Most astounding were the statues and inscriptions of a king named Gudea (circa 2400 B.C., Fig. 33) in which he described the miraculous circumstances leading to the building of a complex temple for the god Ningirsu and the god's spouse, Bau. The task, detailed later on, involved divine instructions given in 'Twilight Zone' circumstances, astronomi-
Figure 33
cal alignments, elaborate architecture, the importation of rare building materials from distant lands, calendrial know-how, and precise rituals— all taking place some 4,300 years ago. The Lagash discoveries have been summed up by its last French excavator, Andre Parrot, in his book Tello (1948).
A few miles northwest of the mounds of Lagash, a mound locally called Tell el-Madineh was located. The French excavators of Lagash peeked at it too; but there was not much to excavate, for the ancient city that had been there was, at some time, completely destroyed by fire. A few finds, however, helped identify that ancient city as Bad-Tibira. The ancient city's Sumerian name, 'Bad Tibira', meant 'The Metalworking Fort'; as other discoveries clarified later, Bad-Tibira was indeed considered to have been a metalworking center.
A decade after de Sarzec began excavations at Lagash, a new major archaeological player joined the effort to uncover Sumer: The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It had been known, from preceding finds in Mesopotamia, that the most important religious center in Sumer was a city called Nippur; in 1887 John Peters, a professor of Hebrew at the university, succeeded in lining up academic support at the university and financial support from individual donors to organize an "archaeological expedition" to Iraq to find Nippur.
The location of Nippur seemed easy to guess: At the geographical center of southern Mesopotamia, a can't-be-missed huge mound rising some 65 feet above the mudplain was called Niffar by the locals; it fitted references to ancient Nippur as "Navel of the Earth." The University of Pennsylvania's Expedition conducted four excavation 'campaigns' at the site from 1888 to 1900, at first under the direction of John Peters, then under the leadership of Hermann Hilprecht, a German-born Assyriologist of international standing.
Nippur, the archaeologists ascertained, had been continuously settled from the 6th millennium B.C. to about A.D. 800. The excavations focused at first on the city's Sacred Precinct whose location—as incredible as it may sound—was indicated on a millennia-old city map inscribed on a large clay tablet (Fig. 34, transcript and translation). There,
Figure 34
the remains of a high-rising ziggurat (step-pyramid) in the city's sacred precinct (reconstruction, Fig. 35) attested its dominance above the city. Called E.Kur (= 'House which is like a mountain'), it was the main temple dedicated to Sumer's leading god En.lil (= 'Lord of the Command') and his spouse Nin.lil (= 'Lady of the Command'). The temple, inscriptions stated, included an inner chamber in which "Tablets of Destinies" were kept. According to several texts, the chamber was the heart of the Dur.An.Ki (= "Bond Heaven-Earth')—a Command and Control Center of the god Enlil that connected Earth with the heavens.
The Expedition's finds at Nippur, deemed by some to be "of unparalleled importance," included the discovery of nearly 30,000 inscribed clay tablets (or fragments thereof) in a library of what had apparently been a special Scribal & Science quarter of the city, adjoining the Sacred Precinct. Hilprecht planned to publish no less than twenty volumes with the tablets' most important texts, many with "mythological" context,
Figure 35
others dealing with mathematics and astronomy and dating back to the 3rd millennium B.C. Among the Nippur inscriptions that were transcribed, translated and published was a remnant of the original Sumerian tale of the Deluge, naming its "Noah" Ziusudra (= '[His] Lifedays Prolonged')—the equivalent of the Akkadian Utnapishtim.
In this Sumerian inscription (known to scholars by its reference number CBS 10673), it is the god Enki who reveals to his faithful follower Ziusudra a "secret of the gods"—that, at the instigation of an angry Enlil, the gods decided to "destroy the seed of Mankind by the Deluge" that was about to happen; and Enki ('Cronos' in the Berossus Fragments) instructs Ziusudra (the 'Xisithros' of Berossus) to build the salvaging boat.
But all the Expedition's plans were cut short by a spate of accusations by Peters that Hilprecht was providing misleading 'provenances' (discovery locations) for announced finds, and that Hilprecht had made a deal with the Turkish Sultan in Constantinople (today's Istanbul) to send most of the finds there—rather than to the university in Philadelphia—in exchange for the Sultan letting Hilprecht keep some finds as 'gifts' for his private collection. The controversy, which divided Philadelphia's highest echelons and made headlines in the New York Times, raged from 1907 to 1910. A commission of inquiry formed by the University in the end found the accusations of professional misconduct against Hilprecht to be "unsubstantiated"; but in fact many of the Nippur ^ tablets did end up in Constantinople/Istanbul. Hilprecht's private collection ended up in Jena, Hilprecht's university town in Germany.
The University of Pennsylvania, through its Archaeological Museum, returned to Nippur only after World War II, in a joint expedition with Chicago University's Oriental Institute. The Peters-Hilprecht controversy is still regarded by historians as a major disruption of Near Eastern archaeology. But due to the ever-intervening Law of Unintended Consequences, in the end it led to one of the greatest advances in Sumerology, for it provided the first job to a young epigrapher named Samuel N. Kramer who then became an outstanding 'Sumerologist'.
* * *
The excavations at Lagash and Nippur, requiring continuous archaeological efforts year after year after year, revealed the existence of major urban centers in Sumer that rivaled in size the Babylonian and Assyrian sites in the north, even though the ones in Sumer were older by more than a thousand years. The existence of walled sacred precincts, each with a skyscraping ziggurat, indicated a high level of ancient building technology that preceded and served as a model for the Babylonians and Assyrians. The ziggurats—literally 'That which rises high'—rose in several steps (usually seven) to heights that could reach 90 meters. They were built of two kinds of mud bricks—sun-dried for high-rise cores, and kiln-burned for extra strength for stairways, exteriors, and overhangs; the size, shape, and curvature of the bricks varied to fit their function; and they were held together with bitumen as mortar. (Modern laboratory tests show that kiln-burnt mud bricks are fivefold stronger than sun-dried ones.)
The discovered ziggurats literally confirmed the biblical statement in Genesis 11:1-4 regarding the construction methods of the settlers in Shine'ar after the Deluge:
And the whole Earth was of one language
and one kind of words.
And it came to pass,
as they journeyed from the east,
that they found a plain in the land of Shine'ar
and they settled there.
And they said unto each other:
Come, let us make bricks,
and burn them thoroughly.
And the brick served them for stone,
and bitumen served them for mortar.
And they said:
Come, let us build us a city,
and a tower whose head shall reach heaven.
In lands like Canaan, where stones were used for building and lime is still used as mortar (for they lack bitumen), the reference to bricks and brick-making technology ("burn them thoroughly") and to bitumen (which seeps out of the ground in southern Mesopotamia)—represent a remarkably detailed and amazing knowledge of past events in a stone- less land like Sumer. Uncovering ancient Sumer, the archaeologists' spades were corroborating the Bible.
Beside the various technological accomplishments of those settlers in the plain between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers—they also included the wheel and wagon, the kiln, metallurgy, medicines, textiles, multicolored apparel, musical instruments—there were countless other 'firsts' of what are still deemed essential aspects of an advanced civilization. They included a mathematical system cal
led sexagesimal ('Base 60') that initiated the circle of 360°, timekeeping that divided day/night into 12 'double-hours', a luni-solar calendar of 12 months properly intercalated with a 13th leap month, geometry, measurement units of distance, weight and capacity, an advanced astronomy with planetary, star, constellation, and zodiacal knowledge, law codes and courts of law, irrigation systems, transportation networks and customs stations, dance and music (and musical notes), even taxes—as well as a social organization based on kingship and a religion centered at temples with prescribed festivals and a specialized priesthood. Additionally, the existence of scribal schools and temple and royal libraries indicated astounding levels of intellectual and literary achievements.
The Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer, in his trailblazing book History Begins At Sumer (1956), described twenty-seven of those Firsts, including the First Legal Precedent, the First Moral Ideals, the First Historian, the First Love Song, the First 'Job', and so on—all culled from Sumerian inscribed clay tablets. Actual archaeological finds of artifacts, and pictorial depictions, enhance and affirm that extensive textual record.
The realization in Europe and America of all of that served to increase the pace of uncovering Sumer; and the more archaeologists dug, the more they found themselves facing earlier and earlier times.
A site, called Bismaya, was excavated by an expedition of the University of Chicago. It was an ancient Sumerian city called Adab.
Remains of temples and palaces were found there, with objects bearing votive inscriptions; some identified a king of Adab named Lugal-Dalu, who reigned there circa 2400 B.C.
At mounds grouped around the locally named Tell Uhaimir, French archaeologists uncovered the ancient Sumerian city of Kish, with remains of two ziggurats; they were built of unusual convex bricks; a tablet inscribed in early Sumerian script identified the temple as dedicated to the god Ninurta, Enlil's warrior son. The earliest ruins, dated to the Very Early Dynastic period, included a palace of "monumental size"; the building was columned—a rarity in Sumer. The finds in Kish included remains of wheeled wagons and metal objects. Inscriptions identified two kings by their names—Mes-alim and Lugal-Mu; it was later determined that they reigned at the start of the 3rd millennium B.C.
Excavations at Kish were resumed after World War I by Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. Among their finds were some of the earliest examples of cylinder seal impressions. (In 2004 the Field Museum launched a project to unify, digitally on computers, the more than 100,000 Kish artifacts that have
been dispersed between Chicago, London, and Baghdad.)
* * *
In the 1880s a site called Abu Habbah drew the attention of L. W. King . of the British Museum when "interesting tablets"—dug up at the site by local plunderers—were offered for sale. A colleague, Theophilus Pinches, correctly identified the city as ancient Sippar—the very city of the god Shamash, mentioned by Berossus in the story of the Flood!
The site was briefly excavated by Layard's assistant Hormuzd Rassam; one of the best known finds there has been a large stone tablet depicting none other than the god Shamash, sitting on his canopied throne (Fig. 36). The accompanying inscriptions identified the king being presented to the god as King Nabu-apla-iddin, who in the 9th century B.C. refurbished the Shamash temple in Sippar.
The city's twin mounds were more thoroughly excavated in the 1890s by a joint expedition of the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft and the
Figure 36
Ottoman Antiquities Service. They not only discovered undisturbed hoards of textual tablets—shared between Berlin and Constantinople— but also some of the tablets' oldest and oddest libraries: The tablets were kept in 'pigeonhole' compartments cut into the mud-brick walls, rather than (as in later periods) on shelves. The library's texts included tablets whose colophons explicitly stated that those were copies of texts from earlier tablets coming from Nippur, from a city called Agade, and from Babylon—or found in Sippar itself; among them were tablets belonging to the Sumerian Atra-Hasis text!
Did that indicate that Sippar had been an early repository of "writings," as the statements by Berossus have suggested? No certain answers can be given, except to quote Berossus again: First, 'Cronos' ordered Xisithros "to dig a hole and to bury all the writings about the Beginnings, Middles, and Ends, in Sippar, the city of the Sun god [Shamash]." Then, the Flood's survivors "came back to Babylon, they dug up the writings from Sippar, founded many cities, set up shrines, and once again established Babylon." Was the unique storage in cutout compartments a reminder of the "digging of holes" to preserve the most ancient tablets? We can only wonder.
At Sippar, the tale of the Deluge began to assume physical reality; but it was only the beginning.
In the decade preceding World War I, German archaeologists, under the auspices of the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft, began excavating at a site locally named Fara. It was an important Sumerian city called Shuruppak, which had been settled well before 3000 B.C. Among its interesting features were buildings that were, without doubt, public facilities, some serving as schools with built-in mud-brick benches. There were plenty of inscribed tablets whose contents threw light on daily life, the administration of laws, and the private ownership of houses and fields—tablets that mirrored urban life five thousand years ago. Inscribed tablets asserted that this Sumerian city had a pre-Diluvial predecessor—a place that played a key role in the events of the Deluge.
The discoveries there stood out by their unusual hoard of cylinder seals or their impressions—a unique Sumerian invention that, as the cuneiform script, was in time adopted throughout the ancient lands. These were cylinders (mostly an inch or two in length) that were cut from a stone (often semiprecious), into which the artisan engraved a drawing, with or without accompanying writing (Fig. 37). The trick was
Figure 37
to engrave it all in reverse, as a negative, so that when it was rolled on wet clay the image was impressed as a positive—an early 'rotary press' invention. These cylindrical works of art are called 'seals' because that was their purpose: The seal's owner impressed it on a lump of wet clay that sealed a container of oil or wine, or on a clay envelope to seal a clay letter inside. Some seal impressions had already been found in Lagash, bearing the name of their owner; but the ones in Fara/Shuruppak exceeded 1,300 in number, and in some cases were from the earliest times.
But no less an amazing aspect of uncovering Shuruppak was its very finding—for, according to Tablet XI of the Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Shuruppak was the hometown of Utnapishtim, the 'Noah' of the Deluge! It was there that the god Enki revealed to Utnapishtim the secret of the coming Deluge and instructed him to build the salvage boat:
Man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu:
Tear down the house, build a ship!
Give up possessions, seek thou life!
Forswear belongings, keep soul alive!
Aboard ship take thou the seed of all living things.
That ship thou shalt build—
Its dimensions shall be to measure.
(Enki, it will be recalled, was reported to have been the revealer of the gods' secret decision also in the Sumerian text mentioned earlier.)
The discoveries of and at Shuruppak, together with those at Sippar, transformed the Deluge tale from legend and 'myth' to a physical reality. In Divine Encounters I have concluded, based on ancient data and modern scientific discoveries, that the Deluge was a colossal tidal wave caused by the slippage of the eastern Antarctic ice sheet off that continent.
World War I (1914-1918) interrupted those and other archaeological explorations in the Near East, which was part of the Ottoman empire until its dismemberment after the war. Mesopotamia was left in the hands of local excavators—both official, and (mostly) private site- robbers. Some of the finds did reach the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Constantinople/Istanbul, revealing that during the war years excavations in Iraq had taken place at Abu Habbah, ancient Sippar; but t
here was so much to uncover there, that varied excavations have continued into the 1970s—almost a full century after excavations there began.
* * *
A continuous and most determined series of excavations, lasting from the end of World War I until the outbreak of World War II in 1939 (and resumed in 1954) took place at a southern Sumerian site locally called Warka—the very Uruk of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Erech of the Bible!
Adopting an excavating technique that cut a vertical shaft through all the strata, the German archaeologists of the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft were able to see at a glance the site's settlement and cultural history—from the latest settlement at the top to a beginning in the 4th millennium B.C. at the bottom. At all times since at least 3800 B.C., it appeared, every power from Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian to Persian, Greek, and Seleucid wanted to leave a footprint at Uruk. Uruk, it was apparent, was a special place.
At Uruk the German archaeologists found several 'firsts'—the first , items of colored pottery baked in a kiln, the first use of a potter's wheel, the first objects of metal alloys, the first cylinder seals, and the first inscriptions in the pictorial predecessor of cuneiform. Another first was a pavement made of limestone blocks, part of an unusual use of stones rather than mud bricks for construction—unusual because the stones had to be brought from mountains situated more than fifty miles to the east. The archaeologists described some of the city's stone buildings as of "monumental proportions."
There Were Giants Upon the Earth Page 6
