The sun was hot in Lagash. On the plain
Outside the city, stretching far away
To where the great Twin Rivers reached the sea,
Heat waves arose, and fitful blasts of wind
Played dervish with the sands. Within the walls
That girt the city round, deep shadows fell
Where sacred shrines on terraced zikkurats
Were lifted toward the heavens. Deep canals
Brought water from afar and filled the pools
That cooled and slaked the city. Stately palms,
Growing within the garden of the king,
Whispered their monotone of rustling fronds
Above the song of man-made waterfalls.
~
It was the time of market. The bazaars
Were thronged with buyers from the city homes
And filled with sellers from the countryside.
Small farmers brought their melons, fowls, and eggs;
Fish stalls were redolent of finny food;
And butcher shops displayed the new-killed beef
That had been bred and fattened on the land
Around the city. Craftsmen, too, were there,
Each in his booth, with hand-wrought merchandise —
Slim shoes of finest leather, earthen jars,
Cookpots of metal sealed with melted lead;
~
Fine-woven fabrics; and anon a booth
Displayed exotic products from afar,
Brought in by merchant ship from distant lands.
Yet even in the hour of marketing,
Above the haggling and the shouts of trade,
Voices were raised in song, and there were heard
Soft strains of music from the temple walks,
And from the schoolrooms, and from many homes —
The sweet-toned rippling harp, the tinkling lyre,
Reed instruments and drums and tambourines.
For these were happy people, and they lived
In joyous rhythm with the sun and stars,
And built their lives upon a gay response
To nature’s promptings and the joy of living.
~
Thus went the life of Lagash, in an age
So distant and remote that time and sand
Would wipe it out and cover every trace.
The terraced temples and the palaces,
The walls and streets and turrets and canals —
All these would vanish, and the very name
Of those who toiled and planned and builded them
Would be forgotten; and the waves of time,
Century after century, would pound
On that forsaken city; and the wind
Would blow the hot sand from the desert waste
And pile it in the fountains and the streets
And on the fallen rooftrees; till at last
Nothing was there but drifted dunes that held
Their secret while the slow millenniums passed.
~
And when some forty centuries were gone
Four thousand years and more of creeping time! —
Behold, men came and dug and thrust away
The obliterating sands and brought to light
The streets and gardens and the palace walls,
The ruined temples and the broken fanes,
That once had been a city. And they found
Statues of men and women, wrought with skill,
So that the semblance of those vanished men
Is known to us. But more than all beside,
The diggers found the record of that people,
Inscribed on tablets made of clay and baked
In sun or fire — the wedge-shaped characters
That were at last interpreted, to yield
The story of those ancient men and women.
~
The gods were central in their scheme of things:
Enki, the god of water; Ki, of earth;
Enlil, who ruled the air; An, lord of heaven;
Inanna, who controlled the tides of love;
And grim Dumuzi, who was god of death.
All these were ancient gods, and universal
Among the folk who dwelt Between the Rivers.
But one was closer to their hearts and lives —
Ningirsu, the particular god of Lagash.
~
And as the gods were dominant in their lives,
The temple was the center of their city,
Lifting its terraced stories toward the skies,
Even as the churches of a later age
Would raise their spires above the narrow streets
Of medieval towns. The temple rulers,
The Sangas, who were ministers to the gods,
Were potent also in the state’s affairs,
And with the freemen of the city chose
The man who was to rule them — the Ishakku.
~
But as the desert decades multiplied,
A bold Ishakku, selfish beyond the rest,
Avid of power, ambitious that his name
Should live beyond him in a dynasty,
Determined that his own son should succeed him.
And in a moment of unwariness,
Or of participant venality,
Sangas and freemen let the matter pass,
The kingship was declared hereditary,
And so Ur-Nanshe’s name became dynastic.
What followed was as certain as that night
Will follow day. The kings became ambitious
For more and greater power. To the north
Lay Umma, rich and potent city state,
The capital betimes of all Sumeria,
And then as ever strong in rivalry
Against the Lagashite economy,
And strong in might against Ur-Nanshe’s arms.
Umma was more than rival; she was threat—
Threat to the commerce and the growing wealth
Of Lagash and its people — and its kings!
~
The Lagashites must be prepared for war.
The border guards must be increased. The king
Must have an army capable to meet
The best that Umma might equip and train.
The city walls must forthwith be rebuilt
And strong new bastions added; all the arts
And implements and strategies of war
Must be employed to strengthen Lagash arms,
And guard the sacred temple of Ningirsu.
War was the next step, and the Lagashites
Swept northward like a scourge across the land
To conquer Umma ; and there came a time
When one bold ruler of the Ur-Nanshe line
Would bring all Sumer under vassalage!
Great was Ningirsu, patron god of Lagash!
Great was the king, the scion of Ur-Nanshe,
Rivaling for a time the great Gilgamish,
The legendary hero of all Sumer.
~
But all things have their price; and Lagash paid
Full measure for her triumph. For to raise
The needed armies and secure the arms
And food and clothing to supply their wants,
And to support them in the field, and pay
The soldiers’ wages, and defray the cost
Of transport, and to fortify the walls —
All this imposed upon the treasury
A vast expenditure that never stopped.
The spoils of conquest that enriched a few
Were never channeled back to pay the cost
Of conquest, or reduce the staggering debt
That ever mounted as the conquests spread.
~
Under the stress of war no one complained.
Their lives were forfeit if their armies failed,
And Umma was not merciful. They paid
The mounting taxes — and watched hopefully
The northward roads for the next messenger
Who should bring news of added victory.
The good news came — and taxes rose again!
~
Moreover, temple property was seized,
And lands belonging to the god Ningirsu
Were pledged to meet the costs of war. And then
The wars were finished, and the men came home,
Those who remained alive; and with them came
An army of the maimed, who must be cared for.
And in addition there had come to be
Another army of the king’s retainers,
The palace coterie, who throve on power
And had their hands upon the public funds
And lived by eating from the treasury.
~
So potent had these grown that even the king,
If he had been disposed, could not have stopped
Their depredations, which were all excused
As necessary functions in the line
Of public duty. All the subtle web
Of state controls that had been spun about
The lives and occupations of the people
Were lucrative emoluments for those
Who lived them up. New taxes were devised
To seize the peoples’ earnings. Men of wealth
Were stripped and forced to sell their costly homes.
The merchants, too, were victims of duress;
And on the farms the tillers of the soil
Were shorn by taxes as they sheared their sheep,
And ate their bread despondent. Came a day
When money-taxes would no longer meet
The appetite insatiable that gnawed
Within the grotesque body that had grown
Out of a monstrous blend of kingly power
And unrestrained bureaucracy, let loose
Among a suffering people. Ages later,
Upon the tablets that the desert sand
Had covered through four thousand years and more,
The truth was seen and read. The ancient scribe,
Prodding his stylus angrily in the clay,
Had set it boldly down for all to see:
~
The inspector of the boatmen seized the boats.
The cattle, too, at pleasure of the king,
Were seized; and if a countryman brought in
A white sheep to be sheared, a fee was levied —
A fee of five good sheckels for the king.
And if a poor, unhappy man and wife,
Wracked by domestic infelicity,
Were driven to divorce, a double fee
Was then imposed: five sheckels for the king,
And one to pay his vizier. And when
The fishermen brought in their catch, behold
An officer whose daily task it was
To inspect the fisheries, seized, instead, the fish!
Or if a man who dealt in sweet perfumes
Devised a new scent, for his industry
He was assessed a triple penalty:
He must disgorge five sheckels for the king,
Another sheckel to the vizier,
And still another to the palace steward.
~
The king then seized the temple and its lands,
So that the pious and indignant scribe
Lamented that the oxen of the gods
Were used to plow the onions of the king,
And that the god’s best fields were now the patch
Where grew the king’s cucumbers! And the priests,
The temple Sangas or administrators
These had their oxen and their donkeys seized;
Their grain likewise was taken for the king.
~
And even death itself brought no relief;
For when the family of the dead were come
With their beloved burden to the place
Of burial, lo, the henchmen of the king
Were waiting at the cemetery gates
To levy their demands of bread and beer,
Tributes of barley — and at times to take
Even the household furnishings of the dead!
~
The houses of the king (so wrote the scribe)
The houses of his harem, and the fields
About his harem, and the nurseries —
These crowded one another, side by side.
And in a final bitter mood he noted
That in the state, from one end to the other,
There were the tax collectors to be seen!
And save for phrasing that is quaint and simple,
What is the difference in this far cry
Out of the distant past, from that which rises
In every land and age in which the state —
Whether it be a king, a parliament,
Or pure democracy — devours the substance
Of its own people in the name of progress?
~
And then, as always in the lives of men
When fate has brought their tide to lowest ebb
And misery compounded is their lot,
A leader rose in Lagash — a young prince,
Not of the ruling family, but schooled
In all the old traditions that had made
For happiness and progress. He devised
A revolution, and he led its armies
Against the entrenched despoilers, and deposed
Ur-Nanshe’s dynasty; and in its place
By popular acclaim he set himself
To be the head of state — a king whose reign
Should be devoted to the restoration
Of all that had been taken from his people.
~
His name was Urukágina. He lived
Two thousand years and more before the dawn
Of our own Christian Era; and he gave
New meaning to a principle of life
That men had cherished, but had never named —
The principle of freedom. Hitherto
Valid assumptions, never formulated,
Had been implicit in their social patterns:
That, under God, each several man belonged
To his own self; and that he had the right
To claim and use the fruit of his own labor;
That he could come and go as suited him,
Could loaf or labor, farm or sail the seas,
Teach, carve, paint, fish — so long as his pursuit
Or lack of it wrought injury to none,
And left all others also undisturbed
In their employments. They had found, indeed,
That each must make concessions for the sake
Of peace and safety, and that none could live
Wholly alone; and for the benefits
Of urban life — for streets and for canals,
For armies to protect them from the world,
And for police to guard them from each other
(Since they were men, too) — for all this they gave
A portion of their substance, called a tax;
And this they looked upon as right and fit
Because it gave them what they asked of life,
And they were happy in it, and content.
~
But this was lost to them, what time Ur-Nanshe
And his descendents drained the country dry.
And so, deprived of what they had possessed,
A thing intangible, they could but pray
To great Ningirsu that he would restore
That former way of life which until now
They had not thought about, or valued highly,
Accepting casually and as their due
A thing as precious as the air they breathed.
~
And then came Urukágina, aflame
With righteous anger; and the people heard
With unbelieving joy his words of wrath
Against their wrongs; and when he called to arms
They rushed to join him and to spend their lives,
If need be, to restore the former ways
And rid the land of tyranny. The king
Was overthrown. The new king, in his place,
Began the restoration; and the scribe,
Happily scoring wedge-marks in the clay,
And using the repetitive formula
Common to ancient writings, set it down
That one by one the wrongs which he had listed
Were all removed and restitution made:
The boats and cattle were no longer seized;
The heavy, ruinous taxes were repealed;
Industry and initiative and skill —
These were no longer stupidly penalized;
The profaned, sacred temple was restored,
And life in Lagash went its wonted way.
Nor was this all; for Urukágina
Forbade the rich to treat the poor unjustly,
Curbed the rapacity of tax collectors,
Revoked the perquisite of high officials
To pluck at will fruit from the poor man’s tree,
Cleaned out the dens of murderers and thieves,
Banished the usurers — and made a pact,
A special covenant with the god Ningirsu,
That he would not permit the men of power,
No matter what their station in the realm,
To victimize the widow and her orphans.
~
Truly a wise and heartful ruler, this —
And yet he had his share of vanity,
His need for recognition, his desire
To be remembered for his noble deeds.
And like his peers before and after him,
He told the busy scribe to set it down
For all to read — what marvels he had wrought,
What evils he had righted, and withal
How good and great was Urukágina!
~
And in the process something new was added.
A new word concept first was introduced
Into man’s records. For the eager scribe,
Seeking to dramatize the mighty deeds
Of Urukágina, at last set down
As culmination, that he had established
The freedom, of his people. Men who know
The antique wedge-script used in ancient Sumer
Render the phrase in different ways. Some say
It could mean “a returning to the mother” —
A reference to the universal notion
Of intra-womb content and blessedness,
Whence comes the concept of the Golden Age.
But in the context of the narrative
Such imagery might well be rendered “freedom.”
~
Others believe the old Sumerian symbol
Has the Semitic meaning of anduru —
Freedom from taxes: but that still is “freedom.”
Clearly the wedge-shaped symbols meant to say
That Urukágina had freed his people
From tyranny and seizure, and the weight
Of ruinous taxation, and had set
Their feet upon a better way of life,
Known to their fathers and to them denied.
Truly he had established them their freedom.
