nor philosophical debate were yet born. Textual sources tend to leave commonly shared
knowledge unexplained (Civil 1980 ). Late Uruk period tablets are almost entirely
confined to administrative transactions and the royal inscriptions and literary com-
positions that start increasing from the later Early Dynastic period onwards were issued
by the establishment, as were the visual images. Whether in text or in image, what we
have is largely the self-representation of the elite aimed at asserting their authority.
Although it is tempting to use every bit of information, caution is needed. Due to
the accidental nature of retrieval, it is often hard to tell whether our sources are
representative of actual circumstances and there is a danger of drawing conclusions on
evidence that is not. Based on the surviving monuments of the Third Dynasty of Ur,
for example, we could easily assume that these kings, in contrast to the preceding kings
of Akkad, chose to represent themselves as temple builders only; yet copies of inscrip-
tions inform us of now lost victory monuments. Moreover, the recording of royal deeds
for eternal remembrance had an agenda other than history writing. A good example is
the choice and ranking of events for naming years in the Ur III period: donations to
the gods were prioritised over investitures of priests, while military victories ranked
below cultic events (Sallaberger 1999 : 164 ); or consider that royal inscriptions and
hymns describe kings’ relations with goddesses, yet never mention queens.
Our sources are generally not representative of power structures, not even in the Ur
III period when we have an abundance of textual sources of various kinds. This is
particularly true of royal hymns, which had a restricted audience in their own time and
professed a static, timeless ideal of kingship and stability of rule (Michalowski 2004 ).
Even as a source for royal ideology they are not entirely reliable, since they are largely
preserved in Old Babylonian school texts, telling us more about what teachers wanted
their students to learn at that time rather than what was actually composed and
performed in Ur III times. The situation for the kings of Akkad is still worse, with the
few contemporary texts and many legends put in writing in much later times. In reality,
the kings’ control over their realm, whether it was a city-state or a united Mesopotamia,
fluctuated and while royal accounts make us believe that kings were omnipotent,
administrative texts inform us of families who held high offices over generations and
must have co-determined politics.
Only exceptionally and with a lot of wit can we see through the meshes of power
and detect cases of veiled critique. In a perceptive analysis of the pertinent texts, Piotr
Michalowski ( 2003 ) succeeded in exposing the legendary king Enmebaragesi as a
fictional character: he who was blamed for the fall of the proto-Elamite civilisation,
celebrated as author of the first royal inscriptions and identified as an example of a
female king, actually entered history as part of a complex critique of contemporary
politics, local chauvinism, and sexual symbolism. In a ruse, Gilgamesh, legendary king
of Uruk and claimed brother of Ur III kings, offers Huwawa, mythical guardian of the
Cedar Forest and paragon of – from a Mesopotamian perspective – “uncivilized”
mountain inhabitants, his two sisters in marriage: one Peshtur, whose name is homo-
phonous with an Ur III princess and may have hidden a sexual joke; the other with a
name that combines a title of kings and high priestesses and first element in office
names of high priestesses (En) with the name of an early king of Kish (Mebaragesi),
whom Gilgamesh allegedly defeated. A less dramatic example is the resistance of the
scribes of Umma against Sˇu-Suen’s attempt to eradicate the memory of his predecessor:
they continued offerings to the latter, omitted the divinity determinative in around
–– Kings and queens ––