Naram-Sin and the Fall of the Akkadian Empire

 

Victory stele of Naram-Sin,
from Susa, Iran, 2254-2218 BCE.
Pink sandstone, 6′ 7″ high.
Musée  du Louvre, Paris.
(Image from Ancient to Medieval Art page
on Mesopotamia and Persia).

The reign of Naram-Sin (c. 2254–2218 BCE) is important because it helps us to understand why Mesopotamian rulers were not worshiped as gods even though their counterparts in Egypt, the Pharaohs, were. And, yet, as a successful Mesopotamian ruler, Naram-Sin attempted to establish himself as a minor deity. His success lie in part in the favorable perception of the reigns of his father, Manishtushu (c. 2270 BC – 2255 BCE), and his grandfather, Sargon of Akkad (c. 2334–2284 BCE). Because he and his father had been able to hold onto and enlarge the empire created by Sargon the Great, Naram-Sin's reign enjoyed this idea of stability.

We can see the association of Naram-Sin with divinity on the Victory Stele of Naram-Sin, a carved sandstone marker that recounts Naram-Sin's defeat of the Lullubi, a people who lived to the east in the Iranian mountains. The stele shows his army marching over the slain bodies of the enemy as he leads his soldiers into battle. Naram-Sin's deified nature is indicated in four ways. First, he carries two weapons, a spear and a bow, suggesting that he is proficient in both, while each soldier carries only a spear or a bow but never both. Second, Naram-Sin's soldiers and the enemy are all the same size, while Naram-Sin is much larger than anyone else; he towers over them much as would a god. Third, the horns on Naram-Sin's helmet were signs of divinity and were only used for gods. Fourth, one can see two stars at the top of the stele, and these stars symbolize the presence of a god or, in Naram-Sin's case, a demigod. Contestation of Naram-Sin's association with the gods was successful until the end of or after his reign, which forces to ask "What changed?" 

People's perceptions of the next part of the story are recounted in "The Cursing of Agade" (sometimes referred to as "The Curse of Akkad"), a text written down sometime after 1750 BCE, though it is believed to have been composed well before then. In lines 1–39, the poem recounts Sargon's success in establishing the empire and the favor that the gods bestowed upon him by ensuring that the the people had food to eat and that the any conquered people provided tributes that included such exotic animals as monkeys and elephants. Indeed, the land was so loved by the gods that old women gave wise counsel, young women entertained, old men were eloquent, and young men could fight.

Everything turns for the Akkadian Empire beginning with line 40, where Naram-Sin builds a new temple for himself that rivaled the temples of the gods. Furthermore, Naram-Sin diverted food and resources from the gods' temples to his own. These actions indicated that he not only rivaled them for supplication but no longer worshiped the gods themselves. These actions angered the gods, and they withdrew their favor from the Akkadian Empire and instead opened the heavens to pour deluge upon the land (lines 149–175). Food became scarce (lines 149–175) and the costs of everything rose (lines 176–192). Life became difficult to sustain as people competed for fewer and fewer resources (lines 193–280).  In the end, the gods destroyed the Akkadian Empire (line 281). While "The Cursing of Agade" contains some truth, the Akkadian Empire did collapse, and its inhabitants suffered widespread hunger, it misses a number of factors because the author(s) could not see the wider picture. 

Historical and archeological investigation into such things as weather patterns, flooding, crop yields, and people's movements provides a broader tableau for us to see. Near the end of Naram-Sin's reign, weather patterns took a turn for the worse throughout the Mesopotamia and even in Egypt. In most years, the Nile valley, the center of Egyptian civilization, enjoyed predictable and well-timed weather. Each year, the rains came before the planting season and caused the Nile river to flood. These rains eroded nutrient-rich soil from Nubia and placed it along the northern Nile and in the river's delta region just before planting season. This regularity ensured abundant crops and sealed the Pharaohs as successful intercessors with the gods for securing this annual bounty. 

By contrast, Mesopotamian weather was erratic, meaning that no one could predict whether or not it would rain or how much rain would fall if it did rain. Moreover, rains often came after the planting season and at a time when floods could wash away the crops. This irregularity is why Sumerians first built canals on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, so that they could direct any floods away from the crops and then try to control how much water could reach the crops. Even with the use of canals, Mesopotamian agriculture was always subject to heat waves and/or floods that could destroy the crops in any given year. For this reason, the Mesopotamian kings were considered to be important intercessors with the gods, but not necessarily great ones.

With the First Interregnum (c. 2181–2055 BCE) in Egypt and the fall of the Akkadian Empire, we see that a major change in weather patterns caused both regions to suffer widespread crop failures. In each kingdom, people died on a massive scale because of hunger. With their respective armies reeling from lack of food, invaders pillaged with ease. Egyptian and Akkadian governments buckled and broke, and administrations on a large scale disappeared, although some leaders were able to maintain some sense of order on local levels. 

Because weather patterns and the orderly flooding of the Nile later returned to normal, Egyptian leaders were able to retain the godhood status of the Pharaohs, even if that belief took a beating. However, it should be no surprise that the more mercurial nature of Mesopotamian weather caused the people to challenge any notion of godhood on the part of Mesopotamian leaders. If weather patterns had remained similar to those experienced through Sargon's, Manishtushu's and the first part of Naram-Sin's reigns, the association might have been strong enough for the common people to accept their leaders as divine. With a regional collapse just after an important ruler had claimed divinity, though, was another matter. In this way, the difference in perception of Egyptian and Mesopotamian rulers lay their role as intercessors for the gods as well as in the relative stability or instability of the region being ruled. 

The Concept of Civilization

One of my interests has concerned how people think about “civilization.” In a discussion with a student, Margaret Mead once stipulated a definition that placed the beginning of civilization before the construction of settled edifices, whether as part of a civitas (the general Latin concept of a demarcated city, whether with a wall or sense of community) or polis (the general Greek concept of community often containing urban centers). The student asked Mead what was the first indication of civilization, and it is suggested that the student most likely expected the answer to be something like a tool or a clay pot. However, Mead said that the first sign would be a femur that had been broken and then healed, since it meant that other individuals cared for the injured person long enough for the individual to heal and to return to caring for herself/himself again (https://divinity.yale.edu/news/15000-year-old-bone-and-fall-2013-issue-reflections). This is a very attractive idea, but we have examples of wild or feral animals caring for injured partners (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=60suFxmr_Ks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2L89b5RHME, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lQaMypcyqc,. There are others, but these are the ones that I’ve seen most often in social media). These examples mean that this idea does not separate humans from, say, feral cats, and we do not think about wild animals as having civilizations of their own.

“The Epic of Gilgamesh” contains one of the, if not the, oldest discussions of civilization. In the tale, the author(s) states that civilization resulted from the construction of walls around a collection of homes and other buildings. This point was important enough for the author(s) to state it at both the beginning and the end of the story. The Gilgamesh cycles were originally shared orally long before the Sumerians invented writing, so it is possible for this element of the stories to have survived from a period before the city-states grew large enough to become threats to each other. Since the author(s) talks about peoples who are not settled and does not mention other cities, the purpose of that wall was to protect settled, agrarian peoples from attacks by migratory hunter-gatherers. The wall establishes a barrier between those whom the author(s) considers uncivilized (migratory, dangerous, lacking government, etc.) and civilized (settled, fairly peaceful, having government, etc.). Although likely formed in oral versions, this element was first written by a Sumerian author while surrounded by city-states, but later interpreters retained it in the versions that they reworked in the age of Mesopotamian empires.

 

The Greeks share the Sumerian dichotomy between civilized and uncivilized, but the dividing line was not a physical barrier but the Greek cultural identity. Though not all Greeks lived within walled cities, they did share fairly similar cultural attitudes if not values. After all, the Greeks inhabited polities around the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas with a variety of political and cultural expressions, but they shared similar ideas about what it meant to be Greek. They expressed the demarcation of Greek/civilized and Not Greek/uncivilized in terms of language, the most evident aspect of their shared culture. By contrast, the Greeks characterized the non-Greek peoples as making “bar bar” sounds, from which we get the term “barbarian,” which is a synonym for “uncivilized.” This characterization is most evident in the Amazigh peoples of northern Africa but whom the Greeks and Romans named Berbers (from the sounds “bar bar”), an appellation that we continue to use.

 

One of the most radical arguments along these lines was most clearly—and most fully—elaborated in Augustine of Hippo’s “The City of God.” Augustine’s argument in this context is that the City of Man is full of sin and exhibited the worst in humans regardless of the state of civilization. By contrast, the City of God was open to the best in humanity regardless of whether or not the individuals were considered “civilized” by other humans so long as these people gave themselves over entirely to Christ. In this way, spiritual salvation through complete surrender of one’s body and soul to Christ permitted one to enter the superior spiritual civilization established by God.

 

These ancient usages of civilization have resonated with people into the modern era. We still make judgments as to what demarcates the civilized from the uncivilized. The definitions are often written from an idealized and sometimes righteous conceptions of the author’s perceptions that other observers don’t see a difference between the two groups under discussion. For example, it is a commonplace to describe the civilized as peaceful and the uncivilized as violent; however, such definitions overlook the fact that both groups provide abundant examples of being peaceful or violent.

 

Possibly the most intense articulation of rivalry between civilizations was the Cold War. The US stood for democracy, capitalism, and individual liberty, while the Soviet Union represented communism, authoritarian government, and anti-imperialism. However, the most recent that gained popular notoriety was Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations,” which pits the “civilized” values of the Christian West against the “uncivilized” values of the Muslim East. In brief, Huntington argued that civilizations are more prone to be in conflict with each other because of differing value systems. Huntington assertions stem from an ideological perspective and relied heavily on cherry-picked evidence. By ignoring ideology and looking at the evidence, Giacomo Chiozza refuted Huntington’s arguments in “Is There a Clash of Civilizations? Evidence from Patterns of International Conflict Involvement, 1946–97.” Chiozza notes that nations are more likely to be in conflict with bordering states regardless of its civilization designation or stated values. Moreover, conflict was less likely between nations of different civilizations when they did not share a border, which means that conflicting values was not an issue. 

 

The spiritual variation was most widely disseminated in Hall Lindsey’s 1970 book, “The Late Great Planet Earth,” but whose ideas continue to reverberate within evangelic Christianity. Lindsey loosely conceptualized Augustine’s ideas and about 1600 years of changes in Christian theology within Cold War ideology. The book’s argument is that the confrontation between the US (fighting for Christ) and the Soviet Union (Satan’s champion) would lead to the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. Its construction would usher in the last battle between Christ and Satan and the end of the physical world. God would then carry out the Last Judgement to separate the saved from the damned. Conversations with some evangelicals shows that this narrative has been updated within the War on Terrorism, with Islam replacing the Soviet Union as the great enemy.

 

The dichotomy between “uncivilized” and “civilized” is always used to different cultures, but it always does so be denigrating those characterized as “uncivilized.” While the Sumerians were settled agrarians and they maligned hunter-gatherers, humans continue to combine aspects of both cultures even if we rely more on growing our food. After all, how many of us have supplemented grocery shopping (which we are able to do through a highly developed system of domesticated food production) by hunting wild game or by picking such wild plants as berries, mushrooms, and so on? I know that I have.

 

Likewise, the comparison and contrast of civilizations is often performed to denigrate. Consider Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations,” in which he treats the civilization of which he is a part in positive terms and the civilization that he perceives as an enemy in negative ones. Indeed, a google search for definitions for “civilization” reveals that most of them setup that dichotomy between one that is superior and one that is inferior by using superlatives or loaded words like “advanced.” The most palatable definition shared by modern dictionaries avoids the loaded language and instead centers upon treating peoples within a given area or region in terms of their “society, culture, and way of life.” 

 

Depite all of the above, it is important to bear in mind that the characterization of civilization belonging to the civilized, as if every person within its designated borders shares the same level of development, is inaccurate. In the fourteenth century, Ibn-Khaldun (1332–1406), who is considered to have created the discipline of sociology, observed that a civilization contains peoples at all levels of development: from uncivilized to civilized, no matter how one defines the terms. Notwithstanding how advanced (regardless of how one defines the word) a civilization (again no matter the definition) might be, its population will vary greatly in terms of how individuals do or do not embody, represent, of take advantage of that exposition of civilization. 

 

In the end, I think of the difference between uncivilized and civilized as being whether or not an individual has joined with others within a civitas or polis style organization. This is not to say that agrarian-based societies are better than hunter-gatherer ones, as the Gilgamesh author(s) suggests but to emphasize the settled nature of the civitates/poleis and its emphasis on edifices for homes, religious observances, food storage, government, and so on. As for “civilization,” the definition would have to consider the relationships between and/or characteristics of peoples in some form of association with civitates/poleis regardless of whether or not the individuals participate in the civitates/poleis.