The Tigris Expedition

by Heyerdahl, Thor

  Ships were so much part of the daily life of the Sumerians that they even entered into their proverbs: "The ship bent on honest pursuits sails oflF with the wind, Utu [the sun god] finds honest ports for it. The ship bent on evil sails off with the wind, he will run it aground on the beaches."^ (Gherman jokingly commented that if this proverb had been true we were damned close to getting ourselves a bad reputation by our maneuvers in the river and off Failaka.)

  Sumerian ships and their cargo

  Nobody had done more research into these topics than Armas Salonen. I admired his intellect although we were probably going to prove his verdict on the buoyancy of berdi wrong. But I knew nobody who could present his findings in a way less hkely to become a best seller. In a most academic and almost unintelligible treatise intended only for his fellow readers of Studia Orientalia Edidit Societas Orientalis Fennioa this erudite Finnish scholar presents more than two hundred pages in a mixtiure of German, Greek, Hebraic, Latin, Arabic, French, English, Sumerian, Babylonian and Akkadian languages, amassing all that the learned world has recorded of fragmentary references to ancient Mesopotamian ships and cargo since the days of Alexander the Great. Most of his sources were precious extracts from cuneiform Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets.

  Salonen stressed that the first ships in the twin-river country were reed ships and that, with them as models, the earliest wooden ships were built later. He begins his treatise by pointing out that the evolution of shipbuilding in Mesopotamia is the same as that of ancient Egypt, where reed ships also formed the prototypes for later wooden boats. He shows that until historic time all the original types of Mesopotamian watercraft, in one form or another, continued to survive side by side: the reed boat, the goatskin pontoon raft, the basket boat of coracle type and the plank-built wooden ship.

  First of all he assembles references to the ma-gur, which he refers to as "the seagoing ship," "the god ship," "the ship with high bow and stem." This, he says, was the type depicted in the oldest ideographs for "ship" before the cuneiform script was invented. It is also the traditional vessel incised on the earliest Sumerian cylinder seals. It was the type of ship used by the demigods and divine ancestors before Ur was settled, originally built from reeds, not from wood.

  Salonen specifically refers to the Egyptian reed ships as built of papyrus, but he has no comment on the kind of reeds used for the original seagoing ma-gur of Mesopotamia. He translates the Babylonian term for reed ship, elep urhati, into German as Papyrusboot, but there is no evidence that papyrus ever grew in Mesopotamia.

  For botanical reasons we cannot escape the conclusion that the seagoing Sumerian reed ships were built from the same berdi as that which dominates the local marshes today. It was now up to us to find out whether berdi cut in August might not float just as well as papyrus.

  The national heroes of the Sumerians, the important ancestor-god Enid and his contemporaries, sailed to Ur from distant Dilmim in ma-gurs of reeds. But in subsequent Sumerian times ma-gur also remained the term for the largest of the ships used in the gulf for merchant adventures, even those that followed the original reed ships in form although built from spht timber. Timber became, together with copper, one of the principal cargoes freighted to Mesopotamia in the largest of local saihng ships.

  Salonen shows that the Sumerians had names also for four other types of wooden ships, two for mere river traffic, one for normal sailing both on river and on sea and one a simpler freighter or cargo barge. However, in the functions of the temple priests and other religious performances, it was the "god ship," the original ma-gur, that was invariably represented.

  A common measure given for a ma-gur was 120 gur. A gur was unfortunately a measure of varying value, sometimes given as the equivalent of 80 gallons and sometimes as 30 gallons. In either case it would be ships roughly within the ranges of the modem dhows. Oppenheim, subsequent to Salonen's study, came across references to ships from Ur recorded as 300 gur. He referred to them as exceedingly large, and they were indeed: they would have made the two Ras and Tigris seem small.

  Salonen quotes excerpts from tablet texts referring to passenger ships, ferryboats, fishing vessels, battleships, troop-transport ships, and privately owned as well as chartered merchant vessels. "Life-saving boats" are also mentioned, indicating that larger ships carried lifeboats in case of emergency. The ships even had personal names, like ours today, after towns, countries, kings and heroes. Some even had more romantic names, like The Morning, The Life Protectress, or Heart's Delight. Many carried names referring to their special cargo. To judge from these names the transport was by no means restricted to timber, copper, ivory and textiles, but included such trade goods as wool, canes, reed mats, shoe leather, bricks, quarried stone, asphalt, cattle, small hvestock, hay, grain, flour, bread, dates, milk products, onions, herbs, flax, malt, fish, fish

  oil, vegetable oil and wine. One tablet refers to sixteen men needing two days to pull their ship into port and unload it on the docks and another day to move aU the unloaded cargo into the warehouse.'

  Our conclusion from Salonen's analysis was that Tigris clearly would have to be classed as a ma-gur, a "god ship" of early model. This made sense to everybody on board, especially as I had stressed that we were in search of the very beginning, and Sumerian history began with navigating gods, not with merchant seamen.

  The modern debt to Sumerians

  And I was not joking. It was sometimes easy for us, who have inherited Abraham's monotheistic rehgion from Ur, to forget that the term "god" had a different meaning for the ancestor worshipers who had another rehgion. Semitic tribes blended at an early date with Sumerian intruders in what is today southern Iraq, and there must have been a blending of old rehgions as well. Like Abraham, the Sumerians traced their list of kings back to the boatbuilder who saved mankind from the flood, but whereas the Hebrews believed that kings and men ahke descended from Adam, the Sumerians made a clear distinction between commoners and kings. Like the Egyptians and the early culture peoples in Mexico and Peru, they beheved that their royal famihes were the divine descendants of the sun. They were sun worshipers combined with ancestor worshipers. The king was venerated as a human god even while stiU ahve, and his rank among the deities was higher the farther he was counted back in the royal genealogies. The sacred kings who first came to the Sumerian coast, and whose descendants founded the First Dynasty of Ur, would necessarily be classified as gods by the scribes who recorded ancestral events on tablets in the centuries before Abraham's departure. If we dismiss the Sumerian gods as mere mythical creatures, we should have also to dismiss all their royal famihes from first to last. The real problem is to disentangle the transition between Sumerian history and Sumerian myth way back where terrestrial god-men are blended with bird-men and celestial bodies.

  I had on board also a httle book called The Sumerians, written by another noted authority on Middle Eastern archaeology, Profes-

  sor C. L. Woolley. In his first chapter, termed "The Beginnings,** he goes straight to the point:

  Sumerian legends which explain the beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia seem to imply an influx of people from the sea, which people can scarcely be other than the Sumerians themselves, and the fact that the historic Sumerians are at home in the south country and that Eridu, the city reputed by them to be the oldest in the land, is the southernmost of all, supports that imphcation.

  The same scholar ends his book by stating how diflBcult it is to estimate the debt which the modern world owes to the Sumerians, a branch of mankind so recently rescued from complete oblivion. The Sumerians, he says, merit a very honorable place for their attainment, and a still higher rank for their eflFect on human history. Their civilization ht up a world still plunged in primitive barbarism. We have outgrown the phase when all the arts were traced to Greece and the Olympian Zeus, he says, and continues:

  ... we have learnt how that flower of genius drew its sap from Lydians and Hittites, from Phoenicia and Crete, from Babylon and Egypt. But
the roots go farther back: behind all these lies Sumer. The mihtary conquest of the Siunerians, the arts and crafts which they raised to so high a level, their social organization and their conceptions of morahty, even of religion, are not an isolated phenomenon, an archaeological curiosity; it is as part of our own substance that they claim our study, and in so far as they win our admiration we praise oiu: spiritual forebears.^

  When we praise the Sumerians as our spiritual forebears we praise a people with no known beginnings, a people who came by ma-gur from the sea.

  Tomb riches suggest importation by sea

  The incredible art treasures left by these, our spiritual forebears, in predynastic time, have more to tell us than a story of unsurpassed craftsmanship and a most refined taste.* The mere mate-

  • Summarizing present knowledge gained from excavations, Woolley points out that Sumerian civilization made no progress in the period from the

  First Dynasty of Ur to the last. On the contrary, all archaeological evidence shows tihat Sumerian civilization had attained its zenith already before the First Dynasty was founded: "By the First Dynasty of Ur if there is any change it is in the nature of decadence, and from later ages we have nothing to parallel the treasures of the prehistoric tombs."

  With this in mind, WooUey's vivid descriptions of such tombs are thought-provoking:

  At Ur has been found a cemetery of which the earlier graves would seem to date to about 3500 B.C. and the latest to come down to the beginning of the First Dynasty of Ur; amongst them are the tombs of local kings not recorded in the king-lists. ... It is astonishing to find that at this early period the Sumerians were acquainted with and commonly employed not only the coliimn but the arch, the vault, and . . . the dome, architectxiral forms which were not to find their way into the western world for thousands of years.

  That the general level of civilization accorded with the high development of architecture is shovm by the richness of the graves. Objects of gold and silver are abundant, not only personal ornaments but vessels, weapons, and even tools being made of the precious metals; copper is the metal of everyday use. Stone vases are numerous, white calcite (alabaster) being most favoured, but soapstone, diorite, and limestone also common, while as rarities we find cups or bowls of obsidian and lapis lazuli; lapis and cameUan are the stones ordinarily used by the jeweller. The inlay technique that was illustrated by the Kish wall-decoration, carried out in shell, mother-of-pearl, and lapis lazuli, occurs freely in the graves at Ur.

  A description of the contents of the grave of a prince, Meskalam-dug, belonging to the latter part of the cemetery period, will show the wealth of this civiHzation. The grave was an ordinary one, a plain earth shaft, at the bottom of which was a wooden coffin containing the body with a space alongside it wherein the offerings were placed. The prince wore a complete head-dress or helmet of beaten gold in the form of a wig, the hair rendered by engraved lines and the fillet which bound it by a twisted band also engraved; the helmet came down to the nape of the neck and covered the cheeks, the ears being represented in the roimd and the side-whiskers in relief; it is jxist such a head-covering as is represented on Eannatum's Stela of the Vultiires. With the body were two plain bowls and a shell-shaped lamp of gold, each inscribed with the name of the prince; a dagger v^dth gold blade and gold-studded hilt hung from his silver belt and two axes of electrum lay by his side; his personal ornaments included a bracelet of triangular beads of gold and lapis lazuli, hundreds of other beads in the same materials, ear-rings and bracelets of gold and silver, a gold bull amulet in the form of a seated calf, two silver lamps shaped as shells, a gold pin with lapis head. Outside the coffin the offerings were far more numerous. The finest of them was a gold bowl, fluted and engraved, with small handles of lapis lazuh; by this lay a silver libation-jug and a patten; there were some fifty cups and bowls of silver and copper and a great number of weapons, a gold-mounted spear, daggers with hilts decorated with silver and gold, copper spears, axes and adzes, and a set of arrows with triangular flint heads.

  The royal graves with masonry tomb chambers had been even richer.

  rials chosen for use by the artists may tell us something about their former homeland or routine range of foreign contacts—contacts of no superficial or casual nature. For in the land they came to settle, southern Iraq, they would neither find nor learn about metals or precious stones. There was nothing to be found locally in the entire territory of Sumer but endless alluvial plains with soft soil, mud, and sand that could be used for crops and herds. It is therefore of extreme importance and most thought-compeUing to note that archaeologists have found the tombs of the very first Sumerians, from the earHest settlement period prior to the beginning of the First Dynasty, to abound in objects wrought from raw materials available only far away from Sumer and in widely scattered countries. Jewelry, decorations, weapons, and everyday utensils accompanying buried royalty were made from copper, gold, silver, electrum, alabaster, lapis lazuli, soapstone, hmestone, diorite, carnelian, obsidian, and mother-of-pearl. How could they be acquainted with such materials? And how did they obtain them? In their own land there was not even common rock to quarry. Their only riches were the fertile soil and navigable waters: a perfect location for commercial activities by sea and river. Indeed, the Sumer they found had a richer vegetation, as appears from a tablet describing the arrival at Ur of the first god-king from Dilmun: "To Ur he came, Enki king of the

  and these presented a feature to which there was no parallel in the plain shaft graves. The burial of the kings were accompanied by human sacrifice on a lavish scale, the bottom of the grave pit being crowded with the bodies of men and women who seemed to have been brought down here and butchered where they stood. In one grave the soldiers of the guard, wearing copper helmets and carrying spears. He at the foot of the sloped dromos which lead down into the grave; against the end of the tomb chamber are nine ladies of the court with elaborate golden headdresses; in front of the entrance are drawn up two heavy four-wheeled carts Mdth three bullocks harnessed to each, and the driver's bones lie in the carts and the grooms are by the heads of the animals; in another grave, that of Queen Shub-ad, the court ladies are in two parallel rows, at the end of which is the harpist with a harp of inlay work decorated with a calf's head in lapis and gold, and the player's arm-bones were found lying across the wreckage of the instrument; even inside the tomb chamber two bodies were foimd crouched, one at the head and the other at the foot of the wooden bier on which the queen lay. In no known text is there anything that hints at hmnan sacrifice of this sort, nor had archaeology discovered any trace of such a custom or any survival of it in a later age; if, as I have suggested above, it is to be explained by the deification of the early kings, we can say tiiat in the historic period even the greater gods demanded no such rite. . . .^

  abyss, decrees the fate: 'O city, well supplied, washed by much water, . . . green hke the mountain, Hashur-iorest, wide shade, . . .'"*

  This was the Sumerian description of a place today without a drop of water, buried in sand, deprived of every green leaf and without shade. But the beauty of the landscape did not yield what a goldsmith or a jeweler needed for planning and producing the magnificent treasures interred with the earhest royal families.

  One point that should not be passed over hghtly is what Professor WooUey also emphasized; the wealth of Lower Mesopotamia is piurely agricultural: "there is no metal here and no stone, and not the least interesting point about the treasures recovered from the site of Ur is that the raw material of nearly all of them is imported from abroad." How can the first civihzation known to us, antedating the first known dynasties in both Simier and Egypt, be based entirely on imported materials? Extensive unrecorded travels must somehow have antedated the known beginnings.

  Unless we recognize that the god-men described and depicted on the earliest Sumerian tablets and seals were people Hke those buried in the earliest royal tombs of Ur, we shall never have an explanation of the riches in those tombs.
Enki, the "god" who came from Dilmun and found Ur still washed by water and shaded by hashur-iorest, reflects the memory of one of these mighty kings whose fleet of ma-gurs must already have carried capable craftsmen and merchants to many distant lands. How else could they have been acquainted with the great variety of precious metals and stones they needed to create the royal treasures? Before coming to Ur experienced members of the king's party must aheady have thoroughly explored many distant lands to acquire an expert knowledge of all those foreign materials, where to locate them and how to work them. The shipwrights and seamen of the earhest god-kings buried at Ur must therefore have been of the same high standard as the goldsmiths and the jewelers.

  No wonder that people of today who have heard of spacecraft but never of ma-gur could be fooled into believing that these god-men of sudden appearance had come to Mesopotamia from outer space. We ourselves had every reason to feel humble hanging on a rope behind Slavsk.