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.

The Ancient World - Cantor

Bestselling author Norman Cantor delivers this compact but magisterial survey of the ancient world -- from the birth of Sumerian civilization around 3500 B.C. in the Tigris-Euphrates valley (present-day Iraq) to the fall of the Roman Empire in A.D. 476. In Antiquity, Cantor covers such subjects as Classical Greece, Judaism, the founding of Christianity, and the triumph and decline of Rome.

In this fascinating and comprehensive analysis, the author explores social and cultural history, as well as the political and economic aspects of his narrative. He explains leading themes in religion and philosophy and discusses the environment, population, and public health. With his signature authority and insight, Cantor highlights the great books and ideas of antiquity that continue to influence culture today.

Author's Note

This book is an attempt to communicate to the educated reader and to students of history some basic knowledge about antiquity from 2.5 million years ago -- the dawn of humanity -- to the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D.  I have tried to convey this long history in simple language, keeping names, places, and dates to a minimum, and focusing on the Mediterranean and Western Europe.

Part I, Basic Narrative, lays out the fundamental knowledge about antiquity that every educated person should possess.

Part II, Societies and Cultures, focuses in more detail on the most important aspects of antiquity.

I have used the conventional, European Christian dating of B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini, "in the year of the Lord) rather than B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. -- not for religious reasons, but simply because that is what most readers are familiar with.

One

Basic Narrative

Chapter One

Hydraulic Despotisms

A very long time ago, some 2.5 million years B.C., the mother of human species as we know it, our ultimate ancestor, appeared in East Africa.  She walked erect and was able to close her thumbs and forefingers to make tools for doing what her limbs were unable to do.  She was four feet tall and probably black.  This is what the science of paleontology told us during the last four decades of the twentieth century.

The earliest humans were related to primates, the apes and monkeys.  Humans and gorillas share 92 percent of their DNA.  The genetic conformity between humans and chimpanzees is significantly greater. Humans and chimpanzees share 98 percent of their DNA. It is possible that humans and chimpanzees are descended from the same species of animal long ago extinct. Or that humans evolved out of chimpanzees who gave up swinging from trees in order to find food on the ground. Like chimps, humans tend to migrate in colonies. Gorillas are more individualistic, but they, too, are often found to be migrating and living in small groups.

That humans are a species of primate is indisputable.  The earliest humans lived and traveled in small groups.  They were hunters and gatherers.  They gathered fruits and vegetables growing wild in the then-great forests and savannas of East Africa and they hunted animals that they could kill and eat.

Like most humans today, they were carnivorous, but not entirely so.  As long as there were vegetables and fruits in abundance, they were satisfied with a vegetarian diet.  But fresh meat, eaten both raw and cooked, appealed to them.

Out of stones and bones, they made weapons to kill animals.  Their throats and larynxes could utter sounds that allowed for communication between these humans, and over time, these sounds were shaped into organized languages.

Frequently on the move in search of food, the humans very slowly drifted northward and moved up the great rivers that flowed together to form the Nile valley.  Around a hundred thousand years ago, the humans reached the Nile delta and the Mediterranean Sea and began to spread east and north from there. By this time, they had learned to be farmers, to plant seeds, to irrigate their croplands, and to build villages and town, drawing their sustenance from the cultivated earth.  But they did not cease to hunt and gather.

The humans reached Europe – at first, the territory adjacent to the Crimea and the northern shores of the Black Sea – about 10,000 B.C.

Based on their excavations, archaeologist tell us later, around 6000 B.C., two centers of rich and highly developed civilization had emerged in the Near East – in the northern extremity of Egypt and in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, in what is today southern Iraq.

A Guide to Further Reading

Prehistory

There is a gap of 2.5 million years between the emergence of recognizable humans in East Africa and the appearance of literate civilizations in the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates valleys around 3500 B.C. What is known from archaeological data about this period of so-called prehistory is summarized in:

Colin Tudge, The Time Before History, 1996

Donald Johanson and Blake, Edgar, From Lucy to Language, 1996

Virginia Morrell, Ancestral Passions, 1995, a fascinating biography of the famous Leakey family of paleontologists.

The availability of irrigation systems to water the land and produce grain and other food crops was the material foundation for these two great river-valley societies, Egypt and Iraq. They were hydraulic despotisms, in which a small ruling class, with the aid of the soldiers and priests, commanded the material resources that gave sustenance to these civilizations and allowed them to build cities, palaces, and tombs.

The soldiers made sure that the peasants and laborers did what had to be done to maintain irrigation systems, harvest crops, and erect buildings. The priests assured the masses that this forced-labor system was dictated by the gods, who were represented on earth by kings.

The Nile Valley was for the most part a natural irrigation system, in which the great river overflowed once a year, covering the land with rich silt brought from East Africa, but pharaohs, as the Nile kings were called, also built some major canals to improve upon natural irrigation.  The Tigris-Euphrates valley was a scene of massive and complicated irrigation systems built by human labor to pull the water inland from the rivers.

We know about these two large and prosperous settlements of Iraq and northern Egypt exclusively from the material records offered by archaeology.  It was not until around 3500 B.C. that writing emerged in both societies.  Each developed its own distinctive forms of writing.

For another millennium, these written records consisted entirely of state business-accounts and letters, and panegyrics to the mightiness and divinity of kings. (By the dawn of writing, a half-million people were settled in each of the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates valleys, where huge temples and palaces were erected for kings, priests, and aristocrats, while the common people lived in small houses made of sundried bricks, or in tents.)

The forces for change in the two great societies of Egypt and Iraq were, with one exception, external rather than internal.  That one exception was the attempt by Pharaoh Akhenaton (around 1330 B.C.) to create a new monotheistic religion (with similarities to Judaism) and eliminate the power of the traditional priests who served a multitude of deities.  This theological revolution was immediately reversed after Akhenaton’s death.

Otherwise, what happened in the two river valley civilizations was determined by wars spurred by invasions from without.  In Egypt, dynasties enduring for centuries presided over irrigation and cultivation, huge edifices built by forced labor, and the manufacture of exquisite paintings and jewelry.  For a century, around 1100 B.C., Egypt was invaded and ruled by a “sea people,” from western Asia, but then effective power returned to a native dynasty.

The history of the ancient Tigris-Euphrates valley was shaped by a series of invasions from the north. As Sumerians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians succeeded one another, the structure of severely class-ridden societies and agriculture-based economies did not change.  The series of invasions and conquest ended about 500 B.C. with Iraq absorbed into the expanding Iranian (Persian) empire to the east.

In the first century B.C., Egypt was absorbed into the expanding Roman empire, and remained its wealthiest province until the Muslim Arabs took it over in the seventh century A.D.

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In both instances the hydraulic despotisms were marked by the tremendous capacity for millennia-long continuities in government, religion, urban environment, social structure, and economy. Life expectancy was short, never rising above forty years of age until well into the twentieth century A.D. Peasants and urban laborers constituted 95 percent of the population.

Monarchy was considered divine.  The priests unequivocally supported the king. Aristocrats derived their wealth from royal largess. Whether they were legally slaves or subject to some other variant of forced labor, the role of peasants and urban workers was to serve the king, priests, and aristocrats until death.

The physical remains of the Iraqi monarchies have survived only in small fragments, the most impressive being huge Assyrian statues and bas-reliefs now found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the British Museum in London. Many of the famous pyramid tombs of the Egyptian rules have survived, and some are still unexcavated. The higher one was on the social scale while alive, the more likely one was to enjoy a happy afterlife, accompanied by one’s prized possessions. The contents of the excavated pyramids can be seen in museums in Cairo, in principal Western European cities, particularly London and Paris, and in Brooklyn, New York. Egyptian craftsmen were highly skilled, especially in the making of colorful murals and gold jewelry. Many Egyptian jewelry designs are still popular today.

No despotism, not even the technocratic monstrosities of the twentieth century A.D., can entirely shut off the human predilection for law, art, and charitable ethics.  The Iraqis were prone to compiling law codes, such as that of Hammurabi, which slightly mitigated the harshness of everyday life for the masses. The Iraqis also developed myths about the creation of the world, including a story about a Great Flood, nowadays believed to have actually occurred on the shores of the Black Sea. Those writings may have influenced the authors of the Hebrew Bible, who lived in Iraq around 500 B.C.

The Egyptians produced attractive murals of domestic life and idealized depictions of animals, and a host of myths connected to Re, the Sun god.

The only clear expression of intellectual dissent from hydraulic despotism occurred in the southern half of the coastal lands of the eastern Mediterranean, called variously Canaan, Palestine, Israel, Judah, and today, Israel again. Here and in a satellite Jewish colony in Iraq, between 800 and 500 B.C., visionaries (“the Prophets”) – namely Amos, Ezekiel, Isaiah (at least two different writers writing under this name, and Jeremiah – wrote elegant poems calling for social justice in the world and a freer, more open and humanitarian society.

This Promised Land of the Hebrews was on the main mercantile-and-army route that ran from Egypt to Iraq. It was the place of equalitarian ideas that contradicted the way of life of the two great empires that lay at either end of the road that traversed Israel.

Proponents of a monotheistic theology that resembled that of Pharaoh Akhenaton, and of a strong national consciousness, the Hebrew prophets called for a just and free society sharply at odds with the hydraulic despotisms, even in the severely edited form their writings were given by the priests before these writings were admitted into the slowly developing Hebrew Bible.  Some of the works attributed to Isaiah and Ezekiel were composed in Iraq.  Jeremiah spent the last years of his life in Egypt, so that there is more than local significance to the radical, democratic, humanitarian visions of the Hebrew prophets.

The text of the Hebrew Bible read in synagogues today was defined in Spain around 1000 A.D., but this version corresponds very closely to a Biblical text written in or near Jerusalem between 300 and 250 B.C. and discovered in the late 1940s in caves overlooking the Dead Sea, south of Jerusalem.

Historians and archaeologists now believe that the Hebrew Bible crystallized around 600 B.C., in the time of King Josiah, who, together with the Judean priests, undertook a religious reformation.  A strict monotheism was ordained, local shrines destroyed, and the important religious services centralized in Jerusalem.  A stern moral code and a maze of religious laws were imposed.  Shortly, after, the main part of the Jewish community was exiled by the Babylonians to Iraq, where some Jewish families continued to live in unbroken peace until 1948. After their conquest of Iraq around 500 B.C., the tolerant Persian rulers encouraged the Jews to return to Judea, and perhaps half did so, carrying with them historical myths and ethical ideas from Iraq.

Their scribes settled down to organize and compose the Bible as it has existed since 250 B.C. and later came to be part of the Christian Old Testament.  God’s covenant with the Jews, His chosen people and witnesses to His message of love and law for all mankind, became the prime theme of the Hebrew Bible, which now included the heavily edited texts of the Prophets calling for social justice at a time when a succession of petty Hebrew kings imitated the hydraulic despotisms in Iraq and Egypt.

A grand national myth was created in which the Hebrews were said to have come originally from Iraq and to have migrated to Canaan and then to Egypt, where they became slaves of the Pharaohs. They were led by Moses into freedom and a return to the Promised Land.  Archaeologists after a century of excavation know today that this is only a liberation myth; there was no exodus of the Jews from Egypt, although Passover annually celebrates this event.  The rabbis who took over from the Jerusalem priests after the Romans sacked Jerusalem in 70 A.D. placed another conservatizing layer of editing upon the final text of the Bible, making it a persistent reminder of national consciousness but further downplaying the radical call for social justice against hydraulic despotism, which the Prophets had inculcated between 800 and 500 B.C.