goods and the goddess Inanna receiving them. In the early third millennium, the
architecture of cities starts showing two new elements, however: a monumental
building with a different layout from temples, first attested at Kish, and city-walls, first
attested at Uruk. They suggest that a non-religious source of authority had arisen,
connected to warfare, which was perhaps on the increase because growing populations
demanded greater hinterlands and fought over the agricultural zones between the cities.
The people reacted by seeking protection behind walls and military leadership. The
person in charge demanded his own special residence, the palace. It is clear that by the
mid-third millennium military conflict was common in southern Mesopotamia and
that army leaders acquired supreme powers. The earliest preserved documentation of
a war, the conflict between the cities of Umma and Lagash over territory on their
border, which lasted several generations, shows how the rulers gained prominence
through victory in battle.
It seems that rulers of the middle of the third millennium did away with the parallel
existence of two sources of power, secular and religious, and merged them into one.
Urukagina’s reforms, already mentioned here as an edict to protect the people from
officials’ abuse, claim that the king restored domains that since time-immemorial had
been owned by the city ruler and his wife to the gods Ningirsu and Bau. Rather than
seeing a restoration of religious authority, one can see this as Urukagina integrating
the divine domains into his own secularly based one (Foster 1995 : 169 ). Administrative
documents of his reign show his wife in charge of the goddess’ estate. Around the same
time in the city of Ur, rulers were buried with gigantic riches and were even able to
demand that humans were sacrificed to assist them in the hereafter, a practice that later
Mesopotamian rulers abandoned. The ceremonies attached to the burials probably
were important in the celebration of power and its transfer, and may have turned the
corpse of the deceased into something akin to the divine image (Cohen 2005 : 147 – 156 ).
The usurpation of divine powers did not stop there. The fourth king of the
subsequent Sargonic dynasty, Naram-Sîn, became a living god himself. The official
announcement of that transition is preserved; the inscription on the Bassetki statue
states that after he had won numerous military encounters the people of his land
pleaded with the various gods to make Naram-Sîn a god as well (Van De Mieroop
2007 : 68 ). Henceforth, he could write the divine determinative in front of his name,
depict himself with the divine crown, and call himself god. The impact of this move
is hard to fathom for modern observers with ideals of a separation between church and
state, although similar deifications of living rulers have occurred throughout history.
It was not an automatic status Babylonian rulers received from then on; in the period
of confusion after Naram-Sîn’s successor Sharkalisharri kings stopped using the divine
determinative and the practice only re-emerged with the founder of the Ur III dynasty,
Ur-Namma. It was probably Ur-Namma’s successor, Shulgi, who developed practices
that made the divine character of the living king a central part of royal ideology.
Starting in his reign, many state officials began to adopt names that included a
reference to the king as god; for example, Shulgi-ili, which means “Shulgi is my god.”
He also promoted a literary genre of royal hymns that praised kings as gods and that
became fundamental in the educational curriculum of the scribes who would become
government officials. The idea that the king was a charismatic god was at the center
of the ideology spoon-fed to young students, a practice that persisted into the early
second millennium (Michalowski 1987 ). One note of caution is appropriate: although
–– Marc Van De Mieroop ––