Mesopotamia is a loose term that denotes the region that covers the watersheds of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris as they flow down to what is now the Persian Gulf. It was at the southern end of the Mesopotamian plain that the earliest of the city-states appeared. The Akkadian (Akkadian was a Semitic language used in the area from about 2600 bc) word for this part of Mesopotamia was Sumerum and this gives the name Sumerian to this early civilization and its language. There are problems. Sumerian, a language of monosyllabic words, is hard to place as it seems unrelated to any other language of the region and its origin is unknown. Again, it is difficult to distinguish specific features of Sumerian culture that isolate it from others, so here Sumerian will be used broadly to define the world of the city-states of this region that emerged in about 3500 bc and lasted until 2300 bc. (For general background reading for this chapter, see ‘What to Read Next, pp. 683-4.)
At first sight the plain did not appear to be a likely home for a stable civilization. There were few natural resources, no timber, stone, or metals. Rainfall was limited, and what water there was rushed across the plain in the annual flood of melted snow. As the plain fell only 20 metres in 500 kilometres the beds of the rivers shifted constantly. Yet this impelled the inhabitants to organize their irrigation effectively, by building canals and preserving water before it flowed onwards. Once this was done and the silt carried down by the rivers planted with crops, the rewards were rich: four to five times what rain-fed earth would produce. It was these conditions that allowed an elite to emerge, probably as an organizing class, and to sustain itself through the control of surplus crops that could be used in exchange for the raw materials that it lacked. In short, the need to survive forced innovative responses.
The mountains of accumulated remains that mark ancient sites are known as tells. An especially prominent one is Eridu. The site was/is close to the Euphrates but at the intersection of marsh, desert, and alluvial soil that gave it access to both farmland and fishing with some scope for pastoralism. It had a constant supply of water that was accumulated in a depression in the ground. This lake appears to have given it a sacred quality. As excavators dug down through the tell in the 1940s they began uncovering a sequence of temples, one superimposed on the other. They eventually found a small ‘chapel’ built of sun-dried brick on a base of undisturbed sand. It was dated, astonishingly, to 4900 bc. Each subsequent temple was larger than the one before and the final temples, of the third millennium bc, had massive platforms, with open courts in the centre surrounded by rooms. The corners of the buildings were orientated to points of the compass and the mudbrick walls supported by buttresses. The period that ends in about 3500 bc is known as the Ubaid, from a site of this period excavated in the 1920s, Tell Ubaid, near Ur. (These names for periods tend to stick even when more important sites from the same period are discovered.)
The sequence of buildings implies that once a site had been given religious significance this was reinforced from generation to generation. The larger and later temples showed that they had been centres of ritual worship and that worshippers had brought simple offerings such as fish (again perhaps reinforcing the sacredness of water and all it gave life to) and other agricultural produce as offerings or for exchange. Pottery dishes suggested that communal meals had been part of the rituals. The god worshipped at Eridu appears to have been Enki, the creator god who shaped the world and who embodied wisdom. Well might later Babylonian texts talk of the creation of Eridu as the first city, ‘the holy city, the dwelling of their [the other gods] delight.
A cemetery was found close by the temple complex and the excavation of graves dating from about 3800 bc suggests that it was reserved for an elite. Their grave goods were well crafted and some, such as obsidian beads and the intensely blue stone, lapis lazuli, had come long distances. Older burials had been marked and preserved. The assumption is that this elite was somehow associated with the maintenance of the temples and gained privileges and veneration after death as a result. Eridu, which was the southernmost of the Mesopotamian settlements, may have been, in fact, primarily a centre for pilgrimage. Its mythological links to creation and its association with permanent supplies of water, so yearned for in the desert, preserved its status so that modern Iraqi governments still see it as the founding city of their civilization. More recent excavations of other sites suggest, however, that similar shrines were to be found at other centres of the period. This was a culture that enjoyed some uniformity in religious practice. Pottery too is decorated in similar styles across the Ubaid culture.
Eridu could hardly be called a city in the full sense of the word but its neighbour Uruk, to the north-west, has a better claim. The most significant period in Uruk’s transformation is between 3800 and 3200 bc. From about 3500 its population was too great to sustain itself from local resources and so there must have been some coercive control of other areas. This was helped by climate change that led to less flooding and the release of fertile land for cultivation. The opportunities were grasped by an enterprising elite. Uruk’s rise in status is reflected in a mass of monumental building, in stone and a primitive concrete for some periods, in mudbrick for others. This suggests a disciplined workforce working over long periods. Bevelled-rim bowls of fixed capacity are abundant and may have contained the agreed daily rations for a worker.
What is remarkable is that architectural styles change when rebuilding takes place—there is no attempt to perpetuate the same style of building—although there are enduring design features such as attractively coloured clay cones which were set into walls and pillars. So this was a people who were happy to innovate, and hand in hand with this goes evidence of more sophisticated bureaucratic skills. Officials had their own seals, their individually chosen designs inscribed on cylinders that could then be rolled across damp clay to identify goods of which they were owners or for which they were responsible. Their quality confirms that they were incised by trained craftsmen. A primitive form of writing, again inscribed on damp clay, was used to record goods, administrative decisions, and the use of labour. Some signs were simply representations of the commodity itself, an ear of corn, water, or numbers of containers (these are known as logograms). The evidence that this was an ordered society is reflected in the Warka (Warka is the modern Arabic name for the site) vase in which a procession of naked men carry containers of goods in some form of ritual procession probably associated with Inanna, the goddess of love and war. Other depictions from cylinders show captives paraded before kings.
The development of Uruk, a site that eventually covered some 550 hectares, about half the size of Rome at its height in ad 100, goes hand in hand with the diffusion of artefacts that appear to have originated in Uruk, such as the distinctive bevelled-rim bowls, far beyond southern Mesopotamia, into southern Anatolia and northern Syria. There were also trading links with Egypt that provided cultural models at a time when different groups in Egypt were consolidating their control of the Nile valley (see further p. 40). What does this tell us about the nature of Uruk society? Did the opportunism that led to the exploitation of agricultural resources transform it into an imperialist state that set up colonial outposts in the north that acted as centres for the control of trade? Uruk settlements include Habuba Kabira, a totally new foundation on the Middle Euphrates, and Hacinebi Tepe where a Uruk enclave existed alongside an Anatolian culture for 400 years. Or was it a state whose economic structure was more egalitarian, with relatively little in the way of a hierarchy, which simply organized its trading activities more efficiently than its rivals, so ‘dumping’ surplus food in return for metals, luxuries, or slaves? (Slavery is impossible to track in the archaeological record but, as will be seen later in this book, was endemic in the ancient world.) The easy access to the ceremonial buildings and the generous open spaces in the centre of the city do suggest a relaxed society. The contrast with the enclosed temple sanctuaries of Egypt is marked. Nor was there any attempt to reuse traditional styles of architecture as a means of ensuring continuity with the cultural symbols of earlier eras.
So Uruk was home to an innovative society that was dedicated to promoting and sustaining an economy based on exchange, possibly using its public spaces for rituals celebrating the fact. Surviving ‘lists of professions’ show a hierarchy of officials and defined professions, priests, potters, and jewellers among them. Of the two leading administrative officials, one was a man (en) and the other a woman (nin). Perhaps Uruk’s greatest achievement was to find ways of sustaining its economic vigour over centuries. However, in about 3100 Bc its trading links disappear, perhaps, it is suggested, because the water supplies around Uruk began to dry up or the land was so intensively cultivated that the rural economy necessary to support the city collapsed. Outlying cultural outposts such as Habuba Kabira simply disappear and the older cultural traditions of northern Mesopotamia reassert themselves. Yet the precedent for city life had been set and as Uruk contracted, many smaller city-states emerged, each exploiting its own access to water and surrounding land.
The use of writing had now become a feature of many of these Mesopotamian city-states. As suggested above, the earliest script was based on logograms, symbols that are used to express a whole word. Two thousand logograms have been recorded from these early centuries of writing and insofar as many represented what it was wished to record (an ear of corn for corn, for instance), they were relatively easy to read and could be comprehensible across different language groups, an important consideration so far as a trading state such as Uruk was concerned. About 3000 bc, however, writing is found expressed in Sumerian. As already noted the origins of the Sumerians are obscure and their language has no links with any other known language but it clearly had some kind of status so that for centuries texts written in Sumerian were considered superior to those in other languages.
Hand in hand with the adoption of Sumerian came an important development, the use of Sumerian words of one syllable (which was common in the language) in longer words where the sound of that syllable was needed. To take an example: the Sumerian word for ‘head’ was sag. Whenever a word including a syllable with the sound sag was to be written, the sign for sag could be used to express that syllable with the remaining syllables of the word expressed by other signs. So, in a first move towards the limited number of symbols of an alphabet, the number of signs required had been reduced, to 600 by 2300 bc, and the range of words which could be expressed had widened. Complications remained. Scribes had to make clear whether the sag sign was the whole word ‘head’ or part of a longer word. Texts dealing with economic matters predominated, as they always had done, but now works of theology, literature, history, and law appear. The writing was no longer incised (on damp clay tablets) with a pointed stylus but one with a wedge shape at its end. (The Romans called the shape cuneus and this gives the script its name of cuneiform.) Gradually the signs diverged from their pictorial roots and became more abstract but it is remarkable that the changes spread uniformly between cities suggesting the continuing importance of trade links between them. Texts found in a large cache of tablets at Shuruppak, north-west of Uruk, show that six neighbouring cities of the period worked well together, even raising men from each to work on communal projects and allowing each other’s citizens free access to their territories. Cuneiform could be used to express any language, just as Latin script can be used today for different European languages. (See Andrew Robinson, Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2009, for these early scripts and Dominique Charpin, Reading and Writing in Babylon, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2010, for a wide-ranging study of the writing process.)
Analysis of the texts from Shuruppak suggests a conservative society. A father exhorts his son not to drink or consort with prostitutes or even to speak in public to a woman he is not married to. He should respect those of higher social status, protect his family, and work the land carefully. In other texts there is an emphasis on lists—of fish, birds, plants, officials, or even mathematical terms. These lexical lists, as they are known, were arranged according to the relative status of subjects (higher officials before lower ones, the sheep as the highest of animals, this suggesting the importance of wool in the community). They reflect the desire to define order, the imposition of an ideal of society that would have been absorbed by all those being trained to write. So writing here transcends administrative functions and becomes a means of transmitting an ideology.
Other innovations of the late fourth millennium include the wheel, probably developed first as a more efficient way of making pottery and then transferred to transport. A tablet incised about 3000 bc provides the earliest known example, a roofed box-like sledge mounted on four solid wheels. A major development was the discovery, again about 3000 bc, that if copper, which had been known in Mesopotamia since about 3500, was mixed with tin, a much harder metal, bronze, would result. Bronze was far more successful than copper in creating sharp edges to cut anything, from crops and wood to human bodies, and it had the extra advantage that its melting point was very much lower than that of copper and the solidifying point of the molten metal even lower than that. This made it much easier to cast. The period from 3000-1000 bc (when the use of iron becomes widespread) is normally referred to as the Bronze Age. Bronze-working spread right across Europe and, even when iron replaced bronze for weapons and tools, bronze remained important for statues and ceremonial goods. The Greeks achieved an extraordinary proficiency in statuary by the fifth century bc.
The use of bronze requires access to copper and tin sources and these now became important. The people of Sumer probably imported their tin from mines in central Asia. It was one strand of a busy network of trade routes, some running north and south along the rivers, others eastwards through the city of Susa on the edge of the Iranian plateau to Afghanistan, the source of lapis lazuli. Timber and aromatics came from the mountains of Turkey and Syria, granite and dolerite from Egypt, cedarwood from the mountains of Lebanon. The sophistication of Sumer’s society can be seen in the finds made in the so-called Royal Cemetery of the city of Ur by the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley in the 1920s and 1930s. (Woolley was able to exploit Britain’s administrative control of Iraq after the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the best finds were transferred to the British Museum.) The richest of the graves, which date from around 2500 bc, contain what appear to be cult figures of men and women (there is no firm evidence that they are actually kings or queens), buried with other bodies around them. There is a mass of finely crafted goods, harps and lyres fashioned in inlaid wood, gaming boards, drinking cups, and jewellery in gold and silver. The so-called Standard of Ur, one of the finest discoveries, is a two-sided sounding box with scenes of war on one side and peace on the other, beautifully inlaid with shell and lapis lazuli. The relationship between the elite corpses and those around them has been the subject of fierce debate. Woolley constructed an elaborate explanation based on royal attendants being drugged and then laid alongside their masters in a single ceremonial burial. More recently it has been thought that the cult figures had such prestige that others wished their bodies to be buried as close to them as possible at the time of death (as, later, Christians would do at the shrines of saints and martyrs).
The plains of Mesopotamia were not peaceful. Ceremonial weapons of gold were found among the finery of the Royal Graves of Ur, suggesting a high status for those successful in war. On the so-called Vulture stele from the city of Lagesh (like the Royal Graves dated possibly to about 2500 bc), a king is portrayed first in a wheeled battle-wagon leading ranks of helmeted infantry and then a second time with the infantry striding over a defeated enemy. The city leaders were not necessarily all war chieftains—some of the terms used to describe them refer to them as religious or administrative rulers—but there is no doubt that this was an age of increasing inter-city rivalry and conflict. The emergence of war leaders is associated with northern Mesopotamia where the Euphrates and the Tigris come closest to each other, the later Babylonia. The riverbeds are stable and land routes well established. It was control and defence of this area that was vital and this required new forms of leadership. The city of Kish, well placed between both rivers, has one of the first recorded kings, one Mesilim, who ruled in about 2600 bc. He is given divine parentage and is recorded as having demarcated a territory.
So it is that palaces now become more prominent in the cities. At Kish, the entrance of the palace was fronted by fortified towers and surrounded by a perimeter wall. There is evidence of growing inequality in society notably in the contrast between the houses of the rich and the poor, and a system of rations appears in which the amount given out depends on the status of the recipient. Slavery makes its first appearance in the written record, with female slaves recorded as working as spinners and weavers in the temple workshops. There are documents from the courts in which slaves dispute their status. (A good overview of the fragmentary evidence is to be found in Daniel Snell, ‘Slavery in the Ancient Near East’, in Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (eds.), The Cambridge History of World Slavery, i: The Ancient Mediterranean World, Cambridge, 2011.)
As seen in Chapter 1, one of the trends of epigraphy has been a shift from a literal translation of documents or inscriptions towards more nuanced interpretations of them as public relations exercises. Texts from Sumer in the late third millennium were often inscribed on slabs or statues and displayed in temples for all to see. They evoke an image of society in which the ruler is upheld as the chosen one of the gods, who maintains peace and security for all and sustains prosperity, not least as an overseer of irrigation. Cities flourish under his rule and the population grows under his ‘shepherding’. (This image of the Good Shepherd reappears throughout the ancient world and is eventually incorporated into Christianity.) This may well have been idealization but the first law codes suggest that there may have been some reality in the picture of the benign ruler. The earliest surviving code, that of Urukagina, ruler of Lagesh about 2350 bc, seems aimed at restricting the power of the bureaucrats and wealthy landowners. The poor are protected against their excesses and there is evidence from Sumer in general that a system of law operated, with courts and respected local citizens sitting as judges.
The Epic of Gilgamesh (see further below) contributes the idea that the king is a superior being created as such by the god Ea and the Mother Goddess.
Ea opened his mouth to speak, saying a word to the Lady of the Gods: ‘You are Belet-ili, the mistress of the great gods. You have created man the human. Fashion now the king, the counsellor-man. Gird the whole of his figure sweet. Make perfect his countenance and well formed his body!’ The Lady of the Gods fashioned the king, the counsellor man. They gave to the king the task of doing battle for the great gods. Anu gave him his crown, Enlil gave him his throne, Nergal gave him his weapons, Ninurta gave him his corona of splendour, The Lady of the Gods gave him his features of majesty, Nuska commissioned counsellors, stood them before him. (Translation: Andrew George)
The rise of an ordered kingship was a development with immense implications for later history. Throughout the following centuries, with the Hellenistic kingships, the pagan Roman emperors, and then the Byzantine emperors, this emphasis on the ruler as the chosen of the gods, whether pagan or, in the case of the Byzantine emperor, Christian, reasserts itself. In each case success in war is intrinsic to the rulers’ survival, as it clearly is here.
World History
