Kingdoms of Mesopotamia

The city states of Sumer formed one of the first great civilisations in human history (see feature link). This Near Eastern civilisation emerged a little way ahead of that of Africa's ancient Egypt, and up to a millennium before that of the Indus Valley culture. It developed out of the end of the Pottery Neolithic across the Fertile Crescent, a period which had seen Neolithic Farmer practices spread far and wide across the Near East and beyond.

As irrigation improved so the more southerly reaches of the Euphrates could at last be occupied by humans and their animals. Southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and the western edge of Iran) was subjected to permanent settlement, initially in the form of pastoralists but soon as farmers too. Cultures around the edges of this progression included the Hassuna and Samarra which began this settlement process, and perhaps elements of the Hissar culture in the Iranian highlands were also involved.

By the late fourth millennium BC, Sumer was divided into approximately a dozen city states which were independent of one another and which used local canals and boundary stones to mark their borders. Many early historical events in the region are found only in the Sumerian king list, which notates the rulers of the city states (and see feature link), but archaeology has also uncovered a wealth of detail.

Second of the early city states to be mentioned in the Antediluvian section of the king list, Bad-tibira was situated on the Iturungal Canal, below Umma and to the close north of Uruk and Larsa. Today it is generally linked to the archaeological site of Tell Madineh (alternatively shown as Tell al-Madineh or Tell al-Mada’in). That link comes via looted inscriptions rather than on-site discoveries, so is yet to be fully confirmed and accepted.

The same canal connected Umma with the small city of Zabalam to its north. The Old Testament mentions the city as Tubal. In Akkadian it was Dûr-gurgurri, but early scholarship may have misattributed this to Bad-tibira and it could instead relate to a different location.

The city's main god was Lulal, while the city's main temple was E-mush-kalamma, which was mentioned in the tale, Inanna's Descent to the Underworld. Bad-tibira seems to have lost its initial importance in the 'Post-Diluvian' period as the king list sees it, although it was known by the Macedonians as Panti-Biblos (Pantibiblos).

The site of Tell Madineh was visited for a single day in 1927 by Raymond P Dougherty. He reported a site which covered about 1.5 square kilometres, the western mound of which was the largest, with low extensions bearing off about 1.5 kilometres to the north. Walls both straight and circular were noted. Numbers of baked bricks were seen, along with door sockets, flint saw blades, and a bronze needle.

Some badly-effaced half-bricks on the mound's surface bore the inscription of Amar-Sin of Ur. Pieces of vitrified brick which were scattered over the surface of the large mound bore witness to the city's destruction by fire. No building remains were noted. Vaughn E Crawford of the Metropolitan Museum of Art visited the site in 1965. He noted that surface pottery indicated occupation until about 1500 BC. Again no building remains were noted.

According to the Sumerian king list, a total of three kings ruled for 108,000 years, once (one dynasty) in Bad-tibira and then the kingship was removed to Larak. A later version of the list, written in Larsa in the Gutian or 'Third Dynasty' of Ur period, inserts Kichu-Ana as the second king in the sequence. Possibly he was omitted from other lists for political reasons.

List 1 is primarily used here, but is backed up by List 2 and List 3 to provide a more complete version of the list. Note that older dating systems place the earliest reigns at dates which have been shown to be unrealistically early.

The king list presents kingship as a divine gift which had been bestowed upon mankind in primordial times. It was passed down from king to king and from city to city through the will of the gods and could only be held by one person at a time. This now appears to be more of a high kingship, with each city recognising the most powerful king of the period while ruling their own territory. Only later did the concept of empire emerge to remove or minimise local rule under a more powerful empire-builder.

Near East Kingdoms

Ancient Mesopotamia

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