Besides just living in cities, a second criterion by which one could consider a people civilized was that they prepared their food and did not eat it raw. The meals of the
Sumero-Akkadians were cooked; the meat was roasted or boiled, and so were broth and soup; bread and cakes were baked in the oven. Beer, wine, honey, and cheese were not regarded as natural but produced; their preparation was equivalent to cooking. The gods were only given cooked meats, and sacrifices consisted of roasted pieces of beef or mutton. This was considered the civilized diet (Limet 1996: 259-61).
Mesopotamians imagined that the first steps of mankind were ‘‘primitive,’’ and they believed that they had gotten beyond this stage of behavior. Long ago men fed on grass like the wild beasts because the gods had not yet given them cereals; they did not wear clothes; flax was unknown.
Some texts recall that in these ancient days there were no domesticated goats or sheep. Therefore there was no wool, no clothes, and no weaving loom. In these remote times men did not eat bread. They drank only water from pools. Enkidu in the Gilgamesh Epic was ‘‘constantly feeding on grass with his beasts’’ (Foster 2001: 14 ii 38). When the harlot led him to Uruk, she dressed him in a piece of her clothing. Enkidu washed his face, anointed himself, drank beer, and ‘‘ate bread until he was sated.’’ In this way he became a civilized man. The poets who lost hope after the destruction of their cities complained that beer, wine, and honey were lacking; the oven in which meat was roasted was disused. They alluded to their enemies as ‘‘those who are unfamiliar with butter’’ or with milk and cream (Michalowski 1989a: 311, 335-6).
If some people, in particular the nomads, were deprived of farming and irrigation, that was the reason in the opinion of the Sumerians that the gods were not favorable to them. They were an object of fun and perhaps contempt.
In the way of treating the dead there was a fundamental difference between the sedentary people and the nomads. The dead were to be buried following the usual customs, called ‘‘putting into the soil,’’ sometimes inside the house, but at other times in a vault. The dead were not cremated. The ghost of a dead one who had not been properly buried in a grave could appear to his relatives and harass them. A man who drowned in a river or in a well or who was killed or hanged, or a man who fell down from a date palm and died, or whose body was left in the desert, or one who died of hunger or thirst might become a ghost (Bottero 1987: 342).
The worst humiliation a defeated king might expect was that the bones of his ancestors might be disturbed by a conqueror. A defeated adversary, going into exile, sometimes carried away the bones of one of his generals or the bones of his late parents (Cassin 1987: 248-54). Therefore sedentary peoples felt that it was abominable for nomads to leave the dead of the tribe anywhere the nomads chanced to be on their journeys. Nomads could not insure the continuity of the generations; the connections in a territory where families were living for a long time broke down. Respect for the dead was, for sedentary people, the symbol that they were permanently settled in a definite place.
World History
