The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome
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But although the land was watered by this braided riverway, it grew drier. As the ice retreated, the temperature rose. Just north of the Gulf, the rains diminished into infrequent sprinkles that came only during the winter months. In the summer, searing winds blew across the unprotected plain. Each year, the streams swelled up over their banks and washed away fields before receding back into their beds, leaving silt behind. The silt began to build up on the banks of the interweaving streams, pushing them apart. And the Gulf continued to creep northwards.
The people who lived on the southern plain, closest to the Gulf, scratched for survival in a shifting and unpredictable landscape. Once a year, far too much water covered their fields. As soon as the floods subsided, the ground dried hard. They had no stone, no forests to provide timber, no wide grasslands; just reeds, which grew along the streams, and plenty of mud. Mud, molded and dried, mixed with reeds and baked, became the foundations of their houses, the bricks that formed their city walls, their pots and dishes. They were people of the earth.2
1.1 Very Ancient Mesopotamia
The language that these settlers spoke—Sumerian—is apparently unrelated to any other language on earth. But by the time that the Sumerians began to write, their language was peppered with words from another tongue. Sumerian words are built on one-syllable roots, but dozens of words from the oldest inscriptions have unfamiliar two-syllable roots: the names of the two most powerful rivers that ran through the plain, the names for farmer, fisherman, carpenter, weaver, and a dozen other occupations, even the name of the city Eridu itself.
These words are Semitic, and they prove that the Sumerians were not alone on the southern plain. The Semitic words belonged to a people whose homeland was south and west of the Mesopotamian plain. Mountains to the north and east of Mesopotamia discouraged wanderers, but travelling up from the Arabian peninsula, or over from northern Africa, was a much simpler proposition. The Semites did just this, settling in with the Sumerians and lending them words. And more than just words: the Semitic loanwords are almost all names for farming techniques (plow, furrow) and for the peaceful occupations that go along with farming (basketmaker, leatherworker, carpenter). The Semites, not the Sumerians, brought these skills to Mesopotamia.
So how did the Semites learn how to farm?
Probably in gradual stages, like the peoples who lived in Europe and farther north. Perhaps, as the ice sheets retreated and the herds of meat-providing animals moved north and grew thinner, the hunters who followed these herds gave up the full-time pursuit of meat and instead harvested the wild grains that grew in the warmer plains, shifting residence only when the weather changed (as the native North Americans in modern Canada were still doing when Jacques Cartier showed up). Maybe these former nomads progressed from harvesting wild grain to planting and tending it, and finally gave up travelling altogether in favor of full-time village life. Well-fed men and women produced more babies. Sickles and grinding stones, discovered from modern Turkey down to the Nile valley, suggest that as those children grew to adulthood, they left their overpopulated villages and travelled elsewhere, taking their farming skills with them and teaching them to others.
Ancient stories add another wrinkle to the tale: as the Semite-influenced Sumerians planted crops around their villages, life became so complicated that they needed a king to help them sort out their difficulties.
Enter Alulim, king of Eridu, and the beginning of civilization.
It’s easy to wax lyrical over the “beginning of civilization.” Civilization, after all, is what divides us from chaos. Civilized cities have walls that separate the orderly streets within from the wild waste outside. Civilization, as archaeologist Stuart Piggott explains in his introduction to Max Mallowan’s classic study of ancient Sumer, is the result of a courageous discontent with the status quo: “Sporadically,” Piggott writes, “there have appeared peoples to whom innovation and change, rather than adherence to tradition, gave satisfaction and release: these innovating societies are those which we can class as the founders of civilization.”3
Actually, civilization appears to be the result of a more elemental urge: making sure that no one seizes too much food or water. Civilization began in the Fertile Crescent, not because it was an Edenic place overflowing with natural resources, but because it was so hostile to settlement that a village of any size needed careful management to survive. Farmers had to cooperate in order to construct the canals and reservoirs needed to capture floodwaters. Someone needed to enforce that cooperation, and oversee the fair division of the limited water. Someone had to make sure that farmers, who grew more grain than their families needed, would sell food to the nonfarmers (the basketmakers, leatherworkers, and carpenters) who grew no grain themselves. Only in an inhospitable and wild place is this sort of bureaucracy—the true earmark of civilization—needed. In genuinely fertile places, overflowing with water and food and game and minerals and timber, people generally don’t bother.3
In the Fertile Crescent, as villages grew into cities, more people had to sustain themselves on the same amount of dry land. Strong leadership became more necessary than ever. Human nature being what it is, city leaders needed some means of coercion: armed men who policed their decrees.
The leaders had become kings.
For the Sumerians, who struggled to survive in a land where water either washed away their fields in floods, or retreated entirely, leaving the crops to bake in the sun, kingship was a gift from the gods. No primordial gardens for the Sumerians: cities, protected from invading waters and hungry raiders by thick mud-brick walls, were man’s first and best home. The city of Eridu, where kingship first descended from heaven, reappears in the myths of the Babylonians as the Sumerian Eden, created by the king-god Marduk:
All the lands were sea….
Then Eridu was made….
Marduk constructed a reed frame on the face of the waters.
He created dirt and poured it out by the reed frame….
He created mankind.4
Eridu never disappears, as the Eden of Genesis does. The sacred city stood as the division between the old world of the hunters and gatherers, and the new world of civilization.
But the hunters and gatherers were not entirely gone. From the earliest days of kingship and the first building of cities, settled farmers quarrelled with nomadic herdsmen and shepherds.
The fifth king in the Sumerian list is Dumuzi, who is (as the list tells us, with an air of faint surprise) a shepherd. That a shepherd who becomes king is a meeting of opposites becomes clear in “The Wooing of Inanna,” a tale starring Dumuzi and the goddess Inanna.4 In this story, Dumuzi is not only a shepherd and king, but also has the blood of gods in his veins; despite his divinity, Inanna finds Dumuzi unworthy. “The shepherd will go to bed with you!” exclaims the sun-god Utu, but Inanna (who generally bestows her favors without a whole lot of hesitation) objects:
The shepherd! I will not marry the shepherd!
His clothes are coarse; his wool is rough.
I will marry the farmer.
The farmer grows flax for my clothes.
The farmer grows barley for my table.5
Dumuzi persists with his suit. After a fair amount of arguing about whose family is better, he wins entrance to Inanna’s bed by offering her fresh milk with cream; she promptly suggests that he “plow her damp field.” (He accepts the invitation.)
Inanna’s preference for the farmer echoes a real tension. As the southern plain grew drier, cities clustered along the riverbanks. But beyond the cities, the desert wastes still served as pasture for sheep and goats and as the home of nomads who kept the ancient wandering ways alive. Herdsmen and farmers needed each other; herdsmen provided farmers with meat, fresh milk, and wool in exchange for life-sustaining grain. But mutual need didn’t produce mutual respect. City dwellers scoffed at the rustic, unwashed herdsmen; herdsmen poked fun at the effete and decadent townspeople.
In this land of cities and kings, farmers and no
madic wanderers, the first eight kings of Sumer ruled until catastrophe struck.
Chapter Two
The Earliest Story
In Sumer, slightly later, a very great flood occurs
NO RAIN HAS FALLEN for months. In a field near the salty head of the Gulf, a woman is harvesting the shrivelled heads of wheat. Behind her, the walls of her city rise up against a lead-colored sky. The ground is stone beneath her feet. The reservoirs, once filled with water from the yearly floods, hold only an inch of liquid mud. The irrigation channels are empty.
A drop of water dents the dust on her arm. She looks up to see clouds creeping from the horizon towards the peak of the sky. She shouts towards the walls of the city, but the streets are already filled with men and women, thrusting pots, basins, and hollowed shells into every open space. Far too often, the squalls blow across the plains in moments.
But not this time. The drops strengthen and stream down. Water collects, pools, and swells. In the distance, an unfamiliar roar strengthens and shakes the earth.
ANCIENT PEOPLES without deep wells, dams, or metropolitan water supplies spent a large part of their lives looking for water, finding water, hauling water, storing water, calculating how much longer they might be able to live if water were not found, and desperately praying for water to fall from the sky or well up from the earth beneath. But in Mesopotamia, an unexpected fear of water exists alongside this vital preoccupation. Evil and malice lurk in deep water; water may bring life, but catastrophe is not far behind.
The history of the earth (so geologists tell us) has been punctuated by great catastrophes which apparently wiped out entire categories of life forms. But only one echoes down in the words and stories of a dozen different races. We don’t have a universal story that begins “And then the weather began to grow VERY, VERY COLD.” But at some point during the living, storytelling memory of the human race, water threatened man’s fragile hold on the earth. The historian cannot ignore the Great Flood; it is the closest thing to a universal story that the human race possesses.
Apart from the brief mention of the flood in the king list, the Sumerian story of the flood comes to us only indirectly, translated thousands of years after the event into Akkadian (a Semitic language spoken later in Mesopotamia) and preserved in an Assyrian library. Enlil, king of the gods, grows exasperated because the roar of men on the earth keeps him from sleeping; he convinces the other gods to wipe out mankind, but the god Ea, who has sworn an oath to protect mankind, whispers news of the plot to the wise man Utnapishtim in a dream.5 And then
the gods of the abyss rose up
the dams of the waters beneath were thrown down
the seven judges of hell lit the land with their torches
daylight became night,
the land was smashed as a cup
water poured over the people as the tides of battle.1
Utnapishtim, warned, escapes in a boat with his family, a few animals, and as many others as he can save.
The Babylonian version of this story is called the “Poem of Atrahasis” (Atrahasis, translated, means something like “Super Wiseman”). Atrahasis, the wisest king on earth, is warned of the coming disaster. He builds an ark and—knowing that he can spare only a few—invites the rest of his subjects to a great banquet, so that they may have one last day of joy before the end. They eat and drink, and thank him for his generosity; but Atrahasis himself, knowing that the feast is a death meal, paces back and forth, ill with grief and guilt.
So they ate from his abundance
and drank their fill,
but he did nothing but come in, and go out,
come in, and go out,
never seated,
so sickened and desperate was he.2
Even the wisest king on earth cannot always assure the survival of his people, in the face of overwhelming disaster.
But the most familiar flood story is undoubtedly the one told in Genesis. God determines to cleanse his creation of corruption, so he tells Noah, “blameless among his people,” to build an ark which will save him and his family from destruction. Rain falls, and the “great springs of the deep burst, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened,” and water swallows the earth.
Three cultures, three stories: too much coincidence of detail to be dismissed.6
Nineteenth-century geologists, with Genesis as their guide, searched for traces of the Great Flood and often found them: disordered geological layers, shells on tops of mountains. But the slow movement of ice sheets across land, a theory first suggested by Louis Agassiz in 1840, also explained many of those geological formations previously attributed to a universal flood. It was also more in tune with the growing scientific consensus that the development of the universe was uniform, gradual, always affected by the same logical processes, moving evenly forwards in a predictable pattern in which unique, unrepeatable events had no part.7
Yet the stories of a Great Flood remained. Students of Mesopotamia continued to champion the existence of a real flood—not a universal flood, since this was no longer philosophically respectable, but a Mesopotamian flood destructive enough to be remembered for thousands of years. Archaeologist Leonard Woolley, known for his excavations of Ur, wrote, “The total destruction of the human race is of course not involved, nor is even the total destruction of the inhabitants of the delta…but enough damage could be done to make a landmark in history and to define an epoch.”3 Looking for the footprints of a flood, Woolley (not surprisingly) found them: a ten-foot layer of silt, dividing early Mesopotamian settlements from later.
Seventy years or so later, the geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman suggested that the flood stories represent, not a devastating Mesopotamian flood, but a permanent inundation, “a flood that never subsided…[that] expelled a people from their former homeland and forced them to find a new place to live.”4 As ice melted and the Mediterranean Sea rose, the Bosphorus Strait, at that point a solid land plug, burst open. The Black Sea overran its banks and settled into a new bed, forever drowning the villages on its edge; the people who escaped travelled south, and took with them the memory of the disaster.
2.1 Before the Ryan-Pitman Flood
Less spectacular answers have been suggested as well. Perhaps the flood story represents a sort of generalized anxiety about flooding, which undoubtedly was a regular occurrence near the braided stream that ran through Mesopotamia.5 Or maybe the story of the earth-changing flood reflected the reshaping of the Sumerian homeland as the Gulf crept northwards, swallowing villages in its rising tide.
All of these explanations have their difficulties. Leonard Woolley’s silt layer, as further excavation revealed, was far too localized to strike the Mesopotamian residents as civilization-ending. (It also dates to around 2800 BC, which puts it right in the middle of Sumerian civilization.) It is difficult to see how centuries of rising and falling floods, each of which receded and then came again, could be transformed into one single cataclysmic event which forever changed the face of the earth. And although the rising of the Gulf probably inundated villages, the waters crept up at a rate of one foot every ten years or so, which is unlikely to have produced a huge amount of angst.
Pitman and Ryan’s theory—based on samples taken from the bottom of the Black Sea—is more engaging. But their flood dates to about 7000 BC, which leaves a question unanswered: How did stories of a universal flood make their way into the oral traditions of so many peoples who, by any reckoning, were far away from Mesopotamia by 7000 BC?
In China, where two independent farming cultures—the Yang-shao and the Longshan—grew up during the centuries that the Sumerians were building their cities, a treacherous warleader tears a rent in the sky’s canopy and water rushes through, covering the whole earth and drowning everyone; the only survivor is a noble queen who takes refuge on a mountaintop along with a small band of warriors. In India, a fish warns the wise king Manu that an enormous flood is coming, and that he should build a ship and climb into it as soon
as the waters begin to rise. “The waters swept away all the three heavens,” the Rig Veda tells us, “and Manu alone was saved.”6
More intriguing are the flood stories from the Americas, some of which bear an uncanny resemblance to the Mesopotamian stories (and seem to predate Christian missionaries who brought the book of Genesis with them, although this is not always certain). In the Mayan version, “four hundred sons” survive the flood by turning into fish; afterwards, they celebrate their deliverance by getting drunk, at which point they ascend into the heaven and become the Pleiades. (Alert readers will notice the odd parallels to the Noah story, in which signs also appear in the sky, and in which Noah gets insensibly drunk once he’s on dry land.) In Peru, a llama refuses to eat; when its owner asks why, the llama warns him that in five days water will rise and overwhelm the earth. The man climbs the highest mountain, survives, and repopulates the earth. (No woman climbs up with him, which seems an unfortunate oversight.) If these American flood stories are related to the Mesopotamian tales, the flood could not have happened in 7000 BC; as the historian John Bright suggests, the shared disaster must have taken place before 10,000 BC, when hunters migrated across the Bering Strait.7
So what happened?
Water flooded man’s world; and someone suspected, before the flood crashed down, that disaster was on its way.
AFTER THE WATER, the earth dries out. Man starts again, in a world redder in tooth and claw than it was. Something has been lost. In Genesis, Noah is told that it is now acceptable to kill an animal for its meat; in the Sumerian flood story, the gods lament the destruction of the world that was: