What, of all this, comes down to later ages and comes down to us? In surveying this span of history and cultural achievement, we can see that the Ancient Near East has bequeathed to later ages a myriad of ideas, institutions, and techniques which have been important and in many cases centrally important to later developments in Western civilization. It is obvious to readers of the essays here that scholars are still struggling to understand how and when the transitions of these elements to later ages took place. Sometimes we have the clear evidence of transmission and other times we are left to guess at the mechanisms. And some elements became so basic to how people lived that we do not have to speak of transmission but only of continuity.
The elements that come to mind include the following, not necessarily in order of importance. And other scholars might highlight other aspects of the Ancient Near Eastern legacy:
• Cities. There were cities elsewhere, but it was in the Near East that the biggest ones were formed first, and the norms of living in cities seem to have come down almost unbroken to later ages. People came to Uruk, even though it might have been unhealthy, because it was the biggest and most exciting market where all the best things could be seen, and the government would attempt to guarantee your safety to see them.
• Writing. Writing was devised first in or near Mesopotamia, and though various systems were devised, the cuneiform system and the hieroglyphic system and their offshoots, among which is the alphabetic system in which we now write, came to dominate how people recorded things for later times. Humans developed writing elsewhere probably independently, but it is the Near Eastern-originated system that has come to spread most widely.
• Royal or governmental authority. Again this appeared elsewhere independently, but the role of the king in protecting the weak and securing the safety of the others first found formulation among the rulers of the Near East, and their rhetoric echoes with us now as we face very different challenges.
Representative local government. The localities were governed through time by consensus generated among well-off men, and though outsiders might hope to swerve their deliberations and could sometimes force them to do things they did not want to do, when those coercers retreated, as they always did, the kind of ward government that became the norm in much later ages reemerged to manage how things actually got done.
Bureaucracy and the passion for record-keeping. When it was too detailed but potentially important and difficult to remember, they wrote it down. But the obsessiveness and meticulousness with which they worried about records has fanned out through the writing world. Perhaps even the categories of bureaucracy practiced in the Early Modern Near East had something to do with the ancients’ approach, and if one feels that bureaucracy died with the Ottomans, perhaps one should arrange to visit any Middle Eastern country today.
The spirit of laws. The texts that look legal to us may not have been laws intended to be enforced, and yet they embodied the values of the community as conceived by the kings and scribes who put such texts together. And if one looks at the codes as a programmed course of instruction by example of what justice is, one can see that already in very early times the assumptions were there about what the norms of justice ought to be. These might be summarized in the idea that the rich should not oppress the weak, as Hammurapi explicitly said, and that access to the means of redress for the powerless should not be restricted by officials. Also there is an assumption that a king, a government, ought to have a policy that assured some kind of social equity. If they did not, they might be accused of impiety. These ideals about how states ought to function and how society ought to operate have enjoyed extraordinary continuity in the Western tradition, even though we must admit that kings and states have frequently fallen short of them. Our politicians may not want to be called ‘‘king of justice’’ as Hammurapi did, but they all have to show that they care about the little guy and will be ready to right wrongs brought to their attention by the eloquent peasants of our day.
An idea of freedom. The kings boasted of their establishing the right to move without restrictions for their populations, and though this boast frequently was hollow and unfounded, people from all walks of life found it a worthy goal. It accords with other, more obviously religious, ideas that attribute to individuals the responsibility for their own conduct and lives. Although kings strived ironically also to assert their powers and restrict their subjects’ decisions, the freedom of persons and of corporate entities like cities was a thing to be struggled over, negotiated, and asserted. It was not an absolute, but it was an ideal widely held. The Muslims later said explicitly that the basic assumption in cases of lack of clarity of status was freedom; earlier Near Easterners would have agreed.
Some forms of poetry. Through the influence of the Hebrew Bible the devices of repetition with changes has become part of our rhetoric. And the so-called Gilgamesh Epic along with a few other compositions may have bequeathed to later ages the idea of writing on a vast canvas, geographically at least, and exploring the basic questions about human existence, life, and death. More sadly, the lament has had a long legacy from its Mesopotamian origins, but so
Have other genres like the apologetic autobiography of the sort first found on Egyptian tombs. Literary tastes and genres change with time, and it is not possible to prove descent for many genres. And yet, perhaps because of the assumptions about life that remain the same, some of these ancient expressions retain for us the vitality they probably had for their first hearers.
The religious idea that you only live once. This is so basic to the Western view of human beings that it is important to remind ourselves that much of the world does not share it. But these dead ancients did. And if they did not themselves invent the notion, for it is likely to have been millennia-old when writing was devised, they saw it as self-evident, as most of us still do. And they were not afraid to explain the corollary of this being our only time to make an impression on the world and its sense of the right. They were willing to look at why the righteous suffered, and why the good all too often died young. These questions are unanswerable, and the angry and young will find that unacceptable in every age. Monotheism. A late innovation in the first millennium’s age of crises, this way of seeing the forces in the world simplified the position of human beings. It exacerbated the problem of evil if the evil had also to come from the one true god, but it gave comfort and assurance to many. Its spread transformed the way people thought about the cosmos and themselves and, as the nineteenth century French Orientalist Ernest Renan once remarked, monotheism dulls the taste for all other forms of religion, so that even organized polytheisms of our day have reconceived themselves as confessions of faith. There is no way to minimize the originality and the power of this Ancient Near Eastern idea.
The individual. The integrity of the individual human being is rooted in biology, but in fact it has been flexible over time, and in ancient times, as in our own days, on occasion persons stressed their uniqueness, and sometimes they emphasized their group solidarity. The range of assertions the ancients made does not appear different from what we find in our own time. Again, the way they thought about themselves probably did not change with the invention of writing, but for the first time we know of it.
The week, the calendar. The units of seven days came down from the Near East, along with ways of resolving the fact that counting lunar months gets the months out of season with the solar year.
Encyclopedism. The idea that the way to understand the world is to make a list of the elements relevant to an area of inquiry definitely started with the Mesopotamians. Sometimes we call it ‘‘list science’’ since they tried to collect names for trees, appearances of planets, instances of just rulings, almost anything lexical, the instances of the Pythagorean theorem, and of course the omens that might reveal to the careful student what the gods had written in nature to tell us how to behave and what to do. This cultural style was one that avoided generalization as a needlessly simple-minded exercise. Because the Greeks liked generalization, we do too, but there is still the tendency to collect examples and hope that generalizations will emerge from them.
Data and the practice of astronomy. Out of the practical and wondrous skywatching that all human societies do, came the efforts precisely to measure and then to record the movement of planets and other bodies. These efforts were meticulously preserved and passed down to Greek-speakers, and Ptolemy said he had records going back to 747 bce. Although the West has now moved beyond Ptolemy, the Mesopotamian data obviously was of central importance to his view.
• Medicine. The practical medicine of the Mesopotamian practitioners obliquely filtered down to Greek and Roman physicians, but it did not always accord with their theoretical assumptions and so did not always survive.
• The idea of education. Samuel Kramer’s assertion that in Sumer we see the first school days is perhaps a bit exaggerated; surely before in other cultures children were educated at least in oral lore. But it is true that among the Ancient Near Eastern scribes one sees for the first time a school tradition that lasted over millennia. We who have followed the ancient scribes in getting our wedges straight and our hieroglyphs in order feel a special kinship to that kind of learning, even though it may not be in fashion today.
• The wheel. The origins of this basic device lurk in prehistory, but its importance was great for ease of transport, and it rolled forth from the Ancient Near East. Here it seems likely that the device was only invented once in human endeavor, and the New World civilizations that lacked it paid a price in relatively restricted ability to distribute their surpluses.
• Domesticated plants and animals. Humans poked around their favorite plants and animals and manipulated them in many times and places, but it is the things domesticated in the Near East that went on to become the staple crops of much of the world, the grains, the foods, even the pets that sustain life in many places to this day.
• Pottery. A practical and lowly technique, perhaps, and again one that was reinvented elsewhere, but it was in the Near East that the uses of pots for cooking and storing were first devised.
These things seem a hodge-podge, not necessarily making a coherent whole, and they were not introduced at the same times in the same places, but they cluster together out of the Ancient Near East and drift down through later ages, plumes of smoke above their scrap of history, but still breathed in and used by us and by millions quite unaware that the anonymous originators lived so very long ago in the Ancient Near East.
World History
