The 12th Planet (6 page)

The ancient texts leave no doubt that the haute cuisine of ancient Mesopotamia developed in the temples and in the service of the gods. One text prescribed the offering to the gods of "loaves of barley bread ... loaves of emmer bread; a paste of honey and cream; dates, pastry ... beer, wine, milk ... cedar sap, cream." Roasted meat was offered with libations of "prime beer, wine, and milk." A specific cut of a bull was prepared according to a strict recipe, calling for "fine flour ... made to a dough in water, prime beer, and wine," and mixed with animal fats, "aromatic ingredients made from hearts of plants," nuts, malt, and spices. Instructions for "the daily sacrifice to the gods of the city of Uruk" called for the serving of five different beverages with the meals, and specified what "the millers in the kitchen" and "the chef working at the kneading trough" should do.

Our admiration for the Sumerian culinary art certainly grows as we come across poems that sing the praises of fine foods. Indeed, what can one say when one reads a millennias-old recipe for "coq au vin":

In the wine of drinking,

In the scented water,

In the oil of unction

This bird have I cooked,

and have eaten.

A thriving economy, a society with such extensive material enterprises could not have developed without an efficient system of transportation. The Sumerians used their two great rivers and the artificial network of canals for waterborne transportation of people, goods, and cattle. Some of the earliest depictions show what were undoubtedly the world's first boats.

We know from many early texts that the Sumerians also engaged in deep-water seafaring, using a variety of ships to reach faraway lands in search of metals, rare woods and stones, and other materials unobtainable in Sumer proper. An Akkadian dictionary of the Sumerian language was found to contain a section on shipping; listing 105 Sumerian terms for various ships by their size, destination, or purpose (for cargo, for passengers, or for the exclusive use of certain gods). Another 69 Sumerian terms connected with the manning and construction of ships were translated into the Akkadian. Only a long seafaring tradition could have produced such specialized vessels and technical terminology.

Fig. 16

Fig. 17

Fig. 18

For overland transportation, the wheel was first used in Sumer. Its invention and introduction into daily life made possible a variety of vehicles, from carts to chariots, and no doubt also granted Sumer the distinction of having been the first to employ "ox power" as well as "horse power" for locomotion. (Fig. 19)

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In 1956 Professor Samuel N. Kramer, one of the great Sumerologists of our time, reviewed the literary legacy found beneath the mounds of Sumer. The table of contents of
From the Tablets of Sumer
is a gem in itself, for each one of the twenty-five chapters described a Sumerian "first," including the first schools, the first bicameral congress, the first historian, the first pharmacopoeia, the first "farmer's almanac," the first cosmogony and cosmology, the first "Job," the first proverbs and sayings, the first literary debates, the first "Noah," the first library catalogue; and Man's first Heroic Age, his first law codes and social reforms, his first medicine, agriculture, and search for world peace and harmony.

This is no exaggeration.

The first schools were established in Sumer as a direct outgrowth of the invention and introduction of writing. The evidence (both archaeological, such as actual school buildings, and written, such as exercise tablets) indicates the existence of a formal system of education by the beginning of the third millennium
B.C.
There were literally thousands of scribes in Sumer, ranging from junior scribes to high scribes, royal scribes, temple scribes, and scribes who assumed high state office. Some acted as teachers at the schools, and we can still read their essays on the schools, their aims and goals, their curriculum and teaching methods.

Fig.19

The schools taught not only language and writing but also the sciences of the day—botany, zoology, geography, mathematics, and theology. Literary works of the past were studied and copied, and new ones were composed.

The schools were headed by the
ummia
("expert professor"), and the faculty invariably included not only a "man in charge of drawing" and a "man in charge of Sumerian," but also a "man in charge of the whip." Apparently, discipline was strict; one school alumnus described on a clay tablet how he had been flogged for missing school, for insufficient neatness, for loitering, for not keeping silent, for misbehaving, and even for not having neat handwriting.

An epic poem dealing with the history of Erech concerns itself with the rivalry between Erech and the city-state of Kish. The epic text relates how the envoys of Kish proceeded to Erech, offering a peaceful settlement of their dispute. But the ruler of Erech at the time, Gilgamesh, preferred to fight rather than negotiate. What is interesting is that he had to put the matter to a vote in the Assembly of the Elders, the local "Senate":

The lord Gilgamesh,

Before the elders of his city put the matter,

Seeks out the decision:

"Let us not submit to the house of Kish,

let us smite it with weapons."

The Assembly of the Elders was, however, for negotiations. Undaunted, Gilgamesh took the matter to the younger people, the Assembly of the Fighting Men, who voted for war. The significance of the tale lies in its disclosure that a Sumerian ruler had to submit the question of war or peace to the first bicameral congress, some 5,000 years ago.

The title of First Historian was bestowed by Kramer on Entemena, king of Lagash, who recorded on clay cylinders his war with neighboring Umma. While other texts were literary works or epic poems whose themes were historical events, the inscriptions by Entemena were straight prose, written solely as a factual record of history.

Because the inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia were deciphered well before the Sumerian records, it was long believed that the first code of laws was compiled and decreed by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, circa 1900
B.C.
But as Sumer's civilization was uncovered, it became clear that the "firsts" for a system of laws, for concepts of social order, and for the fair administration of justice belonged to Sumer.

Well before Hammurabi, a Sumerian ruler of the city-state of Eshnunna (northeast of Babylon) encoded laws that set maximum prices for foodstuffs and for the rental of wagons and boats so that the poor could not be oppressed. There were also laws dealing with offenses against person and property, and regulations pertaining to family matters and to master-servant relations.

Even earlier, a code was promulgated by Lipit-Ishtar, a ruler of Isin. The thirty-eight laws that remain legible on the partly preserved tablet (a copy of an original that was engraved on a stone stela) deal with real estate, slaves and servants, marriage and inheritance, the hiring of boats, the rental of oxen, and defaults on taxes. As was done by Hammurabi after him, Lipit-Ishtar explained in the prologue to his code that he acted on the instructions of "the great gods," who had ordered him "to bring well-being to the Sumerians and the Akkadians."

Yet even Lipit-Ishtar was not the first Sumerian law encoder. Fragments of clay tablets that have been found contain copies of laws encoded by Umammu, a ruler of Ur circa 2350
B.C.
—more than half a millennium before Hammurabi. The laws, enacted on the authority of the god Nannar, were aimed at stopping and punishing "the grabbers of the citizens' oxen, sheep, and donkeys" so that "the orphan shall not fall prey to the wealthy, the widow shall not fall prey to the powerful, the man of one shekel shall not fall prey to a man of 60 shekels." Urnammu also decreed "honest and unchangeable weights and measurements."

But the Sumerian legal system, and the enforcement of justice, go back even farther in time.

By 2600
B.C.
so much must already have happened in Sumer that the
ensi
Urukagina found it necessary to institute reforms. A long inscription by him has been called by scholars a precious record of man's first social reform based on a sense of freedom, equality, and justice—a "French Revolution" imposed by a king 4,400 years before July 14, 1789.

The reform decree of Urukagina listed the evils of his time first, then the reforms. The evils consisted primarily of the unfair use by supervisors of their powers to take the best for themselves; the abuse of official status; the extortion of high prices by monopolistic groups.

All such injustices, and many more, were prohibited by the reform decree. An official could no longer set his own price "for a good donkey or a house." A "big man" could no longer coerce a common citizen. The rights of the blind, poor, widowed, and orphaned were restated. A divorced woman—nearly 5,000 years ago—was granted the protection of the law.