8 Chapter 1An organized priesthood served in the great raised
temple or ziggurat that dominated the town. The zig-
gurat was a stepped pyramidal tower dedicated to the
god or goddess who was the patron of the city. The
earliest examples were built of packed earth. After
about 2000 B.C. most were constructed on a foundation
of imported stone and decorated with glazed tiles. The
temple and its priests were supported by extensive
landholdings. Other large tracts were owned by the
royal family and its retainers. Sumerian kings were
likely at first war chiefs whose powers became heredi-
tary as their responsibilities for the distribution of
goods and labor grew. Like chiefs in other societies,
they stood at the center of a system of clientage that
involved their families and their servants as well as offi-
cials, commoners, and probably priests.
Clientage is best defined as a system of mutual de-
pendency in which a powerful individual protects the
interests of others in return for their political or eco-
nomic support. With or without legal sanction, client-
age is the basic form of social organization in many
cultures and was destined to become a powerful force
in the history of the West. In Sumer, clients formed a
separate class of free individuals who were given the
use of small parcels of land in return for labor and a
share of their produce. Their patrons—kings, noble of-
ficials, or temple priests—retained title to the land and
a compelling hold on their client’s political loyalties.
The cities were therefore ruled by a relatively small
group. Clients had full rights as citizens, but they could
not be expected to vote against those who controlled
their economic lives.
The rest of the land was owned by private families
that were apparently extended, multigenerational, and
organized on patriarchal lines. Though rarely rich,
these freeholders enjoyed full civil rights and partici-
pated in the city’s representative assembly. The greatest
threat to their independence was debt, which could
lead to enslavement. Other slaves were sometimes ac-
quired for the temple or palace through war, but Sumer
was not a slave-based economy. The organization of
trade, like that of agriculture, reflected this social struc-
ture. For centuries Sumerian business was based on the
extended family or what would today be called family
corporations. Some firms ran caravans to every part of
the Middle East or shipped goods by sea via the Persian
Gulf. They exported textiles, copper implements, and
other products of Mesopotamian craftsmanship and im-
ported wood, stone, copper ingots, and precious met-
als. Iron and steel were as yet unknown. Later, in the
time of Hammurabi, Babylonian rulers attempted to
bring some of these trading concerns under govern-
ment regulation.
The organization of Sumerian society was probably
much like that of earlier Neolithic communities, and its
political institutions reflect the ancient idea of chief-
tainship. More is known about it only because the
Sumerians were the first Western people to create a
written language. Their political and economic rela-
tionships had reached a level of complexity that re-
quired something more than the use of movable clay
tokens to record transactions, a practice characteristic
of many earlier cultures. Though the Sumerian lan-
guage was apparently unrelated to any other and was
used only for ritual purposes after the second millen-
nium B.C., all later Mesopotamian cultures adopted its
cuneiform system of writing.
Cuneiform refers to the wedge-shaped marks left
by a stylus when it is pressed into a wet clay tablet.
Sumeria was rich in mud, and slabs of clay were perfect
for recording taxes, land transfers, and legal agree-
ments. When the document was ready, the tablet
could be baked hard and stored for future reference
(see illustration 1.3).llustration 1.
A Cuneiform Tablet.This fragment of the eleventh tablet of
the Epic of Gilgameshfrom Ashurbanipal’s great library at Nineveh
is a superb example of cuneiform text.