Page 32 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

14 Bronze and Stone

potamians of 2000 b.c. than the rulers that follow. Naram-Sin
died less than two hundred years ago and his memory is still
green. But his empire fell, attacked at its heart by tribes from
the Persian highlands. They held Mesopotamia for a hundred
years, though latterly the cities of the south for all practical pur­
poses were independent. It was the ancient city of Ur which
finally overthrew the alien rule and reunited south Mesopotamia.
Though the Sumerians did not know it, it was the last time that
they were to dominate the land. People alive in 2000 b.c. have
seen the growing threat of Elamites to the east and Semitic
Amorites to the west. And sixteen years ago a combined attack
overthrew the Dynasty of Ur. Ibi-Sin, king of Ur, was earned
qff captive to Elam, and an Elamite puppet kingdom, with its
capital centrally placed at Isin, now holds only a small area of
the country. Kish is once more a center of a Semitic confederacy
to the north, and the new Semitic Amorites have established a
southern confederacy based on Larsa.
It is clearly this period of warfare, and the rising power of
the Semites, that has unsettled the old-established temple com­
munism. Sargon and his sons had rewarded their demobilized
veterans with gifts of land, and the desert nomads, arriving with
their flocks and herds, would feel no compulsion to hand these
over to an omnipotent state. And once private ownership is even
partially recognized, people are no longer content to be wage
slaves of the state. When the priests lost their power to enforce
temple ownership of the means of production, the capitalist revo­
lution was carried forward by the momentum of a popular de­
sire to own property.
The farmers whom we have seen this winter morning on their
way to work, and who are now eating their barley cakes and
dried fish in the lee of an embankment, with their woolen cloaks
pulled over their heads, may thus well own their own land. But
they are more probably tenant farmers, paying the owner a
rental of one third of the net produce. It is the time of the barley
sowing, and all the farmers are busy, too busy to hunt or fish,
though they keep their bronze-tipped spears ready to hand. The
times are unruly, and, besides, lions are not uncommon in the
region of the Twin Rivers. Even wild elephants, though rare,