by Bruce Feiler
The decision to visit Ur was easy, even though the city appears by name only in Genesis. For one, Ur is central to the story of Abraham. But more, Sumer serves as an important link between the birth of humanity and the humane vision of the prophets. The notion that Abraham began his journey toward the Promised Land near the same place the Israelites were later banished from the Promised Land suggests the stories share an underlying connection. The importance of exile in Israelite life began long before Babylon.
Buildings like this actually predate Abraham. Enormous mud-brick platforms were constructed in Mesopotamia as early as six thousand years ago. Beginning in the mid–third millennium B.C.E., some of these buildings were erected with receding tiers, ranging from two to seven levels. The tops, accessible through ramps or stairways, housed temples or shrines. Remains of at least twenty-five ziggurats still speckle this area.
Around 2100 B.C.E., southern Mesopotamia came under the control of King Ur-Nammu, who built ziggurats in numerous cities, including Eridu, Uruk, and Nippur. He built the one in Ur to draw closer to Nanna, the god of the moon. The lowest platform comprised 7 million mud bricks, strengthened every six layers with reed matting and sand. These layers of silt functioned as shock absorbers, giving the building flexibility in the event that a flood destabilized the soil. The building was faced with more than 700,000 fire-baked bricks, stamped with Ur-Nammu’s name and glazed in bright colors. Numerous holes in the outer layer allowed the mud bricks to expand and contract as they got wet, then dried.
The Sumerian name for these buildings was Etemennigur, or the Foundation of Heaven and Earth. Akkadian, the extinct Semitic language from southern Mesopotamia, refers to these structures as ziqquratu, from the root word zaqaru, meaning “to build high.” This word was introduced into Europe in the eighteenth century by caravan traders and eventually made its way into English as ziggurat. The Etruscans took the same root to form ekzakkera, or “breast of God,” as ziggurats have large, mammarylike shapes. From ekzakkera travelers created a jargon term for women’s breasts and the Latin exaggerat. This etymology seems only fitting: The grandest ecclesiastic structures of their time have inspired untold generations of hyperbole.
One legacy of the architecture of the ziggurat, in other words, is the art of exaggeration.
At 122 steps I reached the top. The surface was uneven and covered in small pebbles. Dozens of terra-cotta shards, some decorated with insignias, sprinkled the ground. I approached the edge tentatively. Down below were the partially excavated remains of a huge city—royal palaces, a cemetery, neighborhood housing. The surrounding scenery was depressing: low mudflats as brown as a paper lunch bag, occasional date palms, very little water. I looked in vain for the Euphrates but remembered it had been diverted by a flood in 1954. Today Ur is a ghost town on the banks of a ghost river.
As I surveyed the landscape, a small group of U.S. soldiers arrived on the summit. Sergeant First Class Robert Sasser was giving a tour. “Genesis 11 says Abraham lived in Ur of the Chaldeans,” he said. “That’s this spot, men. Abraham married Sarah and together they moved up to Harran.” Dressed in desert camouflage fatigues, Sergeant Sasser is a huge man, with looming shoulders. He would need no pads to play linebacker in the NFL. In his mid-forties, he has pale skin and green, intense eyes. When he finished I went over to see him.
“My mother read me stories about this place years ago,” he explained. “And I love it here. I’m an elder in a church, so this is where I belong.”
“Which church?”
“It’s a peculiar story, really,” he said. “My father was in the military, so we lived all over. We tried many different churches, but none really stuck. Then in my teens I learned about the Church of Latter-Day Saints. My mother sought it out. We were all baptized, and from then on, it’s been my life.”
“Is your mother alive today?”
“No, sir,” he said. “But she’s patting me on the back right now. She guided me here.”
“What would you tell her it feels like?”
“I’d say uplifting. Really, that’s the word to describe it—and not just because I’m standing on top of the biggest building around. I came here to do a military mission, but I plan to do much more.” He explained that he was helping local Iraqis build schools and work on water distribution. His uncle had already raised some private funds to help.
“For me, that’s the reason to be here,” he continued. “It’s religious. It’s biblical. Not all the folks that are here understand the significance.”
“So what is the significance?”
He reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a Bible. I reached into my bag and pulled out mine. He stared at me, and for a second I thought he would cry. But he didn’t seem all that surprised. It seemed natural to him somehow that I would be here, Bible in hand, in the middle of a war zone. He embraced me, and we sat down on the stones.
After Adam and Eve are kicked out of the Garden of Eden, the great primeval events of Genesis unfold with thundering quickness: the births of Cain and Abel, the Flood, the Tower of Babel. At the start of Genesis 11, everyone on earth speaks the same language. “And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.” Shinar refers to ancient Sumer. “Come, let us make bricks and burn them hard,” the people say.
Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered over the world.”
The idea of a tower that men could use to climb up to heaven sounds eerily like the stepped pyramids of Mesopotamia, and ever since these buildings were unearthed in the nineteenth century, the popular image of the Tower of Babel has been a ziggurat. The bitumen in the description refers to a black, pitchlike compound of carbon and hydrogen that seeps from underground oil sources and was used to seal these buildings and others. The Arabic term for this site, Tell Muqayyar, means “built of bitumen.”
The only figure who doesn’t celebrate the building of the tower is God. “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act,” he says of humans, “then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.” He scatters the people and confounds their speech. And he names their construct Babel, a clear reference to the nearby capital of Babylon—one hundred miles to the north—though not the root for the English word babble, which is thought to be imitative of baby talk and more likely comes from the Latin babulus.
Following this story, the Bible outlines a detailed list of human generations, its fifth genealogical chain in six chapters. The earlier lists describe the ten generations that lead from Adam and Eve to Noah; this list describes the ten generations that run from Noah to Abraham. The overwhelming implication is that all humans come from the same biological source. Near the end of the recitation, Genesis 11:26 says, “When Terah had lived seventy years, he begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran.” The story continues, “Haran died in the lifetime of his father Terah, in his native land, Ur of the Chaldeans.” Later, Terah takes “his son Abram, his grandson Lot, the son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and they set out together from Ur of the Chaldeans for the land of Canaan.”
One curious detail in this careful litany is that the Bible does not say Abraham was born in Ur, as millions believe. It merely says that his brother was born there and that Abraham left there with his wife. (Abraham is still called Abram at this point, his wife, Sarai; God would change their names later.) This seemingly minor lapse has generated great dispute. Some Muslims believe Abraham was born hundreds of miles to the north, in the southern Turkish town of Sanliurfa, just north of Harran, which is the family’s first stop after leaving Ur. This location would seem to make some geographic sense, though it’s far afield from the preceding story, the Tower of Babel, which appears to take place in southern Iraq.
Jewish and Christian tradition puts the birthplace here,
the site of ancient Ur. But that identification has problems, too, as the term Chaldeans refers to a population that did not inhabit the area until the ninth century B.C.E. Abraham, by contrast, would have been born at least a thousand years earlier. A mention of Abraham in Deuteronomy 26 suggests he was an Aramean, which refers to a different Mesopotamian tribe, from hundreds of years after Ur faded. With such diverging clues, scholars believe the Bible conflates different traditions into a single narrative. Either way, all traditions agree that Abraham has Mesopotamian roots.
For me, Abraham’s connection to this soil suggests that biblical writers wanted to root the Israelites in the birthplace of civilization, both to plant their origins in the earliest moments of human history and to suggest that Abraham’s one God supplanted the multiple gods of Mesopotamia. Also, Abraham appears to have been an alien during his time in Ur, with a belief system different from that of his neighbors. When God calls Abraham to leave Mesopotamia in Genesis 12, Abraham doesn’t question him. He acts as if he already knows God. The idea that the forefather of the Israelites was an outsider reinforces the idea that the Israelites are always apart from their surroundings. In Genesis, Abraham is described as a “stranger and a sojourner”; in Exodus, Moses is described as a “stranger in a strange land”; in Jeremiah, the Israelites are described as living among strangers. The message of this repetition transcends time: Wandering is a natural state for Israel. Being in exile is positive.
God’s children should not become overconfident and start imposing their will on others. Instead, descendants of Abraham have an obligation to be more sensitive to others in their midst because they themselves are perpetually other. They are at home in the unfamiliar.
“For me,” Sergeant Sasser said, “the significance of this story is that if you go through Scripture, you realize that all three monotheistic faiths trace our roots back to Abraham. The Islamic faith, through his son Ishmael. The Jewish and Christian faiths, through his son Isaac. A lot of people do their genealogy work, and some can trace their families back to right here.”
I asked Sergeant Sasser why genealogy is such a rich tradition in the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
“Because we are a huge family,” he said. “In order for all God’s people to come together in the hereafter, and be with our Heavenly Father, everyone must have the same blessing. We trace our genealogical roots back as far as we can to give baptism to those people who have passed before us, so they may go where we are going.”
I mentioned that ever since 9/11, many people believed the world was in religious war. Did he agree?
“Yes, sir,” he said. “But we can get past this.”
“How?”
“Strangely enough, it’s not done with weapons. It’s done with love and consideration for each other. We’re not here to tear up stuff, we’re here to rebuild. We want places like Ur to be here, just like this, forever and ever.”
Sergeant Sasser was married with five kids—“age twenty all the way down to ten.” In the event that his children could not visit here, I said, what would he want them to know?
“I’m not a writer or a poet,” he said, “but I will share the message that the world is all about people. It’s neighbors. It’s friends. We’re all family, no matter where we’re from. We’re all connected. And sooner or later, we’re all going to be in the same place, right back with the Heavenly Father, where we all belong.”
After our conversation I walked down the grand staircase at the front of the ziggurat. The steps, which had been restored along with the rest of the building in the 1970s, were shallower than those of modern staircases, which forced me to walk more slowly. On either side, bricks had been formed into wide banisters, not unlike the areas between escalators that children sometimes use as slides. Altogether, being on the ziggurat was like climbing around one of the monuments on the Mall in Washington, D.C.—grand, quasi-civic, quasi-religious architecture, completely out of scale with anything familiar, giving one a feeling of awe, insignificance, and pride.
Back on the ground, I was met by a short, toothless man with sunbaked skin carrying a stack of maps and drawings. We were the first tourists in more than a year, he said, and he was eager to give us a tour. He launched into a spiel: “The name of this city, Ur. Ur the capital of the Sumerians. Sumerians lived four thousand years before Christ.”
“Hold on a second,” I said. “Who are you?”
Dhief Muhsen was one of a multigenerational line of attendants who live alongside the ziggurat—his grandfather had dug with Leonard Woolley in the 1920s; his grandson had just been born. He never leaves the site, he said, even during war. Were you in peril during the latest conflict? I asked. “The tanks came,” he said. “One time a shot landed thirty meters from my house. Maybe they thought I was dangerous.” He paused for a second. “Now can I give you a tour?” We proceeded toward the ruins.
The roots of civilization in Iraq go back at least seven thousand years, when humans stopped wandering from place to place, hunting and gathering, and began to settle on small pieces of land and cultivate more regular supplies of food. In the mid–fourth millennium B.C.E., the region underwent a climate change, turning cooler and drier, which allowed agricultural techniques born in the mountainous upper regions to stretch into the flatter areas in the south. Irrigation was so successful that early farmers grew chickpeas, lentils, millet, wheat, turnips, onions, garlic, and mustard. Burgeoning populations hurried to exploit this newfound wealth, developing the plow for faster farming, the sled for dragging grain, the cart for carrying goods, and the sail for ferrying products as far away as Egypt, India, and the Far East.
By 3000 B.C.E. a flourishing civilization existed in southern Iraq that called itself “the place of civilized lords” and its population “the black-headed people.” Sumer, as this land was later named, comprised an area of around ten thousand square miles, stretching from Baghdad to the gulf, and made up of city-states separated by open steppe. Sumer rose and fell numerous times but reached a peak with the reign of Ur-Nammu, lasting for around a century, from 2112 to 2004 B.C.E. This was the period of the ziggurat and around the time the Bible suggests Abraham was born. Flush with technology, elite Sumerians invented the potter’s wheel, the arch, the dome, and other amenities of civilized life, including beer. Sumerians were the first to use barley and other cereals to brew sweetened malt, called bappir. This fermented brew was mentioned in the Code of Hammurabi and even had its own goddess, Ninkasi, “the lady who fills the mouth.” “When you pour out the filtered beer of the collector’s vat,” read one ode to Ninkasi, “it is like the onrush of the Tigris and Euphrates.”
Sumer’s reputation as the provenance of Western civilization rests primarily on two innovations: its breakthrough use of the written word and its vision of a god-centered world. Both have deep echoes in the Bible and profound implications for the religious conflicts of today. The earliest writing in Mesopotamia probably occurred on animal skins or paper, though both are easily destroyed and no remnants exist today. Instead, almost everything we know about the history of western Asia comes from writing on baked clay tablets. As early as the fourth millennium B.C.E., scribes began taking lumps of fine clay and molding them into smooth, cushion-shaped tablets an inch or two long and three-quarters of an inch thick. Using the end of a reed stalk cut on an angle, the scribe would draw pictograms, which were later replaced with horizontal and vertical lines that look like elongated triangles. This writing, the first evolved system in history, is called “cuneiform,” from the Latin cuneus, or “wedge.”
During our tour, I asked Dhief Muhsen whom of all the people who had ever lived in Ur he would most want to meet. “The person who invented writing,” he said. And what would he tell this person? “You served the world. Anytime anyone anywhere sits down to write a letter, they are a baby of Ur. They are a child of Iraq.”
Much of Mesopotamian writing was used to record economic transactions, but numerous epic poems survive that paint a detailed port
rait of the population’s religious worldview. The Sumerians may not have been a people of the Book, but they were a people of the tablet, making them forebears of the biblical tradition of using written narrative as a basis for collective identity. Sumerians believed that the universe consisted of a flat disk, sitting on primordial waters and covered with a dome. Heaven and earth were populated by gods, who looked human, had human defects and passions, and were endowed with supernatural powers that filled humans with awe and fear. The narrative pinnacles of Sumerian religion bear striking resemblance to the Bible. In Sumerian creation, earth emerges from a watery chaos, and the gods planted a watered garden where humans lived in Paradise (the word Eden is derived from the Sumerian edin, meaning “a plain” or “open country”). Sumerian epics describe a time when all humans shared a single language until the gods intervened to create a confusion of tongues.
The most stunning parallels occur in twelve tablets that relate the epic of Gilgamesh, the likely fictitious king of the Sumerian city of Uruk. Gilgamesh is an oppressive ruler, so his constituents appeal to the gods, who create a nemesis, Enkidu. Born naked in the wilderness, Enkidu is tempted by a harlot, who educates him about sin and teaches him to wear clothes. The similarities to Adam and Eve are striking. After Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh, still fearing the gods, seeks out Utnapishtim, the only man granted eternal life. During his journey, Gilgamesh tussles with an unknown supernatural figure in a scene that prefigures the biblical moment when Abraham’s grandson Jacob wrestles with God. When Gilgamesh finds Utnapishtim, he is residing in a secret garden covered in precious stones. The gods had been planning to destroy the earth with a flood, Utnapishtim reveals, though one god took pity and advised Utnapishtim to abandon his possessions, build a seven-tiered ship, and take with him the seed of all creatures. Utnapishtim did so, and after seven days, the ark landed on a mountain and he sent forth a dove. Humanity was saved. The path for Noah was set.
