by Will Durant
937:
Schism of the Jews: Judah & Israel
884-859:
Ashurnasirpal II King of Assyria
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
B.C.
EGYPT
947-720:
XXII Dynasty: the Bubastite Kings
947-925:
Sheshonk I
925-889:
Osorkon I
880-850:
Osorkon II
850-825:
Sheshonk II
821-769:
Sheshonk III
763-725:
Sheshonk IV
850-745:
XXIII Dynasty: The Theban Kings
725-663:
XXIV Dynasty: The Memphite Kings
745-663:
XXV Dynasty: The Ethiopian Kings
689-663:
Taharka
685:
Commercial Revival of Egypt
674-650:
Assyrian Occupation of Egypt
663-525:
XXVI Dynasty: the Saïte Kings
663-609:
Psamtik (“Psammetichos”) I
663-525:
Saïte Revival of Egyptian Art
615:
Jews begin to colonize Egypt
609-593:
Niku (“Necho”) II
605:
Niku begins the Hellenization of Egypt
593-588:
Psamtik II
B.C.
WESTERN ASIA
859-824:
Shalmaneser III King of Assyria
811-808:
Sammuramat (“Semiramis”) in Assyria
785-700:
Golden Age of Armenia (“Urartu”)
745-727:
Tiglath-Pileser III
732-722:
Assyria takes Damascus & Samaria
722-705:
Sargon II King of Assyria
709:
Deioces King of the Medes
705-681:
Sennacherib King of Assyria
702:
The First Isaiah
689:
Sennacherib sacks Babylon
681-669:
Esarhaddon King of Assyria
669-626:
Ashurbanipal (“Sardanapalus”) King of Assyria
660-583:
Zarathustra (“Zoroaster”)?
652:
Gyges King of Lydia
640-584:
Cyaxares King of the Medes
639:
Fall of Susa; end of Elam
639:
Josiah King of the Jews
625:
Nabopolassar restores independence of Babylon
621:
Beginnings of the Pentateuch
612:
Fall of Nineveh; end of Assyria
610-561:
Alyattes King of Lydia
605-562:
Nebuchadrezzar II King of Babylonia
600:
Jeremiah at Jerusalem; coinage in Lydia
597-586:
Nebuchadrezzar takes Jerusalem
586-538:
Jewish Captivity in Babylon
OF NEAR EASTERN HISTORY
B.C.
EGYPT
569-526:
Ahmose (“Amasis”) II
568-567:
Nebuchadrezzar II invades Egypt
560:
Growing Influence of Greece in Egypt
526-525:
Psamtik III
525:
Persian Conquest of Egypt
485:
Revolt of Egypt against Persia
484:
Reconquest of Egypt by Xerxes
482:
Egypt joins with Persia in war against Greece
455:
Failure of Athenian Expedition to Egypt
332:
Greek Conquest of Egypt; foundation of Alexandria
283-30:
The Ptolemaic Kings
30:
Egypt absorbed into the Roman Empire
B.C.
WESTERN ASIA
580:
Ezekiel in Babylon
570-546:
Croesus King of Lydia
555-529:
Cyrus I King of the Medes & the Persians
546:
Cyrus takes Sardis
540:
The Second Isaiah
539:
Cyrus takes Babylon & creates the Persian Empire
529-522:
Cambyses King of Persia
521-485:
Darius I King of Persia
520:
Building of 2nd Temple at Jerusalem
490:
Battle of Marathon
485-464:
Xerxes I King of Persia
480:
Battle of Salamis
464-423:
Artaxerxes I King of Persia
450:
The Book of Job (?)
444:
Ezra at Jerusalem
423-404:
Darius II King of Persia
404-359:
Artaxerxes II King of Persia
401:
Cyrus the Younger defeated at Cunaxa
350-338:
Ochus King of Persia
338-330:
Darius III King of Persia
334:
Battle of the Granicus; Alexander enters Jerusalem
333:
Battle of Issus
331:
Alexander takes Babylon
330:
Battle of Arbela; the Near East becomes part of Alexander’s Empire
CHAPTER VII
Sumeria
Orientation—Contributions of the Near East to Western civilization
WRITTEN history is at least six thousand years old. During half of this period the center of human affairs, so far as they are now known to us, was in the Near East. By this vague term we shall mean here all southwestern Asia south of Russia and the Black Sea, and west of India and Afghanistan; still more loosely, we shall include within it Egypt, too, as anciently bound up with the Near East in one vast web and communicating complex of Oriental civilization. In this rough theatre of teeming peoples and conflicting cultures were developed the agriculture and commerce, the horse and wagon, the coinage and letters of credit, the crafts and industries, the law and government, the mathematics and medicine, the enemas and drainage systems, the geometry and astronomy, the calendar and clock and zodiac, the alphabet and writing, the paper and ink, the books and libraries and schools, the literature and music, the sculpture and architecture, the glazed pottery and fine furniture, the monotheism and monogamy, the cosmetics and jewelry, the checkers and dice, the ten-pins and income-tax, the wet-nurses and beer, from which our own European and American culture derive by a continuous succession through the mediation of Crete and Greece and Rome. The “Aryans” did not establish civilization—they took it from Babylonia and Egypt. Greece did not begin civilization—it inherited far more civilization than it began; it was the spoiled heir of three millenniums of arts and sciences brought to its cities from the Near East by the fortunes of trade and war. In studying and honoring the Near East we shall be acknowledging a debt long due to the real founders of European and American civilization.
I. ELAM
The culture of Susa—The potter’s wheel—The wagon-wheel
If the reader will look at a map of Persia, and will run his finger north along the Tigris from the Persian Gulf to Amara, and then east across the Iraq border to the modern town of Shushan, he will have located the site of the ancient city of Susa, center of a region known to the Jews as Elam—the high land. In this narrow territory, protected on the west by marshes, and on the east by the mountains that shoulder the great Iranian Plateau, a people of unknown race and origin developed one of the first historic civilizations. Here, a generation ago, French archeologists found human remains datin
g back 20,000 years, and evidences of an advanced culture as old as 4500 B.C.*1
Apparently the Elamites had recently emerged from a nomad life of hunting and fishing; but already they had copper weapons and tools, cultivated grains and domesticated animals, hieroglyphic writing and business documents, mirrors and jewelry, and a trade that reached from Egypt to India.3 In the midst of chipped flints that bring us back to the Neolithic Age we find finished vases elegantly rounded and delicately painted with geometric designs, or with picturesque representations of animals and plants; some of this pottery is ranked among the finest ever made by man.4 Here is the oldest appearance not only of the potter’s wheel but of the wagon wheel; this modest but vital vehicle of civilization is found only later in Babylonia, and still later in Egypt.5 From these already complex beginnings the Elamites rose to troubled power, conquering Sumeria and Babylon, and being conquered by them, turn by turn. The city of Susa survived six thousand years of history, lived through the imperial zeniths of Sumeria, Babylonia, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome, and flourished, under the name of Shushan, as late as the fourteenth century of our era. At various times it grew to great wealth; when Ashurbanipal captured and sacked it (646 B.C.) his historians recounted without understatement the varied booty of gold and silver, precious stones and royal ornaments, costly garments and regal furniture, cosmetics and chariots, which the conqueror brought in his train to Nineveh. History so soon began its tragic alternance of art and war.
II. THE SUMERIANS
1. The Historical Background
The exhuming of Sumeria—Geography—Race—Appearance—The Sumerian Flood—The kings—An ancient reformer——Sargon of Akkad—The Golden Age of Ur
If we return to our map and follow the combined Tigris and Euphrates from the Persian Gulf to where these historic streams diverge (at modern Kurna), and then follow the Euphrates westward, we shall find, north and south of it, the buried cities of ancient Sumeria: Eridu (now Abu Shahrein), Ur (now Mukayyar), Uruk (Biblical Erech, now Warka), Larsa (Biblical Ellasar, now Senkereh), Lagash (now Shippurla), Nippur (Niffer) and Nisin. Follow the Euphrates northwest to Babylon, once the most famous city of Mesopotamia (the land “between the rivers”); observe, directly east of it, Kish, site of the oldest culture known in this region; then pass some sixty miles farther up the Euphrates to Agade, capital, in ancient days, of the Kingdom of Akkad. The early history of Mesopotamia is in one aspect the struggle of the non-Semitic peoples of Sumeria to preserve their independence against the expansion and inroads of the Semites from Kish and Agade and other centers in the north. In the midst of their struggles these varied stocks unconsciously, perhaps unwillingly, coöperated to produce the first extensive civilization known to history, and one of the most creative and unique.*
Despite much research we cannot tell of what race the Sumerians were, nor by what route they entered Sumeria. Perhaps they came from central Asia, or the Caucasus, or Armenia, and moved through northern Mesopotamia down the Euphrates and the Tigris—along which, as at Ashur, evidences of their earliest culture have been found; perhaps, as the legend says, they sailed in from the Persian Gulf, from Egypt or elsewhere, and slowly made their way up the great rivers; perhaps they came from Susa, among whose relics is an asphalt head bearing all the characteristics of the Sumerian type; perhaps, even, they were of remote Mongolian origin, for there is much in their language that resembles the Mongol speech.9 We do not know.
The remains show them as a short and stocky people, with high, straight, non-Semitic nose, slightly receding forehead and downward-sloping eyes. Many wore beards, some were clean-shaven, most of-them shaved the upper lip. They clothed themselves in fleece and finely woven wool; the women draped the garment from the left shoulder, the men bound it at the waist and left the upper half of the body bare. Later the male dress crept up towards the neck with the advance of civilization, but servants, male and female, while indoors, continued to go naked from head to waist. The head was usually covered with a cap, and the feet were shod with sandals; but well-to-do women had shoes of soft leather, heel-less, and laced like our own. Bracelets, necklaces, anklets, finger-rings and ear-rings made the women of Sumeria, as recently in America, show-windows of their husbands’ prosperity.10
When their civilization was already old—about 2300 B.C.—the poets and scholars of Sumeria tried to reconstruct its ancient history. The poets wrote legends of a creation, a primitive Paradise and a terrible flood that engulfed and destroyed it because of the sin of an ancient king.11 This flood passed down into Babylonian and Hebrew tradition, and became part of the Christian creed. In 1929 Professor Woolley, digging into the ruins of Ur, discovered, at considerable depth, an eight-foot layer of silt and clay; this, if we are to believe him, was deposited during a catastrophic overflow of the Euphrates, which lingered in later memory as the Flood. Beneath that layer were the remains of a prediluvian culture that would later be pictured by the poets as a Golden Age.
Meanwhile the priest-historians sought to create a past spacious enough for the development of all the marvels of Sumerian civilization. They formulated lists of their ancient kings, extending the dynasties before the Flood to 432,000 years;12 and told such impressive stories of two of these rulers, Tammuz and Gilgamesh, that the latter became the hero of the greatest poem in Babylonian literature, and Tammuz passed down into the pantheon of Babylon and became the Adonis of the Greeks. Perhaps the priests exaggerated a little the antiquity of their civilization. We may vaguely judge the age of Sumerian culture by observing that the ruins of Nippur are found to a depth of sixty-six feet, of which almost as many feet extend below the remains of Sargon of Akkad as rise above it to the topmost stratum (ca. 1 A.D.);13 on this basis Nippur would go back to 5262 B.C. Tenacious dynasties of city-kings seem to have flourished at Kish ca. 4500 B.C., and at Ur ca. 3500 B.C. In the competition of these two primeval centers we have the first form of that opposition between Semite and non-Semite which was to be one bloody theme of Near-Eastern history from the Semitic ascendancy of Kish and the conquests of the Semitic kings Sargon I and Hammurabi, through the capture of Babylon by the “Aryan” generals Cyrus and Alexander in the sixth and fourth centuries before Christ, and the conflicts of Crusaders and Saracens for the Holy Sepulchre and the emoluments of trade, down to the efforts of the British Government to dominate and pacify the divided Semites of the Near East today.
From 3000 B.C. onward the clay-tablet records kept by the priests, and found in the ruins of Ur, present a reasonably accurate account of the accessions and coronations, uninterrupted victories and sublime deaths of the petty kings who ruled the city-states of Ur, Lagash, Uruk, and the rest; the writing of history and the partiality of historians are very ancient things. One king, Urukagina of Lagash, was a royal reformer, an enlightened despot who issued decrees aimed at the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and of everybody by the priests. The high priest, says one edict, must no longer “come into the garden of a poor mother and take wood therefrom, nor gather tax in fruit therefrom”; burial-fees were to be cut to one-fifth of what they had been; and the clergy and high officials were forbidden to share among themselves the revenues and cattle offered to the gods. It was the King’s boast that he “gave liberty to his people”;14 and surely the tablets that preserve his decrees reveal to us the oldest, briefest and justest code of laws in history.
This lucid interval was ended normally by one Lugal-zaggisi, who invaded Lagash, overthrew Urukagina, and sacked the city at the height of its prosperity. The temples were destroyed, the citizens were massacred in the streets, and the statues of the gods were led away in ignominious bondage. One of the earliest poems in existence is a clay tablet, apparently 4800 years old, on which the Sumerian poet Dingiraddamu mourns for the raped goddess of Lagash:
For the city, alas, the treasures, my soul doth sigh,
For my city Girsu (Lagash), alas, the treasures, my soul doth sigh.
In holy Girsu the children are in distress.
Into the interior of the splendid shrine he (the invader) pressed;
The august Queen from her temple he brought forth.
O Lady of my city, desolated, when wilt thou return?15
We pass by the bloody Lugal-zaggisi, and other Sumerian kings of mighty name: Lugal-shagengur, Lugal-kigub-nidudu, Ninigi-dubti, Lugal-andanukhunga. . . . Meanwhile another people, of Semitic race, had built the kingdom of Akkad under the leadership of Sargon I, and had established its capital at Agade some two hundred miles northwest of the Sumerian city-states. A monolith found at Susa portrays Sargon armed with the dignity of a majestic beard, and dressed in all the pride of long authority. His origin was not royal: history could find no father for him, and no other mother than a temple prostitute.16 Sumerian legend composed for him an autobiography quite Mosaic in its beginning: “My humble mother conceived me; in secret she brought me forth. She placed me in a basket-boat of rushes; with pitch she closed my door.”17 Rescued by a workman, he became a cup-bearer to the king, grew in favor and influence, rebelled, displaced his master, and mounted the throne of Agade. He called himself “King of Universal Dominion,” and ruled a small portion of Mesopotamia. Historians call him “the Great,” for he invaded many cities, captured much booty, and killed many men. Among his victims was that same Lugal-zaggisi who had despoiled Lagash and violated its goddess; him Sargon defeated and carried off to Nippur in chains. East and west, north and south the mighty warrior marched, conquering Elam, washing his weapons in symbolic triumph in the Persian Gulf, crossing western Asia, reaching the Mediterranean,18 and establishing the first great empire in history. For fifty-five years he held sway, while legends gathered about him and prepared to make him a god. His reign closed with all his empire in revolt.
