inscriptions focus on the king as an individual, we should not believe that the king
himself always was a powerful man. In a sense, he was a figurehead of an institution
called king and members of his entourage could de facto have control over large
segments of the state (Michalowski 2004 ).
The Sumerian Kinglist, mainly known to us from early second millennium manu-
scripts, records rulers with and without the divine determinative. It does not grant
kings of the Sargonic dynasty divine status, and reserves it for all but the last of the Ur
III dynasty and selected kings of the succeeding Isin dynasty (Glassner 2004 : 124 – 125 ).
Why certain rulers were deified and others not, is unclear, and the idea of the king as
a living god seems to have disappeared after the Larsa dynasty ended in 1763.
Subsequently the occurrences are very few (Seux 1980 – 1983 : 170 – 171 ). That does not
mean that religious authorities were separate and independent from the secular ones;
by Ur III times the temples were fully integrated into the royal administration and the
priestly roles of kings remained essential for their authority throughout Mesopotamian
history.
PRIMITIVE DEMOCRACY?Popular assemblies and divine kings may seem to be mutually exclusive. If kings had
the same status and powers as the gods, how could they have tolerated the interference
of commoners in political life? Should we see early Mesopotamia as an example of
despotism, so commonly associated with the east in Orientalist stereotypes, or should
we underscore the power of the people? Intuitively, we may imagine the first scenario,
since we read so much more about kings and their exploits and see so many more
of their remains in the archaeological record. But the second approach has a great
appeal and allows for a broad view of the role of the assembly. All surveys of early
Mesopotamian history at some point mention the concept of “Primitive Democracy,”
one of the most influential legacies of the famous Sumerologist Thorkild Jacobsen.
Prevented by the Second World War from excavating in Iraq as he had done before and
restricted to library research at the University of Chicago, he turned his attention to
political institutions, and in the midst of the war published a seminal article “Primitive
Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia”( 1943 ), based on a lecture he had given in 1941.
He used the term “democracy” with a classical Greek model in mind, involving all free
male citizens, regardless of class or wealth, and argued that the existence of assemblies
showed that popular participation in the political process had been essential at the start
of Mesopotamian history. A subsequent article, “Early Political Development in
Mesopotamia” ( 1957 ), depicted how people’s powers gave way to royal control rooted
in force: primitive democracy became primitive monarchy. Later Mesopotamian
history saw the primitive empire of the Old Akkadian period, a bureaucratic national
state of Ur III, and, after a long time of political stagnation, the birth of the Assyrian
empire as the first of a sequence of increasingly large empires. How could an emperor
like Assurbanipal, master of the entire Near East, pay heed to the political wishes of
his subjects? Jacobsen did not consider Mesopotamia the sole example of an early
society that relied on mutual agreement and consultation; his 1943 article ended with
a reference to primitive Teutonic societies. One wonders whether his nostalgia for a
distant past with popular participation in political life was not inspired by the events
in his own life. He defended his doctoral dissertation on the Sumerian Kinglist at the
–– Democracy and the rule of law ––