Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Temple City

In Chapters 3 to 5 of Uruk: The First City, Mario Liverani describes in more detail the proposal he laid out in the previous two chapters, namely that Uruk developed into a tri-polar temple-run city. Liverani provides numerous examples of the power of the temple over the inhabitants of Uruk. Though Liverani spends a few pages toward the end of Chapter 4 discussing the motivation the people of Uruk might have had for their altruistic actions (mainly ideology), he nonetheless makes very little progress toward proposing a sound theory. I would have appreciated it if Liverani had elaborated on the role that ideology played in the Sumerians’ actions.

Liverani describes workers as giving up to the temple barley, wool, skills, labor, and even their lives in the form of military service in exchange for adequate rations or land from the temple. It seems to me like the temple did not regard the general populace very highly. Toward the end of Chapter 3, Liverani also mentions that “guards” protected the central wealth from the people, rather than protecting the people from threats. This documentation, coupled with Liverani’s mention of the term “man-day” in Chapter 4 (defined as the amount of labor one man must perform in a day) (Liverani, 57), further suggests that the temple did not exactly view the general populace in the most respectful light.

Liverani makes Uruk sound as if it ran like a well-oiled machine, with workers willingly giving up their hard-earned possessions to the temple for the promotion of the general well-being of the state while receiving minimal compensation. In reality, such a system would be highly precarious and prone to toppling, as evidenced by numerous monarchies and dictatorships throughout history. I don’t believe that ideology would have sufficed as an explanation for such selfless actions by the people, either. Although some modern ideologies require followers to pay a tithe, none of them have the power to induce its followers to undertake measures as economically-burdening or self-sacrificing as those described by Liverani. Also, I would have expected to hear at least one mention of a rebellion or some resistive movement on the part of the people against the temple, but there were none. This all begs the question of how such an unlikely system could sustain itself. Though Liverani suggests that the temple, through ideological factors, had enormous control over the lives of Uruk’s inhabitants, I still harbor doubts about the strength of ideology as a motivating factor in Uruk.

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