The writer as an emperor

the world for nepo-babies

Apr 25, 2025

I have just been reminded that Sargon was the first known ruler of the known world. This happened before empires were a thing. It was at a time when kingdoms were not yet available to be captured and incorporated. Imperialists had to make do with cities.

This was in a post about Sargon's daughter Enheduanna by Historical Snapshots. Enheduanna being regarded as the first known author. A writer with their own name. An activity afforded her by her nepo-baby job as cross-city manager of religious-political unity.

To help unify these territories, Sargon appointed his daughter as High Priestess of the moon god Nanna, the patron deity of Ur. This move reflected Sargon's political wisdom because in Mesopotamia, religious and political power essentially existed as one. Cities were an extension of their patron deities, with temples at the center of civic life. Sargon sought to assert control by placing Enheduanna into a revered Sumerian religious roles.

*Sumerian clay tablet inscribed with the text of the poem Inanna and Ebih -- Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago wikimedia*

Accepting these firsts, ruler of the world and known writer, with the proviso that mostly things always go back earlier than you have direct evidence for, is not hard. In this case they we go back 4500 years ago. This sounds like a long time, but it’s not even half way back to the earliest developments of agriculture and the need for storage and accounting of a successful harvest. What took you so long?

So, the post reminded me that at this time and previously, and for a good while after:

“Cities were an extension of their patron deities, with temples at the center of civic life.”

Their world-building efforts were religio-politico worlding. So if you wanted to be a politico-religio or military ruler of more than one city instance, you had to incorporate that undifferentiated politico-religio world of each city with it own local identity, i.e. different gods and pantheons in each city under control.

This issue never really get resolved. We call it history. There is a tension between being the one ruler of the world and each local instance that make up the known world, which has it's own worlding, both of the local and of the world as the known world. The local is thus constantly confused with the known world, because the locals world away like anyone and everyone in the world: local, known or unknown. So being the one ruler of the known world causes certain tensions if not incompatibility between the local instances and the overall instance of the worlding urge in a imperialist project.

What are you gonna do? Call in a writer, or at east put in someone you can trust to implement the new logos.

This is why some millennia later we get a solution invented by the late Roman Empire which syncretically selects one sect for its one-sized conscience fits all, and bans local poltico-religio expressions (as pagan or heresy), with dollops of Zoroastrian good/evil cosmology and an Old Testament backstory. The local reappears as saints and their stories, but this is covered by the continual revelations as indicating the final eschatology.

The devotional aspects of Christianity of a personal soul with its own non-city-but-personal-relationship god are mediated by the Emperor’s church, who interposed a military sense of obedience in the followers, and thus incorporated the unity (or perhaps a re-unity) of the politico-religio experience which makes up the world we live, or practice, or inherit. [See Fideism & Obedience : the extra bit about St Augustine of Hippo.]

This late type of imperial effort announces a phase change, as it is no longer a known world collection of cities-deities-inhabitants, the local political reality on the ground. The cities become merely local expressions of the imperial world. (This is what Spivaks use of worlding indicates BTW). And the world is only the empire. This is the lie of unity.

In an earlier example, when Alexander conquers the known world, the empire becomes the known world. When the project is bedded down, then the world known and unknown is of the empire. The phase change is that the local then becomes an expression of the world=empire, and thus an empire is no longer a kingdom of kingdoms, or cities.

I am probably putting the late type here a bit more consciously directed than it was, perhaps they just saw it as ‘obvious’ rather than as Machiavellian scheming and deceit, but this is the direction works like St Augustine of Hippo’s ‘The City of God’ push it. Zoroastrianism did it a lot earlier (one step forward, two steps back) but that came out of a nomadic experience of factionalism and may express intra-elite conflict and bargaining and dominance more than arises out of dealing with local captured civilisations and their staid local politico-religio expressions or social-learning complexes (also known as the world).

This post is also in part thinking about J.N. Nielsen’s The Lower Bound of Civilization which considers what is the lowest number of dominant cities that could form a civilization, I.E. what is the lowest number of people in what population densities, for a complexification to occur that then creates a potential phase change or emergent re-iteration of something… —we can label progress or development.

So to get back to Sargon with this framework.

The world is whatever you notice as important to, and in, your limited local geographic experience. It pre-dates civilisation and neighbors, nomadism and war. The world is more than a local expression because it is always aware of its neighbours, and to a less extent the neighbors of your neighbours, until the furthest market becomes known as the source for products from further away (c.f. “Arabic” numerals).

If you are a ruler of the world then you rule less and more than your local expectations. This tension is at the heart of power and its insecurities.

Anxiety drives all mistakes of deception.

The world is more than your local experience, including its trading communications, but less than that about which you known nothing. We may, as descendants of colonial or sea-lane trader enterprises, see the world as bigger than what we know, but this was not the case in afore times. And indeed as this view is always available, empires often confuse their dominant poltico-religio instantiation as the world itself. The French have often placed their own experience, not just as the centre of the world, but as the world itself, wherein France=World (which often just meant Europe). The Americans have their World Series Baseball. The Russians have their conflation of peace & world (миг) as in русский мир (romanized: rússkiy mir). It is a common enough mistake that it must betray a certain cognitive error at either the indivudual or social learning (world) level. Possibly in interference between the two cognition pathways when trying to sort things out. Or just some sort of emotional laziness.

Such error. Much pain.

Another example is like when Hegel saw Napoleon but passing by and saw the ‘world-spirit on horseback’, when really he just saw Europe (as the world) and a few colonies thrown in to spice things up, because progress? A dancing synthesis on a nomad's steed?

Here the complexification kneads itself even as it simplifies in order to complexify…

(Napoleonic Code anyone? That which gastrulates the institutions and the laws, wherein the many take one side)

—and so take on dominant local or parochial expressions (France=World) metonymically. And this globalisation is at odds with actual local expression across the world, even if those local expressions want to be a part of the empire/world, and not do their own thing as empire or nationalism.

Loyalty is never believed in an empire. Trust seeks its own levels. This destroys the empire.

Back to Enheduanna as the first known writer.

The imperial project, consciously or unconsciously, is a worlding effort, so no wonder writers turn up to give evidence right there at the beginning, or at least where we have direct evidence of anything at all.

At least literature is a humanities subject.

I guess.

References

Beckwith, Christopher I. 2022. The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Nielsen, J. N. 2025, April 18. ‘The Lower Bound of Civilization’, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon. Retrieved 19 April 2025 from

Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon

The Lower Bound of Civilization

In newsletter 333 I discussed the historical process of aggregation as complementary to the process of dissolution. It has since occurred to me that the process of aggregation allows for a significant generalization if we hold that cities are a given threshold of aggregation. I suppose I implied that in this newsletter, since I said that aggregation goe…

2 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · J. N. Nielsen

Wisdom, Classical, and Historical Snapshots. 2025, April 24. ‘Enheduanna’, Classical Wisdom. Retrieved 25 April 2025 from