by Peter Watson
The greatest literary creation of Babylon, the first imaginative masterpiece in the world, was the epic of Gilgamesh, or ‘He Who Saw Everything to the Ends of the World’, as the title of the poem has it. Almost certainly, Gilgamesh ruled in Uruk around 2900 BC, so some of the episodes in his epic are rooted in fact.67 His adventures are complicated, often fantastic and difficult to follow. In some respects, they recall the labours of Hercules and, as we shall see, are echoed in the Bible. In the poem, he himself is two-thirds god and one-third man. In the first verses, we learn how Gilgamesh has to overcome the resistance of the people of Uruk and push through ‘a wondrous feat’, namely the building of the city wall. This, 9.5 kilometres long, boasted, it is said, at least 900 semi-circular towers. Some of this part of the story may be based on fact, for excavations have identified semi-circular structures in the Early Dynastic period (i.e., around 2900 BC) using a new type of curved brick.68 Gilgamesh is a hard taskmaster, so much so that his subjects appeal to the gods to create a counterforce, who will take on Gilgamesh and let the citizens have a quiet life. Sympathetic, the gods create Enkidu, a ‘hairy wild man’. But here the plot twists and Enkidu and Gilgamesh become firm friends and from then on undertake their adventures as companions.69 The two return to Mesopotamia where the goddess Inanna falls in love with Gilgamesh. He spurns her attentions and in retaliation she sends the awesome ‘bull of heaven…which even a hundred men could not control’ to kill him.70 But Enkidu joins forces with Gilgamesh and together they defeat the bull by tearing off its limbs.
This early part of the poem is in general positive, but it then turns darker. Enlil, the god of the air and of the earth, decides that Enkidu must die for some of the heroic killings he has performed. The loss of Enkidu affects Gilgamesh badly:
All day and all night have I wept over him
and would not have him buried–
my friend yet might rise up at my (loud) cries,
for seven days and nights–
until a maggot dropped from his nose.
Since he is gone, I can no comfort find,
keep roaming like a hunter in the plains.71
Until this point, Gilgamesh has given little thought to death. From now on, however, his sole aim is to find everlasting life. He recalls the legend that, at the end of the world, beyond ‘the waters of death’, lives an ancestor of his, Utnapishtim, who is immortal and therefore must know the secret. Alone now, Gilgamesh sets out to reach the end of the world, beyond the mountains where the sun sets. He finds the dark passage through which the sun disappears at night, and eventually arrives on the shore of a wide sea.72 There, he meets Utnapishtim’s boatman, who agrees to ferry him over the waters of death, ‘a single drop of which means certain destruction’.73 When, finally, Gilgamesh reaches Utnapishtim he is disappointed. The ancestor’s immortality, he tells Gilgamesh, is due to unique circumstances that will never be repeated. He confides that, in an earlier age, the gods had decided to destroy mankind and had caused a flood. Utnapishtim and his wife were the only ones allowed to survive: they were forewarned and built a large boat, in which they stored pairs of all living things. After the storm had lashed the boat for six days and nights, and when all was quiet, Utnapishtim opened a window, and saw that his boat was beached on an island, which was in fact the top of a mountain. He waited for another six days, then sent out a dove, followed by a swallow. Both returned. Finally, he let loose a crow, which did not come back.74 Later on, Utnapishtim reports, Enlil regretted his rash decision and rewarded Utnapishtim with immortality for saving life on earth. But the gods will never repeat this act.
The first libraries were installed in Mesopotamia, though to begin with they were more like archives than libraries proper. They contained records of the practical, day-to-day activities of the Mesopotamian city-states. This is true whether the library was in Nippur, in the middle of the third millennium BC, or Ebla, where two thousand clay tablets were found in 1980, dating to roughly 2250 BC, or to later libraries. We have to remember that in most cases the libraries served the purposes of the priests and that in Mesopotamian cities, where the temple cult owned huge estates, practical archives–recording transactions, contracts and deliveries–were as much part of the cult as were ritual texts for the sacred services. But the propagandistic needs of the cult and the emerging royal elite–hymns, inscriptions–provoked a more modern form of literacy. Texts such as the epic of Gilgamesh, or the epic of Creation, may therefore have been used in ritual. But these works, which involved some form of mental activity beyond flat records of transactions, appear first in the texts at Nippur in the middle of the third millennium. The next advance occurred at Ebla, Ur and Nippur.75 Each of these later libraries boasted a new, more scholarly entity: catalogues of the holdings, in which works of the imagination, and/or religious works, were listed separately. Later still, there was a further innovation: several lines of writing, added at the end of the text on the back surface, identifying what the text contained, more or less as a table of contents does today. This acquired the term colophon, derived from the Greek kolophon, meaning ‘finishing touch’. One, for example, was written thus: ‘Eighth tablet of the Dupaduparsa Festival, words of Silalluhi and Kuwatalla, the temple-priestess. Written by the hand of Lu, son of Nugissar, in the presence of Anuwanza, the overseer.’ The colophons were numbered, and recorded how many tablets the text was comprised of. Some of the catalogues went beyond the detail in the colophons, so that the scribes could tell from perusing just this document what was in the library. The ordering of the list was still pretty haphazard, however, for alphabetisation was not introduced for more than 1,500 years.76 As time went by, the number of religious titles began to grow. By the time of Tiglath-Pileser I, one of Assyria’s greatest rulers (1115–1077 BC), the biggest component of the texts dealt with the movements of the heavens, and prediction of the future based on a variety of omens. There were some hymns and a catalogue of musical compositions (‘5 Sumerian psalms comprising one liturgy, for the adapa [possibly a tambourine]’). Ashurbanipal, Assyria’s last important ruler (668–627 BC), also had a fine library and was himself literate. Here too the mass of archival material comprised the bulk of the library; next in number came the omen texts; next largest were the lists, words and names, dictionaries for translating; and finally literary works, such as the epic of Gilgamesh. In all there were about 1,500 separate titles.77 A curse was inscribed on many Assyrian tablets to deter people from stealing them.78
Libraries undoubtedly existed in ancient Egypt, but because they wrote on papyrus (the ‘bullrushes’ in which the infant Moses was supposed to have been sequestered), little has survived. In describing the building complex of Ramses II (1279–1213 BC), the Greek historian Diodorus says that it included a sacred library which bore the inscription ‘Clinic for the Soul’.
In the early cities there were two types of authority. There was first the high priest, known as the en. He (and sometimes she) administered the corporate entity, or municipality, interceding with the gods to guarantee the continued fertility of enough land to provide everyone with food/income, and the en also administered its redistribution, both among the citizens and for foreign trade. The en’s consort was nin and, in Petr Charvát’s words, they comprised the ‘pontifical couple’.79 The second form of authority was the lugal–the overseer, fortress commander, literally the ‘great man’, who administered military matters, foreign affairs as we would say, relations with outsiders. We should not make too much of this division, however: not every city had two types of leader–some had ens and others had lugals, and in any case where there were two types of authority the military leaders would have sought the backing of the religious elite for all of their military exploits. But this early arrangement changed, for the records show that, at some point, nin detached herself from en and realigned herself with the lugal.80 At the same time, the role of the ens shrank, to become more and more ceremonial, whereas the lugal and the nin took on the functions of what we would call
kings and queens. There now developed a greater division between temporal and spiritual power, and more of an emphasis on masculinity,81 a change that may have been brought about by war, which was now more of a threat and for two reasons. First, in an area that was circumscribed between two mighty rivers there would have been growing competition among rival cities, rivalry for land and for water, as population expanded; and second, with increasing prosperity and the accumulation of material possessions, produced by increasing numbers of specialists, there would have been more to gain from successful plunder. In war, a warrior was his own master, much more so than in peacetime, and the charisma and success of a clever lugal would have had a forceful impact on his fellow citizens. It would have been natural, following the victory of one city over another, for the lugal to have administered both territories: it was he who had achieved the victory, and in any case the gods of the rival city might well be different from those in his native city. The en from city A, therefore, would have little or no authority in city B. In this way, lugals began to overtake ens as the all-powerful figures in Sumerian society. Petr Charvát notes that the worship of the same god in different Sumerian cities did begin to grow, confirming this change. The growing power of the lugals was recognised in the practice whereby they acquired the prerogative to control systems of measurement (perhaps a relic of building defences) and the right to leave written records of their deeds. This was part-propaganda, part-history, so that people would remember who had done what and how.82 Thus the more-or-less modern idea of kingship grew up in Mesopotamia and, parallel with it, the idea of the state. Lugals who became kings administered more than one city, and the territory in between. The first supra-regional political entity in the ancient Middle East was the Akkadian state, which began with Sargon, c. 2340–2284 BC, the first king in the sense that we still use the term.
Kingship, then, was forged in part by war. War, or the institutionalisation of war, was the crucible or the forcing house for a number of other ideas.
The wheel may or may not have been invented in Mesopotamia. The first vehicles–sledges–were used by early hunter-fisher societies in near-Arctic northern Europe by 7000 BC, presumably pulled by dogs.83 ‘Vehicle’ signs occur in the pictographic script of Uruk in the late fourth millennium BC, and actual remains of an axle-and-wheel unit were found at a similar date at a site in Zurich in Switzerland. These vehicles had solid wheels, made from either one or three pieces of wood. From archaeological remains at sites before 2000 BC, these so-called disc wheels stretch from Denmark to Persia, with the greatest density in the area immediately north of the Black Sea.84 So this may indicate where the wheel was first introduced. Oxen and donkeys appear to have been used at first.
These (four-wheeled) wagons were very slow–3.2 kph, on one estimate. The (two-wheeled) chariot, however, was a good bit faster–12–14 kph when trotting, 17–20 kph when galloping. In the cuneiform texts, Sumerian refers to the ‘equid of the desert’, meaning an ass or donkey, and to the ‘equid of the mountains’, meaning horse.85 Three words were used for wheeled vehicles: mar-gid-da, for four-wheeled wagons, gigir, for two-wheeled vehicles, and narkabtu which, as time went by, came to mean chariot. With narkabtu, says archaeologist Stuart Piggott, ‘We come to the beginning of one of the great chapters of ancient history: the development of the light two-wheeled chariot drawn by paired horses as a piece of technology and as an institution within the social order as an emblem of power and prestige.’86 After the first solid wheels were invented, the spoked wheel was conceived. This had to be built under tension, with shaped wood, but its lightness made much greater speeds possible.87 Chariot warfare flourished between 1700 and 1200 BC–i.e., at the end of the Bronze Age and in the Iron Age.
A word about the equid of the mountains. It is fair to say that, just now, no one knows exactly where or when the horse was domesticated and when or where the idea of riding was conceived. Until recently, it was assumed that settlement of the Eurasian steppe depended on the domestication of the horse, and that the steppe pioneers were ‘pastoral horsemen of warlike disposition’. Among archaeologists, the earliest example of horse domestication was for many years attributed to Dereivka, 300 kilometres north of the Black Sea, and now in Ukraine, and which formed part of the Sredny Stog culture–i.e., much the same location as where the wheel may have been invented. This site, dated to between 4570 and 3098 BC, is located on the right bank of the river Omelnik, a tributary of the Dnepr. The evidence for this interpretation came from the presence of horse bones in human burials, the remains of pre-molar teeth apparently worn down by bits, perforated antler tines interpreted as cheek pieces, and the preponderance of male horse bones at ancient sites, suggesting that they were preferred in a traction and riding context. There is also the indirect evidence of the emergence of horse-headed sceptres, made of bone, which indicate a horse cult, if not, strictly speaking, riding.88
Reanalysis of the material in the past few years has by and large vitiated these conclusions. The so-called cheek pieces have never been found in place on a horse’s skull and are only rarely associated with horse remains at all. The wear of the pre-molars on wild horses turns out to be no different from that on so-called domesticated animals, and the profile of bones found at ancient sites, both inside and outside tombs, is no different from wild populations (which are known to exist, for example, in ‘bachelor groups’). We now know that the only area where changes in bone structure are incontrovertibly brought about by domestication, in this case by riding, is to the mid-backbone of a horse, where the rider would sit. Vertebrae of ancient horses that undoubtedly were ridden characteristically show minute stress lesions (cracks) on their epiphyses, the outer harder parts. Such lesions are completely absent in wild horses. So far, these lesions on ancient horses have been traced back no earlier than the fifth century BC.89 The earliest unambiguous dateable textual and artistic evidence for horse domestication goes back to the end of the third millennium BC. Evidence of horse graves, accompanied by artefacts unambiguously associated with riding or traction, is even more recent, dating to probably no later than the end of the second millennium BC, when horses were widely used to pull chariots in both the Near East, the Eurasian steppe and in Greece. There is thus no reliable textual or artistic evidence for horse-riding earlier than the end of the second millennium BC.90
The Latin poet Ovid was just one author in antiquity who was convinced there had once been a primeval golden age, free of aggression and rancour: ‘With no one to impose punishment, without any laws, men kept faith and did what was right…The people passed their lives in security and peace, without need for armies.’91
If only…In 1959 Raymond Dart published an analysis of an Australopithecine chin and concluded that ‘it was bashed in by a formidable blow from the front and delivered with great accuracy just to the left of the point of the jaw’. The instrument, in his view, was an antelope humerus.92 In the proto-Neolithic period, four ‘staggeringly powerful’ new weapons appeared ‘that would dominate warfare down to the present millennium: the bow, the sling, the dagger and the mace’.93 Cave paintings from Spain show warriors carrying bows and arrows, the leader marked out by a more fancy headdress. Other paintings show archers arrayed into a firing line. ‘The appearance of the column and line, which imply command and organisation, is synonymous with the invention of tactics.’94 Other paintings depict what appears to be protective clothing–armour–over the warriors’ knees, genitals and shoulders. Slings are shown being used at Çatal Hüyük and the spread of fortified sites took place all over the Middle East from 8000–4000 BC.95 There was no golden age of peace.
By the time of the New Kingdom in Egypt, the pharaohs could put armies of up to 20,000 in the field. This implied vast organisation and logistical support. For comparison, at Agincourt (1415) 6,000–7,000 Englishmen defeated a French force of 25,000 and in the battle of New Orleans (1815) 4,000 Americans defeated 9,000 British troops. The introduction of the chariot meant that rapid reaction was mor
e necessary than ever, which in turn provoked the idea of standing armies. In Egypt the army comprised professional soldiers, foreign mercenaries (Nubians, in this case) and, sometimes, conscripts. The title, ‘overseer of soldiers’ was equivalent to our term ‘general’, of whom, at any one time, there were about fifteen.96 Conscripts were recruited by special officers who toured the country and were empowered to take one in a hundred men. Assyria’s awesome power as a fighting nation was due to two factors over and above the chariot: iron and cavalry. Iron, in particular the Assyrians’ discovery of how to introduce carbon into red-hot iron to produce carburised, or steel-like, iron favoured the development of the sword–with a sharp edge–as opposed to the dagger, with a point.97
Given that the horse was not indigenous to Assyria, the measures they adopted to acquire animals was extraordinary. This was revealed in 1974 by Nicholas Postgate, a professor at Cambridge, in his Taxation and Conscription in the Assyrian Empire. He showed that around 2,000 ‘horse reports’ were written daily, addressed to the king, who had two men in every province specifically searching out horses and transporting them to the capital. Collectively, these agents, or musarkisus, sent around one hundred animals per day to Nineveh over a period of three months. Nearly three thousand animals are mentioned in the Horse Reports, of which 1,840 are ‘yoke’ or chariot horses, and 787 are riding or cavalry horses. ‘Though the Assyrians were the classic charioteers of all time, the more mobile cavalry would soon displace them, and from around 1200 BC formed the elite of the world’s armies until the arrival of the tank in the First World War, in 1918.’98
