Introduction
The landscape of ancient Mesopotamia did not favour permanence. The meandering courses of the Tigris and Euphrates constantly reshaped the plain, carving out new channels over time and leaving old ones dry.1 Without access to water, cities along the old channels suffered losses of population or even abandonment; temples, palaces, and city walls, built as they were of mud brick, quickly deteriorated into earthen mounds if not properly maintained and repaired.2 The lack of natural borders facilitated movements between populations on the margins of the alluvium and those residing in the heartland, periodically bringing new ethnic groups to prominence.
Yet in spite of these destabilizing forces, Babylonian civilization displayed a remarkable degree of continuity over the centuries due in large part to the ideological importance attached to the cities that dotted the Mesopotamian plain. Even after Hammurabi removed royal power to Babylon in the second quarter of the second millennium bc,3 many cities retained economic and administrative importance and their temples continued to be centres of veneration where priests and scribes served the local gods and perpetuated scholarly traditions. The ideal Babylonian monarch organized the digging of canals to supply cities no longer served by the rivers and saw to it that temples were rebuilt following the outlines of their original foundations.4 Kings took great pride in the palaces they inhabited, and the city walls that they maintained not only served a defensive purpose, but were also a testament to the king's legacy, as Gilgamesh's remarks to the boatman, Ur-sanabi, as they approached Uruk at the conclusion of The Epic of Gilgamesh demonstrate:5Go up, Ur-sanabi, on to the wall of Uruk and walk around, survey the foundation platform, inspect the brickwork!
[See] if its brickwork is not kiln-fired brick,
and if the Seven Sages did not lay its foundations!
One sar is city, one sar date-grove, one sar clay-pit, half a sar the temple of Istar:
three sar and a half (is) Uruk, (its) measurement.
(George, Gilg.
XI 323-8)The major topographical features of the city defined it in the Babylonian mind, but it has been through the textual output of the institutions housed in these structures - memorial inscriptions, scholarly works, as well as more mundane legal and administrative documents - that modern scholars have encountered ancient Mesopotamia. Certainly, the copious amounts of textual material from some periods is a testament to the sophisticated manner in which the Babylonians used writing to access the past, whether to commemorate the exploits of a king or specify the conditions of a short-term loan. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that for the Babylonians, their past was also present in the major edifices of their cities, and that they encountered and recalled that past both in their daily activities within the city and through the performance of rituals and celebrations that defined the city's calendar. Hence cities sustained both the material and intellectual culture that were necessary to the textual and performative continuation of collective memory in Babylonia.6