"10 Naram-Sin, Gutians, climate change, Gudea of Lagash, Sumerian Renaissance"

People often say that history repeats itself, but it really doesn't. If it did, historians could get rich predicting the future. Each time a set of circumstances looks similar to another event in the past, there are actually a lot of differences. Technology has changed since that past event, or groups of people are facing different challenges or have different goals. All kinds of things can influence what happens next, and almost none of it can be predicted. Politicians also often say that history teaches us something, but there are examples in history of just about every possible scenario. So, for example, someone might say that history teaches us that a wide gap between rich and poor in a society leads to rebellions by the poor, except that sometimes history teaches us that it doesn't. One thing in history does seem to repeat itself. Every powerful kingdom, empire, or state eventually falls, and others rise. The reasons may differ, but no state has managed to defy this inevitability. It's an interesting phenomenon. Ever since Edward Gibbon published the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, historians have returned over and over to the reasons for the decline and fall of great states. The Akkadian Empire of ancient Mesopotamia is of particular interest because it was the world's first empire, and its kings, Sargon and Naram-Sin, have been remembered for thousands of years. The Mesopotamians themselves were sure the gods were behind the eventual collapse of the empire around 2150 BCE. Of course, in their eyes, the gods were responsible for absolutely everything. If your crops did well, you should thank the gods. If your crops failed, you should try to appease the gods. If a king wanted to conquer a neighboring city, he had the diviners check the omens and the signs to see if the gods approved. If he was successful in his conquest, he credited the god of his city with prevailing over the god of the other city. Things got more complicated when the omens said the king's army would win and the army was defeated. The omens couldn't be wrong, but the diviner could have read them incorrectly, or the gods could have changed their minds. And what about a situation in which a kingdom was attacked from outside? There wasn't much you could do but to pray to the gods, provide them with offerings, prepare your defenses, and hope that the gods were on your side. But what if an attack happened, your city was ravaged, the king was deposed, and citizens were taken away as prisoners of war to become servants and slaves to the conquerors? How in the world did this make sense? Your city gods were supposed to protect you. Usually, people concluded not that their own gods were weaker than the other people's gods. Instead, they concluded that their own gods must have been angry with them. Someone must have done something to really upset them. This is what the Mesopotamians believed about the end of the Akkadian Empire. The fact is that the capital city of Agade was attacked and its rule over Mesopotamia came to an end. This must have seemed incomprehensible at the time. The Akkadian Empire was a huge power. Its king was believed to be a god and yet the empire collapsed and the land ended up being divided into smaller kingdoms. Someone must have upset the gods. A later poem called The Curse of Agade blamed King Naram-Sin for angering the gods and bringing about the empire's destruction. Naram-Sin was the grandson of Sargon and, like his grandfather, Naram-Sin spent a lot of time fighting, putting down rebellions, and trying to keep the empire together. Unlike some earlier kings, Naram-Sin didn't want to be remembered as a shepherd of his people. He'd prefer to be feared. According to the authors of the poem, Naram-Sin broke all kinds of taboos, including destroying a temple and letting people see the most holy part of it, a place that never sees the light, the place where the statue of Enlil was kept. Enlil was the king of the gods and his city was called Nippur. The poets said that Naram-Sin made the temple collapse like a city in a flood storm. In a way, Naram-Sin had destroyed the old temple, but he did so as part of a magnificent renovation project. He built a brand new temple in its place, decorated with incredible amounts of gold, silver and copper statues and fittings. It was an act of devotion, not sacrilege. But the poem's authors believed Enlil was furious at what Naram-Sin had done. They wrote, Enlil, because his beloved Acre temple had been destroyed, what should he destroy in turn for it? They believed that the answer was that Enlil decided to punish King Naram-Sin by destroying his capital city of Agade. Specifically, the authors said the gods summoned foreigners, Gutians, from the mountains to swarm down into the Mesopotamian river valley. In an ancient poem, the Gutians were described this way. They were, and I quote, beings not considered people, not counted as a land. Gutium, a race who knows no order, made like humans, but with the brains of dogs, the shapes of apes. It's interesting that the authors of the poem called the Gutians a race who knows no order. The people of Mesopotamia prized order so much, and they saw the Gutians as a force of chaos. Enlil wasn't rewarding the Gutians in this story. They were just a tool that he used in order to punish the Akkadians. Other records confirm that the attack on Agade was indeed by the Gutians, who came from the Zagros mountains. But it didn't happen until quite a while after the reign of Naram-Sin, which ended around 2218 BCE. And the Gutians weren't the barbarians that the poem described. They had an organized military and a king to lead them. What follows in the poem is a textbook example of chaos to Mesopotamian eyes. All normal order was turned upside down. The fields didn't produce grain. Prices went up. Brothers turned against one another. Strong men became weak. Weeds grew over the streets. And no one could find a place to live in the city. Everything was destroyed. This was almost certainly an exaggeration, but it reflects the sense of crisis that they felt. Needless to say, modern historians don't think the empire fell because Enlil was angry. Something else is required to adequately explain things. Even though every empire eventually falls, each one does so for different reasons. And when examining the Akkadian empire, the reasons for its failure are fascinating to explore. The last king of the Akkadian empire was named Shahr-Khali-Shahri, the son of Naram-Sin. But we don't know a lot about him because there are few records from his reign. Perhaps he was a successful king who was able to hold the empire together and it fell apart only after his death. Or it could be that Agade was conquered during his lifetime. For a long time, scholars have been exploring other reasons behind the collapse of the empire, reasons in addition to the Gutian invasion, and reasons that help explain the success of that invasion. What made Mesopotamia so vulnerable at this particular time? There had always been raiders from the mountains. So what made it possible for them to successfully invade at the end of the reign of Shahr-Khali-Shahri? Rebellions were quite common throughout the time of the Akkadian empire and some are well known. King Naram-Sin himself boasted about putting one of them down. So loyalty to the empire was probably always limited. The provincial leaders would have been unlikely to fight on behalf of the Akkadian kings if those kings seemed weak. Besides, many local kings did keep their thrones during the empire. This might have been a popular move. People would have appreciated if their local leader didn't change when the city was conquered by the Akkadian kings. But it would also have meant that the local leader might try to reclaim his city's independence at any time. In 1993, an archaeologist at Yale University named Harvey Weiss published an earth-shaking article in the journal Science. Weiss and his six co-authors proposed a new explanation for the collapse of the Akkadian empire. They'd been working at Akkadian-period sites in northern Syria, an area where ancient farming was based on rainfall. And they found that many cities there had been abandoned starting around 2200 BCE because of a period of intense drought. They believed as many as 100,000 people might have become refugees because of this climatic change. And these people presumably would have moved south into Mesopotamia. Weiss and his colleagues also proposed that the Akkadian empire was dependent for much of its grain on this region of north Syria, and that the drought could have had a powerful economic impact on the imperial administration. Even the Gutian invasion might have occurred due to the Gutians being affected by the drought and being forced to move away from their dustbowl farms. Even more striking was the author's suggestion that this drought didn't just cause the end of the Akkadian empire. It might also have brought an end to the old kingdom in Egypt, the Harappan civilization in the Indus River Valley, and could have caused the collapse of states in the Aegean region and the southern Levant as well. There's plenty of evidence for the drought now. It definitely happened between 2200 and 1900 BCE. Since the time the article came out, researchers have studied sediment cores from the Gulf of Oman, the Persian Gulf, the Dead Sea, and other bodies of water, and they found a spike in windblown dust during this period. Windblown dust would have been a symptom of a loss of vegetation, which would have been caused by the drought. A big question, though, is what caused the drought? In the original article, the scientists described evidence of volcanic dust in glass at a number of sites in Syria. An analysis showed parallels to dust from volcanoes to the north in what is now Turkey. A big volcanic eruption can change the local climate for decades, and this might be what happened. In any event, most archaeologists and historians who study the ancient Near East are united in thinking that the many states that collapsed around 2200 BCE might have had environmental crises to deal with, not just political ones. Even so, the drought might not have been as catastrophic as scholars originally thought. Some archaeologists have found that plenty of sites in northern Syria continued to be occupied. Others argue that even if the drought was terrible, the Akkadian Empire wasn't all that dependent on grain from northern Syria, after all. Not enough, anyway, to have crippled the empire's economy. So we're left with a lot of questions, and also some important new ways of trying to answer them. Research has gone in a great many different directions in recent years, and historians and archaeologists are working closely with scientists in many different fields. More evidence will no doubt emerge and will help us understand what was going on. Scientists on excavations today look at just about everything you could imagine and provide us vastly more information than used to be possible. Pollen and carbonized seeds can tell us what grew in the region. Residues inside pots can tell us what people ate and drank. DNA from skeletons can tell us where the people came from, and so on. So, going back to the collapse of the Akkadian Empire, more than one thing could have caused it. Maybe it happened because of a domino effect of several problems and crises. But then, you could also look at it another way and say the empire was a giant experiment from the start and it didn't stand much chance of working for long. This kind of extended territorial state had never existed before in human history. Some scholars don't think the Akkadian Empire even merits the term empire, because many structures and institutions that defined later empires hadn't been invented yet. Sargon and his descendants were in uncharted territory, and it's hardly surprising that the state they created was rather fragile. Perhaps the surprise isn't that this civilization fell, but that it had survived for any length of time at all before falling. After the reign of King Sharkali Shari and the invasion of the Gutians around 2100 BCE, it's unclear who ruled the region around Agadir. The later Sumerian king list mentions this period in its chronicle of the many kings and dynasties of Mesopotamia. I love the way the author of the list tries to capture the uncertainty of this era. He wrote, Who was king? Who was not king? It must have been a chaotic time with many claimants to the throne. When the dust settled, the region was no longer unified. But a much smaller kingdom was still centered on Agadir and was ruled by a king named Dudu, the Gutians had a separate state and other independent kingdoms dotted the region that had previously been subject to Agade. Although history books tend to emphasize the times when big parts of Mesopotamia were unified under territorial states, like the Akkadian Empire and later the Ur III kingdom, the times of smaller kingdoms were much more common and typical for this region. In this, Mesopotamia was different from Egypt. Throughout most of ancient history until the 11th century BCE, all of Egypt was usually united under a single king. The times when this was not true are called the intermediate periods and later Egyptian writers thought of them as chaotic and disorienting. But Mesopotamia was not often unified. And, perhaps surprisingly, it seems that people's lives didn't change much, no matter whether they lived under a local kingdom or a larger empire. They still farmed and paid taxes and were recruited for labor projects and called up into the military from time to time. At the end of the Akkadian Empire, the drought in the north certainly made life more difficult in that region. But the same doesn't seem to have been true in the south. If anything, the people of southern Mesopotamia seemed to have been better off economically toward the end of the Akkadian period than they'd been during its height. And local leaders are unlikely to have mourned the end of the empire since they'd never been thrilled to be a part of it. So, although Akkadian kings and high officials must have been deeply affected, the Mesopotamian culture didn't change much. New leaders came to power and life went on. One such dynasty of new leaders came to power in the southern kingdom of Lagash in the 22nd century BCE. It's known as the Second Dynasty of Lagash to distinguish it from the previous time when Lagash had been dominant, which was between around 2500 and 2300 BCE. The capital by this time wasn't the city of Lagash itself, but another city in the same kingdom, a city called Girsu. One of the kings who ruled during the Second Lagash Dynasty is particularly well-known to modern scholars. His name was Gudea. To describe himself, he didn't use the term king, which was lugal in Sumerian. He called himself ensi, or governor. It's not that he was subject to a greater king. He was in charge, but he was a very pious man and he saw his main role as being the representative on earth of his god Ningirsu. So he called himself an ensi, not a lugal. Still, we can refer to him as a king. You've almost certainly seen a statue of Gudea at some point because these statues are in lots of museums around the world. Almost all of them are beautifully sculpted out of a shiny black stone called diorite. They show the king standing or seated in the prime of life. He's portrayed as having a large head on a fairly short body. He's clean-shaven and he usually wears a cap with a wide band. He wears a tunic that looks a little like a later Roman toga with a shoulder exposed. His upper arm is muscular and his hands are folded in prayer. Long inscriptions on Gudea's statues explain where they were placed and why. In each instance, the statue had a name and was dedicated to a god in whose temple the statue lived. I say lived because the Mesopotamians really believed the statues had a life force. Let's look at one of the most famous of Gudea's statues. It's known to us as Statue B, but the name Gudea gave to it was a whole sentence. It was called, For my lord, I built this house. Life is my reward. The name explains one reason why the statue existed. To pray to the god Ningirsu, the city god of Lagash, that Gudea would enjoy a long life. And why should the god grant him a long life? Because Gudea had built a temple for him. And the statue was to tell the god the following message. At the time, when I built for him his beloved house, I released all debts, cleansed all hands. For seven days, no grain was ground. The maid was equal to her mistress. The slave stood at his master's side. I made the unclean in my city sleep outside of it. I banned all evil in it and procured justice for the gods Nanshe and Ningirsu. The orphan was not subjected to the rich. The widow was not subjected to the strong. In the household, having no male heir, I made its female heir possess it. This list of the things Gudea did to celebrate the finishing of the temple is a wonderful account of his care for his people, especially the weakest among them. They were freed from their debts. Orphans and widows were protected from rich and powerful people. And women could inherit property. For seven days, slaves were even equal to their owners. There's much more in the inscription on Statue B. It lists the daily offerings that were to be given to the statue itself. Then it describes in detail the construction of Ningirsu's temple called the Eninu. It describes how the statue was commissioned and it curses anyone who would remove the statue from the temple or who would erase Gudea's name from the statue. And it praises Ningirsu. The audience for the inscription was partly the god himself. The writing has a sort of magical quality. Gudea knew the statue would outlive him and that its inscription would continue to remind Ningirsu about who had built his home for him. But Gudea was also writing to people in the future to inform them about the offerings they would need to continue to provide for the statue as part of his worship and about his greatness as the builder of the Eninu. And Gudea was trying to control the future by asking the gods to curse anyone who tried to take credit for his achievements. He was successful in a way. We do remember him. Here am I talking about him and reading you his inscription. We're not making offerings to the statue anymore. And the statue is in the Louvre in Paris and that's a long way from Mesopotamia. So he didn't get everything he wanted but he is remembered for building the Eninu temple. The materials for the temple came from all over the known world according to the statue inscription. There were huge logs from Lebanon that had been tied together into rafts and floated down the Euphrates. They became the roof beams of the temple. There were blocks of stone from the west, copper from the south and black wood from the Indus Valley. Imported gold, lapis lazuli and bitumen were used as well. There's no reason to think Gudea lied about any of this. He obviously traded widely to get access to the goods he needed. His kingdom must have been rich in order to pay for it all. The most striking feature of statue B is that Gudea has a big rectangular tablet on his lap. There's a measuring stick and a stylus lying on it. And inscribed on the tablet is a floor plan of the temple. Gudea was showing that he was responsible for the design of the Aninu, but he didn't invent it himself. He says in the inscription that the plan for the temple came to him directly from the god on a lapis lazuli tablet in a dream. One thing that many inscriptions mention is that Gudea chose to have his statues made out of stone instead of metal. This tells us that metal was the normal material for a royal statue. On statue B, he wrote, for this statue, nobody was supposed to use silver or lapis lazuli, neither should copper or tin or bronze be a working material. It is exclusively of diorite. Nobody will forcibly damage the stone. This helps explain why we have so many statues of Gudea and relatively few of the kings who ruled before or after him. Metal statues must have been normal, but they would have been melted down in later centuries. In contrast, diorite is a really hard stone. Gudea could be pretty sure that his statues would survive. While I focused on statue B, dozens of other Gudea statues have also been found, and he was said to have built innumerable temples. We know of 30 temples that he claimed to have built in just the city of Girsu, where the Eninu was located. He also commissioned buildings in many other cities, including in Ur, Nippur, and Uruk. So Gudea must have controlled quite a lot of southern Mesopotamia. Did Gudea have any other preoccupations besides worshipping the gods, building temples, protecting the weak, and establishing widespread trade? Was there a darker side to him? It seems not. We know of only one military campaign during this entire era, and Gudea never depicted himself in artworks as a warrior or a war leader. Mostly, he and his subjects seemed to have enjoyed a time of peace. Before moving on, it's important to mention something else about Gudea. One royal inscription from his reign is considered to be a literary masterpiece. It was written on two big, hollow terracotta cylinders. The bigger one is 24 inches tall, and each is about 13 inches in diameter. The inscription is usually referred to with the rather boring name of Gudea Cylinder A and B, though it's also called by its ancient name the Building of Ningirsu's House. The text is the longest known inscription up to that time. It's 1,363 lines long, and in a modern translation, extends across more than 50 pages. These cylinders were found in 1877, probably in the ruins of the Aininu Temple, and they're now at the Louvre in Paris. Scholars believe several different scribes must have been responsible for writing on them, because the text is written in several different handwriting styles. The cylinder inscription is all about the building of the Aininu Temple, like the inscription on Statue B. But the cylinder adds a whole complicated myth, including the dreams that Gudea is said to have received to guide him in the construction. And the cylinder inscription describes the great ceremonies held when the god was brought into his new temple and the seven-day festival that took place. Although Gudea completely dominates our knowledge of the Second Dynasty of Lagash, he wasn't its only king. He ruled for perhaps 20 years, after which his son, Ur-Ningirsu, took the throne. Only a few statues of Ur-Ningirsu survived. Soon after his reign, the Second Dynasty of Lagash was conquered by a king who had taken power in the city of Ur, and who founded a powerful royal family, the Third Dynasty of Ur. Gudea is important because he was so different in the way he presented himself to his subjects from the Akkadian kings who came before him. He didn't try to seem terrifying. He didn't claim to be He didn't tear down city walls and drag kings into captivity in neck stocks. He wanted to protect his subjects, and he loved his gods. This is a model of rule that seems to have influenced many kings who came after him.