Order and disorder

Mesopotamian history is longer than that of the western world and more homogeneous. While chapter 2 described the rise and fall of dynasties, I have treated the different components of the Mesopotamian social order as broadly constant, despite occasional instances of changes through time. This was a necessary, over-simplification, and, to conclude, it is time to pull together some of the different threads, and see how political factors interacted with the social order, and the different sectors of society with one another, to create the changes we observe. Long-term trends within the fabric of society are often assumed by historians, but usually depend on intuitive judgements. Thus, reacting rightly against the Deimel ‘temple—state’ construct which was current until the 1950s, Diakonoff emphasized the role of the extended family and the local commune. Nissen goes further back in time, and even suggests that the undeniable importance of the temple in southern Mesopotamia does not date as far back as the Uruk period. ⁵³⁵ As far as the private sector is concerned, another frequently asserted trend is the development of private property at the expense of the state after the collapse of the Ur III Dynasty. ⁵³⁶ This again seems to draw its legitimacy from a silence which could be broken; it is extremely difficult to allow for the bias deriving from the absence of private documents in the Ur III period and the rarity of palace archives later. Similarly the relative importance of a semi-free class in the third millennium, by comparison with nominally free labour in the Old Babylonian period, may also be affected by the same biases, and seems less absolute than it did as more detail of the early labour relations is recovered. ⁵³⁷ Such issues depend so much on the quantitative role of different archives or types of text available to us that I prefer to shelve them, and leave time and future excavation to shed more light. Instead, we shall look at some of the processes which we can observe at work, not being too dogmatic about their relative importance but concentrating on the mechanisms by which changes took place.