Fields of Blood (7 page)

We have no firm evidence, but it was probably pastoralists living in the mountainous regions surrounding the
Fertile Crescent who introduced warfare to Sumer.
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The
herdsmen would have found the cities’ wealth irresistible, and they had perfected the art of the surprise attack, their speed and mobility terrifying the city dwellers, who had not yet mastered the art of horsemanship. After a few such lightning raids, the
Sumerians would have taken steps to protect their people and storehouses. But these assaults probably gave them the idea of using similar techniques to seize loot and arable land from a neighboring Sumerian city.
⁷³
By the middle of the third millennium BCE, the Sumerian plain was mobilized for warfare: archaeologists have discovered a marked increase in walled fortifications and bronze weaponry in this stratum. This had not been unavoidable; there was no such escalation of armed conflict in
Egypt, which had also developed a sophisticated civilization but was a far more peaceful agrarian state.
⁷⁴
The
Nile flooded the fields with almost unfailing regularity, and Egypt was not exposed to the tumultuous climate of
Mesopotamia; nor was it encircled by mountains full of predatory herdsmen.
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The Egyptian kingdoms probably had an ad hoc militia to repel an occasional nomadic attack from the desert, but the weapons unearthed by archaeologists are crude and rudimentary. Most ancient Egyptian art celebrates the joy and elegance of civilian life, and there is little glorification of warfare in early Egyptian literature.
⁷⁶

We can only piece together the progress of Sumerian militarization from fragmentary archaeological evidence. Between 2340 and 2284 BCE, the Sumerian king lists record thirty-four intercity wars.
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The first kings of Sumer had been priestly specialists in astronomy and ritual; now
increasingly they were warriors like
Gilgamesh. They discovered that warfare was an invaluable source of revenue that brought them booty and prisoners who could be put to work in the fields. Instead of waiting for the next breakthrough in productivity, war yielded quicker and more ample returns. The
Stele of Vultures (c. 2500 BCE), now in the
Louvre, depicts
Eannatum, king of
Lagash, leading a tightly knit and heavily armed phalanx of troops into battle against the city of
Umma; this was clearly a society equipped and trained for warfare. The stele records that even though they begged for mercy, three thousand Ummaite soldiers were killed that day.
⁷⁸
Once the plain had become militarized, each king had to be prepared to defend and if possible extend his territory, the source of his wealth. Most of these Sumerian conflicts were
tit-for-tat campaigns for booty and territory. None seem to have been decisive, and there are signs that some people saw the whole business as futile. “You go and carry off the enemy’s land,” reads one inscription; “the enemy comes and carries off your land.” Yet disputes were still settled by force rather than by diplomacy and no state could afford to be militarily unprepared. “The state weak in armaments,” commented another inscription, “the enemy will not be driven from its gates.”
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During these inconclusive wars, Sumerian aristocrats and retainers were wounded, killed, and enslaved, but the peasants suffered far more. Because they were the basis of any aristocrat’s wealth, they and their livestock were regularly slaughtered by an invading army, their barns and homes demolished, and their fields soaked with blood. The countryside and peasant villages would become a wasteland, and the destruction of harvests, herds, and agricultural equipment often meant severe
famine.
⁸⁰
The inconclusive nature of these wars meant that everybody suffered and that there would be no permanent gain for anybody, since today’s winner was likely to be tomorrow’s loser. This would become the besetting problem of civilization, since equally matched aristocracies would always compete aggressively for scarce resources. Paradoxically, warfare that was supposed to enrich the
aristocracy often damaged productivity. Already at this very early date it had become apparent that to prevent this pointless and self-destructive suffering, it was essential to hold these competing aristocracies in check. A higher authority had to have the military muscle to impose the peace.

In 2330 a new type of ruler emerged in Mesopotamia when
Sargon, a common soldier of
Semitic origins, staged a successful coup in the city
of
Kish, marched to
Uruk, and deposed its king. He then repeated this process in one city after another until, for the very first time, Sumer was ruled by a single monarch. Sargon had created the world’s first agrarian empire.
⁸¹
It was said that with his massive standing army of 5,400 men, he conquered territory in what is now
Iran,
Syria, and
Lebanon. He built Akkad, an entirely new capital city, which may have stood near modern Baghdad. In his inscriptions, Sargon—his name meaning “True and Rightful King”—claimed to have ruled “the totality of lands under heaven,” and later generations would revere him as a model hero, not unlike
Charlemagne or King
Arthur. For millennia, in his memory, Mesopotamian rulers would style themselves “lord of Akkad.” Yet we know very little about either the man or his empire. Akkad was remembered as an exotic, cosmopolitan city and an important
trade center, but its site has never been discovered. The empire has left little archaeological trace, and what we know of Sargon’s life is largely legendary.

Yet his empire was a watershed. The world’s first supraregional polity, it became the model for all future agrarian
imperialism, not simply because of Sargon’s prestige but because there seemed to be no viable alternative. Warfare and
taxation would be essential to the economy of every future agrarian empire. The
Akkadian Empire was achieved by the conquest of foreign territory: subject peoples were reduced to vassals, and kings and tribal chieftains became regional governors, their task to extort taxes in kind from their people—silver, grain, frankincense, metals, timber, and animals—and send them to Akkad. Sargon’s inscriptions claim that he fought thirty-four wars during his exceptionally long reign of fifty-six years. In all later agrarian empires, warfare was not an unusual crisis but became the norm; it was not simply the “sport of kings” but an economic and social necessity.
⁸²
Besides gaining plunder and loot, the chief goal of any imperial campaign was to conquer and tax more peasants. As the British historian
Perry Anderson explains, “war was possibly the most
rational
and
rapid
single mode of economic expansion, of surplus extraction, available for any given ruling class.”
⁸³
Fighting and obtaining wealth were inseparable and interconnected: freed from the need to engage in productive work, the nobility had the leisure to cultivate their martial skills.
⁸⁴
They certainly fought for honor, glory, and the sheer pleasure of battle, but warfare was, “perhaps above all, a source of profit, the nobleman’s chief industry.”
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It needed no justification, because its necessity seemed self-evident.

We know so little about Sargon that it is hard to be precise about the role of religion in his imperial wars. In one of his inscriptions he claimed that after he defeated the cities of Ur,
Lagash, and
Umma, “the god Enlil [did] not let him have a rival, gave him the Lower and the Upper Sea and the citizens of Akkad held [posts of] government.” Religion had always been inseparable from
Mesopotamian politics. The city was viable because it fed and served its deities; doubtless, the oracles of these gods endorsed Sargon’s campaigns. His son and successor
Naram-Sin (.c 2260–2223), who further extended the Akkadian
Empire, was actually known as the “god of Akkad.” As a new city, Akkad could not claim to have been founded by one of the Anunnaki, so Naram-Sin declared that he had become the mediator between the divine
aristocracy and his subjects. As we shall see,
agrarian emperors would often be deified in this way, and it gave them a useful
propaganda device that justified major administrative and economic reforms.
⁸⁶
As ever, religion and politics co-inhered, the gods serving not only as the alter ego of the monarch but also sanctifying the structural violence that was essential to the survival of civilization.

The agrarian empire made no attempt to represent the people or serve their interests. The ruling class regarded the peasant population as virtually a different species. The ruler saw his empire as his personal possession and his army as his own private militia. As long as their subjects produced and relinquished the surplus, the ruling class left them to their own devices, so peasants policed and governed their own communities; premodern communications did not permit the imperial ruling class to impose its religion or culture on the subject peoples. A successful empire supposedly prevented the destructive
tit-for-tat warfare that had plagued Sumer, but even so Sargon died suppressing a revolt, and besides constantly subduing would-be usurpers, Naram-Sin also had to defend his borders against
pastoralists who had founded their own states in
Anatolia,
Syria, and
Palestine.

After the decline of the Akkadian Empire, there were other imperial experiments in Mesopotamia. From 2113 to 2029,
Ur ruled the whole of Sumer and Akkad from the Persian Gulf to the southern
Jezirah as well as large parts of western
Iran. Then, in the nineteenth century BCE,
Sumu-abum, a
Semitic-
Amorite chieftain, founded a dynasty in the small town of Babylon.
King Hammurabi (c. 1792–1750), the sixth in
line, gradually gained control of southern Mesopotamia and the western regions of the middle Euphrates. In a famous stele, he is shown standing before
Marduk, the sun god, receiving the laws of his kingdom. In his law code, Hammurabi announced that he had been appointed by the gods “to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, that the strong might not oppress the weak.”
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Despite the structural violence of the agrarian state,
Middle Eastern rulers would regularly make this claim. Promulgating such laws was little more than a political exercise in which the king claimed that he was powerful enough to bypass the lower aristocrats and become a supreme court of appeal to the oppressed masses.
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His benevolent laws, his code concluded, were the “laws of righteousness, which Hammurabi,
the strong king,
established.”
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Significantly, he published this code at the end of his career, after he had forcefully oppressed any opposition and established a system of
taxation throughout his domains that enriched his capital in Babylon.

But no agrarian civilization could advance beyond a certain limit. An expanding empire always outran its resources, once its requirements exceeded what nature, peasants, and animals could produce. And despite the lofty talk about justice for the poor, prosperity had to be confined to an
elite. While
modernity has institutionalized change, radical innovation was rare in premodern times: civilization seemed so fragile that it was deemed more important to preserve what had been achieved rather than risk something entirely new. Originality was not encouraged, because any new idea that required too great an economic outlay would not be implemented and this frustration could cause social unrest. Hence novelty was suspect, not out of timidity but because it was economically and politically hazardous. The past remained the supreme authority.
⁹⁰

Continuity was therefore politically essential. Thus the
Akitu festival, inaugurated by the Sumerians in the mid-third millennium, was celebrated each year by every Mesopotamian ruler for over two thousand years. Originally performed in
Ur in honor of Enlil when Sumer had become militarized, in Babylon these rituals centered on the city’s patron, Marduk.
⁹¹
As always in Mesopotamia, this act of worship had an important political function and was essential to the regime’s legitimacy. We shall see in
Chapter 4
that a king could be deposed for failing to perform these ceremonies, which marked the start of the New Year, when the old year was dying and the king’s power also waning.
⁹²
By ritually
rehearsing cosmic battles that had ordered the universe at the beginning of time, the ruling aristocracy hoped to make this powerful surge of sacred energy a reality in their state for another twelve months.