[106]This has been demonstrated by Professor Thorkild Jacobsen in lectures at Chicago.
[107]V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, 152 et passim. In Social Worlds of Knowledge (London, 1949), 19, he concurs, however, with the view expressed in our text.
[108]P. P. Howell, in Man, No. 144 (1947).
[109]R. H. Lowie, Are We Civilized?, 108.
[110]After Anna Schneider, op. cit., 54.
[111]M. David, “Bemerkungen zur Leidener Keilschriftsammlung,” Revue de l’Histoire du droit, XIV, 3-6, has pointed out that the “Staatssozialismus” of early Sumerian times was only fully replaced by a free economy under the First Babylonian Dynasty, about 1800 B.C. Under the Third Dynasty of Ur, private property could consist of houses and the gardens belonging to them, but not of arable fields, which belonged to the temple or to the king.
[112]Schneider, op. cit., 93 f.
[113]This seems the most probable interpretation of the fact that even holders of allotments received rations during four months. Schneider, loc. cit., 92, views this as payment for corvée; but since many holders of allotments, such as craftsmen, worked for the temple all the year round, this seems less likely.
[114]Thorkild Jacobsen, “Primitive Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, II (1943), 159-72.
[115]The word has not yet been found in Protoliterate texts, a fact which does not prove, of course, that the institution was unknown in that period, although it does make a prima facie case for that assumption. On the monuments (Figs. [15], [44]) a bearded figure in a long garment is throughout the main actor. He wears his hair wound round his head and gathered in a chignon at the back, a style usual with rulers in the Early Dynastic period. But it should be remembered that the Protoliterate objects on which he appears derive from Erech where, according to the Epic of Gilgamesh, there was a permanent king in very early times. (This was possibly connected with the cult of Inanna.) Note, however, that even Gilgamesh consulted the assembly and the elders before he embarked on a course of action which entailed the risk of war (Journal of Near Eastern Studies, II, 166, n. 44). At Erech the ruler was called, not lugal, but en, “lord.”