ABSTRACT
So far our description of Mesopotamian society has treated it almost as though a closed and stable system, but the political history sketched in chapter 2 is enough to show that this is far from reality.lt may not be too bold to say that, in the view of Sumer and Akkad, the forces of disorder pressed on their borders, so that order at home could be achieved only by a readiness to fight abroad. To judge from the year-names of the 3rd Dynasty of Ur, the state was engaged annually in some military action, as under the Assyrian or Roman empires, but we are not entitled to assume the same for other regimes without good reason. Unfortunately, though, we have little to go on: with war, perhaps more than any other subject, we are the prisoners of what the Mesopotamian rulers wanted us to know: both their royal inscriptions and the public art are essentially propaganda, and we must be more cautious than ever about reading between the lines. There is the danger of allowing a single triumphant event to colour our perception of an entire disastrous, or essentially peaceful, reign. The situation is made worse because there is little in the way of compensating documentation of an archival kind: the obsessive bureaucracy of the Mesopotamian palaces did not up sticks and tag along on campaign; and we don’t have the archives of any military quarter-master. Hence we are unable to gauge the extent of the communal investment in offensive and defensive military measures, or the impact of organized campaigns or civil disorder on the lives of the bulk of the population.
