ABSTRACT
Another first often accredited to the arena of ancient Mesopotamia is that of empires, perhaps acceptably defined as ‘any large sovereign political entity whose components are not sovereign, irrespective of this entity’s internal structure or official designation’ (Taagepera 1978a: 113), or ‘a supernational system of political control’ (Larsen 1979: 92). Ironically, in historical ancient Mesopotamia there appears to have been no special word for ‘empire’, only for countries, lands or peoples. Definitions of empire vary greatly, and it is possible to regard some of the complex core/periphery interactions considered in the previous chapter as taking place within a context already containing elements of imperialism, as we have seen. Conventionally the term ‘first Mesopotamian empire’ (Larsen 1979: 75), or even ‘world’s first empire’, is reserved for that of the Akkadian period of the later third millennium in Mesopotamia, when textual evidence appears to attest an imperial expansion and administration across substantial swathes of Lower and Upper Mesopotamia and beyond. The presence of textual evidence, however, has arguably encouraged an over-hasty definition and detection of imperial modes of power in what is still essentially an ahistoric archaeological environment. In relation to the alleged Tula empire of central Mexico, Smith and Montiel comment that there has been a tendency ‘to give too much weight to the native historical record in central Mexico, in spite of its obviously propa-gandistic nature’ (Smith and Montiel 2001: 269), and a similar sentiment might be cast in the direction of some Mesopotamian textual scholars as regards study of the Akkadian period. The notion of ahistoric or prehistoric empires in ancient Southwest Asia has not seriously been entertained, in contrast to studies in the New World on political phenomena such as the aliterate Inka and Wari empires of Peru (D’Altroy 2001b; Schreiber 2001). In truth, the specifically archaeological study of empires in the Mesopotamian context is in its infancy. The apparent wealth of texts surviving from empires of the Mesopotamian past has perhaps encouraged a view that atextual archaeological investigation has little to contribute. In this chapter we hope to show how false that view might be.
