The Human Story

by James C. Davis

  The Sumerians now were civilized, and they knew it. But in the wilderness around them there were rougher people — so they saw them — who had not progressed as far. This is how they described such nomads: “The MAR.TU who know no grain…. The MAR.TU who know no house nor town, the boors of the mountains…. The MAR.TU…who do not bend their knees [to farm], who eat raw meat, who have no houses during their lifetime, who are not buried after their deaths.”

  Some towns grew to little cities whose people numbered as many as 35,000. These included Nippur, Uruk, Kish, and Ur. Since all of them depended on the rivers, they were fairly close together; Ur was visible from Eridu. As time went by, the larger cities conquered smaller ones so that they were no longer merely cities but city-states. Along their borders they dug ditches and planted markers.

  Bigger states and warfare called for tougher rulers, so the “big men” gave way to iron-fisted warrior-kings who claimed that they had been chosen by the gods. The warrior-kings fought their neighbors over water rights and land, and if they beat them they removed the border markers. (A proverb ran: “You go and carry off the enemy’s land; the enemy comes and carries off your land.”)

  The kings had courtiers, wives and concubines, many scribes, hordes of servants, companies of infantry, and troops of lancers who rode to battle in chariots, hurling spears. In Ur at least, when rulers died their subjects buried them in outsized graves. Then their court musicians, bodyguards, and concubines (in costly dresses) drank a painless poison and, their goblets still in hand, lay down to die beside their lords.

  One such king was Gilgamesh, the ruler of Uruk. (Now we reach the point in history where we know some names of people, mostly kings.) We don’t know much about his life, but Sumerians wrote poems and tales about him and transformed him from a kinglet to a godlike hero. In the stories Gilgamesh is a complicated man; not only does he do great deeds but he also asks big questions about life and death. In the first poem, Gilgamesh saves Uruk from devastation by the king of Kish. But when he sees men perish and he gazes on “dead bodies floating in the river’s waters” he becomes aware with sorrow that he too will one day die.

  He decides that he must make his name before he meets his fate, and he and his companion, Enkidu, leave home and have adventures. After one of these, Enkidu bravely descends to the world of the dead to recover a drum and drumstick that a goddess gave to Gilgamesh. But then, because he broke the netherworld’s taboos, Enkidu can’t return. Gilgamesh begs the god of wisdom to help him, and finally the spirit of Enkidu rises to the surface of the earth. The two embrace, and Enkidu tells Gilgamesh how dismal existence after death is. In the final poem, Gilgamesh dies.

  About five centuries after the Sumerians had founded them, the age of independent city-states was near its end. The first Sumerian to govern more than several of them may have been King Etana of Kish. In about 2800 B.C. he “stabilized all the lands.” Several centuries later a people from what is now Iran conquered all of Sumer and ruled it for about a century. Later, in about 2350 B.C., another Sumerian, King Lugalzaggesi of Umma, ruled all Sumer. He claimed that under his wise rule everybody “from the rising to the setting of the sun” lived in peace like cattle in a meadow.

  But during Lugalzaggesi’s reign another foreign conqueror appeared. Up the rivers from Sumer, near the site of modern Baghdad, was the kingdom of Akkad. King Sargon of Akkad stormed Lugalzaggesi’s capital city, conquered it, and razed its walls. He clamped Lugalzaggesi’s neck in stocks by a city gate where everyone could spit on him.

  Sargon, “King of Battle,” conquered all of Sumer, to his south, and Assyria, to his north, and more besides. “Now,” he said, “[let’s see] any king who wants to call himself my equal go wherever I went.” His empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. For several generations, Sumer was merely a province.

  Sumer wasn’t finished yet, however, as a kingdom or as a cultural innovator. The Sumerians won their independence back, and King Ur-Nammu united the country. Among his other deeds, Ur-Nammu wrote a code of laws, probably the very first. No doubt he had the words inscribed on large stone tablets for everyone to see, but a damaged clay copy is all that now survives of them. In an introduction to the code, Ur-Nammu boasts that he has brought his people justice. He has rid them of the men who grabbed their oxen, sheep, and donkeys, and has seen to it that “the widow did not fall prey to the powerful” and “the man of one shekel did not fall prey to the man of [sixty shekels].”

  Ur-Nammu’s laws set money fines to compensate for damage. For example: “If a man has cut off…the nose of another man, he shall pay two-thirds of a mina of silver.” And: “If a man violates a virgin slave girl without the owner’s consent, that man shall pay five shekels of silver.” He paid them to the owner, of course, not the slave. Ur-Nammu died in battle with invaders from the mountains to the east. According to a poem he was “abandoned on the field of battle like a broken pot.”

  Sumer now was all but finished. In about 1750 the kingdom of Babylon, farther up the Euphrates, conquered all of Mesopotamia. Henceforth Sumer would be merely an unimportant province of Babylon and later conquerors. The Sumerians abandoned the cities where they had invented civilization, and were absorbed by other peoples. The canals choked up with silt, and the cities crumbled until nothing was left of them but awesome hills of rubble, big bumps in the flat desert. Until the early 1900s, when archaeologists uncovered it, humankind forgot the place where civilization began.

  Sumer lived on, however, in what it had taught the nearby peoples and what others learned from them. The most important thing that others learned from Sumer was how to read and write, but Sumer also taught its neighbors how to live in cities, how to shape their pots on wheels, how to make an inventory, how to put their vehicles on wheels, how to fight with chariots and axes, how to measure fields, and how to figure square and cube roots. Even peoples outside of Mesopotamia, especially the Hebrews, borrowed Sumer’s myths and laws and made them their own.

  ANCIENT EGYPT LAY a thousand miles southwest of Sumer, but these two civilizations were, in a way, sisters. Both arose at about the same time along the banks of rivers, and both showed humans who live in clusters how to organize themselves.

  Although people who live beside the Amazon River in Brazil deny it, the Nile is probably the longest river on earth. It begins at Lake Victoria, deep in East Africa, and from there it flows north through other lakes, threads its way through highlands, deserts, and a vast papyrus swamp, and picks up the Blue Nile and other rivers. Only then does it enter what in ancient times was Egypt. At this point it is still 750 miles from the Mediterranean Sea. From here on, the river promenades along a course (see the map, p. 16) shaped like one of its own water lilies. It curves to the right, it curves to the left, and when it reaches Cairo it divides into several streams (forming the lily blossom) and empties into the Mediterranean.

  Every year, heavy rains in the forests and hills far to the south swell the Nile. Until recent times the river flooded in late summer, and when it receded it left a coat of fertile mud along its banks. (Today a dam across the Nile prevents the floods.) In very ancient times, the narrow strips of fertile land on either side of the river held swamps and slender forests. Just beyond them was the barren desert. The contrast was astounding; one could stand with one foot on fertile soil and the other on gleaming sand.

  Many thousands of years ago, hunters and gatherers lived along the Nile. They reaped wild grains, fished in swamps for perch and catfish, and hunted crocodiles and hippopotami. Then they made the shift to farming that we pictured in a general way at the start of this chapter. They began to keep goats, sheep, cattle, and pigs, and they planted wheat and barley. After centuries had passed, thousands of villages lined the Nile. Each year, just after the Nile had flooded and receded, the peasants would sow their seeds in the mud and later they would reap the grain.

  Not long before 3000 B.C., a conqueror united Egypt. What we know about him isn’t clear. Archaeologists
have found a victory monument that seems to say that the man who united Egypt was a warrior with a chilling name: Scorpion. On the other hand, several ancient lists of Egypt’s rulers start out with a man named Menes. Perhaps Scorpion and Menes were the same person. Menes is said to have made the northern town of Memphis his capital. He reigned for sixty-two years and was killed by a hippopotamus.

  Not long before the time of Menes, the Egyptians invented a writing system. They may have borrowed the idea of writing from the Sumerians (with whom they traded), but recently archaeologists found pots and labels in an ancient Egyptian cemetery with inscriptions that seem to be older than the earliest Sumerian writing. At first the Egyptians painted pictures on wood or clay, and these are known today as hieroglyphs, a word derived from the Egyptian name for them, “the god’s words.” We see some hieroglyphs in this drawing of a tablet that records a victory of an early king. Experts disagree about this, but early Egyptians may have read the hieroglyphs just to the right of the king’s head as, “the falcon-god Horus [i.e., the king himself] has defeated the people of the papyrus country [i.e., “lower,” or northern Egypt].”

  King Narmer’s victory tablet

  Already in this victory tablet the Egyptians were using pictures to represent things that cannot be drawn, such as names. Often, though, the pictures stood for sounds, which could be combined to form words. Later the Egyptians took the next step, which advanced writing beyond what the Sumerians had done. They made up twenty-four symbols to represent the sounds of consonants. They did not make symbols for vowels, and got by without them. But the Egyptians did invent the principle of the alphabet, with symbols for the individual sounds our voices make.

  Th nly trbl s tht th lck f vwls mks t hrd t knw hw thy prnncd sm wrds, r vn wht th wrds wr. (“Wr” cd mn war, whore, where, ware, nd s n.)

  The surviving Egyptian hieroglyphs are hard to understand, and most of them do not tell us the things we really want to know. As a result, figuring out the history of Egypt during most of its three thousand years is like boating down the Nile on a moonless night, with no hint of the life on either bank except rare, mysterious glows of light from dimmed lanterns.

  Egypt’s unifying vision through three millennia was the pharaoh. What, you say, not the gods? But Egyptians believed the pharaoh was a god, a living god. This is why the king is shown on his victory tablet (opposite) as Horus, the ancient sky and falcon god. Pharaohs stood for power and for everlasting order and justice. In their statues and in paintings they are nearly always shown as strong and calm.

  Some of the earliest pharaohs built the pyramids, which were really giant tombs. Since the ruler was a god he lived on after death, and his pyramid would be his house and tomb forever. In about 2680B.C., Pharaoh Djoser set the example by building himself a step pyramid, which looks something like a Sumerian ziggurat. His successors in the centuries that followed had their architects design smooth-sided pyramids that were triumphs of geometry and art.

  Historians know fairly well how the Egyptians built these tombs. Each year in the time of floods, when farming halted, the pharaoh’s builders took on many thousand peasant-workers. Gangs of workers hacked great blocks of stone in quarries hundreds of miles away and then rafted them to the building site. Skillful workmen dressed the stones, and then more gangs of peasants dragged them up long earthen ramps and shoved them into place. What a feat! Pharaoh Khufu’s pyramid at Giza measures 451 feet high. The men who built it had to move two million blocks of stone, and some of these weigh more than one large car. It took them twenty years to build it.

  The pharaohs may have had some earthly motivations to construct these massive tombs. For one thing, since the pyramids were visible from far along the Nile, they reminded those who saw them of the ruler’s might. What’s more, building them must have pleased the ruling class and bonded them to the pharaoh. It gave the royal bureaucrats a goal that they believed in, since their own lives after death depended on the pharaoh’s. They would have their own tombs near the ruler’s great one, with their bodies mummified like his so that they as well as he would have an afterlife. So building his colossal pyramid may have helped to make them loyal to him.

  As for all the peasant-workers, they depended on the government for what they ate throughout a quarter of the year. So being paid to work may have fostered loyalty. And working next to peasants who had come from other places may have made them all feel that they were a single people.

  A single people yes, but of what race or color? Today (in the early 2000s) this question interests many people, black and white, who want to claim these gifted people as their own. The artists who painted scenes of daily life on the walls of tombs showed most of the men as having reddish skin, and the women yellow. However, the bodies of some people in these paintings, especially the slaves or servants, are black. Furthermore, to judge by the faces carved on their statues, a few of the pharaohs and queens and high officials were black Africans. Archaeologists have x-rayed the carefully preserved bodies of both royal and nonroyal Egyptians that are found in tombs. They reached the same conclusion that the paintings and sculpture point to: The ancient Egyptians were a multiracial people.

  In about 2100 B.C., after it had thrived a thousand years, Egypt fell apart. Rival factions fought for power, and the country suffered turmoil for a century and a half. Then able rulers from southern Egypt gained control, and they moved the capital to Thebes, far south of Memphis. They gave the country two centuries of order.

  During these two hundred years the pharaohs, so it seems, held themselves less distant from their people than the earlier pharaohs had. Their tomb inscriptions picture them as shepherds of their flocks. Their statues show them old and worn, nothing like the strong, sure rulers in both earlier and later Egyptian art. Perhaps the sculptors wanted to convey how much the pharaohs cared about the ordinary people.

  Then an Asiatic people, riding horse-drawn chariots of war and wielding battle-axes, conquered Egypt. The Egyptians called them “Hyksos,” which apparently means “rulers of foreign lands.” They learned the Hyksos’s ways of waging war, and a century later the Egyptians drove the Hyksos from the country. The leader of the victors boasted, “When the earth became light, I was upon him like a hawk…. I overthrew him, I razed his wall, I slew his people, and I caused his wife to go down to the riverbank. My soldiers were like lions with their prey, with serfs, cattle, milk, fat, and honey, dividing up their possessions.”

  In the next five hundred years, the pharaohs often went to war to expand their country and create an empire. We can guess why they were free to do this. The rulers no longer needed to employ their armies to keep peace at home, so they used them to extend their power. At times they ruled the little countries on the Mediterranean’s eastern shore, Palestine and Syria, and they also drove far south along the Nile and conquered gold-rich Kush.

  In about 1350 B.C., Pharaoh Amenhotep IV broke shockingly with beliefs that the Egyptians had held for two thousand years. Early in his reign he told his people to abandon all the old gods and to worship only Aten, a god of the sun. He pictured Aten as a loving world creator, whose brilliant rays brought life to humankind. The king originally had borne the name of an old god — Amenhotep means “Amen is content” — but now he changed it to Akhenaten (“One Useful to Aten”) to demonstrate his love of the one true god. All through Egypt Akhenaten’s allies hacked the name of Amen off inscriptions.

  The pharaoh may have had to struggle with his priests and nobles as he rammed his reform through, but for about a decade Akhenaten had his way. Then he ran into trouble. Busy with reform, he had neglected his governors and his army. Enemies attacked, and Egypt lost a good part of its empire. Apparently he then recanted his beliefs and started to restore the old Egyptian gods.

  After Akhenaten’s death first one and then another of his daughters’ husbands took his place. The second was a teenaged prince named Tutankhaten, who changed his name to Tutankhamen, thus honoring the god his father-in-law had depo
sed. He issued a decree admitting Akhenaten’s errors and restored the old religion, and then he died when he was about eighteen.

  Rightly or wrongly, later pharaohs deemed that Akhenaten and the first three pharaohs who succeeded him were all tainted by the same offenses to the gods. So they struck their names from the official list of kings. One result was that Egyptians forgot young Tutankhamen and, what’s more, the location of his tomb. Because of that, and since officials had concealed his tomb so well, grave robbers didn’t find it. But three millennia later, in 1922, English archaeologists uncovered Tutankhamen’s tomb. As Howard Carter shone a flashlight through a hole they had pierced in the tomb, his colleague Lord Carnarvon hoarsely asked him, “What do you see?” Carter whispered, “Wonderful things!”

  Wonderful indeed. Robbers long ago had looted almost all the tombs of Egypt’s pharaohs; and the treasures that were in them are forever gone. But when Carter and Carnarvon found it, Tutankhamen’s mummy, or embalmed cadaver, lay inside a set of “Chinese boxes”: first two gold-and-wooden coffins, then another coffin made of solid gold. On his head he wore a golden portrait mask. In other chambers funerary beds and chests, statues, thrones, and chariots gleamed with gold. And this was the tomb of a minor pharaoh!