Ancient Mesopotamia is famous for its kings. Sargon of Agade is said to have built the first empire. Ḫammurabi of Babylon showed off his authority in a collection of standard law. The shadow of later Assyrian and Babylonian monarchs darkens the prospects of Israel and Judah in the biblical tradition. Karl Marx's “oriental despotism” began in the ancient world.

Democracy, in contrast, belongs to Greece, a world away, facing west toward Europe with its back to the east. Here we find the roots of the political system that Francis Fukuyama placed at “the end of history,” the system that is the life-breath of all modern academic pursuits (Fukuyama 1992). When we scholars study ancient Greece, we study ourselves. When we study ancient Mesopotamia, we explore the “other,” all ethnic identity aside.

Reality, as always, resists the tug of our impulse to categorize. In the case of ancient Mesopotamia and the larger Near East, the reputation for authoritarian monarchy has been transmitted to us through Athens and Israel, the two main conduits that carried eastern Mediterranean ideas into western Europe. Both of these faced eastern empires in the crucial periods of their classical writings, Achaemenid “Persia” against Athens, after Assyria and Babylon had dismantled Israel.

The Near East did indeed produce a variety of powerful centralized kingdoms, but it is not true that individualizing, authoritarian rule was specially characteristic of Near Eastern political life.