By Seth Richardson

 

Great states. Mighty kings. Epic battles. The story of power, we have come to expect, ought to be the standard bill of fare for ancient Near Eastern history: after all, the region was the birthplace of states themselves. But were they really all that powerful?

 Naram Sin stele (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Victory_stele_of_Naram-Sin_of_Akkad-Sb_4-IMG_0556-black.jpg)

 

German sociologist Max Weber famously distilled the nature of state power as a successful claim on the “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” We often describe this great state power as something emerging from the appointment of temporary war leaders who permanently installed themselves and their descendants on thrones. These leaders gradually gathered to themselves powers over law, production, territory, commerce, cult, scholarship—you name it. Our idea that the first three millennia BCE are ever-larger conglomerations of state power—city-states, territorial states, then empires—seem to meet this definition.

But historians of Mesopotamia constantly hedge when speaking about these ancient kingdoms, since all the criteria for their “state” powers seem to fall short. Ancient kings spoke as if they had all these powers: royal inscriptions claimed control over broad empires; law codes confidently asserted punishments for crimes; edicts purported to remit the debts of the land. But these were images projected by texts, creating a simulated or “documentary” authority. In practice, these states were underdeveloped in terms of legal jurisdiction, territory, national identity, systems of taxation, political membership, and so on.

Enter the “low power” model. This theory attempts to get inside the head of state propaganda and understand how it worked, as a dialogue between rulers and ruled which actually created the described powers. If propaganda is ever to be effective, it must persuade, which presupposes a politics. It must also be credible, which means it must contain enough truth to be persuasive in the first place. The “low power” model meets early states where they were—in their essential insufficiency—rather than at the claims of their texts. It then tries to understand those claims as more than empty excuses for power, but expressions conjuring those absent powers into being.

Take for example the development of legal power by the state, where the Laws of Hammurabi were arguably the most potent statement of royal authority in this field.

 Hammurabi stele (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/P1050763_Louvre_code_Hammurabi_face_rwk.JPG)

Hammurabi and the god Shamas (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/F0182_Louvre_Code_Hammourabi_Bas-relief_Sb8_rwk.jpg)

 Hammurabi detail (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/files/2015/05/CodeofHammurabi.jpg)

 Nearly 300 decisions listed cover civil, criminal, and commercial law, and the text rightly stands as a monumental statement. Yet the Laws have long been known to have virtually no footprint in legal practice. Actual law cases of the time did not follow Hammurabi’s ‘rules’ for evidence or procedure; contracts did not reflect their restrictions; letters did not describe the punishments it prescribed. The king routinely turned away jurisdiction, and there is little evidence even for the officers or courts who could have made a royal law work on the ground. Royal administrative practice often directly contravened its own legal standards. The list of variances between statute and practice is almost endless.

We might say: so the Laws exaggerate; so what? But with so many differences, who would believe the Laws? Who would the text persuade if it were not credible? This is where a “low power” reading comes to the fore. A close look at Hammurabi’s Laws finds a battery of rhetorical tricks that simultaneously asserted state power while retreating from responsibility to execute it. Exhibit A: the punishments are voiced in the passive (“he shall be killed”) or the third person plural (“they shall kill him”). Who is “they”? The Laws never say. Exhibit B: the only power actually reserved to the king by the Laws is the right to pardon an adulterer. As great state powers go, this is not much. Exhibit C: if a state soldier was taken as a prisoner of war, his ransom was first to be paid by his private household; failing that, by his city’s temple; and only failing that by the state that sent him to war in the first place. This is also pretty weak stuff. Hammurabi’s Laws were voiced to sound as if the state provided legal protection; in practice, the law either punted to other actors or hung back until the last possible moment.

Why would the king, the text, or the state do this? This isn’t simply the familiar matter of exaggeration. Instead, the state was styling its “decisions” after existing practice—in effect, taking credit for what already was—without having to take on board any of the fiscal costs or political liabilities for actually executing the law. If we approach the issue from the notion that every legal judgment makes as many enemies as it makes friends, we can see that deciding actual cases was not a great business for politicians to be in. It was better to sound responsible for generating the entire field of law in this vague and unverifiable way without having to enforce it.

But after this Old Babylonian moment, there was an historical effect: later ages believed that Hammurabi had actually acted as a judge. A process of misremembering allowed successive epochs and states to point to the past and say of their powers, “See? They did it. It’s normal.” I have called this a “seizure of genre” In a first step, the state ventured to “speak” in fields of law, religion, warfare, etc.; in a second step, there was a naturalizing effect, a “historical forgetting,” in which cultures selectively remembered the former extent of state powers.. This describes the birth process of authority for all the fields of action in which states now act. Early rulers were not in fact mighty kings, but they hoped to some day to realize that kind of power, and that their successors in later ages would perceive their hopes as truths. In a number of articles (see below), I have worked out the basic theory and its applications to issues of rebellion, labor, warfare, food security, law and territorialism, and concepts of political membership.

Mari, palace of Zimri Lim (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Mari_Palazzo_di_Zimri-Lim_-_GAR_-_7-02.jpg)

Head of Sargon showing gouged out eyes (https://images5.alphacoders.com/410/410755.jpg)

 

What’s most useful about this “low power” approach is that it requires neither a full acceptance of early state texts as essentially true, nor yet their rejection as a wholesale pack of lies, set up in opposition to some hidden truth. The first approach is too naïve, the second, too suspicious. The “low power” model takes, with some sympathy, the claims states put forward about power—in its absence and its wanting—and tries to see how texts that were simultaneously credible and deniable simulated the powers that kings wanted to bring into being. It is one possible solution to the age-old question of distinguishing between image and reality in a holistic way.

But “low power” isn’t only for ancient historians: it should also hold interest for scholars working on the contemporary state system. In our time, 51% of the world’s population still lives in states in some stage of failure, as non-state actors and globalist forces gnaw at each end of the system of states and the international order. We should take a long view, and a processual one. The state form was not “born” in a moment, reaching some apex of power, and then passing beyond their historical event horizon in some “post-national moment.” Rather, we should rewrite the earliest history of states as one in which we can, for the first time, see the process of bringing order out of presumptive claims to it. If we struggle still to make the world as it should be—but as it is not yet—then the story of an ancient world leveraging “low power” into ever-higher gears shows that the struggle is nothing new at all.

 

Seth Richardson is Managing Editor of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies and Associate at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

 

Further readings on Mesopotamian “low power” states by the author:

2010    “The Fields of Rebellion and Periphery,” pp. xvii–xxxii in Rebellions and Peripheries, ed. S. Richardson (Ann Arbor, MI: The American Oriental Society).

2012    “Early Mesopotamia: The Presumptive State,” Past & Present 215/1: 3–49.

2014    “Mesopotamian Political History: The Perversities,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 1/1: 61–93.

2015    “Building Larsa: Labor-Value, Scale, and Scope-of-Economy in Ancient Mesopotamia,” pp. 237–328 in Labor in the Pre-Classical Old World, ed. P. Steinkeller and C. Wunsch (Dresden: ISLET).

2016a  “Insurgency and Terror in Early Mesopotamia,” pp. 31–61 in The Brill Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient World, ed. L. Brice and T. Howe. Leiden: Brill.

2016b  “Obedient Bellies: Hunger and Food Security in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in The Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 59/5: 750–792.

2017    “Before Things Worked: A ‘Low-Power’ Model of Early Mesopotamia,” pp. 17–62 in Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America, ed. C. Ando and S. Richardson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

2018    “The Mesopotamian Citizen Conceptualized: Affect, Speech and Perception,” pp. 261–275 in State Formations: Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood, ed. J. Brooke, J. Strauss, and G. Anderson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).