Ancient Iraq

by Georges Roux

  After his victory Marduk put the universe in order. Having in the new sky fixed the course of the sun, the moon and the stars, he decided to create mankind:

  I will establish a savage (lullu), ‘man’ shall be his name.

  Verily, savage-man I will create.

  He shall be charged with the service of the gods

  That they might be at ease!

  On Ea's advice Kingu was put to death, and from his blood Marduk and his father fashioned the first human being. Thereafter Marduk divided the gods into two groups: three hundred of them to dwell in heaven, three hundred to live on earth side by side with humanity. As a reward for his victory the gods built Marduk's great temple in Babylon, Esagila, and, assembled at another great banquet, they ‘proclaimed his fifty names’.

  Childish as this story may sound, it was loaded with grave significance for the Babylonians. To their deeply religious minds it offered a non-rational but nevertheless acceptable ‘explanation’ of the universe. Among other things, it described how the world had assumed its alleged shape; it made good the fact that men must be the servants of the gods; it accounted for the natural wickedness of humanity, created from the blood of evil Kingu; it also justified the exorbitant powers of Marduk (originally Enlil) by his election and his heroic exploit. But, above all, it had, like the Sacred Marriage, a powerful magical virtue. If every year for nearly two millennia Enuma elish was recited by the priests of Babylon on the fourth day of the New Year Festival it was because the Babylonians felt that the great cosmic struggle had never really ended and that the forces of Chaos were always ready to challenge the established Order of the gods.

  Life, Death and Destiny

  The commerce of men with the gods, like the commerce of men between themselves, had its degrees. If the King of Babylon was directly under Marduk's orders the Babylonian peasant was in closer contact with Ashnan, the barley-god, or Shumuqan, the cattle-god, than with Anu or Enlil. Besides, there were enough deities to cater for the important events of life; whenever required, an invocation and an offering of dates would propitiate Gula, the goddess of childbirth, or Pasag, the protector of travellers. In case of dire emergency, the greater deities could be approached through the clergy or, more directly, through the offices of his ‘personal god’.

  Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians looked up to their gods as servants look to their good masters: with submission and fear, but also with admiration and love. For kings and commoners alike, obedience to divine orders was the greatest of qualities, as the service of the gods was the most imperative of duties. While the celebration of the various festivals and the performance of the complicated rituals of the cult were the task of priests, it was the duty of every citizen to send offerings to the temples, to attend the main religious ceremonies, to care for the dead, to pray and make penance, and to observe the innumerable rules and taboos that marked nearly every moment of his life. A sensible man ‘feared the gods’ and scrupulously followed their prescriptions. To do otherwise was not only foolish but sinful, and sin – as everyone knew – brought on man's head the most terrible punishments. Yet it would be wrong to think of the Mesopotamian religion as a purely formal affair, when hymns and prayers disclose the most delicate feelings and burst with genuine emotion.20 The Mesopotamians put their confidence in their gods; they relied upon them as children rely upon their parents, they talked to them as to their ‘real fathers and mothers’, who could be offended and punish, but who could also be placated and forgive.

  Offerings, sacrifices and the observance of religious prescriptions were not all that the Mesopotamian gods required from their worshippers. To ‘make their hearts glow with libation’, to make them ‘exultant with succulent meals’ was certainly deserving, but it was not enough. The favours of the gods went to those who led ‘a good life’, who were good parents, good sons, good neighbours, good citizens, and who practised virtues as highly esteemed then as they are now: kindness and compassion, righteousness and sincerity, justice, respect of the law and of the established order. Every day worship your god, says a Babylonian ‘Counsel of Wisdom’, but also:

  To the feeble show kindness,

  Do not insult the downtrodden,

  Do charitable deeds, render service all your days…

  Do not utter libel, speak what is of good report,

  Do not say evil things, speak well of people…21

  As a reward for piousness and good conduct the gods gave man help and protection in danger, comfort in distress and bereavement, good health, honourable social position, wealth, numerous children, long life, happiness. This was perhaps not a very noble ideal by Christian standards, but the Sumerians and Babylonians were contented with it, for they were practical, down-to-earth people who loved and enjoyed life above everything. To live for ever was the dearest of their dreams, and a number of their myths – in particular Adapa and the Gilgamesh cycle (see next chapter) – aimed at explaining why man had been denied the privilege of immortality.

  But only the gods were immortal. For men death was ineluctable and had to be accepted:

  Only the gods live for ever under the sun,

  As for mankind, numbered are their days,

  Whatever they achieve is but wind.22

  What happened after death? Thousands of graves with their funerary equipment testify to a general belief in an after-life where the dead carried with them their most precious belongings and received food and drink from the living. But such details of the Mesopotamian eschatology as we can extract from the myth ‘Inanna's descent to the Netherworld’ or the Sumerian cycle of Gilgamesh are scanty and often contradictory. The ‘land of no return’ was a vast space somewhere underground, with a huge palace where reigned Ereshkigal and her husband Nergal, the god of war and pestilence, surrounded by a number of deities and guards. To reach this palace the spirits of the dead had to cross a river by ferry, as in the Greek Hades, and take off their clothes. Thereafter, they lived a wretched and dreary life in a place:

  Where dust is their food, clay their sustenance;

  Where they see no light and dwell in darkness,

  Where they are clad like birds with garments of wings,

  Where over door and bolt dust has spread.23

  Yet we learn from other sources that the sun lit the Netherworld on its way round the earth, and that the sun-god Utu pronounced judgement on the dead, so that they were probably not all treated with the same severity. It would seem that the Sumerian idea of hell was as vague as ours, and that a great deal of this literature is just poetical embroidery on a loose theme.

  Death, however, was not the Mesopotamians' sole preoccupation. They had, like us, their share of disease, poverty, frustration and sorrow, and like us they wondered: how could all this happen when the gods ruled the world? How could Evil prevail over Good? To be sure, it was often possible to put the blame on man himself. So tight was the network of rules and prohibitions that surrounded him that to sin and offend the gods was the easiest thing to do. Yet there were occasions when the irreproachable had nevertheless been punished, when the gods seemed to behave in the most incomprehensible way. A Babylonian poem called Ludlul bêl nemeqi, ‘I will praise the Lord of Wisdom’, pictures the feelings of a man, once noble, rich and healthy, now ruined, hated by all and afflicted with the most terrible diseases. As it turns out, in the end the god Marduk takes pity on him and saves him; but our Babylonian Job had had time to doubt the wisdom of Heaven. Bitterly he exclaimed:

  Who knows the will of the gods in heaven?

  Who understands the plan of the underworld gods?

  Where have mortals learnt the way of a god?

  He who was alive yesterday is dead today.

  For a minute he was dejected, suddenly he is exuberant.

  One moment people are singing in exaltation,

  Another they groan like professional mourners…

  I am appalled at these things; I do not understand their significance.24

  But the so-calle
d Babylonian ‘pessimism’ was much more than a temporary outburst of despair. It was metaphysical in essence, not ethical, and had its roots in the natural conditions which prevailed in Mesopotamia itself. The Tigris–Euphrates valley is a country of violent and unexpected changes. The same rivers that bring life can also bring disaster. The winters may be too cold or rainless, the summer winds too dry for the ripening of the dates. A cloudburst can in a moment turn a parched and dusty plain into a sea of mud, and on any fine day a sandstorm can suddenly darken the sky and blow devastation. Confronted with these manifestations of supernatural forces, the Mesopotamian felt bewildered and helpless. He was seized with frightful anxiety. Nothing, he believed, was ever sure. His own life, the life of his family, the produce of his fields and of his cattle, the rhythm and measure of the river floods, the cycle of seasons and indeed the very existence of the universe were constantly at stake. If the cosmos did not revert to confusion, if the world order was none the less maintained, if the human race survived, if life came again to the fields after the scorching heat of the summer, if the moon and the sun and the stars kept revolving in the sky, it was by an act of will of the gods. But the divine decision had not been pronounced once and for all at the origin of all things; it had to be repeated again and again, particularly at the turn of the year, just before that terrible oriental summer when nature seems to die and the future appears loaded with uncertainty. The only thing man could do in these critical circumstances was to provoke the decision of the gods and secure their goodwill by performing the age-old rites that ensured the maintenance of order, the revival of nature and the permanence of life. Each spring, therefore, a great and poignant ceremony took place in many cities and especially in Babylon: the akitu or New Year Festival, which combined the great drama of Creation and the annual reinstatement of the king, and culminated in the gathering of all the gods who solemnly ‘decreed the Destinies’ (see Chapter 24) Only then could the king go back to his throne, the shepherd to his flock, the peasant to his field. The Mesopotamian was reassured: the world would exist for another year.

  CHAPTER 7

  AN AGE OF HEROES

  If the Sumerians were not short of theories as to the origin of the universe, they were regrettably more discreet about their own origins, thereby standing in sharp contrast with, for instance, the Israelites who never forgot that Abraham, their ancestor, had come from Ur and who located the earthly paradise in the garden of Eden (a word derived from the Sumerian edin meaning ‘plain’ or ‘open country’), between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Sumerians have left two texts which allude to a golden age but unfortunately do not provide information on their ancestral cradle. The first one is a passage of the epic tale Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta'1 which speaks of very remote times when there were no dangerous animals and when ‘all peoples together paid homage to Enlil in one single language’. This blissful unity ended when rivalries between Enki and Enlil led to a ‘confusion of tongues’, a theme which recurs in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

  The second text is a strange and complicated myth called Enki and Ninhursag2 (in which the action takes place in Dilmun the island of Bahrain and neighbouring regions). To put it briefly, in this myth the god Enki makes Dilmun a fertile country by creating freshwater springs, while the goddess Ninhursag creates a number of healing gods, one of these being Enshag who appears as Inzak in stone inscriptions found in Bahrain and in the island of Failaka, near Kuwait. The first lines of the myth describe Dilmun as a clean, pure and bright country where old age, disease and death are unknown, and where:

  The raven utters no cries,

  The ittidu-bird utters not the cry of the ittidu-bird

  The lion kills not,

  The wolf snatches not the lamb,

  Unknown is the kid-devouring wild dog…

  Does this mean that the Sumerians originated from, or at least had once lived in this blessed island? There is nothing in the myth that suggests it, and we are inclined to see in these lines an indirect reference to the East, traditionally ‘the land of the living’ and the West, ‘the land of the dead’, perhaps combined with an attempt by the Sumerians to include in their pantheon Inzak and all other gods of Dilmun – a country with which they had very close commercial relations in the third millennium B.C. In reality, the Sumerians, like most ancient peoples, saw their country as the hub of the universe and themselves as the direct descendants of the first human beings. They used the same ideogram for kalam, ‘The Country’ (i.e. Sumer) and for ukú, ‘people in general’ and ‘the people of Sumer’ in particular. Significantly, the other ideogram for ‘country’, kur, pictures a mountain and was originally used in connection with foreign countries only. Clearly the Sumerians identified themselves with the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia and indeed with the initial population of the earth. How, then, did they imagine their own ‘prehistory’?

  From ‘Adam’ to the Deluge

  In the preceding chapter we have seen how, in the great Babylonian Epic of Creation, the first and nameless ‘savage-man’ had been created from the blood of the evil god Kingu. Other myths such as ‘Atrahasis’ (see below) refer to the making by the gods of one or two human beings either from clay or from the blood of minor deities, or both. But nowhere are we told what happened to these Adams or Eves. Up to now the Sumerian literature has offered no close parallel to the biblical story of the Lost Paradise, and to find a Mesopotamian account of the Fall of Man we must turn to the legend of Adapa,3 written in the middle of the second millennium B.C.

  Created by the god Ea (Enki) as ‘the model of men’, Adapa was a priest of Eridu who fulfilled various tasks in Ea's temple, the most important being to supply his master with food. One day, as he was fishing on the ‘great sea’, the South Wind suddenly blew with such violence that his boat capsized and he himself was nearly drowned. In his anger Adapa uttered a curse whereby the wings of the South Wind – that big demon-bird – were broken, and for a long time ‘the South Wind blew not upon the land’. It so happens that the south (-easterly) wind is of capital importance to agriculture in southern Iraq, for it brings what little rain there is in winter, and in summer causes the ripening of the dates.4 When the great god Anu heard what Adapa had done he was naturally much angered and sent for the culprit. But Ea came to Adapa's aid. He told him that upon his arrival at Anu's gate in heaven he would meet the two vegetation gods, Dumuzi and Ningishzida (whom Adapa, it seems, had indirectly ‘killed’ by suppressing the South Wind), but if he clad himself in mourning and showed signs of grief and contrition the two gods would be appeased; they would ‘smile’ and even speak to Anu in Adapa's favour. Anu would then no longer treat Adapa as a criminal but as a guest; he would, after oriental fashion, offer him food and water, clothes to put on and oil with which to anoint himself. The last two Adapa could accept but, warned Ea:

  When they offer thee bread of death,

  Thou shalt not eat it. When they offer thee water of death,

  Thou shalt not drink it…

  This advice that I have given thee, neglect not; the words

  That I have spoken to thee, hold fast!

  Everything happened as Ea had said even beyond expectation, for Anu, touched no doubt by Adapa's repentance and sincere confession, offered him instead of the food and drink of death the ‘bread of life’ and the ‘water of life’. But Adapa, following strictly his master's advice, refused the gifts that would have rendered him immortal. Whereupon, Anu dismissed him with these simple words:

  Take him away and return him to earth.

  Whether Ea's proverbial foresight had failed him, or whether he had deliberately lied to Adapa is difficult to determine. But the result was that Adapa lost his right to immortality. He lost it through blind obedience as Adam lost it through arrogant disobedience. In both cases man had condemned himself to death.

  The biblical parallel, however, goes no farther for the time being, for even if we see in Adapa a Mesopotamian Adam, we are lacking that long
line of posterity which in the Bible links the first man with the Hebrews' true ancestor, Abraham. The Sumerians were not possessed of the passion for genealogy that was characteristic of the nomadic Semites. They viewed their own history from a different angle. The gods, they reasoned, had created mankind for a definite purpose: to feed and serve them. They had themselves fixed the details of this service, they had ‘perfected the rites and exalted the divine ordinances’. Humanity, however, was but a great, rather stupid flock. It needed shepherds, rulers, priestly kings chosen and appointed by the gods to enforce the divine law. At some remote date, therefore, almost immediately after the creation of mankind, ‘the exalted tiara and the throne of kingship’ were ‘lowered from heaven’, and from then on a succession of monarchs led the destinies of Sumer and Akkad on behalf of and for the benefit of the gods. Thus was justified by reference to the most distant past the theory of divinely inspired kingship, current in Mesopotamia from the third millennium onwards. Yet some modern scholars hold different views. They believe that the original political system of Sumer was what they call a ‘primitive democracy’. Monarchy, they say, developed comparatively late in proto-history, when the warrior chief (lugal), formerly elected by an assembly of citizens for short periods of crisis, took over for good the control of the city-state.5 This theory, first put forward by Th. Jacobsen in a penetrating study cannot be lightly dismissed. Thus the passage in the Epic of Creation describing the election of Enlil (or Marduk) to the rank of ‘champion of the gods’ for the specific purpose of waging war against Tiamat may reflect what happened on earth in similar circumstances. There is also no doubt that there were in Early Dynastic Sumer local assemblies, especially of older men, which played a part in the government of each city. But as pointed out by other Sumerologists, these assemblies (ukin) appear to have been purely consultative bodies summoned by the rulers on rare occasions, so that the word ‘democracy’ in this context is perhaps a misnomer. Judging from the texts at our disposal, there is no clear-cut evidence in the Sumerian tradition of a period when the city-states were ruled by collective institutions, and as far as we can go back into the past we see nothing but rulers or monarchs second only to the gods.