gravity feed, weirs, dams and lifting devices to bring fertility to the area and to hold
back the floods (see Wilkinson this volume).
The social organisation of the Sumerian world also saw important innovations as it
moved from a society characterised by farmers and mobile herders living in small
communities, to complex urban ones which, although still agriculturally based,
required more sophisticated systems of governance than that provided by the heads of
the families who lived in the smaller settlements (Algaze this volume). These new towns
and cities saw the first formal systems of government led initially by a figure usually
referred to today as the priest king (see Brisch this volume). He seems to have had
military, administrative and religious duties. The priest king was succeeded by dynastic
rulers whose power was to some extent balanced by that of the priesthood, and perhaps
of an assembly of citizens (Ridley 2000 ; Van De Mieroop this volume). The societies
over which they ruled became increasingly specialised and hierarchical with the emer-
gence of highly skilled professionals who included merchants, potters, metalworkers,
weavers and many others, as well as the increasingly ubiquitous scribes (Wright and
Taylor this volume).
The bulk of the population was still engaged in agriculture and in these com-
munities the basic unit of settled society continued to be the extended family (see
Widell this volume). Nomadic and semi-nomadic groups supplied additional animal
products to the settled population. It is difficult to find traces of these animal herders
in the archaeological record and it is only with the rich textual evidence from Mari in
the early second millennium that we begin to learn about them in any detail (Edzard
1981 ).
The new cities of south Mesopotamia began to compete amongst themselves for
political primacy, a situation which is reflected in the Sumerian King list (Jacobsen
1939 ; Michalowski 1983 for contrasting views) and for control of vital but scarce
resources such as water and irrigable land (Cooper 1983 ). By c. 2300 BCthe Semitic
kings of Akkad, a city whose exact location is still unknown, conquered the old
Sumerian cities of the south and united them into a single rather fractious kingdom,
the first in the region. Naram-Sin, the fourth king of the dynasty, declared himself the
god of his city, thus uniting what might simplistically be called secular and religious
powers in his own person. The dynasty was brought to an end by invasions from the
east and it was only c. 2100 BCthat the dynasty of Ur, known as Ur III, was once again
able to unite the south and to conquer territory outside Mesopotamia as well. This
‘empire’ was of short duration, lasting little more than a century. A process of political
fusion and fission seems to be typical of the region throughout much of the third
millennium and into the first quarter of the second (Brisch this volume).
The cities of the Sumerian plain were complex organisms whose internal workings
are still not fully understood (Van De Mieroop 1997 ). It seems likely that by the end
of the millennium the different neighbourhoods within the city walls were inhabited
by people who shared a trade and were probably in many cases members of an extended
family (Stone this volume). Some administrative and legal duties seem to have been
devolved to local governing councils which were probably made up of the heads of the
main families, while other matters could be referred up to the king as supreme judge.
One of the most important professions in these early cities was that of priest. The
priests and the ruler were charged with the vital task of ensuring that the complicated
pantheon of gods remained well disposed towards the city (Westenholz this volume).
–– Introduction ––