If we survey the fall of Mesopotamian empires from the beginning of written sources to the end of the Neo-Babylonian Empire we find one astonishing similarity:the warlike people that finally destroyed these empires came from the East.A number of factors,not at least geography,might explain this,but here I want to focus on the effect the Mesopotamian empires had on the bordering regions themselves and discuss the possibility that the constitution of these organized political actors pushing back against the empire was a result of Mesopotamian imperial politics themselves determined by a poor evaluation of the empire’s ability to exercise direct control of areas where military actions took place.The aim of this paper is to build on earlier work and investigate the fall of the empires of Akkad and Ur III under a systemic perspective,in order to understand which factors might have caused the decline and fall of these empires that were not merely accidental.Many reasons have been suggested for the fall of Mesopotamian empires,like climatic change(Kinnier-Wilson 2005),salinization of the soil(Powell 1985),or the arrival of new peoples.Here,I want to focus on the question of whether this“arrival of new people”may be better described as the establishment of opposing political forces.They are often described as coming out of nowhere,but I would like to suggest that this was the result of an ethnogenesis or secondary state formation at the border of the empire.
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