University of Copenhagen while Hitler’s troops invaded Poland in the fall of 1939 , and
must have observed in horror the German occupation of his native Denmark soon
afterwards. His article may have been “a Sumerological contribution to the fight against
Nazism” (Liverani 1993 : 11 ).
Jacobsen’s view of the assembly was encompassing. He suggested that at the cusp
of Mesopotamian history, societies governed themselves through consultative meetings
in which every citizen (an ill-defined term, but likely limited to free men) had the right
to express an opinion. Only in times of crisis the need for decisive leadership forced
citizens to select an individual to take full control, and already in the third millennium
“kings” refused to relinquish power and autocracy replaced democracy. Yet, for several
centuries the assemblies continued to hold certain powers. In Early Dynastic times, the
king had to obtain their permission to go to war, and into the early second millennium
they acted as courts of law, an activity the available sources document most often.
Because already in the early historical period the assembly’s role had been much
reduced, Jacobsen relied especially on myths to depict how it functioned, most promi-
nently the Babylonian Creation story, or En, ma eliå, a poem that dates to the latter
part of the second millennium (Foster 2005 : 436 ). In it, the gods threatened with
annihilation by their mother Tiamat, selected the strapping young Marduk as their
champion to confront the monsters she had created. In return, Marduk demanded
and received kingship. Although the story was written some 2 , 000 years after king-
ship emerged in Mesopotamian society, Jacobsen thought it reflected what had
happened in human society. According to him, popular assemblies made decisions in
Mesopotamian prehistory; early in the historical period the kings usurped the powers
to rule. His narrative closely resembles the biblical description of the rise of the mon-
archy as well as the political developments in late Republican Rome, parallels he
(surprisingly) did not point out.
For several decades, Jacobsen’s ideas were very popular and widely quoted. Some
scholars tried to elaborate on them and envisioned strong parallels with the Classical
Graeco-Roman world with its various assemblies and popular courts (e.g., Evans 1958 ).
Scholars working outside the field of Near Eastern studies who sought antecedents for
Classical Greek democratic practices also regularly referred to the concept of Primitive
Democracy (e.g., Bailkey 1967 ; Momigliano 1973 ; Wills 1970 ). But at the same time,
others expressed many caveats. For example, they questioned the use of second
millennium literary descriptions of the divine world to study human affairs of the early
third millennium, and even contested Jacobsen’s reading of the literary materials:
assemblies do not assert much power in them, but merely endorse the king’s sug-
gestions (Garelli 1969 : 248 – 252 ). Another concern was the assumption that the words
unkinor puærumcontinued to indicate the same thing for more than a thousand years
(see Seri 2005 : 159 – 180 for a convenient survey). These lingering questions have made
the concept of Primitive Democracy less popular in recent years. Even scholars who see
an authoritative assembly at the start of Mesopotamian history are skeptical about the
use of the word “democracy” (Glassner 2000 ). In a postmodern world, the teleological
implications of the very terminology “Primitive Democracy” have become suspect
(Keane 2009 : 112 ). The term still appears in studies of political structures, but hesitantly
and seemingly more to encourage book sales than to elucidate. A recent book that uses
the term in its title, Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors, states bluntly: “I find the word
‘democracy,’ however broadly defined, a barrier to understanding the diverse Near
–– Marc Van De Mieroop ––