Would that famine had wasted the world
Rather than the flood.
Would that pestilence had wasted mankind
Rather than the flood.8
Surely it is not a coincidence that the creation stories of so many countries begin with chaotic waters which must recede so that man can begin his existence on dry land. In the Akkadian creation story, discovered on fragmented tablets along with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first lines read:
When above were not raised the heavens:
And below on earth a plant had not grown up;
The abyss also had not broken open their boundaries:
The chaos Tiamat was the mother of the whole of them.9
In the creation of the world, the sea-being Tiamat is killed, and half of her body is tossed into the heavens, so that death-bringing salt water will not cover the newly dry land.
“In the year and the day of the clouds,” the Mixtec creation legend begins, “the world lay in darkness. All things were orderless, and water covered the slime and ooze that then was the earth.”10 “Truly,” the Indian Satapatha-Brahamana tells us, “in the beginning was water, nothing but a sea of water.” “In the beginning, in the dark, there was nothing but water,” the Bantu myth begins. And perhaps best known to those of us born into Christianity or Judaism, the words of Genesis: “In the beginning, the earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the waters; and the Spirit of God hovered over the deeps.”
There is no way of knowing what was destroyed by the waters. But like many other peoples, the Sumerians had a tale of lost paradise. In the very ancient Sumerian poem “Enki and Ninhusag,” this paradise is described as a place where
the lion does not kill,
the wolf does not seize the lamb,
the wild dog, devourer of kids, is unknown,
he whose eyes hurt does not say: “My eyes hurt.”
He whose head aches does not say, “My head aches.”11
But this dream city, filled with fruit trees and watered by fresh streams uncorrupted by salt, is lost to man.
We are still fascinated by water, and its inundation of the dry and orderly spaces where we live. Witness our ongoing obsession with the Titanic; the decks began to tilt, the water crept upwards, and the officers who had certain foreknowledge of the coming catastrophe could do nothing to avert it. Stories of deep water still frighten and attract us; as though, philosopher Richard Mouw suggests, “images associated with ‘the angry deep’ have an enduring power in the human imagination that has little to do with our geography.”12
But this is the territory of theologians and philosophers. The historian can only observe that the brewing of beer seems to have gone on as long as farming, and that the world’s oldest wine (found at a village site in the present-day country of Iran) dates to the sixth millennium. For as long as man has grown grain, he has tried to recapture, if only temporarily, the rosier and kinder world that can no longer be found on a map.
Chapter Three
The Rise of Aristocracy
In Sumer, around 3600 BC, kingship becomes hereditary
AFTER THE GREAT FLOOD, the Sumerian king list tells us that the city of Kish—to the north, surrounded by cornfields—became the new center of kingship. The list begins over again, with a series of kings generally known as “The First Dynasty of Kish.” The first ruler of Kish was a man called Gaur; next came the magnificently named Gulla-Nidaba-annapad; after that, another nineteen kings led right down to Enmebaraggesi, the twenty-second king after the flood. Thanks to inscriptions, we know that Enmebaraggesi ruled around 2700, the first date that we can assign to a Sumerian king.
Which still leaves us with the problem of describing Sumer’s history between the Sumerian flood (whenever it was) and 2700 BC. After the flood, kings no longer rule for neat multiples of thirty-six hundred years. Instead, the reigns trail raggedly off, growing shorter and shorter. Altogether, 22,985 years, 3 months, and 3 days elapse between the flood and before Enmebaraggesi comes to the throne—a figure which is not as helpful as its precision may imply. (Scholars of Sumerian literature tend to call the kings before the flood “mythical” and the kings afterwards “quasi-historical,” a distinction which eludes me.)
Most of the twenty-one kings who rule before Enmebaraggesi are described with a single phrase: a name, a length of reign, no more. The one exception to this rule comes a little more than halfway through the list, when Etana, the thirteenth king after the deluge, is suddenly set apart from his colorless predecessors.
Etana, he who ascended into heaven,
He who made firm all the lands,
He reigned 1,560 years as king;
And Balih, the son of Etana,
He reigned 400 years.
There is more history here than might appear at first glance.
BY THE TIME the king list resumes, the valley has assumed something like its present shape. The head of the Gulf has advanced northwards. The braided steam that once watered the valley, its branches pushed apart by accumulating silt, has become two large rivers fed by meandering tributaries. Today we call these rivers the Euphrates and the Tigris, names given them by the Greeks; in more ancient times, the western river was called Uruttu, while the quicker and rougher east river was named after the swiftness of an arrow in flight: Idiglat.8
Between these two rivers, cities grew up. Archaeology tells us that by 3200, large groups of country-dwellers were shifting their whole way of life, moving into walled cities in a phenomenon called “streaming-in.”
The transition was not always peaceful. The book of Genesis and its parallel flood story give us an intriguing glimpse of disruption: When Noah begins again, his descendants spread out across the land. In Shinar, the Semitic name for the southern Mesopotamian plain, city-building is taken to a particularly high level. Carried away by their own skill, the city-dwellers decide to make themselves a tower that reaches up to heaven, a tower that will give them place of pride not only over the earth, but over God himself. This act of arrogance brings confusion of language, estrangement, and eventually war.
The Tower of Babel, like the biblical flood, lies in the undatable past. But it gives us a window into a world where mud-brick cities, walled and towered, spread their reach across Mesopotamia.1 A dozen walled cities, each circled by suburbs that stretched out for as much as six miles, jostled each other for power: Eridu, Ur, Uruk, Nippur, Adab, Lagash, Kish, and more. Perhaps as many as forty thousand souls lived in these ancient urban centers.
Each city was protected by a god whose temple drew pilgrims from the surrounding countryside. And each city sent tentacles of power out into the countryside, aspiring to rule more and more land. Shepherds and herdsmen came into the city to bring gifts to the gods, to sell and buy—and to pay the taxes demanded by priests and kings. They relied on the city for trade and for worship, but the city demanded as much as it gave. The egalitarian structure of earlier hunter-gatherer groups had shattered. A hierarchy now existed: the city first, the countryside second.
3.1 Early Cities of Sumer
Ten generations (or so) after the deluge, hierarchy took on a new form. Men claimed the right to rule, for the first time, not by virtue of strength or wisdom, but by right of blood.
The tenth king of Kish after the flood, Atab, is the first to be succeeded by his son and then by his grandson. This three-generation dynasty is the earliest blood succession in recorded history. But when the next king, Etana, takes the throne, he faces a brand new difficulty.
Of Etana, the king list tells us only that he “ascended into heaven”—a detail given without clarification. To discover more, we have to turn to a much later poem, which appears to preserve an older Sumerian story. In this poem, Etana is a pious king, faithful to the gods, but he has one great sorrow: he has no child. He laments, in his prayers,
I have honoured the gods and respected the spirits of the dead,
The dream-interpreters have made full use of my incense,
&
nbsp; The gods have made full use of my lambs at the slaughter…
Remove my shame and provide me with a son!2
In a frightening dream, Etana sees that his city will suffer if he can provide no heir to his throne:
The city of Kish was sobbing
Within it the people were in mourning…
Etana cannot give you an heir!3
Almost without remark, another huge change has come to man. Kingship has become hereditary. The leader who takes on the burden of his people’s good is now born to that task, fitted for it by blood. For the first time, we see the rise of an aristocracy: a class born to rule.
The gods have pity on Etana and show him an answer. He must ride on an eagle’s back up to heaven, where he will find the plant of birth, the secret to fathering a son. The tablet breaks off, and the rest of the story is lost. But the king list tells us that Balih, the son of Etana, reigned after Etana’s death, so we can assume that the quest succeeded.
Inequality has been enshrined in blood. Like the idea of kingship itself, the idea of a born aristocracy never really goes away.
SINCE THOSE who are born to lead should clearly control as much territory as possible, Etana then “makes firm the land” for his son.
The cities of Mesopotamia were independent, each ruled by a local prince. But Kish lay between the two rivers, a position which simply cried out for some exercise of overlordship. Sumer, after all, had no native wood; only a few imported palm trees, which make for third-rate building material. There was no stone, no copper, no obsidian, nothing but mud and a few deposits of bitumen (asphalt, used as “pitch” in torches and as a mortar-binder). Wood had to be shipped down from the northeastern Zagros Mountains, or brought from the Lebanon Mountains to the northwest. Copper came from the southern Arabian mountains, lapis lazuli from the rocky lands north and east; stone from the desert to the west and obsidian from the far north. In exchange, the Sumerian cities traded the goods of an agricultural society: grain, cloth, leather, pottery. Sumerian pots and bowls show up in a wide swath of little settlements and towns all across eastern Europe and northern Asia.
Some of this trade took place across the deserts to the east and west, but a huge proportion went up and down the Tigris and Euphrates; the old name of the Euphrates, the Uruttu, means “copper river.” The Mesopotamian valley, as archaeologist Charles Pellegrino points out, was a linear civilization: “an oasis thousands of miles long with a width of less than ten miles.”4 Ifacity downstream intended to send upriver to the mountains of Lebanon for cedar logs, the goods had to pass Kish. The king of Kish, collecting some percentage from the traffic passing by his city, could feather his own nest by plucking a few feathers from other princes.
By the time that Etana’s son inherited, Kish had replaced the old southern city of Eridu as the most powerful city on the plain. By 2500, kings of other cities sometimes claim the title “king of Kish” as though it has become an honorary label, showing some sort of authority over other Sumerian cities.5
Collecting tribute is one thing, though, and actual conquest is another. Etana and his kin never extended imperial rule to the other cities of Sumer. The difficulty of moving armies up and down the length of the plain may have dissuaded the kings of Kish from actually conquering other cities; or perhaps they simply had, as yet, no thought of imperial leadership to complement the ideas of kingship and aristocracy. The first empire-builder would come from another nation entirely.
Chapter Four
The Creation of Empire
In the Nile river valley, around 3200 BC, the Scorpion King unites northern and southern Egypt, and Narmer of the First Dynasty makes the union permanent
SOUTHWEST OF SUMER, beneath the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, the first empire-builder stormed through the Nile river valley.
Like the first kings of Sumer, the Scorpion King hovers on the border between history and myth. He appears on no king list; he exists only as a carved image on the head of a ceremonial weapon. But unlike the first kings of Sumer, who occupy the vague distant past, the Scorpion King lives almost within the realm of written history. He made his effort to conquer his world around 3200 BC.
The Scorpion King was the descendant of an African people who had once lived on either side of the Nile valley. Centuries before his birth—in the days when the legendary Alulim ruled over a damper, cooler Sumer—the Nile valley was probably uninhabitable. Every year, when heavy rains poured down on the southern mountains, the gathered waters cascaded down the length of the Nile, northwards to the Mediterranean, and rushed far out over the surrounding land. The flooding was so violent that few groups of hunters and gatherers dared to linger. Instead, they lived in the more hospitable lands to the east and west: settling close to the shores of the Red Sea, and wandering through the Sahara. In those milder, wetter years, the Sahara was grassy and watered. Archaeologists have discovered leaves, trees, and the remains of game animals beneath the sands.
But the hotter, dryer weather patterns that changed the Mesopotamian plain also withered the Sahara. The people of the Sahara journeyed east, towards the well-watered Nile valley. Thanks to the decreasing rains, the Nile flood had become more moderate; the refugees found that they could manage the yearly inundation, digging reservoirs to hold the water at flood-time, and canals to irrigate their fields in the drier months. They built settlements on the banks, planted grain in the dark silt left by the floods, and hunted the wildlife of the marshes: wild cattle, ibex, crocodiles, hippopotami, fish, and birds. Other peoples travelled over from the western shores of the Red Sea to join them. They were the first full-time residents of the Nile valley: the first Egyptians.9
Unlike Sumer, the Nile valley had game and fish, stone, copper, gold, flax, papyrus—everything but wood. The Egyptians did trade west for ivory, east for shells, and north for semiprecious stones, but to survive they needed only the Nile.
The Nile, the bloodstream of Egypt, ran through a valley five hundred miles long, bordered by cliffs in some places and by flatlands in others. The yearly floodwaters began upstream, in what are now the Ethiopian highlands, ran down past the Second Cataract towards the First Cataract, careened around a bend where kings would one day be buried, and thundered towards a flat plain where the river finally fell away into a dozen streams: the Nile Delta.
Because the Nile flowed from south to north, it was clear to the Egyptians that every other river ran backwards. Judging from later hieroglyphs, they used one word for north, downstream, and back of the head, and another for upstream, south, and face;1 an Egyptian always oriented himself by turning south, towards the oncoming Nile current. From the days of the earliest settlements, the Egyptians buried their dead at the edge of the desert, with their heads pointed south and their faces turned west towards the Saharan waste. Life came from the south, but the Land of the Dead was westward, towards the desert they had fled as grass and water disappeared.
The Egyptians gave their country two different names. The land where the yearly flood laid down its silt was Kemet, the Black Land; black was the color of life and resurrection. But beyond the Black Land lay Deshret, the deathly Red Land. The line between life and death was so distinct that a man could bend over and place one hand in fertile black earth, the other on red, sunbaked desert.
This doubleness, an existence carried on between two extremes, was echoed in Egypt’s growing civilization. Like the cities of Sumer, the Egyptian cities saw “streaming-in” by 3200 BC. Nubt (also called Nadaqa), on the east-west route that led to gold mines, became the strongest city of the south, with Hierakonpolis, home to at least ten thousand, not far behind. Very early, these southern cities identified themselves not as separate and sovereign, but as part of a kingdom: the White Kingdom (also called “Upper Egypt,” since it lay upstream from the Mediterranean), ruled by a king who wore the cylindrical White Crown. In the north of Egypt (“Lower Egypt”), cities banded together in an alliance called the Red Kingdom; the cities of Heliopolis and Buto grew to promine
nce. The king of Lower Egypt wore the Red Crown, with a cobra shape curling from its front (the earliest portrayal of the crown dates to around 4000 BC),2 and was protected by a cobra-goddess who spat venom at the king’s enemies.3 The two kingdoms, White and Red, like the Red and Black Lands, mirrored that basic Egyptian reality: the world is made up of balanced and opposing forces.
Unlike the Sumerian king list, which apparently intends to chronicle the beginning of time, the oldest Egyptian king lists do not go all the way back to the White and Red Kingdoms, so the names of their kings are lost. But for the existence of the Scorpion King, we have a different kind of testimony: a macehead, unearthed at the temple at Hierakonpolis. On it, a White King, wearing the distinctive White Crown, celebrates his victory over defeated soldiers of the Red Kingdom (and holds an irrigation tool, showing his power to sustain his people). To his right, a hieroglyph records his name: Scorpion.10
The Scorpion King himself may well have been a native of Hierakonpolis, which was itself a double city. Hierakonpolis was originally two cities divided by the Nile: Nehken, on the west bank, was dedicated to the falcon-god, and Nekheb on the east was guarded by the vulture-goddess. Over time, the two separate cities grew into one, watched over by the vulture. Perhaps the Scorpion King, seeing the two halves united, first conceived his plan of drawing White and Red Kingdoms together under one king.
His victory, which probably took place around 3200 BC, was temporary. Another carving records the reunion of the two kingdoms under another White King, perhaps a hundred years later. Like the Scorpion King macehead, the carving was found at the temple at Hierakonpolis. Done on a palette (a flat piece of stone that served as a “canvas”), the carving shows a king who wears the Red Crown on the front of the palette, and the White Crown on the back. A hieroglyph names the king: Narmer.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 4
