Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia?

Some years ago, I wrote some posts (here, here, and here) on how "Liberty Begins at Sumer."  Sumer was the earliest human civilization, located in southern Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq).  I was particularly interested in understanding why Pierre Goodrich adopted the cuneiform symbol for the Sumerian word amagi as the logo for the Liberty Fund--the first word in the oldest written language for "liberty."  I suggested that recent archaeological studies of ancient Mesopotamian history confirm Goodrich's insight that here we can find the first written evidence for the human struggle for liberty in the rebellion against autocratic government over 5,000 years ago.  

Recently, I have been thinking more about this after reading David Stasavage's claim in The Decline and Rise of Democracy that democracy began in Sumer and elsewhere in Mesopotamia.  If democracy in its broadest sense means political rule by consent of the people, then democracy began long before Sumer among our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors living in stateless societies.  But in Sumer, we see the emergence of the first "states"--such as the city-state of Uruk, where a city wall was first built around 3,200 BCE--and so here we can look for evidence of how democracy might have first emerged in a society with a specialized state apparatus (with a royal bureaucracy, military, and priestly class).  If there is such evidence, that would indicate that the formation of states did not extinguish the natural desire for democratic liberty that had evolved among prehistoric hunter-gatherers. 

IS IT DEMOCRACY VERSUS AUTOCRACY?

In 1943, Thorkild Jacobsen--a famous Assyriologist at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago--wrote an article on "Primitive Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia."  Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, European archaeologists had led excavations in the Near East that uncovered evidence for the emergence of the first human civilizations--with the first cities, the first writing systems, the first religious temples, and the first bureaucratic states--in the ancient Near East over 5,000 years ago.  The monumental architecture and the written records displayed the grand power of kings ruling with absolute and divine authority, which seemed to confirm what the ancient Greeks had said about the "Oriental Despotism" of the East as the powerful alternative to the freedom-loving world of the Greek polis.  But Jacobsen challenged this old story of Western freedom versus Eastern despotism by arguing that prehistoric Mesopotamia had a tradition of democratic governance that had left some traces even in the autocratic kingdoms of historic Mesopotamia.

Jacobsen assumed a simple dichotomous taxonomy of political regimes--democracy or autocracy.  He defined democracy according to the original Athenian conception of democracy as the regime in which a large portion of the community--the free adult male citizens--consent to all the major decisions, exercise supreme judicial authority, and consent to rulers and magistrates.  He defined autocracy as any form of governance that concentrates power in a single individual and those he appoints to carry out his will.

The ancient Greeks who invented the word democracy (democratia) distinguished three forms of government based on the rule of one, few, or many, corresponding to kingship, oligarchy, or democracy.  Oligarchy was rule by a council of aristocrats or nobles.  Democracy was rule by an assembly open to the great multitude of the people (the demos), or at least the free adult male citizens, which was a large group but still a minority of the whole population of a polis.

By contrast, Jacobsen thought that oligarchy merged into democracy insofar as both were forms of collective governance as opposed to autocracy.  Even in a democracy, those of high status or seniority (the elders, the wealthy, or the nobles) will often fill the councils of governance, but these councils will sometimes have to have the approval of popular assemblies.  So what Jacobsen calls democracy might be identified as what Aristotle called the "mixed regime," which combined aristocratic and democratic elements.

Stasavage agrees with this, and he points out that classical scholars have recognized that in ancient Greece, "all polis constitutions were mixed" (Hansen and Nielsen 2004:84).  Most oligarchies had both an assembly of the people to which all citizens had access and an oligarchic council to which only the wealthiest citizens had access (Hansen 2006:112).  Some Greek historians (like Thucydides) and philosophers (like Aristotle) identified the balanced mixture of the few and the many as the best regime.

I should add here, however, that there is a good argument for Clifford Bates's claim that the best regime for Aristotle is actually limited democracy--democracy restrained by the rule of law.  All regimes are imperfect, Aristotle suggests, but democracy constrained by law is the least imperfect (Bates 2003).  Bates's book was originally a dissertation at Northern Illinois University that I supervised.

It might seem odd to look for democracy in ancient Mesopotamia, where the monarchic rulers identified themselves as kings with ultimate authority conferred on them by the gods; and so one might think they did not need the consent of their people to their rule.  But if one reads the legal and political documents from ancient Mesopotamia, it is clear that the ruler needed the cooperation of his people for the proper functioning of the state (Van De Mieroop 2017).  He needed soldiers to fight for him.  He needed laborers to work for him.  He needed taxpayers to provide revenue for him.  He needed judges to adjudicate legal disputes.  He also needed his people not to run away from or revolt against his state.  (In fact, as I have indicated in previous posts, over 3,000 years of Mesopotamian political life, there were hundreds of rebellions.)

And, sometimes, the king needed his people to meet in an "assembly" (unkin in Sumerian, puhrim in Akkadian) to consent to public policies.  For example, in the Laws of Hammurabi, which was compiled sometime around 1750 BC by the king of Babylon, it is said that if a judge unjustly overturns a judgment, "they shall unseat him from his judgeship in the assembly, and he shall never again sit in judgement with the judges" (Roth 1997, LH, para. 5).  One form of punishment for a criminal is that "he shall be flogged in the public assembly with 60 stripes of an ox whip" (LH, para. 202).

Jacobsen thought that these public assemblies in the historic Mesopotamian city-states were vestiges of a prehistoric Mesopotamian democracy in which popular assemblies had exercised the ultimate authority of the people to consent to governance, although gradually the government of Mesopotamia had moved from democracy to autocracy.  He offered four kinds of evidence for this.

First,  many Mesopotamian documents indicate that the adjudication of legal disputes, both civil and criminal, was carried out by each city or "town" (alum in Akkadian), and often the word "assembly" was equivalent to the "town," suggesting that the citizenry of each town had the authority to adjudicate cases. That this was open to the citizenry at large is implied by a Babylonian proverb that Jacobsen quotes:

"Do not go to stand in the assembly;

"Do not stray to the very place of strife.

"It is precisely in strife that fate may overtake you;

"Besides, you may be made a witness for them

"So that they take you along to testify in a lawsuit not your own" (Jacobsen 1943:164).

Here is seems that anyone who passes by an assembly could join it and participate in its legal process.

As we have seen, the Legal Code of Hammurabi assumes that the "assembly" will exercise judicial authority.  In previous posts on "The Lockean Social Contract in Ancient Mesopotamia," I have written about Seth Richardson's observation that Hammurabi's Code shows the "presumptive state"--that is, Hammurabi presumes in his code that he has absolute authority to make and enforce laws, but when you read through the laws, you notice that there are few references to the king; and so it seems that the actual exercise of legal power depends upon the people in each city.  The king's rhetorical presumption of absolute autocratic power is contradicted by the reality of popular assemblies exercising the real governing power.

So here we see within the presumptively autocratic state, Jacobsen suggests, a survival of the older traditions of popular rule that dominated the early stateless democracies in Mesopotamia before the emergence of states.

Jacobsen points to a second kind of evidence for the primacy of popular assemblies in prehistoric Mesopotamia in some of the epic tales about Gilgamesh.  The "Epic of Gilgamesh" in Akkadian is the most famous of those stories, which many of us read in college as the first assigned reading in our "world literature" class.  But there also are five Sumerian stories of Gilgamesh, one of which can be entitled "Gilgamesh and Agga."  

The Story of "Gilgamesh and Agga" in the Sulaymaniyah Museum, in the Kurdish Region of Iraq

Gilgamesh was a king of Uruk, who probably ruled sometime between 2900 BC and 2350 BC, although some scholars wonder whether he was a purely mythical creation.  "Gilgamesh and Agga" relates a story about the conflict between Gilgamesh as king of Uruk (or Erech) and Agga as the king of Kish (Kramer 1949).  The envoys of Agga to Gilgamesh ordered him to surrender Uruk to the rule of Agga.  In response, Gilgamesh convened "the assembly of the elders," and he proposed to them: "Let us not submit to the house of Kish, let us smite it with weapons."  But the elders rejected his proposal, saying "Let us submit to the house of Kish, let us not smite it with weapons."  Refusing to accept this advice from the elders, Gilgamesh convened the "assembly of the men of his city," and again he proposed: "Do not submit to the house of Kish, let us smite it with weapons."  This popular assembly agreed with him, and he was pleased: "At the word of the men of his city, his heart rejoiced, his spirit brightened."

Gilgamesh ordered his soldiers to go to battle, and Agga besieged Uruk.  The account of subsequent events is somewhat unclear, but apparently Agga was finally persuaded to lift the siege, and Uruk was not conquered.

In History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History, famous Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer identified this as the story of "The First Bicameral Congress."  Here he saw the Sumerians taking the first steps towards democratic government in which the power of kings was restrained by popular political assemblies.  Like the American Congress, there were two "houses": a "senate" or assembly of elders and a "lower house" or assembly of arms-bearing male citizens.  So Kramer agreed  with Jacobsen in seeing this as evidence for "primitive democracy" in Mesopotamia.  (For the scholarly debate over the interpretation of the "Gilgamesh and Agga" story, see Ridley 2000.)

It was probably because Pierre Goodrich had read Kramer's book that Goodrich decided to put the name of Gilgamesh at the beginning of his history of liberty on the walls of the Goodrich Seminar Room at Wabash College.  (I have written about this in my post on "Amagi: Mesopotamian Liberty in the Goodrich Seminar Room.")  

Jacobsen's third piece of evidence for a prehistoric tradition of Mesopotamian democracy came from the Enuma Elish (named for the first words of the poem "When above"), the Babylonian Creation Myth, and the primary source for Sumerian cosmology (Heidel 1952).  The Enuma Elish was probably first composed during the reign of Hammurabi (1810-1750 BC).  Hammurabi extended Babylonian rule over almost all of Mesopotamia.  This Babylonian dominance of Mesopotamia included spreading the worship of Marduk, the supreme god of the Babylonians.  The Enuma Elish tells the story of how Marduk became the ruler of the gods, which might have provided cosmological justification for Babylonian dominance.

Hammurabi Receiving His Royal Insignia from Marduk (or Shamash), The Relief on the Top Part of the Stele of Hammurabi's Laws, Held in the Louvre in Paris

Since the Sumerians and the Akkadians depicted their gods as human-like in living a life like that of human beings, and thus the stories of the world of the gods were a projection of the human world, Jacobsen inferred that the political life of the gods should be an image of the earliest political life of the Mesopotamians.   He found it significant, therefore, that the political order of the gods looked democratic.

Enuma Elish refers many times to an "assembly of all the gods."  The word "assembly" (puhrum) is used 26 times (see Heidel 1952, I, 55, 146, 151-52; II, 33, 38-39, 125-26; III, 37, 43, 60-61, 95, 100-101, 118-19, 131-32; IV, 15; VI, 86, 162, 165; VII, 13, 37). Before the assembly, the gods sit down to a sumptuous meal with wine and beer, much like the lavish banquets that some Mesopotamians enjoyed.  Once the banquet is over, they talk about whatever it is they must decide.

Enuma Elish tells the story of how the assembly of the gods met to decide how to handle the danger from Tiamat, the goddess of the primeval waters, who was planning war against them.  The young god Marduk offered to lead them in war if they would give him absolute authority as their war leader.  After deliberating, the assembly agreed to this, and Marduk became the war leader of the gods.

Jacobsen observed that not only could the assembly grant kingly authority, it could also revoke it.  Kings were given a "term" (bala) of office, a limited period of rule.  One city and its god could rule over Mesopotamia for a time, but then it could be overthrown by another city and its god.  Texts such as the Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur would then tell the story of how the assembly of the gods had decided that a ruling city and its god had reached the end of its term.

Jacobsen saw this as a projection in religious myth of how popular assemblies in prehistoric Mesopotamia had originally appointed kings to rule over the people of a city, particularly in time of war when they needed a military leader. 

To reinforce this claim that the political order of prehistoric Mesopotamia was democratic, Jacobsen made a fourth argument--that this same kind of primitive democracy could be found in the earliest societies of people around the world.  To illustrate this in the early history of Western Europe, Jacobsen (1943:172) quoted two statements by W. J. Shepard:

"Among all the primitive peoples of the West, there seems to have been some kind of popular assembly which shared with the tribal chief or king and with a council of lesser chieftains the powers of social control."

"The significant political institutions of the primitive Teutonic tribes who overran Western Europe were a folkmoot, or meeting of all the adult males bearing arms; a council of elders; and in time of war a war leader or chieftain.  All important questions, such as peace and war, were decided by the folkmoot.  The council of elders prepared questions to be submitted to the folkmoot and decided minor matters.  It was a rude form of democracy in which government was not differentiated nor law clearly distinguished from religious or social custom."

As I have indicated in a previous post, Stasavage has added to these empirical findings by showing that some form of democratic council governance has been widespread in human societies throughout history.  Using data from the Standard Cross Cultural Sample of 186 societies that were representative of the best described societies for specific geographic areas, Stasavage found that for most of these societies there was some council governance, either at the local level or at the level of a central authority (Stasavage 2020; Ahmed and Stasavage 2020).  He also found, however, that autocratic political executives could sometimes develop rule by bureaucracy as a substitute for shared rule with a council.

So in ancient Mesopotamia, as in all of human history, democracy is natural but not inevitable, as human beings move between the two poles of democracy and autocracy.  Another way to think about this is to say that all governmental rule depends ultimately on the support of a "minimal winning coalition," and in an autocracy, that coalition is very small, while in a democracy, it is large.

Do we see this same choice today in the emerging geopolitical struggle between American democracy and Chinese autocracy for hegemony?

REFERENCES

Ahmed, Ali T., and David Stasavage. 2020. "Origins of Early Democracy." American Political Science Review 114:502-518.

Bates, Clifford. 2003. Aristotle's "Best Regime": Kingship, Democracy, and the Rule of Law. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2006. Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hansen, Mogens Herman, and Thomas H. Nielsen. 2004.  An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heidel, Alexander. 1952. The Babylonian Genesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jacobsen, Thorkild. 1943. "Primitive Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 2:159-72.

Kramer, Samuel Noah. 1949. "Gilgamesh and Agga." American Journal of Archaeology 53:1-18.

Kramer, Samuel Noah. 1956. History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Ridley, Ronald T. 2000. "The Saga of an Epic: Gilgamesh and the Constitution of Uruk." Orientalia 69:341-367.

Roth, Martha T. 1997. Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. 2nd edition. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.

Stasavage, David. 2020. The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Van De Mieroop, Marc. 2017. "Democracy and the Rule of Law, the Assembly, and the First Law Code." In Harriet Crawford, ed., The Sumerian World, 277-89.  London: Routledge.