Ancient State Systems Sumeria Persia and Assyria

Ancient State Systems: Sumeria, Persia and Assyria

The ancient state-systems of Sumeria, Assyria and Persia each rose, flourished and fell in the region known as Mesopotamia between 3500 BC and 330 BC. Each exerted a considerable, if highly variable, degree of authority over a large geographical area; authority created and maintained by governmental and administrative institutions and backed by diplomacy and military force. Each depended on complex trading and commercial systems, and each succeeding in growing wealthy and achieving advances in agriculture, technology and social organization. As Mesopotamia was the first region to experience the development of organized states based on urban civilization, the nature of these early states, their internal structures and relationships with the societies around them, and the ways in which they laid the foundations for, and ultimately gave way to, one another, are all significant issues for the history of politics, diplomacy and international relations.

Perhaps most important as a determining and unifying theme in the evolution of state systems in Mesopotamia is the geography of the region. It is significant that it was in the area of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, forming wide fertile valleys enclosed by mountains, that the first urban civilization developed; and the topography, resources and economic potential of the Mesopotamian landscape was crucial in influencing the character of the societies that flourished there.

Here in Mesopotamia we have an area capable of producing a massive agricultural surplus, with excellent links to areas rich in the basic raw materials, especially metals, which it lacked. Trade was the life-blood of the economy and probably a critical factor in the development of urban life in the region and of one of the earliest civilizations the world has seen.

The combination of irrigation, agriculture and widespread trade, underpinned by the increase in population which agricultural improvements permitted, contributed to the development of cities in this region, which in turn produced radical innovations in religion, administration, culture, society and political life. The importance of these developments is perhaps symbolized most clearly in the appearance in this region of writing during the fourth millennium BC; a phenomenon intimately linked with the rise of complex administration and government, and the requirements of wide-ranging trade and diplomacy. Beginning with the city states of Sumer, the political entities of ancient Mesopotamia had in common a tradition of bureaucratic government, of complex administration and record-keeping, that marks them out as among the first organized and sophisticated state systems in human history:

When the records of their dealings with each other begin, the Sumerian city-temple states had achieved a high level of civilization, with well-developed agriculture, seafaring, trade and accounting, held together by an impressive system of religion and government.

In The Evolution of International Society, Adam Watson proposes a spectrum along which the political and administrative character of any state system can be plotted, running from 'absolute independence' to 'absolute empire' through stages of 'independence,' 'hegemony,' 'dominion' and 'empire.' Watson's overall account of Sumeria, Assyria and Persia depicts state systems which reflect hegemony rather than centralized empire, but which can also be seen as following a historical trajectory of development (related partly to the evolution of military technologies and techniques, and commercial and agricultural systems) towards the unity, dominant authority and coherence of 'empire' and away from the fragmentation, contested authority and loose organization of 'independence.' The significant differences that can be identified between these states largely reflect this developing tendency; equally, the crucial similarities between them reflect the degree to which they drew on a strongly-rooted tradition of the exercise of legitimate, recognized political authority.

The Sumerian city-state system can be seen as a model in miniature of the concept communities evolving regulations and rules to govern their interaction, and these rules constituting the basis of inter-state relations. Sumeria consisted of a number of urban communities - Uruk, Lagash, Nippur, Umma being among the most prominent - possessing a substantial degree of independence, but united by a largely shared linguistic and social culture, and a common tradition of political institutions, economic practices, religious beliefs, gods, legends, and administrative systems. The northern city of Akkad was separated from the southern area of Sumer by linguistic differences, but when the ruler of Akkad, Sargon, became the dominant ruler in Sumeria he followed an evidently considered policy of stressing his continuity with Sumerian tradition and legitimacy:

Sargon was a formidable soldier and a considerable administrator. He became one of the great heroic prototypes on whom later monarchs modelled themselves... he went out of his way to abide by the old customs and, like many of his Sumerian predecessors, built a temple at Nippur, the home of the national god.

As self-ruling communities, however, each had its own temple and its own king (the religious and political elites forming two elements in the same ruling structure), and controlled its own economic, political and diplomatic life. Watson describes the way in which each city was identified with its own god, with the king acting as the representative of that god on earth. This system underpinned a system of relationships between the various city states based on shifting hegemony, characterized by constant economic and diplomatic rivalry and occasionally marked by violence, but based upon an acceptance that hegemonic authority would be exercised by one city over the others.

The system in Sumer, one realizes as one looks at the records, was summed up by their formula that 'the kingship must reside somewhere.' The kingship was necessary in their eyes because it reflected the situation in heaven, because it was authorized by the holy city of Nippur and because it was necessary for the settlement of disputes.

The location of that authority varied as the fortunes of different cities (and thus, it was believed, the strength and influence of their gods) rose and fell, but the concept of one centre possessing authority - that 'kingship must reside somewhere' - was not itself generally challenged or undermined.

Watson interprets the rise of Babylon to its first period of hegemony in southern Mesopotamia within this overall pattern, while recognizing that the greater authority claimed by the king of Babylon over local rulers - who became 'vassals' of the great king in a way that was not true of the rulers of Sumerian city states - marked a movement of the political culture away from a system based on independence and towards one embodying a vision of empire: 'the Babylonian supremacy was nearer to the imperial end of the scale.' As with the Sumerian city-states, religion and legitimate authority were inextricably identified, with the law code of Hammurabi (c.1750 BC) expressing the moral purpose of the new laws as being an expression of the moral purpose of the gods. This moral purpose was to be expressed by the just and effective government of the earth, echoing the harmony which ruled in the heavens.

One of the districts subjected for a time to the authority of the first Babylonian empire was the northern region inhabited by the Assyrians, whose state subsequently rose to achieve the status of an 'empire' in its own right. The factors influencing the development of the Assyrian state system were different in important respects from those determining the nature of the Sumerian system. Most importantly, Assyria was more exposed to external pressures than the Sumerian cities further south, which were to some extent protected by their geography from other significant powers such as the Hittites of Asia Minor and from the assaults of nomadic and tribal peoples. This resulted in Assyria itself having long experience of external rule, and on the Assyrian kingdom having a greater emphasis on centralized military strength than was the case in Sumeria:

The Assyrians learned in a hard school, and were a hard people. Because of their exposed position their army was the indispensable bastion of the state. Alongside well-trained infantry they were the first settled people in the area to make effective use of horses in war, and also the first to adopt iron weapons and armor on a large scale.

By contrast, the armies of Sumer owed allegiance to particular city-states; in that sense an army of 'Sumeria' did not exist. Under the Akkadian king Sargon the Great, who unified much of Mesopotamia under his rule in the later third millennium BC, Sumer achieved the nearest thing to a unified army that it knew before the advent of Assyria, and effective military force was an essential ingredient of the extension of Sargon's authority, but it was not as integrated politically, social and economically into the state system as was the army of Assyria.

The new 'imperial' current in Assyrian self-perceptions is suggested by Watson's comment that the Assyrian state system 'was the first real attempt to organize politically the whole ancient world.' He immediately goes on to point out, however, that direct government of Assyria's area of dominance was not possible, and that a system of vassal rulers - native governments backed (and effectively dominated) by resident Assyrian garrisons was imposed. This reveals the extent to which Assyria reflected the nature of all ancient 'imperial' states: not a single unitary polity but a subtle gradation of authority from a central core, through a penumbra of dominion, to a fringe of semi-autonomous allied or client states. This kind of structure is clearest in large political units such as Assyria, rather than relatively small state structures such as the Sumerian city-states. It also influences the nature of the relationship between state-structures. For the Sumerian cities, relations with other political units seem to have been carried out on a fairly ad-hoc basis, with central 'policy' only coming into play where the interests of the whole community of cities, as interpreted by the king who currently exercised dominion, were called into question. In the case of Assyria a far more coherent and considered system of 'international relations' developed, with a consciously-created image of what it meant to be under Assyrian hegemony (and of the penalties of resisting that hegemony) being assiduously propagated:

In contrast to many ancient rulers who were indifferent to what their subjects and their enemies thought, they took pains to extol the advantages of living under the overlordship of Asshur, and they deliberately encouraged stories of their ferocity in battle and the terrible punishments they meted out afterwards, especially to defeated rulers.

For Assyria, as for Sumeria, commercial relations with external powers were an important element in shaping perceptions of the interests of the state and the ways in which those interests were expressed. It is notable, for example, that Assyrian merchants living in communities beyond Assyria, in regions such as Asia Minor, had extensive dealings with surrounding rulers and communities, and were recognized as a coherent community in their own right, coming under the authority of Assyria proper. This phenomenon was continued into the Persian period, where the existence of resident Persian trading communities was a significant factor in determining Persia's policies towards 'marcher' states on the fringes of its dominion.

The propaganda that characterized the exercise of authority by the Assyrians served to give expression to both the power and the legitimacy of the Assyrian state structure. Such legitimacy had spiritual significance as an expression of the harmony of a properly-ordered universe; it also had firmly practical benefits in terms of peace, stability and prosperity. The wealth and importance of the Mesopotamian region was ultimately based on production and trade. If local conflict was allowed to rage unchecked, the basis of that wealth would be undermined. Internally, a state with centers of power judged to be legitimate would not experience challenges to that authority in the form of rebellions, insurrections and coups; externally, it would be respected and taken seriously as a great power. Assyria, with its strong central monarchy, its intimate co-relationship of political and religious authority, and its effective military strength, achieved that status. The Assyrians, hardened by their environment, were well-placed and well-equipped to establish their power and legitimacy in this way, but they also had the tradition of Sumerian kingship, administration, and belief in legitimate authority on which to draw. With the fall of Assyria in the late seventh century BC, the Persians inherited, extended and built upon this model of imperial authority and created one of the greatest state-systems, in terms of sheer geographical spread, that the world had yet seen.

The Persian rulers themselves stressed continuity with what had gone before, with Persian kings styling themselves 'King of Babylon.' At its greatest extent the Persian Empire stretched from Asia Minor to the Indus Valley; and, in accord with the model already established for the Sumerian and Assyrian polities, represented not so much a unitary state as an area of radiating and fluctuating authority, in which the power of the central core extended along lines of communication but became transformed as it spread from that center into a system of increasing local autonomy. From the Assyrians the Persians took an imperial culture, based on propaganda and imagery, which expressed the benefits of Persian rule; as with Assyria, this reflected a state structure based on conciliation and a balancing of interests rather than direct military and political domination (although always backed by the ultimate threat of military intervention). In some ways, as was the case with the Egyptian and the Hittite kingdoms, the pervasiveness and potency of Persian imperial and military imagery is an expression, not of powerfulness and unchallengeable might, but of relative weakness and a need on the part of rulers to create an image which will do some of the ruling for them. In a wider sense, it is no surprise to see propaganda - art, architecture, literature, the trappings of kingship and so on - playing such a central role in a part of the world in which a written culture had made such an early appearance.

If an indicator of state authority is the monopoly of armed force, none of the three state systems discussed here quite achieved this status, although Assyria came closest. In all cases local armed forces remained in existence, and were used by local rulers against their neighbors. In the case of Sumeria, as described above, there were only local armed forces; Assyria possessed a strong central army, but local rulers under Assyrian suzerainty continued to maintain their own armed forces; while Persia also possessed an effective military force of its own but similarly did not seek to disarm the local rulers over whom it exercised its authority:

Persian imperial authority was superimposed on local political entities, that were autonomous enough to have their own armed forces and to use them not just to maintain domestic order within their jurisdiction but on occasion against neighbours.

One indication of the increase of imperial authority under the Persian system was an insistence in many cases that the communities under Persia's authority should refrain from using armed force against each other (although not from possessing armed forces of their own). This expressed a self-confident imperial rhetoric of authority, but beyond the rhetoric it reflected a pragmatic assessment of the necessity for internal peace if the Great King's dominion was to be secure and successful, and avoid the challenges that could so easily disturb that dominion: