For most of the third millennium BCE, southern Mesopotamia was not a country but a patchwork of rival cities. Ur, Uruk, Kish, Lagash, Umma, Eridu and a dozen others each controlled their own fields, canals and villages, guarded by walls and by a patron god. Historians call the stretch from about 2900 to 2350 BCE the Early Dynastic period. Like the city-states of classical Greece, they shared a language and religion and fought one another constantly.

Rulers and titles

Each city had its own ruler, and the titles varied. Some used en, a word tied to priestly leadership, and others ensi, often translated "governor" because the ruler governed on behalf of the city god. The title that won out was lugal. Lugal is a word meaning "big man," from lu, man, and gal, big, and it came to mean king. Rulers led in war, built temples and canals, and claimed to have been chosen by the gods.

One city stood apart. Nippur was important as the holy city of the chief god Enlil, and its temple, the Ekur, was the religious heart of Sumer. Nippur rarely ruled other cities, but kings who controlled it gained prestige, as if Enlil had approved their rule.

The Sumerian King List

Later scribes tried to put this crowded past into order. The text called the Sumerian King List opens with the line that kingship came down from heaven to Eridu, then names a series of kings, some with reigns of tens of thousands of years, before a great flood. After the flood, it says, kingship passed to Kish, then to Uruk, then to Ur and so on. The King List claims that kingship passed from one city to another, as if only one city ruled at any time. Its known versions were written down around 2100 to 1800 BCE, long after many of the events. Historians distrust the King List because it forces rival cities into one neat line, when in fact many of those dynasties ruled at the same time. It is best read as political argument, a claim that Sumer had always been one kingdom, which suited the kings who sponsored it.

Rivals at war

The best documented conflict is between Lagash and its neighbor Umma, about thirty kilometers apart. Lagash and Umma fought for generations over farmland and water along their border, especially a fertile strip called the Gu-edena. Around 2450 BCE King Eannatum of Lagash defeated Umma and set up a carved monument now in the Louvre. The Stele of the Vultures shows the god Ningirsu holding Lagash's enemies in a net, while on another side Eannatum's soldiers march in a tight formation of shields and spears over fallen bodies, and vultures carry off pieces of the dead.

Death at Ur

From 1922 to 1934 the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley excavated a cemetery at Ur with about two thousand graves dating from around 2600 to 2450 BCE. Sixteen of them held astonishing wealth: gold helmets and headdresses, lyres decorated with bulls' heads. One tomb belonged to a woman named Puabi, whose seal calls her queen. Several tombs held dozens of attendants. In the largest, the so-called Great Death Pit, lay 74 bodies, most of them women in fine dress. Woolley thought they had walked in willingly and drunk poison. CT scans of skulls in 2009 suggested some attendants were killed by blows to the head. The evidence is limited, but it suggests that a few people at the top could claim the lives of many others for their journey into death.

A ruler who promised fairness

Around 2350 BCE a ruler of Lagash named Uruinimgina, once read as Urukagina, left inscriptions describing reforms. He complained that officials had seized boats, livestock and fields, that priests charged heavy fees for burials and that the rich took what they wanted from the poor. Uruinimgina's reforms claimed to protect widows and orphans from the powerful. His texts also contain the earliest known Sumerian word for freedom, amargi, used for release from debt. Amargi literally means "return to the mother," since a freed debtor went home to his family. We cannot tell how much changed in practice, and Uruinimgina was soon overthrown by Lugalzagesi of Umma. But the idea that a ruler owes special protection to the weak would echo through Mesopotamian kingship for two thousand years.

Worked example: The first border treaty

How do we know about the Lagash and Umma war in such detail? Much of it comes from clay cones made for King Enmetena of Lagash, a nephew of Eannatum, around 2400 BCE. They tell a history of the dispute: long before, a king of Kish named Mesilim had settled the boundary and set up a marker stone. Umma's ruler later tore it out and seized the fields. Eannatum fought back, restored the border, built a ditch and made Umma's leaders swear by the gods to respect it.

The text is valuable as one of the earliest pieces of written history and the earliest known record of arbitration and a sworn treaty between states. But notice whose voice it is. Every word comes from Lagash. No Ummaite account survives. A careful reader treats the cones the way you would treat a single government's press release: full of real facts, arranged to win an argument.