Early Mesopotamia: The Presumptive State*

Abstract

I will proceed with my history, telling the story as I go along of small cities no less than of great … Since I know that man’s good fortune never abides in the same place, I will make mention of both alike. Herodotus, Histories, i. 5. 3. Our earliest account of Mesopotamian state origins comes from the Sumerian King List, compiled around 2000 bc, which blandly confines its aetiology to: ‘When kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in the city of Eridu’. The time to which it alludes, the Uruk period of more than a thousand years before, saw the simultaneous appearance in southern Mesopotamia of massive urbanism, writing technologies, and institutional political authority — the cultural assemblage of an early pristine state. Although modern interpreters of this florescence at first defined it primarily in ideological terms — as, for example, the ‘Sumerian Temple State’ model — the last fifty years of scholarship have turned squarely to explanatory models that focus on the synergy of man and his landscape: hydraulic management, storage economies, environmental circumscription, and so forth. There can be no doubt that the built landscape and means of production were chief concerns of early managerial polities, but the rapid development of the technological capacities of these early polities has led to the terminological supposition that something called the ‘state’, as idea and entity, had therefore emerged just as suddenly and as permanently.

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