Gudea and His Dynasty.

• Author: COOPER, JERROLD
• Position: Review

Gudea and His Dynasty. By DIETZ OTTO EDZARD. The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Early Periods, vol. 3.1. Toronto: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS, 1997. Pp. xvii + 233. [pounds sterling]113. $150.

The history of later third millennium (B.C.) Babylonia is dominated by three polities: the state founded by Sargon of Akkade, variously known as the Old Akkadian or Sargonic empire, or the dynasty of Akkad (ca. 2350-2200); the state founded by Urnammu with its capital at Ur, known as the Third Dynasty of Ur, or, simply, Ur III (ca. 2100-2000); and the state of Lagash, in the southeast of Sumer, with its major urban centers of Girsu, Lagash, and Nina. Whereas the first two, which controlled not only all of Babylonia but considerable territory beyond it, are considered to be the first "empires" in western Asian history, and are known from widely distributed sources, the place of Lagash in Babylonian history is controversial and poorly understood. Due to the copious epigraphic material unearthed by the French expeditions to Girsu (Tello) beginning in the last century, and to a much smaller extent by the American expedition to Lagash itself (Al-Hiba) in the 1970s, we know more by far about Lagash in the period prior to Sargon of Akkade, ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2350), and in the period just before Urnammu, than we do about any other place in Babylonia. But generally, historians have not considered Lagash a major player on the political scene; even the claims of Eanatum (ca. 2400) to victories over Elam and Mari, and his assumption of the hegemonic title "King of Kish" tend to get dismissed unfairly, I would think, as the overblown boasts of a petty city-state ruler.

For the period between the Sargonic state and Ur III, the place of the so-called "Second Dynasty of Lagash," whose inscriptions are edited and translated in the volume under review, is likewise not well understood nor agreed upon. Even the chronology of the best-known ruler of the dynasty, Gudea, whose statues grace the Louvre and whose inscriptions can be found in museums and collections all over the globe, is disputed--did he rule prior to Urnammu or did he overlap with him?--as is the order and identity of some of the other rulers. The author does not rehearse these problems, wisely, since without new sources they appear so intractable, but he does seem to belong to those historians who see Gudea's state as a peaceable kingdom: "Foreign relations, at least according to the information of our corpus, were trade-oriented since enormous quantities of building materials and precious goods had to be imported for Gudea's ambitious projects. It goes without saying that our texts do not state how these imports were to be paid for, but they were certainly neither booty nor foreign tribute" (p. 26). These two sentences conclude a paragraph that refers, in an almost dismissive way, to the following passage from Gudea's Statue B (vi 64-76, as translated by Edzard on p. 35): "He defeated the cities of Ansan and Elam and brought the booty therefrom to Ningirsu in his Eninnu. When he had built the Eninnu for Ningirsu, Gudea, ruler of Lagas, made (the booty) a donation forever." Actually, Gudea never says that he "paid" for any of the raw materials he gathered; rather, he usually simply says he "brought down" the various materials from this "land" or that "mountain range," and it seems rash to assume that these were trade goods rather than booty or forcible extractions of some sort. In fact, the latter is suggested by the long passage in Cyl. A xv-xvi, where, on the one hand, various foreign lands are...