Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Figure 6: The development of pictographs into Babylonian cuneiform script36

  [Source: Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East: 9000–2000 BC, translated by Elizabeth Lutzeier with Kenneth J. Northcott. © 1988 by the University of Chicago]

  In these early phases, the uses of writing were limited and, because of its basis in trade, consisted just as much of numbers as of words. Among the signs, for example, there was one which had a D-shape: there was a straight edge which was deep-cut and a round end which was much shallower, reducing to nothing. What gave the game away was that these Ds were grouped into clusters, ranging from one to nine. Here then was the making of a decimal system. In some cases, a circular punchhole, formed by means of a cylindrical reed pressed into the clay, was associated with the Ds. ‘It is a reasonable assumption that these “round holes” represent tens.’37 It was common for the early tablets to have a list of things on one side, and the total on the other.38 This helped decipherment.

  A system of signs was one thing. But, as we have seen in examples from elsewhere, such a system does not fully amount to writing as we know it. For that, three other developments were necessary: personal names, grammar, and an alphabet.

  Personal identification was a problem and a necessity from the moment that economic organisation went beyond the extended family, where everyone knew each other and property was owned communally. Certain names would have been easy, ‘Lionheart’ say.39 But how would one render an abstract name, such as ‘Loved-by-God’? Pictographs would have been developed, much as the heart shape, , has come to mean ‘love’ in our time. In this way, multiple meanings overlapped: the sun, , for example, might mean ‘day’, ‘bright’, or ‘white’, while a star, , might mean ‘god’ or ‘sky’, depending on context. The ‘doctrine of the name’ was important in Babylon, where thought worked mainly by analogy, rather than by inductive or deductive processes as we use in the modern world.40 For both the Babylonians and the Egyptians the name of an object or a person blended in with its essential nature.41 Therefore, a ‘good’ name would produce a ‘good’ person. For the same reason, people were named after the gods and that was also the case with streets (‘May the enemy never tread it’) and canals and city walls and gates (‘Bel hath built it, Bel hath shown it favour’). To cap it all, the practice evolved to adopt a certain tone when uttering proper names. This was especially true when speaking gods’ names and it is still true today, to a certain extent, when people use a different tone of voice when praying out loud.42

  To begin with, there was no grammar. Words–nouns mainly, but a few verbs–could be placed next to one another in a random fashion. One reason for this was that at Uruk the writing, or proto-writing, was not read, as we would understand reading. It was an artificial memory system that could be understood by people who spoke different languages.

  Writing and reading as we know it appears to have been developed at Shuruppak in southern Mesopotamia, and the language was Sumerian. No one knows who the Sumerians were, or where they originated, and it is possible that their writing was carried out in an ‘official’ language, like Sanskrit and Latin many thousands of years later, its use confined only to the learned.43 This next stage in the development of writing occurred when one sound, corresponding to a known object, was generalised to conform to that sound in other words or contexts. An English example might be a drawing of a striped insect to mean a ‘bee’. Then it would be adapted, to be used in such words as ‘be-lieve’. This happened, for example, with the Sumerian word for water, a, the sign for which was two parallel wavy lines. The context made it clear whether a meant water or the sound. This was when the signs were turned through ninety degrees, to make them easier to write in a hurry, and when the signs became more abstract. This form of writing spread quickly from Shuruppak to other cities in southern Mesopotamia. Trade was still the main reason for writing but it was now that its use was extended to religion, politics and history/myth–the beginnings of imaginative literature.

  Such a transformation didn’t happen overnight. In the early schools for scribes, we find lexical lists–lists of words–and lists of proverbs. This is probably how they were taught to write, and it was through well-known proverbs and incantations, even magic spells, that abstract signs for syntactical and grammatical elements became established (the proverbs had a simple, familiar form). And it was in this way that writing changed from being a purely symbolic system of information-recording and exchange, to a representation of speech.

  Although the first texts which contain grammatical elements come from Shuruppak, word order was still highly variable. The breakthrough to writing in the actual order of speech seems to have occurred first when Eannatum was king of Lagash (c. 2500 BC). It was only now that writing was able to convert all aspects of language to written form.44 The acquisition of such literacy was arduous and was aided by encyclopaedic and other lists.45 People–in the Bible and elsewhere–were described as ‘knowing the words’ for things, such as birds or fishes, which meant they could, to that extent, read. Some lists were king lists, and these produced another advance when texts began to go beyond mere lists, to offer comment and evaluation on rulers, their conflicts, the laws they introduced: history was for the first time being written down.46 The list about the date-palm, for instance, includes hundreds of entries, not just the many parts of the palm, from bark to crown, but words for types of decay and the uses to which the wood could be put. In other words, this is how the first forms of knowledge were arranged and recorded. At Shuruppak the lists included: bovines, fish, birds, containers, textiles, metal objects, professions and crafts.47 There were also lists of deities, mathematical and economic terms. (In the names for gods, females still predominate.)

  Lists made possible new kinds of intellectual activity. They encouraged comparison and criticism. The items in a list were removed from the context that gave them meaning in the oral world and in that sense became abstractions. They could be separated and sorted in ways never conceived before, giving rise to questions never asked in an oral culture. For example, the astronomical lists made clear the intricate patterns of the celestial bodies, marking the beginning of mathematical astronomy and astrology.48

  The texts repeatedly mention other cities, with which Shuruppak had contact: Lagash, Nippur, Umma and Uruk among them. The very first idea, apart from economic tablets and proper names, that we can decipher among the earliest writing is that of the battle between ‘kings’ and ‘priests’. At one stage it was believed that all of a city’s inhabitants and all of its land ‘belonged’ to the supreme city god and that the high priest or priestess administered the city on behalf of this deity, but such a view is no longer tenable: land holding was much more complex than this. The high priest or priestess was known as the en, or ensi. Normally, and to begin with, the en or ensi was the most powerful figure, but there was another, the lugal–literally speaking, the ‘great man’. He was in effect the military commander, the fortress commander, who ran the city in its disputes with foreign powers. It does not take much imagination to envisage conflict between these two sources of power. The view preferred now is that Mesopotamian cities are better understood not as religious but as corporate entities–municipalities–in which people were treated equally. Their chief characteristic was economic: goods and produce were jointly owned and redistributed, both among the citizens themselves but also to foreigners who provided in exchange goods and commodities which the cities lacked. This is inferred from the writing on seals, references to ‘rations’, the fact that everyone was buried in the same way, certainly to begin with, and the discovery of locks by which goods were sequestered in warehouses. To begin with, the en administered this system though, as we shall see, that changed.49

  Apart from lists, the other major development in writing was the switch from a pictographic system to a syllabary and then to a full alphabet. Just as it was in the busy trading cities of Sumer that writing began, because it was needed, so the alph
abet was invented, not in Mesopotamia but further west where the Semitic languages lent themselves to such a change. A pictographic system is limited because hundreds if not thousands of ‘words’ need to be remembered (as with Chinese today). In syllabaries, where a ‘word’ corresponds to a syllable, only around eighty to a hundred entities need to be remembered. But alphabets are even better.

  Hebrew and Arabic are the best-known Semitic languages today but in the second millennium BC the main tongue was Canaanite, of which both Phoenician and Hebrew are descendants. What made the Semitic languages suitable for alphabetisation was that most nouns and verbs were composed of three consonants, fleshed out by vowels which vary according to the context, but which are generally self-evident. (Professor Saggs gives this English equivalent: th wmn ws cryng and th wmn wr cryng. Most readers have no difficulty in deciphering either phrase.50)

  The earliest alphabet so far found was discovered in excavations made at Ras Shamra (‘Fennel Head’) near Alexandretta, the north-east corner of the Mediterranean that lies between Syria and Asia Minor. Here, on a hill above a small harbour was an ancient site excavated in 1929, which in antiquity was known as Ugarit. A library was discovered at the site, situated between two temples devoted to Baal and Dagon. The library belonged to the high priest and consisted mainly of tablets in writing in a cuneiform style but which comprised only twenty-nine signs. It was, therefore, an alphabet. The scholars making the excavation guessed that the language was probably related to Canaanite or Phoenician or Hebrew and they were right: the script was rapidly deciphered. Many of the events portrayed, as we shall see, prefigure stories in the Old Testament.51 This system appears to have been deliberately invented, with no real precursors. As Figure 7 shows, the signs fit into five groups, with patterns of increasing complexity, indicating an order for the letters.

  Figure 7: Signs of the Ugaritic alphabet52

  [Source: H. W. F. Saggs, Civilisation Before Greece and Rome , London: B. T. Batsford, 1989, page 81]

  Although the first alphabet occurred at Ugarit, it was restricted mainly to north Syria and a few Palestinian sites. After the twelfth century BC, it died out and the future lay with descendants of the proto-Canaanite language. This alphabet took time to stabilise, with the letters facing either way, and the writing often taking the boustrophedon form.* However, shortly before 1000 BC, proto-Canaanite did become stabilised into what is generally referred to as the Phoenician alphabet (the earliest inscriptions occur at Byblos–now Jublai, north of Beirut in Lebanon–many on bronze arrow heads, saying who the head belonged to). By this time the number of letters was reduced to twenty-two and all the signs had become linear, with no traces of pictographs. The direction of writing had also stabilised, consistently horizontal from right to left. By common tradition, it was the Phoenician alphabet which was imported into classical Greece.

  In both Mesopotamia and Egypt literacy was held in high esteem. Shulgi, a Sumerian king around 2100 BC, boasted that

  As a youth, I studied the scribal art in the Tablet-House, from the tablets of Sumer and Akkad;

  No one of noble birth could write a tablet as I could.53

  Scribes were trained in Ur since at least the second quarter of the third millennium.54 When they signed documents, they often added the names and positions of their fathers, which confirms that they were usually the sons of city governors, temple administrators, army officers, or priests: literacy was confined to scribes and administrators. Anyone in authority probably received some sort of scribal education and it has even been suggested that the Sumerian term dub.sar, literally ‘scribe’, was the equivalent of Esquire, or BA, applied to any educated man.55

  Two schools, perhaps the first in the world, were founded by King Shulgi at Nippur and at Ur in the last century of the third millennium BC, but he referred to them without any elaboration, so they may have been established well before this. The Babylonian term for school or scribal academy was edubba, literally ‘Tablet-House’. The headmaster was called ‘Father of the Tablet-House’, and in one inscription a pupil says this: ‘You have opened my eyes as though I were a puppy; you have formed humanity within me.’56 There were specialist masters for language, mathematics (‘scribe of counting’) and surveying (‘scribe of the field’) but day-to-day teaching was conducted by someone called, literally, ‘Big Brother’, who was probably a senior pupil.

  Cuneiform extracts have been found in several cities which show that there were already ‘standard texts’ used in instruction. For example, there are tablets with the same text written out in different hands, others with literary texts on one side, maths exercises on the reverse, still others with the teacher’s text on one side, the pupil’s on the other, together with corrections. On one tablet, a pupil describes his workload:

  This is the monthly scheme of my school attendance:

  My free days are three each month;

  My religious holidays are three each month;

  For twenty-four days each month

  I must be in school. How long they are!57

  Scribes had to learn their own trade, too–they needed to know how to prepare clay for writing and how to bake the texts that were to be preserved in libraries. Limestone could be added to make the surface of the clay smoother, and the wedges clearer.58 Besides clay, boards of wood or ivory were often coated with wax, sometimes hinged in several leaves. The wax could be wiped clean and the boards reused.59

  The scribal tradition spread far beyond Mesopotamia, and as it did so it expanded.60 The Egyptians were the first to write with reed brushes on pieces of old pottery; next they introduced slabs of sycamore which were coated with gypsum plaster, which could be rubbed off to allow re-use.61 Papyrus was the most expensive writing material of all and was available only to the most accomplished, and therefore least wasteful, scribes. Scribal training could take as long as for a modern PhD.

  Not all writing had to do with business. The early, more literary texts of Sumer, naturally enough perhaps, include the first religious literature, hymns in particular. In Uruk there was a popular account of the king’s love affair with the goddess Inanna (Ishtar in Babylon, Astarte in Greece). Other texts included a father’s instructions to his son on how to lead a useful and rewarding life, accounts of battles and conquests, records of building activity, cosmogonies, and a vast corpus to do with magic. By the time Ashur flourished, roughly 1900–1200 BC, there were many private archives, in addition to the public ones, some of which contained as many as 4,000 texts. By now, the most prestigious form of learning was astronomy/astrology, omen literature, and magic. These helped establish Ashur’s reputation as al nemeqi, ‘City of Wisdom’.62

  We should never forget that in antiquity, before writing, people performed prodigious feats of memory. It was by no means unknown for thousands of lines of poetry to be memorised: this is how literature was preserved and disseminated. Once writing had evolved, however, two early forms of written literature may be singled out. There was in the first place a number of stories that prefigured narratives which appeared later in the Bible. Given the influence of that book, its origins are important. For example, Sargon, king of Akkad, emerged from complete obscurity to become ‘king of the world’. His ancestry was elaborated from popular tales, which tell of his mother, a priestess, concealing the fact that she had given birth to him by placing him in a wicker basket, sealed with bitumen, and casting him adrift on a river. He was later found by a water drawer who brought Sargon up as his adopted son. Sargon first became a gardener…and then king. The parallels with the Moses story are plain. Sumerian literature also boasts a number of ‘primal kings’ with improbably long reigns. This too anticipates the Old Testament. In the Bible, for example, Adam begot his son Seth at age 130 and is said to have lived for 800 more years. Between Adam and the Deluge there were ten kings who lived to very great ages. In Sumer, there were eight such kings, who between them reigned for 241,200 years, an average of 30,400 years per king. The texts unearthed at Ras Shamra/Uga
rit speak of the god Baal fighting with Lotan, ‘the sinuous serpent, the mighty one with seven heads’, which anticipates the Old Testament Leviathan. Then there is the flood literature. We shall encounter one version of the flood story in the epic of Gilgamesh, which is discussed immediately below. In that poem, the flood-hero was known as Utnapishtim, ‘Who Found [Eternal] Life’, though he was also known in similar legends as Ziusudra or Atra-hasis. In all the stories the flood is sent by the gods as a punishment.63

  The very name, Mesopotamia, between the rivers, suggests that floods were a common occurrence in the area. But the idea of a Great Flood seems to have been deeply embedded in the consciousness of the ancient Middle East.64 There are three possibilities. One is that the Tigris and Euphrates flooded together, creating a large area of water. According to Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Ur, referred to at the beginning of this chapter, the flood revealed in the silt he found there could have meant an inundation twenty-five feet deep that was 300 miles long and 100 miles across.65 This has been called into question because Uruk, fifteen miles from Ur, and situated lower, shows no trace of flood. A second possibility, discussed in more detail in the next chapter, is that a terrible earthquake hit the Indus valley area of India in about 1900 BC and caused the diversion of the river Sarasvati. This, the mighty river of the ancient Hindu scripture, the Rig Veda, was ten kilometres wide in places but is now no more. The event that triggered this great catastrophe must have caused huge floods over a very wide area. The last possibility is the so-called Black Sea flood. According to this theory, published in 1997, the Black Sea was formed only after the last Ice Age, when the level of the Mediterranean rose, around 8,000 years ago, sluicing water through the Bosporus and flooding a vast area, 630 miles from east to west, and 330 miles from north to south.66