Peace, Peacemaking and the First Civilizations

The roles peace and peacemaking played in the ancient cultures that arose around the fertile valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers have just begun to be unraveled. It is not only peace that is lost in war in what is now Iraq, where the first historic cities, states and civilizations emerged c.

The identifying traits of Mesopotamian villages before 3500 BCE are their subsistence-level surpluses, economic autonomy, little differentiation between town and country, communal property, local gods and despotic rule. In contrast, the city of Mari’s archives (fl. 2900-1750 BCE), for example, point to economically and politically interdependent centers characterized by overall material abundance due to irrigation; distinctions of class, occupation, place of origin, as well as public and private prop­erty; trade networks; organized religions; and shifting cooperative and defensive alliances.

The village-linked meanings of peace are predominantly reactive and protectionist; those specifically tied to cities, proactive and integrationist. A clear sign of this fundamental change in peace and peacemaking can be found in the earliest evidence of urban imperatives for peace in its Hittite sense, cylinder seals, the imprints of which were used to authenticate doc­uments and reproduce standardized statements. Cylinder seals were unnecessary and unused in village life, in which verbal agreements between close relations were adequate to prevent and resolve conflicts. In cosmopolitan city life, however, written agreements tendered by cylinder seals were necessary tools in legitimizing and preserving ties between parties whose relationships were much less secure. That is, shared identi­ties and interests of tight-knit village communities were sufficient to safe­guard kin-group solidarity and non-kin affiliations, also essential to sustaining peaceful coexistence in cities. But the meanings of urban peace embodied in cylinder seals were crucial survival and subsistence strategies of Mesopotamian cities and their citizens insofar as they facilitated coop­eration and averted war between individuals and groups with different identities and interests. Without these social and collective functions being expressed in a permanent way, fulfilled legitimately on previously agreed upon terms, it is doubtful that Mesopotamian cities could have borne the more abstract formations of states and civilizations.

A graphic entry point into the coterminous worlds of peace and war in Mesopotamia can be found in the earliest mosaic yet unearthed, set on a trapezoidal stone (presented on the following page). The archaeologists who discovered the mosaic while excavating graves in the Sumerian city of Ur identified it as a standard, carried like a banner before the state’s army. This function explains the “war side” (above), in which donkey­drawn chariots charge over fallen enemies, spearmen in helmets and cloaks seize prisoners, and captives are brought before a centralized authority figure. By making clear what would happen to enemies if battles were won, or to allies if lost, this fearsome sight may have been part of “the earliest and crudest means to avoiding war,” deterrence: the prevention of aggression by threat of retaliation.²⁶ The high value of the materials and workmanship involved suggests that the mosaic was emblematic of Sumerian economic and political prowess in

The Mosaic of Ur, c. 2650 BCE

Mesopotamia at the time. Sumerians were, after all, the first to found cities like Ur, the cornerstones of Mesopotamian states, which were nearly always ruled by one male leader. Such a leader is symbolized by the centralized authority figure on the war side but conspicuously absent from the “peace side” (below), portraying a lively banquet with leisurely attendants serenaded by lyres, enjoying each other’s company and the gifts of the rivers, such as grains, sheep, goats and fish. This pointed detail launches one of the oldest debates in peace studies, whether “war helps to make states, states make war, and therefore states are in part, and always must be, war machines.”²⁷ Archaeologists since the mosaic’s discovery have interpreted its function as the sound box of a musical instrument, a credible rationale for the peace side. Either as a centerpiece at a feast or a rallying point in battle, this reassuring sight and its possi­ble sounds likely were a strong reminder of the shared experience and vision of the civilized peace Sumerians considered worth celebrating and fighting for.

The mosaic’s mixed messages regarding the relationships between states, war, civilization and peace echo across two millennia of Mesopotamian history and beyond. Namely, that the constructive ideal of civilized peace, lived or striven for, may paradoxically be the only force capable of sustaining as well as counteracting the destructive actualities of state warfare. In any case, the mosaic’s juxtaposition of state warfare and civilized peace is the earliest evidence of the two being put into close material and conceptual proximity, inaugurating one of the longest running analytical traditions in the history of peace. Like villages before them, “no city can exist if it does not draw on surpluses of food, and in most cases this comes from the surrounding land;” it was the hydraulic revolution of irrigation that converted the sporadic, subsistence-level sur­pluses of Mesopotamian villages into the material abundance needed to sustain their cities, states and civilizations.²⁸ War was comparatively rare in Mesopotamia before the hydraulic revolution, and so the advent of irri­gation tends to be seen as spurring integrations of military or police forces (a distinction which tended to be blurred) into local political systems, though only at minimal levels, when at all. But before two or more cities would go to war, other cities often attempted to diffuse the situation, resulting in unexpected unions between the cities concerned. If this junc­ture is taken as the starting point of regional state systems, as some his­torians of the period concur, then the peace-oriented concept of neutrality and role of moderator must be recognized as primary channels of inter­city relations and statehood.

Intra-city peace and prosperity were primarily predicated upon links between land and social structures, or geo-social configurations, signifi­cantly more complex than in villages. Sumerian land was divided into that belonging to the state, given temporarily to officials as part of their salaries and rented out.

Researchers studying social stratification agree that with it comes a form of structural violence which can compromise peaceful coexistence, such as systemic inequality and injustice, and on this point Mesopotamian cities are no exception.³⁰ Textual evidence suggests that the distinctions between slave/free and native/foreign may have a common origin.

In the Sumerian tradition, leaders’ activities “concentrated upon the works of peace,” already discussed, and “the building of temples;” one complemented rather than contradicted the other.³¹ By far the largest buildings in Mesopotamia were steppe temples, or ziggurats, religious and administrative centers of cities and states. The organized religions they represented created new justifications for war, but also new possibilities in peacemaking. Secular life and religious life were apparently inseparable, as officials combined “what we would see as priestly and civil authority.”³² Yet, organized religions contributed to the history of peace in their own right. Leaders customarily doubled as religious and political, leveraging their war- and peacemaking powers. Leaders backed military campaigns with the joint forces of Church and State, but they also prevented and resolved conflicts in the same way. Another major consequence of expand­ing inter-city relations was that local gods, who had reigned supreme for centuries, now had to contend other religious beliefs, practices and figure­heads. Peacemaking among competing organized religions frequently took the form of two or more local gods being fused into one regional god either at once or over time, as in the prominent god Ahura-Mazda. As long as regional authority rested with the religious and political representatives of Ahura-Mazda, local beliefs could go on as they had for centuries.

Degrees of religious amalgamation ranged from all-inclusive religious synthesis, known as syncretism, to worshiping one god without denying others, or henotheism, which generally outproportioned syncretism in Mesopotamia. When they failed preemptively, such procedures could further post-war peace. Typical of these religious peace processes, Assyrian armies would return religious objects to the citizens of a con­quered city, and post-war peace terms were finalized by oaths evoking both Assyrian and non-Assyrian gods. Following anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who proposed that a civilization’s myths can serve as alle­gorical maps of its social structures and cultural assumptions, multiple versions of the same Mesopotamian myths can be read as reflecting the pacific fluidity syncretic and henotheistic peace processes imply. For instance, many editions of Enuma Elish (c. 1200 BCE), the era’s most widespread cosmogony, from different places and in a variety of lan­guages have been found, each adapted to local traditions, indicating that a conscious effort was made to foster common regional identities through rather than against local ones. An earlier narrative loosely based on a Babylonian ruler, Gilgamesh (c. 2700 BCE), was passed down orally in the region for seven hundred years before it was set in stone with local variations. The moral of Gilgamesh is that violence, whether structural or outright, by rulers like the story’s namesake, leads inevitably to their downfall. Conversely, those who live and lead peacefully can avert disas­ters as great as floods, as did Utnapishtim, the man Gilgamesh takes as his mentor but from whom he does not learn.

In Mesopotamia, then, “king and god reinforced each other’s legiti­macy,” if legitimacy is taken to mean the perception that power is moderately exercised according to moral and cultural norms.³³ Socio- historical studies show that the legitimacy of leaders generates socially cohesive group loyalty and collective identity so that, statistically, warfare occurs less frequently in the earlier than in the later stages of states, when the legitimacy of leaders is less likely to be fully intact. The centripetal propensity of political legitimization was of particular importance to the peace and peacemaking of the early large-scale empires in Mesopotamia. For example, at its zenith, the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus II (r. c. 559-30 BCE) covered roughly 6 million kilometers in size, enclosed about 35 million people and lasted for more than 200 years. In order to main­tain peace in such vast territories and among such a diversity of people, leaders like Cyrus sought legitimacy in meaningful and effective ways. This meant affirming “strength in peace and war, by his justice in uphold­ing a fair and benevolent law, and by sharing and investing the enormous capital at his disposal to the benefit of his poorer subjects.”³⁴ The issuance of coins by the state was also developed as a way to reduce transactional friction and for non-violently “asserting its fiscal if not political indepen­dence,” the designs of which could serve as propaganda for takes on civilized peace.³⁵ But implementing these plans and public relations campaigns for the prosperity upon which peace depends were inadequate on their own.

Overextended empires without effective political systems and leaders who promised more than they could deliver often fell in civil war or by invasion, precluding any kind of peace. Governmental decentralization, balancing regional authority and local autonomy, was one way leaders of larger and more complex states maintained peace and power legitimately. To this end, the Persian Empire was divided into twenty administrative districts, each of which kept its own surpluses, records and police force. Persian rulers earned the loyalty of foreign subjects by leaving their tra­ditions intact, making selective non-interference another legitimate cross- cultural peacekeeping option. Post-war political integration was perhaps the surest path to peacemaking taken by Cyrus. Not only did he adapt Persian practices to foreign customs, he cultivated natives capable of wielding power on his behalf. Cyrus is also credited with being the first known ruler to enlarge his holdings not by attacking neighbors, but by being attacked by them. The cliches that the best offense is the best defense, and that preparing for war is the best way to prepare for peace, can thus in retrospect be validly applied as far back as the first civilizations.

More than a thousand years before Cyrus was Hammurabi (c. 1810­1750 BCE), first emperor of the Babylonian Empire he founded. An early study claims that “peace and prosperity prevailed during his reign,” though more recent research confines this preponderantly peaceful period to the first two decades Hammurabi ruled.³⁶ He improved agricultural practices, balanced geo-social configurations and put equitable economic policies. The god Marduk’s syncretic and henotheistic ascendancy has also been attributed to Hammurabi. The earliest known non-military uses of military personnel are his army’s expeditions aimed not at defeating enemies, but at collecting materials for ziggurats. Successes in these respects prompted the military expansion of the second half of his reign, but conquests complete he continued to rule according to peaceful prin­ciples. Hammurabi set forth these principles in his famous Code of Laws (c. 1780 BCE), carved on black stone monuments eight feet in height and strategically placed across his empire. The importance of Hammurabi’s legislation lies in its codification of Mesopotamian legal tradition rather than in the originality of its content. While literacy was far from common, all Babylonians were subject to the Code, which broadly regulated society and prescribed specific punishments for particular crimes. Laws cover theft and bodily harm, pastoral practices, as well as the rights of women, children and slaves, among other issues, which invaluably contributed to the future history of peace by influencing “all subsequent legislation.”³⁷