Background
Background
In the narrow sense, Mesopotamia is the area between
the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, north
or northwest of the bottleneck at Baghdad, in modern
Iraq; it is Al-Jazirah ("The Island") of
the Arabs. South of this lies Babylonia, named after the
city of Babylon. However, in the broader sense, the name
Mesopotamia has come to be used for the area bounded on
the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and on the
southwest by the edge of the Arabian Plateau and
stretching from the Persian Gulf in the southeast to the
spurs of the Anti-Taurus Mountains in the northwest.
Only from the latitude of Baghdad do the
Euphrates and Tigris truly become twin rivers,
the Rafidain of the Arabs, which have constantly
changed their courses over the millennia. The low-lying plain of the
Karun River in Persia has always been
closely related to Mesopotamia, but it is NOT
considered part of Mesopotamia as it forms its own river
system.
Mesopotamia, south of Ar-Ramadi
(about 70 miles, or 110 kilometers, west of Baghdad) on the
Euphrates and the bend of the Tigris below
Samarra' (about 70 miles north-northwest of Baghdad), is
flat alluvial land. Between Baghdad and the mouth of the
Shatt al-'Arab (the confluence of the Tigris
and Euphrates, where it empties into the Persian
Gulf) there is a difference in height of only about 100 feet (30
meters). As a result of the slow flow of the water, there are heavy
deposits of silt, and the riverbeds are raised. Consequently, the rivers
often overflow their banks (and may even change their course) when they
are not protected by high dikes. In recent times they have been regulated
above Baghdad by the use of escape channels with overflow
reservoirs. The extreme south is a region of extensive marshes and reed
swamps, Hawrs, which, probably since early times,
have served as an area of refuge for oppressed and displaced peoples.
The supply of water is not regular; as a result of the high average
temperatures and a very low annual rainfall, the ground of the plain of
latitude 35 N is hard and dry and unsuitable for plant cultivation for at
least eight months in the year. Consequently, agriculture without risk of
crop failure, which seems to have begun in the higher rainfall zones and
in the hilly borders of Mesopotamia in the 10th
millennium BC, began in Mesopotamia itself, the real
heart of the civilization, only after artificial irrigation had been
invented, bringing water to large stretches of territory through a widely
branching network of canals. Since the ground is extremely fertile and,
with irrigation and the necessary drainage, will produce in abundance,
southern Mesopotamia became a land of plenty that could
support a considerable population. The cultural superiority of north
Mesopotamia, which may have lasted until about 4000 BC,
was finally overtaken by the south when the people there had responded to
the challenge of their situation.
The present climatic conditions are fairly similar to those of 8,000
years ago. An English survey of ruined settlements in the area 30 miles
around ancient Hatra (180 miles northwest of Baghdad) has
shown that the southern limits of the zone in which agriculture is
possible without artificial irrigation has remained unchanged since the
first settlement of Al-Jazirah.
The availability of raw materials is a historical factor of great
importance, as is the dependence on those materials that had to be
imported. In Mesopotamia, agricultural products and those
from stock breeding, fisheries, date palm cultivation, and reed industries
[in short, grain, vegetables, meat, leather,
wool, horn, fish, dates, and reed and plant-fiber products]
were available in plenty and could easily be produced in excess of home
requirements to be exported. There are bitumen springs at Hit
(90 miles northwest of Baghdad) on the Euphrates (the Is
of Herodotus). On the other hand, wood, stone, and metal were rare or even
entirely absent. The date palm--virtually
the national tree of Iraq--yields a wood suitable only for
rough beams and not for finer work. Stone is mostly lacking in southern
Mesopotamia, although limestone is quarried in the desert
about 35 miles to the west and "Mosul marble" is found
not far from the Tigris in its middle reaches. Metal can
only be obtained in the mountains, and the same is true of precious and
semiprecious stones. Consequently, southern Mesopotamia
in particular was destined to be a land of trade from the start.
Only rarely could "empires" extending over a wider area guarantee
themselves imports by plundering or by subjecting neighboring regions.
The raw material that epitomizes Mesopotamian
civilization is clay: in the almost exclusively mud-brick
architecture and in the number and variety of clay figurines and pottery
artifacts, Mesopotamia bears the stamp of clay as does no
other civilization, and nowhere in the world but in Mesopotamia
and the regions over which its influence was diffused was clay used as the
vehicle for writing. Such phrases as cuneiform civilization,
cuneiform literature, and cuneiform law
can apply only where people had had the idea of using soft clay not only
for bricks and jars and for the jar stoppers on which a seal could be
impressed as a mark of ownership but also as the vehicle for impressed
signs to which established meanings were assigned--an intellectual
achievement that amounted to nothing less than the invention of writing.
The character and influence of ancient Mesopotamia
Questions as to what ancient Mesopotamian civilization
did and did not accomplish, how it influenced its neighbors and
successors, and what its legacy has transmitted are posed from the
standpoint of 20th-century civilization and are in part
colored by ethical overtones, so that the answers can only be relative.
Modern scholars assume the ability to assess the sum total of an "ancient
Mesopotamian civilization"; but, since the publication of an
article by the Astrologist Benno Lands Berger on "Die
Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt" (1926; "The
Distinctive Conceptuality of the Babylonian World"), it has
become almost a commonplace to call attention to the necessity of viewing
ancient Mesopotamia and its civilization as an
independent entity.
Ancient Mesopotamia had many languages and cultures;
its history is broken up into many periods and eras; it had no real
geographic unity, and above all no permanent capital city, so that by its
very variety it stands out from other civilizations with greater
uniformity.
The script and the pantheon
constitute the unifying factors, but in these also
Mesopotamia shows its predilection for multiplicity and
variety. Written documents were turned out in quantities, and there are
often many copies of a single text. The pantheon
consisted of more than 1,000 deities, even though many divine names may
apply to different manifestations of a single god. During 3,000 years of
Mesopotamian civilization, each century gave birth to the
next. Thus classical Sumerian civilization influenced
that of the Akkadians, and the Ur III empire,
which itself represented a Sumero-Akkadian synthesis,
exercised its influence on the first quarter of the 2nd millennium BC.
With the Hittites, large areas of Anatolia
were infused with the culture of Mesopotamia from 1700 BC
onward. Contacts, via Mari, with Ebla in
Syria, some 30 miles south of Aleppo, go
back to the 24th century BC, so that links between Syrian
and Palestinian scribal schools and Babylonian
civilization during the Amarna period (14th
century BC) may have had much older predecessors. At any rate, the
similarity of certain themes in cuneiform literature and
the Old Testament, such as the story of the Flood
or the motif of the righteous sufferer, is due to such
early contacts and not to direct borrowing.
The achievements of ancient Mesopotamia
The world of mathematics and astronomy
owes much to the Babylonians--for instance, the sexagesimal
system for the calculation of time and angles, which is still practical
because of the multiple divisibility of the number 60; the Greek
day of 12 "double-hours"; and the zodiac and its signs.
In many cases, however, the origins and routes of borrowings are obscure,
as in the problem of the survival of ancient Mesopotamian legal
theory.
The achievement of the civilization itself may be expressed in terms of
its best points--moral, aesthetic, scientific, and, not least, literary.
Legal theory flourished and was sophisticated early on,
being expressed in several collections of legal decisions, the so-called
codes, of which the best-known is the Code of Hammurabi.
Throughout these codes recurs the concern of the ruler for the weak, the
widow, and the orphan--even if, sometimes, the phrases were regrettably
only literary clichés.
The aesthetics of art are too much governed by
subjective values to be assessed in absolute terms, yet certain peaks
stand out above the rest, notably the art of Uruk IV, the
seal engraving of the Akkad period, and the relief
sculpture of Ashurbanipal .
Science the Mesopotamians had, of a
kind, though not in the sense of Greek science. From its
beginnings in Sumer before the middle of the 3rd
millennium BC, Mesopotamian science was characterized by
endless, meticulous enumeration and ordering into columns and series, with
the ultimate ideal of including all things in the world but without the
wish or ability to synthesize and reduce the material to a system. Not a
single general scientific law has been found, and only rarely has the use
of analogy been found. Nevertheless, it remains a highly commendable
achievement that Pythagoras' law (that
the sum of the squares on the two shorter sides of a right-angled triangle
equals the square on the longest side), even though it was
never formulated, was being applied as early as the 18th century BC.
Technical accomplishments were perfected in the building of the
ziggurats (temple towers resembling pyramids), with their huge
bulk, and in irrigation, both in practical execution and
in theoretical calculations .
At the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, an artificial stone often
regarded as a forerunner of concrete was in use at Uruk
(160 miles south-southeast of modern Baghdad), but the secret of its
manufacture apparently was lost in subsequent years. Writing
pervaded all aspects of life and gave rise to a highly developed
bureaucracy--one of the most tenacious legacies of the ancient
Middle East. Remarkable organizing ability was required to
administer huge estates, in which, under the 3rd dynasty of Ur,
for example, it was not unusual to prepare accounts for thousands of
cattle or tens of thousands of bundles of reeds. Similar figures are
attested at Ebla, three centuries earlier.
Above all, the literature of Mesopotamia is one of its
finest cultural achievements. Though there are many modern anthologies and
chrestomathies (compilations of useful learning), with translations and
paraphrases of Mesopotamian literature, as well as
attempts to write its history, it cannot truly be said that "cuneiform
literature" has been resurrected to the extent that it deserves.
There are partly material reasons for this: many clay tablets survive only
in a fragmentary condition, and duplicates that would restore the texts
have not yet been discovered, so that there are still large gaps. A
further reason is the inadequate knowledge of the
languages: insufficient acquaintance with the
vocabulary and, in Sumerian, major
difficulties with the grammar. Consequently, another
generation of Assyriologists will pass before the great
myths, epics, lamentations, hymns, "law codes," wisdom literature, and
pedagogical treatises can be presented to the reader in such a way that he
can fully appreciate the high level of literary creativity of those times.
The classical and medieval views of Mesopotamia
Rediscovery in
modern times
Before the first excavations in Mesopotamia, about
1840, nearly 2,000 years had passed during which knowledge of the ancient
Middle East was derived from three sources
only: the Bible, Greek and
Roman authors, and the excerpts from the writings of
Berosus, a Babylonian who wrote in
Greek. In 1800 very little more was known than in AD 800,
although these sources had served to stir the imagination of poets and
artists, down to Sardanapalus (1821) by the 19th-century
English poet Lord Byron.
Apart from the building of the Tower of Babel, the
Old Testament mentions Mesopotamia only
in those historical contexts in which the kings of Assyria
and Babylonia affected the course of events in
Israel and Judah: in particular
Tiglath-pileser III, Shalmaneser V, and
Sennacherib, with their policy of deportation, and the
Babylonian Exile introduced by Nebuchadrezzar II.
Of the Greeks, Herodotus of Halicarnassus (5th century
BC, a contemporary of Xerxes I and Artaxerxes I) was the first to report
on "Babylon and the rest of Assyria"; at that date the
Assyrian empire had been overthrown for more than 100
years. The Athenian Xenophon took part in an expedition
(during 401-399 BC) of Greek mercenaries who crossed
Anatolia, made their way down the Euphrates
as far as the vicinity of Baghdad, and returned up the
Tigris after the famous Battle of Cunaxa.
In his "Cyropaedia"
Xenophon describes the final struggle between Cyrus II
and the Neo-Babylonian empire. Later, the Greeks
adopted all kinds of fabulous tales about King Ninus,
Queen Semiramis, and King Sardanapalus.
These stories are described mainly in the historical work of
Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC), who based them on the reports
of a Greek physician, Ctesias (405-359 BC).
Herodotus saw Babylon with his own
eyes, and Xenophon gave an account of travels and
battles. All later historians, however, wrote at second or third hand,
with one exception, Berosus (b. c. 340 BC), who emigrated
at an advanced age to the Aegean island of Cos, where he
is said to have composed the three books of the Babyloniaka.
Unfortunately, only extracts from them survive, prepared by one
Alexander Polyhistor (1st century BC), who, in his turn, served
as a source for the Church Father Eusebius (d. AD 342).
Berosus derided the "Greek historians"
who had so distorted the history of his country. He knew, for example,
that it was not Semiramis who founded the city of
Babylon, but he was himself the prisoner of his own environment
and cannot have known more about the history of his land than was known in
Babylonia itself in the 4th century BC. Berosus'
first book dealt with the beginnings of the world and with a myth
of a composite being, Oannes, half fish, half man, who
came ashore in Babylonia at a time when men still lived
like the wild beasts. Oannes taught them the essentials
of civilization: writing, the arts,
law, agriculture, surveying,
and architecture. The name Oannes must
have been derived from the cuneiform U'anna (Sumerian) or
Umanna (Akkadian), a second name of the mythical figure
Adapa, the bringer of civilization. The second
book of Berosus contained the Babylonian king
list from the beginning to King Nabonassar (Nabu-nasir,
747-734 BC), a contemporary of Tiglath-pileser III.
Berosus' tradition, beginning with a list of primeval
kings before the Flood, is a reliable one; it agrees with
the tradition of the Sumerian king list, and even
individual names can be traced back exactly to their Sumerian
originals. Even the immensely long reigns of the primeval kings, which
lasted as long as "18 sars" (= 18 3,600 = 64,800) of years, are found in
Berosus. Furthermore, he was acquainted with the story of
the Flood, with Cronus as its instigator
and Xisuthros (or Ziusudra) as its hero, and with the
building of an ark. The third book is
presumed to have dealt with the history of Babylonia from
Nabonassar to the time of Berosus
himself.
Diodorus made the mistake of locating Nineveh
on the Euphrates, and Xenophon gave an
account of two cities, Larissa (probably modern
Nimrud [ancient Kalakh], 20 miles southeast of modern
Mosul) and Mespila (ancient Nineveh, just north
of Mosul).
The name Mespila probably was nothing more than the
word of the local Aramaeans for ruins;
there can be no clearer instance of the rift that had opened between the
ancient Middle East and the classical West.
In sharp contrast, the East had a tradition that the ruins opposite
Mosul (in north Iraq) concealed ancient Nineveh.
When a Spanish rabbi from Navarre,
Benjamin of Tudela, was traveling in the Middle East between 1160
and 1173, Jews and Muslims alike knew
the position of the grave of the prophet Jonah.
The credit for the rediscovery of the ruins of Babylon
goes to an Italian, Pietro della Valle, who correctly
identified the vast ruins north of modern Al-Hillah,(60
miles south of Baghdad); he must have seen there the
large rectangular tower that represented the ancient ziggurat.
Previously, other travelers had sought the Tower of Babel
in two other monumental ruins: Birs Nimrud, the massive
brick structure of the ziggurat of ancient
Borsippa (modern Birs, near Al-Hillah),
vitrified by lightning, and the ziggurat of the
Kassite capital, Dur Kurigalzu, at Burj
'Aqarquf, 22 miles west of Baghdad.
Pietro della Valle brought back to Europe
the first specimens of cuneiform writing, stamped brick,
of which highly impressionistic reproductions were made. Thereafter,
European travelers visited Mesopotamia with increasing
frequency, among them Carsten Niebuhr (an 18th-century
German traveler), Claudius James Rich (a
19th-century Orient list and traveler), and Ker Porter (a
19th-century traveler).
In modern times a third Middle Eastern ruin drew visitors from Europe--
Persepolis, in the land of Persia east
of Susiana, near modern Shiraz, Iran. In
1602, reports had filtered back to Europe of inscriptions that were not in
Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic,
Georgian, or Greek. In 1700 an
Englishman, Thomas Hyde, coined the term "cuneiform"
for these inscriptions, and by the middle of the 18th century it was known
that the Persepolis inscriptions were related to those of
Babylon. Niebuhr distinguished three
separate alphabets (Babylonian, Elamite,
and Old Persian cuneiform). The first promising attempt
at decipherment was made by the German philologist
Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802, by use of the kings'
names in the Old Persian versions of the trilingual
inscriptions, although his later efforts led him up a blind alley.
Thereafter, the efforts to decipher cuneiform gradually developed in the
second half of the 19th century into a discipline of ancient Oriental
philology, which was based on results established through the pioneering
work of Emile Burnouf, Edward Hincks,
Sir Henry Rawlinson, and many others.
Today this subject is still known as Assyriology,
because at the end of the 19th century the great majority of
cuneiform texts came from the Assyrian city of Nineveh,
in particular from the library of King Ashurbanipal in
the mound of Kuyunjik at Nineveh.
The emergence of Mesopotamian civilization
The Late Neolithic Period and the Chalcolithic
Period. Between about 10,000 BC and the genesis of large
permanent settlements, the following stages of development are
distinguishable, some of which run parallel :-
-
The change to sedentary life, or
the transition from continual or seasonal change of abode, characteristic
of hunter-gatherers and the earliest cattle breeders, to life in one place
over a period of several years or even permanently.
-
The transition from experimental
plant cultivation to the deliberate and
calculated farming of grains and leguminous plants.
-
The erection of houses and the associated "settlement"
of the gods in temples.
-
The burial of the dead in cemeteries.
-
The invention of clay vessels,
made at first by hand, then turned on the wheel and fired
to ever greater degrees of hardness, at the same time receiving almost
invariably decoration of incised designs or painted patterns,
-
The development of specialized
crafts and the distribution of labor.
-
Metal production (the first use
of metal--copper--marks the transition from the Late Neolithic
to the Chalcolithic Period).
These stages of development can only rarely be dated on the basis of a
sequence of levels at one site alone. Instead, an important role is played
by the comparison of different sites, starting with the assumption that
what is simpler and technically less accomplished is older. In addition to
this type of dating, which can be only relative, the radiocarbon, or
carbon-14, method has proved to be an increasingly valuable tool since the
1950s. By this method the known rate of decay of the radioactive carbon
isotope (carbon-14) in wood, horn, plant fibre, and bone allows the time
that has elapsed since the "death" of the material under examination to be
calculated. Although a plus/minus discrepancy of up to 200 years has to be
allowed for, this is not such a great disadvantage in the case of material
6,000 to 10,000 years old. Even when skepticism is necessary because of
the use of an inadequate sample, carbon-14 dates are still very welcome as
confirmation of dates arrived at by other means. Moreover, radiocarbon
ages can be converted to more precise dates through comparisons with data
obtained by dendrochronology, a method of absolute age
determination based on the analysis of the annual rings of trees.
The first agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the transition
to sedentary life took place in regions in which animals
that were easily domesticated, such as sheep,
goats, cattle, and pigs, and
the wild prototypes of grains and leguminous
plants, such as wheat, barley,
bitter vetch, pea, and lentil,
were present.
Such
centers of dispersion may have been the valleys and grassy border
regions of the mountains of Iraq, Iran,
Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine,
but they also could have been, say, the northern slopes of the
Hindu Kush. As settled life, which caused a drop in infant
mortality, led to the increase of the population, settlement spread out
from these centers into the plains--although it must be remembered that
this process, described as the Neolithic Revolution, in
fact took thousands of years.
Representative of the first settlements on the borders of
Mesopotamia are the adjacent sites of Zawi Chemi Shanidar
and Shanidar itself, which lie northwest of
Rawanduz. They date from the transition from the 10th to the 9th
millennium BC and are classified as prepottery. The finds included
querns (primitive mills) for grinding grain (whether wild or
cultivated is not known), the remains of huts about 13
feet in diameter, and a cemetery with grave goods.
The presence of copper beads is evidence of acquaintance
with metal, though not necessarily with the technique of
working it into tools, and the presence of
obsidian (volcanic glass) is indicative of the acquisition of
non indigenous raw materials by means of trade. The
bones found testify that sheep were
already domesticated at Zawi Chemi Shanidar.
At Karim Shahir, a site that cannot be accurately tied
chronologically to Shanidar, clear proof was obtained
both of the knowledge of grain cultivation, in the form
of sickle blades showing sheen from use, and of the
baking of clay, in the form of lightly fired clay
figurines. Still in the hilly borders of Mesopotamia,
a sequence of about 3,000 years can be followed at the site of
Qal'at Jarmo, east of Kirkuk, some 150 miles
north of Baghdad. The beginning of this settlement can be
dated to about 6750 BC; excavations uncovered 12 archaeological levels of
a regular village, consisting of about 20 to 25 houses
built of packed clay, sometimes with stone
foundations, and divided into several rooms. The
finds included types of wheat (emmer and einkorn) and
two-row barley, the bones of domesticated goats,
sheep, and pigs, and obsidian tools,
stone vessels, and, in the upper third of the levels, clay vessels with
rough painted decorations, providing the first certain
evidence for the manufacture of pottery.
Jarmo must be roughly contemporary with the sites of
Jericho (13 miles east of Jerusalem) and
of Çatalhüyük in Anatolia (central
Turkey). Those sites, with their walled settlements, seem
to have achieved a much higher level of civilization, but too much weight
must not be placed on the comparison because no other sites in and around
Mesopotamia confirm the picture deduced from
Jarmo alone. Views on the earliest Neolithic in
Iraq have undergone radical revisions in the light of
discoveries made since the 1970s at Qermez Dere,
Nemrik, and Maghzaliyah.
About 1,000 years later are two villages that are the earliest so far
discovered in the plain of Mesopotamia: Hassuna,
near Mosul, and Tall Sawwan, near
Samarra'.
At Hassuna the pottery is more advanced, with incised
and painted designs, but the decoration is still unsophisticated. One of
the buildings found may be a shrine, judging from its
unusual ground plan. Apart from emmer there occurs, as
the result of mutation, six-row barley, which was later
to become the chief grain crop of southern Mesopotamia.
In the case of Tall Sawwan, it is significant that the
settlement lay south of the boundary of rainfall agriculture;
thus it must have been dependent on some form of artificial
irrigation, even if this was no more than the drawing of water
from the Tigris. This, therefore, gives a date after
which the settlement of parts of southern Mesopotamia
would have been feasible.
The emergence of cultures
For the next millennium, the 5th, it is customary to speak in terms of
various "cultures" or "horizons"
distinguished in general by the pottery, which may be
classed by its color, shape,
hardness, and, above all, by its decoration. The
name of each horizon is derived either from the type site
or from the place where the pottery was first found: Samarra'
on the Tigris, Tall Halaf in the central
Jazirah, Hassuna Level V, Al-'Ubaid
near Ur, and Hajj Muhammad on the
Euphrates, not far from As-Samawah (some
150 miles south-southeast of Baghdad).
Along with the improvement of tools, the first
evidence for water transport (a model boat from the
prehistoric cemetery at Eridu, in the extreme south of
Mesopotamia, c. 4000 BC), and the development of
terra-cottas, the most impressive sign of progress is the
constantly accelerating advance in architecture. This can
best be followed in the city of Eridu, which in
historical times was the centre of the cult of the Sumerian
god Enki.
Originally a small, single-roomed shrine, the temple in the
Ubaid period consisted of a rectangular building, measuring 80 by
40 feet, that stood on an artificial terrace. It had an "offering
table" and an "altar" against the short walls,
aisles down each side, and a facade decorated with
niches. This temple, standing on a
terrace probably originally designed to protect the building from
flooding, is usually considered the prototype of the
characteristic religious structure of later Babylonia,
the ziggurat.
The temple at Eridu is in the very same place as that
on which the Enki ziggurat stood in the time of the 3rd
dynasty of Ur (c. 2112-c. 2004 BC), so the cult tradition
must have existed on the same spot for at least 1,500 to 2,000 years
before Ur III itself. Remarkable as this is, however, it
is not justifiable to assume a continuous ethnic
tradition. The flowering of architecture reached its peak with the great
temples (or assembly halls?) of Uruk, built around the
turn of the 4th to 3rd millennium BC (Uruk Levels
VI to IV).
In extracting information as to the expression of mind and spirit
during the six millennia preceding the invention of writing,
it is necessary to take account of four major sources:
decoration on pottery, the care of the dead,
sculpture, and the designs on seals. There
is, of course, no justification in assuming any association with ethnic
groups.
The most varied of these means of expression is undoubtedly the
decoration of pottery. It is hardly coincidental that, in regions
in which writing had developed, high-quality
painted pottery was no longer made. The motifs in decoration are
either abstract and geometric or
figured, although there is also a strong tendency to
geometric stylization. An important question is the extent to
which the presence of symbols, such as the bucranium (a
sculptured ornament representing an ox skull), can be considered as
expressions of specific religious ideas, such as a
bull cult, and, indeed, how much the decoration was
intended to convey meaning at all.
It is not known how ancient is the custom of burying the dead
in graves nor whether its intention was to maintain communication (by the
cult of the dead) or to guard against the demonic
power of the unburied dead left free to wander. A
cemetery, or collection of burials associated with grave
goods, is first attested at Zawi Chemi Shanidar.
The presence of pots in the grave indicates that the bodily
needs of the dead person were provided for, and the discovery of
the skeleton of a dog and of a model boat
in the cemetery at Eridu suggests that
it was believed that the activities of life could be pursued in the
afterlife.
The earliest sculpture takes the form of very crudely worked
terra-cotta representations of women; the
Ubaid Horizon, however, has figurines of
both women and men, with very slender
bodies, protruding features, arms akimbo, and the genitals accurately
indicated, and also of women suckling children. It is uncertain whether it
is correct to describe these statuettes as idols, whether
the figures were cult objects, such as votive
offerings, or whether they had a magical significance,
such as fertility charms, or, indeed, what purpose they
did fulfill.
Seals are first attested in the form of stamp seals at
Tepe Gawra, north of Mosul. Geometric
designs are found earlier than scenes with figures, such as men,
animals, conflict between animals,
copulation, or dance. Here again it is
uncertain whether the scenes are intended to convey a deeper meaning.
Nevertheless, unlike pottery, a seal has a direct
relationship to a particular individual or
group, for the seal identifies what it is used to seal (a
vessel, sack, or other container) as the property or responsibility of a
specific person. To that extent, seals represent the earliest
pictorial representations of persons. The area of distribution of
the stamp seal was northern Mesopotamia,
Anatolia, and Iran. Southern
Mesopotamia, on the other hand, was the home of the
cylinder seal, which was either an independent invention
or was derived from stamp seals engraved on two
faces. The cylinder seal, with its greater surface area
and more practical application, remained in use into the 1st millennium
BC. Because of the continuous changes in the style of the seal designs,
cylinder seals are among the most valuable of
chronological indicators for archaeologists.
In general, the prehistory of Mesopotamia can only be
described by listing and comparing human achievements, not by recounting
the interaction of individuals or peoples. There is no basis for
reconstructing the movements and migrations of peoples unless one is
prepared to equate the spread of particular archaeological types with the
extent of a particular population, the change of types with a change of
population, or the appearance of new types with an immigration.
The only certain evidence for the movement of peoples beyond their own
territorial limits is provided at first by material finds that are not
indigenous. The discovery of obsidian and lapis
lazuli at sites in Mesopotamia or in its
neighboring lands is evidence for the existence of trade,
whether consisting of direct caravan trade or of a
succession of intermediate stages.
Just as no ethnic identity is recognizable, so nothing
is known of the social organization of
prehistoric settlements. It is not possible to deduce anything of
the "government" in a village nor of any
supraregional connections that may have existed under the domination of
one centre. Constructions that could only have been accomplished by the
organization of workers in large numbers are first found in Uruk
Levels VI to IV: the dimensions of these
buildings suggest that they were intended for gatherings of hundreds of
people. As for artificial irrigation, which was
indispensable for agriculture in south
Mesopotamia, the earliest form was probably not the
irrigation canal. It is assumed that at first floodwater was
dammed up to collect in basins, near which the fields
were located. Canals, which led the water farther from
the river, would have become necessary when the land in the vicinity of
the river could no longer supply the needs of the population.
Mesopotamian protohistory
Attempts have been made by philologists to reach
conclusions about the origin of the flowering of civilization in southern
Mesopotamia by the analysis of Sumerian
words. It has been thought possible to isolate an earlier,
non-Sumerian substratum from the Sumerian
vocabulary by assigning certain words on the basis of their endings to
either a Neolithic or a Chalcolithic
language stratum. These attempts are based on the phonetic character of
Sumerian at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC, which
is at least 1,000 years later than the invention of writing.
Quite apart, therefore, from the fact that the structure of
Sumerian words themselves is far from adequately investigated,
the enormous gap in time casts grave doubt on the criteria used to
distinguish between Sumerian and "pre-Sumerian"
vocabulary.
The earliest peoples of Mesopotamia who can be
identified from inscribed monuments and written tradition--[people in
the sense of speakers of a common language]--are, apart from the
Sumerians, Semitic peoples (Akkadians
or pre-Akkadians) and Subarians
(identical with, or near relatives of, the Hurrians, who
appear in northern Mesopotamia around the end of the 3rd
millennium BC). Their presence is known, but no definite statements about
their past or possible routes of immigration are possible.
At the turn of the 4th to 3rd millennium BC, the long span of
prehistory is over, and the threshold of the historical
era is gained, captured by the existence of writing.
Names, speech, and actions are fixed in a system that is composed of signs
representing complete words or syllables. The signs may consist of
realistic pictures, abbreviated representations, and perhaps symbols
selected at random. Since clay is not well suited to the drawing of curved
lines, a tendency to use straight lines rapidly gained ground. When the
writer pressed the reed in harder at the beginning of a stroke, it made a
triangular "head," and thus "wedges" were impressed into the clay.
It is the Sumerians who are usually given the credit
forr the invention of this, the first system of writing in the Middle
East. As far as they can be assigned to any language, the inscribed
documents from before the dynasty of Akkad (c. 2334-c.
2154 BC) are almost exclusively in Sumerian. Moreover,
the extension of the writing system to include the creation of
syllabograms by the use of the sound of a logogram (sign
representing a word), such as gi, "a reed stem," used to
render the verb gi, "to return," can only be explained in
terms of the Sumerian language. It is most probable,
however, that Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC, just
as in later times, was composed of many races. This makes
it likely that, apart from the Sumerians, the interests
and even initiatives of other language groups may have played their part
in the formation of the writing system.
Many scholars believe that certain clay objects or tokens that are
found in prehistoric strata may have been used for some
kind of primitive accounting. These tokens, some of which
are incised and which have various forms, may thus be three-dimensional
predecessors of writing.
Sumerian is an agglutinative language:
prefixes and suffixes, which express various
grammatical functions and relationships, are attached to a noun
or verb root in a "chain." Attempts to
identify Sumerian more closely by comparative methods
have as yet been unsuccessful and will very probably remain so, as
languages of a comparable type are known only from AD 500 (Georgian)
or 1000 (Basque)--that is, 3,000 years later. Over so
long a time, the rate of change in a language, particularly one that is
not fixed in a written norm, is so great that one can no longer determine
whether apparent similarity between words goes back to an original
relationship or is merely fortuitous. Consequently, it is impossible to
obtain any more accurate information as to the language group to which
Sumerian may once have belonged.
The most important development in the course of the 4th millennium BC
was the birth of the city. There were precursors, such as
the unwalled prepottery settlement at Jericho of about
7000 BC, but the beginning of cities with a more permanent character came
only later. There is no generally accepted definition of a city. In this
context, it means a settlement that serves as a centre for smaller
settlements, one that possesses one or more shrines of one or more major
deities, has extensive granaries, and, finally, displays an advanced stage
of specialization in the crafts.
The earliest cities of southern Mesopotamia, as far as
their names are known, are Eridu, Uruk,
Bad-tibira, Nippur, and Kish
(35 miles south-southeast of Baghdad). The surveys of the
American archaeologist Robert McCormick Adams and the
German archaeologist Hans Nissen have shown how the
relative size and number of the settlements gradually shifted: the number
of small or very small settlements was reduced overall, whereas the number
of larger places grew. The clearest sign of urbanization
can be seen at Uruk, with the almost explosive increase
in the size of the buildings. Uruk Levels VI
to IV had rectangular buildings covering areas as large
as 275 by 175 feet. These buildings are described as temples,
since the ground plans are comparable to those of later buildings whose
sacred character is beyond doubt, but other functions, such as assembly
halls for noncultic purposes, cannot be excluded.
The major accomplishments of the period Uruk VI to
IV, apart from the first inscribed tablets (Level IV B),
are masterpieces of sculpture and of seal engraving and also of the form
of wall decoration known as cone mosaics. Together
with the everyday pottery of gray or red burnished ware, there is a very
coarse type known as the beveled-rim bowl. These are vessels of standard
size whose shape served as the original for the sign sila, meaning "litre."
It is not too rash to deduce from the mass production of such standard
vessels that they served for the issue of rations. This would have been
the earliest instance of a system that remained typical
of the southern Mesopotamian city for centuries: the
maintenance of part of the population by allocations of food from
the state.
Historians usually date the beginning of history, as
opposed to prehistory and protohistory,
from the first appearance of usable written sources. If
this is taken to be the transition from the 4th to the 3rd millennium BC,
it must be remembered that this applies only to part of
Mesopotamia: the south, the
Diyala region, Susiana (with a later
script of its own invented locally), and the district of the
middle Euphrates, as well as Iran.
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