In Search of the First Civilizations Read online

  At the centre of the ancient city was the temple, as the mosque is today, and they were no doubt run in the same manner as now. In Nippur for example in 2000 BC, the Ur-Meme family administered the Inanna temple for generations. Just so, in Irbil today, the Al-Mulla family have run the main mosque for the last 600 years, producing distinguished poets, astronomers and scholars. In Baghdad the Gailani family have administered the greatest of the city’s shrines since the twelfth century, and in many ways it resembles the temples of old, with its philanthropic role in the community, its library, its great kitchen and hostels, and its wide landholdings across the Diyala plain. The ancient city then has its lineal descendant in the medieval – and even in some cases, the modern – Islamic city.

  But there is another way in which the Mesopotamian city resembles its modern counterpart: it was parasitical of the soil and the environment. The plain around Uruk was once big wheat country with grain yields as high as the Mid-West and Canada; today it is salt-encrusted and barren as far as the eye can see. The need for more land and for more intensive cultivation to feed an ever-growing population eventually devastated the landscape. We know now that civilization inevitably destroys the environment, but they discovered it here for the first time. The most telling proof of this is that there is virtually no continuity in land use between the great periods of Mesopotamian history, between the ancients, the Hellenistic and Sassanian, the Islamic and the modern. Improved irrigation and fertilization, better use of fallow periods, and especially the cutting of huge new dykes by the Sassanians and the Arabs all enabled some landscapes to regenerate and live on. But essentially each of these great epochs had to open up new areas for cultivation, leaving the old land, now exhausted, to return to desert.

  So it is a salutary experience today to walk the weathered gullies of ‘wide-wayed Uruk,’ littered with testimony to the long ascent of man, if such it is. Here were enormous temples as big as cathedrals, their façades decorated with blue glazed tiles, just as can be seen today on the mosques of Iraq. Still visible are the platforms of the vast shrines rebuilt in traditional Babylonian style in the third century BC under the Greek successors of Alexander the Great, when Uruk was still rich and populous, and perhaps still a major centre of pilgrimage. At that time the cities of Old Sumer still preserved their own civil customs and organization and were still built in the old way, still worshipping the old gods. As late as the Christian period there was some life left in the old place. In the south-east quarter of the city centre is a small temple to a local god Gareus, dedicated in November 110 AD by a guild of Greek-speaking locals from near Mosul: probably merchants who engaged in the old trade down the Gulf and beyond, to Bahrain and the Indus. On the back wall is the same fish-tailed sea goddess which can be seen in shrines in Gujerat and the Gulf of Cambay, where Iraqi merchants still trade today.

  With the ups and downs of any living organism, the city of Uruk and its institutions lasted through to about 300 AD. A small settlement outside the walls survived till the Arab conquest. Indeed, even in the eighth century the local Christian bishop still called himself ‘Bishop of Uruk and Kaskar.’ But by then it was dead, after a life of over five thousand years.

  THE MOTHER OF INVENTION

  Amid this vast rubbish tip of human history are clues to the genius of these first city builders. Everywhere are fragments of pottery: wheel-turned pottery, with a beautiful greenish colour and fine black geometric patterns. The wheel is found here in Sumer for the first time in history, along with so many of the great inventions we still live our lives by today. Here was the first astronomy, the first literature, the first law, the first school, the first map of the world. Here they first thought of dividing time and space in multiples of sixty, so that even now whenever we look at a watch we are still in their debt.

  The greatest of all Sumerian inventions however was writing. Writing is first found in the world in Uruk, maybe invented in this city by some unknown genius, not long before 3000 BC. Most of the writing found on Iraqi sites, more than ninety-five per cent of it in fact, is economic texts: facts and figures, bills, accounts, inventories, measures of dates or barley, parcels of land down to every rod, pole or perch. Contrast that with the earliest Sanskrit (religious texts) or the Chinese oracle bones (shamanistic divination) and you have the clearest possible indicator of the different character of these civilizations right from the outset. Here in Mesopotamia is the birth of economic man whose relations are bound by secular law: homo oeconomicus, the root idea of the modern west.

  Nevertheless, perhaps the most enduring legacy of Mesopotamian culture is its imaginative literature, and especially its myths. Iraqis have always been great story-tellers, going back long before the Thousand and One Nights to the world’s first literature in Sumerian, and to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh was almost certainly a real person; perhaps, as later legend said, the King of Uruk who built the walls around 2700 BC. With him would be associated the Sumerian tale of the Flood and the great ark, which many centuries later appeared in the Bible and is known today right across the world. Gilgamesh’s last adventure was his futile quest for everlasting life, accompanied by his ever faithful friend Enkidu, the ‘wild man’ alter ego of the ‘civilized’ city man. It is the model for all searches, from the Odyssey to the Holy Grail and Indiana Jones. His stories were copied, translated and told in the Near East right down to Greek times. Some motifs crept into the Homeric epics in the Aegean world in the eighth century BC. They survived in versions overlaid with Jewish and Hellenistic elements in the first centuries AD. Then they reappear with Muslim colouring in Islamic times in the Thousand and One Nights, the tales of Aladdin and Sindbad, where Buluqiya’s search for everlasting life and the Tree of Paradise is an unmistakable echo of Gilgamesh. In the eighth century AD his tale was still remembered in the old southern heartland in Kaskar, close to the now dead city whose walls he may have built; when the local Nestorian bishop in a religious handbook mentioned him among the kings who ruled after the Flood, ‘in whose days Abraham was born in Ur of the Chaldees.’ Doubtless the bishop heard the tale at his mother’s knee, for similar stories have survived even till now in Iraq.

  The story of Gilgamesh also brings us to one of the characteristic qualities of Mesopotamian civilization from the earliest times till today: its pessimism. For over three thousand years, from ancient times to the golden age of Islam, its literature, proverbs and religious texts all reveal the same sensibility, so different from the optimistic quality of Egyptian civilization, or the ethical confidence of classical China. It is there in the recension of Gilgamesh done by the Uruk master scribe Sin-leqiuninni in around 1300 BC, in the most famous lines of ancient Babylonian literature:

  Gilgamesh, what you seek you will never find. For when the Gods created Man they let death be his lot, eternal life they withheld. Let your every day be full of joy, love the child that holds your hand, let your wife delight in your embrace, for these alone are the concerns of humanity.

  THE FALL OF SUMER

  Given their collective dependence on the Euphrates system for irrigation, it was in the interests of all the city states of the south of Iraq to co-operate despite their differences. But internecine warfare is the constant theme of the first age of cities, the third millennium BC. In this there could hardly be a greater contrast with Egypt, which united early and generally stayed united. The rivalry between city states was often bitter, as in the long-running feud between Umma and Girsu over the control of their branch of the Euphrates (2500–2300 BC). The overlordship of the dynasty of Akkad (2300–2150 BC), dominating the north of the plain, was another time of conflict. The last heyday of an independent south took place between 2100 and 2000 BC under the leadership of the city of Ur. Founded by a general, Ur Nammu, the Third Dynasty of Ur harked back to an ancient and glorious Sumerian past. Great ziggurats were built at the old cult shrines of Sumer – Uruk, Eridu, Ur, Larsa and Nippur; their temples were beautified and embellished with treasures. Ur Nammu and his kinsm
en sponsored the copying of literature about the heroes of the Old Sumerian heartland, the Kings of Uruk, and especially Gilgamesh, with whom they claimed kinship. In his forty-eight years’ reign, Shulgi of Ur initiated massive and costly administrative reforms including the revival of an archaic custom of tribute by the nineteen cities of Sumer to the ‘national’ shrine at Nippur, where vast numbers of animals and supplies were brought each month to a central depot for sacrifice at the temples. That this enormous expenditure contributed to the dynasty’s economic troubles seems likely. The climate of the plain seems now to have been going through a long, dry spell; much agricultural land had gone out of use, and economic documents show administrators shifting from wheat to the more salt-resistant barley to combat salinization. Worse, the perennial raids on the plain from nomadic outsiders grew more and more threatening. Shulgi’s successor Shu-sin built and garrisoned a ‘Martu wall’ in the north-west to keep out one group of invaders from Syria. The roof finally fell in on his successor, Ibbi Sin. There is evidence that much land by now had been abandoned through salinization. The population could not be fed: prices hit the ceiling with a sixtyfold increase in grain. International trade, on which Sumer had always depended for its raw materials, broke down, and soon government communications started to fail. Panic-stricken messages survive between the king and his agents as his enemies closed in. Gloomy oracles prophesied the worst, and the worst duly arrived. It was the perennial problem of Iraqi history – how to hold the rich and populous plain, with no natural boundaries, against the many outside enemies covetous of its wealth: a drama still being played out in the early twenty-first century.

  The end of the Third Dynasty of Ur was one of the greatest events in the history of Sumer. Around 2000 BC the land was devastated by a coalition of its enemies, Elamites from what is now Iran, and their nomadic allies from the desert. All the main cities of Sumer were sacked, their temples destroyed, their treasures plundered, and their populations killed, enslaved or forced to flee. Finally Ur itself was wrecked and burned, and Ibbi Sin carried off to Elam as a prisoner. These terrible events left an indelible mark on the psyche of the culture. Several lamentations survive describing in graphic detail the destruction of Sumer and its cities:

  Ur is destroyed, bitter is its lament. The country’s blood now fills its holes like hot bronze in a mould. Bodies dissolve like fat in the sun. Our temple is destroyed, the gods have abandoned us, like migrating birds. Smoke lies on our city like a shroud.

  These laments were performed every year in temple festivals in the south right down to the Hellenistic Greek age; they were recited too whenever a temple was rebuilt after destruction in war or peace, as if forever to remind the people of the fragility of civilization. The lament itself was an ancient form in Sumerian culture and the city laments are only part of a huge number of compositions (called ersemma or balag) which survive from temple archives, confirming our impression of a uniquely pessimistic vision of history and human destiny: indeed, as we shall see, it is difficult not to associate this sensibility with the later culture of Shiism which arose in the same fertile soil of southern Iraq.

  FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD TO ISLAM

  The urban civilization of southern Iraq was restored after the destruction of 2000 BC, its cities and temples rebuilt. Indeed, through many destructions it proved uniquely long-lasting and durable. In the second and first millennia BC, Mesopotamia was ruled in turn by Babylonians, Kassites, Hittites, Assyrians, Nebuchadnezzar’s Neo-Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Parthians, and subsequently by Sassanian Persians in the period before the Arab conquest. Most of these dynasties were foreign, but the culture remained Mesopotamian, in custom, organization and in the language of the root population, whose Arabic today is descended from the Aramaic spoken across the Near East in early Christian times, which in its turn comes from the Semitic Akkadian already spoken throughout Babylonia by 2000 BC. (Sumerian by then it seems was already a dead language, though still used for recording literary and liturgical texts in Greek times). Right down to the third century BC the great temples in the south retained their own cults and organization, and were rebuilt in the ancient local tradition. But the world was changing fast. The Greek conquest of the Near East under Alexander opened up the region to new currents of thought. Iraq as always was a crossroads where East and West met, and the international culture of Hellenism inaugurated an era of tremendous speculation about culture, civilization and history, and about God. During the next centuries, the Fertile Crescent gave birth to new universal religions, all of which could draw inspiration from the diverse traditions and contacts stirred up by the Greek epoch and the mixing of Persian, Arab, Jewish and Greek religion and culture which it had brought about. By the fourth century AD Christianity and Manichaeism were both ambitious to be world religions. But as it turned out, the most successful crystallization of change in the Middle East was Islam. Like the others, Islam drew on Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian elements, but with its radical and democratic message, and its use of the Arabic language, it transformed the ancient cultures of the Near East.

  In the seventh century AD Arab armies bearing the new faith of Islam swept into Mesopotamia, overcoming the armies of the Sassanian Persian Empire which was now in decline. Like most invaders in history, they were a small minority. The majority of the population of Iraq adopted Islam during the next four hundred years, but they did not follow the Sunni tradition of their Arab conquerors. After the Arab conquest in the south of Iraq, old Sumer, Islam took on a distinctive local form which remained in touch with ancient roots: Shiism. The mass of the people of Iraq, the poor farmers of the south who were descendants of the Aramaic-speaking population of pre-Islamic Mesopotamia, never forsook their ancient forms of worship even though their faith now focused on the seventh-century martyrdoms of Hussayn and Ali, whom they believe to be the true inheritors of the Prophet’s spiritual authority. This ancient split between Sunni and Shia is still at the heart of the Islamic world today. In the sacred city of Kerbala, the Shiites carried the ancient Sumerian tradition of lamentation close to their hearts, as no other faith has done. And so it had been for thousands of years before Islam. Many of the customs of the Shia seem to hark back to an earlier Iraqi past: their forms of worship, purification rituals, marriage contract, the organization of the priesthood, and their burial customs. Shia lamentations, especially the female form, also offer close parallels with the ancient world. These remarkable traditions are perhaps a survival of the most deep-rooted Mesopotamian religious experience. Even the physical appearance of the great Shiite mosques of Hussayn and Abbas at Kerbala and Ali at Najaf recalls the buildings of old Sumer. Though reconstructed many times in Persian style by Iranian benefactors, the elaborate mosaics and geometrical designs on their façades still reproduce patterns like those which had adorned the shrines of Uruk, Ubaid and Eridu; ‘True temples,’ as the Sumerian hymns said, ‘shining like rainbows in the bright sun.’

  THE WORLD OF EARLY ISLAM

  In the first centuries of Muslim Arab rule, Iraq was very prosperous. Two fascinating snapshots of Mesopotamia survive from the tenth century, one by Ibn Serabh (c.900) the other in a Persian geography of 982. Both portray its fertility and its thriving urban life, ‘the abode of scholars and merchants … with running waters and flourishing countryside.’ One of the prosperous towns of that time was the old sacred city of Mesopotamia, Nippur. In the centuries after the Islamic conquest a mixed society arose here in a town as multicultural as any big city in the USA today, a far cry from the conventional view of Islam we hold in the West. In the maze of mudbrick streets there was a thriving Jewish community with its own scribal school. The Talmud, the greatest collection of Hebrew custom, was written in southern Iraqi towns like Nippur during the first millennium AD, in a time of dynamic interplay between Jewish and Islamic culture. In addition to the Friday mosque, there was a Nestorian Christian Church here with a bishop; Christians were still probably in the majority in the tenth century. There were Man
daeans and Manichaeans (their prophet Mani was born near Ctesiphon, raised in the marshes, and went on to found a world religion which spread from Iraq across Asia as far as China).

  But whatever community you belonged to, you still relied on the old Babylonian folklore of planets, stars and demons. Even today magical incantation bowls are turned up after heavy rain in the wadis of the western quarter of the old city of Nippur, inscribed in Hebrew, Syriac, Mandaic and in the Aramaic used by the followers of Mani. These give us an intriguing insight into the continuing world of old Babylonian magic in the years leading up to and after the Islamic conquest. Their function was quite simple. If you had a problem you went to see the sorcerer who lived in your quarter of the city and he would draw up a spell for you, inscribing the spell in a spiral inside the bowl. The spell might, for example, ask the demoness Lilith (an ancient Babylonian spirit) to ‘get out of our lives, leave my wife alone, leave my family alone, my sheep, my cattle, my fields, depart from us.’The sorcerer would also paint a picture of the demon in the centre of the bowl. Some of them were bug-like creatures, with their feet shackled to keep them down, others were depicted with ziggurats as heads, as if the ruined towers still carried a numinous power. You then took the bowl home and sealed it inside the wall or the threshold of your house, placed upside down so that the demon would be trapped inside. These bowls chart the final decline of the ancient Babylonian gods, now mere devils daubed on incantation bowls in spells for the urban poor. Here are Bel and Nergal; Greek deities too, such as Zeus, Hermes and Apollo, and Iranian spirits from the period of Sassanian rule in Iraq. Such then was the sad end of Inanna ‘great goddess of the universe’, who appears as the jinn Nanna on the bowls. In these ways spirit worlds change and metamorphose over time. Amazingly some of those old beliefs, especially the incantation magic, survived among the poor people of Iraq – Jewish, Christian and Muslim – right up to our own time: specialists in folk religion were still to be found in the southern countryside even in the 1960s, wise men or ‘openers’ with their books of charms.