Ancient Iraq

by Georges Roux

  Progress in techniques, achievements in art, writing, all these are the symptoms of a fully mature civilization which should be called without hesitation ‘Sumerian’ since it is practically certain that the tablets from Jemdat Nasr and the contemporary levels of Ur and Tell ‘Uqair are written in that language. Born and bred in southern Iraq, this civilization radiated over the entire Near East and exerted a deep influence on the other oriental cultures. We may well imagine that the as yet undeciphered ‘Proto-Elamite’ script on clay, which appears about that time in near-by Elam (south-west Persia), was inspired by the archaic Sumerian writing or invented by a people related to the Sumerians, but it is more difficult to understand through which channel and in what circumstances Egypt borrowed from Mesopotamia.15 Yet the late prehistoric graves of Naqadah have yielded typical Jemdat Nasr cylinder-seals, and the object itself was adopted by the Egyptians, who engraved it with their own traditional designs and, having no clay tablets on which to roll it, used it for centuries as an amulet. Similarly, favourite Mesopotamian motifs, such as hunting scenes, lions devouring cattle or beasts with long, intertwined necks were copied by Egyptian sculptors just as the Egyptian architects of the First Dynasty built their royal tombs with the recessed façades of the Mesopotamian temples. Indeed, some authorities believe that the Sumerian pictograms antedate the earliest hieroglyphs and may well have inspired their inventors. This one-way influence is the more remarkable, since contacts between the two great focuses of civilization in the Near East have always been surprisingly rare and superficial throughout ancient history.

  Less unexpected, though no less striking, was the Sumerian influence over northern Syria. Little is known so far of the first settlement at Ebla, but when that great city flourished, in the third millennium, much of its architecture and art had a strong Sumerian flavour, and the library of its royal palace contained both Sumerian and Semitic texts in standard cuneiform writing, which suggests close previous contacts with southern Iraq. The same can be said of Mari, on the middle Euphrates, where art and script in the Early Dynastic period are purely Sumerian, though here again the people are Semites. Furthermore, the finding of Mesopotamian cylinder-seals in Iran (Susa, Tepe Sialk, Tepe Hissar), as well as in Turkey (Ali_ar, Troy), Lebanon and Palestine, and the discovery of typical Jemdat Nasr pottery in Oman bear witness to extensive commercial relations between lower Mesopotamia and its neighbours.

  Strangely enough, in Mesopotamia proper the archaic Sumerian civilization remained confined for a long time to the southern half of the country. Whilst traces of the Uruk culture are almost omnipresent in the north, traces of the Jemdat Nasr culture are limited to a few sites, thought to be Sumerian colonies, such as Tell Brak, in the Khabur basin, and Grai Resh,16 in the Sinjar area, where temples on platform with clay-cone mosaic and small southern-type idols – some with staring eyes, others spectacle-shaped – were found in the late thirties, or again Tell Asmar and Khafaje, in the Diyala valley, where soundings brought to light Jemdat Nasr pottery, sculptures, cylinder-seals and tablets.17 It therefore looks as though, for some obscure reason, most of Jazirah and the entire upper Tigris valley had been impervious to the cultural developments that had taken place some 300 kilometres to the south. The only important site in future Assyria at that time is Tepe Gawra; yet throughout the Uruk and Jemdat Nasr periods the inhabitants of Tepe Gawra fought with maces and slings, continued to use stamp-seals, made their pottery by hand and ignored writing, though they drove in four-wheeled chariots and buried their chiefs with a wealth of grave furniture unequalled in the south at that time. The ‘Gawra culture’ was eventually replaced by the ‘Nineveh 5 culture’ (level 5 of the deep sounding at Nineveh) characterized by a wheel-made, rather attractive, painted or incised pottery and by Sumerian weapons and seals. But by that time Sumer had already entered history, and the whole of the Early Dynastic period (c. 2900 – 2334 B.C.) was to elapse before the first written documents appeared in the north in the wake of the Akkadian conquerors.

  The gap opened at the end of the fourth millennium between the north and the south was never entirely filled in ancient history. After the Akkadians, successively the Sumerian kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur and Hammurabi of Babylon held under their sway the Upper Tigris and the foothills of Kurdistan. Yet from their inscriptions one forms the impression that these districts were considered somewhat foreign and culturally inferior. The Hittite raid on Babylon (1595 B.C.) and the long period of semi-anarchy that followed the Kassite domination put an end to the political supremacy of the south. The north then took its revenge and the kings of Assur and Nineveh ruled over the whole of Mesopotamia. But the Babylonians never willingly accepted government by these ‘barbarians’ and repeatedly tried to shake off the yoke, while the mighty monarchs of Assyria themselves, who piously collected the old Sumerian texts and regularly took part in the New Year Festival of Babylon, implicitly acknowledged their debt to a very ancient and venerable civilization.

  The Sumerian Problem

  Who are these Sumerians, whose name can now be pronounced for the first time and who are going to occupy the stage of history for the next thousand years? Do they represent a very ancient layer of population in prehistoric Mesopotamia, or did they come from some other country, and if so, when did they come and whence? This important problem has been debated again and again ever since the first relics of the Sumerian civilization were brought to light more than a century ago, and is still with us. The most recent discoveries, far from offering a solution, have made it even more difficult to answer, but at least they have supplied fresh and solid arguments to an old debate and it is in this new light that the ‘Sumerian problem’ should be examined.18

  The word ‘Sumerian’ comes from the ancient name of the southern part of Iraq: Sumer or, more exactly, Shumer, usually written in cuneiform texts with the signs KI.EN.GI.19 At the beginning of historical times three ethnic groups lived in close contact within that region: the Sumerians, predominant in the extreme south from approximately Nippur (near Diwaniyah) to the Gulf, the Semites, predominant in central Mesopotamia (the region called Akkad after 2400 B.C.), and a small, diffuse minority of uncertain origin to which no definite label can be attached. From the point of view of the modern historian, the line of demarcation between these three components of the first historical population of Mesopotamia is neither political nor cultural but linguistic. All of them had the same institutions; all of them shared the way of life, the techniques, the artistic traditions, the religious beliefs, in a word the civilization which had originated in the extreme south and is rightly attributed to the Sumerians. The only reliable criterion by which we can separate and identify these three peoples is therefore their language. Stricto sensu, the appellation ‘Sumerians’ should be taken as meaning ‘Sumerian-speaking people’ and nothing else; similarly, the ‘Semites’ were those who spoke a Semitic dialect; and indeed we would be unaware of the existence of the third ethnic element were it not for a few strange, non-Sumerian and non-Semitic personal and geographical names which occur here and there in ancient texts. This, incidentally, explains why all efforts to define and to assess the relations between Sumerians and Semites in other fields than philology are doomed to failure.20 Another point should be made quite clear: there is no such thing as a Sumerian ‘race’ neither in the scientific nor in the ordinary sense of the term. The skulls from Sumerian graves that have been examined are either dolicho- or brachycephalic and indicate a mixture of the so-called Armenoid and Mediterranean races, the latter being somewhat predominant.21 As for the physical features depicted on monuments, they are largely conventional and have therefore no real value. The big, fleshy nose, the enormous eyes, the thick neck and flat occiput long considered to be typical of the Sumerians also belong to the statues of individuals bearing genuine Semitic names found in the almost exclusively Semitic district of Mari, while more realistic portraits, such as those of Gudea, the Sumerian governor of Sumerian Lagash, show a short, straight nose and a long
head.

  Philology alone is often a good index of ethnic relationship. Thus the Greeks, the Hittites and the Indo-Aryans, though dispersed over a wide area, were related to each other through the Indo-European languages they spoke and probably came from a common homeland in south-eastern Europe. But in the case of the Sumerians philology is of no help. The Sumerian language is ‘agglutinative’, which means that it is formed of verbal radicals modified or inter-connected by the apposition of grammatical particles. As such, it belongs to the same category as numerous dialects spoken from Hungary to Polynesia, though it bears no close resemblance to any known language, dead or living. The Sumerian literature presents us with the picture of a highly intelligent, industrious, argumentative and deeply religious people, but offers no clue as to its origins. Sumerian myths and legends are almost invariably drawn against a background of rivers and marshes, of reeds, tamarisks and palm-trees – a typical southern Iraqi background – as though the Sumerians had always lived in that country, and there is nothing in them to indicate clearly an ancestral homeland different from Mesopotamia.

  We are therefore obliged to fall back on archaeology, that is to say on the material elements of the Sumerian civilization. The question here is: which of the various ethnic groups responsible for the successive proto-historic cultures of Mesopotamia can be identified with the Sumerian-speaking people of history? Put in this way the problem is of course insoluble, since we do not know what languages were spoken in Mesopotamia before the Uruk period. Whatever answer is given can only rest on broad generalization, intuitive thinking or mere guesswork. On this question scholars in general are divided into two groups: for some the Sumerians came to Mesopotamia during the Uruk period; for others they were already there in Ubaid times at the latest. We cannot enter here into a detailed discussion, but we are personally rather inclined to agree with the tenets of the second theory. True, the Sumerian writing appears for the first time at the end of the Uruk period, but this does not imply that the Sumerian language was not spoken before. Again, there are in ancient Mesopotamian literature place names that are neither Sumerian nor Semitic, but do they necessarily represent the traces of an older and exclusive population? As for the change in pottery style which marks the beginning of the Uruk period, we have seen that it was probably due to mass production rather than to foreign invasion or influence. In fact, in all respects the Uruk culture appears as the development of conditions that existed during the Ubaid period. In any case, if we assume that the Sumerians were invaders where did they come from? Some authors have sought their origin in the mountainous countries to the east of Mesopotamia where they arrived by land or by sea, while others believe that they came from Anatolia following the Euphrates down to its mouth; but the arguments afforded in favour of these theories are not very convincing. Furthermore, since the Second World War numerous archaeological excavations have been conducted in Turkey, Iran, Baluchistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, and none of them has revealed anything resembling, even vaguely, the Uruk and Jemdat Nasr cultures; nor have they produced any inscription written in Sumerian which of course would be the only decisive evidence. In these circumstances, why not turn to Mesopotamia itself?

  It has been shown in Chapter 4 that many material elements of the Sumerian civilization – mud-brick buildings, coloured walls and frescoes, stone vases and statuettes, clay figurines, seals, metal work and even irrigation agriculture – originated in northern Iraq during the sixth and fifth millennia B.C., and the excavations at Choga Mami have established a definite link between the Samarra culture and the partly contemporary Eridu and Hajji Muhammad cultures, now recognized as the early stages of the Ubaid culture. To equate the Samarrans with the Sumerians, or even the Ubaidians, on the sole basis of their pottery and extraordinary statuettes would be unacceptably rash, but there is little doubt that the first settlers in southern Mesopotamia were in some way related to, or at least influenced by, their northern neighbours. And the Samarrans, in turn, might have descended from the Neolithic farmers of Hassuna or Umm Dabaghiya. Thus the more we try to push back the limits of our problem, the more it thins out and vanishes in the mist of prehistory. One is even tempted to wonder whether there is any problem at all. The Sumerians were, as we all are, a mixture of races and probably of peoples; their civilization, like ours, was a blend of foreign and indigenous elements; their language belongs to a linguistic group large enough to have covered the whole of Western Asia and much more. They may therefore represent a branch of the population which occupied the greater part of the Near East in early Neolithic and Chalcolithic times. In other words, they may have ‘always’ been in Iraq, and this is all we can say. As one of the most brilliant orientalists put it: ‘The much discussed problem of the origin of the Sumerians may well turn out to be the chase of a chimera.’22

  CHAPTER 6

  THE GODS OF SUMER

  Whatever the real origin of the Sumerians, there is no doubt that their civilization sprang from the prehistory of Iraq itself. It reflected the mood and fulfilled the aspirations of the stable, conservative peasant society which has always formed the backbone of that country; it was ‘Mesopotamian’ in origin and in essence. For this reason, it survived the disappearance of the Sumerians as a nation in about 2000 B.C. and was adopted and carried over with but little modification by the Amorites, Kassites, Assyrians and Chaldaeans who, after them, ruled in succession over Mesopotamia. The Assyro-Babylonian civilization of the second and first millennia is therefore not fundamentally different from that of the Sumerians, and from whatever angle we approach it we are almost invariably brought back to a Sumerian model.

  This is particularly true of religion. For more than three thousand years the gods of Sumer were worshipped by Sumer-ans and Semites alike; and for more than three thousand years the religious ideas promoted by the Sumerians played an extraordinary part in the public and private life of the Mesopotamians, modelling their institutions, colouring their works of art and literature, pervading every form of activity from the highest functions of the kings to the day-to-day occupations of their subjects. In no other antique society did religion occupy such a prominent position, because in no other antique society did man feel himself so utterly dependent upon the will of the gods. The fact that the Sumerian society crystallized around temples had deep and lasting consequences. In theory, for instance, the land never ceased to belong to the gods, and the mighty Assyrian monarchs whose empire extended from the Nile to the Caspian Sea were the humble servants of their god Assur, just as the governors of Lagash, who ruled over a few square miles of Sumer, were those of their god Ningirsu. This of course does not mean that economics and human passions did not play a part in the history of ancient Iraq, as they did in the history of other countries; but the religious motives should never be forgotten nor minimized. As an introduction to the historical periods which we are about to enter, a brief description of the Sumerian pantheon and religious ideas will surely not be out of place.1

  The Sumerian Pantheon

  Our knowledge of Mesopotamian religious and moral ideas derives from a variety of texts – epic tales and myths, rituals, hymns, prayers, incantations, lists of gods, collections of precepts, proverbs, etc. – which come, in the main, from three great sources: the sacerdotal library of Nippur (the religious centre of Sumer), and the palace and temple libraries of Assur and Nineveh. Some of these texts are written in Sumerian,2 others are usually Assyrian or Babylonian copies or adaptations of Sumerian originals, even though, in a few cases, they have no counterpart in the Sumerian religious literature discovered so far. The dates when they were actually composed vary from about 1900 B.C. to the last centuries before Christ, but we may reasonably assume that they embody verbal traditions going back to the Early Dynastic period and possibly even earlier, since a number of Sumerian deities and mythological scenes can be recognized on the cylinder-seals and sculptured objects from the Uruk and Jemdat Nasr periods. Before these, positive evidence is lacking, but the unbroken c
ontinuity of architectural traditions, the rebuilding of temple upon temple in the same sacred area suggest that some at least of the Sumerian gods were already worshipped in southern Iraq during the Ubaid period.

  The formulation of religious ideas and their expression as divine families and in myths were certainly slow processes, carried out by several ‘schools’ of priests simultaneously; but somehow, in the end a general agreement on principles was reached, and while each city retained its own patron-god and its own set of legends, the whole country worshipped a common pantheon.3 The divine society was conceived as a replica of the human society of Sumer and organized accordingly. The heavens, the earth and the netherworld were populated with gods – at first in hundreds but later less numerous owing to an internal syncretism that never reached monotheism. These gods, like the Greek gods, had the appearances, qualities, defects and passions of human beings, but they were endowed with fabulous strength, supernatural powers and immortality. Moreover, they manifested themselves in a halo of dazzling light, a ‘splendour’ which filled man with fear and respect and gave him the indescribable feeling of contact with the divine, which is the essence of all religions.4

  The gods of Mesopotamia were not all of equal status, but to classify them is not an easy task. At the bottom of the scale we would perhaps put the benevolent spirits and the evil demons who belonged more to magics than to religion proper, and the ‘personal god’, a kind of guardian angel attached to every person and acting as an intermediary between this person and the higher gods.5 Then would come the humble deities who were responsible for such tools as the plough, the brick-mould or the pickaxe, and for such professions as potters, blacksmiths, goldsmiths and the like, as well as the gods of Nature in the broad sense of the term (gods of rivers, mountains, minerals, plants, wild and domesticated animals, gods of fertility, birth and medicine, gods of winds and thunderstorms), originally perhaps the most numerous and important as they personified ‘élan vital, the spiritual cores in phenomena, indwelling wills and powers’,6 all concepts that are characteristic of the so-called primitive mentality. One step higher would be found the gods of the Netherworld, Nergal and Ereshkigal, side by side with warrior gods such as Ninurta. Above them the astral deities, notably the moon-god Nanna (called Sin by the Semites), who controlled time (the lunar months) and ‘knew the destinies of all’ but remained in many ways mysterious, and the sun-god Utu (Shamash), the god of justice who ‘laid bare the righteous and the wicked’ as he flooded the world with blinding light. Finally, atop of the scale would naturally stand as dominant figures in the vast Mesopotamian pantheon the three great male gods An, Enlil and Enki.