Violence and Warfare

At that time, I, Ur-Namma, mighty warrior, lord of the city of Ur, king of the lands of Sumer and Akkad, by the might of the god Nanna, my lord, by the true command of the god Utu, I established justice in the land...

(Ur-Namma, king of Ur, twenty-first century bce )1

The growth of the state in early Mesopotamia entailed a serious and sustained engagement with violence and warfare, and the state's response to it was one of the hallmarks of its growing authority. Kings in Mesopotamia laid claim to the right to practise violence. Ultimately, the only violence that was legitimate was state-sponsored and divinely sanctioned. Kings promised to banish violence at home, except when performed under their auspices, and they pledged to bring the outside world to battle in a muscular extension of power over that world.

Violence was an ever-present theme in royal inscriptions, which meant the elites in early Mesopotamian communities were very familiar with its ima­gery and the language associated with its royal exercise.

Manishtushu, king of the world; when he conquered Anshan and Shirihum, had ships cross the Lower Sea. The cities across the sea, thirty-two [in number], assembled for battle, but he was victorious [over them]. Further, he conquered their cities, struck down their rulers, and after, he roused his troops, plundered as far as the Silver Mines. He quarried the black stone of the mountains across the Lower Sea, loaded it on ships, and moored [the ships] at the quay of Agade.

(Manishtushu, king of Akkad, twenty-third century bce)^{[437] [438]}

This royal inscription from the kingdom of Akkad in the late third millen­nium bce shows the early development of language that described, often violently, Mesopotamian control of the surrounding world.

The civilised world of ancient Mesopotamia was a demonstrably urban phenomenon. The cities, with their temples, were the most significant features of the landscape and their walls kept the outside world at bay. This emphasis was made most clear in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which invited the newly civilised Enkidu into that urban world with the following words: ‘Come to Uruk the Town Square, where you too will find your place, like a man.'^[439] This epic is a good tool for measuring Mesopotamian attitudes towards violence both inside and outside of their communities. Preserved in the Mesopotamian literary tradition for 2,000 years, its themes were central to the manner in which readers and listeners understood their relationship with the world around them. Uruk, one of the earliest and certainly the largest of the Mesopotamian cities, was the model for urban civilisation. The epic traces Gilgamesh's heroic journey, in the course of which he is rebuked for allowing violence within the city and praised for carrying violence into the wild periphery; it ends as it began, atop the mighty walls of Uruk, the defence of which is Gilgamesh's chief responsibility.

Cities were the centre of civilisation in ancient Mesopotamia and their proliferation was the characteristic feature of the civilisation's early history. And it was in those cities that kings like Ur-Namma (quoted above) promised an absence of violence. Violence itself, however, was understood to be an intrinsic part of that same civilisation. Zainab Bahrani began her study of the body and violence in Mesopotamia with a reference to the Sumerian mythi­cal composition, Enki, and the World Order.^[440] In that composition, battle is identified as one of the arts of the civilised world (Sumerian ‘me').

Ancient Mesopotamians understood that the victories of urban civilisation were based on the violent overthrow of both nature and their surrounding communities. This again connected their world with its divine origins. In the Sumerian composition Inana and Ebih, the mountainous east needed to be subdued and the responsibility lay in the hands of the goddess Inana, who presided over both war and the fertility of the agricultural hinterland.

Goddess of the fearsome divine powers, clad in terror, riding on the great divine powers, Inana, made perfect by the holy a-an-kar weapon, drenched in blood, rushing around in great battles, with shield resting on the ground, covered in storm and flood, great lady Inana, knowing well how to plan conflicts, you destroy mighty lands with arrow and strength and overpower lands. In heaven and on earth you roar like a lion and devastate the people. Like a huge wild bull you triumph over lands that are hostile.^[441]

This subjugation of the outside world often had a measurable economic component. Just as Gilgamesh brought timber back to Uruk from his violent encounter with Humbaba in the cedar forest, the real kings of Mesopotamia were expected to provide similar resources. Kings brought back rich booty from the defeats that they inflicted upon outsiders. In connection with this, we note that the famous stele of Naram-Sin, which depicted that king's victory over the mountainous periphery, was itself taken to Susa as booty by an Elamite king.^[442] This pattern was repeated time and again in Mesopotamia when the royal monuments that proclaimed violent victories also became prizes taken upon their defeat. The famous stele of Hammurabi bearing his so-called ‘Law Code' was also found by French archaeologists excavating the city of Susa, hundreds of kilometres from the city in which it had originally stood. These symbols of royal authority and its connection to violence were powerful enough to be taken as spoils of war and given new life in another royal court elsewhere in the ancient Near East.

The ability to routinely inflict defeats on outsiders, such a common theme in royal text and image, became one of the pillars of kingship in the Mesopotamian tradition. The king's power to take control of violence, to shift the locus of conflict out of the community, reinforced his role as shepherd of the people.^[443] Royal imagery, from the third millennium bce down to the first millennium bce, often depicted the kings carrying baskets of earth on their heads to help build the temples and walls of their cities. The similarity of these images across 2,000 years illustrates extraordinary con­tinuity in the conception of kingship. The king's responsibility to lead was based on his ability to protect the community from violence by establishing administrative control over violence within the community and exercising violent control of the world beyond his civilisation's borders through the regular pursuit of warfare. As we will see, the regularity of these military campaigns was such that they became virtually an annual event by the end of the third millennium bce.

The king's monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence was based on the inheritance of that right from the gods. We have already seen the manner in which violence was a divine attribute of members of the Mesopotamian pantheon. The tremendous growth of the cities of southern Mesopotamia ultimately meant that violence was commonplace among these city-states and within the cultural boundaries of their civilisation. As the cities grew and began to contest rights to land and water along their borders, so they needed to adopt an approach that would allow them to make war on each other beyond the walls of their cities but within the land of Sumer and Akkad. This led to a conception of just war in which the participation of the gods was both sought and assumed by royal authority, and this deepened the connection between divine authority and the mandate of the king to exercise violence.

Enlil, king of all lands, father of all the gods, by his authoritative command, demarcated the border between Ningirsu and Shara. Mesalim, king of Kish, at the command of Ishtaran, measured it off and erected a monument there. Ush, ruler of Umma, acted arrogantly: he smashed that monument and marched on the plain of Lagash. Ningirsu, warrior of Enlil, at his [Enlil's] just command, did battle with Umma. At Enlil's command, he cast the great battle-net upon it, and set up burial mounds for it on the plain.

(Enmetena, king of Lagash, twenty-fifth century bce)^[445]

This idea of the just expression of violence was accompanied by an increasing dichotomy in which royal authority used its divine mandate to eliminate violence at home and carry war abroad, and the nature of this violence and warfare is graphically described in the texts and inscribed on the monuments that bore them. Many such royal inscriptions survived over the course of a century of violent conflict between the neighbouring cities of Umma and Lagash, whose people fought over access to the fertile fields along their border. The Stele of the Vultures, one of the most famous of these monu­ments, depicts on one side the ranks of soldiers pressing forth into battle behind the king, while on the other side the god Ningirsu engages in the slaughter of enemy soldiers with his mace, having first scooped them up in his battle net. Many of the inhabitants of these early states would have experienced this violence at first hand, as a characteristic feature was the broad participation of the people, and especially of elites, in combat.

The history of the third millennium bce in Mesopotamia was charac­terised by the growth of the territorial state as a response to the inability of the city-states to regulate their affairs non-violently, and this growth was accomplished through the calculated exercise of violence on a greater scale.

Mesopotamian kings routinely proclaimed themselves kings of the uni­verse. This did not express an actual desire to govern the distant four quarters of the world, but rather to provide a claim to boundless supremacy at home. The stele of Hammurabi was carved towards the end of this long era of secondary state formation, and it marked a culmination of this process.

At that time, the gods, for the enhancement of the people, named me by my name: Hammurabi, the pious prince, who venerates the gods, to make justice prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, to rise like the sun-god over all humankind, to illuminate the land.

(Hammurabi, king of Babylon, eighteenth century bce) ^[446]

Hammurabi's stele, in both text and image, made clear to the inhabitants of his kingdom that he recognised no limit to his authority. Of course, this claim to power over all humankind did not require the outright conquest of the outside world; instead, it was focused on what we might call the Mesopotamian universe, and it called for the land's submission to the sovereignty of kingship that gave exclusive power over violence to the royal family. Good evidence for this idea is found in a text that modern observers call ‘The Nippur Murder Trial'. This trial was set at the end of the twentieth century bce, but it was preserved in the second millennium bce as a school exercise.

Nanna-sig, the son of Lu-Sin, Ku-Enil, the son of Ku-Nanna, the barber, and Enlil-ennam, the slave of Adda-kalla, the gardener, killed Lu-Inanna, the son of Lugal-apindu, the nishakku-official. After Lu-Inanna, the son of Lugal- apindu, had been put to death, they told Nin-dada, the daughter of Lu- Ninurta, the wife of Lu-Inanna, that her husband had been killed. Nin-dada, the daughter of Lu-Ninurta, did not open her mouth, [her] lips remained sealed. Their case was [then] brought to [the city of ] Isin before the king, [and] the King Ur-Ninurta ordered their case to be taken up in the Assembly of Nippur... In accordance with the decision of the Assembly of Nippur, Nanna-sig, the son of Lu-Sin, Ku-Enil, the son of Ku-Nanna, the barber, and Enlil-ennam, the slave of Adda-kalla, the gardener, were handed over to be killed.¹¹

The trial shows both the everyday violence of these early urban communities as well as the royal attempt to control such episodes.^{[447] [448]} Here three men accused of murder were brought to trial before a city assembly at the order of the king, under whose auspices the crime was punished. This text, and certainly the category of ‘Law Codes' to which the Hammurabi stele belongs, demonstrate quite clearly that the kings could not prevent violent acts from occurring within the boundaries of their states, but we see a clear demarca­tion between permissible and impermissible violence.^[449]