California: A History by Kevin Starr

Preface: A Nation-State

Where did it come from – this nation state, this world commonwealth, this California? How did an American state, one in fifty, rise to such global stature, with its $1.5 trillion economy making it, as of 2005, the fifth-ranked economy on the planet?  Never before in human history, it could be argued, had such a diverse population assembled itself so rapidly under one political system. By 2004, the Los Angeles Unified School District alone was reporting some ninety-two languages in use in its student population. The city itself, meanwhile, had become the second largest Mexican city on the planet and a ranking Korean, Iranian, Armenian, and Ethiopian metropolis. With a population of thirty-six million in 2005, California contained 12.5 percent of the population of the United States as of Census 2000. Metropolitan Los Angeles was the second largest urban region in the nation, the San Francisco Bay Area the fourth. If the five-county Los Angeles metropolitan region alone were a separate state, its 20.6 million people would make it the fourth largest state in the country.

Where had these people come from? And why were they here? What forces of war and peace, of economics, what shifts of demography and social aspiration had caused the population of California to shoot up from seven million in 1940, to seventeen million in 1962 (when California surpassed New York as the most populous state in the nation), to nineteen million by the mid-1960s when immigration laws were reformed, allowing for new migration from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East? Sponsored by Spain and Mexico in its colonial and early frontier eras, California – with 32.4 percent of its population Latino as of 2000 – was in the process of becoming the most important center of Mexican culture and society outside Mexico itself. Facing the Asia-Pacific Basin, California was likewise becoming an epicenter of Asian American civilization, with nearly 11 percent of its population of Asian origin and San Francisco on the verge of becoming the first prominent American city with an Asian American majority.

Here was an American state that by the twenty-first century had become a world force in terms of people, trade and commerce, tourism and technology, and, more subtly, a state possessed of a certain glamor, a magic even, rich with the possibilities of a better life. Here was a crossroads commonwealth. By the millennium, California was exporting some $1.7 billion in goods worldwide – mostly to Mexico, Japan, Canada, Taiwan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and mainland China, its leading trading partners (in that order), but also to twenty-six other ranking trading partners as well. The Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach on San Pedro Bay was the busiest port in the nation and one of the ranking ports of the w. orld. Five million overseas visitors were pouring into California each year by the late 1990s, and the travel and tourism economy of the state was generating more than $75 billion annually from domestic and international travelers and employing more than a million Californians before the terrorist attack of 9/11. What did the nonbusiness traveler come to see? Disneyland in Anaheim, first of all, and Universal Studios in Hollywood, followed by an array of amusement parks and outdoor attractions including the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Yosemite National Park. These dual attractions – the entertainment industry and natural beauty – virtually define the state.  In the early twentieth century, California had won the contest over the best site for the emergent motion picture industry. And this in turn established a matrix for the development of other new entertainment media – radio, records, television, video, CDs, DVDs – that were to follow. The main reason California was attracting so many visitors, foreign and domestic, was that California had long since been presenting itself to them via the various entertainment media as a land of enchantment and dreams. Much of the world tended to perceive the United States itself as, somehow, California, thanks to television programs such as Baywatch, which broadcast to millions a Day-Glo version of life on the sunny beaches of the Golden State.

At times, California seemed imprisoned in a myth of itself as an enchanted and transformed place: a myth that, in one way or another, had its origins in the Spanish colonial era. The very acceleration of California into an American commonwealth had been the result of a gold rush, with all that such beginnings implied for the perception of California as a place where human beings might break through the constraints of day-to-day life and come into possession of something immeasurable better. Such a utopian expectation also brought with it, when things did not go well – when California was wracked by earthquake, fire, and flood; when its prisons filled to overflowing; when it politics grew dysfunctional; or merely when Californians experienced the inevitable human tragedies, shock and setbacks they had come to California to escape – the common complaint that California had been hyped beyond recognition: that for all its media-driven pretenses to glitz and glamour, California was, all things considered, just another American place, and sometimes even worse than that. 

Still, it had to be admitted – even in bad times – that California noir, as disappointing as it might be, could not negate the cumulative achievement of California as a fused instance of American and global cultures. Here, among other things, nature had been supplemented and heroically rearranged so as to make possible a population of thirty-six million – an estimated fifty-five million by 2040 – which natural conditions alone could never have supported. Not since ancient Rome or the creation of Holland had any society comparably subdued, appropriated, and rearranged its water resources. Or used this water-related infrastructure, including hydroelectricity, to establish – again, so swiftly – the foundations for a mass society at once agricultural and industrialized. Or created such extensive cities and suburbs in such short order.  Or linked these built environments in an equally rapid time with highways, freeways, and bridges of comparable magnitude.

California emerged as a society with a special capacity for technology. In the nineteenth century, the locally invented Pelton turbine increased water-driven power sixfold. Pioneered in California by the heavier-than-air glider flights of John Montgomery in 1883, aviation was localized in California a few short years after Kitty Hawk, and the great names of California aviation – Lockheed, Curtis, Douglas, Northrop – became synonymous with the very planes they designed and built. In the 1930s and early 1940s, California played more than its part in the release of atomic energy. In what later would be designated the Silicon Valley, the semiconductor was invented, and from this came the digital revolution, including the Internet, also perfected in California. The millennium found California on the cutting edge of yet another revolution; bio technology.

The great universities and research institutes of California were the cause and the result of this aptitude for science and technology. It began in the American frontier era with the technology of mining, which led to the establishment of an academy of science and a state geological survey. And then, when barely out of its frontier phase, California turned to the purest science of them all – astronomy – with the construction of the first of three world-leading astronomical observatories. From this arose a scientific community that demanded – and achieved – some of the best universities and research institutes in the nation.

The very same society that was ordering and rearranging its environment through technology was also learning to revere nature as its primary symbol of social identity. From the beginning, American California was at once what human beings had made of it and what they had found there in the first place: a region of magnitude and beauty, encompassing all the topography, climate, and life zones of the planet (with the exception of the tropical), from the seashore to the desert, from the Great Central Valley at its center to the snow capped Sierra peaks guarding its eastern flank. From the beginning, American California was caught in a paradox of reverent awe and exploitative use. As early as 1860, the state had urged the setting aside of the Yosemite Valley not just because it was so grand and so beautiful, but because its very grandeur and beauty established the expectation of what California should become in its social and moral existence. A streak of nature worship – sometimes mawkish and sentimental, sometimes neopagan in its intensity, and, toward the millennium, frequently Zen-like in its clarity and repose – runs through the imaginative, intellectual, and moral history of California as a fixed reference point of social identity. A society that had consumed nature so wantonly, so ferociously, was, paradoxically, nature’s most ardent advocate.

California is an American story that from the beginning has been a global story as well. Despite its quasi-autonomous existence – the power of its economy on the world stage, the overseas offices maintained by the state government to promote international trade, the continuous diplomacy demanded by its world wide investments – California remains an American place, perhaps the most American of American places, prophesying the growing diversity of the United States. In the mid-nineteenth century, the American people, operating through their federal government, brought American California into being. By the millennium, the national importance of California had become far more than the fifty-three Californians who sat in the House of Representatives or the two women who sat in the United States Senate. California had long since become one of the prisms through which the American people, for better and for worse, could glimpse their future. It had also become not the exclusive, but a compelling way for this future to be brought into existence. California, noted Wallace Stegner, is like the rest of the United States – only more so. How California came to be such a representative American place, what has been gained and what has been lost, is the theme of this brief chronicle.

Chapter One - Queen Calafia’s Island
Place and First People

First described in a bestseller, California entered history as a myth. In 1510 the Spanish writer Garci Ordonez de Montalvo issued a sequel to his 1508 prose romance Amadis de Gaula, which Montalvo had in turn based upon a late thirteenth- to early fourteenth-century Portuguese narrative derived from French sources. Published in Seville, Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandian (The Deeds of Esplandian) chronicled the exploits of Esplandian, son of the hero Amadis of Gaul, at the siege of Constantinople. Among Esplandian’s allies at the siege were the Californians, a race of black Amazons under the command of Queen Calafia.  California itself, according to Montalvo, was “an island on the right hand of the Indies... very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise,” abounding in gold and precious stones. The Californians rode griffins into battle and fought with golden weapons. Queen Calafia herself was “very large in person, the most beautiful of all of them, of blooming years, and in her thoughts desirous of achieving great things, strong of limb and of great courage.”

Equipping a fleet, Calafia had sailed to Constantinople to join the other great captains of the world in the siege against the Turks. By the end of the story, Queen Calafia and the Californians have become Christians (which involved, one surmises, giving up her promiscuous ways and the feeding of their male offspring to their griffins), and Calafia herself marries one of Esplandian’s trusted lieutenants, with whom she goes on to further adventures.

In 1863 the Boston antiquarian Edward Everett Hale, author of the well-known short story “The Man Without a Country,” sent a paper to the American Antiquarian Society in which he provided translations of key passages of Las Sergas de Esplandian and cited the prose romance as the source of the name “California.” Hale’s report was in turn reported on by The Atlantic Monthly in March 1864. Montalvo’s two tales, Hale noted, were instant bestsellers and remained so for the rest of the sixteenth century. Not until the publication of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saovedra in two parts in 1605 and 1615 were Montalvo’s romances superseded in popularity. Don Quixote, furthermore, was not the only one to take these stories as literal fact. The Spanish in general had a tendency to conflate fact with fiction when it came to these prose romances.

In 1533 a party of Spanish explorers, sailing west from Mexico across an unnamed sea at the command of Hernan Cortes, conqueror of Mexico, landed on what they believed to be an island in the recently discovered Pacific. After 1539 they began to call the place after the mythic island of California, half believing and more than fully hoping they would find there as well the gold and precious stones described in Montalvo’s romance and perhaps even an Amazon or two. Not until 1539-40 did the Spanish discover their geographical mistake. California was a peninsula, not an island, and north of this peninsula – eventually called Antigua or Old California – was a vast northern region that the Spaniards, for one reason or another, would be unable to settle for another 230 years.

The American state of California faces the Pacific Ocean between latitude 42 degrees north (at the border of the American state of Oregon) and latitude 32 degrees north (at the border of the Mexican state of Baja California Norte). On a clear day, photographed from a satellite, California appears a serene palette of blue, green, brown, white, and red. This apparent serenity, however, masks a titanic drama occurring beneath the surface, in the clash of the two tectonic plates upon which California rests. California itself resulted from a collision of the North American and Pacific plates. Across a hundred million years, the grinding and regrinding of these plates against each other, their sudden detachments, their thrust above or below each other – together with the lava flows of volcanoes, the bull-dozing action of glaciers, and, later, the flow of water and the depositing of alluvial soil – created a region almost abstract in its distinct arrangements of mountain, valley, canyon, coastline, plain, and desert. As the California-born philosopher and historian Josiah Royce observed, there is nothing subtle about the landforms and landscapes of California. Everything is scaled in bold and heroic arrangements that are easily understood.

Fronting more than half the shoreline of the western continental United States, California – all 158,693 square miles of it – offers clear-cut and confrontational topographies. First of all, there is the 1,264-mile Pacific shoreline itself. Thirty million years ago, tectonic action formed this shoreline by detaching a great land mass from the southern edge of the Baja California peninsula, moving it northward, and attaching it back onto the continent. At four strategic intervals – the bay of San Diego in the south, Monterey and San Francisco bays in the midregion and Humboldt Bay in the north – this appended land mass opened itself to the sea and created four harbors. Formed as recently as thirty thousand years ago when mountains on the shoreline collapsed and the sea rushed in, San Francisco Bay is among the two or three finest natural harbors on the planet.

Rising from this coastline, from north to south, various mountain ranges run boldly into the Pacific. At latitude 35 degrees 30 minutes north, in the county of San Luis Obispo, these coastal mountains bifurcate into two ranges: the Transverse Ranges, veering in a southeasterly direction into southern Kern County in the interior, and the Peninsula Ranges, continuing southward down the coast.  In the far north, the Klamath Mountains and the southern tip of the Cascades move in an easterly direction toward the Modoc Plateau on the northeastern corner. Turning south from the Modoc Plateau is another, even more formidable mountain range, the Sierra Nevada – John Muir’s “Range of Light,” four hundred miles long, eighty miles wide – sealing off the eastern edge of California from the Great Basin until these mighty mountains yield to the Mojave Desert in the southeastern corner. Forty-one California mountains rise to more than ten thousand feet. The highest – Mount Whitney – is, at 14,496 feet, the second highest mountain in the continental United States. Mount Shasta in the north – rising from its plain to a height of 14,162 feet, its crowning glaciers still grinding against each other – was once an active volcano. Nearby Mount Lassen, also a volcano, was active as recently as 1921.

Thus in eons past did mountains set the stage for the essential drama of the California landscape: an interplay of heights, flatland, and coast. Coastal plains adjoin the bays of San Francisco and Monterey, and a great basin, the Los Angeles Plain, flanks the coast south of the transverse Ranges. Four hundred and thirty miles in length, the Central Valley runs through the center of the state in two sequences, the San Joaquin Valley to the south, the Sacramento Valley to the north. Open and sweeping as well are the moonlike Modoc Plateau in the northeastern corner of the state, the high desert Great Basin on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert in the southeast, and the Salton Trough thrust itself up from Baja.

Here it is, then: a landscape of stark contrast, vibrant and volatile with the geological forces that shaped the western edge of the continent. Numerous fault lines – the San Andreas, the Hayward, the Garlock, the San Jacinto, the Nacimiento – crisscross the western edge from San Francisco Bay to the Mexican border, keeping the region alive with tectonic action. Within human memory – in 1857 at the Tejon Pass in Southern California, in 1872 in the Owens Valley, in San Francisco in 1906, in Long Beach in 1933, in the San Fernando Valley in 1971, again in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989, and again in the San Fernando Valley in 1994 – great earthquakes shook the land, destroying lives and property. At magnitude 8.3 on the Richter scale, the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, like the Lisbon earthquake of 1775, precipitated the destruction of an entire city.

Just sixty miles from Mount Whitney, the highest point in the state, is Death Valley, the lowest point on the continent at 282 feet below sea level. Here temperatures can reach as high as 134 degrees Fahrenheit, as they did on July 10, 1913. In midsummer the central Valley can be as hot as the Equator.  Fortunately for California as a place for human settlement, however, two factors – the California Current coming down from the northwestern Pacific, and the Pacific High, a high-pressure zone a thousand miles off the coast – help moderate the heat of the interior. From the point of view of human preferences, coastal California – where settlement began and maintains its greatest density – sustains a mosaic of salubrious climates. Few climates in North America, if any, can equal that of coastal California from the point of view of human use. Like the Mediterranean, the southern littoral is warm and dry. This Mediterranean climate continues up the coast and veers inland until it meets the forested regions of the north. From Monterey Bay to the Marin headlands north of San Francisco, however, the Mediterranean climate is moistened and softened by morning sea fogs and the other mitigating influences of maritime weather. In general coastal California rarely gets below 40 degrees in January or above 72 degrees in July, in dramatic contrast to the inland heat.

There are two seasons in California, wet and dry. Rain (and, in the mountains, snow) falls typically from October to March, mostly between December and February. The rest of the year is generally sunny. Two thirds of the total precipitation falls in the northern third of the state, where some locations average as much as eighty inches of rain (or its equivalent in snow) in a year.  This rainfall and the melting snowpacks of the Sierra Nevada and other ranges water the state through a series of streams that feed into the Sacramento River running north to south and the San Joaquin River running south to north, the two converging in Suisun Bay in the Delta country on the northeastern edge of San Francisco Bay. The interior Central Valley was once an extensive inland sea, hence its rich fossil deposits. Other river systems drain the Coast, Transverse, and Peninsula ranges north and south. In comparison to the arid Far West, then, California has more than its share of water, although it is not always where it is most needed.

The barriers of mountain and desert, together with its patterns of water and climate, render California a distinct bioregion. Even before it was depicted as an island in early Spanish maps, California was a kind of island on the land, sealed of by the Pacific, the Sierra Nevada, the Klamath and Cascade ranges in the north, and the Mojave Desert in the southeast. Off Monterey looms an undersea chasm as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon, and the effects of such depths – aside from the sapphire blue of the of the Bay – can be seen in the forest of kelp hugging the shore and the biotic exuberance of innumerable tide pools. Off shore, gray whales make their annual migrations north and south to feeding and breeding grounds. Salmon, sardines, halibut, tuna, bonito, crab, and abalone abound. Dolphins, sea elephants, sea lion, seals and sea otters find abundant feeding in the fish-rich coastal seas. Sharks, barracudas, and samurai swordfish prowl, hunt, and feed through these waters.

Then there is the seacoast – a world unto itself, more than twelve hundred miles in extent. In certain regions – the North Coast, for example, or Big Sur south of Monterey – the land plunges precipitously into the sea. At other points, such as the Delta region on the eastern edge of San Francisco Bay or the south central coastal regions, a rich complexity of estuaries, tidelands, and marshes intercedes between land and sea. This littoral is in many ways its own life zone, with grunion running ashore, sandpipers skirting the dunes in carpets of low-flying silver, pelicans and herons rooting for frogs and small fish in the wetland, and everywhere, overhead, the white light and bright cries of seagulls, egrets, and other seabirds.

Just inland, extending from San Francisco Bay to the Oregon border, there once commenced a primeval forest of redwoods, which also stretched across the upper portions of Monterey Bay on the Santa Cruz peninsula. These trees (Sequoia sempervirens) and their first cousins (Sequoiandendren giganteum), flourishing in some thirty-five groves in the Sierra foothills, were the most ancient living entities on the plane, some of them four thousand years old. Equally distinct to California were great oak trees, millions of them. A vast woodland, a river of oak nearly four hundred miles in length, circled the interior of the region, with a stately procession of great trees moving up along the eastern flank of the Coast Range, then sweeping eastward across the top of the Central Valley before flowing southward through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Found here as well, in the coastal mountainous regions, was the madrone: a thick hard red tree, clinging close to the earth, that also bespoke California as a distinctive region, as did the Monterey pine and the Monterey cypress: trees evocative of the classical past, standing in Virgilian dignity along the shorelines of the Central Coast.

Above this coastal region and its adjacent interior – above, that is, the mountains of Big Sur, the oak-dotted rolling hills of the south Central Coast, the sagebrush and chaparral of the southern region – glided the mighty condor, ancient survivor of the Pleistocene, borne aloft on its nine-foot wingspan by updrafts from the Pacific. Eagles, ospreys, hawks, and the lowly buzzard, alert for carrion below, shared these skies as well. Looking down from great heights, these soaring birds caught sight of the multitudinous herds of tule elk which, by the hundreds to thousands, roamed the Coast Ranges and the marshes of the Central Valley: the western wetlands that were all that was left of the ancient sea that once filled the interior.

Because California was mountain country, it was bear country as well: the black bear, the brown bear, and the great grizzly that could rise to full height, master of all it surveyed. Shambling through the state, primeval demigods in an unwritten epic, grizzles stood at the apex of the food chain, the omnivorous predator of elk and deer on the plain, salmon and trout in the northern rivers, the fat-tailed beaver plying their ancient craft in the rivers of the interior. Even mountain lions gave way when grizzlies drew near. Native Americans considered the grizzly another kind of human being, a creature from the mythic past, a survivor from the dawn of creation.

Because California was an island on the land, its bird life was distinct, especially in the mountain forests that dominated the region. Flourishing in the vast pine woods, the mountain birds of California were lighter, paler, grayer than their counterparts in the interior of the continent, although the blue-fronted California jay seemed robust enough and, like the mighty condor, a worthy symbol of the state to come. Abundant as well were the quail flourishing in the underbrush, the flights of ducks over the wetlands, and, in the interior, over the vast Central Valley, the temporary birds of the state – flocks of Canada geese especially – flying in migration, north and south, along the Pacific Flyway. To put the matter in a nutshell (or rather, in an acorn shell, since the oak acorn was a primary nutrient for bear and Native American alike), California sustained throughout its many life zones the same plants and animals as were flourishing in the rest of the continent, albeit they had been transformed over time by the island-on-the-land nature of their habitat.   

Such a teeming plenitude of plant, animal, and bird life was quite conducive to human habitation, as the Native Americans of the region had been discovering to their satisfaction for the more than twenty-five generations since their ancestors had first settled down at various points and various ways in this mountain- and desert-guarded enclave, a semicontinent unto itself. At the initial moment of European contact in 1492, something approaching one third of all Native Americans living within the present-day boundaries of the continental United States – which is to say, more than three hundred thousand people – are estimated to have been living within the present-day boundaries of California.  This claim has been disputed by those who argue for a much larger Native American population for the continental United States, but no matter: the figures, however they compare to the rest of the continent, are still impressive. For centuries, hundreds of thousands of Native Americans had been making their homes, living their lives, in the place now called California. In time, anthropologists would describe this Native American culture according to ethnographic categories based on linguistic distinctions. The Native Americans of California, they tell us, belonged to twenty-two linguistic families. Within these categories were some 135 separate languages.

No two authoritative ethnographic maps of Native American California are ever exactly alike, but the general outline of settlement – as in the case of the landforms, flora, and fauna that helped determine patterns of Native American life – are generally agreed upon. In the mountainous, stream-rich northwest were the fishing peoples: the Yuki, the Tolowa, Karok, and Yurok, the Hoopa, Wiyot, Mattole, and Wailaki, each skilled at netting and spearing trout and salmon, each builders of impressive settlements and totems. To the west were the Wintun, the Shasta, and the Yana, the last native peoples to survive in aboriginal circumstances, their final survivor, Ishi, emerging from the forest in August 1911.  Farther south, encountered from the coast into the interior, were Pomo, the Maidu, the Lile’ek and the Wappo. The Miwok people throve in three enclaves: the Lake Miwok around Clear Lake north of the Bay Area; the Coast Miwok in what would eventually be known as Marin County; and the Miwok of the northern San Joaquin Valley. Southeast along the coast from San Francisco Bay flourished the Costanoan. Like the Coast Miwok, the Costanoan were a shellfish-gathering people, and over the centuries they left behind great mounds of shells from innumerable feasts. To the south of the Costanoan were the Esselen people of Big Sur, adept at mysticism and the healing arts, and south of them were the Salinan, followed by the Chumash, who lived in long lodges in complex social arrangements and took to the channel off the Santa Barbara coast in seagoing canoes resembling those of Polynesia. The Gabrielino were centered in what would later be known as Orange County. To the east, along the mountains and plains of San Bernardino, lived the Serrano, an inland people with connections to the coast. The Yokut inhabited the center of the Great Central Valley. The northern Paiute, Washo, Mono, and Panamint peoples lived along the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada, seasonally dividing their time between the mountains and the plain. The Tubatulabal held to the mountains of the southern Sierra, spilling into the southwestern desert. Here could also be found the Ute-Chemehuevi, a desert society related to the other peoples of the southwest.  The Luiseno-Cahuilla and the Yuman occupied the southern tier of the southeastern desert.

With so many languages, so many tribes and tribelets, so many autonomous communities, Native American California offered a paradigm of linguistic and cultural diversity anticipating the population patterns of a later era when the peoples of the world arrived in the region. Certain generalizations, however, can be made that are valid for all the Native American peoples of California. The early inhabitants of California found in their various regions more than enough flora and fauna to sustain their lives; they were, therefore, not warlike in their relationships with each other, although quasi-ritualistic conflicts over disputed territories were not unknown. Large-scale political organizations were equally unnecessary. With no need to make war, they did not develop elaborate hierarchies. With nature relatively abundant, simple and effective technologies for hunting and gathering sufficed – although in their woven storage baskets, the Native Californian women achieved an art form that was also eminently practical.  Theirs was a world of river, creek, or desert oasis, and of settlement that could easily be moved. Their therapy – their sociology even, and certainly their communal life – was centered on sweat lodges, where they warmed themselves with steam from water poured on fire-heated stones before plunging into a nearby river or lake, emerging renewed. In matters of property, they tended to be communal. In matters sexual, they tended toward balance and restraint, with full regard for the rearing of children. Their ego, as far as we can tell, was not the self-conscious, self-rewarding ego of post-Renaissance Europe, but rather an awareness of self through the rhythms of daily life, the pageant of nature, the companionable presence of spirits, and the creation myths that gave them a cosmology and a history and fixed for them a place in the world. With the exception of the acorn, a universal food, the sustenance of each region in this mosaic – distinct in its topography, its climate, its varieties of fish and game – determined the gross and subtle differences of life: the fishing people of the northeast, the shell gatherers of the Central Coast, the hunter-gatherers of the interior, the agriculturists of the southeast all had their cultures determined over the centuries by what was there in the first place, by California itself.

While external organization tended toward the simplistic, the internal cultures of the various groups offered a highly developed heritage of creation myths, totems, and taboos, together with rituals and protocols for stylized warfare and the more pervasive peace, for coming of age, sexuality, family life, birth, and death. For these people, the world was alive with spirit, and the web of life – the linkages, dependencies, and interactions among humans, animals and plants – was a continuum. The world itself was anchored in a story that had first been told when Coyote created the world and the human beings in it, and it was a continuing story in which they also were participating, from birth to death, in a flow of time that was circular, pervasive, and nonlinear. In the early twentieth century, pioneering anthropologists such as Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, Thomas Waterman, and Saxton Pope would marvel at the intricate linguistic, material, mythological and moral culture achieved by these First Californians, especially as so vividly incarnated in Ishi, the last of them to come of age in aboriginal circumstances. The late twentieth century would witness the reemergence of these First Californians as a financial and political force in a postmodernist state.  For a long time to come, however, theirs would not be an easy life as first Europe and then the United States invaded their land, wiped out their food supply, uprooted their culture, and decimated their numbers. After twenty-five generations, the First Californians would soon be encountering social forces, diseases, and genocidal violence that would bring them to the brink of extinction.

Kramer, The Sumerians, Chapter 1

Chapter One

Archeology and Decipherment

Sumer, the land which came to be known in classical times as Babylonia, consists of the lower half of Mesopotamia, roughly identical with modern Iraq from north of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf.  It has an area of approximately 10,000 square miles, somewhat larger than the state of Massachusetts.  Its climate is extremely hot and dry, and its soil, left to itself, is arid, wind-swept, and unproductive.  The land is flat and river-made, and therefore has no minerals whatever and almost no stone.  Except for the huge reeds in the marshes, it had no trees for timber.  Here, then, was a region with “the hand of God against it,” an unpromising land seemingly doomed to poverty and desolation.  But the people that inhabited it, the Sumerians, as they came to be known by the third millennium B.C., were endowed with an unusually creative intellect and a venturesome, resolute spirit.  In spite of the land’s natural drawbacks, they turned Sumer into a veritable Garden of Eden and developed what was probably the first high civilization in the history of man.

The people of Sumer had an unusual flair for technological invention.  Even the earliest settlers had come upon the idea of irrigation, which made it possible for them to collect and channel the rich silt-laden overflow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and use it to water and fructify their fields and gardens.  To make up for the dearth of minerals and stones, they learned to bake that river clay and mud, the supply of which was practically inexhaustible, into sickles, pots, plates, and jars.  In lieu of the scarce building timber, they cut and dried the huge and plentiful marsh reeds, tied them into bundles or plaited them into mats, and with the help of mud-plastering fashioned them into huts and byres. Later the Sumerians invented the brick mold for shaping; and baking the ubiquitous river clay and so had no more building-material problem.  They devised such useful tools, skills, and techniques as the potter’s wheel, the wagon wheel, the plow, the sailboat, the arch, the vault, the dome, casting in copper and bronze, riveting, brazing and soldering, sculpture in stone, engraving, and inlay.  They originated a system of writing on clay, which was borrowed and used all over the Near East for some two thousand years.  Almost all that we know of the early history of western Asia comes from the thousands of clay documents inscribed in the cuneiform script developed by the Sumerians and excavated in the cuneiform script developed by the Sumerians and excavated by archeologist in the past hundred and twenty-five years.

The Sumerians were remarkable not only for their material progress and technological resourcefulness, but also for their ideas, ideals, and values.  Clear-sighted, levelheaded, they took a pragmatic view of life and, within the limits of their intellectual resources, rarely confused fact with fancy, wish with fulfillment, or mystery with mystification.  In the course of the centuries, the Sumerian sages evolved a faith and creed which in a sense “gave unto the gods what was the gods’” and recognized and accepted as inevitable mortal limitation, especially helplessness in the face of death and divine wrath.  On the material side they prized highly wealth and possessions, rich harvest, well-stocked granaries, folds and stalls filled with cattle, successful hunting in the plain, and good fishing in the sea.  Spiritually and psychologically, they laid great stress on ambition and success, pre-eminence and prestige, honor and recognition.  The Sumerian was deeply conscious of his personal rights and resented any encroachment of them, whether by his king, his superior, or his equal.  No wonder that the Sumerians were the first to compile laws and law codes, to put everything down in “black and white” in order to avoid misunderstanding, misrepresentation , and arbitrariness.

While the Sumerians thus set a high value on the individual and his achievement, there was on overriding factor which fostered a strong spirit of cooperation among individuals and communities alike:  the complete dependence of Sumer on irrigation for its well-being – indeed, for its very existence.  Irrigation is a complicated process requiring communal effort and organization.  Canals had to be dug and kept in constant repair.  The water had to be divided equitably among all concerned.  To ensure this, a power stronger than the individual landowner or even the single community was mandatory:  hence, the growth of governmental institutions and the rise of the Sumerian state.  And since Sumer, because of the fertility of the irrigated soil, produced a vast surplus of grain but had practically no metals and very little stone and timber, the state was forced to obtain the material essential to its economy either through trade or military force.  So that by the third millennium B.C., there is good reason to believe that Sumerian culture and civilization had penetrated, at least to some extent, as far east as India and as far west as the Mediterranean, as far south as ancient Ethiopia and far north as the Caspian.

To be sure, all this was five thousand years ago and may seem of little relevance to the study of modern man and culture.  But the fact is that the land of Sumer witnessed the origin of more than one significant feature of present-day civilization.  Be he philosopher or teacher, historian or poet, lawyer or reformer, statesman or politician, architect or sculptor, it is likely that modern man will find his prototype and counterpart in ancient Sumer.  Admittedly, the Sumerian origin of the modern offshoot can no longer be traced with directness or certainty:  the ways of cultural diffusion are manifold, intricate, and complex, and its magic touch is subtle and evanescent.  Even so, it is still apparent in a Mosaic law and a Solomonic proverb, in the tears of Job and a Jerusalem lament, in the sad tale of the dying man-god, in a Hesiodic cosmogony and a Hindu myth, in a Aesopic fable and a Euclidean theorem, in a zodiacal sign and a heraldic design, in the weight of a mina, the degree of an angle, the writing of a number.  It is the history, social structure, religious ideas, educational practices, literary creations and value motivations of the civilization created in ancient Sumer that will be briefly sketched in the following page.  First, however, a brief introductory review of the archeological “resurrection” of the Sumerians and their culture and of the decipherment of their script and language.

Remarkably enough, less than a century ago not only was nothing known of Sumerian culture; the very existence of a Sumerian people and language was unsuspected.  The scholars and archeologist who some hundred years ago began excavating in Mesopotamia were looking not for Sumerians but for Assyrians; these were the people about whom they had considerable, though far from accurate, information from Greek and Hebrew sources.  In the case of the Sumerians, however, there was no recognizable trace of the land, or its people and language, in the entire available Biblical, classical, and postclassical literature (or at least so it was thought, see pages 297-99 for the possibility that Sumer is mentioned in the Bible under a slightly variant form).  The very name Sumer had been erased from the mind and memory of man for more than two thousand years.  The discovery of the Sumerians and their language was quite unlooked for and came quite unexpectedly, and this rather irrelevant detail led to controversies which were responsible to some degree fro the rather slow and troubled progress of Sumerological research.

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pp. 297-99

So much for some of the more obvious and significant Biblical parallels from Sumerian literature. Needless to say, this list only scratches the surface.  Thus, while revising the translation of the Farmers’ Almanac for this book, I was struck by two Biblical parallels of an ethical character which the earlier translation had missed:  the touching exhortation to the farmer to show compassion to the “gleaners” during the harvesting and to the oxen during the threshing.  In the coming years, as more and more of the Sumerian literary documents become available, the number of Sumerian parallels will grow and multiply – particularly for such books as Psalms, Proverbs, lamentations, and Song of Songs.  These considerations bring us to a question which may already have occurred to the reader:  If the Sumerians were a people of such outstanding literary and cultural importance for the ancient Near Eastern world as a whole that they even left their indelible impress on the literary works of the Hebrew men of letters, why is it that there seems to be little trace of them in the Bible? In Genesis, chapters 10 and 11, for example, we find lists of quite a number of eponyms, lands, and cities. But except for the rather obscure word “Shinar,” which scholars usually identify with Sumer, but which actually stand for the Sumerian equivalent of the compound word “Sumer-Akkad,” there seems to be no mention of the Sumerians in the entire Bible, a fact which is hardly reconcilable with their purported pre-eminence and influence.

Interestingly enough, a solution to this rather puzzling enigma was suggested over a quarter of a century ago by my teacher and colleague, Arno Poebel, in the form of a brief comment in an article published in the American Journal of Semitic Languages (LVLLL[1941}, 20-26). Poebel’s suggestion has found no responsive echo among Orientalists, and it seems to have been relegated to scholarly oblivion.  It is my convection, however, that it will stand the test of time and in due course be recognized as a significant contribution to Hebrew-Sumerian interconnections.

Before evaluating Poebel’s explanation, however, the reader will have to bear in mind a rather curious, but well-founded and generally accepted, Sumerian phonetic law which is essential to an intelligent approach to the problems involved. This law, the formulation of which marked a milestone in the study of the Sumerian language, may be stated as follows:  Sumerian final consonants were amissible and were not pronounced in speech unless followed by a grammatical particle beginning with, or consisting of, a vowel.   Thus, for example, the Sumerian word for field, ashag, was pronounced asha (without the final g).  But when this same word appeared in the Sumerian complex ashag-a, “in the field,” in which the –a is a grammatical element equated with the English “in,” it was pronounced ashag, not asha.  Similarly, the Sumerian word for ”god,” dingir, was actually pronounced dingi, with the final r silent.  But in the complex, dingir-e, “by god,” in which the –e stands for the English “by,” the word was pronounced dingir, not dingi.

Now to return to our problem and the quest for the word “Sumer,” or rather “Shumer,” to use the form found in the cuneiform documents.  Poebel was struck by the word’s resemblance to the name “Shem,” Noah’s eldest son, and the distant ancestor of such eponyms as Ashur, Elam, Aram, and above all, Eber, the eponym of the Hebrews.

The equation of “Shem” and “Shumer,” however, presented two difficulties:  the interchange of the vowels e and u and the omission of the final er.  Now the first of these presents no difficulty at all; the cuneiform u often becomes e in Hebrew – a particularly pertinent example is the Akkadian shumu, “name,” and the Hebrew shem.  As for the second difficulty – the omission of the final er of “Shumer” in its Hebrew counterpart “Shem” – this can now be explained by applying the Sumerian law of amissibility of final consonants.  For the word “Shumer” was pronounced Shumi or, even more probably, Shum (the final i is a very short, shewa-like vowel), and the Hebrews thus took it over from Sumerian as “Shem.”

Nor is Shem the only example of a Hebrew name borrowed from a Sumerian word without its final consonant.  The name of the city where Abraham was born is written as Ur in the Bible.  But the Sumerian name, as has long been known, is not Ur but Urim; “in Ur,” for example, is urim-a, nor ur-a.  In this case, too, therefore, the Biblical authors had borrowed the name as actually pronounced in Sumerian when not followed by a grammatical element beginning with a vowel.

If Poebel’s hypothesis turns out to be correct, and Shem is identical with Shumer-Sumer, we must assume that the Hebrew authors of the Bible, or at least some of them, considered the Sumerians to have been the original ancestors of the Hebrew people. Linguistically speaking, they could not have been more mistaken:  Sumerian is an agglutinative tongue unrelated to the inflected Semitic family of languages of which Hebrew forms a part. But there may very well have been considerable Sumerian blood in Abraham’s forefathers, who lived for generations in Ur or some other Sumerian cities.  As for Sumerian culture and civilization, there is no reason to doubt that these proto-Hebrews had absorbed and assimilated much of the Sumerian way of life.  In brief, Sumerian-Hebrew contacts may well have been more intimate than hitherto suspected, and the law which went forth from Zion (Isaiah 2:2) may have had not a few of its roots in the soil of Sumer.

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The decipherment of Sumerian actually came about through the decipherment of Semitic Akkadian, known in earlier days as Assyrian or Babylonian, which, like Sumerian, is written in cuneiform script.  And for Akkadian in turn, the key was found in Old Persian, an Indo-European tongue spoken by the Persians and Medes who ruled Iran during much of the first millennium B.C.; for some of the rulers of the Persian Achaemenid dynasty – the name goes back to Achaemenes, the founder of the dynasty who lived about 700 B.C. – found it politic to have their cuneiform inscriptions written in three language:  Persian, their own mother tongue; Elamite, an agglutinative language spoken by the natives of western Iran whom they conquered and subjugated;  and Akkadian, the Semitic tongue spoken by the Babylonians and Assyrians.  This group of trilingual cuneiform inscriptions, which was roughly the counterpart of the Egyptian Rosetta stone, did not come from Iraq but from Iran, although it is Iraq that is the home of cuneiform writing.  And this brings us to the story of the explorations and excavations leading to the decipherment of the cuneiform script and the rediscovery of the Mesopotamian civilizations.  It well here be sketched only briefly – it has been told repeatedly and in detail during the past decades (see Bibliography for specific works) – in order to give the reader at least a glimpse into the picture as a whole and at the same time to make a reverent and grateful bow to those long dead explorers, excavators, and armchair savants who unknowingly and unwittingly, and each in his own way, helped to make the writing of a book on the Sumerians possible.

The resurrection of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Sumerian peoples, long buried under their desolate mounds, or tells, is an eloquent and magnificent achievement of nineteenth-century scholarship and humanism.  To be sure there were isolated reports of ancient Mesopotamian ruins in the preceding centuries.  In fact, as early as the twelfth century a rabbi of Tudela, in the kingdom of Navarre, by the name of Benjamin son of Jonah visited the Jews of Mosul and correctly identified the ruins in the vicinity of that city as those of ancient Nineveh, although his account was not published until the sixteenth century.  On the other hand, the identification of Babylon was not made until 1616, when the Roman Pietro della Valle visited the mounds in the neighborhood of modern Hilla.  This sharp-eyed traveler not only gave a remarkable description of the ruins of Babylon, but also brought back to Europe inscribed bricks that he had found there and at the mound now called by the Arabs Tal al Muqayyar, “the mound of pitch,” which covers the ruins of ancient Ur; and thus it was that first examples of cuneiform writing came to Europe.

Throughout the rest of the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries numerous travelers, each with a different idea as to the identification of the various localities and ruins, journeyed to Mesopotamia, all trying to fit what they saw into the Biblical frame of reference.  Between 1761 and 1767, there took place one of the most valuable of these expeditions, that of Carsten Niebuhr, a Danish mathematician who, besides copying at Persepolis the inscriptions which led to the decipherment of cuneiform, was the first to give his contemporaries a concrete idea of the ruins of Nineveh with the help of sketches and drawings.  A few years later the French botanist A. Michaux sold to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris a boundary stone found near Ctesiphon, south of Baghdad, which proved to be the first really valuable inscription to come to Europe.  Some  absurd translations were made of this simple inscription, which actually contains the usual curse against anyone disturbing the boundary marker; one of these, for example, ran as follows;  “The army of heaven will water us with vinegar in order to lavish on us the right remedies to effect our healing.”

About this same time Abbe Beauchamp, vicar-general at Baghdad and correspondent of the Academy of Science, was making careful and accurate observations of what he saw around him, particularly in the ruins of Babylon; in fact, he actually made the first known archeological excavation in Mesopotamia, employing a few native workmen under the leadership of a master mason, in connection with a sculpture now generally known as the “Lion of Babylon,” which can still be seen there by today’s tourist.  He was the first to describe parts of the Ishtar Gate, a beautiful replica of which can now be seen in the Near Eastern Section of the Berlin Museum; he also mentions finding solid cylinders covered with minute writing that he felt resembled the inscriptions from Persepolis.  The memoirs of his travels, published in 1790, were translated almost immediately into English and German and created quite a sensation in the scholarly world.

One of the consequences of the spark kindled by Abbe Beauchamp was that the East India Company in London authorized their agents in Baghdad to do some archeological prospecting and reconnoitering.  And so in 1811, we find Claudius James Rich, a resident of the East India Company in Baghdad, examining and mapping the ruins of Babylon and even excavating briefly parts of them. 

Kramer, The Sumerians, Preface

Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963

Preface

The year 1956 saw the publication of my book From the Tablets of Sumer, since revised, reprinted, and translated into numerous languages under the title History Begins at Sumer.  It consisted of twenty-odd disparate essays united by a common theme – “firsts” in man’s recorded history and culture.  The book did not treat the political history of the Sumerian people or the nature of their social and economic institutions, nor did it give the reader any idea of the manner and method by which the Sumerians and their language were discovered and ‘resurrected.”  It is primarily to fill these gaps that the present book was conceived and composed.

The first chapter is introductory in character; it sketches briefly the archeological and scholarly efforts which led to the decipherment of the cuneiform script, with special reference to the Sumerians and their language, and does so in a way which, it is hoped, the interested layman can follow with understanding and insight.

Chapter One

Bauer, The History of the Ancient World

Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.

Part One

The Edge of History

One                The Origin of Kingship:  Just north of the Persian Gulf, in the very distant past, the Sumerians discover that cities need rulers

Many thousands of years ago, the Sumerian king Alulim ruled over Eridu: a walled city, a safe space carved out of the unpredictable and harsh river valley that the Romans would later name Mesopotamia.  Alulim’s rise to power marked the beginning of civilization, and his reign lasted for almost thirty thousand years.

The Sumerians, who lived in a world where the supernatural and the material had not yet been assigned to different sides of the aisle, would not have choked over the last part of the sentence.  On the other hand, they would have found Alulim’s placement at “the beginning of civilization” extremely hard to swallow.  In their own minds, the Sumerian king list (perhaps the oldest historical record in the world), “descended from heaven” and was already perfect when it arrived on earth.

But looking back, we see the coming of the first king in different perspective.  It is a sea change in the condition of man, the beginning of a whole new relationship between people, their land, and their leaders.

We can’t date Alulim’s reign, since he is not mentioned in any other records, and since we don’t know how old the Sumerian king list itself is.  The list was set down on clay tablets sometime after 2100 BC, but it undoubtedly preserves a much older tradition.  More than that: the chronology given by the Sumerian king list doesn’t exactly match the past as we know it. “After kingship had descended from heaven,” the king list tells us, “Alulim reigned 28,000 years as king; [his heir] Alalgar reigned 36,000 years.”1

The length of these reigns may suggest that both of these kings are actually demigods, drawn from mythology rather than history; or perhaps, simply that Alulim and his heir ruled for a very long time.  According to the Sumerians, eight kings ruled before the enormous catastrophe of Sumerian history occurred and “the Flood swept over” the land. Each reign lasted for a multiple of thirty-six hundred years, which suggest that the king list involves a kind of reckoning we don’t understand.*

*There are other problems with the king list, including missing pieces where the tablets are broken, and the apparent elimination of rules who are attested to by inscriptions and other independent evidence;  still, the list is the best guide we have to the distant past of the Sumerians.

What we can do is place the first Sumerian king in the distant past.  Whenever he reigned, Alulim lived in a land probably quite different from the Mesopotamia we know today, with its familiar two rivers – the Tigris and the Euphrates – running into the Persian Gulf.  Geologists tell us that, just before the beginning of history (the date 11,000 BC, although far from precise, gives us a reference point), ice spread down from the polar caps far to the south, down almost to the Mediterranean Sea.  With so much water contained in ice, the oceans and seas were lower; the northern end of the Gulf itself was probably a plain with streams running through it, and the ocean lapped up against a shore that lay roughly level with modern Qatar.  Rain fell regularly, so that the land was watered.

As the climate began to warm and the ice caps began to melt – a process that geologists assign to the five thousand years between 11,000 and 6000 BC – the ocean crept up past Qatar, past the modern territory of Bahrain.  Settlements retreated before the rising water.  By 6000 BC, Britain – previously a peninsula jutting off from Europe – had become an island, and the shore of the Persian Gulf had crept up to the southern border of Kuwait.  The plain that lay to its north was watered, not by two rivers, but by a whole complex of powerful streams, their paths still visible in satellite photos; the book of Genesis describes one river with “four heads” running through the plain. 2

But although the land was watered by this braided riverway, it grew drier.  As the ice retreated, the temperature rose.  Just north of the Gulf, the rains diminished into infrequent sprinkles that came only during the winter months.  In the summer, searing winds blew across the unprotected plain.  Each year, the streams swelled up over their banks and washed away fields before receding back into the beds, leaving silt behind.  The silt began to build upon the banks of the interweaving streams, pushing them apart.  And the Gulf continued to creep northwards.

The people who lived on the southern plain, closest to the Gulf, scratched for survival in a shifting and unpredictable landscape.  Once a year, far too much water covered their fields.  As soon as the floods subsided, the ground dried hard.  They had no stone, nor forests to provide timber, no wide grasslands; just reeds, which grew along the streams, and plenty of mud.  Mud, molded and dried, mixed with reeds and baked, became the foundations of their houses, the bricks that formed their city walls, their pots and dishes.  They were people of the earth.*

*In many histories, these villagers are not called “Sumerians.”  Historians have reserved that name for the culture that occupied the Mesopotamian plain from about 3200 BC onwards, because for many years the evidence seemed to suggest that while early villages did exist from about 4500 BC on, the Sumerians themselves were a distinct group who invaded from the north and took over sometime after 3500 BC.  However, more recent excavations and the use of technology to sound the land below the water table shows that Sumer was occupied long before 4500 BC.  Closer examination of the remains that are accessible to archaeologists shows that a foreign invasion did not impose a new culture over the “native Mesopotamians”; early villages have the same patterns of house building, settlement, decoration, etc., as later “Sumerian” villages.  It is much more likely that the earliest villagers were joined by peoples wandering down from the north, up from the south, and over from the east, not in one overwhelming invasion, but in a constant seepage of settlement.  Despite this, the old names for the most ancient Sumerian settlement have stuck; the people in the lower Mesopotamian plain are called “Ubaid” for the period 5000-4000 BC, and “Uruk” for the period 4000-3200 BC.  Another period, called “Jemdat Nasr,” has been suggested for 3200-2900 BC, although these dates seem to be in flux.  The settlements before 5000 are referenced, variously, as Samarra, Hassuna, and Halaf.  These ears, based partly on innovations in pottery styles, are named after archaeological sites where the most typical remains of the period were first identified. (Linguists use a different set of names, just to confuse the issue; the Ubaid people become “Proto-Euphrateans,” for example.)  I find it simpler – and more accurate – to use “Sumerian” throughout.

The language that these settlers spoke – Sumerian – is apparently unrelated to any other language on earth.  But by the time that the Sumerians began to write, their language was peppered with words from another tongue.  Sumerian words are built on one-syllable roots, but dozens of words from the oldest inscriptions have unfamiliar two-syllable roots: the names of the two most powerful rivers that ran through the plain, the names for farmer, fisherman, carpenter, weaver, and a dozen other occupations, even the name of the city Eridu itself.

These words are Semitic, and they prove that the Sumerians were not alone on the southern plain.  The Semitic words belonged to a people whose homeland was south and west of the Mesopotamian plain.  Mountains to the north and east of Mesopotamia discouraged wanderers, but travelling up from the Arabian peninsula, or over from northern Africa, was a much simpler proposition. The Semites did just this, settling in with the Sumerians and lending them words.  And more than just words: the Semitic loanwords are almost all names for farming techniques (plow, furrow) and for the peaceful occupations that go along with farming (basketmaker, leatherworker, carpenter).  The Semites, not the Sumerians, brought these skills to Mesopotamia.

So how did the Semites learn how to farm?

Probably in gradual stages, like the peoples who lived in Europe and farther north.  Perhaps, as the ice sheets retreated and the herds of meat-providing animals moved north and grew thinner, the hunters who followed these herds gave up the full-time pursuit of meat and instead harvested the wild grains that grew in the warmer plains, shifting residence only when the weather changes (as the native North Americans in modern Canada were still doing when Jacques Cartier showed up).  Maybe these former nomads progressed from harvesting wild grain to planting and tending it, and finally gave up travelling altogether in favor of full-time village life.  Well-fed men and women produced more babies.  Sickles and grinding stones, discovered from modern Turkey down to the Nile valley, suggest that as those children grew to adulthood, they left their overpopulated villages and travelled elsewhere, taking their farming skills with them and teaching them to others.

Ancient stories add another wrinkle to the tale:  as the Semite-influenced Sumerians planted crops around their villages, life became so complicated that they needed a king to help them sort out their difficulties.

Enter Alulim, king of Eridu, and the beginning of civilization.

It’s easy to wax lyrical over the “beginning of civilization.”  Civilization, after all, is what divides us from chaos.  Civilized cites have walls that separate the orderly streets within from the wild waste outside.  Civilization, as archaeologist Stuart Piggott explains in his introduction to Max Mallowan’s classic study of ancient Sumer, is the result of a courageous discontent with the status quo: “Sporadically,” Piggott writes, “there have appeared peoples to whom innovation and change, rather than adherence to tradition, gave satisfaction and release:  these innovating societies are those which we can class as the founders of civilization.”3

Actually, civilization appears to be the result of a more elemental urge: making sure that no one seizes too much food or water. Civilization began in the Fertile Crescent, not because it was an Edenic place overflowing with natural resources, but because it was so hostile to settlement that a village of any size needed careful management to survive.  Farmers had to cooperate in order to construct the canals and reservoirs needed to capture floodwaters.  Someone needed to enforce that cooperation, and oversee the fair division of the limited water.  Someone had to make sure that farmers, who grew more grain than their families needed, would sell food to the nonfarmers (the basketmakers, leatherwworkers, and carpenters) who grew no grain themselves.  Only in an inhospitable and wild place is this sort of bureaucracy – the true earmark of civilization – needed.  In genuinely fertile places, overflowing with water and food and game and minerals and timber, people generally don’t bother.*

*This is not quite the same as explaining the rise of bureaucracy by the need to control large-scale irrigation systems, as Jared Diamond points out in Guns, Germs, and Steel, the centralized bureaucracies of cities were generally well in place before “complex irrigation systems” formed, and “in the fertile Crescent food production and village life originated in hills and mountains, not in lowland river valleys” (p. 23).  The formation of bureaucracies was necessary before those systems could be properly built and maintained; and the fact that “civilization” had its beginning in the hills, which were far less hospitable than the river valleys, demonstrated my point.

In the Fertile Crescent, as villages grew into cities, more people had to sustain themselves on the same amount of dry land.  Strong leadership became more necessary than ever.  Human nature being what it is, city leaders needed some means of coercion:  armed men who policed their decrees.

The leaders had become kings.

For the Sumerians, who struggled to survive in a land where water either washed away their fields in floods, or retreated entirely, leaving the crops to bake in the sun, kingship was a gift from the gods.  No primordial gardens for the Sumerians: cities, protected from invading waters and hungry raiders by thick mud-brick walls, were man’s first and best home.  The city of Eridu, where kingship first descended from heaven, reappears in the myths of the Babylonians as the Sumerian Eden, created by the king-god Marduk:

            All the lands were sea. . . .

            Then Eridu was made. . . .

            Marduk constructed a reed frame on the face of the waters.

            He created dirt and poured it out by the reed frame. . . .

            He created mankind.4

Eridu never disappears, as the Eden of Genesis does.  The sacred city stood as the division between the old world of the hunters and gatherers, and the new world of civilization.

But the hunters and gatherers were not entirely gone.  From the earliest days of kingship and the first building of cities, settled farmers quarreled with nomadic herdsmen and shepherds.

The fifth king in the Sumerian list is Dumuzi, who is (as the list tells us, with an air of faint surprise) a shepherd.  That a shepherd who becomes king is a meeting of opposites becomes clear in “The Wooing of Inanna,” a tale starring Dumuzi and the goddess Inanna.*  In this story, Dumuzi is not only a shepherd and king, but also has the blood of gods in his veins; despite his divinity, Inanna finds Dumuzi unworthy.  “The shepherd will go to bed with you!” exclaims the sun-god Utu, but Inanna (who generally bestows her favors without a whole lot of hesitation) objects:

            The shepherd!  I will not marry the shepherd!

            His clothes are coarse; his wool is rough.

            I will marry the farmer.

            The farmer grows flax for my clothes.

            The farmer grows barley for my table.5

*Inanna is known as Ishtar, slightly later, by the Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia; she evolves into the goddess of both love and war, a combination fairly common in ancient times.

Dumuzi persists with his suit.  After a fair amount of arguing about whose family is better, he wins entrance to Inanna’s bed by offering her fresh milk with cream; she promptly suggest that he “plow her damp field.”  (He accepts the invitation.)

Inanna’s preference for the farmer echoes a real tension.  As the southern plain grew drier, cities clustered along the riverbanks.  But beyond the cities, the desert wastes still served a pasture for sheep and goats and as the home of nomads who kept the ancient wandering ways alive.  Herdsmen and farmers needed each other; herdsmen provided farmers with meat, fresh milk, and wool in exchange for life-sustaining grain.  But mutual need didn’t produce mutual respect.  City dwellers scoffed at the rustic, unwashed herdsmen; herdsmen poked fun at the effete and decadent townspeople.

In this land of cities and kings, farmers and nomadic wanderers, the first eight kings of Sumer ruled until catastrophe struck.