The Birth of Expansionist Patrimonialism [Mesopotamia]
Steinkeller on consolidation & collapse of World’s First empires
Piotr Steinkeller wrote:
[For] the purpose of the two cases studied in this chapter “empire” will be defined the following way: Empire is the sustained ability to wield political power over a relatively large, culturally and ethnically diversified geographical area that was brought together under one rule mainly through military conquests …
The task in front of me is to give an account of what, to the best of our present knowledge, are the two earliest examples of imperial experiments on record: the empire of Sargon of Akkade (2300–2200 BCE) and that of the Third Dynasty of Ur (2100–2000 BCE). Both of them developed in southern Mesopotamia (= Babylonia), being separated from each other in time by a mere century or so ….
1. Sargonic Empire
… Although the Sargonic Empire was a completely novel experiment in the use of political power, it was not without precursors. Already a millennium earlier, Mesopotamia saw the appearance of a curious interregional venture, the so-called Uruk Expansion. This network of unmistakably Babylonian enclaves occupied practically the same territory that was later claimed by the Sargonic kings—from Anatolia and the Mediterranean coast in the west to the outer reaches of the Iranian Plateau in the east … [The] “Uruk Expansion” was a commercial phenomenon, a system of colonies established by Uruk and other Babylonian proto-city-states without a recourse to military conquest. While emphatically not an empire, the “Uruk Expansion” was nevertheless significant historically, since it was apparently this development that was responsible for the establishment of trading patterns and commercial routes existing later in the very same region …
… Owing to [his] military achievements … Sargon claimed to rule “from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea,” coining for himself accordingly the title of “Absolute Ruler” [although] no articulated political and administrative system of any importance was imposed upon the conquered territories during his reign. It would also appear that Sargon’s hold over many of those newly acquired lands was ephemeral. Even in southern Babylonia the old system of city-states remained in place, with their rulers now simply Sargon’s vassals … At best, it was an imperial project under way. Significantly, though, Sargon’s conquests delineated the basic extent of the Sargonic expansion, since the reigns of his successors added to it only marginally …
… The task of consolidating Sargon’s territorial conquests and of turning them into a true empire fell to his sons Rimuš and Maništušu, whose combined reigns lasted a total of 23 years. Information on the events of these two kings’ tenures is sparse …
… However important the contributions of these two rulers may have been, it was only under their successor Naram-Suen that the empire reached the heights of its power and internal development … Around Naram-Suen’s thirtieth regnal year a major revolt against his rule erupted … In the wake of this … “Great Rebellion”, Naram-Suen carried out a concentrated program of administrative reforms. As the “Great Rebellion” must have taught him, the main obstacle in the way of turning Babylonia into a truly unified state was the still unresolved question of the [southern city-states which] constituted exclusive domains of a democratic society of gods, with their borders being divinely sanctioned— and hence immutable.
This ideological peculiarity made the creation of supra-city-state entities in southern Babylonia virtually impossible. Naram-Suen’s solution was to elevate himself to the divine plane … to claim divine rule—and thereby political sovereignty—over other city-states … [He] became the divine master of Akkade …
… This ideological innovation was accompanied by … transformations in the realm of administration and economy. From the perspective of imperial policy, the most important development here was the creation of a chain of garrisons at the nodal points of the empire and the introduction of an efficient system of communications, both of which were meant to strengthen the empire’s defenses. The running of the administration was facilitated by the systematization of accounting procedures, with Akkadian replacing Sumerian as the official idiom …
… [The] main reason why the Sargonic kings undertook the enormous effort and expense of sending their armies to the outer borders of Western Asia and, subsequently, of maintaining a modicum of control over that vast territory must have been … the goal of controlling—and thereby of exploiting economically—the main trade routes. In fact, it was the Sargonic rulers themselves who created the first great commercial highway of the Near East, through the linking of a number of subregional trading networks …
… That the reaping of profits from international commerce was the main motivation behind the Sargonic expansion is corroborated by the testimony of the Sargonic kings themselves, who … identify as one of their greatest accomplishments the bringing of the ships [to Akkade] … Further indication of this is provided by the fact that, apart from exacting the payment of tribute, the Sargonic Empire was never engaged in a systematic economic exploitation of the conquered territories. Nor did the Sargonic kings make any attempt, as far as we know, to annex those lands to Babylonia and to put them under their direct rule. The empire’s involvement in the periphery was limited to the establishing … of large military strongholds. Permanently staffed with Akkadian soldiers and administrators, these garrisons overlooked trade routes, safeguarding the free movement of caravans and collecting custom dues …
… [The] empire’s administrative system consisted essentially of its military organization, to which there was attached extensive scribal and accounting personnel. Although it existed already under Sargon, the standing army was considerably expanded during the following reigns. It appears that, subsequent to the “Great Rebellion”, it was also significantly reorganized. Its highest officers were “generals” (šagina), who were posted in charge of the empire’s chief nodal points. The power and prestige of that office was such that, following the empire’s demise, in various parts of the periphery the title of šagina became the favored designation of a royal figure.
As part of the changes … administrative and accounting procedures were significantly reformed. This led to the introduction of a new script and new types of administrative records. Since the documents produced during that time show a remarkable uniformity throughout the empire, a large program of scribal training must have been carried out as well.
This system of limited and comparatively light- handed imperial control … was fortified by treaties and diplomatic marriages with the important regional powers … constituting one of the main tools of the empire’s foreign policy …
… Although causes of imperial collapse are notoriously difficult to identify, they almost always involve a combination of internal (structural) and external (mainly political) factors. In the case of the Sargonic collapse, structural factors probably took precedence. As emphasized earlier, the empire was never fully integrated either politically or economically … Therefore, once the external factors intervened in force … the empire was unable to maintain its control of the periphery … its allies and vassals lacked any incentive to keep their prior commitments. Thus, as soon as the disintegrative processes had set in, they declared independence …
As for the outside factors, probably the most significant among them was the intrusion of two new ethnic groups—the Amorites and the Hurrians—into northern Syria and Upper Mesopotamia …
… Another destabilizing development was the Gutian intrusions … In the opinion of contemporaries at least, these mountain folk were the main cause of the Sargonic collapse …
… As a result of the Sargonic conquests, for the first time since the days of the “Uruk Expansion” polar parts of Western Asia were brought into direct contact with each other. For a century or so, an unprecedented level of exchange and human intercourse occurred … Apart from artifacts, minerals, animals, and plants, technology, ideas, literature, and art were also traded en masse. To the people who experienced it, especially those living at the center of the empire, it must have looked like the dawning of a new age. Not only did a “world economy” of sorts develop for the first time, but a high degree of cultural integration was also brought about throughout the area …
… The empire had a strong and lasting impact on the later history of Mesopotamia. For two millennia—down to the time of Alexander the Great—Sargon and Naram-Suen served as paragons of a heroic world-conqueror. They began to be imitated as soon as their empire came to an end …
… What impressed later generations most about the Sargonic Empire was the incredible scale of its conquests. Nothing like that had been attempted before, and no earlier ruler had claimed dominium over such an unimaginably large and diversified geographical area …
… The last Sargonic kings ruled for a while over the remnants of the empire, which included portions of northern Babylonia and the Diyala Region …
… Toward the very end of the post-Sargonic period, Babylonia was plunged into a period of political upheaval of bewildering complexity ….
2. Ur III Empire
The Ur III Dynasty ruled over Babylonia for slightly over one century (2112– 2004 BCE). It numbered five rulers in five generations: Ur-Namma, his son Šulgi, the latter’s son Amar-Suen, Amar-Suen’s son Šu-Suen, and Šu-Suen’s son Ibbi-Suen. In brief, the history of the period may be divided into the following phases, which coincide fairly closely with the individual reigns: the formation of the Ur III state (Ur-Namma); the creation of an empire (Šulgi); the period of imperial consolidation (Amar-Suen); the first major challenges to the empire’s rule and the attempts to deal with them (Šu-Suen); the demise of the empire and the slow disintegration of the Ur III state (Ibbi-Suen) …
… Around Šulgi’s twentieth regnal year there began a period of reforms that were to affect every aspect of Babylonia’s political institutions and its social and economic organization. In view of their highly coordinated character, and since they were implemented during a relatively brief period of time, one suspects that these reforms were carried out according to a specific blueprint. As a result of these reforms, which took some 10 years to complete, Babylonia was transformed into a highly centralized patrimonial state. Structured as a pyramid, and comprising a hierarchy of individual households, this state constituted one vast royal domain.
As dictated by the patrimonial principle, all of the economic resources of the state became the exclusive property of the king and his extended family. Correspondingly, the entire population of the state (excluding slaves), regardless of their economic and social status—and including the king’s immediate relatives—assumed the status of king’s dependents. In this relationship, which mirrored that existing between the junior members of a household and their master, all of the king’s subjects were required to provide services to the state. In exchange for those services, they were offered protection and economic support, which usually took form of the usufruct grants of agricultural land. The size of those grants depended on the individual’s rank within sociopolitical hierarchy.
The fact that the king was now the owner of all arable land made it possible for the crown fundamentally to reorganize Babylonia’s economic and administrative system. Within individual provinces of Babylonia, which, in terms of their size and geographic extent, corresponded quite closely to the earlier city-states, the fields and other forms of rural holdings originally owned by the chief deities of those principalities (temple estates) were significantly reduced in size and put under the management of provincial governors, who, though usually stemming from local elites, were royal appointees. These “institutional economies”, as they are commonly referred to by Assyriologists, constituted for all practical purposes fiefdoms, which were granted to the governors on the condition of supplying to the crown ca. 50 percent of their agricultural income, as well as various other forms of economic contributions (mainly physical labor) that were meant to support a variety of state-run operations, such as military expeditions, corvée works and building projects of national importance, and the maintenance of the chief administrative and religious centers of the state. These manifold contributions were paid according to a rotational system (called bala, “turn”), which prescribed that each province would be responsible for the upkeep of the state and its operations during a specific time period, whose length was determined by the given province’s size and economic capabilities.
The remaining portions of the agricultural holdings formerly belonging to the temples were used by the crown to create a new fund of land, which was managed directly by the state’s royal officialdom. This type of land was further expanded through the massive development of new fields and the establishing …of new towns and villages. The population of those settlements … were provided with subsistence fields, and put under the control of the central military organization. Out of this new fund of land large rural estates were concurrently developed. Scattered throughout the country, such estates were granted by the king to his relatives and high state officials on the condition of usufruct.
As a result of these developments, Babylonia acquired a two-part type of internal organization, in that within each province there now existed two economic and administrative entities essentially quite independent of each other: the domain of the province’s governor … which was a remnant of the original temple estates; and the holdings and settlements either confiscated from temple estates or newly developed by the crown, which were governed by the highest military officials residing in a given province … The latter entity, which may conveniently be termed “royal economy”, constituted the power-base of the crown, at the same time counterbalancing the position of the governor and providing an important check on his powers.
For the state to handle the revenues incoming from the provincial … the bala taxes and those paid by the various constituent parts of the “royal economy” an efficient collecting mechanism was required. To this end, toward the close of the third decade of Šulgi’s reign a huge complex of storage facilities, offices, and industrial units, called Puzriš-Dagan, was built in the neighborhood of Nippur, the religious capital of Babylonia. This localization was due primarily to logistical considerations, since Nippur … represented Babylonia’s geographic midpoint, and therefore a perfect locus for a national collecting and re-distribution center … [Once] Babylonia had seriously embarked on her “imperial scheme”, establishing a solid foothold in the periphery, Puzriš-Dagan also became the primary collector of the taxes paid by the newly annexed territories.
Only a couple of years before Puzriš-Dagan became operational, Šulgi had built, just to the south of it, at the religious center of Tummal, a new royal palace. The physical proximity of this palace to Puzriš- Dagan, combined with the fact that it was constructed at roughly the same time, strongly indicates that these two projects were but parts of the same grand undertaking, whose objective was to provide the state with a centrally located nerve center. Since Tummal was later regularly visited by the royal family and the highest officials of the realm … it was perhaps at Tummal and Puzriš-Dagan—rather than at Ur—that most of the state business was conducted, and where the government’s most important departments, such as the war and foreign offices, were situated.
The bala taxation system, which imposed on Babylonian provinces specific proportional quotas of material and labor contributions, necessitated that each “institutional economy” keep close track of all the expenditures it made to the state during a given year, in order to be able to calculate the outstanding balance of its yearly tax obligation. This requirement resulted in the production of an unprecedented volume of administrative records, taking mainly the form of receipts and various types of economic forecasts. This explosion of records began suddenly and in full force around Šulgi’s thirtieth regnal year, confirming that this phenomenon was a direct outcome of the introduction of the bala taxation system and of the creation of a centralized economic system more generally. Indeed, it may be conjectured that if not for the uniquely high level of Ur III centralization—and particularly because of the bala system—this great profusion of administrative documents, which is so characteristic of Ur III times, would never have taken place.
A striking feature of this documentation is the appearance of new types of records, reflecting novel accounting procedures. This documentation is equally notable for its uniform script, technical terminology, and the standardized tablet shapes. These facts make it clear that a massive program of scribal education must have been carried out as part of Šulgi’s reforms, the purpose of which was to provide Babylonia with an army of uniformly trained administrators …
… [The] Ur III political and economic organization diverged from the Sargonic model primarily in that it imposed the southern institution of city-states — now turned into provinces — on northern Babylonia. It also eliminated private ownership of arable land … making all such holdings the property of the king. On the other hand, it retained many of the Sargonic innovations, such as a standing army and various other central institutions and mechanisms, and the practice of granting subsistence fields to the state’s dependents in exchange for services …
[The] House of Ur was all about descent and kinship relations, in which, of course, it followed the Sargonic example … Ur III kings outdid their Sargonic predecessors in that area, since their state was … a family affair, in that, like in the modern House of Saud, nearly everybody of importance in Ur III society was related by blood to the royal family.
Most remarkable of all is the fact that the Ur III kingship managed to combine the principle of divine selection with the idea of king’s divinity … Šulgi assumed the title of the vague and inoffensive “god of the land”. Moreover, he cleverly embedded himself within the divine families of all the southern city-states, thereby legitimizing his claim to their individual kingships. There are indications that Šulgi and his followers were accordingly required to undergo separate coronations in each of the southern capitals …
… While abandoning the idea of large-scale foreign conquests, and settling instead for a compact, highly centralized native state with a ribbon of defensive periphery, the Ur III kings still aimed at political and economic domination of much of the territories previously impacted by the Sargonic expansion …
… As far as it can be ascertained, the main objective of this design was to secure for Babylonia direct access to the natural resources not available locally, such as metals, stone, and timber, and, much more importantly, to establish Babylonian domination over the key trade routes between east and west, all the way from the Iranian highlands to the Mediterranean. Among those routes, of particular importance were the ones leading to the sources of tin, a metal of immense strategic value …
… The foundation of the Ur III imperial design—or its “Grand Strategy”—were political and economic alliances with the international powers of particular strategic importance to Ur … By forming these … alliances, Šulgi created a coherent international order, in which the entire territory between eastern Iran and northern Syria was divided into clearly defined spheres of interest. Since at least three of these alliances date to before the Ur III territorial expansion really took off, they had clearly been designed as a strategic framework for launching the expansion …
… The fruit of all these developments was an imperial construct of remarkable complexity and intricacy. While much smaller than the Sargonic Empire territorially, the Ur III Empire was much more closely integrated politically and economically. It was also more sophisticated in terms of its organization and the ways in which it operated. It may further be conjectured that, during the three decades of its effective existence, it was also more successful as an economic venture, even though most of its income probably came from trade, rather than from direct exploitation of the conquered territories …
[Summary] … As is typical of patrimonial systems, in the Ur III Empire political power rested with the king, who was both its ultimate source and its exclusive possessor. The king dispensed this power through a hierarchy of royal dependents, at whose top stood his extended family. The royal princes and the king’s sons- in- laws held some of the top positions in the empire’s military forces, at the same time controlling vast economic resources, in the form of rural estates that had been granted to them by the king on the right of usufruct. Other princes and princesses occupied many of the most important priestly offices. Queens too wielded much power, mainly through harem politicking and their ability to influence the king directly, but also through their extensive— and largely independent— economic activities. While all this necessitated some power sharing with his innumerable kin, the actual decision-making and the daily running of the state were exclusive prerogatives of the king …
… After the king, the most important official of the realm—and in fact the only such functionary of significance—was the chancellor (sukkal-mah). The office of the chancellor acquired particular importance after Šulgi’s death, when it combined all the powers related to the army, the conduct of foreign relations, and probably the running of Babylonia’s “royal economy” as well. This development was due to the political rise of Aradmu (also known as Arad-Nanna) … There are strong reasons to think that during the following two reigns, and well into the reign of Ibbi-Suen, Aradmu was the de facto ruler of the empire … whatever the precise extent of Aradmu’s extraordinary powers may have been, it is indisputable that he was the empire’s most towering figure ….
… The single most important institution of the state was the army and the economic resources it controlled (the so- called “royal economy”), both in Babylonia and in the periphery. The army’s generals and colonels, who numbered in the hundreds, formed as a group a reservoir of great political power … Not only the officerial ranks, but also the troops themselves, comprised great numbers of foreigners … [The] troops (mainly conscripts) mobilized for major military operations … may have numbered as many as 40,000 soldiers.
… The unusually high efficiency of the empire’s operations is attributable to its superb system of communications. Already at the very beginning of his reign, Šulgi established an extensive network of roads, resting places, and relay stations throughout Babylonia. Following the period of foreign conquests, this network was expanded throughout the periphery and far beyond it …
Large numbers of foreigners were brought to Babylonia over the years. While some of them were enslaved, the majority were settled on land and turned into the state’s dependents. All in all, however, since the empire also invested heavily in the maintenance of its institutions in the periphery, it would appear that on balance the main economic benefit it derived from the possession of the periphery was the profits from the control of international trade routes …
… The stable conditions of Amar-Suen’s reign continued to prevail during the first years of his successor and son Šu-Suen (2037– 2029) … [By] the end of Šu-Suen’s reign, serious cracks had appeared throughout the empire’s structure, and that the whole project began to teeter on the brink of disaster … The Ur III state lingered for 20 more years …
Causes of the Collapse:
Since the Ur III Empire was such an intelligent and deliberately designed construct, the question of course arises: Why did it fail, and so suddenly at that? This question is especially pertinent if one considers the small size of the empire and its pragmatic and essentially non- aggressive posture vis-á-vis its foreign possessions and the outside world more generally. Logically, both the highly limited nature of its foreign engagement and the security system it established with its partners, which was based on shared economic interests, should have made it more resilient and durable. Such a calculation may have also been made by Šulgi and his successors, but logic is not a sure guide in strategic planning.
As in the case of the Sargonic enterprise, it was undoubtedly structural—rather than political—factors that were mainly responsible for the collapse of the Ur III Empire …
… Among the structural factors that were responsible for the Ur III collapse we may identify the following, in the order of importance:
(1) … it relied too much on diplomatic arrangements with its allies and vassals …
(2) … military resources were in themselves insufficient to maintain stability in the periphery…
(3) Because of its great centralization and the incredible intricacy of its organization, the Ur III economic system was inherently vulnerable, as its existence depended on the perfect functioning of all its component parts …
(4) … contact with the empire’s institutions must have hastened state-formation processes among its adversaries in the periphery …
(5) … large numbers of foreigners assumed important positions in its central institutions … only superficially embracing the values and goals of the Ur III Empire … [contributing] to the collapse insofar as they tended to think primarily of their own interests and to cultivate their prior ethnic and political allegiances …
… Unlike the Sargonic Empire … despite all the meticulous planning and hard work that went into its creation, the Ur III Empire had been … a resounding failure.
The Source:
Piotr Steinkeller, ‘The Sargonic and Ur III Empires’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, Volume 2, The History of Empires, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, Oxford 2021 [pp. 43-44, 48-55, 57-61, 64-70]
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