Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (18 page)

Using myth and belief, the rulers of Mesopotamia—and the priestly classes allied with them—created and cemented their political and social power. The importance of this leap in human history can’t be overstated. It was a development as significant as the invention of the wheel or writing.

Like the “Where’s Waldo?” of the ancient world, the Greek historian Herodotus also popped up in Babylon, which was the great capital city of several Mesopotamian empires as well as the Persian empire of King Cyrus (d. 530 BCE). His description of the inner sanctum of a temple, with its rooms devoted to gods, is well supported by archaeological investigations. The god whom Herodotus referred to as “Bel” (which means “Lord”) was actually Babylon’s central deity, Marduk, and the title of “Bel” was transformed into “Baal” in the myths that would figure significantly in the history of the Bible.

An idol devoted to Bel is also featured in the story “Bel and the Dragon,” a brief addition to the biblical Book of Daniel (of lion’s den fame). Set in Babylon during the time of Cyrus, the story satirizes the priests who ate the food set out before the idol of Bel. When Daniel tells Cyrus of this deception, the Persian king has the priests killed.
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What’s so special about the “cradle of civilization”?

Okay. You’re back in elementary school and your teacher pulls down one of those window-shade maps that tend to snap right back up. The teacher is already in trouble, since this seems more like slapstick comedy than school. Then you open your first World Civilizations textbook to a list of “key words” and see “Fertile Crescent,” and “Cradle of Civilization,” “Hammurabi’s Code,” “Nebuchadrezzar’s Hanging Gardens,” and “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.” The phrases are almost clichés, but they contain more than a nugget of truth, capturing the extraordinary accomplishments of the people and empires of Mesopotamia, where much of civilization began.

So what is so special about this part of the world? Why did these people in this rather dry, hot, and unappealing part of the world produce so many of civilization’s “firsts”? Why here?

As any real estate broker will tell you, it comes down to three things—location, location, location.

Ancient Mesopotamia spanned a geographic area that now includes most of modern Iraq, eastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey. It extended from the marshy lowlands on the Persian Gulf in the south to the highlands of the Taurus Mountains (bordering modern Turkey) in the north, and from the Zagros Mountains (in modern Iran) in the east to the Syrian desert in the west.

The oldest known communities in ancient Mesopotamia were villages established in the Zagros foothills more than nine thousand years ago. These early sites, such as Jarmo in northern Iraq, were among the world’s oldest known human settlements, along with the biblical city of Jericho, near the Dead Sea, Tell Hamoukar in modern Syria on the fringes of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, and Catalhoyuk (also called Catal Huyuk, and pronounced
cha-tahl-hu-yook
) in modern Turkey. With ample water supplies in otherwise dry areas, it was here that people first began to cultivate wheat and barley, domesticate animals, build crude mud houses, and keep herds of goats, sheep, and pigs.

Around 6000 BCE, some of these early farmers moved south, to the region between the future site of Babylon and the Persian Gulf. Drawn to the rivers, they settled in what became the heart of ancient Mesopotamia, in the southern end of the flat plain between the Tigris and Euphrates, roughly the area between modern Baghdad and Basra, which became all too familiar to a world that watched the war in Iraq unfold during the spring of 2003. Like the Nile, the rivers of Mesopotamia also flood, and farmers began to dig irrigation canals that would water their otherwise dry lands. This intensive agricultural undertaking demanded cooperation—and with it, the beginnings of a social order.

As the old story from Aesop put it, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” The intensive communal agriculture allowed people to successfully farm, provided a constant source of food that encouraged larger settlements, and led to expanding populations. Without the pressure of needing to hunt and gather food, communities set down permanent roots and grew. Over time, their stability allowed them to produce textiles, pottery, and other inventions that marked the beginnings of civilization. The first wheel, for instance, was not used by Fred Flintstone in the Stone Age, as generations of cartoon lovers may believe, but more likely by anonymous Mesopotamians around 6500 BCE.

As their agricultural improvements succeeded, populations flourished, and the division of labor became more complex. A social hierarchy developed, in which a ruling class emerged that was responsible for organizing production and trade. The region was also lacking in many basic natural resources, such as wood, stone, and metal ores. Again, necessity led to the invention of dried mud bricks for construction. This shortfall in raw materials also made trading for other resources more important, and trade routes gradually grew along the course of the rivers. Eventually, control of key river-crossings became a source of economic, military, and political power.

How did a swamp inspire Mesopotamia’s myths?

Around 5000 BCE, settlements sprang up in a place called Eridu on the Euphrates River, a southern site near the marshes that mark the transition from land to sea. The people here, who are considered the first city-dwellers, also built some of the first known religious shrines, and ruins of a small temple with an offering table and a niche for statues have been found here. This marshy, or swampy, area, where freshwater mingled with salt water, would inspire the core of the Mesopotamian Creation myths, in which the freshwater and salt water were actually imagined to be deities who created the world. Water, especially freshwater, was the key to existence in this otherwise arid, hot plain. Not surprisingly, then, in some of the world’s earliest Creation stories and myths, the earth, the gods, life, and humanity emerged from these primordial Mesopotamian waters.
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Sometime before 3500 BCE, a new group moved into the region and settled on the banks of the Euphrates. Although it is not known where these people originated—most historians surmise that they came from the east—the area they settled became known as
Sumer
, and the civilization they built is called Sumerian. The Sumerians began to build cities that gradually became city-states, including Ur (presumed home of the biblical Abraham), Uruk (the biblical Erech), Kish, and Nippur. The preciousness of water led to “water-wars” between these city-states until the more powerful ones gradually swallowed the smaller ones. Over the next fifteen hundred years, the Sumerians gradually harnessed animals to plows, drained marshlands, and irrigated the desert to extend areas of cultivation. Their increased agricultural efficiency eventually led to the first “leisure class,” allowing for the development of commerce, and with it merchants, traders, artisans, and priests, to make sure that the gods approved of everything that was going on. By 3000 BCE, the first walled cities were built in Mesopotamia, always including temple complexes within the city walls.

Although political power in these cities was initially held by free citizens and a governor, as the city-states grew and vied for power, the Sumerians also may have developed one of the world’s first systems of monarchy, headed by a priest-king. Sumer’s first known king—in Sumerian, the word was
lugal
and meant “big man”—was Etana of Kish (c. 3000 BCE), described in ancient writings as “the man who stabilized all the lands.” But in one of these Sumerian cities, long before the Greeks coined the word “democracy,” the “first bicameral congress” met in 3000 BCE. Prominent Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer points out that in the city of Uruk, one council made up of elders and another of arms-bearing men both met to decide whether or not to go to war with the neighboring city of Kish. This “congress” voted for war and the king approved.

The Sumerians are also credited with inventing a form of bureaucracy around the same time that the Egyptians did. Devised to manage the land, Sumer’s bureaucracy consisted of a priesthood that was responsible for surveying and distributing property and collecting taxes. To make sure that everything worked, the Sumerians also invented every bureaucrat’s best friend—records. That required the invention of writing, and the Sumerians are also credited with introducing the world’s first system of writing around 3200 BCE, word-pictures that developed into wedge-shaped characters known as cuneiform, which comes from the Latin word
cuneus
, meaning “wedge.” Cuneiform characters consisted of small indentations made with a wedge-shaped tool called a stylus, impressed in wet clay. The Sumerians used about six hundred characters, which ranged from a single wedge to complicated signs consisting of thirty or more wedges. The clay hardened, and the cuneiform tablets became the first known “official records” in history.

There is even a Sumerian legend to explain this invention. A messenger of a king of the city of Uruk arrived at the court of another king, but was so winded from his journey that he was unable to deliver his message. The clever king wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again, so when he needed to send another message, he patted some clay and set down the words of his next messages on a tablet. The king of Uruk had invented writing. How the person at the other end could read this message was not explained in the legend.

There is still disagreement in the scholarly world as to why writing developed in Sumer, and whether it happened in other places, such as Egypt or China, either earlier or at the same time. One leading theory holds that Sumerian writing grew out of accounting, as molded clay “tokens” were used to represent quantities of different trade goods, such as oil, grain, or livestock. Early evidence does suggest that Sumerian cuneiform was used almost exclusively for these accounts for its first five hundred years. But eventually, writing evolved to express the spoken word, and among its earliest uses in Sumer was to record the ingredients of beer. There is no evidence that the ancient symbol for beer was two women in bikinis wrestling in mud.

How do we know what the Mesopotamians believed?

Here’s a sobering thought. Long after most of the books we produce today are gone, the writings of these ancient Mesopotamians will still be around. Why? Because their literature, business accounts, and other writings were literally “written in stone,” the hardened clay tablets that have been found in the tens of thousands in a variety of sites in what once was Mesopotamia.

Like their Egyptian neighbors, the Mesopotamians created an enormous trove of art, architecture, and, most significant, written records that have survived the ages and thousands of years of conquest, right down to modern times. The widespread chaos and subsequent looting of Baghdad’s museums and ancient archaeological sites in the days following Saddam Hussein’s ouster in 2003 provided a vivid reminder of the area’s extraordinary history. Some of the world’s oldest artworks, including a five-thousand-year-old sculpture of a woman’s face called the
Sumerian Mona Lisa
, were stripped away by looters, along with thousands of antiquities. Fortunately, many of the country’s most valuable pieces had been stored out of harm’s way in the run-up to the war, and thousands of other stolen items have since been returned. But there are still many missing relics, and the art world was put on high alert for these looted artworks, many of which may likely end up in a secretive and lucrative black market.

In spite of those losses, and with hopes that Iraq will eventually be reopened to a new era of scholarly archaeology, much is already known about Mesopotamia’s past. The surprising secrets of Mesopotamia’s history were first opened in the mid-nineteenth century, when the first great cache of cuneiform tablets was unearthed in Nineveh. An ancient city located near the modern city of Mosul in northern Iraq, Nineveh was once the capital of the Assyrian Empire. Discovered in the ruins of the library of a king named Ashurbanipal were more than 24,000 clay tablets that included business documents, personal letters, and some of the world’s oldest known literature, including the epic of
Gilgamesh
. This treasure trove gave the world its first look at the myths and history of Sumer. Since then, many more thousands of tablets have been found in the sites of such ancient cities as Nippur, Ur, and Ebla (in modern Syria), giving archaeologists a comprehensive source of written materials from very early times in Mesopotamia, as well as their first hints of the astonishing connection of Sumer’s myths to the Bible.

When Sumer disappeared, where did its myths go?