Sumerian, Mesapotamian Civlization…the cradle of human civilization

(late 6th millennium BC - early 2nd millennium BC)

hi friends,

Archeologists call Sumerian (Mesapotamia) civilization as the cradle of all the human civilizations across the wold. My question is, because of the influence and monopoly of some fast growing religions did we ignore our past?

Authorities do not all agree about the definition of civilization. Most accept the view that “a civilization is a culture which has attained a degree of complexity usually characterized by urban life.” In other words, a civilization is a culture capable of sustaining a substantial number of specialists to cope with the economic, social, political, and religious needs of a populous society. Other characteristics usually present in a civilization include a system of writing to keep records, monumental architecture in place of simple buildings, and an art that is no longer merely decorative, like that on Neolithic pottery, but representative of people and their activities. All these characteristics of civilization first appeared in Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamia: The First Civilization

During the European Ice Ages the Near East was an uninhabitable, overgrown swamp.  When the glaciers began to retreat the rainfall in the Near East began a steady decline.  The grasslands became deserts and the swamps slowly became inhabitable lowlands, a valley formed by two neighboring rivers; the Tigris and the Euphrates; Mesapotamia

The first true civilization on planet earth (of which we are aware) developed in Mesopotamia, and the people who built this first civilization are known as the Sumerians. Ironically, little more than a century ago, nothing was known of the Sumerians.  The first civilization in history had been lost to history.  Slowly, over the past hundred years, and largely due to the efforts of the Universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, the puzzle has been slowly pieced together.

There are, however, more questions than answers.  For instance, modern scholars have no idea where the Sumerians originated.  We do know that the Sumerians were not the first inhabitants of the ‘Land Between the Rivers.’   The primary evidence that there were earlier inhabitants comes from the study of language, in much the same way that the names  Chattahoochee, Tallapoosa, Etowah, Coosa, Kennesaw, Apalacheecola, and Alatoona indicate that those who now inhabit our own state were preceded by others.  At present, the best scholarly guess is that the Sumerians came from the same area that would eventually give rise to the Indo-Europeans, though the Sumerian language does not appear to be related in any way to the Indo-European languages, or, for that matter, any other language that has ever been spoken on earth.

The Sumerians occupied the lower half of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, roughly the area presently known as Iraq.  It was an area about the size of Massachusetts and had a hot, dry, wind-swept climate.  There were no trees, and therefore no timber.  It would seem that the only natural resources were the silt-laden waters of the rivers and the huge reeds that grew in abundance along the river banks.  For the resourceful Sumerians, however, this would prove to be sufficient.

During the first half of this century an extremely important historian named Arnold Toynbee authored  a twelve-volume work that revolved around his theory that civilizations develop or die as a result of the manner in which they respond to various challenges.  In most instances, these challenges are environmental in nature.  The environment of Sumeria and the Sumerian response provide an excellent example of Toynbee’s theories in action.

To begin, contrast the Tigris-Euphrates valley with the Nile, the cradle of Egyptian civilization.  The Nile was predictable.  Though it flooded, it flooded with regularity, at the same time and with basically the same intensity every year.  As we will see next class, this predictability is the key to understanding the longevity as well as the static nature of Egyptian civilization.

The flooding of the Tigris and the Euphrates, on the other hand,  was violent and irregular, hence the mental life of the Mesopotamian civilizations became dominated by a sense of anxiety.  The world was unpredictable and capricious, bringing life-giving rain and fertility one day and devastating destruction the next.  Since the forces of nature were expressions of the whims of the gods, the gods were also unpredictable and capricious.  Rather than the high estate which the Hebrews assigned to man as the representative of God on earth, for the inhabitants of Mesopotamia man was nothing more than the slave of the gods, designed to relieve them of their toils and subject to their whims.

 

The Geography Of Mesopotamia

Around 6000 B.C., after the agricultural revolution had begun to spread from its place of origin on the northern fringes of the Fertile Crescent, Neolithic farmers started filtering into the Fertile Crescent itself. Although this broad plain received insufficient rainfall to support agriculture, the eastern section was watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Known in ancient days as Mesopotamia (Greek for “between the rivers”), the lower reaches of this plain, beginning near the point where the two rivers nearly converge, was called Babylonia. Babylonia in turn encompassed two geographical areas – Akkad in the north and Sumer, the delta of this river system, in the south.

Broken by river channels teeming with fish and re-fertilized frequently by alluvial silt laid down by uncontrolled floods, Sumer had a splendid agricultural potential if the environmental problems could be solved. “Arable land had literally to be created out of a chaos of swamps and sand banks by a ‘separation’ of land from water; the swamps … drained; the floods controlled; and lifegiving waters led to the rainless desert by artificial canals.” ^4 In the course of the several successive cultural phases that followed the arrival of the first Neolithic farmers, these and other related problems were solved by cooperative effort. Between 3500 B.C. and 3100 B.C. the foundations were laid for a type of economy and social order markedly different from anything previously known. This far more complex culture, based on large urban centers rather than simple villages, is what we associate with civilization.

The Land of the Two Rivers

The word Mesopotamia , derived from the Greek, means literally “between the rivers,” but it is generally used to denote the whole plain between and on either side of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The plain was bordered to the north and east by mountain ranges, in whose foothills, as we have seen, agriculture was first practiced. To the southwest lay the forbidding deserts of Syria and Arabia . Each year the two great rivers were swollen with the winter snows of the northern mountains, and each year at flood stage they spread a thick layer of immensely fertile silt across the flood plain where they approached the Persian Gulf . This delta, a land of swamp rich in fish, wildlife, and date palms, was the most challenging and rewarding of the three natural units into which the river valleys were divided; and it was here, between 3500 and 3000 B. c., that agricultural settlers created the rich city-states of Sumer , of which the best known is Ur . The delta could only be made habitable by large-scale irrigation and flood control, which was managed first by a priestly class and then by godlike kings. Except for the period 2370-2230 B. c., when the Sumerian city-states were subdued by the rulers of Akkad , the region immediately to the north, the Sumerians remained prosperous and powerful until the beginning of the second millennium B. C.

Immediately to the north of Sumer , where the two rivers came most closely together, the plain was less subject to flooding but made fertile by rainfall and irrigation. This area, known first as Akkad , was inhabited by Semitic peoples who subdued the Sumerians in the middle of the third millennium; but when a new Semitic people called the Amorites conquered the area about 2000 B. c. and founded a great new capital city of Babylon ; the area henceforth came to be known as Babylonia . Except for invasions of Hittites and Kassites, who were Indo-European peoples from Asia , Babylonia continued to dominate Mesopotamia for a thousand years.

The third natural region, called Assyria , stretched from the north of Babylonia to the Taurus range. Its rolling hills were watered by a large number of streams flowing from the surrounding mountains as well as by the headwaters of the two great rivers themselves. The Assyrians, a viciously warlike Semitic people, were able to conquer the whole of Mesopotamia in the eighth and seventh centuries B. c. Thus the history of Mesopotamia can be envisaged as a shift of the center of power northwards, from Sumer to Babylonia and then to Assyria.

Cuneiform-writing system

We can say that History begins at Sumer because the earliest written records that have to this point come into our possession are of Sumerian origin.  Without documents there can be no history; there may be tradition, there may be culture, but there can be no civilization and no history. To the extent of our present knowledge, there have been only three genuine writing systems created in human history: The Egyptian, the Sumerian, and the Chinese.

Fully 75% of the records that have been preserved are economic or administrative in nature.  Deeds, loans, marriages, inventories, wills, census, and tax matters form the bulk of our knowledge of Sumerian life.  There is also, however, a substantial body of literature, as well as such mundane conveniences as cookbooks, lists of familiar plants and animals, and most important, dictionaries.

The earliest of these dictionaries contain about 2000 pictographs or icons.  These symbols were meant to resemble that which they represented.  The Egyptian and the Chinese systems of writing developed in much the same way.

In Sumeria, however, the pictographic character of the written language was soon lost, primarily due to the difficulty of making a curved line in soft clay.  They were replaced by a series of signs based on wedge-shaped characters, or cuneiform.

Eventually the limitations of such pictorial representations became obvious.  Then the idea occurred to someone that the signs could represent sounds instead of things.  This greatly increased the versatility of written language, since any spoken word could now be written.  In the beginning the sounds that were represented were syllables rather than individual sounds,  so extremely large numbers of signs were still necessary.  For centuries writing would remain the property of the few who were able to invest years in mastering the system.

STORIES, GOD’S & HEROES

As the people in a city-state became familiar with the gods of other cities, they worked out relationships between them, just as the Greeks and Romans did in their myths centuries later. Sometimes two or more gods came to be viewed as one. Eventually a ranking order developed among the gods. Anu, a sky god who originally had been the city god of Uruk, came to be regarded as the greatest of them all–the god of the heavens. His closest rival was the storm god of the air, Enlil of Nippur. The great gods were worshiped in the temples. Each family had little clay figures of its own household gods and small houses or wall niches for them.

The Sumerians believed that their ancestors had created the ground they lived on by separating it from the water. According to their creation myth, the world was once watery chaos. The mother of Chaos was Tiamat, an immense dragon. When the gods appeared to bring order out of Chaos, Tiamat created an army of dragons. Enlil called the winds to his aid. Tiamat came forward, her mouth wide open. Enlil pushed the winds inside her and she swelled up so that she could not move. Then Enlil split her body open. He laid half of the body flat to form the Earth, with the other half arched over it to form the sky. The gods then beheaded Tiamat’s husband and created mankind from his blood, mixed with clay.

The longest story is the Gilgamesh epic, one of the outstanding works of ancient literature. The superhero Gilgamesh originally appeared in Sumerian mythology as a legendary king of Uruk. A long Babylonian poem includes an account of his journey to the bottom of the sea to obtain the plant of life. As he stopped to bathe at a spring on the way home, a hungry snake snatched the plant. When Gilgamesh saw the creature cast off its old skin to become young again, it seemed to him a sign that old age was the fate of humans.

Another searcher for eternal life was Adapa, a fisherman who gained wisdom from Ea, the god of water. The other gods were jealous of his knowledge and called him to heaven. Ea warned him not to drink or eat while there. Anu offered him the water of life and the bread of life because he thought that, since Adapa already knew too much, he might as well be a god. Adapa, however, refused and went back to Earth to die, thus losing for himself and for mankind the gift of immortal life. These legends somewhat resemble the Bible story of Adam and Eve. It is highly probable, in fact, that the ancient legends and myths of Mesopotamia supplied material that was reworked by the biblical authors.

It was during the Sumerian era that a great flood overwhelmed Mesopotamia. So great was this flood that stories about it worked their way into several ancient literatures. The Sumerian counterpart of Noah was Ziusudra, and from him was developed the Babylonian figure Utnapishtim, whose story of the flood was related in the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’. Immortal after his escape from the flood, Utnapishtim was also the wise man who told Gilgamesh where to find the youth-restoring plant.

The epic if Gilgamesh

The Sumerians were the first to produce epic tales about semi-legendary characters, the most famous of whom was Gilgamesh, ruler of the city-state of Uruk (known in the Bible as Erech) about 2700 B.C.  Some seven hundred years later, an unknown Babylonian collected a series of ten tales about Gilgamesh and fused them into a whole.

In literature  the Sumerians provided us with the prototype of  the  tragic  hero,  perhaps the most enduring of all literary staples.   From  Gilgamesh  to  Indiana  Jone’s ‘Last Crusade’ we find  the  Holy  Grail within our grasp, only to slip through our fingers at the last moment

AKKAD

The Sumerians were never able to unify their society due primarily to the fierce independence of each of the eleven city-states.  Unity was finally imposed from without, around 2340 BC,  when Sargon, the king of the northern Mesopotamian territory, known as Akkad, and the first great world-conquerer,  drove his forces into the south.

SARGON

According to one legend Sargon’s mother abandoned him at birth, setting him to float down the Euphrates in a reed basket.  A farmer fished him from the river and raised him as his own….oops…..it sounds familiar…….in Bible it’s Moses and in Mahabharath it’s karna…what a coincidence….!!!!!

Religion

We know very little about the early Semitic religions, but the Semites that invaded Mesopotamia seem to have completely abandoned their religion in favor of Sumerian religion. Sumerian religion was polytheistic, that is, the Sumerians believed in and worshipped many gods. These gods were incredibly powerful and anthropomorphic, that is, they resembled humans. Many of these gods controlled natural forces and were associated with astronomical bodies, such as the sun. The gods were creator gods; as a group, they had created the world and the people in it. Like humans, they suffered all the ravages of human emotional and spiritual frailties: love, lust, hatred, anger, regret. Among the gods’ biggest regrets was the creation of human life; the Sumerians believed that these gods regretted the creation of human life and sent a flood to destroy their faulty creation, but one man survived by building a boat. While the destruction of the earth in a great flood is nearly universal in all human mythology and religion, we can’t be sure if the Semites had a similar story or took it over from the Sumerians. This is, of course, a question of contemporary significance: according to Genesis, the originator of the Hebrew race, the patriarch Abraham, originally came from the city of Ur.

Although the gods were unpredictable, the Sumerians sought out ways to discover what the gods held in store for them. Like all human cultures, the Sumerians were struck by the wondrous regularity of the movement of the heavens and speculated that this movement might contain some secret to the intentions of the gods. So the Sumerians invented astrology, and astrology produced the most sophisticated astronomical knowledge ever seen to that date, and astrology produced even more sophisticated mathematics. They also examined the inner organs of sacrificed animals for secrets to the gods’ intentions or to the future. These activities produced a steady increase in the number of priests and scribes, which further accelerated learning and writing.
Hammurabi’s Code

Hammurabi’s Code of laws were some of the very fist laws to be invented. We benefit from the invention of a code of laws because the laws that Hammurabi made, he made purposely created to help keep people safe in a peaceful, orderly, and well-structured society that was his kingdom. Maybe some of his punishments for disobeying the law were harsh, but he did it in order to keep the people of the society of his kingdom safe so they don’t have to live in fear of any threats that may uphold them. We still benefit from the invention of laws today, and still for the same purpose; to help keep people within our society safe.

His 11 Codes

• If a man kills another man’s son his son shall be cut off.

• If anyone ensnares another, putting a ban upon him, but he can not prove it, then he that ensnared him shall be put to death.

• If anyone brings an accusation against a man, and the accused goes to the river and leaps into the river, if he sinks in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river proves that the accused is not guilty, and he escapes unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser.

• If anyone brings an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if a capital offense is charged, be put to death.

• If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then the builder shall be put to death.(Another variant of this is, If the owner’s son dies, then the builder’s son shall be put to death.)

• If a son slaps his father, his hand shall be cut off.

• If a man give his child to a nurse and the child dies in her hands, but the nurse unbeknown to the father and mother nurses another child, then they shall convict her of having nursed another child without the knowledge of the father and mother and her breasts shall be cut off.

• If anyone steals the minor son of another, he shall be put to death.

• If a man takes a woman to wife, but has no intercourse with her, this woman is no wife to him.

• If a man strikes a pregnant woman, thereby causing her to miscarry and die, the assailant’s daughter shall be put to death.

• If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.

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THE FERTILE CRESCENT

The light of civilization first dawned in the Middle East along what is known by historians as the fertile cresent – a cresent-shaped region stretching from just south of modern-day Jerusalem then northward along the Mediterranean coast to present-day Syria and eastward through present-day Iraq then southward along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Persian Gulf.

Initially, the Fertile Crescent was only sparsely inhabited but around 8000 BC, it was in this fertile valley that agriculture was first believed to have been developed. Wild wheat and barley grew in abundunce and tribes of nomad hunters and herders began to settle down along the lush banks of the rivers and became the world’s first farmers. Agriculture was the spark which lit the flame of civilization. Farming gave rise to social planning on a larger scale as groups of nomadic tribes settled down and joined co-operative forces. Irrigation developed as the need increased to feed and support growing populations. Soon towns were built to afford comfort and protection for these early settlers. Towns like Jericho, Jarmo, Ali Kosh, Catal Huyuk, Beidha and Hassuna were the basis of a new form of human social organization and became the foundation for the first civilization.

Around 5,000 B.C. the first cities were constructed in the southern part of this long crescent valley, near the Persian Gulf, by an intelligent, resourceful and energetic people who became known as the Sumerians. Their capital, Sumer, became a rich and vibrant city in which the rudiments of writing and an alphabet were first invented. Another great city established by the Sumerians, where a famous temple, or ziggurat, was excavated is the city of Ur. These people introduced the Bronze Age to civilization; they  invented the wheel and the rudiments of mathematics. They gave to humankind one of the first great literary epics -“The Epic of Gilgamesh”; and they also fought the first large-scale wars. They had a religion and built great temples – called ziggurats – to their gods, their primary purpose in life being to serve and please these gods. The priests who administered the temples were the aristocracy and their war leaders become their kings. A rough form of writing called cuneiform developed from the requirements of administering the temples, which included collecting the earliest taxes or tribute to the gods. The Sumerians were also extensive traders of goods and natural resources, exchanging their grain and manufactured products, such as pottery, hand tools and weaponry, for precious metals from surrounding settlements. The Sumerians gradually extended their civilization northward, becoming the first great empire. Mesopotamia, meaning “land between two rivers”, was a name given to this geographical area by the ancient Greeks.

Because of its accessibility, the region has seen a constant wave of invaders and conquests. Around 2300 BC the Akkadians invaded the area and for some time the more backward culture of the Akkadians mixed with the more advanced culture of the Sumerians. The Akkadians invented the abacus as a tool for counting and they developed somewhat clumsy methods of arithmetic with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division all playing a part. The Sumerians, however, revolted against Akkadian rule and by 2100 BC they were back in control. Around 2000 BC, the Babylonians, a Semitic people, invaded Mesopotamia and established their capital at Babylon.

This land had deep roots in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic (and hence, the present-day western) tradition. It is said to have hosted the legendary Garden of Eden – if it existed anywhere. To emphasize this the ancient village of Al-Qurna singled out a tree (“Adam’s tree”) with a sign – in Arabic and English. Abraham prayed here 2,000 years B.C. Throughout Iraq loom ziggurat temples dating from 3,000 B.C. which recall the story of the Tower of Babel. One such ziggurat is Aqar-Quf (a suburb of present day Baghdad) marking the capital of the Cassites. In the south lie the ruins of Sumer where were found tens of thousands of stone tablets from the incredible Sumerian culture which flourished 5,000 years ago. On some of these tablets, which were used for teaching children, are found fascinating descriptions of everyday life, including the first organized and detailed set of instructions on when to plant and when to harvest. Also in the south lie the ruins of Ur from which at God’s prodding Abraham set out for the promised land. Here the Akkadians introduced chariots to warfare. In the north of Iraq the gates of Ninevah the Assyrian capital with their imaginative stone winged-bulls mark the place where the prophet Jonah is said to have preached penance to the wicked inhabitants, all of whom repented, much to Jonah’s chagrin.