Sumerians were the first people to write. Using a sharp three-cornered stylus, they wrote on clay-small wedge-shapes called cuneiform. With writing, Sumerians turned the corner from prehistory to history! After at least two million years of humans telling stories, the Sumerians introduced literacy. Most civilizations passed down their heritage through orally recited traditions-stories were passed from one generation to another by word of mouth. The Sumerians were the first to write down their oral traditions. To make the historical record easier, the Sumerians invented calendars with exact dates of events and contracts often corroborated by astronomy. Since Sumerian farmers invented irrigation and created a surplus, other Sumerians could choose to specialize in law, education, architecture, engineering, marketing, and politics-all of which were accompanied by written records. Using the writings of the Sumerians and modern archaeology, this book will trace the story of the Sumerians, the world's first writers.

First Writers—The Sumerians

They Wrote On ClayBy Gary Arthur Thomson

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Gary Arthur Thomson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-5984-3

Contents

Sumer Preface..................................................ixSumer Chronology...............................................xiSumer Map......................................................xiiiChapter 1. Writing Begins at Sumer.............................1Chapter 2. Writing on Bisitun Rock.............................7Chapter 3. First Farmers of Jarmo..............................13Chapter 4. Sumerians Settle The Floodplain.....................19Chapter 5. Eridu...............................................27Chapter 6. Ubaid...............................................33Chapter 7. Nippur..............................................39Chapter 8. Uruk................................................49Chapter 9. Ur..................................................59Chapter 10. Lagash.............................................67Chapter 11. Umma...............................................77Chapter 12. Shuruppak..........................................85Chapter 13. Dilmun.............................................89Chapter 14. Eshnunna...........................................93Sumerian Key Words.............................................101Cuneiform Lexicon..............................................121Bibliography...................................................131Index..........................................................149

Chapter One

Writing Begins at Sumer

Food-Gatherer Storytellers

For approximately 100,000 years, human clans roamed about gathering nuts, and berries to survive! They spent most of their time in search of food. These food-gatherers required 10 square kilometers to feed one person! Standing upright, they walked and ran. They ran fast and far in pursuit of small game. Around the evening campfire, storytellers entertained them. Their oral traditions were the most nuanced stories ever spoken and heard. We know this from the increased complexity of language as one moves back from English to Greek and Latin to Indo-European word roots. They were spellbound by the grammar of the aoristic present—a storyteller's art of moving from the past and making it become present to his listeners.

First Farmers

Scarcely 10,000 years ago, humans invented agriculture. The change was incredible! First farmers could feed 10 persons from one square kilometer. The archaeologist, Colin Renfrew, calls it an amazing ratio reversal—an agricultural revolution!

Sumerian Farming & Irrigation

5000 years ago, the Sumerians took further giant steps for humankind. Innovative Sumerian farmers ventured from their foothills gardens down onto the bottomlands of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. In spite of floods and heat, Sumerian farmers tenaciously tilled the rich floodplain. They noticed that lush grasses grew in the riverbeds where water lingered after the flood. The creative farmers planted seeds in the moist soil. Their horticultural experiments were eventually rewarded. One early farming technique was to hoe up a little terpen of soil in the midst of the remaining waters. The wading farmers would plant seeds in the drier soil on the terpen; this was an early prototype for French "raised bed" gardens. Then, another inventive miracle occurred; these Sumerian farmers got the bright idea of diverting river water around their raised seedbeds. The flat bottomland between the Tigris and Euphrates was spaded into a network of water channels around the seedbeds. There were major channels; there were middle-size channels; there were small field ditches. These practical horticulturalists were inventing irrigation. They were irrigating "the land between the rivers" with an intricate matrix of interconnecting ditches and watergates. Soon there was an agricultural surplus!

Sumerians Invent Writing

About the same time the Sumerians were inventing writing. The first writing was for practical purposes. The Sumerians wrote the first laws to regulate the use of watergates. They inscribed these irrigation regulations on clay tablets with a three-cornered stylus.

Once the process of flood control and irrigation was begun, the agricultural surplus meant that some people did not have to be farmers any more. Sumerian society was freed to move on to other forms of human cultural development. From the impetus of the agricultural network, the cooperative Sumerian cultural spirit grew like a mushroom. There were spinoffs of social capital at every juncture.

Cuneiform writing was initially invented to count livestock and grain, to record regulations and laws. Soon a judiciary was created to settle disputes. Marketing was invented to trade products. Schools were organized to teach scribes, judges, farmers, musicians, builders, managers and priests.

Goddesses and Gods, mythic stories and rituals patterned the cycles of the Sumerian social network. For 35,000 years, Paleolithic cave artists represented the Mother Goddess in paintings, sculpture, and reliefs in her mystical pregnant solitude. Now, Sumerian writers record the words of the previously silent Mother Goddess!

In the desert west of the Euphrates lived the Amurru. These Amorite desert nomads carried on tribal warfare. They invaded each other's camps stealing livestock. When these nomads came to the edge of the desert at the Euphrates, they looked incredulously at what was going on in the valley. Sometimes they attacked the Sumerian settlers. But more often, they marveled at Sumerian work in progress. The Sumerians worked like bees. Whether hoeing their fields or constructing their buildings, the Sumerians were workaholics! From the point of view of the desert tribesmen, the Sumerians had a compulsive and unrelenting need to work. They looked on in wonder at the productivity of the Sumerian economy. Cooperative human work and thought was a new thing.

A few centuries later some Amurru (Semites) decided to follow Sumerian patterns. Akkadians, Canaanites, Babylonians and Assyrians imitated the Sumerian model. They learned Sumerian agricultural technology. They traded in the Sumerian brokered market economy. They copied their monumental temple architecture and their planned urban housing. They emulated Sumerian aesthetic arts. They participated in Sumerian feasts and assimilated into the cycles of the Sumerian calendar. The Amurru enjoyed the convivial Sumerian love of good company.

Indeed, the totality of Sumerian social investment spread over all the Ancient Near East and extended to become the cultural base of Western civilization. The first Europeans to write were the Hittites who used the Sumerian cuneiform system to record their Indo-European language. Those who cite only Greece and Rome are ignorant of the genesis of civilization in ancient Iraq. Linguistics and archaeology of the twentieth century have enabled us to understand how the agricultural revolution in ancient Sumer became an urban revolution of human cooperation.

The fact that the Sumerians invented writing means that recorded "history begins at Sumer." Through what they wrote about themselves, we can actually know what the Sumerians were thinking when they were inventing their civilization between the rivers.

Chapter Two

Writing on Bisitun Rock

Archaeologists usually uncover buried civilizations. Under an unusual mound, archaeologists find a walled citadel. Later, philologists connect the dots of inscriptions to ancient nations, languages, and cultural forms. The reverse was true for Sumer. Philologists discovered the Sumerian language, named it, and established the existence of the Sumerians themselves before a stone was turned.

In the folded mountains of the Zagros Range in central Iran, broad vertical movements have elevated once-horizontal, sedimentary rock high and jagged into the sky. The geological activity known as geosyncline pressed the Iranian plateau against the Arabian massif. This collision thrust the Zagros Mountains upward in saw-tooth formations. The Bisutun Rock is one of the most imposing of the jagged mountains jutting up—majestic and awe-inspiring. In the sixth century before the Christian era, Darius the Great commissioned a sculptor to carve a bas-relief on a precipitous ledge high on the side of the Bisutun Rock. Beneath the carvings that celebrate the triumph of the Great King of Kings, a trilingual text is immortally inscribed.

In 1835 Sir Henry Rawlinson, a British military attaché in Persia, scaled the Bisutun Rock. He copied the text while perched on a homemade Persian ladder propped vertically against the face of the cliff. Below the twelve-inch-wide ledge was a sheer drop of 300 feet. He wrote: "One steadies the body against the rock with the left arm, while the left hand holds the notebook and the right hand is employed with the pencil." Corroborating the work of George Grotefend of Germany, Edward Hinck of Dublin, and Jules Oppert of France, Rawlinson published his decipherment of the trilingual Bisutun text between 1846 and 1851.

The decipherment of cuneiform went something like this. The later Persian characters were simpler than the other two cuneiform texts of the trilingual inscription. They bore a vague resemblance to modern Persian. The repeated names of the Achaemenid kings—Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes—were familiar in the history written by Herodotus. Once Rawlinson discovered the meaning of the Old Persian, he could attack the other two more complex cuneiform languages by comparing them. One was possibly Elamite. The other seemed Babylonian, relating to the Semitic family.

Cuneiform symbols are syllables—syllabic sounds. Each sign represents a phonetic sound, a speech sound. Each sound-sign is not subdivided into alphabetic letters. Cuneiform is in many ways simpler than our complicated inflected alphabetic systems of writing. Cuneiform was used for about 3500 years, considerably longer than the alphabet. Today educators suggest a "new" phonetic language to replace the alphabet! "The Phonetic Ideal is a language in which every spoken sound is represented by one letter and only one." The "new" system also projects a simpler syntax forming sentences along more natural patterns of verbal behavior. The cuneiform writing system was invented sometime after the middle of the fourth millennium BCE when language patterns were perhaps closer to innate usage.

Cuneiform was not Semitic in origin. It was not alphabetic. It was not sinistrorsum—moving from right to left across the page. It originated possibly with the Finnish-Hungarian-Ugric-Turanian-Mongol family of languages of central Europe. But this too is very debatable. Let it suffice to say, "Sumerian is a non-Semitic, non-Indo-European language of an agglutinative type."

"Sumerian" is the correct name of the "Babylonian-type" cuneiform discovered by Rawlinson. The kings of Mesopotamia, following their principal title of address, added the title "King of Sumer and Akkad." For a long time Semitically-inclined scholars preferred "Akkad" as the correct name because it was mentioned in the Bible. But "Sumer" was eventually given its proper earlier place by philologists. Strong support for this contention soon came from the French archaeologist, Ernest de Sarzec, digging at Telloh (ancient Lagash) between 1877 and 1900.

Soon archaeologists took up the scent of the chase. After a number of inglorious beginnings by treasure-hunters, the novice science of archaeology began calculated excavations. Known Assyrian cities like Khorsabad, Nineveh and Ashur were initially uncovered in Mesopotamia. The unknown civilization of Sumer began to come to light in its great magnitude when Ernest de Sarzec discovered Lagash in 1877. Generally speaking, the French continued the excavations at Lagash from 1877 until 1933 under the leadership of such men as Henri de Genouillac and Andre Parrot. American scholars worked at Nippur in the decades between 1890 and 1900, and 1948 and 1958. The British dug at Ur under the outstanding leadership of Sir Leonard Woolley from 1922 to 1934. The years between the two World Wars were termed the "Golden Age" of Mesopotamian archaeology.

Sumerian writing began as pictographs—little pictures inscribed on wet clay tablets. Very soon these pictographs evolved into archetypal symbols representing something with sound and meaning. These writing forms expressed syllabic sounds with particular meanings. Single and multi-syllable written words were put into sentences with syntax to express the verbal and oral traditions of storytellers that went back thousands of years. Then the technology of the stylus in the deft hands of a skilled scribe inscribed stylized wedge-shaped characters known as cuneiform.

The Sumerians used cuneiform to write their stories. Then the Semitic Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Canaanites used the sound signs to write down their spoken languages. Indo-European Kassites, Hittites, and Persians picked up on the cuneiform writing system for their oral languages. The Hittites became the first historical Europeans because they were first to write about themselves.

From the archaeological excavations at Uruk, we find the Sumerian pictograph of an ox. This pictograph evolved into the Sumerian cuneiform sign meaning "ox."

Cuneiform, which means "wedge-shape", can be seen here. The cuneiform character has been drawn with a stylus cutting into the moist clay of a tablet, the writing surface used in the second millennium BCE in Mesopotamia.

This cuneiform sign represented a sound. The cuneiform sign pictured here of an ox-head laid on its side represented the sound "gu." Scholars have traced these sounds back from modern Near Eastern languages such as Persian, back through earlier signs such as Old Persian, back to Akkadian and Sumerian beginnings.

Today we are accustomed to the alphabet as our writing system. We use "letters" such as A, B, and C to create "syllables" which are "sounds." If we can remove the letters and think in terms of sounds alone, then we are thinking in terms of phonetic whole-syllable signs such as were used in Sumerian cuneiform writing.

To study Sumerian cuneiform texts for historical, literary or mythological reasons, it is necessary to transliterate the cuneiform signs into alphabetic syllables. To transliterate ordinarily means to change letters into corresponding letters of another alphabet. It is a matter of changing signs representing sounds into corresponding sound-equivalents in alphabetic syllables.

Enkidu—A Hunter-Gatherer

Enkidu was born in the open country; he ate grass with the gazelles; he drank with the animals at the watering-hole; together, they raced and played at the oasis. This wild man, the woman saw— this savage man from the depths of the steppe.

Chapter Three

First Farmers of Jarmo

The first farmers of the Ancient Near East settled in the foothills overlooking the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Jarmo in the piedmont of the Zagros Mountains was one of the first agricultural sites to be archaeologically excavated. Jarmo was a small village of 150 inhabitants. An interdisciplinary team from the University of Chicago led by Robert Braidwood investigated the botany, the geology, the climate, the pottery and the tools discovered here.

After five million years of hunter-gatherers running with the animals and drinking beside them at streams, settled life itself advanced a risky proposition—a daring undertaking of uncertain outcome. After five million years, the new demography of subsistence required that every person in the village participate in hoeing and weeding the plants. The few corralled animals had to be carefully watched. In the early agricultural revolution, humans became interdependent with the plants and animals. This was quite different from seasonally wandering to find berries and nuts; then searching out hunting sites to track animal migrations. Colin Renfrew suggests that there was a dramatic ratio reversal. The wandering hunter-gatherers combed 10 square kilometers to feed one person. Having succeeded in settling down in the foothills, the first farmers could feed 10 persons from one square kilometer. It was truly an agricultural revolution!

The evidence shows domesticated plants and animals. Carbonized emmer wheat and barley kernels came to light. Bones of dog, goat and sheep were found. Farmers of Jarmo relied on the natural rainfall to hydrate their small gardens. In this piedmont region, plants lacked moisture. After a few years of crops, the soil became depleted of nutrients. These earliest farmers were none the wiser. They had been successful in their agricultural revolution!

The Prehistoric Facts

The prehistoric facts are that the inhabitants of Jarmo did not write; therefore they left no history. We deduce strictly from careful archaeology. The University of Chicago team knew what they were doing. Jarmo has been a model type-site for the Agricultural Revolution. But the facts are that we do not know what they said.

One can carry a torch into the caves of the Pyrenees on the border of France and Spain. One can observe the Paleolithic paintings on the walls of prehistoric animals and prehistoric hunting. The deep chamber at Niau in the Pyrenees is some five kilometers beneath the earth. Were it not for one's torch it is pitch-black darkness. Yet a circle of seats under the 60-foot high dome suggests that people gathered here. The acoustics are wonderful and suggest the congregation of hunter-gatherers might have raised their voices in song. But we do not know what they said or sang.

(Continues...)

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