Passages from Nels Bailkey, “Early Mesopotamian Constitutional Development”

Religion excepted, few aspects of civilization in the ancient Near East hold the attention of modern students for long as they press on to the serious study of the Greeks…The view that the Greeks “invented politics” is a pardonable exaggeration that effectively points up the difficulty of naming a form of government unknown to this gifted people…

The prevailing view that nothing approaching this rich and varied constitutional development can be dated earlier than the Greeks now needs considerable modification in the light of burgeoning evidence from ancient Mesopotamia. The object of this essay is to demonstrate the extent to which this evidence—chronologically surveyed to the end of the Old Babylonian period (about 1595 B.C.)—warrants the conclusion that, with the important exception of democracy, early Mesopotamia evolved constitutional forms that parallel, in their essentials, those of Greece. Consideration also will be given to a more plausible explanation for the failure of the ancient Mesopotamians to achieve democracy than simply the absence of a “democratic spirit,” an unhistorical begging of the question first resorted to by Greek writers.

[Bailkey then narrates the existence and fall of primitive monarchy in Sumer; its replacement by oligarchy; the rise of the lugal (“great householder” or “powerful man”), as communally owned clan land fell into the hands of private owners; the appearance of strong lugal-tyrants who ruled cities and founded dynasties; and the weakening in power and possessions of the temple priesthoods.]

Within a generation after Urukagina’s failure [Urukagina was a lugal who for a brief period vigorously sought to right abuses and restore egalitarian practices in lands under his control], tyranny was firmly established in Sumer by Sargon (about 2370-2315 B.C.) of neighboring Akkad, whose large standing army enabled him to subdue the Sumerian temple-dominated cities and create an empire in which, he thought it important to record, “natives of Akkad are holding the ensi-ships.” [governorships].

Despite the presence of Akkadian garrisons, what Sargon’s inscriptions call the “rebellious” and “guilty cities” of Sumer organized a series of formidable revolts against him and his successors….At issue was the old question of who would exercise power in the Mesopotamian theocratic state: the priestly oligarchs of the temple-dominated cities or the secular but god-appointed tyrant. …According to the slightly later Sumerian composition know as “The Curse of Agade,”…it was after Naram-Sin [Sargon’s grandson and third successor] had confiscated some temple property that the priests of Enlil’s “holy city” of Nippur proclaimed that the “good sense of Agade [has] turned to folly.” They set up an antiking at Nippur and were joined by the “gods” of eight other Sumerian cities in pronouncing “A curse of destruction upon Agade” and the tyrant “who defied Enlil.” The Akkadian Empire did not recover from the onslaught of this coalition whose more than twenty eventual members included lands stretching from Cappadocia to Magan, which had harbored outposts of Akkadian imperialism.

The next turn in the course of Mesopotamian politics was unwittingly foretold by the author of “The Curse of Agade” in stating that as a consequence of the dire economic aftermath of the breakup of the Akkadian Empire—collapse of trade, inflation and famine-- …the gods of the Sumerian cities were forced to take action to save “all mankind fashioned by Enlil” from want and misery.

[Bailkey narrates the rise of the Third Dynasty of Ur, which produced a highly centralized state. Ur-Nammu, who founded the dynasty, is proclaimed in documents to have “established equity in the land…he made the arrogant have a master. The orphan was not given over to the rich, the widow was not given over to the powerful, the man of one shekel was not given over to the man of one mina.“] The Temple economic organization of the Old Sumerian period was fully revived to function as the state’s economic arm… A gradual revival of private business activity soon began…and reached large-scale proportions…

The fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur abruptly ended a century of economic stability and prosperity… As in Greece after the fall of the Athenian Empire, there now ensued a long period characterized by political instability, chronic depression, and extremes of wealth and poverty commonly but imprecisely called the Old Babylonian period (about 2006-1595 B.C.). During this Era of Contending Kingdoms, as the period is increasingly called, incessant wars to maintain the balance of power, fought by constantly shifting coalitions (“there is no king who is powerful on his own”), beset the land together with resurgent oligarchy…

The predominantly private economic records of the period describe in detail how these ubiquitous rich and powerful “gentlemen” (awelu) invested their accumulated “capital” (qaqqadum, literally “head”) in domestic and foreign commerce and industry, purchased extensive landed estates, and made loans to peasant farmers and sharecroppers at interest rates so excessive as to become proverbial: “The awelum who makes [grain] loans as a creditor—his grain remains his grain, while his interest is enormous” So prevalent was debt slavery that, according to a popular saying, ”The strong man lives off what is paid for his strength, and the weak man off what is paid for his children.” A new term, muskenu (“clients”), was now used for the mass of the population who had been reduced to a state of dependency which, for many if not most, bordered on destitution. Their plight was accentuated by inflation and famine, twin evils of a stagnant economy caused by a sharp decline of foreign and domestic trade and a continuing decrease in agricultural production caused by the gradual salting up of the irrigated land.

That the poor did not always lack protection, however, is the major glory of the Old Babylonian period: the strong rulers who arose made ameliorative state action their main domestic concern. In broad reference to their work as social reformers, these rulers commonly employed the terse expression first used, as we have seen, by Urukagina, “I have established liberty (amargi),” meaning the removal of abuses from the oppressed and, more positively, the restoration and safeguarding of their rights. In part, these Old Babylonain reformers followed their predecessors of the Third Dynasty in viewing social justice as a return to what Urukagina had called “the divinely decreed way of life of former times,” or what as now termed kittum (in Sumerian, nig-ge-na), “truth,” the fixed and invariably body of law upon which society was founded, the creation of the gods who had entrusted it to the ruler’s care.

Increasingly, however, stress was placed on a new, dynamic type of law that had come to the fore during the period of the Third Dynasty as a supplement to kittum. Called misarum (in Sumerian, sig-si-sa), literally “rightings” and hence translated “justice” or “equity,” this new law was clearly of human origin, the work of a true “legislator” (lugal misarum, “master of equity law”). Promulgated as “ordinances of the king” misaru acts sought to alleviate the injustices produced by the extreme economic and social dislocations of the Old Babylonian period for which kittum had no specific remedy.

The evidence that many of the Old Babylonian rulers issued misaru acts ranges from brief phrases in inscriptions and date formulas to extensive collections of remedial legislation: the recovered “codes” of Lipit-Ishtar, Hammurabi, Ammisaduqa, and, earliest of all, an unknown ruler of Eshumma. …[in the Lipit-Ishtar code] debt bondage was limited to three years, …to curb inflation—the price of grain had risen to sixty times its normal level immediately following the collapse of the Third Dynasty--maximum prices were established for basic commodities, including beer. Wages were fixed by law, as were fees charged by housebuilders, physicians, veterinarians, boat caulkers and leasers of work animals, wagons and boats… Much private trade continued, but it was circumscribed by regulations covering weights and measures, partnership and agency, the sale of liquor and the carriage and safe deposit of money and goods…

The success, however sporadic and ephemeral, of the paternalistic Third Dynasty of Ur and Old Babylonian rulers in establishing a social and economic “equilibrium” (another sense of the term misarum) provides a not unlikely explanation of why democracy did not succeed tyranny in ancient Mesopotamia, or put in terms of historical process, why the Mesopotamians did not anticipate the Greeks and other later peoples in reviving their heroic age popular assembly to become the seat of political power. It is generally held that tyranny in Greece ended only after it had lost the support of the people; in Mesopotamia, however, no lengthy abatement of the compelling circumstances behind such support ever was forthcoming. In this land where proverbs noted that “the poor man has no power,” …the only effective spokesman for “the poor [who] are the silent ones of the land” was the powerful enlightened despot who sought “by intelligence and wisdom to protect the people” [inscription of an unknown ruler in the Third Dynasty]

Aristotle’s famous dictum (Politics, 3.14.6) that what kept these “barbarians” from achieving democracy was a defect of character—“the people are by nature slaves”—is surely at best a half-truth. A far more accurate ancient Greek appraisal of the reason behind the continued existence of despotism in Mesopotamia has long lain unappreciated in the work of Herodotus, whose travels and “inquiries” (historia) among the peoples of the ancient Orient made him the least parochial of Hellenistic writers… In a passage [from the Histories 3.82] that purports to record the arguments of three Persian nobles over the best form of government—monarchy, oligarchy, or democracy—to replace the anarchy that followed the sudden death of the unpopular Cambyses, Herodotus ably presents the case for “Oriental despotism” in words that he attributed to Darius:

“One ruler: it is impossible to improve upon that—provided that he is the best man for the job. His judgment will be in keeping with his character; he will act blamelessly as the steward of the people…[He] comes forward as the people’s champion and breaks up the cliques which are out for their own interests. This wins him the admiration of the people, and as a result he soon finds himself entrusted with absolute power . . . To sum up: where did we get our freedom from, and who gave it to us? Is it the result of democracy, or of oligarchy, or of monarchy? We were set free by one man, and therefore I propose that we should preserve that form of government, and further, that we should refrain from changing ancient laws, which have served us well in the past. To do so would only lead to disaster.”

Herodotus’ reference to “freedom” under a monarch touches on a pertinent point. It can be argued that ancient Mesopotamia knew democracy of a sort: the “true democracy” of the Roman Empire (and, as is all too evident, of large parts of our contemporary world) which, its apologists maintained, was achieved only after libertas (that is, individual rights) had been guaranteed by the auctoritas of the emperors. All this was anticipated in the “establishing of liberty” by the ancient Mespotamian “true steward of the assembly.”

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From:

Nels Bailkey, “Early Mesopotamian Constitutional Development,” The American Historical Review, Vol 72, No. 4 (July, 1967), 1211-1236.

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Constitutional Rights in Ancient Mesopotamia