University of Chicago Press: Excerpt from I. M. Diakonoff, Early Antiquity, translated by A. Kirjanov, Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Chicago Distribution Services, a division of The University of Chicago Press.
University of Chicago Press: Excerpts from Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, Vol. I: Historical Records of Assyria from the Earliest Times to Sargon by Daniel D. Luckenbill, Copyright © 1926, University of Chicago Press. Excerpts from Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, Vol. II: Historical Records of Assyria from Sargon to the End by Daniel D. Luckenbill, Copyright © 1927, University of Chicago Press. Excerpts from The Annals of Sennacherib by Daniel D. Luckenbill, Copyright © 1924, University of Chicago Press. Used by permission of University of Chicago Press.
University of Chicago Press: Five lines from A Babylonian Genesis, translated by Alexander Heidel, Copyright © 1951, University of Chicago Press. Used by permission of University of Chicago Press.
University of Toronto Press: Seven lines from Rulers of Babylonia from the Second Dynasty of Isin to the End of Assyrian Domination (1157–612 BC) by Grant Frame, Copyright © 1995, University of Toronto Press. Used by permission of University of Toronto Press.
University of Toronto Press: Four lines from Assyrian Royal Inscriptions by Albert Kirk Grayson, Copyright © 1972, University of Toronto Press. Used by permission of University of Toronto Press.
Wolkstein, Diane: Four lines from “Wooing of Inanna,” Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, Copyright © 1983. Published by permission of Diane Wolkstein.
1 There are other problems with the king list, including missing pieces where the tablets are broken, and the apparent elimination of rulers who are attested to by inscriptions and other independent evidence; still, the list is the best guide we have to the distant past of the Sumerians.
2 In many histories, these villagers are not called “Sumerians.” Historians have reserved that name for the culture that occupied the Mesopotamian plain from about 3200 BC onwards, because for many years the evidence seemed to suggest that while early villages did exist from about 4500 BC on, the Sumerians themselves were a distinct group who invaded from the north and took over sometime after 3500 BC. However, more recent excavations and the use of technology to sound the land below the water table shows that Sumer was occupied long before 4500 BC. Closer examination of the remains that are accessible to archaeologists shows that a foreign invasion did not impose a new culture over the “native Mesopotamians”; early villages have the same patterns of house building, settlement, decoration, etc., as later “Sumerian” villages. It is much more likely that the earliest villagers were joined by peoples wandering down from the north, up from the south, and over from the east, not in one overwhelming invasion, but in a constant seepage of settlement. Despite this, the old names for the most ancient Sumerian settlements have stuck; the people in the lower Mesopotamian plain are called “Ubaid” for the period 5000–4000 BC, and “Uruk” for the period 4000–3200 BC. Another period, called “Jemdat Nasr,” has been suggested for 3200–2900 BC, although these dates seem to be in flux. The settlements before 5000 are referenced, variously, as Samarra, Hassuna, and Halaf. These eras, based partly on innovations in pottery styles, are named after archaeological sites where the most typical remains of the period were first identified. (Linguists use a different set of names, just to confuse the issue; the Ubaid people become “Proto-Euphrateans,” for example.) I find it simpler—and more accurate—to use “Sumerian” throughout.
3 This is not quite the same as explaining the rise of bureaucracy by the need to control large-scale irrigation systems; as Jared Diamond points out in Guns, Germs, and Steel, the centralized bureaucracies of cities were generally well in place before “complex irrigation systems” formed, and “in the Fertile Crescent food production and village life originated in hills and mountains, not in lowland river valleys”. The formation of bureaucracies was necessary before those systems could be properly built and maintained; and the fact that “civilization” had its beginnings in the hills, which were far less hospitable than the river valleys, demonstrates my point.
4 Inanna is known as Ishtar, slightly later, by the Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia; she evolves into the goddess of both love and war, a combination fairly common in ancient times.
5 In some versions, the Sumerian Noah-figure is named Ziusudra.
6 When the Sumerian flood story was first translated, most historians assumed that the Genesis account was derived from it; further study of the substantial differences between the two stories suggests that they are far more likely to have arisen separately from the same source event.
7 This view of the universe has been somewhat dented by proof that unrepeatable catastrophes do in fact afflict the earth and, quite often, change the climate or bring an end to an entire species: for example, the asteroid thought to have ended the Cretaceous period. For a layman’s overview of ancient global disasters, see Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Mysteries.
8 Of the four rivers named in Genesis 2—Pishon, Gihon, Hiddeqel, and Perat—it appears that Pishon and Gihon disappeared, while Hiddeqel became known as Idiglat, later the Tigris, and Perat (“Great River”) as Uruttu, later the Euphrates. Modern English translations of Genesis 2 tend to cheat and translate Hiddeqel ( ) as “Tigris” and Perat ( ) as “Euphrates.”
9 Like early Sumerian history, early Egyptian history before about 3000 BC (“predynastic Egypt”) is divided into archaeological periods, each period defined partly by pottery styles, and named after towns where typical pottery was found. The earliest settlements, from about 5000 to 4000, are called Badarian. Between 4000 and 3000 BC is known as the Naqada Period, and was once divided into three phases: the Amratian, which runs from 4000 to 3500 BC; the Gerzean, from 3500 to 3200 BC; and the Final Predynastic, from 3200 to 3000 BC. Some Egyptologists divide Naqada into two periods, Naqada I (ends 3400) and II (3400–3200 or so). Yet others label 4000–3500 as Naqada I, 3500–3100 as Naqada II, avoid the labels Amratian and Gerzean altogether, and assign yet a third period, Naqada III, to 3100–3000—a century also sometimes called Dynasty0. Since there is little reason to think that Egyptian culture is somehow unrelated to these earlier settlements of the Nile valley, I will use “Egyptian” throughout. (It was once traditional to suggest that Egyptian culture came from outside the Nile valley and was brought by invaders around 3400, but continued excavations have not supported this theory.)
10 Some studies of predynastic Egypt mention two Scorpion Kings; Scorpion II is the first empire-builder. An earlier king, Scorpion I, may have ruled in the south, but apparently made no effort to unite the country; he may be buried in the tomb at U-jat Abydos.
11 There is, naturally, an ongoing debate about this. From 1500 BC on, inscriptions call the unifier of Egypt “Meni.” This could be the “Menes” of Manetho, the “Narmer” of the palette, a later king named Aha, or—a suggestion which will probably gum up the identification of Egypt’s unifier permanently—it could even be a grammatical form meaning “The one who came.” Whoever he is, he seems to have spearheaded the unification of the two kingdoms.
12 Many of the king lists, found on tomb or palace walls, are clearly written to boost the reputation of one pharaoh or another; the Turin Canon, written about 1250 BC, is a reasonably independent listing that seems to preserve a much older oral tradition.
13 In the Indian cosmology, the previous three ages of Gold, Silver, and Copper (Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, and Duapara Yuga, respectively) had each seen spiritual awareness diminish by one quarter; the Iron Age, being the fourth, is the most wicked of all.
14 There is not total agreement among ancient Chinese accounts about this arrangement of Three God-Kings followed by Three Sage Kings. In some accounts, three Demigod Kings—Fu Hsi, Shennong, and Kan Pao, the thresher of grain—are followed by Five Emperors, who are Huangdi, Ti K’u (the maker of musical instruments), Yao, Shun, and Yü, who founds the semilegendary Xia Dynasty. The Xia Dynasty is foll
owed by the Shang in 1776, the first dynasty for which significant historical records exist.
15 Any Western account of Chinese history is complicated by the fact that no system of transcription of Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet is universally accepted. The Wade-Giles system, devised between 1859 and 1912 by two Cambridge men named (not surprisingly) Wade and Giles, was widely used until 1979, when the government of the People’s Republic of China officially chose the Pinyin (“Chinese Phonetic Alphabet”) system in order to try to standardize the spelling of Chinese names in other languages. Pinyin has not entirely caught on, however, in part because the Wade-Giles romanizations became so well known that many Westerners found the Pinyin versions of Chinese names disorienting (the I ching becomes Yi jing; the Yangtze river becomes the Chang Jiang) and in part because many Chinese terms have become familiar to non-Chinese readers in forms which are neither Wade-Giles nor Pinyin. For example, the northeastern region of China is properly called Tung-pei in Wade-Giles romanization and Dongbei in the Pinyin system, but most historians seem to have given up the battle and just call it by its sixteenth-century name, Manchuria.
Since Pinyin (so far as I can judge) seems the most accurate of the systems, I have tried to use Pinyin whenever possible. However, when another version of a name seems to be so much more familiar that the Pinyin version might cause confusion, I have defaulted to the better-known spelling (as with the Yangtze river).
16 The development of writing is a subject on which volumes have been written; this chapter is only an attempt to put it within its historical context. For a more detailed account written by an actual expert in linguistics, try Steven Roger Fischer’s A History of Writing; for a readable account of the earliest systems of writing and their development, see C. B. F. Walker’s Cuneiform: Reading the Past, as well as the second volume in the series, Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Reading the Past by W. V. Davies.
17 Archaeologists refer to the period of Sumerian history which stretched from 4000 to about 3200 BC as the Uruk Period, a designation which refers to a certain type of pottery characteristic of these years rather than directly to the city of Uruk itself. The name Early Dynastic Period is generally assigned to the years 2900–2350 in Sumerian history. The period is often subdivided into ED I (2900–2800), ED II (2800–2600), and ED III (2600–2350).
18 During Meskiaggasher’s reign, a tiny statue of Inanna stood in the Eanna complex, probably on an altar. The statue’s face, known as the Mask of Warka, was dug up in 1938. It was stolen from the Iraqi National Museum in April of 2004, in the looting that took place during the U.S. invasion. The culprit, ratted out by a neighbor, admitted to Iraqi police that Inanna’s head was buried in his backyard; in September of the same year, police dug it up with a shovel and returned it to the Ministry of Culture.
19 In other words, Sumer had been in the Copper Age and out of the Stone Age for some time. These particular designations are like moveable feasts, changing from civilization to civilization. So the Copper Age of Sumer ran from around 5500 to 3000 or so, at which point smiths began to make bronze and Mesopotamia moved into the Bronze Age; for northern Europeans, who learned much later how to work soft copper into tools and weapons, the Stone Age lasted longer, and the Copper Age stretched until 2250 or so, so that the Bronze Age began seven hundred years later than in Sumer.
20 Enmebaraggesi is the first Sumerian king whose reign can be estimated; he was on the throne roughly around 2700, which allows us to date Gilgamesh’s life as well. See chapter 3, frontmatter.
21 The sequence of rulers seems to have run something like this:
22 Traditionally, the eight kings of “Dynasty 1” are Narmer, Hor-Aha, Djer, Djet (sometimes called Wadj), Den, Adjib, Semerkhet, and Qaa. Hor-Aha is probably Narmer’s son, the pharaoh known to Manetho as Athothis. Given the lack of certainty over Narmer’s actual identity, it is possible that Menes should be identified with Hor-Aha rather than with Narmer (in which case Manetho’s Athothis would have to be Djer). As a way of dealing with this, some sources will list Narmer as belonging to a sui generis “dynasty” nicknamed “Dynasty 0” along with the Scorpion King. I have maintained the identification of Narmer/Menes, so I’ve eliminated any reference here to “Dynasty 0.” The Scorpion King didn’t begin a royal line, so he should remain in predynastic Egypt, where he belongs. (Dating the ancient dynasties of Egypt is an uncertain business. I have here generally followed the dating used by Peter Clayton in his Chronicle of the Pharaohs, although I’ve rejected his “Dynasty 0.”)
23 Some Egyptologists hold that the earliest pharaohs were buried at Saqqara and had honorary tombs also constructed at Abydos, so that they could rest in both north and south; opinion now seems to favor Abydos as the sole royal burying ground for the First Dynasty.
24 When considering Egyptian theology, it is useful to keep in mind Rudolf Anthes’s observation that “Egyptian religion is…completely free of those logics which eliminate one of two contradictory concepts” (“Egyptian Theology in the Third Millennium B.C.”).
25 Yes, I am aware that this is not actually possible. But it would be shocking.
26 The world of the Sumerian dead was a particularly unpleasant place. So far as we can tell, the Sumerian afterlife was carried on in a kind of underground realm neither truly light nor completely dark, neither warm nor cold, where food was tasteless and drink thin, a place where (according to one Sumerian poem) all of the residents wandered around totally naked. It was a place reached across a river that devoured flesh, a world so distant and unpleasant that Gilgamesh refused to allow Enkidu to enter it for an entire week after his death, until the need for burial became imperative.
Enkidu, my friend…
For six days and seven nights I wept over him,
I did not allow him to be buried
Until a worm fell out of his nose.
(Tablet X of Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, Chapter Eleven) An eternal existence in this gray and unattractive place was a horrific prospect for any Sumerian.
27 Except for Djoser, the Third Dynasty kings are just as obscure as those of the Second Dynasty.
28 During the 1980–1988 war between Iran and Iraq, Saddam Hussein used the greatest ziggurat at Ur—the ziggurat of Ur-Nammu—as a base for a battery of antiaircraft guns; it was higher to the heavens than any surrounding spot.
29 Building a place for the god to set his feet remains a constant in ancient Near Eastern forms of worship, right up to the building of Solomon’s Temple, which featured two bronze pillars, each twenty-seven feet high, at its portico. The south pillar was called, in Hebrew, he establishes and in him is strength; in all likelihood they were meant to serve as symbolic pedestals for the God of Abraham. (Their presence in 1 Kings may suggest that Solomon’s attempt to build the temple was less than theologically pure; see chapter 45.)
30 Herodotus refers to Khufu by the Greek name Cheops.
31 Similar battle scenes are shown on the Standard of Ur, the other memorable war monument from Sumer in the years between 3000 and 2500 BC. Found in the Royal Graves of Ur, a set of graves that date from the Early Dynastic III Period (2600–2350), the Standard—still brightly colored after all these millennia—shows phalanxes of soldiers, war-chariots, and even forms of armor: cloaks that appear to be sewn over with metal circles. Lagash was not the only city to engage in highly organized and specialized warfare.
32 When Sumerian scholars proposed this interpretation of the cuneiform sign, the sign itself was immediately adopted as a logo by the Liberty Fund, simply proving that no good social reform goes unexploited.
33 The line here is literally “My city is Azupiranu,” but Azupiranu is not a real city; as the Assyriologist Gwendolyn Leick points out, it refers to the mountainous area in the north where aromatic herbs (azupiranu) grow. See Leick’s Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, Chapter nine.
34 As anyone who has ever been to Sunday School will immediately wonder what possible re
lationship this has to the story of Moses, I have speculated on this in chapter 32.
35 Sharrum-kin, elided to Sharken, is spelled Sargon in Hebrew; it appears in Isa. 20: 1 (in reference to Sargon II, who adopted his great predecessor’s name fifteen hundred years later, around 700 BC), and the Hebrew rendering has become the best-known version of the name.
36 Sargon’s accession is tentatively dated to 2334, a date which is reached by counting seven hundred years backwards from the reign of the Babylonian king Ammisaduga; the date 2334 may be off by as much as two hundred years. However, it has become the traditional dividing point in Mesopotamian history between the Early Dynastic Period (2900–2334) and the Akkadian Period (2334–2100).
37 Gen.10:10 makes specific reference to Babylon, Uruk, and “Akkad, in Shinar.”
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 89