ishtartv.com - historynewsnetwork.org
By
Christopher Binetti, 2-12-17
How
we think of the Middle East.
At a
time in which Americans’ main experience with the Middle East is profoundly
negative, it is more important than ever to highlight both brighter spots in
the history of the Middle East, called the Near East by most ancient
historians, and to underline the strong historical and cultural links that tie
that region to us in the West. That Western Civilization is in fact more a
product of the ancient Near East than of Europe may come as a surprise, but is
supported by the evidence, both in archaeological and more traditional written
historical sources.
Even
more surprising is the revelation that the history of political development in
this ancient region did not begin with an authoritarian regime but with a
relatively free government where city elders formed a primitive oligarchical
assembly with considerable power to block the ambitions of the kings of ancient
Mesopotamia, or modern-day Iraq. Over time, social unrest due to injustice and
inequality (sound familiar?) led to polarization in society, particularly in
Sumer (southern Mesopotamia), leading to political revolutions, most notably in
the city of Lagash, where Urukagina seized power from the dominant priesthoods
and asserted his sovereign authority with the invention of law.
Whether
law was envisioned from the start to lead the way to a more authoritarian form
of kingship or to re-establish societal balance and equity, it eventually
evolved into a way of crushing dissent among the powerful priesthoods and
aristocracy and to court the support of the common people. In the Epic of
Gilgamesh, which most experts agree was based upon a historical Sumerian king
of Uruk, the early king Gilgamesh is often checked by the council or assembly
of elders. Later on, Hammurabi used both his authority as tribal chieftain
(something that actually developed later on in the cities due to migration of
new peoples) and the mechanism of the law to establish himself as the one ruler
of society. More importantly, Urukagina and the earlier rulers’ law codes were
much less punitive than was Hammurabi’s Code. His code has been regarded as a
civilizing influence on Mesopotamia; it was not. His “eye for an eye”)
corporal punishments greatly increased state-sanctioned violence.
Thus, the ancient Near east, particularly Mesopotamia, gave us law and civil
government, order and state violence, though these were not necessarily happily
paired. Law codes in fact became more prevalent as civil (non-authoritarian)
government collapsed. The Assyrian government of the early 2nd-millenium BC did
not have a written law code as far as we can tell and yet order and freedom
prevailed for centuries. There were certainly laws but not written law codes in
Old Assyria. Written contracts formed the basis of legal judgments and breach
of contract was the center of litigation in Old Assyrian courts much like
today. A city assembly, probably more egalitarian than the earlier ones of the
3rd-millenium BC in Sumer, checked the power of the king of Assyria. There was
a limmu official, who ran the economy of the city, was chosen by the assembly,
not the king, and who named the year after himself. There was an entire working
bureaucracy that regulated the economy of the city and its relationship with
its colonies in modern-day Turkey. The king was far from powerless but checked
and was checked in turn by these other offices and offices in the colonies
themselves. Thus a form of representative government and not a tyrannical
authoritarian regime ruled in these days before the strict Assyrian law code of
the Late Bronze Age. By the time of this law code, the check-and-balance system
of Old Assyria had long collapsed and was replaced by the kind of tyrannical
regime that has long given Assyria a bad name (like in the Bible). Its laws
were strict and very punitive, even for the time. Thus, while law could be
beneficial to a just and equitable society, it could also have the opposite
effect.
Before
one despairs as to the relationship between balanced government and law, the
Hittite Empire arose between the time of the fall of old Assyria and the rise
of the Middle Assyrian polity of the Late Bronze Age. The Hittite Laws were a
set of laws or a law code that was less harsh than the Assyrian laws and yet
kept effective order in the land for centuries. At the same time, a
pluralistic, multi-ethnic bureaucracy that largely ran the Empire alongside the
royal family governed in a fashion somewhere between the free society of the
Old Assyrians and the aristocratic check-and balance system of the Sumerians.
In other words, decentralization, meritocracy, and toleration created a
bureaucratic system that allowed freedom and law and order to the diverse
ancient people of the Hittite Empire.
Thus,
we can see much of the struggle for freedom, law, order, and good government in
the ancient Near East, both in Mesopotamia and the Hittite Empire of Anatolia
(the Asian part of modern Turkey) and Syria. Many of these struggles were
exported to Greece, Etruria, and Rome in the early 1st-millenium BC, leading in
many cases directly to the struggles, events, and political institutions of
classical antiquity. We owe to the ancient Near East a great debt as members of
Western Civilization. It is an error to view the current Middle East as some
foreign thing unrelated to use. Instead, we should see the modern Middle East
as another branch of our own Western Civilization and hope for it to reclaim
its roots in freedom, law, and order.
*Christopher
Binetti has a MA from Rutgers-Newark and PhD from the University of
Maryland-College Park in Political Science. He also has a life-long love of
history, particularly ancient history. His specialty is combining political
theory, comparative politics, and history, especially ancient history.
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