THE FERTILE CRESCENT IN THE THIRD MILLENNIUM
This most ancient cradle of civilization was a great arc of richly irrigated land stretching from the Persian Gulf northwest across the whole Tigris-Euphrates plain, then southwest along the Levant—Jordan River valley and ending at the Sinai. The principal Sumerian-Akkadian city-states are shown (including Babylon, which belongs to a later period). The broken line indicates the shore of the Gulf in the third millennium B.C.
What the nomads did not possess is nicely enumerated in this Sumerian description of a typical Amorite:
A tent-dweller buffeted by wind and rain, he knows not prayers,
With the weapon he makes the mountain his habitation,
Contentious to excess, he turns against the land, known not to bend the knee,
Eats uncooked meat,
Has no house in his lifetime,
Is not brought to burial when he dies.
This is almost a description of an animal: without manners or courtesy—even toward the dead—without religion or even cooking fire, the nomads were always getting themselves into bloody disputes with more “civilized” landowners. Behind the description we can detect the prejudice of imperialists throughout history, who blithely assume their superiority, moral as well as technical, over those whom they have marginalized and therefore their divine right to whatever is valuable, especially the land.
Thanks to the work of pioneering archaeologists, who have dug up many Sumerian cities during this century and painstakingly translated their abundant clay treasures, there is much we now know of Sumer, the world’s first civilization. Sumerian techniques of farming and husbandry were extraordinarily sophisticated (the Sumerians had two hundred words just for varieties of sheep); their mathematics enabled them to do square roots and cube roots and to calculate accurately the size of a field or a building and to excavate or enlarge a canal. Their medicine was practical, not magical, and their pharmacopoeias prescribed remedies for everything from battle wounds to venereal disease (called “a disease of the tun and the nu”—and though the experts tell us they cannot be sure of the meaning of these two words, the layman will have little trouble identifying them).
We even know much about Sumerian imagination. Manuals of instruction were often written in the name of a god: a manual on farming (a perennial best-seller, since copies of it have turned up everywhere in the Sumerian ruins) claims to be authored by the god Ninurta, “trustworthy farmer of Enlil”—the great god of the Sumerian pantheon. The human farmer is advised to watch carefully over his crop and to take all precautions, both human and superhuman: “After the sprout has broken through the ground” he is to scare off the flying birds, but he is also to pray to Ninkilim, goddess of field mice, so that she will keep her sharp-toothed little subjects away from the growing grain. Even the process of brewing (the Sumerians were great beer drinkers) had a sponsoring divinity, Ninkasi, a goddess born of “sparkling-fresh water,” whose name means “the lady who fills the mouth.” On this subject the Sumerians would wax poetic: Ninkasi was brewer to the gods themselves, she who “bakes with lofty shovel the sprouted barley,” who “mixes the bappir-malt with sweet aromatics,” who “pours the fragrant beer in the lahtan-vessel which is like the Tigris and Euphrates joined!”
We mustn’t take too seriously every mention of the gods in the Sumerian tablets, any more than we take seriously the pious invocation of our own God by today’s public figures. The Sumerians were practical, down-to-earth businessmen, more interested in calculating the extent of their fields and the capacity of their warehouses than they were in anything else. But this does not mean that they had no worldview beyond the steady acquisition of possessions.
The worldview of a people, though normally left unspoken in the daily business of buying and selling and counting shekels, is to be found in a culture’s stories, myths, and rituals, which, if studied aright, inevitably yield insight into the deepest concerns of a people by unveiling the invisible fears and desires inscribed on human hearts. The stories of Sumer, as resurrected from its plain clay tablets, possess a burnished splendor that cannot but affect contemporary readers, giving us flickering glimpses into the childhood of human imagination. Virtually all the tablets are damaged, leaving us with holes in every narrative. But many of the stories exist in several versions (so that the holes in one version can sometimes be filled in with passages from another) and even in different languages, allowing us to reconstruct, at least partially, a process of dynamic development that took place over many centuries. For the process of Sumerian storytelling itself we may be partly indebted to the wandering Semitic tribes, who, being illiterate, possessed the inexhaustible narrative memory of illiterate peoples and sometimes earned their keep by telling stories to the settled folk. These tales, whether from nomadic minstrels or from the oral traditions of the city-dwellers themselves, were eventually written down by Sumerian scribes, who did their best to categorize the wayward material into orderly groupings, thus creating “books”—in actuality, uniform series of tablets—of continuous narrative, episodic and sometimes intergenerational.
Sometimes too orderly. The Sumerian grouping of the narratives of their kings—the so-called King List—is completely useless to modern historians. These thumbnail sketches of each reign are arranged according to principles of symmetry and numerology to please the eye and ring satisfyingly on the ear, but without the least regard for what may in fact have occurred in Sumerian history. Some of the kings are said to rule for thousands of years, others for mere centuries; and recent studies, comparing these lists with other ancient records, have found that kings whose reigns are listed in sequence were actually contemporaries or near contemporaries, ruling neighboring Sumerian city-states.
The purposes of a modern historian would indeed have had no meaning in Sumer, for Sumerians—paradoxically, since they invented writing, the instrument that makes history possible—had no sense of history. The city-states had been founded by gods in time immemorial; and it was the gods who had given the Sumerians, “the black-headed people” (as they called themselves), all the tools and weapons and marvelous inventions that we know were the products of their own ingenuity. “Development” and “evolution”—words of such importance to us—would have meant little in the timeless culture of Sumer, where everything that was—their city, their fields, their herds, their plows—had always been.
Even their stories miss a sense of development: they begin in the middle and end in the middle. They lack the relentless necessity that we associate with storytelling, from which we demand a beginning, a middle, an end: a shape. When reading a book or watching a movie that seems to wander without direction, we ask impatiently, “Where is this going?” But all Sumerian stories are shaggy-dog stories, sounding sometimes like the patter of small children who imitate the jokes they have heard from older children without realizing that there has to be a punchline. When perusing Sumerian literature, the modern reader is often left waiting for the punchline. Despite this, the tales of ancient Sumer are full of pleasure for us, both because of their archaic strangeness and because of the occasional mirror-moments in which we are startled to glimpse something of ourselves: an image or emotion that we have in common with this people of the dim past.
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The Sumerian work that has left the greatest impress on contemporary imagination is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of a legendary hero who probably flourished toward the middle of the third millennium B.C. as king of Uruk, the very city where writing was likely invented. He may have been of Semitic, rather than Sumerian, stock because, at least according to one translation of the notoriously unreliable King List, Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh’s father and king before him, “was a nomad.” If so, the nomadic minstrels would have had much reason to celebrate his exploits; and Gilgamesh’s kingship would represent an early power grab by the wandering Semitic tribes, who by millennium’s end would wrest power throughout Sumer and establish their languages at the expense of Sumer
ian. Sumerian, a language for which no cognate tongues have been found, was replaced early in the second millennium by Akkadian (or Old Babylonian) as the lingua franca of Mesopotamia, after which Sumerian lived on only as a literary language employed by learned scribes for special documents. But the new Semitic rulers took up not only cuneiform writing but the mythology and beliefs of their Sumerian predecessors in seamless continuity, which is why we have found stories of Gilgamesh not only in Sumerian but in Akkadian and other ancient languages.
The Epic opens on a charming description of ancient Uruk, with the poet acting as tour guide to a first-time visitor:
See its wall, which is like a copper band,
Survey its battlements, which nobody else can match,
Take the threshold, which is from time immemorial,
Approach Eanna, the home of Ishtar,1
Which no future king nor any man will ever match!
Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around!
Inspect the foundation platform and scrutinize the brickwork!
Testify that its bricks are baked bricks,
That the Seven Counselors must have laid its foundations!
One square mile is city, one square mile is orchards, one square mile is claypits, as well as the open ground of Ishtar’s temple.
Three square miles and the open ground comprise Uruk.
The poet’s pride in the splendor and extent of his city is unmistakable. Uruk is “from time immemorial,” its foundations laid by the Seven Counselors, the gods who brought the black-heads all the special skills and crafts that have made them great. True greatness belongs exclusively to this “time immemorial,” and “no future king nor any man will ever match” such primeval achievements as the Eanna, Uruk’s temple to Ishtar, goddess of love and war. Then, as if he were working from a shooting script for a movie, the poet, having given us his establishing shots of the ancient city, invites us to have a closer look at one of the wonders it contains, a secret document preserved on a slab of Sumer’s most precious material:
Look for the copper tablet-box,
Undo its bronze lock,
Open the door to its secret,
Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet, read it,
The story of that man, Gilgamesh, who went through all kinds of sufferings.
He was superior to other kings, a warrior lord of great stature,
A hero born of Uruk, a goring wild bull.
He marches at the front as leader,
He goes behind, the support of his brothers,
A strong net, the protection of his men,
The raging flood-wave, which can destroy even a stone wall.
Son of Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh, perfect in strength,
Son of the lofty cow, the wild cow Ninsun.
He is Gilgamesh, perfect in splendor,
Who opened up passes in the mountains,
Who could dig pits even in the mountainside,
Who crossed the ocean, the broad seas, as far as the sunrise.
Gilgamesh, part human, part divine (since his mother is the wild cow goddess, Ninsun), has all the attributes of a proper mythological figure—fierce as a bull, strong as a wave—but also possesses the practical skills valued by your down-to-earth Sumerian businessman: he is a terrific engineer and an incomparable navigator. And this winning combination of qualities gives us a hint that the story of Gilgamesh is the result of a long process of development and maturation. It may easily have arisen in a past so remote—long before writing, even long before agriculture—that no archaeologist can recapture it. But it has been turned and turned like pottery and elaborately decorated by successive hands, first prehistoric, then Sumerian, then Semitic.
The lines I have quoted come from an unbroken portion of Tablet I. But now I must quote from a portion of the tablet that will give a better idea of the difficulties faced by a translator—lines that also suggest that even in lordly Uruk Gilgamesh was a bit much:
In Uruk the Sheepfold he would walk about,
Show himself superior, his head held high like a wild bull.
He had no rival, at his pukku
His weapons would rise up, his comrades have to rise up.
The young men of Uruk became dejected in their private [quarters(?)].
Gilgamesh would not leave any son alone for his father.
Day and night his [behavior(?)] was overbearing.…
He is the shepherd of Uruk the Sheepfold,
He is their shepherd, yet [ ]
Powerful, superb, knowledgeable, [and expert],
Gilgamesh would not leave young girls [alone],
The daughters of warriors, the brides of young men.
“At his pukku” may mean “alert” or “erect” or it may refer to a kind of hockey game associated with fertility and played at weddings. The translator’s brackets mark places where the tablet is broken or unclear. The young men may have become dejected in their private quarters or in their private thoughts—we can’t be sure. But despite the lacunae and untranslatable words, we can be pretty sure that Gilgamesh was making a nuisance of himself, bullying the boys and bedding the girls. And this seems to be seen by the Sumerians as the necessary excrescence of greatness. Sumerian society, we know from other tablets, was intensely competitive, and Sumerians were swaggerers of the worst kind. Kings indulged in their own constant self-praise without a trace of inhibition. The citizenry often resorted to the law courts, whose “verdicts” fill many tablet collections as one of the most pervasive literary forms. Another pervasive form, which the Sumerians found especially entertaining, is the “contest,” a fanciful public disputation between two rivals—between, for instance, two schoolboys over who is the better student (a disputation replete with such appellations as “dolt,” “numbskull,” “illiterate,” and “windbag”); between two suitors for the hand of a goddess; even between copper and silver, summer and winter. This was a society full of contentiousness and aggression, in which the “good” man—the ideal—was imagined as ambitious in the extreme, animated by a drive for worldly prestige, victory, success, with scant regard to what we would think of as ethical norms. This was also a society that despised poverty.
At any rate, the people of Uruk, for all their pride in Gilgamesh, need some relief, and so they complain bitterly to their gods, especially to “great Aruru,” the universal mother:
“Did [Aruru (?)] create such a rampant wild bull?
Is there no rival? …
You, Aruru, you created [mankind (?)]!
Now create someone for him, to match (?) the ardor (?) of his energies!
Let them be regular rivals, and let Uruk be allowed peace!”
So Aruru creates “inside herself the word of Anu,” the father god. Then, washing her hands, she pinches “off a piece of clay, cast[s] it out in open country,” where it becomes “Enkidu, the warrior, offspring of silence, and sky-bolt of Ninurta”:
His whole body was shaggy with hair, he was furnished with tresses like a woman,
His locks of hair grew luxuriant like grain.
He knew neither people nor country; he was dressed as cattle are.
With gazelles he eats vegetation,
With cattle he quenches his thirst at the watering place.
With wild beasts he satisfies his need for water.
Enkidu, the ultimate “natural man,” at one with animals rather than humans, foils the strategies of the local hunters, one of whom brings the hunters’ complaints to Gilgamesh:
“I am too frightened to approach him.
He kept filling in the pits that I dug [ ],
He kept pulling out the traps that I laid.
He kept helping cattle, wild beasts of open country, to escape my grasp.”
Gilgamesh’s solution is remarkable:
“Go, hunter, lead forth the harlot Shamhat,
And when he approaches the cattle at the watering place,
She must take off her clothes, reveal her attractions.
He wi
ll see her and go close to her.
Then his cattle, who have grown up in open country with him, will become alien to him.”
The hunter does as Gilgamesh bids, bringing Shamhat to the watering place; and when Enkidu, “the murderous youth from the depths of open country,” arrives to drink with the wild beasts:
Shamhat loosened her undergarments, opened her legs and he took in her attractions.
She did not pull away. She took wind of him,
Spread open her garments, and he lay upon her.
She did for him, the primitive man, as women do.
His love-making he lavished upon her.
For six days and seven nights Enkidu was aroused and poured himself into Shamhat.
When he was sated with her charms,
He set his face towards the open country of his cattle.
The gazelles saw Enkidu and scattered,
The cattle of open country kept away from his body.
For Enkidu had become smooth; his body was too clean.
His legs, which used to keep pace with his cattle, were at a standstill.
Enkidu had been diminished, he could not run as before.
Yet he had acquired judgment (?), had become wiser.
Dumbfounded by this transformation, Enkidu returns to the harlot to find out what this is all about. She tells him that he has “become like a god” and urges that his proper place is now in Uruk,
“Where Gilgamesh is perfect in strength,
And is like a wild bull, more powerful than (any of) the people.”
She spoke to him, and her speech was acceptable.
Knowing his own mind (now),2 he would seek for a friend.
Of course, Enkidu’s way of “seek[ing] for a friend” is unusual:
“Let me challenge him, and [ ]
(By saying:) ‘In Uruk I shall be the strongest!’