Wildly amusing to me that we apparently literally know the name of the guy who invented imperialism.
Feel like we should hate him more. Use his name for demons and monsters in fantasy novels. Have a holiday about how shitty he was. That kinda thing. Just on general principle, you know?
[image description: A photograph of a quote from Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East by Amanda H. Podany, reading:
Lugalzagesi cast himself as a new kind of king. He was not a king of single city-state, but “king of the land.” The people didn’t have a name for Mesopotamia yet. It was, to Lugalzagesi, simply “kalam”-“the land”. In the same inscription, he created new language for this vast space over which he claimed to rule, and he did it by defining the extreme edges of the world. The kingdom stretched “from the Lower Sea, through the Tigris and Euphrates, to the Upper Sea” (that is, from south to north, to the seas in both directions that bounded the world) and “from the sunrise to the sunset” (that is, from east to west). This was an exaggeration, but we have to give him credit (or possibly blame) for his new idea. Lugalzagesi dreamed bigger than his predecessors. He must have known that there were many areas over which he did not, in fact, rule. He would have been aware that traders came and went from Dilmun in the Lower Sea, and from the lapis lazuli mountains beyond Afghanistan, and the cedar mountains far to the north in Syria, and that he had no jurisdiction over these places at all. But he created a fantasy that inspired Mesopotamian kings for thousands of years after his death, though they didn’t know to credit him. He invented the power-crazed concept of a vast empire, perhaps even the whole world, ruled by just one man. /ID]
I love the image of some guy just declaring “I am king of everything” and all the other kinds being like “wait shit we can do that?”
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