The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Seth Richardson —
society was ninety percent non-urban. The duty of reporting on this thing, “the
countryside,” is normally considered to be thereby discharged: ex-urban communities
seem historically irretrievable, insufficiently represented in documentary sources,
and only contingently appearing when intersecting with the particular interests of
cuneiform-writing urbanites. 7 Thus has an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural
landscape of villages and villagers been upstaged by what we call the world’s “first
urban civilization.”
These constructs sound patently false when stated so baldly, but are difficult to
re-orient without the presentation of a counter-narrative. Counter-narrative is, indeed,
the conceit of this chapter, but it essays upon territory which is doubly anachronistic:
not only was there no native expression for “Babylonia,” 8 but also no single, stable,
and emic term for “countryside,” either (see Table 2.3). And so what is meant here
by “Babylonian countrysides”? I mean to use a geopolitical definition, to refer to
those settled zones, no further north than the latitude of Sippar, which looked to
second-tier settlements as their central places, rather than to cities, and which were
not always securely fastened to the political order of any urban state. It would be a
mistake to insist that this refers to only a few places: about half of all known Old
Babylonian place names, for instance, are only known from a single attestation, 9 and
their political affiliation is then obscure. Excluding the areas that were only environmentally
conducive to semi-nomadic pastoralism, “countrysides” here means those
settlements and lands that lay beyond the cities’ immediate areas of cultivation.
Such divisions are more easily proposed than mapped out. First, “countryside” does
not have the typological validity that the designation “city” does (urban variation
notwithstanding): 10 it includes rural villages, fishing towns, merchant posts, military
fortresses, bandit hideaways, seasonal pastoralist villages, purpose-built new foundations,
tribal outfits, private landed manors, kin-based collectives, work camps, and
émigré outposts, in a variety of built and natural environments – too much heterogeneity
to argue for group consciousness or cognitive unity (hence the plural
“countrysides”). A second problem is diachronic: areas sometimes in the “countryside”
were not always so: productive fields lying just outside Uruk and Nippur in
the thirteenth century BC, for instance, were, by the late eighth century BC, the
territories of Aramaean pastoralists, Chaldaean tribesmen, and even Arabian camelherders.
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Third, a functionalist problematic: not everything rural was necessarily “countryside.”
For instance, Āl-Isˇkun-Ea was an Old Babylonian village with its own fields; yet it
fell within the farmland of the city of Larsa, under its direct and daily administrative
control. Under this definition, Āl-Isˇkun-Ea was not in the countryside, though its
character was certainly that of a rural village. Rather, we will focus as much as possible
on areas beyond the administrative and legal reach of urban states. This brings us to
the raison d’être of our definition: “countrysides,” well-studied for demography and
agricultural production, 12 are here treated as political subjects in order to emphasize
their active and agentive roles in political ideology and economic security.
First we will examine demographic characteristics of this rural landscape, its heterogeneous
character, and divergences from patterns and periods of state history; next,
a look at how countrysides were deployed in urban literatures, to detect this interstitial
and non-literate world in the very discourses that hoped to elide it.
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