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.
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