CHAPTER VII
Sumeria

Orientation—Contributions of the Near East to Western civilization

WRITTEN history is at least six thousand years old. During half of this period the center of human affairs, so far as they are now known to us, was in the Near East. By this vague term we shall mean here all southwestern Asia south of Russia and the Black Sea, and west of India and Afghanistan; still more loosely, we shall include within it Egypt, too, as anciently bound up with the Near East in one vast web and communicating complex of Oriental civilization. In this rough theatre of teeming peoples and conflicting cultures were developed the agriculture and commerce, the horse and wagon, the coinage and letters of credit, the crafts and industries, the law and government, the mathematics and medicine, the enemas and drainage systems, the geometry and astronomy, the calendar and clock and zodiac, the alphabet and writing, the paper and ink, the books and libraries and schools, the literature and music, the sculpture and architecture, the glazed pottery and fine furniture, the monotheism and monogamy, the cosmetics and jewelry, the checkers and dice, the ten-pins and income-tax, the wet-nurses and beer, from which our own European and American culture derive by a continuous succession through the mediation of Crete and Greece and Rome. The “Aryans” did not establish civilization—they took it from Babylonia and Egypt. Greece did not begin civilization—it inherited far more civilization than it began; it was the spoiled heir of three millenniums of arts and sciences brought to its cities from the Near East by the fortunes of trade and war. In studying and honoring the Near East we shall be acknowledging a debt long due to the real founders of European and American civilization.

I. ELAM

The culture of Susa—The potter’s wheel—The wagon-wheel

If the reader will look at a map of Persia, and will run his finger north along the Tigris from the Persian Gulf to Amara, and then east across the Iraq border to the modern town of Shushan, he will have located the site of the ancient city of Susa, center of a region known to the Jews as Elam—the high land. In this narrow territory, protected on the west by marshes, and on the east by the mountains that shoulder the great Iranian Plateau, a people of unknown race and origin developed one of the first historic civilizations. Here, a generation ago, French archeologists found human remains dating back 20,000 years, and evidences of an advanced culture as old as 4500 B.C.*¹

Apparently the Elamites had recently emerged from a nomad life of hunting and fishing; but already they had copper weapons and tools, cultivated grains and domesticated animals, hieroglyphic writing and business documents, mirrors and jewelry, and a trade that reached from Egypt to India.³ In the midst of chipped flints that bring us back to the Neolithic Age we find finished vases elegantly rounded and delicately painted with geometric designs, or with picturesque representations of animals and plants; some of this pottery is ranked among the finest ever made by man.⁴ Here is the oldest appearance not only of the potter’s wheel but of the wagon wheel; this modest but vital vehicle of civilization is found only later in Babylonia, and still later in Egypt.⁵ From these already complex beginnings the Elamites rose to troubled power, conquering Sumeria and Babylon, and being conquered by them, turn by turn. The city of Susa survived six thousand years of history, lived through the imperial zeniths of Sumeria, Babylonia, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome, and flourished, under the name of Shushan, as late as the fourteenth century of our era. At various times it grew to great wealth; when Ashurbanipal captured and sacked it (646 B.C.) his historians recounted without understatement the varied booty of gold and silver, precious stones and royal ornaments, costly garments and regal furniture, cosmetics and chariots, which the conqueror brought in his train to Nineveh. History so soon began its tragic alternance of art and war.

II. THE SUMERIANS

1. The Historical Background

The exhuming of Sumeria—Geography—Race—Appearance—The Sumerian Flood—The kings—An ancient reformer——Sargon of Akkad—The Golden Age of Ur

If we return to our map and follow the combined Tigris and Euphrates from the Persian Gulf to where these historic streams diverge (at modern Kurna), and then follow the Euphrates westward, we shall find, north and south of it, the buried cities of ancient Sumeria: Eridu (now Abu Shahrein), Ur (now Mukayyar), Uruk (Biblical Erech, now Warka), Larsa (Biblical Ellasar, now Senkereh), Lagash (now Shippurla), Nippur (Niffer) and Nisin. Follow the Euphrates northwest to Babylon, once the most famous city of Mesopotamia (the land “between the rivers”); observe, directly east of it, Kish, site of the oldest culture known in this region; then pass some sixty miles farther up the Euphrates to Agade, capital, in ancient days, of the Kingdom of Akkad. The early history of Mesopotamia is in one aspect the struggle of the non-Semitic peoples of Sumeria to preserve their independence against the expansion and inroads of the Semites from Kish and Agade and other centers in the north. In the midst of their struggles these varied stocks unconsciously, perhaps unwillingly, coöperated to produce the first extensive civilization known to history, and one of the most creative and unique.*

Despite much research we cannot tell of what race the Sumerians were, nor by what route they entered Sumeria. Perhaps they came from central Asia, or the Caucasus, or Armenia, and moved through northern Mesopotamia down the Euphrates and the Tigris—along which, as at Ashur, evidences of their earliest culture have been found; perhaps, as the legend says, they sailed in from the Persian Gulf, from Egypt or elsewhere, and slowly made their way up the great rivers; perhaps they came from Susa, among whose relics is an asphalt head bearing all the characteristics of the Sumerian type; perhaps, even, they were of remote Mongolian origin, for there is much in their language that resembles the Mongol speech.⁹ We do not know.

The remains show them as a short and stocky people, with high, straight, non-Semitic nose, slightly receding forehead and downward-sloping eyes. Many wore beards, some were clean-shaven, most of-them shaved the upper lip. They clothed themselves in fleece and finely woven wool; the women draped the garment from the left shoulder, the men bound it at the waist and left the upper half of the body bare. Later the male dress crept up towards the neck with the advance of civilization, but servants, male and female, while indoors, continued to go naked from head to waist. The head was usually covered with a cap, and the feet were shod with sandals; but well-to-do women had shoes of soft leather, heel-less, and laced like our own. Bracelets, necklaces, anklets, finger-rings and ear-rings made the women of Sumeria, as recently in America, show-windows of their husbands’ prosperity.¹⁰

When their civilization was already old—about 2300 B.C.—the poets and scholars of Sumeria tried to reconstruct its ancient history. The poets wrote legends of a creation, a primitive Paradise and a terrible flood that engulfed and destroyed it because of the sin of an ancient king.¹¹ This flood passed down into Babylonian and Hebrew tradition, and became part of the Christian creed. In 1929 Professor Woolley, digging into the ruins of Ur, discovered, at considerable depth, an eight-foot layer of silt and clay; this, if we are to believe him, was deposited during a catastrophic overflow of the Euphrates, which lingered in later memory as the Flood. Beneath that layer were the remains of a prediluvian culture that would later be pictured by the poets as a Golden Age.

Meanwhile the priest-historians sought to create a past spacious enough for the development of all the marvels of Sumerian civilization. They formulated lists of their ancient kings, extending the dynasties before the Flood to 432,000 years;¹² and told such impressive stories of two of these rulers, Tammuz and Gilgamesh, that the latter became the hero of the greatest poem in Babylonian literature, and Tammuz passed down into the pantheon of Babylon and became the Adonis of the Greeks. Perhaps the priests exaggerated a little the antiquity of their civilization. We may vaguely judge the age of Sumerian culture by observing that the ruins of Nippur are found to a depth of sixty-six feet, of which almost as many feet extend below the remains of Sargon of Akkad as rise above it to the topmost stratum (ca. 1 A.D.);¹³ on this basis Nippur would go back to 5262 B.C. Tenacious dynasties of city-kings seem to have flourished at Kish ca. 4500 B.C., and at Ur ca. 3500 B.C. In the competition of these two primeval centers we have the first form of that opposition between Semite and non-Semite which was to be one bloody theme of Near-Eastern history from the Semitic ascendancy of Kish and the conquests of the Semitic kings Sargon I and Hammurabi, through the capture of Babylon by the “Aryan” generals Cyrus and Alexander in the sixth and fourth centuries before Christ, and the conflicts of Crusaders and Saracens for the Holy Sepulchre and the emoluments of trade, down to the efforts of the British Government to dominate and pacify the divided Semites of the Near East today.

From 3000 B.C. onward the clay-tablet records kept by the priests, and found in the ruins of Ur, present a reasonably accurate account of the accessions and coronations, uninterrupted victories and sublime deaths of the petty kings who ruled the city-states of Ur, Lagash, Uruk, and the rest; the writing of history and the partiality of historians are very ancient things. One king, Urukagina of Lagash, was a royal reformer, an enlightened despot who issued decrees aimed at the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and of everybody by the priests. The high priest, says one edict, must no longer “come into the garden of a poor mother and take wood therefrom, nor gather tax in fruit therefrom”; burial-fees were to be cut to one-fifth of what they had been; and the clergy and high officials were forbidden to share among themselves the revenues and cattle offered to the gods. It was the King’s boast that he “gave liberty to his people”;¹⁴ and surely the tablets that preserve his decrees reveal to us the oldest, briefest and justest code of laws in history.

This lucid interval was ended normally by one Lugal-zaggisi, who invaded Lagash, overthrew Urukagina, and sacked the city at the height of its prosperity. The temples were destroyed, the citizens were massacred in the streets, and the statues of the gods were led away in ignominious bondage. One of the earliest poems in existence is a clay tablet, apparently 4800 years old, on which the Sumerian poet Dingiraddamu mourns for the raped goddess of Lagash:

We pass by the bloody Lugal-zaggisi, and other Sumerian kings of mighty name: Lugal-shagengur, Lugal-kigub-nidudu, Ninigi-dubti, Lugal-andanukhunga. . . . Meanwhile another people, of Semitic race, had built the kingdom of Akkad under the leadership of Sargon I, and had established its capital at Agade some two hundred miles northwest of the Sumerian city-states. A monolith found at Susa portrays Sargon armed with the dignity of a majestic beard, and dressed in all the pride of long authority. His origin was not royal: history could find no father for him, and no other mother than a temple prostitute.¹⁶ Sumerian legend composed for him an autobiography quite Mosaic in its beginning: “My humble mother conceived me; in secret she brought me forth. She placed me in a basket-boat of rushes; with pitch she closed my door.”¹⁷ Rescued by a workman, he became a cup-bearer to the king, grew in favor and influence, rebelled, displaced his master, and mounted the throne of Agade. He called himself “King of Universal Dominion,” and ruled a small portion of Mesopotamia. Historians call him “the Great,” for he invaded many cities, captured much booty, and killed many men. Among his victims was that same Lugal-zaggisi who had despoiled Lagash and violated its goddess; him Sargon defeated and carried off to Nippur in chains. East and west, north and south the mighty warrior marched, conquering Elam, washing his weapons in symbolic triumph in the Persian Gulf, crossing western Asia, reaching the Mediterranean,¹⁸ and establishing the first great empire in history. For fifty-five years he held sway, while legends gathered about him and prepared to make him a god. His reign closed with all his empire in revolt.

Three sons succeeded him in turn. The third, Naram-sin, was a mighty builder, of whose works nothing remains but a lovely stele, or memorial slab, recording his victory over an obscure king. This powerful relief, found by De Morgan at Susa in 1897, and now a treasure of the Louvre, shows a muscular Naram-sin armed with bow and dart, stepping with royal dignity upon the bodies of his fallen foes, and apparently prepared to answer with quick death the appeal of the vanquished for mercy; while between them another victim, pierced through the neck with an arrow, falls dying. Behind them tower the Zagros Mountains; and on one hill is the record, in elegant cuneiform, of Naram-sin’s victory. Here the art of carving is already adult and confident, already guided and strengthened with a long tradition.

To be burned to the ground is not always a lasting misfortune for a city; it is usually an advantage from the standpoint of architecture and sanitation. By the twenty-sixth century B.C. we find Lagash flourishing again, now under another enlightened monarch, Gudea, whose stocky statues are the most prominent remains of Sumerian sculpture. The diorite figure in the Louvre shows him in a pious posture, with his head crossed by a heavy band resembling a model of the Colosseum, hands folded in his lap, bare shoulders and feet, and short, chubby legs covered by a bell-like skirt embroidered with a volume of hieroglyphics. The strong but regular features reveal a man thoughtful and just, firm and yet refined. Gudea was honored by his people not as a warrior but as a Sumerian Aurelius, devoted to religion, literature and good works; he built temples, promoted the study of classical antiquities in the spirit of the expeditions that unearthed him, and tempered the strength of the strong in mercy to the weak. One of his inscriptions reveals the policy for which his people worshiped him, after his death, as a god: “During seven years the maidservant was the equal of her mistress, the slave walked beside his master, and in my town the weak rested by the side of the strong.”¹⁹

Meanwhile “Ur of the Chaldees” was having one of the most prosperous epochs in its long career from 3,500 B.C. (the apparent age of its oldest graves) to 700 B.C. Its greatest king, Ur-engur, brought all western Asia under his pacific sway, and proclaimed for all Sumeria the first extensive code of laws in history. “By the laws of righteousness of Shamash forever I established justice.”²⁰ As Ur grew rich by the trade that flowed through it on the Euphrates, Ur-engur, like Pericles, beautified his city with temples, and built lavishly in the subject cities of Larsa, Uruk and Nippur. His son Dungi continued his work through a reign of fifty-eight years, and ruled so wisely that the people deified him as the god who had brought back their ancient Paradise.

But soon that glory faded. The warlike Elamites from the East and the rising Amorites from the West swept down upon the leisure, prosperity and peace of Ur, captured its king, and sacked the city with primitive thoroughness. The poets of Ur sang sad chants about the rape of the statue of Ishtar, their beloved mother-goddess, torn from her shrine by profane invaders. The form of these poems is unexpectedly first-personal, and the style does not please the sophisticated ear; but across the four thousand years that separate us from the Sumerian singer we feel the desolation of his city and his people.

So for two hundred years, which to our self-centered eyes seem but an empty moment, Elam and Amor ruled Sumeria. Then from the north came the great Hammurabi, King of Babylon; retook from the Elamites Uruk and Isin; bided his time for twenty-three years; invaded Elam and captured its king; established his sway over Amor and distant Assyria, built an empire of unprecedented power, and disciplined it with a universal law. For many centuries now, until the rise of Persia, the Semites would rule the Land between the Rivers. Of the Sumerians nothing more is heard; their little chapter in the book of history was complete.

2. Economic Life

The soil—Industry—Trade—Classes—Science

But Sumerian civilization remained. Sumer and Akkad still produced handicraftsmen, poets, artists, sages and saints; the culture of the southern cities passed north along the Euphrates and the Tigris to Babylonia and Assyria as the initial heritage of Mesopotamian civilization.

At the basis of this culture was a soil made fertile by the annual overflow of rivers swollen with the winter rains. The overflow was perilous as well as useful; the Sumerians learned to channel it safely through irrigating canals that ribbed and crossed their land; and they commemorated those early dangers by legends that told of a flood, and how at last the land had been separated from the waters, and mankind had been saved.²³ This irrigation system, dating from 4000 B.C., was one of the great achievements of Sumerian civilization, and certainly its foundation. Out of these carefully watered fields came abounding crops of corn, barley, spelt, dates, and many vegetables. The plough appeared early, drawn by oxen as even with us until yesterday, and already furnished with a tubular seed-drill. The gathered harvest was threshed by drawing over it great sledges of wood armed with flint teeth that cut the straw for the cattle and released the grain for men.²⁴

It was in many ways a primitive culture. The Sumerians made some use of copper and tin, and occasionally mixed them to produce bronze; now and then they went so far as to make large implements of iron.²⁵ But metal was still a luxury and a rarity. Most Sumerian tools were of flint; some, like the sickles for cutting the barley, were of clay; and certain finer articles, such as needles and awls, used ivory and bone.²⁶ Weaving was done on a large scale under the supervision of overseers appointed by the king,²⁷ after the latest fashion of governmentally controlled industry. Houses were made of reeds, usually plastered with an adobe mixture of clay and straw moistened with water and hardened by the sun; such dwellings are still easy to find in what was once Sumeria. The hut had wooden doors, revolving upon socket hinges of stone. The floors were ordinarily the beaten earth; the roofs were arched by bending the reeds together at the top, or were made flat with mud-covered reeds stretched over crossbeams of wood. Cows, sheep, goats and pigs roamed about the dwelling in primeval comradeship with man. Water for drinking was drawn from wells.²⁸

Goods were carried chiefly by water. Since stone was rare in Sumeria it was brought up the Gulf or down the rivers, and then through numerous canals to the quays of the cities. But land transportation was developing; at Kish the Oxford Field Expedition unearthed some of the oldest wheeled vehicles known.²⁹ Here and there in the ruins are business seals bearing indications of traffic with Egypt and India.³⁰ There was no coinage yet, and trade was normally by barter; but gold and silver were already in use as standards of value, and were often accepted in exchange for goods—sometimes in the form of ingots and rings of definite worth, but generally in quantities measured by weight in each transaction. Many of the clay tablets that have brought down to us fragments of Sumerian writing are business documents, revealing a busy commercial life. One tablet speaks, with fin-de-siècle weariness, of “the city, where the tumult of man is.” Contracts had to be confirmed in writing and duly witnessed. A system of credit existed by which goods, gold or silver might be borrowed, interest to be paid in the same material as the loan, and at rates ranging from 15 to 33% per annum.³¹ Since the stability of a society may be partly measured by inverse relation with the rate of interest, we may suspect that Sumerian business, like ours, lived in an atmosphere of economic and political uncertainty and doubt.

Gold and silver have been found abundantly in the tombs, not only as jewelry, but as vessels, weapons, ornaments, even as tools. Rich and poor were stratified into many classes and gradations; slavery was highly developed, and property rights were already sacred.³² Between the rich and the poor a middle class took form, composed of small-business men, scholars, physicians and priests. Medicine flourished, and had a specific for every disease; but it was still bound up with theology, and admitted that sickness, being due to possession by evil spirits, could never be cured without the exorcising of these demons. A calendar of uncertain age and origin divided the year into lunar months, adding a month every three or four years to reconcile the calendar with the seasons and the sun. Each city gave its own names to the months.³³

3. Government

The kings—Ways of war—The feudal barons—Law

Indeed each city, as long as it could, maintained a jealous independence, and indulged itself in a private king. It called him patesi, or priest-king, indicating by the very word that government was bound up with religion. By 2800 B.C. the growth of trade made such municipal separatism impossible, and generated “empires” in which some dominating personality subjected the cities and their patesis to his power, and wove them into an economic and political unity. The despot lived in a Renaissance atmosphere of violence and fear; at any moment he might be despatched by the same methods that had secured him the throne. He dwelt in an inaccessible palace, whose two entrances were so narrow as to admit only one person at a time; to the right and left were recesses from which secret guards could examine every visitor, or pounce upon him with daggers.³⁴ Even the king’s temple was private, hidden away in his palace, so that he might perform his religious duties without exposure, or neglect them inconspicuously.

The king went to battle in a chariot, leading a motley host armed with bows, arrows and spears. The wars were waged frankly for commercial routes and goods, without catchwords as a sop for idealists. King Manish-tusu of Akkad announced frankly that he was invading Elam to get control of its silver mines, and to secure diorite stone to immortalize himself with statuary—the only instance known of a war fought for the sake of art. The defeated were customarily sold into slavery; or, if this was unprofitable, they were slaughtered on the battlefield. Sometimes a tenth of the prisoners, struggling vainly in a net, were offered as living victims to the thirsty gods. As in Renaissance Italy, the chauvinistic separatism of the cities stimulated life and art, but led to civic violence and suicidal strife that weakened each petty state, and at last destroyed Sumeria.³⁵

In the empires social order was maintained through a feudal system. After a successful war the ruler gave tracts of land to his valiant chieftains, and exempted such estates from taxation; these men kept order in their territories, and provided soldiers and supplies for the exploits of the king. The finances of the government were obtained by taxes in kind, stored in royal warehouses, and distributed as pay to officials and employees of the state.³⁶

To this system of royal and feudal administration was added a body of law, already rich with precedents when Ur-engur and Dungi codified the statutes of Ur; this was the fountainhead of Hammurabi’s famous code. It was cruder and simpler than later legislation, but less severe: where, for example, the Semitic code killed a woman for adultery, the Sumerian code merely allowed the husband to take a second wife, and reduce the first to a subordinate position.³⁷ The law covered commercial as well as sexual relations, and regulated all loans and contracts, all buying and selling, all adoptions and bequests. Courts of justice sat in the temples, and the judges were for the most part priests; professional judges presided over a superior court. The best element in this code was a plan for avoiding litigation: every case was first submitted to a public arbitrator whose duty it was to bring about an amicable settlement without recourse to law.³⁸ It is a poor civilization from which we may not learn something to improve our own.

4. Religion and Morality

The Sumerian Pantheon—The food of the gods—Mythology—Education—A Sumerian prayer—Temple prostitutes—The rights of woman—Sumerian cosmetics

King Ur-engur proclaimed his code of laws in the name of the great god Shamash, for government had so soon discovered the political utility of heaven. Having been found useful, the gods became innumerable; every city and state, every human activity, had some inspiring and disciplinary divinity. Sun-worship, doubtless already old when Sumeria began, expressed itself in the cult of Shamash, “light of the gods,” who passed the night in the depths of the north, until Dawn opened its gates for him; then he mounted the sky like a flame, driving his chariot over the steeps of the firmament; the sun was merely a wheel of his fiery car.³⁹ Nippur built great temples to the god Enlil and his consort Ninlil; Uruk worshiped especially the virgin earth-goddess Innini, known to the Semites of Akkad as Ishtar—the loose and versatile Aphrodite-Demeter of the Near East. Kish and Lagash worshiped a Mater Dolorosa, the sorrowful mother-goddess Ninkarsag, who, grieved with the unhappiness of men, interceded for them with sterner deities.⁴⁰ Ningirsu was the god of irrigation, the “Lord of Floods”; Abu or Tammuz was the god of vegetation. Even Sin was a god—of the moon; he was represented in human form with a thin crescent about his head, presaging the halos of medieval saints. The air was full of spirits—beneficent angels, one each as protector to every Sumerian, and demons or devils who sought to expel the protective deity and take possession of body and soul.

Most of the gods lived in the temples, where they were provided by the faithful with revenue, food and wives. The tablets of Gudea list the objects which the gods preferred: oxen, goats, sheep, doves, chickens, ducks, fish, dates, figs, cucumbers, butter, oil and cakes;⁴¹ we may judge from this list that the well-to-do Sumerian enjoyed a plentiful cuisine. Originally, it seems, the gods preferred human flesh; but as human morality improved they had to be content with animals. A liturgical tablet found in the Sumerian ruins says, with strange theological premonitions: “The lamb is the substitute for humanity; he hath given up a lamb for his life.”⁴² Enriched by such beneficence, the priests became the wealthiest and most powerful class in the Sumerian cities. In most matters they were the government; it is difficult to make out to what extent the patesi was a priest, and to what extent a king. Urukagina rose like a Luther against the exactions of the clergy, denounced them for their voracity, accused them of taking bribes in their administration of the law, and charged that they were levying such taxes upon farmers and fishermen as to rob them of the fruits of their toil. He swept the courts clear for a time of these corrupt officials, and established laws regulating the taxes and fees paid to the temples, protecting the helpless against extortion, and providing against the violent alienation of funds or property.⁴³ Already the world was old, and well established in its time-honored ways.

Presumably the priests recovered their power when Urukagina died, quite as they were to recover their power in Egypt after the passing of Ikhnaton; men will pay any price for mythology. Even in this early age the great myths of religion were taking form. Since food and tools were placed in the graves with the dead, we may presume that the Sumerians believed in an after-life.⁴⁴ But like the Greeks they pictured the other world as a dark abode of miserable shadows, to which all the dead descended indiscriminately. They had not yet conceived heaven and hell, eternal reward and punishment; they offered prayer and sacrifice not for “eternal life,” but for tangible advantages here on the earth.⁴⁵ Later legend told how Adapa, a sage of Eridu, had been initiated into all lore by Ea, goddess of wisdom; one secret only had been refused him—the knowledge of deathless life.⁴⁶ Another legend narrated how the gods had created man happy; how man, by his free will, had sinned, and been punished with a flood, from which but one man—Tagtug the weaver—had survived. Tag-tug forfeited longevity and health by eating the fruit of a forbidden tree.⁴⁷

The priests transmitted education as well as mythology, and doubtless sought to teach, as well as to rule, by their myths. To most of the temples were attached schools wherein the clergy instructed boys and girls in writing and arithmetic, formed their habits into patriotism and piety, and prepared some of them for the high professsion of scribe. School tablets survive, encrusted with tables of multiplication and division, square and cube roots, and exercises in applied geometry.⁴⁸ That the instruction was not much more foolish than that which is given to our children appears from a tablet which is a Lucretian outline of anthropology: “Mankind when created did not know of bread for eating or garments for wearing. The people walked with limbs on the ground, they ate herbs with their mouths like sheep, they drank ditch-water.”⁴⁹

What nobility of spirit and utterance this first of the historic religions could rise to shines out in the prayer of King Gudea to the goddess Bau, the patron deity of Lagash:

Women were attached to every temple, some as domestics, some as concubines for the gods or their duly constituted representatives on earth. To serve the temples in this way did not seem any disgrace to a Sumerian girl; her father was proud to devote her charms to the alleviation of divine monotony, and celebrated the admission of his daughter to these sacred functions with ceremonial sacrifice, and the presentation of the girl’s marriage dowry to the temple.⁵¹

Marriage was already a complex institution regulated by many laws. The bride kept control of the dowry given her by her father in marriage, and though she held it jointly with her husband, she alone determined its bequest. She exercised equal rights with her husband over their children; and in the absence of the husband and a grown-up son she administered the estate as well as the home. She could engage in business independently of her husband, and could keep or dispose of her own slaves. Sometimes, like Shub-ad, she could rise to the status of queen, and rule her city with luxurious and imperious grace.⁵² But in all crises the man was lord and master. Under certain conditions he could sell his wife, or hand her over as a slave to pay his debts. The double standard was already in force, as a corollary of property and inheritance: adultery in the man was a forgivable whim, but in the woman it was punished with death. She was expected to give many children to her husband and the state; if barren, she could be divorced without further reason; if merely averse to continuous maternity she was drowned. Children were without legal rights; their parents, by the act of publicly disowning them, secured their banishment from the city.⁵³

Nevertheless, as in most civilizations, the women of the upper classes almost balanced, by their luxury and their privileges, the toil and disabilities of their poorer sisters. Cosmetics and jewelry are prominent in the Sumerian tombs. In Queen Shub-ad’s grave Professor Woolley picked up a little compact of blue-green malachite, golden pins with knobs of lapis-lazuli, and a vanity-case of filigree gold shell. This vanity-case, as large as a little finger, contained a tiny spoon, presumably for scooping up rouge from the compact; a metal stick, perhaps for training the cuticle; and a pair of tweezers probably used to train the eyebrows or to pluck out inopportune hairs. The Queen’s rings were made of gold wire; one ring was inset with segments of lapis-lazuli; her necklace was of fluted lapis and gold. Surely there is nothing new under the sun; and the difference between the first woman and the last could pass through the eye of a needle.

5. Letters and Arts

Writing—Literature—Temples and palaces—Statuary—Ceramics-Jewelry—Summary of Sumerian civilization

The startling fact in the Sumerian remains is writing. The marvelous art seems already well advanced, fit to express complex thought in commerce, poetry and religion. The oldest inscriptions are on stone, and date apparently as far back as 3600 B.C.⁵⁴ Towards 3200 B.C. the clay tablet appears, and from that time on the Sumerians seem to have delighted in the great discovery. It is our good fortune that the people of Mesopotamia wrote not upon fragile, ephemeral paper in fading ink, but upon moist clay deftly impressed with the wedge-like (“cuneiform”) point of a stylus. With this malleable material the scribe kept records, executed contracts, drew up official documents, recorded property, judgments and sales, and created a culture in which the stylus became as mighty as the sword. Having completed the writing, the scribe baked the clay tablet with heat or in the sun, and made it thereby a manuscript far more durable than paper, and only less lasting than stone. This development of cuneiform script was the outstanding contribution of Sumeria to the civilizing of mankind.

Sumerian writing reads from right to left; the Babylonians were, so far as we know, the first people to write from left to right. The linear script, as we have seen, was apparently a stylized and conventionalized form of the signs and pictures painted or impressed upon primitive Sumerian pottery.* Presumably from repetition and haste over centuries of time, the original pictures were gradually contracted into signs so unlike the objects which they had once represented that they became the symbols of sounds rather than of things. We should have an analogous process in English if the picture of a bee should in time be shortened and simplified, and come to mean not a bee but the sound be, and then serve to indicate that syllable in any combination as in being. The Sumerians and Babylonians never advanced from such representation of syllables to the representation of letters—never dropped the vowel in the syllabic sign to make be mean b; it seems to have remained for the Egyptians to take this simple but revolutionary step.⁵⁵

The transition from writing to literature probably required many hundreds of years. For centuries writing was a tool of commerce, a matter of contracts and bills, of shipments and receipts; and secondarily, perhaps, it was an instrument of religious record, an attempt to preserve magic formulas, ceremonial procedures, sacred legends, prayers and hymns from alteration or decay. Nevertheless, by 2700 B.C., great libraries had been formed in Sumeria; at Tello, for example, in ruins contemporary with Gudea, De Sarzac discovered a collection of over 30,000 tablets ranged one upon another in neat and logical array.⁵⁶ As early as 2000 B.C. Sumerian historians began to reconstruct the past and record the present for the edification of the future; portions of their work have come down to us not in the original form but as quotations in later Babylonian chronicles. Among the original fragments, however, is a tablet found at Nippur, bearing the Sumerian prototype of the epic of Gilgamesh, which we shall study later in its developed Babylonian expression.⁵⁷ Some of the shattered tablets contain dirges of no mean power, and of significant literary form. Here at the outset appears the characteristic Near-Eastern trick of chanting repetition—many lines beginning in the same way, many clauses reiterating or illustrating the meaning of the clause before. Through these salvaged relics we see the religious origin of literature in the songs and lamentations of the priests. The first poems were not madrigals, but prayers.

Behind these apparent beginnings of culture were doubtless many centuries of development, in Sumeria and other lands. Nothing has been created, it has only grown. Just as in writing Sumeria seems to have created cuneiform, so in architecture it seems to have created at once the fundamental shapes of home and temple, column and vault and arch.⁵⁸ The Sumerian peasant made his cottage by planting reeds in a square, a rectangle or a circle, bending the tops together, and binding them to form an arch, a vault or a dome;⁵⁹ this, we surmise, is the simple origin, or earliest known appearance, of these architectural forms. Among the ruins of Nippur is an arched drain 5000 years old; in the royal tombs of Ur there are arches that go back to 3500 B.C., and arched doors were common at Ur 2000 B.C.⁶⁰ And these were true arches: i.e., their stones were set in full voussoir fashion—each stone a wedge tapering downward tightly into place.

The richer citizens built palaces, perched on a mound sometimes forty feet above the plain, and made purposely inaccessible except by one path, so that every Sumerian’s home might be his castle. Since stone was scarce, these palaces were mostly of brick. The plain red surface of the walls was relieved by terracotta decoration in every form—spirals, chevrons, triangles, even lozenges and diapers. The inner walls were plastered and painted in simple mural style. The house was built around a central court, which gave shade and some coolness against the Mediterranean sun; for the same reason, as well as for security, the rooms opened upon this court rather than upon the outer world. Windows were a luxury, or perhaps they were not wanted. Water was drawn from wells; and an extensive system of drainage drew the waste from the residential districts of the towns. Furniture was not complex or abundant but neither was it without taste. Some beds were inlaid with metal or ivory, and occasionally, as in Egypt, armchairs flaunted feet like lions’ claws.⁶¹

For the temples stone was imported, and adorned with copper entablatures and friezes inlaid with semiprecious material. The temple of Nannar at Ur set a fashion for all Mesopotamia with pale blue enameled tiles; while its interior was paneled with rare woods like cedar and cypress, inlaid with marble, alabaster, onyx, agate and gold. Usually the most important temple in the city was not only built upon an elevation, but was topped with a ziggurat—a tower of three, four or seven stories, surrounded with a winding external stairway, and set back at every stage. Here on the heights the loftiest of the city’s gods might dwell, and here the government might find a last spiritual and physical citadel against invasion or revolt.*⁶²

The temples were sometimes decorated with statuary of animals, heroes and gods; figures plain, blunt and powerful, but severely lacking in sculptural finish and grace. Most of the extant statues are of King Gudea, executed resolutely but crudely in resistant diorite. In the ruins of Tell-el-Ubaid, from the early Sumerian period, a copper statuette of a bull was found, much abused by the centuries, but still full of life and bovine complacency. A cow’s head in silver from the grave of Queen Shub-ad at Ur is a masterpiece that suggests a developed art too much despoiled by time to permit of our giving it its due. This is almost proved by the bas-reliefs that survive. The “Stele of the Vultures” set up by King Eannatum of Lagash, the porphyry cylinder of Ibnishar,⁶³, the humorous caricatures (as surely they must be) of Ur-nina,⁶⁴ and above all the “Victory Stele” of Naram-sin share the crudity of Sumerian sculpture, but have in them a lusty vitality of drawing and action characteristic of a young and flourishing art.

Of the pottery one may not speak so leniently. Perhaps time misleads our judgment by having preserved the worst; perhaps there were many pieces as well carved as the alabaster vessels discovered at Eridu;⁶⁵ but for the most part Sumerian pottery, though turned on the wheel, is mere earthenware, and cannot compare with the vases of Elam. Better work was done by the goldsmiths. Vessels of gold, tasteful in design and delicate in finish, have been found in the earliest graves at Ur, some as old as 4000 B.C.⁶⁶ The silver vase of Entemenu, now in the Louvre, is as stocky as Gudea, but is adorned with a wealth of animal imagery finely engraved.⁶⁷ Best of all is the gold sheath and lapis-lazuli dagger exhumed at Ur;⁶⁸ here, if one may judge from photographs,* the form almost touches perfection. The ruins have given us a great number of cylindrical seals, mostly made of precious metal or stone, with reliefs carefully carved upon a square inch or two of surface; these seem to have served the Sumerians in place of signatures, and indicate a refinement of life and manners disturbing to our naïve conception of progress as a continuous rise of man through the unfortunate cultures of the past to the unrivaled zenith of today.

Sumerian civilization may be summed up in this contrast between crude pottery and consummate jewelry; it was a synthesis of rough beginnings and occasional but brilliant mastery. Here, within the limits of our present knowledge, are the first states and empires, the first irrigation, the first use of gold and silver as standards of value, the first business contracts, the first credit system, the first code of law, the first extensive development of writing, the first stories of the Creation and the Flood, the first libraries and schools, the first literature and poetry, the first cosmetics and jewelry, the first sculpture and bas-relief, the first palaces and temples, the first ornamental metal and decorative themes, the first arch, column, vault and dome. Here, for the first known time on a large scale, appear some of the sins of civilization: slavery, despotism, ecclesiasticism, and imperialistic war. It was a life differentiated and subtle, abundant and complex. Already the natural inequality of men was producing a new degree of comfort and luxury for the strong, and a new routine of hard and disciplined labor for the rest. The theme was struck on which history would strum its myriad variations.

III. PASSAGE TO EGYPT

Sumerian influence in Mesopotamia—Ancient Arabia—Mesopotamian influence in Egypt

Nevertheless, we are still so near the beginning of recorded history when we speak of Sumeria that it is difficult to determine the priority or sequence of the many related civilizations that developed in the ancient Near East. The oldest written records known to us are Sumerian; this, which may be a whim of circumstance, a sport of mortality, does not prove that the first civilization was Sumerian. Statuettes and other remains akin to those of Sumeria have been found at Ashur and Samarra, in what became Assyria; we do not know whether this early culture came from Sumeria or passed to it along the Tigris. The code of Hammurabi resembles that of Ur-engur and Dungi, but we cannot be sure that it was evolved from it rather than from some predecessor ancestral to them both. It is only probable, not certain, that the civilizations of Babylonia and Assyria were derived from or fertilized by that of Sumer and Akkad.⁶⁹ The gods and myths of Babylon and Nineveh are in many cases modifications or developments of Sumerian theology; and the languages of these later cultures bear the same relationship to Sumeria that French and Italian bear to Latin.

Schweinfurth has called attention to the interesting fact that though the cultivation of barley, millet and wheat, and the domestication of cattle, goats and sheep, appear in both Egypt and Mesopotamia as far back as our records go, these cereals and animals are found in their wild and natural state not in Egypt but in western Asia—especially in Yemen or ancient Arabia. He concludes that civilization—i.e., in this context, the cultivation of cereals and the use of domesticated animals—appeared in unrecorded antiquity in Arabia, and spread thence in a “triangular culture” to Mesopotamia (Sumeria, Babylonia, Assyria) and Egypt.⁷⁰ Current knowledge of primitive Arabia is too slight to make this more than a presentable hypothesis.

More definite is the derivation of certain specific elements of Egyptian culture from Sumeria and Babylonia. We know that trade passed between Mesopotamia and Egypt—certainly via the isthmus at Suez, and probably by water from the ancient outlets of Egyptian rivers on the Red Sea.⁷¹ A look at the map explains why Egypt, throughout its known history, has belonged to Western Asia rather than to Africa; trade and culture could pass from Asia along the Mediterranean to the Nile, but shortly beyond that it was balked by the desert which, with the cataracts of the Nile, isolated Egypt from the remainder of Africa. Hence it is natural that we should find many Mesopotamian elements in the primitive culture of Egypt.

The farther back we trace the Egyptian language the more affinities it reveals with the Semitic tongues of the Near East.⁷² The pictographic writing of the predynastic Egyptians seems to have come in from Sumeria.⁷³ The cylindrical seal, which is of unquestionably Mesopotamian origin, appears in the earliest period of known Egyptian history, and then disappears, as if an imported custom had been displaced by a native mode.⁷⁴ The potter’s wheel is not known in Egypt before the Fourth Dynasty—long after its appearance in Sumeria; presumably it came into Egypt from the Land between the Rivers along with the wheel and the chariot.⁷⁵ Early Egyptian and Babylonian mace-heads are completely identical in form.⁷⁶ A finely worked flint knife, found in predynastic Egyptian remains at Gebel-el-Arak, bears reliefs in Mesopotamian themes and style.⁷⁷ Copper was apparently developed in western Asia, and brought thence to Egypt.⁷⁸ Early Egyptian architecture resembles Mesopotamian in the use of the recessed panel as a decoration for brick walls.⁷⁹ Predynastic pottery, statuettes and decorative motives are in many cases identical, or unmistakably allied, with Mesopotamian products.⁸⁰ Among these early Egyptian remains are small figures of a goddess of evident Asiatic origin. At a time when Egyptian civilization seems to have only begun, the artists of Ur were making statuary and reliefs whose style and conventions demonstrate the antiquity of these arts in Sumeria.⁸¹*

Egypt could well afford to concede the priority of Sumeria. For whatever the Nile may have borrowed from the Tigris and the Euphrates, it soon flowered into a civilization specifically and uniquely its own; one of the richest and greatest, one of the most powerful and yet one of the most graceful, cultures in history. By its side Sumeria was but a crude beginning; and not even Greece or Rome would surpass it.