Introductory Remarks

Without delving into the theoretical and terminological questions of what “empire” is (which are treated at length, especially in chap. 1 of volume 1), 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. Not just tempo­rally proximate, these two empires also shared much in common, in that, while not a lineal descendant of the Sargonic Empire—and in many ways its direct opposite— the Ur III Empire grew out of a dialectical relationship with the Sargonic precedent.

A discussion, however brief, of the written documentation bearing on the Sargonic and Ur III empires is necessary. Most importantly, this documentation is unevenly distributed, and vastly favors the Ur III Empire. While the Ur III period has yielded close to 100,000 administrative and legal sources, which allow one to study the Ur III organization in unbelievable detail, the corpus of the Sargonic doc­umentation is incomparably smaller. This is particularly true of the reigns of the first three rulers of the dynasty (Sargon, Rimus, and Manistusu), from which very few administrative records survive (especially those bearing on the operations of the central government).

Piotr Steinkeller, The Sargonic and Ur III Empires In: The Oxford World History ofEmpire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0002. the information found in later fictitious literary compositions about the Sargonic kings.^[117] However, the latter sources, which are not unlike “Alexander Romance” and other innumerable legendary tales about Alexander/Iskander/Dulcarnain, are largely devoid of any historical value (though they say much about how the pos­terity viewed the Sargonic Empire). Therefore, in this presentation I have restricted my discussion solely to the data found in the contemporaneous administrative and historical records. As a consequence, I have devoted considerably more attention (and therefore also space) to the Ur III Empire, whose organization and operations are much better known. Since, as I believe, many of the features characteristic of the Ur III Empire had been put in place by the Sargonic rulers—meaning that the Ur III Empire was in many ways an elaboration of the Sargonic one—it is my convic­tion that the Ur III evidence tells us (though only indirectly) a great deal about the Sargonic situation as well.

But even in the case of the Ur III Empire, many of the facts pertaining to its orga­nization and political goals may only be inferred. Thus, what follows is necessarily but a model—though one that (in my view at least) rests on solid factual and con­ceptual foundations.

2.