Inventing Empire

The history of empire in Western Asia before the Common Era is one of intensifying political integration and territorial expansion. From the earliest well-documented manifestation in the twenty-fourth century bce,¹ imperial states built on a formation of composite statehood that was tied to the joint rise of city and state on the alluvial plains of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers a millennium earlier.

This shaped the conditions under which early empires rose and ruled, and city-states remained the chief building blocks of most larger states until the first millennium bce.² The political dynamic between the cities was the raw material out of which empires were created and maintained. Often it was also the cause of their failure. In addition to the territorially defined urban communities, kinship-based polities or groups that lacked a territorial cognate played a key role in state and empire formation and maintenance. But since written documentation derives mostly from institutional and urban contexts, the demonstrably complex interplay between city and tribal identities is often obscure.³

The fusion of urbanization and state formation in Western Asia led to the rise of the highly integrated state form commonly referred to as “city-states.”⁴ This characteristic type of micro-polity was only gradually demolished or incorporated by the larger and looser empires, ceasing to exist as independent social and political units toward the middle of the first millennium bce.⁵ Empires became increasingly dominant over time, from just two well-documented examples in the third millennium bce to the more-or-less permanent partition of Western Asia into imperial states from the seventh century bce. They also grew progressively in size, with the important exception of the first imperial state to arise in the region.

The empire of Akkad in the twenty-third century bce controlled a territory larger than any of its

¹ See Steinkeller, Chapter 2 of the present volume.

² Barjamovic 2012a.

³ von Dassow 1999; Barjamovic 2004; Fleming 2004; Porter 2013.

⁴ Hansen 2000.

⁵ Larsen 2000.

Gojko Barjamovic, The Empires of Western Asia and the Assyrian World Empire In: The Oxford World History of Empire.

Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0003. successors for almost 15 centuries and came to stand as an imperial ideal during the following almost two millennia.^{^[164]}

Although empires were often transient, and always based on the self-governed cities and tribal groups, their continued reappearance suggests that they possessed organizational capabilities beyond those of their constituent components. Their long-term triumph as a political and social form of organization is also implied by their steady geographical spread. At the beginning of the second millennium bce only the densely settled regions along the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris had seen anything but intermittent imperial unification. By the end of the Bronze Age (ca. 1100 bce) the entire territory between Iran and Egypt had been split between a handful of imperial states in a peer polity international system that had lasted for centuries. In spite of their success, it is suggestive of the strength and stability of the city-states that they continued to endure and prevail over political superstructures for nearly three millennia. A return to a regional system of micro-states occurred at least three times in Mesopotamian history: in the late third, early second, and early first millennia bce.

In terms of origins, the history of empire in Western Asia begins with the unification of the cities of present-day Iraq, Iran, and Syria under Sargon of Akkade in the twenty-fourth century bce.

However, earlier states, such as Kish and Lagas in Iraq, Susa in Iran, and Ebla in Syria, constitute examples of what one might call “protoempires” at least in the sense that these were larger states with hegemonic claims. They were created through military conquest, and sought to establish territorial and political unification and the economic exploitation of a cluster of formerly sovereign polities under the authority of a single city. The imperial phenomenon in Mesopotamia may therefore to some extent be linked to state formation itself, and the notion of empire was already rooted both historically and ideologically in the area by the second millennium bce. A specific and shared cultural sense of a “Mesopotamian world” also reaches back at least into the third millennium bce, independent of the presence of a unifying state.^[165]

The dynamics of state and imperial formation in Iran are less well understood but seem to have mirrored the Syrian and Mesopotamian ones in terms of institutions and the play between sovereign city-states and imperial unification.^[166] Also this region was unified by a shared material culture, religion, language, and notion of territory. In Anatolia the process of state formation happened later than in the rest of Western Asia and Egypt, with the first large urban communities forming during the third millennium bce. In parallel to the dynamics of the south, polities with a shared core culture coalesced into larger territorial units during the following centuries in a process that culminated with the formation of the loose imperial states of Anitta and Hattusili I.^[167]

The continuous formation and collapse of empires in Western Asia were dependent upon a dynamic interaction between economic centralization, agricultural expansion, and urban transformation. Theoretical studies of state dynamics in the region have mostly concentrated on pristine or primary state formation with less attention devoted to the subsequent process of regional integration and different phases of imperialism.

Early writers focused on conquest, emphasizing the coercive role of empires in general^[168] and religious imperialism in particular.^[169] Later, structural typologies of social evolution, world-systems theory, and center-periphery took over as dominant explanatory models.^[170] Focus has shifted toward imperial ideology and elite self-representation.^[171] Recent studies also explore the social basis of political and infrastructural power with prominence given to an understanding of social and political networks^[172] and the limits of state power.^[173]

Particular to the study of empires in Western Asia is the fact that writing was developed for and tied to clay as a medium. Clay survives well in the ground, making the area that used cuneiform writing one of the historically best documented in ancient times.^[174] Records exist in several languages, including Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Old Persian, Sumerian, Ugaritic, and Urartean, and derive from a variety of contexts, states, and periods. They are mainly documents of practice that have remained in the ground since their time of use, offering both advantages and profound challenges in the writing of history.^[175] Their direct survival, not by textual transmission, produces an uneven account of situations and events, biased more by ancient literacy and archaeological sampling than ideology. An extensive material and visual record adds key data to the study of imperial culture and its diffusion^[176] alongside work on early landscape, movement, and environment.^[177]

Due to the nature and prevalence of archival texts, evidence on essential aspects of Mesopotamian statecraft is absent or only indirectly available, including demographic data, production, and surplus. This makes it difficult to identify political strategy or factors that trigger expansion or slippages, except in a most general way.^[178] The magnitude of the written and archaeological data also means that scholars struggle to quantify and process an overwhelming amount of information related to the primary production (e.g., of food, fiber, textile, timber, skin, stone, and metal) that formed the economic foundation of early states. Conversely, the fact that written cuneiform culture covers more than three millennia of documentation offers a unique opportunity to trace social dynamics and follow historical development across an exceptionally long diachronic perspective.^[179]

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

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