Sumerian Tyrants

Normally we look at Sumerian kings through either through their royal inscriptions or their administrative records, both official portraits. Piotr Michalowski has some interesting observations about the flip side of those documents:

An Old Babylonian copy of an inscription placed on an illustrated stele with representations of scenes from victory over the highland land of Zabšali contains these words:

(Šu-Sin) killed both the strong and the weak, heads of the just and wicked he piled up like (heaps) of grain, corpses of their people he piled up like sheaves. . . . their established cities and villages he turned into (empty) tells, destroyed their walls, blinded all the young men of the cities he had conquered, and made them serve in the orchards of Enlil, Ninlil, and in the orchards of all the great gods; he donated all the women of the cities he had conquered to the weaving establishments of Enlil, Ninlil, and the great gods.

These seemingly contradictory portraits of a Sumerian sovereign are, of course, hardly unique as far as tyrants are concerned. And yet the word "tyrant" is scarcely, if ever, used in describing ancient Mesopotamian kings. Instead, they are usually portrayed, in the manner of their own propaganda, as heroic and patriotic, bringing together quarrelling smaller political units for the common good. . .  . In the study of early Mesopotamia, we invariably favor periods of centralization of authority, if for no other reason than that such times provide more ample documentation. But this sort of centralization is the anomaly rather than the norm; in the third and early-second millennia, it accounts for 250 years or so at most. We may celebrate the various civil accomplishments of the famous kings associated with these times—namely, Sargon, Naram-Sin, Šulgi, or Hammurabi—but we should also remember the piles of corpses and shattered lives that they left in their wake. (Piotr Michalowski, The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 11-12.)

It's 1984 BC

Piotr Michalowski makes the following observation:

Although contemporary evidence is still sparse, it appears that sometime under Ur-Namma and Šulgi the masters of the academies wiped the literary slate clean and discarded all but a few of the old compositions that went back to Early Dynastic times. They kept most of the lexical teaching tools but discarded old narratives, replacing them with materials written in honor of the contemporary ruling house—royal hymns, stories about their Uruk ancestors, and so on. (Piotr Michalowski, The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 9.)

So, according to Michalowski, the Ur III kings were not only reformers but systematically rewrote the historical and literary record. Fortunately they overlooked Lagash which has provided a treasure trove of inscriptional material unedited by the Ur III censors. The problem with Orwell's novel 1984 is that it aimed to be futuristic.

One irony, however, is that most of our literary accounts of the Ur III period come from the Old Babylonian period and have a tendency to depict the Ur III monarchs in less than flattering terms.

An Old Description of an Ancient Student

Edward Chiera, writing over eighty years ago, describes ancient cuneiform students doing their exercises during the Old Babylonian Period:

"In general pupils had no interest in the subject matter of their exercises and many a time abandoned one subject for another."[1]

So little has changed in the last four thousand years.


[1] Edward Chiera, Sumerian Lexical Texts from the Temple School of Nippur (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 2.