In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  Nothing is known of the social or political organization of such settlements, but religion may already have been an important element in their rise. At Çatal Hüyük a shrine was identified by the excavator, with evidence of a bull cult and signs of worship of the prehistoric mother goddess who is found throughout ancient Anatolia and the Near East. A recent, spectacular find in the Upper Euphrates valley near Urfa in Turkey may well be the earliest temple yet known. This building, from the eighth millennium BC, was 35 feet square with pillars and a polished gravel and chalk floor. Its kitchen, stores and workshop were reminiscent of later Near Eastern temples and mosques, and winged half-human figures found in the main room strikingly recall the angels and genies of later Near Eastern religious imagery. Another new discovery, at Ain Ghazal in Jordan, also reminds us of the deep continuities in the patterns of ritual and worship in the region. Here near life-sized human images have been uncovered dating from 7000 BC – the oldest statues in the world. Coated with white gypsum plaster, they have the same socketed and black-ringed eyes which were to be characteristic of Mesopotamian cult right down to the Graeco-Roman age and even into the early Christian era.

  In Iraq itself agricultural communities were established in the northern hills by the seventh millennium BC; by the sixth millennium they built villages defended with walls of sun-dried bricks. Some of these ancient sites have remained inhabited till today. At Tel Afar, a Turkoman town on the old caravan road from Mosul into Syria, pottery from the fifth millennium BC has been found inside the citadel, and Irbil on its mound near the Great Zab river may be as early. Both are among the longest continuously occupied places on earth. Already, no doubt, as populations slowly expanded, mankind had begun to make its mark on the environment: slashing, burning, cutting down forests, clearing brushwood, leaving that distinctive, bare-ribbed hilly landscape of Eastern Anatolia and Kurdistan we see today. The soil thus eroded washes into the rivers with each winter’s rain, ‘pouring off the hills in great chocolate torrents’ as the excavator of Jarmo described, providing the source of the alluvium which has extended the southern plain of Iraq by a hundred miles since the fourth millennium BC. So even before the rise of the first cities in the plain, mankind was changing the balance with nature forever, as it continues to do today. And no doubt it was the pressure on a growing population to open up new land which led large groups of people for the first time into the deep south.

  The first civilizations. All the early civilizations of the Old World arose on rivers, in similar climatic conditions, and around the same latitude. Iraq’s contacts with Egypt, the Iranian plateau and the Indus went back deep into prehistory; China, it seems, was a completely original growth.

  Nippur, the sacred city of Sumer. Details of the walls, gates and other named features come from a remarkable map of around 1300 BC. In the first millennium AD the west mound was the heart of the city.

  When exactly did people first settle the plain? There must have been hunter-gatherers moving across it since prehistory, as nomadic herders still do in our own time. But they have left no mark in the archaeological record, save for an intriguing but isolated Palaeolithic site near the most ancient cult shrine of the south at Eridu. But ten miles north of Warka, possibly from as early as 5000 BC, comes an enigmatic settlement which may give a clue. Only 300 feet across, this was the home of perhaps three family groups. They made pottery, fished with nets and baked clay weights; they had stone tools, grinding stones and a quern; they fashioned clay figurines of the mother goddess like those in common use in later times. Their houses perhaps were of mud and reed. The growth of such communities can be traced over the next millennium by their distinctive pottery, which is known as Ubaid after one of the important early sites. These were perhaps the first permanent people of the south. They were not Sumerian, that is, they did not speak the language we call Sumerian, for the early place names of Sumer – Ur, Eridu, Uruk, Nippur – are not from that language. Presumably then it was the Ubaid people who first named the southern landscape; the Sumerian speakers, it is assumed, came into the plain from the south-east around 4000 BC, into an already existing culture. But who the Sumerians were is still one of archaeology’s great mysteries. Their language has no known affinities with any language, living or dead. But new discoveries concerning Elamite, the ancient language of Persia (see here and here), may hold the key to Sumerian origins.

  Living links with that deep past still survive which help us to imagine these early steps towards civilization. The permanent settlements of the Ubaid people were perhaps very similar to traditional mudbrick villages still to be seen in the plain only twenty or thirty years ago. Near the mound of ancient Shurrupak, in the middle of Sumer, for example, is a village abandoned in the 1960s when its canal dried up. It had a population of 200, who lived in mud and reed huts. Each family group had an enclosure wall of sun-dried mud protecting their house, a sleeping platform, corral, grain silo, and bread oven. The village still had an old female traditional religious specialist who composed verses, incantations and spells, and acted as midwife. In architecture, customs and language, theirs was an archaic world harking back to long before Islam. In the deep south of the plain, today’s Marsh Arab settlements must also look much as the Ubaidian and Sumerian settlements once did, scattered along the alluvium: built on man-made islands in the freshwater lagoons where they live by fishing, cutting the reed beds, and cultivating the rich soil along the shores. Their elaborate reed houses, some up to 100 feet long, and their slim and elegant boats sealed with natural bitumen, are still built in the same fashion as was depicted 5000 years ago in Sumerian art. Here it was still possible, at least up to the Gulf War and its aftermath, to enter into a world which recalls the early myths. It is a world of small artificial islands each built on reed piles, with a reed house, barn, mudhif, clay kiln and bread oven, and a painted boat. Here a single family might live with their animals, their cows and water buffalo (which were first introduced from India in the third millennium BC). Such islands are worlds in miniature – living symbols of the way the people of southern Iraq have patiently laboured for millennia to create land out of water and life and civilization out of the plain and the swamp under that vast and unremitting sky.

  So even today in the southern plain the visitor can find clues to the different lives lived by prehistoric societies on the threshold of the city age. There are the mudbrick villages of the sedentary cultivators and herders. There is too the purely nomadic life still followed by the Bedouin, moving their black tented camps up and down the plain from summer to winter pasture. And then the Marsh Arabs constitute a mixture of the two. In such a fluid world, the opportunities of permanent settlements are obvious. By exchanging grains and vegetables for the produce of the marsh dwellers or the Bedouin herders, it would be possible to build up a surplus and to deal long distance for precious metals and luxuries. Along with the social and economic causes of urbanization then, we should not overlook human ambition. The Sumerians had a deeply ingrained drive for worldly success.

  Religion, too, must have played its part. When they emerge, the cities of Sumer centre on shrines of the deities of the plain, gods of wind, air and sky, of the grape vine, the grain, and fertility; shrines for the herders, the cattlefolk, the fisherpeople. They were often situated in border regions. The goddess of childbirth at Kesh was ‘at the top of the plain’; Nippur, the city of the wind god Enlil, was on the northern edge of Sumer; Enki of Eridu, lord of the fresh water, was at the bottom on the marshes; Sin the Moon God was at Ur on the sea. These were liminal places where the fishermen or the herders of the grasslands could exchange with the settled cultivators. And even today, out in the desert the traveller will come across little Islamic shrines of plastered brick surrounded by heaps of gear – bikes, ploughs, tools, transistor radios – left for safekeeping by nomads or seasonal shepherds. Perhaps in ancient times, such favourable meeting places grew bigger, becoming permanent settlements for the storing of treasure, goods and produce, and event
ually places of exchange. Perhaps at the root of the Mesopotamian city, for good practical reasons, was the shrine.

  THE FIRST CITIES

  Not long before 3000 BC, the first true cities in the world arose in Mesopotamia. Later Sumerian written tradition names the first place in Sumer, the earliest shrine: Eridu. Lost to the world for over two thousand years, Eridu was identified in 1853 by John Taylor, the British Vice-Consul in Basra who also did pioneering archaeological work at Ur, the city of Abraham. Twelve miles out into the desert beyond Ur, the mound of Eridu was called by the local nomads Abu Shahrein, ‘Father of the Two Crescent Moons.’ This may allude to the motif found on its walls (Eridu had a ‘New Moon Quay’) though just conceivably may recall the ancient cult at nearby Ur, a memory of which survived among the local Arabs as ‘Moon City.’

  Eridu is lonely, windswept and abandoned today; it had a brief strange afterlife as an anti-aircraft gun post in the war with Iran. But it was one of the most famous places in the history of Mesopotamia. The Sumerians believed that it was the site of the mound of creation, the first land which rose from the primal sea at the beginning of time. They thought that kingship – that is political society – first came down to earth here. Their myths also describe how the arts of civilization were initially possessed by Eridu before any other city. It originally stood at the edge of a great sea of fresh water stretching out to the south, the Apsu, from which apparently comes our word ‘abyss.’ The great temple here, the most ancient shrine in Sumer, was also named Apsu. This was the dwelling place of Enki, the archaic god of the waters, the god of wisdom, named after that primeval ocean of sweet water out of which all human life and all natural life came, as they believed. Indeed, at least as late as the tenth century AD there were still old sects in the southern marshes and coasts who worshipped the waters and whose myths and cosmologies incorporated Sumerian myths. Here too in a walled garden stood the sacred Kiskanu tree, ‘which gleamed like lapis lazuli’, perhaps the prototype of the Tree of Life in the Biblical garden of Eden.

  Eridu had to wait till 1949 before there was a full-scale excavation deep into the mound below the platform of the temple ziggurat built in 2000 BC by the kings of nearby Ur. When the archaeologists dug into the temple hill they uncovered nineteen levels below the ziggurat, going back to the founding of the shrine around 5000 BC. At the bottom was a little sand mound surrounded by a reed fence with a tiny chapel, marking the site of the mythical mound of creation. If anywhere, then, here is the origin of the Biblical story of the garden of Eden. For what the Bible calls paradise, Eden, was simply the Sumerian word Edin, the wild, uncultivated grassland of the south, the natural landscape which lay outside the artificial landscape of the city. And picking over the debris of paradise, it is hard not to see the psychological truth of the Bible story: that the very beginning of our ascent to civilization was also the fall, when we tasted the fateful fruit of the tree of knowledge: the means by which we would become masters of the earth and yet eventually gain the power to destroy it and ourselves.

  Such speculations become all the more pointed when we look at the layers of Eridu which superseded the early Ubaidian village with its primitive mud and reed shrine. For around 4000 BC a dramatic change came over the hill. Massive ceremonial buildings were constructed, a huge shrine in a monumental style of architecture. Grand tombs for an élite suggest class divisions were now in existence. Gold and metal-working and imported luxuries hint that the élite now controlled Eridu’s surplus wealth. Several thousand people now lived around the hill. Perhaps in these clues we can see the very moment when ‘kingship came down to earth’ and political power fell into the hands of the few.

  The Eridu myths then perhaps are reflections of a real historical process, from the creation of organized communities in the south of the plain, to the arrival of the temple, the city, and kingship. These, in sum, were the key arts of civilization which Sumerian myth believed originated in Eridu and were passed on by the gods to future ages from Eridu to the first true city on earth, Uruk.

  To get to Uruk from Eridu today, you cross southern Iraq, skirting Ur and Nasiriyah, names familiar now after the war of 2003. You cross the Euphrates beyond Samawa, then head south-east into the desert, where you enter a lunar landscape, a wasteland swept by gales of sand. Immense mounds loom out of the haze in a furnace heat. It can be 135° Fahrenheit out here in the summer. Finally you come to a city gate, still visible after nearly five thousand years, its approach silted with a deep tide of pottery and bones. This is where William Loftus stood in 1849.

  Still 50 feet high, the line of eroded walls curves round to the horizon. The centre of the city is dominated by the ruins of a great stepped tower, a ziggurat on which once stood the temple of the city’s goddess, Inanna, whom we know as Ishtar. The first city may have begun as a religious centre, perhaps a shrine for the herders of the plain, in the quarter known as Kullaba, the sky god’s shrine. The goddess’s sanctuary came later. From the top of the ziggurat you can see what is left of the rich landscape of Sumer. Once fertile fields criss-crossed by canals, lined with palm groves, the territory of Uruk is now parched, wind-blown desert. To the north-east, beyond a dried bed of the Euphrates, is a huge cone-shaped tomb from the Persian period. All over the desert are the signs of human habitation: ruined irrigation canals, broken pottery, twisted slag. Beyond are the tell-tale mounds of ancient cities, some of which the ancients believed had existed even before the Flood. On the horizon, lit by the setting sun, you can just make out the mound of Larsa. Further out are Umma, one of the oldest cities in Sumer, and Tel Jidr, which survived into the Middle Ages. Out of sight to the north across huge sand dunes is Shurrupak, home town of the Sumerian Noah. There are, surely, few more extraordinary landscapes in the world.

  From the top of the goddess’s ziggurat the full extent of Uruk becomes apparent, with its walled circuit of more than six miles. There were two settlements here before 4000 BC, a sizeable city during the next millennium; but modern archaeology has shown that the walls were built at the end of a period of remarkable expansion when Uruk increased four times in size in just a few generations from about 3000 to 2700 BC. Presumably then, tens of thousands of people were moving in from the countryside to this new city life. There are distant parallels for this kind of large-scale change from rural to urban life. In China between 1100 and 1250 AD, southern cities like Hangchow increased five times in population, fed by a revolution in agriculture. In England during the industrial revolution, the population increased more than four times in a single century before 1800. In some parts of medieval Europe, too, between 1100 and 1300, a tenfold population increase occurred in regions where new land could be opened up through land reclamation and irrigation. In Europe this seems to have gone hand-in-hand with a lowering of the marriage age, which has the effect of accelerating the birth rate by lessening the gap between generations.

  Bearing such ideas in mind we can see how a combination of similar factors could have worked in the early third millennium BC. Improved irrigation and land reclamation created more land; intensive cultivation produced more food; larger walled settlements brought more security; more land, more food and better security encouraged people to leave the countryside and to live in the cities, moving from the uplands into the southern plain. The inexorable pull of the cities’ markets with their necessities and luxuries must have made them additionally attractive, as cities have been throughout history. Then, once powerful rulers were able to impose their control, whether kings, priesthoods or noble families (or a combination of all three), they were no doubt able to place heavy burdens on the poorer peasantry; for some among the masses in old Sumer, the ‘urban miracle’ may have been as grim as it was in the nineteenth-century industrial city. For the answers to many of these questions we are still in the dark, not least about the social and power structures which brought about this great historical change, and in particular in the origins of kingship. But like their nineteenth-century successors they were in no d
oubt as to the greatness of their achievement: ‘Look at the walls of Uruk, gleaming like burnished bronze; inspect its inner wall, the like of which no man can equal! Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around: examine its foundation, look at its brickwork – even the inner core is kiln-fired brick. Didn’t the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plans?’ [Epic of Gilgamesh]

  Another Sumerian poem, the story of Etana, gives us an imagined bird’s-eye view of such cities, and conveys something of their dizzying effect on the imagination of those early generations who lived through this first urban miracle. Looking down on the plain from miles up, on the brown desert and the blue sea, on the warrens of houses, and on their populations with ‘the business of the country ceaselessly buzzing like a myriad insects,’ Etana is lost in admiration at humankind’s ability to reshape its environment.

  In the peak period of the third millennium BC there were some forty cities in Sumer and Akkad, which together made up the Babylonian plain, mainly independent city states. They were densely settled. A big city state like Lagash had 36,000 male adults, Uruk perhaps the same. They were closely organized and controlled. In Nippur at a later period, there were 200 subsidiary villages in its territory, clustered around five main canals and sixty lesser ones, joined by a web of countless small irrigation ditches, all of which were subject to rules, duties and control, a constant source of litigation!

  As for the physical make-up of the city itself, according to the Epic of Gilgamesh, Uruk was one-third built up, one-third gardens, one-third temple property. Excavated streets in Ur and Nippur look just like the warrens of houses still visible in old Irbil, Kirkuk, Tel Afar, or at the sacred city of Najaf. In today’s Irbil the 4000 people who still live inside the now decaying citadel belong to three wards, one to each gate; each has a small shrine, bath and souk; each too had its scribe or writer. These arrangements are an exact echo of ancient Ur or Nippur. The design of houses in the ancient cities was identical to that used up till the advent of air conditioning, with central courtyards, windcatchers, and serdabs (sunken rooms) to keep the ferocious summer heat at bay. The pattern of streets also served to create shadow and allow the breeze to blow through: only in the last thirty years has this older Iraq disappeared.