Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

In the early cities there were two types of authority. There was first the high priest, known as the en. He (and sometimes she) administered the corporate entity, or municipality, interceding with the gods to guarantee the continued fertility of enough land to provide everyone with food/income, and the en also administered its redistribution, both among the citizens and for foreign trade. The en’s consort was nin and, in Petr Charvát’s words, they comprised the ‘pontifical couple’.⁷⁹ The second form of authority was the lugal – the overseer, fortress commander, literally the ‘great man’, who administered military matters, foreign affairs as we would say, relations with outsiders. We should not make too much of this division, however: not every city had two types of leader – some had ens and others had lugals, and in any case where there were two types of authority the military leaders would have sought the backing of the religious elite for all of their military exploits. But this early arrangement changed, for the records show that, at some point, nin detached herself from en and realigned herself with the lugal.⁸⁰ At the same time, the role of the ens shrank, to become more and more ceremonial, whereas the lugal and the nin took on the functions of what we would call kings and queens. There now developed a greater division between temporal and spiritual power, and more of an emphasis on masculinity,⁸¹ a change that may have been brought about by war, which was now more of a threat and for two reasons. First, in an area that was circumscribed between two mighty rivers there would have been growing competition among rival cities, rivalry for land and for water, as population expanded; and second, with increasing prosperity and the accumulation of material possessions, produced by increasing numbers of specialists, there would have been more to gain from successful plunder. In war, a warrior was his own master, much more so than in peacetime, and the charisma and success of a clever lugal would have had a forceful impact on his fellow citizens. It would have been natural, following the victory of one city over another, for the lugal to have administered both territories: it was he who had achieved the victory, and in any case the gods of the rival city might well be different from those in his native city. The en from city A, therefore, would have little or no authority in city B. In this way, lugals began to overtake ens as the all-powerful figures in Sumerian society. Petr Charvát notes that the worship of the same god in different Sumerian cities did begin to grow, confirming this change. The growing power of the lugals was recognised in the practice whereby they acquired the prerogative to control systems of measurement (perhaps a relic of building defences) and the right to leave written records of their deeds. This was part-propaganda, part-history, so that people would remember who had done what and how.⁸² Thus the more-or-less modern idea of kingship grew up in Mesopotamia and, parallel with it, the idea of the state. Lugals who became kings administered more than one city, and the territory in between. The first supra-regional political entity in the ancient Middle East was the Akkadian state, which began with Sargon, c. 2340–2284 BC, the first king in the sense that we still use the term.

Kingship, then, was forged in part by war. War, or the institutionalisation of war, was the crucible or the forcing house for a number of other ideas.

The wheel may or may not have been invented in Mesopotamia. The first vehicles – sledges – were used by early hunter-fisher societies in near-Arctic northern Europe by 7000 BC, presumably pulled by dogs.⁸³ ‘Vehicle’ signs occur in the pictographic script of Uruk in the late fourth millennium BC, and actual remains of an axle-and-wheel unit were found at a similar date at a site in Zurich in Switzerland. These vehicles had solid wheels, made from either one or three pieces of wood. From archaeological remains at sites before 2000 BC, these so-called disc wheels stretch from Denmark to Persia, with the greatest density in the area immediately north of the Black Sea.⁸⁴ So this may indicate where the wheel was first introduced. Oxen and donkeys appear to have been used at first.