ABSTRACT
Until the 1950s the government of the early city was almost universally characterized as a ‘theocracy’, and cuneiform scholars wrote of the ‘temple-city’. Claims were even made that at Lagaš (in truth, the only place for which adequate evidence survived) the temple owned all the land and employed the entire population: ‘The gods, as representatives of the tribe and clans, own the farm land created by social labour … The tribal territory of Lagash, for example, appears divided into the estates of some twenty deities, eminent domain over them all being perhaps retained by the chief god of the city or tribe’ (Gordon Childe, What happened in history, rev. edn, Harmondsworth, 1954, 94). This extreme view is now discredited. We cannot any longer maintain that because the temple collected commodities and distributed them to its dependants the entire economy operated through ‘redistribution’, or that the priests controlled all agricultural production and commercial activity. Nevertheless, we must not overcompensate, and so underrate the importance of the temple’s role. In a sense it represents the communal identity of each city: it symbolizes it, but it also concentrates wealth and offers services to the community which are far more critical to the growth of an urban civilization than the exploitative strategy of the palace, similar though the two institutions often appear in practice. It is right, therefore, that we should treat the temple first.
