Near East Kingdoms

Tiwa (City State) (Sumer)

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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. 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.

By the late fourth millennium BC, Sumer was divided into approximately a dozen independent city states which used local canals and boundary stones to mark their borders. Many of the smaller cities emerged in two broad waves, in the mid-third millennium BC and at the start of the second millennium BC. One of these was Tiwa (or Tiwe).

The city's location is not certain as evidence is yet to be found to link it to a specific archaeological mound. It is known for certain that Urum was the third province from the north out of the nineteen provinces of the twenty-first millennium BC Ur III empire, after Sippar and then Tiwa.

One of Naram-Sin's texts helps to narrow down the options, a text which relates to the pivotal battle in which he crushed the great revolt against his recent accession as king of Akkad. It stated that 'In between the cities of TiWA [sic] and Urum, in the field of the god Sin, he drew up [battle lines] and awaited battle'. The battlefield lay somewhere between Tiwa and Urum, with the text not mentioning any other cities which may have been nearby.

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(Information by Peter Kessler, with additional information from Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, Gwendolyn Leick (Penguin Books, 2001), from Encyclopaedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition, Cambridge (England), 1910), from Historical Atlas of the Ancient World, 4,000,000 to 500 BC, John Heywood (Barnes & Noble, 2000), from The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC, Amélie Kuhrt (Routledge, 2000, Vol I & II), from Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, Michael Road (Facts on File, 2000), from Mesopotamia: Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Enrico Ascalone (Dictionaries of Civilizations 1, University of California Press, 2007), from The Archaeology of Mesopotamia, S Lloyd (Revised Ed, London, 1984), from History of the Ancient Near East c.3000-323 BC, Marc van der Mieroop (Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 2007), and from External Links: Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, and A New Look at Naram-Sin and the 'Great Rebellion', Steve Tinney (Journal of Cuneiform Studies, Vol 47, 1995, pp 1-14, available via JSTOR).)

c.2254? BC

Kish leads a 'Great Revolt' against the Akkadian empire, rallying the northern Sumerian cities of Apiak, Borsippa, Dilbat, Eresh, Kazallu, Kiritab, Kutha, Sippar, and Tiwa, and placing a well-organised army in the field which is then defeated. Presumably this is the period in which Eresh (potentially Abu Salabikh) has its own king in a fractured Sumerian political landscape.

The painted temple at Tell Uqair (ancient Urum) was uncovered by archaeologists in the 1940s, and some attempts have been made to model it with its painted walls fully intact

fl 2250s? BC

Potential lugal (king) of Tiwa. Name unknown.

c.2004 BC

The waning Sumerian civilisation which has at its centre the city of Ur now collapses entirely when the Simashki ruler of Elam, Kindattu, together with the people of Susa, sacks the city and captures Ibbi-Sin. The fate of the little-mentioned Tiwa is unknown, but it has been noted as being Ur's secondmost northern province after Sippar.