GARY BECKMAN -- Professor at University of Michigan

Dear Jonathan,
 
          I'm not ruling out the possibility that undertaking wars was the subject of inter-elite conflict in the ANE, only maintaining that this cannot be demonstrated from our sources....

           I’m afraid that we do not have the “thickness” of documentation from the ancient Near East to even approach the primary question you pose. All we know about the causes of wars is the  ideologically conditioned rationales presented in royal inscriptions and other products of the kings’ chancelleries, e.g., you didn’t pay your tribute, you failed to return fugitives when demanded, you showed disrespect to the god Assur, etc., etc. We know next to nothing about the decision-making processes within the belligerent polities.

                For some understanding of our limited knowledge of factionalism within political entities—most of them not really ‘city-states’--in the ANE, you will find useful Marc Van De Mieroop, The City in the Ancient Near East, and the relevant sections of Trevor Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites.

                 Regards,

                 Gary Beckman

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DANIEL POTTS -- Professor at University of Sydney

Dear Dr. Kolkey,

thanks for the explanation. I certainly think there must be cases in the ancient Near East, particularly in Mesopotamia, but I'm not such a political historian to know straight up. The famous case of the dispute between Umma and Lagash springs to mind, ....

Best of luck with your project which sounds extremely interesting,

Dan Potts

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BENJAMIN FOSTER -- Professor at Yale University

your question is very interesting and challenging. there were certain ruling families in sumerian city states, members of which show up in various places, like temple offices, administrative posts, and the like. they tended to ally with their kind in other cities. in the third millennium, you will have trouble identifying groups for or against war, owing to the nature of the commemoration of them. the classic sumerian literary text which takes up this theme is "Gilgamesh and Agga," but there it is a wisdom motif: old men say not to go to war, young men say "let's fight." as elsewhere in sumerian literature, the war fizzles out in a very odd way. during the first millennium, there is more to go on, as the assyrian imperial project in babylonia found some groups thinking that a pax assyriaca was a great idea and others fighting it regularly, though we have no demosthenes and antipater to work with. i touched on anti-war literature from mesopotamia in a volume edited by k. raaflaub, called, i think, war and peace in the ancient world. but, to cut to the chase, i am not sure how your thesis, persuasive as it is, could be worked out for mesopotamia such that a main stream historian would be satisfied. as usual with assyriology, there would be wisps here and whispers there.

-brf
                                         
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JERRY COOPER -- Ph.D. University of Chicago -- Professor at Johns Hopkins University

In my opinion, nearly all politics is self-interested.  But read my booklet on Lagash and Umma.

Jerry Cooper

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HANS NISSEN -- Professor at Free University of Berlin

I'm sorry to have to disappoint you. While I fully subscribe to your thesis (1) that self-interested factional politics played a much larger role than visible in our sources, and while I have no doubt that this was also true for the early Mesopotamian society/city states I have no way of validating this impression or giving you and answer to (2). At least for the time period which I am familiar with - the 4th and 3rd millennia BC - we are already happy to find names of rulers mentioned in our sources, to be able to reconstruct sequences of rulers and, very rarely, to be able to come up with synchronisms between certain rulers because one boasts with a victory over the other. Basta. There is even not enough ground for speculation.

Sorry again.

Regards

Hans Nissen

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AAGE WESTENHOLZ -- M.A. -- Professor at Copenhagen University

Dear Mr. Kolkey,

         take it that you are interested in internal factional politics within any given city-state.  I know of no evidence for such phenomena from third millennium Mesopotamia; but the Amarna letters testify rather clearly to the presence of pro-Egyptian and anti-Egyptian parties within the city of Byblos and other Levantine cities during the middle of the second millennium.  Similarly, the Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions describe vividly that in the Babylonian cities of the first millennium, there were people who put their money on the Assyrians, while others followed the rebels (notably Marduk-apal-iddina, who must have been a phenomenal politician).  Of course, the Assyrians described the rebels as "sinners", which indeed they were, insofar as they violated sworn treaties.  The general tendency seems to be that, when you have several competing influences from the outside, the result is disagreement within the city on which magnet is the stronger.
                        
        I hope that this does not disappoint you too much.

Aage Westenholz

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