Posted on 04/13/2003 10:04:27 AM PDT by restornu
Chapter 3: EARLY CIVILIZATION, A SHORT HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE EAST FROM 3000 TO 1000 B.C. PART I
The first civilizations after Babel were founded in the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile River valleys. Civilization also occurred at a very early date in the Indus and Yellow River valleys, but they are beyond the scope of this work. In this chapter we will concentrate on the two main civilizations of the "Fertile Crescent," Egypt and Mesopotamia, and conclude with a look at the smaller nations nearby, like the Phoenicians and Minoans.
Map 4: The Middle East, about 2300 B.C. Shown here are VI-dynasty Egypt (yellow), the empire of Sargon I (red), and the Indus valley civilization (purple).
MESOPOTAMIA
The Rise of the Sumerians
Mesopotamia means the land between the rivers; the rivers here are the Euphrates and the Tigris. The southern third of Mesopotamia was known as Sumer (Shinar in Genesis), and its residents, whom we call the Sumerians, developed an agricultural economy before 3000 B.C., as noted in the previous chapter. The Sumerians, according to Merrill Unger, were Hamites. Apparently they were the core group that stayed behind in the ruins of Babel when everybody else moved away. I have previously identified them as the descendants of Nimrod, a grandson of Ham and the mastermind behind Babel.
Archaeological excavations done in Iraq since the mid-nineteenth century have proclaimed the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as the "cradle of civilization." There is also evidence that the Sumerians helped jump-start two other civilizations, those of Egypt and India, but details on that are not clear; only a few Mesopotamian artifacts found in those places testify to the commerce that once existed. We have long regarded Egypt as the world's oldest civilization; now the land of the pharaohs has been relegated to the periphery of the Bronze Age world.(1)
Despite the progress of archaeology, little is known about Mesopotamian history before 2500 B.C. Part of the problem is that most of the available clay tablets from this time are records of business transactions, not the most exciting source of information! The early Sumerians used a system of picture writing that included at least 2,500 characters, each representing a different word. Nouns were easy enough; to express verbs or abstract ideas two or more symbols were put together. For example, a head next to two wavy lines (the symbol for water) meant "drink." As time went by, they experimented with characters that represented syllables or sounds rather than words. By doing this and using a form of punning (one character came to represent several homonyms, or words with the same sound), they reduced the written vocabulary to around 600 words, and as the system of writing grew more sophisticated, it became possible to express virtually any thought that could be spoken.
At the same time there was a revolution in the style of writing. The first scribes wrote in vertical columns like today's Chinese, starting in the top right corner. This was awkward, because the scribe's hand often smudged previously made signs. After a while scribes turned their tablets 90 degrees counterclockwise and started writing horizontally from left to right, which turned out to be more convenient. At the same time they also turned the characters of their writing 90 degrees, presumably so that scribes who learned to read the old-fashioned way could continue to do so by turning the tablet on its right-hand side. Finally the scribes disliked the unsightly bumps and ridges that they made when their writing tool etched the clay, so they replaced drawing sticks with a triangular stylus that was not drawn across the clay but pressed into it, leaving a neat wedge-shaped symbol. Now Sumerian writing lost its picture-book aspect; clusters of wedges replaced drawings, and symbols no longer resembled the words they were supposed to represent. This system of writing, which would be the most widely used in the Middle East for nearly three thousand years, is now called cuneiform, meaning "wedge-shaped" in Latin.
Figure 3: Clay tablet with cuneiform writing. The diagram on the lower two thirds of the tablet is a map of the world, showing the ocean surrounding all land and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers running through the middle.
Cuneiform would be used to record laws, military triumphs, advice in agriculture, and epic literature. Many of these clay tablets, once translated, are still delightful to read today. For instance, around 1800 B.C. one Ea-nasir, a trader who made a living importing copper from Dilmun ( Bahrein), received the oldest known letter of complaint from a dissatisfied customer. "You said," someone wrote to him, "'I will give good ingots to Gimil-Sin.' That is what you said, but you have not done so; you offered bad ingots to my messenger, saying, 'Take it or leave it.' Who am I that you should treat me so contemptuously? Are we not both gentlemen?. . .Who is there among the Dilmun traders who has acted against me in this way?"
Another story, written around 2000 B.C., has gone down as the oldest case of apple polishing. A student, tired of being hit by his schoolteacher's cane for breaking various rules in the classroom, begged his father to invite the teacher home for dinner. The father did just that: when the teacher entered the house, they seated him in a place of honor, the boy attended and served him, and the father gave him a new robe and a new ring to wear. The teacher must have been as underpaid as today's educators, because he was so overcome by this generosity that he forgot the boy's previous conduct. "You have carried out well the school's activities," he told the student. "You have become a man of learning." This story was so popular that twenty-one copies of it have been found so far.
As aspiring scribes learned to write, they also received a healthy dose of mathematics. Sixty and multiples of sixty were seen as lucky numbers, so Sumerian mathematicians used both a decimal and a base-60 system for multiplication and division. The seven-day-week, 360-degree circle, and sixty-minute hour, are all Mesopotamian in origin. So are some of our "English" units of measurement, namely the inch (the average length of three barley corns) and the foot. The standard for the foot was the king's shoe size, so for a while the length of the official "foot" changed every time a new king was crowned.
Other Sumerians focused on spiritual matters. Every Sumerian city had at least one god to worship. Ur, for example, had Nanna, the moon, later known as Sin. Uruk (the Biblical Erech) had two: Anu, the sky-god, and Inanna (later called Ishtar), the goddess of love and war. Nippur venerated Enlil, the wind god, and eventually Enlil became king over the other Sumerian gods; when this happened Nippur became a holy city, "the navel of the world," a neutral site that managed to escape most of the wars fought in the land. Other cities had gods for the water, earth, sun, etc. When the Sumerian city-states united under one ruler, an elaborate mythology was created to explain how the gods interacted (e.g., Anu was the father of Enlil). There was room for every city's gods in the mythology, and new ones were added until the pantheon had no less than 3,000 deities in it.
It was not a religion for optimists. The gods were portrayed as oversized people, showing the best and worst of human nature. According to myth, mankind's only purpose was to serve the gods--one creation epic even claimed that humanity was made from the blood of an evil god, and thus could not help being what he is. The Sumerian view of the afterlife was equally dismal: after death everyone went to a dreary netherworld like the Hades of Greek mythology. In this version of Hell the only consolation was that those who lived good lives did not suffer as much as the rest. The best treatment of dead souls was reserved for royalty and their servants, which helps to explain the mass suicide that took place at the death-pits of Ur (more about that later).
Various forms of divination were invented to learn the will of the gods, the two most popular being astrology and hepatomancy (looking for omens in the livers from sacrificed animals). Failure to worship the gods properly could cause all sorts of calamities: floods, drought, pestilence, or barbarian raids. Generous offerings to the temples were regularly made to avert divine wrath. Sometimes the temples called for more than that; those of Ishtar, for example, demanded the virginity of Ishtar's female worshipers. According to Herodotus, before they could be married, they had to serve as prostitutes in the temple, until they attracted the attention of a pious customer, who expressed his interest by tossing a coin or piece of jewelry to the girl he wanted. Herodotus himself considered the practice unfair because the prettiest girls completed their duty in only a few days, while the homely could be left waiting for years.
The oldest political unit was the city-state, one city with a piece of farmland around it. In Sumer there were fourteen city-states originally. They were, from north to south: Sippar, Kish, Akshak, Larak, Nippur, Adab, Shuruppak, Umma, Lagash, Bad-tibira, Uruk, Larsa, Ur and Eridu. At first each city seems to have been governed by a council of elders who made decisions in a sort of democratic assembly. This worked well enough in peacetime, but when a war or some natural catastrophe happened, quicker decision-making was needed. For this the council appointed a temporary dictator, known as a lugal (literally "big man"). Like the dictators of the Roman republic, more than 2,000 years later, the lugal led the city-state through the emergency; when the crisis ended, so did the big man's authority, and he returned as an honored hero to his former occupation. As the number of wars increased, however, rule by lugals became more common; the logical final step came around 2800 B.C., when a lugal of Kish decided he wanted to be "big" for life. After that the original councils disappeared, lugals started appointing their successors, and the word lugal came to mean "king." It was always government by monarchy after that.
The earliest historical record that we have is a document known as the "Sumerian King List." Compiled from fifteen different texts, this is an uninterrupted list of Mesopotamian kings from the Creation down to the 18th century B.C. The first paragraph lists ten kings with extremely long reigns (averaging 34,500 years each!), before ending with the brief phrase "The Flood swept thereover," undoubtedly a memory of Noah's Flood. After the Flood Kish became the foremost city, ruled by a dynasty of 23 supermen, with an average duration of one thousand years per reign. Gradually the claimed life expectancies decreased; when they finally get below a century, the chronicle can be considered true history.
Eventually the kings of Uruk grew powerful enough to challenge the supremacy of Kish. Legends were later written about all of them; two (Dumuzi and Gilgamesh) were deified and added to the Sumerian pantheon. Dumuzi held a sacred "marriage" with the high priestess of Ishtar while the rest of the city celebrated with an orgy; this was supposed to guarantee good crops (a good crop of babies, anyway!), and Dumuzi became a fertility symbol.(2) Gilgamesh is remembered as a Hercules-type figure, credited with slaying monsters and performing other heroic feats.
Gilgamesh had seven successors, who are only names on the King List to us, and then the city of Ur, enriched from seaborne commerce, became dominant. Around 2550 B.C., a king named Mes-anne-padda overthrew the kings of Uruk and Kish and founded the first dynasty of Ur, which lasted for a century. Contemporary records mentioning the Sumerian kings start appearing around this time, so from this point on true history replaces legend as our main source of information. The tombs of several kings and queens of Ur were excavated in the 1920s by Sir Leonard Woolley, the British archaeologist we earlier credited with rediscovering Sumerian civilization. Besides gold, jewelry, and various art objects, Woolley uncovered a grim secret; whenever a king or queen died in Ur, dozens of servants followed the royal person into the grave and drank poison so they could continue to serve in the next life.
1. When it came to convincing us of their age, the Egyptians were highly successful. Their conservative culture, which changed only slightly over the course of centuries, coupled with an absolute god-king monarchy, easily persuaded Greek visitors like Solon and Herodotus that they were older than everybody else, and Mesopotamian historians like Berosus failed to produce enough evidence to back their claims. The Greeks passed Egypt's claim to us, and we took it as gospel truth until a century after the first translation of hieroglyphics.
It took the diggings of Sir Leonard Woolley and others in southern Iraqi cities like Ur and Eridu to give us a more balanced, less biased picture of the Bronze Age world. Nowadays when one compares Mesopotamia and Egypt, one finds that because the typical Egyptian found life easier than his Mesopotamian counterpart, he was less inclined to change/modernize his tools & ideas.
Consequently Egypt remained at a chalcolithic level of technology all the way to the end of the Old Kingdom (approx. 2200 B.C.), long after Mesopotamia switched over to using bronze implements.
2. The Jewish calendar of today is the same one used by the ancient Mesopotamians, and the fourth month still bears the Semitic name of Dumuzi, Tammuz. The prophet Ezekiel also notes a group of women in Jerusalem "mourning for Tammuz" in Ezek. 8:14; this refers to the legend that claims Dumuzi died and went to the underworld for six months of every year, causing the world to become cold and lifeless (fall and winter) until he came back.
Note: this topic is from 4/13/2003. Thanks restornu.
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Note: this topic is from 4/13/2003. Thanks restornu.
bttt
Hmmm. Now where have I heard that before?;-)
It may tie in with the cult of Demeter whose daughter
resides in the underworld for half the year causing
Demeter to mourn and life to die back during the winter.
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