Frequently Asked Questions: How accurate is Gods Before Kings?

I put a great deal of thought and research into this book.

What we know to be fact is that Uruk was the most successful of all the city prototypes in Sumeria until such time as the rise of the trading city of Ur. Estimates of its population vary and reach as high as 40,000.

As this is prehistory and what really happened can never be known. The Uruk I paint in the pages of Gods Before Kings is based on a city working far more effectively than all the other Sumerian experiments in civilisation. There must have been reasons for this. Geographically there were no advantages so what was the difference?

If there was a golden period of Uruk then it was one of the great golden periods of all history. A period based on a number of things.

The first was the combination of two gods that worked together, uniting the whole population. A city which either accepted, or eagerly embraced, continuous innovation following the way of Anu while at the same time, maintaining social cohesion in the growing population living in the world’s first large scale suburbs by following the way of Inanna.

The second critical factor was a population small enough that the Temple was able to keep track of everyone and provide for them. Food, clothing and housing, everything a citizen needed. Once it had grown too large that became impossible and social cohesion would have been looser and more akin to modern times.

It was the idea of this golden period of our history that led me to write the book.

Even if it can never be 100% accurate we should at least spend some time imagining what that period could have been like.

It would have been a time akin to the Industrial Revolution.

People were walking off the land to live in a city where standards of living were growing fast. Citizens were offered a better way of existing, a permanent food supply, a contract of peace laid down by the Temple priests, and access to the materials of living; clothes, housing, pottery. There was an unambiguous reason and purpose to exist, which was that the gods had created them to serve.

Which would have seemed fine as the burdens placed on them by the gods were not too onerous.

Worship and animal sacrifice was about as demanding as it got. And on the positive side of the ledger were a clear set of social norms that bound the city to a common set of trust as to how their fellow citizens would act.

It would have seemed like a new world to its inhabitants. Nothing like it having ever existed before. If there wasn’t the sense of wonder and excitement that I try and engender in the book then I’m not sure how else a phenomenon like Uruk can be accounted for.

Let us also consider Sumerian Beer, which should not be discounted. There are several studies on the benefits of communal drinking of alcohol. In the book I called these sessions Deme meetings, the word is taken directly from the Athenian system of Demes and were the basis of the Greek symposiums.
The idea that inside a Deme meeting, everyone was equal, all were brothers celebrating together. This was a powerful tool for promoting unity and a sense of purpose. I am proposing the same occurred in Uruk. At least in the early days. The Priests would have seen this as an important way of tying the bonds of society under the auspices of the temple.

Uruk was very much the first city that succeeded in growing its population to a true city state.

My argument is that this was not done easily. Otherwise the other Sumerian proto-cities would have had the same success.

The economy of Uruk was based on expansion. It needed to expand to accommodate the swelling of the population.

For all the philosophers out there who have tried to invent perfect societies working off various alternate economic models to compete with growth based economies, please note that growth based economic models have never been equalled. No matter what the flaws were, it has never been equalled.
Maybe one day it will but for now what started in Uruk is still the best economic model the world has ever found. With obvious flaws.

I want to make this clear. The economic model that started in Uruk is still the model we use today. That is why Uruk is so important in our history.
Uruk was small enough to have the luxury of what we would call socialism, which might seem paradoxical. That’s what makes it a unique time of history. Uruk had the best of everything. A sense of community and common good and the excitement of growth and the benefits coming from expansion.

But the seeds of Uruk’s downfall were in the fruits of its success.

An expanding economy means that eventually Uruk would grow too big for socialist ideas to work. Capitalism works off the idea of giving autonomy to its citizens.

That is the main advantage of it. You can grow a capitalist society with minimum administration. All you need is a uniform set of laws and collect enough tax to enforce them. That will work wonderfully for some but of course others will fall through the cracks.

It allows for infinite expansion with each citizen basically left to their own devices. Grow rich or starve. The system works through individual effort.
And there is a limit to how much expansion of territory a city state can do. We know that fighting broke out amongst Sumerian city states when this occurred and that marked the arrival of the Lugal/Kings. There is a cycle in play still seen today. Innovation drives expansion. Expansion occurs.

Populations swell. Resources are used up or become scarce. Fighting breaks out. Then with the next innovations the cycle starts again. In Uruk and Sumer the amount of farming land grew until borders between city states met. Arguments between those states are well documented.

A main contention I make about Uruk before resources became as an issue is that any society that is truly free and unencumbered by hardship will naturally excel above those that aren’t.

In this regard Uruk would have needed to be completely unsullied and pure in the way its citizens lived. The inventions of Sumeria formed the substrate for its success on which was built a stable and motivated society.

If you allow my arguments so far then the next question must be why is the description of Uruk in Gods Before Kings so different from the Uruk in the Epic of Gilgamesh?

In the story, Nigmah would have been the first Lugal except Uruk simply did not need one.

Of note is that it was necessary for Gilgamesh to kill the great bull of heaven and to spurn Inanna’s advances to elevate himself to the level of the gods. If you don’t mind me saying, that is obviously pure fantasy.

Add to that the highly fanciful Kings List and it is clear that the Kings spent a lot of time trying to convince their subjects that they had been here a long time and make themselves look a lot like gods, elevating themselves to an equivalent status as they dictated their steles to their scribes.

My take on all of this is that when war broke out and things got rough, the new rulers brought a much baser standard of living and set of morals that suited themselves. The epic already says the citizens of Uruk were unhappy about the way Gilgamesh treated their women. The use of hierodules in the temple at this time implies slavery has been introduced. Add that to the larger population adopting a more capitalistic model and you can also see how things like slavery and prostitution came about with expansion.

Because I am writing about a golden age, I was able to leave all those things out of the book. I’d rather write about this period of history.

I contend the Golden Age Uruk fed all its people.

If so then what would be the point of slavery? There was no money. Everyone worked for food. Didn’t matter if you were a slave. So how can you define any difference between a worker in Uruk and a slave? Plus, if you give a slave freedom they are happier and less willing to hold the kind of grudge that will send the occasional kiln firing rolling over or the weavers loom accidentally wrecked.

I just could not see the point of slavery at this stage in history. That was the viewpoint of the Weaver in the book. My contention is that immigrants arrived voluntarily into Uruk because it was a better way of life. That’s the way to get a work force motivated and the book covers this a lot.

Under the clear moral direction of the priests, using the technologies they had developed and were developing, without war, with an enthusiastic population, all benefiting equally from its common wealth, it is entirely feasible that Uruk in this period functioned in the way described in the book and the result was Uruk was far more successful than the other Sumerian experiments.
Thing is, writing had not yet been invented so we can never be sure. It is pre history.

Conclusion

This book colours in the few fragments of what we do know about Uruk during this period of history with a feasible picture of the dream of Uruk.

It can’t be 100% accurate, it is pre-history. Nevertheless I have enjoyed every minute of the amount of research and energy I put in to this book. But in the end, it is a work oh historical fiction. My great hope is that is will further awareness and understanding of the incredible city of Uruk at this amazing time, 5000 years ago. This was the birth of civilisation, nothing less.

I won’t object to people disputing my imagining of this time, that is what pre-history is all about. I’ve said my bit.