Will Durant ---Sumeria

sumeria orientation contributions in 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 big term we shall mean here all South Western 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 and one vast web and communicating complex of Oriental civilization in this rock theater 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 derived 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 honouring the Near East we shall be acknowledging a debt long due to the real founders of European and American civilization one elem 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 Highland 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 archaeologists found human remains dating back 20,000 years and evidences of an advanced culture as old as 4500 BC professor breasted believes that the antiquity of this culture and that of an owl has been exaggerated by de Morgan from Pele and other students 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 in the midst of chipped Flint's that bring us back to the Neolithic Age we find finished bosses 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 here is the oldest appearance not only 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 from these already complex beginnings the Elamites rose to troubled power conquering Sumeria and Babylon and being conquered by them turned by turn the city of Susa survived 6,000 years of history lived through the Imperial zenith of Sumeria Babylonia Egypt Assyria Persia Greece and Rome and flourished under the name of Shushan as late as the 14th century of our era at various times it grew to great wealth when Ashurbanipal captured and sacked it 646 BC his historians recounted without understatement the Buried 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 alternates of art and war to the sumerians one 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 were 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 corner and then follow the Euphrates westward we shall find north and south of it the Buried cities of ancient Sumeria era do now Abu Shah rain were now Mooka our Luke biblical Iraq now waka Larsa biblical elisar now Sankara la gosh now she pala me pour me fair and Neeson follow the Euphrates Northwest to Babylon once the most famous city of Mesopotamia the land between the rivers observed directly east of it Kish site of the oldest culture known in this region then passed some 60 miles farther up the Euphrates to Agra de 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 Agata and other centres in the north in the midst of their struggles these varied stocks unconsciously perhaps unwillingly cooperated to produce the first expensive civilization known to history and one of the most creative and unique the unearthing of this forgotten culture is one of the romances of archaeology to those whom with a poor sense of the amplitude of time we call the Ancients that is to the Romans the Greeks and the Jews Sumeria was unknown Herodotus apparently never heard of it if he did he ignored it as something more ancient to him than he to us Burroughs is a Babylonian historian writing about 250 BC knew of Sumeria only through the veil of a legend he described a race of monsters led by one Oh coming out of the Persian Gulf and introducing the arts of agriculture metalworking and writing all the things that make for the amelioration of life he declares were bequeathed to men by Oh anise and since that time no further inventions have been made not till 2000 years after Burruss was Sumeria rediscovered in 1850 Hinks recognized that cuneiform writing made by pressing a wedge pointed stylus upon soft clay and used in the Semitic languages of the Near East had been borrowed from an earlier people with a largely non-semitic speech and authored gave to this hypothetical people the name Sumerian about the same time Rawlinson and his aides found among Babylonian ruins tablets containing vocabularies of this ancient tongue with interlinear translations in modern college style from the older language into Babylonian in 1854 two Englishmen uncovered the sights of war era duel and Luke at the end of the 19th century French explorers revealed the remains of lagash including tablets recording the history of the Sumerian kings and in our own time professor Woolley of the University of Pennsylvania and many others have exhumed the primeval city of war where the Sumerians appeared to have reached civilization by 4500 BC so the students of many nations have worked together on this chapter of that endless mystery story in which the detectives are archaeologists and the prey is historic truth nevertheless there has been as yet only a beginning of research in Sumeria there is no telling what vistas of civilization and history will be opened up when the ground has been worked and the material studied as men have worked and studied in Egypt during the last 100 years 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 ashore evidences of their earliest culture had 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 relics is an asphalt head bearing all the characteristics of the Cimmerian type perhaps even they were of remote Mongolian origin for there is much in their language that resembles the Mongol speech 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 bounded 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 Heelys and laced like our own bracelets necklaces anklets finger rings and earrings made the women of Sumeria as recently in America show windows of their husbands prosperity when their civilization was already old about 2300 BC 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 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 were discovered at considerable depth an 8-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 a player were the remains of a pre diluvian culture that would later be pictured by the poets as a golden age meanwhile the priests 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 four hundred thirty two thousand years 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 tom was 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 Nepal are found to a depth of 66 feet of which almost as many feet extend below the remains of Sargon of Akkad as rise above it to the topmost stratum circa 180 on this basis Nippur would go back to 50 to 62 BC tenacious dynasties of city kings seemed to have flourished at Kish circa 4500 BC and at or circa 3500 BC in the competition of these two primeval centres we have the first form of that opposition between Semite and nan 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 the first and Hammurabi through the capture of Babylon by the Aryan generals Cyrus and Alexander in the 6th and 4th 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 3,000 BC onward the clay tablet records kept by the priests and found in the ruins of or 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 or la gosh Luke and the rest the writing of history and the partiality of historians are very ancient things one king Luke Agena of La gosh 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 and surely the tablets that preserve his decrees revealed to us the oldest briefest and justest code of laws in history this lucid interval was ended normally by 1 lugol's Agassiz who invaded la gosh overthrew Lulu Coquina 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 ignominiously one of the earliest poems in existence is a clay tablet apparently 4,800 years old on which the Sumerian poet Zynga Radha Moo mourns for the raped goddess of lagash for the city alas the treasures my soul doth sigh for my city gear su la gosh alas the treasures my soul doth sigh in holy gears who the children are in distress into the interior of the splendid shrine he the invader pressed the August Queen from her temple he brought forth old lady of my city desolated when wilt thou return we passed by the bloody lugol's Aggie see and other Sumerian Kings of mighty name lugar shigeng Gor loup-garou ki gonna do do mini G doopty Google and a new conga meanwhile another people of Semitic race had built the kingdom of Akkad under the leadership of Sargon the first and it established its capital at Agra da some 200 miles northwest of the Sumerian city-states a monolith founded 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 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 rescued by a workman he became a cup bearer to the King grew in favor and influenced rebelled displaced his master and mounted the throne of Agatha 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 lugol's Agassi who had despoiled la gosh and violated its God 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 and establishing the first great empire in history for 55 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 na Ramzan was a mighty builder of whose works nothing remains but a lovely steely or memorial slab recording his victory over an obscure king this powerful relief found by de Morgan at Sousa in 1897 and now a treasure of the Louvre shows a muscular nerim scene 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 it's the record in elegant uniform of norm seems 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 26th century BC we find la gosh 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 Coliseum hands folded in his lap their 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 unearth Tim and tempered the strength of the strong in mercy to the weak one of his inscriptions reveals the policy for which his people worshipped him after his death is 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 meanwhile lore of the cow DS was having one of the most prosperous epochs in its long career from 3500 BC the apparent age of its oldest graves to 700 BC its greatest king who were anger bought all Western Asia under his specific sway and proclaimed for all Sumeria the first extensive code of laws in history by the laws of righteousness of shamash forever I establish justice as or grew rich by the trade that flowed through it on the Euphrates were anger like Pericles beautified his city with temples and built lavishly in the subject cities of Larsa Luke Anthony poor his son dungee continued his work through a reign of 58 years and ruled so wisely that the people deified him is the God who had brought back their ancient paradise but soon that glory faded the warlike Elamites from the east and the rising amirite from the west swept down upon the leisure prosperity and peace of war captured its king and sacked the city with primitive thoroughness the poets of war 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 4,000 years that separate us from the Sumerian singer we feel the desolation of his City and his people me the foe have ravished yae with hands unwashed me his hands have ravished made me die of terror oh I am wretched north of reverence hath he stripped me of my robes and clothed therein his consort tore my jewels from me there with decked his daughter now I tread his courts my very person sought he in the shrines alas the day when to go forth I trembled he pursued me in my temple he made me quake with fear there within my walls and like a dove that fluttered purchased on a rafter like flitting outlet in a cavern hidden bird-like from my shrine he chased me from my city like a bird he chased me me sighing far behind behind me is my temple so for two hundred years which to our self-centered eyes seemed but an empty moment illumined amer ruled Sumeria then from the north came the great Hammurabi king of Babylon retook from the Elamites Luke and Ethan bided his time for 23 years invaded Elam and captured its king established his sway over Amer and distant to Syria 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 to 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 irrigation 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 this irrigation system dating from 4000 BC 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 plow appeared early drawn by oxen as even with us until yesterday and already furnished with a tubular seed drill gathered harvest was threshed by drawing it over great sledges of wood armed with flint teeth that cut the straw for the cattle and released the grain for men 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 but metal was still a luxury in the 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 alls used ivory and bone weaving was done on a large scale under the supervision of overseers appointed by the king 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 will remain flat with mud covered reeds stretched over cross beams of wood cows sheep goats and pigs roamed about the dwelling in primeval comradeship was man water for drinking was drawn from wells goods were carried chiefly by water since stone was rare in Sumeria it was brought up the gulf for down the rivers and then through numerous canals to the keys of the cities but land transportation was developing at Kish the oxford field expedition unearthed some of the oldest wheeled vehicles known here and there on the ruins our business seals bearing indications of traffic with Egypt and India there was no coinage yet and trade was normally by barter but gold and silver were already in use of 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 fantasy ocular 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 it rates ranging from 15 to 33 percent per annum since the stability of a society may be partly measured by inverse relay with the rate of interest we may suspect that Sumerian business like ours lived in an atmosphere of economic and political uncertainty in doubt gold and silver have been found abundantly in the tombs not only as jewellery 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 between the rich and the poor a middle class took form composed of small businessmen 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 exercising 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 three 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 pate C or priest king indicating by the very word that government was bound up with religion by 2800 BC the growth of trade made such municipal separatism impossible and generated empires in which some dominating personality subjected the cities and their potatoes to his power and willed them into an economic and political unity the despot lived in a renaissance atmosphere of violence and fear at any moment he might be dispatched 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 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 catch words as a stop for ID lists 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 a blast destroyed Sumeria in the Empire's 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 to this system of royal and feudal administration was added a body of law already rich with precedents when were anger and dungee codified the statutes of or 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 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 it is a poor civilization from which we may not learn something to improve our own for 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 or Engler 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 the 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 cart Nippur built great temples to the god Enlil and his consort nin lo Luke worshipped especially the virgin earth goddess enemy known to the Semites of Akkad as Ishtar the loose and versatile Aphrodite Demeter of the Near East Kish and Lagash worshipped a Mater Dolorosa the sorrowful mother goddess Ning carsick who grieved with the unhappiness of men interceded for them with sterner deities Ning Gear su was the god of irrigation the Lord of floods Abu or Thomas was the god of vegetation even sin was a God of the moon he was represented in human form with the thin Crescent about his head force aging the halos of medieval Saints the air was full of spirits beneficent angels one each as protected 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 lists the objects which the gods preferred oxen goats sheep doves chickens ducks fish dates figs cucumbers butter oil and cakes 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 have given up a lamb for his life 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 part a series and to what extent a king guru cadena rose like a Luthor against the exactions of the clergy denounced them for their veracity 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 already the world was old and well established in its time-honored ways presumably the priests recovered their power when Luke Agena died quite as they were to recover their power in Egypt after the passing of Ignat on 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 afterlife but like the Greeks they pictured the Otherworld is a dark abode of miserable shadows to which all the dead descended indiscriminately they have 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 later legend told how a depe a sage of era due had been initiated into all war by ear goddess of wisdom one secret only had been refused him the knowledge of deathless life 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 tog tubed the Weaver had survived Todd to forfeit in longevity and health by eating the fruit of a forbidden tree the priests transmitted education as well as mythology doubtless sought to teach as well as to rule by their myths to most of the temples were attached schools were in 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 profession of scribe school tablets survived and crusted with tables of multiplication and division square and cube roots and exercises and applied geometry but the instruction was not much more foolish than that which is given to our children appears from a tablet which is a Lucretia 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 what nobility of spirit and utterance this first of the historic religions could rise to shines out in the prayer of King Judea to the goddess bowel the patron deity of La gosh oh my queen the mother who established blah gosh the people on whom thou lookest is rich in power the worshiper on whom thou lookest his life is prolonged I have no mother thou art my mother I have no father thou art my father my goddess bow thou knowest what is good ballast given me the breath of life under the protection of thee my mother in thy shadow I will reverently dwell 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 girls marriage dowry to the temple 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 back West 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 Shuba odd she could rise to the status of Queen and rule her city with luxurious and imperious Grace 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 in the state if barren she could be divorced without further reasons 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 nevertheless as in most civilizations the women of the upper class is 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 Shuba odds grave professor Willie 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 a 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 five letters and darts 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 BC towards 3200 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 and 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 Samaria 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 me not a bee but the sound bee and then served 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 bee e mean the letter B it seems to have remained for the Egyptians to take this simple but revolutionary step 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 BC great libraries have been formed in Sumeria at L o for example in ruins contemporary with Judea this Arzak discovered a collection of over 30,000 tablets ranged one upon another in neat and logical array as early as 2000 BC Sumerian historians began to reconstruct the and record the present for the edification of the future portions of their work have come down to to us not in the original form but as quotations in later Babylonian chronicles among the original fragments however is a tablet founded neap or bearing the Sumerian prototype of the Epic of Gilgamesh which we shall study later in its developed Babylonian expression some of the shattered tablets contained urges 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 without 'less 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 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 this we surmise is the simple origin or earliest known appearance of these architectural forms among the ruins of Nepal is an arched drain 5,000 years old in the royal tombs of or there are arches that go back to 3500 BC and arched doors were common at war 2000 BC and these were true arches that is there stones were set in full loose wire fashioned each stone a wedge tapering downward tightly into place the richer citizens built palaces perched on a mound sometimes 40 feet above the plane and made purposely inaccessible except by one path so that every Sumerians home might be his castle since stone was scarce these palaces were mostly a brick the plain red surface of the walls was relieved by terracotta decoration in every form spirals Chevron's triangles even lozenges and died affairs the inner walls were plastered and painted in simple style the house was built around the 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 an Egypt armchairs flaunted feet like lion's claws for the temples stone was imported and adorned with copper entablatures and friezes inlaid with semi-precious material the temple of none are at war such at 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 storeys surrounded with a winding external stairway and set back at every stage here on the heights the loftiest of the cities God's might dwell and here the government might find a last spiritual and physical Citadel against invasion or revolt the temples were sometimes decorated with statuary of animals heroes and gods figures plain blunt and powerful but severely lacking in sculptural finish and grays most of the extant statues are of King Judea executed resolutely but crudely in resistant diorite in the ruins of Tel el obeid 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 Shuba audit war is a masterpiece that suggests a developed art too much too spoiled by time to permit of our giving it its due this is almost proved by the bow reliefs that survived the steely of the vultures set up by King Ian autumn of La gosh the porphyry cylinder of ignition the humorous caricatures as surely they must be of Bernina and above all the victory steely of nehrim sin shared the crudity of sumerian sculpture but have in the malleus t by tau 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 a terra do 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 Goldsmith's vessels of gold tasteful in design and delicate and finish have been found in the earliest graves at war some as old as 4000 BC the silver of Azov and Tomino now in the Louvre is a stocky as Gudea but is adorned with a wealth of animal imagery finely engraved best of all is the gold sheath and lapis lazuli dagger exhumed it who were 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 they seem to have served the Sumerians in place of signatures and indicate a refinement of life and manners disturbing to our naive 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 consumer jewellery 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 is 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 bow 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 appears some of the sins of civilization slavery despotism Ecclesiastes Amanda me realistic war it was a life differentiated and subtle abundant and complex already the natural in quality 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 3 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 ashore and Samara 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 were anger and dungee 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 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 their the same relationship to Sumeria that French and Italian bear to Latin shrine fort is 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 that is 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 current knowledge of primitive Arabia is too slight to make this of presentable hypothesis more definite is the derivation of certain specific elements of Egyptian culture from Sumeria and Babylonia we know the 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 a look at the map explains why a gypped 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 booked 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 traced the Egyptian language the more affinities it reveals with the Semitic tongues of the Near East the pictographic writing of the pre-dynastic Egyptians seems to have come in from Sumeria the cylindrical seal which is of unquestionably Mesopotamian origin appears in the earliest period of known Egyptian history and then disappears as if an important custom had been displaced by a native mode the potter's wheel is not known in Egypt before the 4th 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 early Egyptian and Babylonian mace heads are completely identical in form a finally worked Flint knife found in pre-dynastic Egyptian remains at gable el Arak bares reliefs in Mesopotamian themes and style copper was apparently developed in Western Asia and brought thence to Egypt early Egyptian architecture resembles Mesopotamian in the use of the recessed panel as a decoration for brick walls pre-dynastic pottery statuettes and decorative motives are in many cases identical or unmistakeably allied with Mesopotamian products 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 war were making statuary and reliefs whose style and conventions demonstrate the antiquity of these arts in Sumeria 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 gravest 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

Channel: Rocky C

Views: 24,542

Rating: 4.7816091 out of 5

Keywords: Will Durant, Sumeria, History, ANcient History

Id: CLsiQjYrkYk

Length: 51min 33sec (3093 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 08 2018