Mesopotamian Empires

In: Bang P.F., Scheidel W. (Eds). The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. — Oxford University Press, 2013. — pp. 120-160.This chapter examines the history of state formation in ancient Mesopotamia, focusing on the Greater Mesopotamia region. It explains the role of territorially defined urban communities and kinship-based polities or tribes in state formation, and provides examples of large states that arose slowly through a cumulative process of smaller polities coalescing into larger ones. The chapter also considers the dynamic shifts between city-state culture and imperial unification during the proto-historical period, and discusses the periods of political unification and fragmentation in Greater Mesopotamia prior to the Persian conquest.