Mesopotamia means “land between the rivers” in Greek. The name reflects the centrality of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers to the way of life in this region (see Map 2.2). Mesopotamian civilization developed in the plain alongside and between the rivers, which originate in the mountains of eastern Anatolia (modern Turkey) and empty into the Persian Gulf. This is an alluvial plain—a flat, fertile expanse built up over many millennia by silt that the rivers deposited.
Mesopotamia lies mostly within modern Iraq. To the north and east, an arc of mountains extends from northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia to the Zagros (ZAG-ruhs) Mountains, which separate the plain from the Iranian Plateau. The Syrian and Arabian deserts lie to the west and southwest, the Persian Gulf to the southeast.
Settled Agriculture in an Unstable Landscape
Although the first domestication of plants and animals took place in the “Fertile Crescent” region of northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia around 8000 B. c.E., agriculture did not come to Mesopotamia until approximately 5000 B. c.E. Lacking adequate rainfall (at least 8 inches [20 centimeters] is needed annually), farming in hot, dry southern Mesopotamia depended on irrigation—the artificial provision of water to crops. At first, people probably took advantage of the occasional flooding of the rivers into nearby fields, but the floods could be sudden and violent and tended to come at the wrong time for grain agriculture—in the spring when the crop was ripening in the field. Moreover, the floods sometimes caused the rivers to suddenly change course, cutting off fields and population centers from water and river communication. Shortly after 3000 B. c.E. the Mesopotamians learned to construct canals to carry water to more distant fields.
By 4000 B. c.E. farmers were using ox-drawn plows to turn over the earth. An attached funnel dropped a carefully measured amount of seed into the furrow. Barley was the main cereal crop
MAP 2.2
Interactive Map
Sumerians The people who dominated southern Mesopotamia through the end of the third millennium b. c.e.
Semitic Family of related languages long spoken across parts of western Asia and northern Africa. In antiquity these languages included Hebrew, Aramaic, and Phoenician. The most widespread modern member of the Semitic family is Arabic.
Mesopotamia In order to organize labor resources to create and maintain an irrigation network in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, a land of little rain, the Sumerians of southern Mesopotamia developed new technologies, complex political and social institutions, and distinctive cultural practices.
Because of its ability to tolerate hot, dry conditions and withstand the salt drawn to the surface by evaporation. Fields were left fallow (unplanted) every other year to replenish the nutrients in the soil. Date palms provided food, fiber, and wood. Garden plots produced vegetables. Reed plants, which grew on the riverbanks and in the marshy southern delta, could be woven into mats, baskets, huts, and boats. Fish was a dietary staple. Herds of sheep and goats, which grazed on fallow land or beyond the zone of cultivation, provided wool, milk, and meat. Donkeys, originally domesticated in Northeast Africa, and cattle carried or pulled burdens; in the second millennium B. c.E. they were joined by newly introduced camels from Arabia and horses from the mountains.
Sumerians and Semites
The people living in Mesopotamia at the start of the “historical period”—the period for which we have written evidence—were the Sumerians. Archaeological evidence places them in southern Mesopotamia by 5000 b. c.e. and perhaps even earlier. The Sumerians created the framework of civilization in Mesopotamia during a long period of dominance in the fourth and third millennia B. c.E. Other peoples lived in Mesopotamia as well. Personal names recorded in inscriptions from northerly cities from as early as 2900 B. c.E. reveal the presence of people who spoke a Semitic (suh-MIT-ik) language. (Semitic refers to a family of languages spoken in parts of western Asia and northern Africa, including ancient Hebrew, Aramaic (ar-uh-MAY-ik), Phoenician (fi-NEE-shuhn), and modern Arabic.) Possibly the descendants of nomads who had migrated into the Mesopotamian plain from the western desert, these Semites seem to have lived in peace with the Sumerians, adopting their culture and sometimes achieving positions of wealth and power.
By 2000 B. c.E. the Semitic peoples had become politically dominant, and from this time forward the Semitic language Akkadian (uh-KAY-dee-uhn) supplanted Sumerian, although the Sumerian cultural legacy was preserved. Sumerian-Akkadian dictionaries were compiled and Sumerian literature was translated. This cultural synthesis parallels a biological merging of Sumerians and Semites through intermarriage. Other ethnic groups, including mountain peoples such as the Kassites (KAS-ite) as well as Elamites (EE-luh-mite) and Persians from Iran, played a part in Mesopotamian history. But not until the arrival of Greeks in the late fourth century B. c.E. was the Sumerian-Semitic cultural heritage of Mesopotamia fundamentally altered.
Cities, Kings, and Trade
Villages and Cities
Mesopotamia was a land of villages and cities. Groups of farming families banded together in villages to protect one another; work together at key times in the agricultural cycle; and share tools, barns, and threshing floors. Village society also provided companionship and a pool of potential marriage partners.
City-state A small independent state consisting of an urban center and the surrounding agricultural territory. A characteristic political form in early Mesopotamia, Archaic and Classical Greece, Phoenicia, and early Italy.
Most cities evolved from villages. When a successful village grew, small satellite villages developed nearby and eventually merged with the main village to form an urban center. Historians use the term city-state to designate these self-governing urban centers and the agricultural territories they controlled. Cities needed food, and many Mesopotamian city dwellers went out each day to labor in nearby fields. However, some urban residents did not engage in food production but instead specialized in crafts, manufacturing pottery, artwork, and clothing, as well as weapons, tools, and other objects forged out of metal. Others served the gods or carried out administrative duties. These urban specialists depended on the surplus food production from the villages in their vicinity. In return, the city provided rural districts with military protection against bandits and raiders and a market where villagers could acquire manufactured goods produced by urban specialists.
Stretches of uncultivated land, either desert or swamp, served as buffers between the many small city-states of early Mesopotamia. Nevertheless, disputes over land, water rights, and movable property often sparked hostilities between neighboring cities and prompted most to build protective walls of sun-dried mud bricks.
Mesopotamians opened new land to agriculture by building and maintaining irrigation networks. Canals brought water to fields far from the rivers. Dams raised the level of the river so that water could flow by gravity into the canals. Drainage ditches carried water away from flooded fields before evaporation could draw salt and minerals harmful to crops to the surface. Dikes protected fields near the riverbanks from floods. Because the rivers carried so much silt, clogged channels needed constant dredging.
Reed Huts in the Marshes of Southern Iraq Reeds growing along the river-banks or in the swampy lands at the head of the Persian Gulf were used in antiquity—and continue to be used today—for a variety of purposes, including baskets and small watercraft as well as dwellings.
Religious and Political Leaders
Early Regional Empires
IB PRIMARY SOURCE: The State Regulates Health Care: Hammurabi's Code and Surgeons Consider the various rewards and punishments for surgeons who either succeed or fail at their job around 1800 B. C.E.
Babylon The largest and most important city in Mesopotamia. It achieved particular eminence as the capital of the Amorite king Hammurabi in the eighteenth century b. c.e.
Hammurabi Amorite ruler of Babylon (r. 1792-1750 B. C.E.). He conquered many city-states in southern and northern Mesopotamia and is best known for a code of laws, inscribed on a black stone pillar, illustrating the principles to be used in legal cases.
Trade
Successful operation of these irrigation systems required leaders who were able to organize large numbers of people to work together. Other projects called for similar coordination: the harvest, sheep shearing, the construction of fortification walls and large public buildings, and warfare. Little is known about the political institutions of early Mesopotamian city-states, although there are traces of a citizens' assembly that may have evolved from the traditional village council. The two centers of power attested in written records are the temple and the palace of the king.
Each city had one or more centrally located temples that housed the cult (a set of religious practices) of the deity or deities who watched over the community. The temples owned extensive agricultural lands and stored the gifts that worshipers donated. The leading priests, who controlled the shrines and managed their wealth, played prominent political and economic roles in early communities.
In the third millennium B. c.E. the lugal (LOO-gahl), or “big man”—we would call him a king—emerged in Sumerian cities. A plausible theory maintains that certain men chosen by the community to lead the armies in time of war extended their authority in peacetime and assumed key judicial and ritual functions. The location of the temple in the city's heart and the less prominent location of the king's palace attest to the later emergence of royalty.
The priests and temples retained influence because of their wealth and religious mystique, but they gradually became dependent on the palace. Normally, the king portrayed himself as the deity's earthly representative and saw to the upkeep and building of temples and the proper performance of ritual. Other royal responsibilities included maintaining city walls and defenses, extending and repairing irrigation channels, guarding property rights, warding off outside attackers, and establishing justice.
Some city-states became powerful enough to dominate others. Sargon (SAHR-gone), ruler of the city of Akkad (AH-kahd) around 2350 b. c.e., was the first to unite many cities under one king and capital. Sargon and the four family members who succeeded him over a period of 120 years secured their power in several ways. They razed the walls of conquered cities and installed governors backed by garrisons of Akkadian troops. They gave land to soldiers to ensure their loyalty. Being of Semitic stock, they adapted the cuneiform (kyoo-N EE-uh-form) system of writing used for Sumerian (discussed later in the chapter) to express their own language.
For reasons that remain obscure, the Akkadian state fell around 2230 B. c.E. The Sumerian language and culture became dominant again in the cities of the southern plain under the Third Dynasty of Ur (2112-2004 B. c.E.). Through campaigns of conquest and marriage alliances, this dynasty of five kings flourished for a century. Although not controlling territories as extensive as those of the Akkadians, they maintained tight control by means of a rapidly expanding bureaucracy of administrators and obsessive recordkeeping. Messengers and well-maintained road stations enabled rapid communication, and an official calendar, standardized weights and measures, and uniform writing practices increased the efficiency of the central administration.
In the northwest the kings erected a great wall 125 miles (201 kilometers) in length to keep out the nomadic Amorites (AM-uh-rite), but in the end nomad incursions combined with an Elamite attack from the southeast toppled the Third Dynasty of Ur. The Semitic Amorites founded a new city at Babylon, not far from Akkad. Toward the end of a long reign, Hammurabi (HAM-uh-rah-bee) (r. 1792-1750 b. c.e.) launched a series of aggressive military campaigns, and Babylon became the capital of what historians have named the “Old Babylonian” state, which stretched beyond Sumer and Akkad into the north and northwest from 1900 to 1600 B. c.E. Hammurabi's famous Law Code, inscribed on a polished black stone pillar, provided judges with a lengthy set of examples illustrating principles to use in deciding cases (and thereby left us a fascinating window on the activities of everyday life). Many offenses were met with severe physical punishments and, not infrequently, the death penalty.
The far-reaching conquests of some states were motivated, at least in part, by the need to obtain vital resources. The alternative was to trade for raw materials, and long-distance commerce flourished in most periods. Evidence of boats used in river and sea trade appears as early as the fifth millennium B. c.E. Wool, barley, and vegetable oil were exported in exchange for wood from cedar forests in Lebanon and Syria, silver from Anatolia, gold from Egypt, copper from the eastern Mediterranean and Oman (on the Arabian peninsula), and tin from Afghanistan. Precious stones used for jewelry and carved figurines came from Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
In the third millennium B. c.E. merchants were primarily employed by the palace or temple, the only two institutions with the financial resources and long-distance connections to organize
The collection, transport, and protection of goods. Merchants exchanged surplus food from the estates of kings or temples for raw materials and luxury goods. In the second millennium B. c.E. more commerce came into the hands of independent merchants, and guilds (cooperative associations formed by merchants) became powerful forces in Mesopotamian society. Items could be bartered—traded for one another—or valued in relation to fixed weights of precious metal, primarily silver, or measures of grain.
Mesopotamian Society
Social Classes
Slaves and Peasants
Urbanized civilizations generate social divisions—variations in the status and legal and political privileges of certain groups of people. The rise of cities, specialization of labor, centralization of power, and the use of written records enabled some groups to amass unprecedented wealth. Temple leaders and kings controlled large agricultural estates, and the palace administration collected taxes from subjects. An elite class acquired large landholdings, and soldiers and religious officials received plots of land in return for their services.
The Law Code of Hammurabi in eighteenth-century b. c.e. Babylonia reflects social divisions that may have been valid for other places and times. Society was divided into three classes: (1) the free, landowning class, which included royalty, high-ranking officials, warriors, priests, merchants, and some artisans and shopkeepers; (2) the class of dependent farmers and artisans, whose legal attachment to royal, temple, or private estates made them the primary rural work force; and (3) the class of slaves, primarily employed in domestic service. Penalties for crimes prescribed in the Law Code depended on the class of the offender, with the most severe punishments reserved for the lower orders.
Slavery was not as prevalent and fundamental to the economy as it would be in the later societies of Greece and Rome (see Chapters 5 and 6). Many slaves came from mountain tribes, either captured in war or sold by slave traders. Others were people unable to pay their debts. Normally slaves were not chained, but they were identified by a distinctive hairstyle; if given their freedom, a barber shaved off the telltale mark. In the Old Babylonian period, as the class of people who were not dependent on the temple or palace grew in numbers and importance, the amount of land and other property in private hands increased, and the hiring of free laborers became
Mesopotamian Cylinder Seal Seals indicated the identity of an individual and were impressed into wet clay or wax to “sign” legal documents or to mark ownership of an object. This seal, produced in the period of the Akkadian Empire, depicts Ea (second from right), the god of underground waters, symbolized by the stream with fish emanating from his shoulders; Ishtar, whose attributes of fertility and war are indicated by the date cluster in her hand and the pointed weapons showing above her wings; and the sun-god Shamash, cutting his way out of the mountains with a jagged knife, an evocation of sunrise.
Women
Scribe In the governments of many ancient societies, a professional position reserved for men who had undergone the lengthy training required to be able to read and write using cuneiform, hieroglyphics, or other early, cumbersome writing systems.
Gods
More common. Slaves, dependent workers, and hired laborers were all compensated with commodities such as food and oil in quantities proportional to their age, gender, and tasks.
The daily lives of ordinary Mesopotamians, especially those in villages or on large estates in the countryside, left few archaeological or written remains. Peasants built houses of mud brick and reed, which quickly disintegrate, and they had few metal possessions. Being illiterate, they left no written record of their lives.
It is likewise difficult to discover much about the experiences of women. The written sources were produced by male scribes—trained professionals who applied their reading and writing skills to tasks of administration—and for the most part reflect elite male activities. Anthropologists theorize that women lost social standing and freedoms in societies where agriculture superseded hunting and gathering (see Chapter 1). In hunting-and-gathering societies women provided most of the community's food from their gathering activities, and this work was highly valued. But in Mesopotamia food production depended on the heavy physical labor of plowing, harvesting, and digging irrigation channels, jobs usually performed by men. Since food surpluses permitted families to have more children, bearing and rearing children became the primary occupation of many women, preventing them from acquiring the specialized skills of the scribe or artisan. Women could own property, maintain control of their dowry (a sum of money given by the woman's father to support her in her husband's household), and even engage in trade. Some worked outside the household in textile factories and breweries or as prostitutes, tavern keepers, bakers, or fortunetellers. Nonelite women who stayed at home helped with farming, planted vegetable gardens, cooked, cleaned, fetched water, tended the household fire, and wove baskets and textiles.
The standing of women seems to have declined further in the second millennium B. c.E., perhaps because of the rise of an urbanized middle class and an increase in private wealth. The laws favored the rights of husbands. Although Mesopotamian society was generally monogamous, a man could take a second wife if the first gave him no children, and in later Mesopotamian history kings and wealthy men had several wives. Marriage alliances arranged between families made women into instruments for preserving and increasing family wealth. Alternatively, a family might decide to avoid a daughter's marriage—and the resulting loss of a dowry—by dedicating her to the service of a deity as a “god's bride.” Constraints on women's lives that eventually became part of Islamic tradition, such as largely confining themselves to the home and wearing veils in public (see Chapter 9), may have originated in the second millennium b. c.e.
Gods, Priests, and Temples
The Sumerian gods embodied the forces of nature. When the Semitic peoples became dominant, they equated their deities with those of the Sumerians. Myths of the Sumerian gods were transferred to their Semitic counterparts, and many of the same rituals continued to be practiced. People imagined the gods as anthropomorphic (an-thruh-puh-MORE-fik) —like humans
Ziggurat of Ur-Nammu, ca. 2100 B. c.E. Built at Ur by King Ur-Nammu for the Sumerian moon-god, Nanna, an exterior made of fine bricks baked in a kiln encloses a sun-dried mud-brick core. Three ramps on the first level converge to form a stairway to the second level. The function of ziggurats is not known.
State Religion
Ziggurat A massive pyramidal stepped tower made of mud bricks. It is associated with religious complexes in ancient Mesopotamian cities, but its function is unknown.
Private Religion
Amulet Small charm meant to protect the bearer from evil. Found frequently in archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia and Egypt, amulets reflect the religious practices of the common people.
Writing
Cuneiform A system of writing in which wedge-shaped symbols represented words or syllables. It originated in Mesopotamia and was used initially for Sumerian and Akkadian but later was adapted to represent other languages of western Asia. Literacy was confined to a relatively small group of administrators and scribes.
In form and conduct. They thought the gods had bodies and senses, sought nourishment from sacrifice, enjoyed the worship and obedience of humanity, and were driven by lust, love, hate, anger, and envy. The Mesopotamians feared their gods, believing them responsible for the natural disasters that occurred without warning in their environment, and sought to appease them.
The public, state-organized religion is most visible in the archaeological record. Cities built temples and showed devotion to the divinities who protected the community. The temple precinct, encircled by a high wall, contained the shrine of the chief deity; open-air plazas; chapels for lesser gods; housing, dining facilities, and offices for priests and other temple staff; and craft shops, storerooms, and service buildings. The most visible part of the temple compound was the ziggurat (ZIG-uh-rat), a multistory, mud-brick, pyramid-shaped tower approached by ramps and stairs. Scholars are not certain of the ziggurat's function and symbolic meaning.
A temple was considered the god's residence, and the cult statue in its interior shrine was believed to embody the deity's life force. Priests anticipated and met every need of the divine image in a daily cycle of waking, bathing, dressing, feeding, moving around, entertaining, soothing, and revering. These efforts reflected the claim of the Babylonian Creation Myth that humankind had been created from the blood of a vanquished rebel deity in order to serve the gods. Several thousand priests may have staffed a large temple like that of the chief god Marduk at Babylon.
Priests passed their hereditary office and sacred lore to their sons, and their families lived on rations of food from the deity's estates. The amount a priest received depended on his rank within a complicated hierarchy of status and specialized function. The high priest performed the central acts in the great rituals. Certain priests made music to please the gods. Others exorcised evil spirits. Still others interpreted dreams and divined the future by examining the organs of sacrificed animals, reading patterns in the rising incense smoke, or casting dice.
Even harder to determine are the everyday beliefs and religious practices of the common people. Scholars do not know how much access the general public had to the temple buildings, although individuals did place votive statues in the sanctuaries, believing that these miniature replicas of themselves could continually seek the deity's favor. The survival of many amulets (small charms meant to protect the bearer from evil) and representations of a host of demons suggests widespread belief in magic—the use of special words and rituals to manipulate and control the forces of nature. For example, people believed that a headache was caused by a demon that could be driven out of the ailing body. In return for a gift or sacrifice, a god or goddess might reveal information about the future. Elite and common folk came together in great festivals such as the twelve-day New Year's Festival held each spring in Babylon to mark the beginning of a new agricultural cycle (see Diversity and Dominance: Violence and Order in the Babylonian New Year's Festival).
Technology and Science
The term technology, from the Greek word techne, meaning “skill” or “specialized knowledge,” normally refers to the tools and machines that humans use to manipulate the physical world. Many scholars now use the term more broadly for any specialized knowledge used to transform the natural environment and human society.
An important example of the broader type of technology is writing, which first appeared in Mesopotamia before 3300 B. c.E. The earliest inscribed tablets, found in the chief temple at Uruk, date from a time when the temple was the most important economic institution in the community. According to a plausible recent theory, writing originated from a system of tokens used to keep track of property—such as sheep, cattle, or wagon wheels—when increases in the amount of accumulated wealth and the complexity of commercial transactions strained people's memories. The tokens, made in the shape of the commodity, were sealed in clay envelopes, and pictures of the tokens were incised on the outside of the envelopes as a reminder of what was inside. Eventually, people realized that the incised pictures were an adequate record, making the tokens inside the envelope redundant. These pictures were the first written symbols. Each symbol represented an object, and it could also stand for the sound of the word for that object if the sound was part of a longer word.
The usual method of writing involved pressing the point of a sharpened reed into a moist clay tablet. Because the reed made wedge-shaped impressions, the early realistic pictures were increasingly stylized into a combination of strokes and wedges, a system known as cuneiform
Violence and Order in the Babylonian New Yearns Festival
The twelve-day Babylonian New Year's Festival was one of the most important religious celebrations in ancient Mesopotamia. Fragmentary documents of the third century b. c.e. (fifteen hundred years after Hammurabi) provide most of our information, but because of the continuity of culture over several millennia, the later Babylonian New Year's Festival preserves many of the beliefs and practices of earlier epochs.
In the first days of the festival, most activities took place in inner chambers of the temple of Marduk, patron deity of Babylon, attended only by high-ranking priests. A key ceremony was a ritualized humiliation of the king, followed by a renewal of the institution of divinely sanctioned kingship:
On the fifth day of the month Nisannu. . . they shall bring water for washing the king's hands and then shall accompany him to the temple Esagil. The urigallu-priest shall leave the sanctuary and take away the scepter, the circle, and the sword from the king. He shall bring them before the god Bel [Marduk] and place them on a chair. He shall leave the sanctuary and strike the king's cheek. He shall accompany the king into the presence of the god Bel. He shall drag him by the ears and make him bow to the ground. The king shall speak the following only once: “I did not sin, lord of the countries. I was not neglectful of the requirements of your godship. I did not destroy Babylon. The temple Esagil, I did not forget its rites. I did not rain blows on the cheek of a subordinate." . . . [The urigallu-priest responds:] “The god Bel will listen to your prayer. He will exalt your kingship. The god Bel will bless you forever. He will destroy your enemy, fell your adversary." After the urigallu-priest says this, the king shall regain his composure. The scepter, circle, and sword shall be restored to the king.
Also in the early days of the festival, a priest recited the entire Babylonian Creation Epic to the image of Marduk. After relating the origins of the gods from the mating of two primordial creatures, Tiamat, the female embodiment of the salt sea, and Apsu, the male embodiment of fresh water, the myth tells how Tiamat gathered an army of older gods and monsters to destroy the younger generation of gods.
All the Anunnaki [the younger gods], the host of gods gathered into that place tongue-tied; they sat with mouths shut for they thought, “What other god can make war on Tiamat? No one else can face her and come back." . . . Lord Marduk exulted, . . . with racing spirits he said to the father of gods, “Creator of the gods who decides their destiny, if I must be your avenger, defeating Tiamat, saving your lives, call the Assembly, give me precedence over all the rest; . . . now and for ever let my word be law; I, not you, will decide the world's nature, the things to come. My decrees shall never be altered, never be annulled, but my creation endures to the ends of the world" . . . He took his route towards the rising sound of Tiamat's rage, and all the gods besides, the fathers of the gods pressed in around him, and the lord approached Tiamat. . . . When Tiamat heard him her wits scattered, she was possessed and shrieked aloud, her legs shook from the crotch down, she gabbled spells, muttered maledictions, while the gods of war sharpened their weapons. . . . The lord shot his net to entangle Tiamat, and the pursuing tumid wind, Imhullu, came from behind and beat in her face. When the mouth gaped open to suck him down he drove Imhullu in, so that the mouth would not shut but wind raged through her belly; her carcass blown up, tumescent. She gaped. And now he shot the arrow that split the belly, that pierced the gut and cut the womb. . . .
He split it apart like a cockle-shell; with the upper half he constructed the arc of sky, he pulled down the bar and set a watch on the waters, so they should never escape. . . . He projected positions for the Great Gods conspicuous in the sky, he gave them a starry aspect as constellations; he measured the year, gave it a beginning and an end, and to each month of the twelve three rising stars. . . . Through her ribs he opened gates in the east and west, and gave them strong bolts on the right and left; and high in the belly of Tiamat he set the zenith. He gave the moon the luster of a jewel, he gave him all the night, to mark off days, to watch by night each month the circle of a waxing waning light. . . . When Marduk had sent out the moon, he took the sun and set him to complete the cycle from this one to the next New Year. . . .
Then Marduk considered Tiamat. He skimmed spume from the bitter sea, heaped up the clouds, spindrift of wet and wind
(Latin for “wedge-shaped”) writing. Mastering this system required years of training and practice. Several hundred signs were in use at any one time, as compared to the twenty-five or so signs in an alphabetic system. The prestige and regular employment that went with their position may have made scribes reluctant to simplify the cuneiform system. In the Old Babylonian period, the growth of private commerce brought an increase in the number of people who could read and write, but only a small percentage of the population was literate.
The earliest Mesopotamian documents are economic, but cuneiform came to have wide-ranging uses. Written documents marked with the seal of the participants became the primary proof of legal actions. Texts were written about political, literary, religious, and scientific topics. Cuneiform is not a language but rather a system of writing. Developed originally for the Sumerian language, it was later adapted to the Akkadian language of the Mesopotamian Semites as well as to other languages of western Asia, such as Hittite, Elamite, and Persian.
And cooling rain, the spittle of Tiamat. With his own hands from the steaming mist he spread the clouds. He pressed hard down the head of water, heaping mountains over it, opening springs to flow: Euphrates and Tigris rose from her eyes, but he closed the nostrils and held back their springhead. He piled huge mountains on her paps and through them drove water-holes to channel the deep sources; and high overhead he arched her tail, locked-in to the wheel of heaven; the pit was under his feet, between was the crotch, the sky's fulcrum. Now the earth had foundations and the sky its mantle. . . .
Marduk considered and began to speak to the gods assembled in his presence. This is what he said, “In the former time you inhabited the void above the abyss, but I have made Earth as the mirror of Heaven, I have consolidated the soil for the foundations, and there I will build my city, my beloved home. A holy precinct shall be established with sacred halls for the presence of the king. When you come up from the deep to join the Synod you will find lodging and sleep by night. When others from heaven descend to the Assembly, you too will find lodging and sleep by night. It shall be BABYLON the home of the gods. The masters of all crafts shall build it according to my plan". . . . Now that Marduk has heard what it is the gods are saying, he is moved with desire to create a work of consummate art. He told Ea the deep thought in his heart.
“Blood to blood Ijoin,
Blood to bone I form
An original thing, its name is MAN, aboriginal man is mine in making.
“All his occupations are faithful service. . ."
Ea answered with carefully chosen words, completing the plan for the gods' comfort. He said to Marduk, “Let one of the kindred be taken; only one need die for the new creation. Bring the gods together in the Great Assembly; there let the guilty die, so the rest may live."
Marduk called the Great Gods to the Synod. . . . The king speaks to the rebel gods, “Declare on your oath if ever before you spoke the truth, who instigated rebellion? Who stirred up Tiamat? Who led the battle? Let the instigator of war be handed over; guilt and retribution are on him, and peace will be yours for ever."
The Great Gods answered the Lord of the Universe, the king and counselor of gods, “It was Kingu who instigated rebellion, he stirred up that sea of bitterness and led the battle for her." They declared him guilty, they bound and held him down in front of Ea, they cut his arteries and from his blood they created man; and Ea imposed his servitude. . . .
Much of the subsequent activity of the festival, which took place in the temple courtyard and streets, was a reenactment of the events of the Creation Myth. The festival occurred at the beginning of spring, when the grain shoots were beginning to emerge, and its essential symbolism concerns the return of natural life to the world. The Babylonians believed that the natural world had an annual life cycle consisting of birth, growth, maturity, and death. In winter the cycle drew to a close, and there was no guarantee that life would return to the world. Babylonians hoped proper performance of the New Year's Festival would encourage the gods to grant a renewal of time and life, in essence to re-create the world.
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
1. According to the Creation Epic, how did the present order of the universe come into being? What does the violent nature of this creation tell us about the Mesopotamian view of the physical world and the gods?
2. How did the symbolism of the events of the New Year’s Festival, with its ritual reading and reenactment of the story of the Creation Myth, validate such concepts as kingship, the primacy of Babylon, and mankind’s relationship to the gods?
3. What is the significance of the distinction between the “private” ceremonies celebrated in the temple precincts and the “public” ceremonies that took place in the streets of the city? What does the festival tell us about the relationship of different social groups to the gods?
Source: Adapted from James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3d ed. with supplement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 332-334. Copyright © 1950, 1955, 1969, renewed 1978 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Other Technologies
Bronze An alloy of copper with a small amount of tin (or sometimes arsenic), it is harder and more durable than copper alone. The term Bronze Age is applied to the era—the dates of which vary in different parts of the world—when bronze was the primary metal for tools and weapons.
Other technologies enabled the Mesopotamians to meet the challenges of their physical environment. Wheeled carts and sledlike platforms dragged by cattle were used to transport goods in some locations. In the south, where numerous water channels cut up the landscape, boats and barges predominated. In northern Mesopotamia, donkeys were the chief pack animals for overland caravans before the advent of the camel around 1200 B. c.E. (see Chapter 8).
The Mesopotamians had to import metals, but they became skilled in metallurgy, refining ores containing copper and alloying them with arsenic or tin to make bronze. Craftsmen poured molten bronze into molds to produce tools and weapons. The cooled and hardened bronze took a sharper edge than stone, was less likely to break, and was more easily repaired. Stone implements remained in use among poor people, who could not afford bronze.
Widely available clay was used to make dishware and storage vessels. By 4000 B. c.E. the potter's wheel, a revolving platform spun by hands or feet, made possible the rapid production of
SECTION REVIEW
Mesopotamia was home to a complex civilization that developed in the plain of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, beginning in the fourth millennium b. c.e.
The elements of civilization initially created by the Sumerians, the earliest known people to live in Mesopotamia, were later taken over and adapted by the Semitic peoples who became dominant in the region.
City-states, centered on cities that coalesced out of villages and controlled rural territory, were initially independent.
The temples of the gods, the earliest centers of political and economic power, became subordinate to kings.
Mesopotamian society was divided into three classes: free landowners and professionals in the cities, dependent peasants and artisans on rural estates, and slaves in domestic service.
Mesopotamians feared their gods, who embodied the often-violent forces of nature.
Cuneiform writing evolved from a system of tokens used for economic records, but it came to have a wide range of uses.
A range of technologies (metallurgy, ceramics, transportation, and engineering) and sciences (mathematics and astronomy) enabled Mesopotamians to meet the challenges of their environment.
Vessels with precise and complex shapes. Mud bricks, dried in the sun or baked in an oven for greater durability, were the primary building material. Construction of city walls, temples, and palaces required practical knowledge of architecture and engineering. For example, the reed mats that Mesopotamian builders laid between the mud-brick layers of ziggurats served the same stabilizing purpose as girders in modern high-rise construction.
Early military forces were nonprofessional militias of able-bodied men called up for short periods when needed. The powerful states of the later third and second millennia B. c.E. built up armies of well-trained and well-paid full-time soldiers. In the early second millennium B. c.E. horses appeared in western Asia, and the horse-drawn chariot came into vogue. Infantry found themselves at the mercy of swift chariots carrying a driver and an archer who could easily run them down. Using increasingly effective siege machinery, Mesopotamian soldiers could climb over, undermine, or knock down the walls protecting the cities of their enemies.
Mathematics and Science
Mesopotamians used a base-60 number system in which numbers were expressed as fractions or multiples of 60 (in contrast to our base-10 system; this is the origin of the seconds and minutes we use today). Advances in mathematics and careful observation of the skies made the Mesopotamians sophisticated practitioners of astronomy. Priests compiled lists of omens or unusual sightings on earth and in the heavens, together with a record of the events that coincided with them. They consulted these texts at critical times, for they believed that the recurrence of such phenomena could provide clues to future developments. The underlying premise was that the elements of the material universe, from the microscopic to the macrocosmic, were interconnected in mysterious but undeniable ways.
World History
