Du’Urgiga, and Lumagirnunta-sˇakugepada.^48 This detailed knowledge of specific
fields at the edge of the state illustrates (as much as the conflict itself) how crucial
these productive areas were to the state. Yet claims were not control: a mid-twentieth-
century AD“Sumerian temple state” model took many such state claims of total
control over hinterlands at face value, but it has long been shown that neither state
nor temple directly owned more than a fraction of these lands. Indeed, the Lagasˇ case
may have been anomalous: only in this area was Babylonia so densely settled and
cultivated. In most places and periods, open space was available on many sides of
almost every major city, and the modest production catchment-areas of these cities
do not suggest that either daily administration or political control of hinterlands was
“naturally” consequent. Figure 2. 1 ,^49 which models the actual production zones of
all identified Babylonian sites in three different periods, shows that non-contiguity
of production was the norm in most periods. Borders were political and ideological
constructs, not the natural result of material conditions, and border-conflict thus not
necessarily a paradigm for early states.
The Lagasˇ-Umma texts describe constantly shifting boundary lines, revealing the
vital interest of the central authority to establish a spatial basis of power. At Lagasˇ,
the border was first marked by a “no-man’s land” between the Nun-canal and the
Gu’edenna; then at a levee called Namnundakigara; then again from Antasura to
Edimgalabzu; yet again to a place called Mubikura; the last ruler would eventually
claim the boundary of Lagasˇ had historically run “to the sea.”^50 Contemporaneously,
King Lugalzagesi of Uruk meticulously detailed an eleven-sided point-to-point
boundary demarcated by canals, fortresses, and villages.^51 The political and legal
relations of persons collected within these Sumerian city-state boundaries is elusive,
but royal interest in borders is not in doubt. In early northern Babylonia, extension
of state control over the countryside was even more contingent and incomplete than
the comprehensive system of the south, and independent rural freeholds were more
common in hinterlands surrounding Kisˇ, Sippar, and Aksˇak.^52 In all times and places,
however, it was in the state’s interest to tell its constituent audiences that its power
across space was unlimited.
And then, all of the physical features of the Babylonian countryside disappeared
in Sargonic royal inscriptions; the concerns here were city walls, city rulers, and city
dwellers. The conceptual map of the Akkadian state incorporated no landscapes beyond
the city walls.^53 Sargon claimed to have demolished three dozen city-walls in wars
throughout Sumer; Rimusˇ expanded this campaign by also “expelling” (>wa ̄s.û) tens
of thousands of city people into the countryside.^54 A typology of the conquered reveals
that exile meant non-existence: those killed and taken prisoner, the physically destroyed,
were at the bottom; at the top were those granted subject status and still within the
political realm; those “expelled,” however, were also said to be “annihilated,” because
those discorporated from urban communes were political non-beings. There never
was any reckoning of victory in terms of land – only in body counts, and the capitulation
of specific, named elite persons. Instead of geographic expressions of control, we must
read clues such as temple-hymn lists to discern the extent of Akkadian control – a
pointillist state, elite by elite, household by household, city by city.^55
Yet Sargonic rule could never afford to neglect rural borderlands: letters between
administrators show that villages still acted as boundary-markers, that persons who
were “citizens” (dumu GN) should not reside in or flee to other city-states, and that
— Seth Richardson —