sections of the system (as the Assyrian state was rebuilt after the Old Assyrian period). This was simply not possible in the Neo-Assyrian case, because the inhabitants of villages were increasingly not Assyrian in ethnicity, religion, or language and had little interest in reconstructing anything that was “Assyrian” …
… [A] rebellion broke out in Babylonia – which was governed in the last century of Assyria’s power by Assyrian puppets – against the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, and the king sacked Babylonia … [A]fter a four-year civil war, Assyria conquered the south. However, this long war cost Assyria in soldiers and in lost tribute that would have been brought in by the campaigns of the Assyrian army. The civil war was a Pyrrhic victory for the Assyrians, who, in their weakened state, soon succumbed to the superior forces of their enemies.
Assyria without the State:
Figure 7.8 shows why the Assyrian state was not rebuilt after the defeat of its king and army in the latter years of the seventh century B.C.E.
The removal of the horizontally connected top layers of the Neo-Assyrian hierarchy did not proceed to a level of landed gentry and Assyrian nobility (as in the Old Assyrian case), since these traditional local elites had been systematically removed by Assyrian kings in their drive to establish a centralized government and an enormously large army. The successes of the army propped up the state, and the officers essentially replaced the traditional gentry of the countryside.
Figure 7.8 Schematization of Assyria without the state.
In that countryside and in the royal capitals lived mostly non-Assyrian workers, who, as I’ve noted, had little connection to Assyrian culture or even the Assyrian language. They had been deported from the west into Assyria, and after the fall of the Mesopotamian capitals, many still inhabited the ruined cities, although most lived in the countryside.
Although the Assyrian kings were defeated by foreigners, it was only the Assyrians themselves who could have destroyed the very qualities that made Assyria Assyria. Gibbon famously described the fall of the Roman empire as the “triumph of barbarism and religion”. When we depict the collapse of Assyria, it is the disappearance of the religion, culture, and language of the Assyrians, which had lasted for hundreds of years, that is most significant and that explains why Assyria did not rise again. Gibbon would have understood this perfectly. People continued to live in Assyria, and remnants of the most ancient city in the land, Nineveh, are cited in a variety of sources, but Assyria was gone …
Conclusion:
… In Assyria we can see how councils of elders and entrepreneurial traders were gradually eliminated by powerful kings, how traditional lands were given to generals and high-ranking bureaucrats, and how imperial successes led to the incorporation in the empire of people, like the “Lost Tribes”, who had nothing in common with their rulers …
… Archaeologists and ancient historians do not often have the luxury of knowing and saying exactly what happened in the past. However, we are very good at saying precisely what didn’t happen … and ancient states like Assyria did not collapse because their leaders mismanaged their environments … One lesson we may learn about the transformations of ancient civilizations, as we see in Assyria, is that, in an important sense, they didn’t collapse at all.
The Source:
Norman Yoffee, ‘Collapse in Ancient Mesopotamia: What Happened, What Didn’t’, in Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, edited by Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee, Cambridge 2010
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