Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

4

Cities of Wisdom

In 1927 the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley began to dig at Ur of Chaldea (Chaldea is an alternative name for Babylon). Ur, the home of Abraham according to the Bible, had first been identified in 1854–1855 but it was Woolley’s sensational excavations that revealed its wider importance in mankind’s history. Among his discoveries was the unearthing of the so-called mosaic standard of Ur, which featured a cluster of chariots, showing that it was the Sumerians (inhabiting what is now the southernmost reaches of Iraq from c. 3400 BC), who may well have conceived the wheel and introduced this device into warfare. Woolley also discovered a practice that royalty in Babylon was not buried alone. Alongside the king and queen, in one chamber, lay a company of soldiers (copper helmets and spears were found next to their bones) and in another chamber were the skeletons of nine ladies of the court, still wearing their elaborate headdresses. Now these were very grisly practices, and quite important enough in themselves, for what they revealed about ancient beliefs. But what particularly attracted Woolley’s attention was that no text had ever hinted at this collective burial. He therefore drew the conclusion that the interment had taken place before writing had been invented to record the event.

According to the historian H. W. F. Saggs, ‘No invention has been more important for human progress than writing’, and Petr Charvát has called it ‘the invention of inventions’.¹ So here we have another major idea, to put alongside farming as ‘the greatest ever’. In fact, more important, more fundamental even than writing in the history of progress, is that happy coincidence that the Sumerians also invented the chariot. For once you start making a list of the ‘firsts’ achieved by this formidable people, it is difficult to know where to stop. For example, in 1946 the American scholar Samuel Noah Kramer began to publish his translations of Sumerian clay tablets and in doing so he identified no fewer than twenty-seven ‘historical firsts’ discovered or achieved or recorded by the early Iraqis. Among them were the first schools, the first historian, the first pharmacopoeia, the first clocks, the first arch, the first legal code, the first library, the first farmer’s almanac, and the first bicameral congress. The Sumerians were the first to use gardens to provide shade, they recorded the first proverbs and fables, they had the first epic literature and the first love songs. The reason for this remarkable burst of creativity is not hard to find: civilisation, as we now call it, occurred only after early man had begun to live in cities. Cities were far more competitive, experimental environments than anything that had gone before. The city is the cradle of culture, the birthplace of nearly all our most cherished ideas.

In the classical definition, civilisation consists of three or more of the following: cities, writing, the specialisation of occupations, monumental architecture, the formation of capital.² But this, while not wrong, ignores the underlying principle. Sometime in the late fourth millennium BC, people came together to live in large cities. The transition transformed human experience for the new conditions required men and women to co-operate in ways they never had before. It was this close contiguity, this new face-to-face style of cohabitation, that explained the proliferation of new ideas, particularly in the basic tools for living together – writing, law, bureaucracy, specialised occupations, education, weights and measures.

According to research published in the autumn of 2004, the first urban sites were Tell Brak and Tell Hamoukar in northern Mesopotamia, on the Iraq–Syria border, dated to just before 4000 BC. They had rows of brick ovens for preparing food on an industrial scale and numerous ‘seal stamps’ used to keep track of goods and to ‘lock’ doors. But they were relatively small – Hamoukar was twelve hectares – and the first cities proper emerged further south in Mesopotamia about 3400 BC. These sites included Eridu, Uruk, Ur, Umma, Lagash and Shuruppak (more or less in that order). By the end of the third millennium BC, 90 per cent of southern Mesopotamia was living in urban areas.³ These cities were very large: Uruk, for example, had a population of 50,000. Why did they develop and what was the experience like? Several reasons have been put forward for the development of cities, the most obvious of which is security. But this argument can no longer be supported, and for three reasons. In the first place, there are some large ancient cities – notably in West Africa (such as in Mali) – that never developed walls. Second, even in the Middle East, where city walls were sometimes vast and very elaborate, the walls came after the initial settlement. At Uruk, for example, the city had been largely formed around 3200 BC, but the walls were not built until roughly 2900 BC. (On the other hand, Uru means a walled area.⁴) Finally, there is a much more convincing explanation, with a great deal of empirical support.

What appears to have happened is that, in the middle of the fourth millennium BC, in Mesopotamia, there was a slight but noticeable change of climate, leading to cooler and dryer average conditions. Until that point, agriculture had flourished between the Tigris and the Euphrates for thousands of years. Because of these rivers, the area was relatively secure and irrigation was well developed.⁵ ‘The climatic changes documented for the middle of the fourth millennium seem, within a space of two to three hundred years, to have stemmed the floods that regularly covered large tracts of land and to have drained such large areas that in a relatively short period of time, large parts of Babylonia became attractive for new permanent settlements.’⁶ Excavations show that, associated with this climate variation, there was a sudden change in settlement pattern, from very scattered and fairly small individual settlements to dense settlements of a much larger kind never seen before.⁷ These geographical conditions appear to have favoured the development of communal irrigation systems – systems that were not elaborate, not at that stage, but which nonetheless brought about marked improvements in the yield of barley (which now evolved from the two-row to the six-row mutant), and at the same time taught people the advantages of co-operation. In other words, it was the particular climatic conditions of Mesopotamia – where irrigation could markedly improve crop yields and where there was enough water available (but in the wrong place) to allow this development fairly easily and obviously. The crucial point was that though the land was now habitable, there was still so much water available that nearly every arable plot had easy and direct access to it. ‘This fact . . . must have produced a “paradise”, with multiple, high-yield harvests each year.’⁸ An added factor was that the southern alluvial plains of Mesopotamia were lacking in other commodities, such as timber, stone, minerals and metals. The food surplus of this ‘paradise’ could be traded for these commodities, making for a dense network of contacts, and provided conditions for the development of specialist workers in the cities themselves. This may have been a factor leading to the diverse populations that were such a feature of early city life, going beyond simple kin groups. This was an exciting advance: for the first time people could become involved in activities not directly linked with food production. Yet this development would have raised anxiety levels: citizens had to rely on others, not their kin, for essentials. This underlying anxiety may well explain the vast, unprecedented schemes and projects which fostered a community spirit – monumental, labour-intensive architectural undertakings. For these same reasons, religion may well have become more important in cities than in previous configurations.

The first city is generally held to have been Eridu, a site just over a hundred miles inland from the Persian Gulf and now called Aby Shahrein. Its actual location was unique, in that it occupied a transitional zone between sea and land. It was near an alluvial plain and close to marshes, which meant that it could easily benefit from three ecological systems – the alluvium, the desert and the marshes, and so profit from three different modes of subsistence: farming, nomadic pastoralism, and fishing.⁹ But there was also a religious reason for Eridu. The city was located on a small hill ringed by a depression, in which subterranean water collected. This surrounding area was never less than a swamp and in the rainy season formed a sizeable lake.¹⁰ It was thus a configuration that conformed neatly to Mesopotamian ideas of the Cosmos, which pictured the earth as a disc surrounded by a huge body of water. In mirroring this configuration, Eridu became a sacred spot. Petr Charvát says that Eridu was believed to contain the source of all wisdom and that it was the seat of the god of knowledge. He says the ‘first intelligible universal religion seems to have been born’ in Eridu, in which worship involved the use of a triad of colours in the local pottery. Earthly existence was affirmed by the use of red, death by the use of black, and eternal life (and purity) through white.¹¹

In general, towns are defined by archaeologists as occupying 30 hectares or less, whereas cities are 31 hectares and more. In the case of Uruk, by the time its wall was built, it occupied about 5.5 square kilometres, roughly 2.5 kilometres by 3.0 kilometres at its most extended points but in a rough diamond shape. With a population density of around 100–200 inhabitants per 1,000 square metres, this would give a total head-count of 27,500–55,000. The built-up area of Ur occupied 100 acres (roughly 41 hectares) with perhaps 24,000 inhabitants. Its surrounding territory of 4 square miles ‘may have been occupied by half a million people . . . Girsu, a site adjacent to and apparently part of Lagash, is said to have had 36,000 males which means a population of 80,000–100,000.’¹² All this compares favourably with Athens, c. 500 BC, which covered an area of 2.5 square kilometres, or Jerusalem at the time of Christ which was but 1 square kilometre. Rome at the time of Hadrian was only twice as large as Uruk had been three thousand years earlier.¹³ A measure of the rapidity of the change at this time can be had from the survey reported by Hans Nissen which shows that at the end of the fourth millennium rural settlements outnumbered urban ones by the ratio of 4:1. Six hundred years later – i.e., the middle of the third millennium – that ratio had reversed completely and was now 9:1 in favour of the larger urban sites.¹⁴ By this time Uruk was the centre of a ‘hinterland’, an essentially rural area under its influence, which extended roughly 12–15 kilometres around it. Next to this was an area some 2–3 kilometres wide which showed no influence, and then began the hinterland of the next city, in this case Umma.¹⁵ There were at least twenty cities of this kind in Mesopotamia.

The achievements of these cities and city-states were astonishing and endured for some twenty-six centuries, with a remarkable number of innovations being introduced which created much of the world as we know it and live it. It was in Babylonia that music, medicine and mathematics were developed, where the first libraries were created, the first maps drawn, where chemistry, botany and zoology were conceived. At least, we assume that is so. Babylon is the home of so many ‘firsts’ because it is also the place where writing was invented and therefore we know about Babylon in a way that we do not know history before then.

Excavations have shown that these early urban areas were usually divided into three. There was an inner city with its own walls, inside which were found the temples of the city’s gods, plus the palace of the ruler/administrator/religious leader and a number of private houses. The suburbs consisted of much smaller houses, communal gardens and cattle pens, providing day-to-day produce and support for the citizens. Finally, there was a commercial centre. Though called the ‘harbour’, this area was where overland commerce was handled and where foreign as well as native merchants lived. The very names of cities are believed in many cases to have referred to their visual appearance.¹⁶

In these first cities, much life revolved around the temple. People associated with the cult were the most prominent members of society.¹⁷ At Eridu and Uruk the existence of temple platforms shows that there was already sufficient communal organisation to construct such buildings – after the megaliths these are the next great examples of monumental architecture.¹⁸ As time went by, these platforms were raised ever higher, eventually becoming stepped or terraced towers crowned by shrines. These are known as ziggurats, a word based on the Assyrian, and probably on an earlier Akkadian term, zigguaratu, meaning summit or mountain top.¹⁹ This increasingly elaborate structure had to be maintained, which required a highly organised cult.

The temples were so important – and so large – that they played a central role in the economic life of the early cities. Records from the temple of Baba (or Bau), a goddess of Lagash, show that shortly before 2400 BC the temple estates were more than a square mile in extent. The land was used for every kind of agricultural purpose and supported as many as 1,200 people in the service of the temple. There were specialist bakers, brewers, wool workers, spinners and weavers, as well as slaves and an administrative staff.²⁰ The tenant farmers were not slaves exactly; instead, their relation to the temple seems to have been an early form of feudalism.²¹ In addition to the new specialisations already mentioned, we may include the barber, the jeweller or metalworker, the costumier and cloth merchant, the laundryman, the brick makers, the ornamental gardener, the ferryman, the ‘sellers of songs’ and the artist. From our point of view the most important specialist was the scribe.

The origin of writing is a contentious issue at the moment, for there are three possibilities. For many years it was assumed that the cuneiform script of Mesopotamia was the earliest true writing, but it was associated with a problem. Cuneiform consists of more or less abstract signs, whereas many people thought that writing proper would show a stronger link with paintings, or pictographs – symbols that were part pictures of objects and part symbols. This is where the work of archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat comes in.

In the late 1960s she noticed that thousands of ‘rather mundane clay objects’ had been found throughout the ancient Near East and regarded as insignificant by most archaeologists. Schmandt-Besserat thought otherwise, that they might have formed an ancient system that had been overlooked. She therefore visited various collections of these ‘tokens’, as she called them, in the Near East, North Africa, Europe and America.²² In the course of her study, she found that the tokens were sometimes geometrical in form – spheres, tetrahedrons, cylinders – while others were in the shape of animals, tools or vessels. She came to realise that they were the first clay objects to have been hardened by fire. Whatever they were, a lot of effort had gone into their manufacture. Whatever they were, they were not mundane. Eventually, she came across an account of a hollow tablet found at Nuzi, a site in northern Iraq and dated to the second millennium BC. The cuneiform inscription said: ‘Counters representing small cattle: 21 ewes that lamb, 6 female lambs, 8 full-grown male sheep . . .’ and so on. When the tablet had been opened, inside were found forty-nine counters, exactly the number of cattle in the written list.²³ For Schmandt-Besserat, this was ‘like a Rosetta stone’. For the next fifteen years she examined more than 10,000 tokens, and came to the conclusion that they comprised a primitive accounting system and one which led to the creation of writing. Words, in a sense, began with numbers. This is, after all, what writing is, a form of communication which allows the two communicating parties to be spatially and temporally separated.

The first tokens dated to 8000–4300 BC and were fairly plain and not very varied. They were found in such sites as Tepe Asiab in Iran (c. 7900–7700 BC), where the people still lived mainly by hunting and gathering. Beginning around 4400 BC, more complex tokens appeared, mainly in connection with temple activity. The different types represented different objects: for example, cones appear to have represented grain, an ovoid stood for a jar of oil, while cylinders stood for domestic animals.²⁴ The tokens caught on because they removed the need to remember certain things, and they removed the need for a spoken language, so for that reason could be used between people who spoke different tongues. They came into use because of a change in social and economic structure. As trade increased between villages, the headman would have needed to keep a record of who had produced what.

The complex tokens appear to have been introduced into Susa, the main city of Elam (southern Iran), and Uruk, and seem to have been a result of the need to account for goods produced in the city’s workshops (most were found in public rather than private buildings). The tokens also provided a new and more accurate way to assess and record taxes. They were kept together in one of two ways. They were either strung together or, more importantly from our point of view, enclosed in clay envelopes. It was on the outside of these envelopes that marks were made, to record what was inside and who was involved. And although this chronology has recently been queried by French scholars, this still seems to be the best explanation for how cuneiform script came about. Of course, the new system quickly made the tokens themselves redundant, with the result that the impressions in the clay had replaced the old system by about 3500–3100 BC. The envelopes became tablets and the way was open for the development of full-blown cuneiform.²⁵

A system of marks, of more or less geometric lines, whorls and squiggles, has been found on a number of tablets, figurines, pottery, and amulets in south-east Europe, in Romania and Bulgaria in what is known as the Vinca culture. Associated with undoubted pictographs – goats, animal heads, ears of corn – these were found in burial and apparently sacrificial contexts, dating from c. 4000 BC. The Gradesnica Plaque, discovered in Vratsa in western Bulgaria in 1969, is even older, dating to 7,000–6,000 years ago.²⁶ The signs associated with this Vinca culture have been analysed according to which type of artefact they appear on – amulets or pottery, for example. The analysis has shown that their distribution is consistent. There is a corpus of 210 signs, forming just five core groups: straight lines, crosses, chevrons, dots and curves. But these nowhere form texts. Instead, they seem to be symbolic designs, no doubt with religious rather than economic meanings. They comprise a form of proto-writing.

Some scholars believe that the users of these ‘Old European’ scripts (to use Marija Gimbutas’ phrase) were forced out of their native lands by invading Indo-Europeans. Harald Haarman, of the University of Helsinki, is one of those who believes that the Old Europeans may have been driven to places like Crete. There, at Knossos and elsewhere, in the early twentieth century, Sir Arthur Evans and his colleagues uncovered a major civilisation – the Minoan, with Bull and Snake worship among its common features. But the Minoans also produced two scripts, known to us as Linear A and Linear B. The use of the term ‘Linear’ was originally Gimbutas’ idea, to stress the mainly linear (as opposed to pictographic) qualities of the Vinca signs. But while Linear B was famously deciphered by the English amateur, Michael Ventris, in the 1950s, and shown to be a form of Greek, Linear A has never been deciphered. Haarman suggests that this is because Linear A is not an Indo-European language at all but an ‘Old European’ one. Haarman says he has found fifty signs in Linear A that are identical with Old European (see Figure 3).

The most recent candidate for the birth of writing takes us to India. There, traditionally, the earliest major civilisation was known as the Indus civilisation, the capitals of which were Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, dating back to 2300–1750 BC. In May 1999 it was announced that a tablet, 5,500 years old, and bearing an inscription, had been discovered at Harappa. A month later, another announcement claimed that the script had been deciphered. This script consisted of a double M, a Y, a lozenge with a dot at its centre, a second lozenge, somewhat deformed, and a V. According to Drs Jha and Rajaram, this means ‘It irrigates the sacred land.’ The language is allegedly ‘pre-Harappan’, much more primitive than other Indus seals. Four other examples have been found in the region. The Indian scholars believe that this script, like other primitive scripts elsewhere, does not use vowels, though in this case the use of double consonants, as in the double M, is meant to indicate vowels. In other words, it shows early writing in the course of evolution. Scholars associated with the discovery believe this is enough to move the ‘cradle of civilisation’ from Mesopotamia to the Indus region.²⁷ These are the latest researches, and in time they may well change the way we think about origins. For the present, however, the Vinca markings do not comprise full-blown scripts, while the tablets discovered in and around the Indus region are only a handful of examples. While undoubtedly intriguing, even promising, we must await further discoveries before abandoning Mesopotamia – and cuneiform – as the earliest example of true writing.

Figure 3: Signs common to Old European script and Linear A

[Source: Richard Rudgley, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, New York: The Free Press, 1999, page 70]

Cuneiform script has been known about since the late seventeenth century. Partially successful attempts to decipher it were made in 1802 and again in 1846. But a complete understanding of Babylonian culture was only possible after the discoveries of a ‘footloose young Englishman’, a newly qualified solicitor, Austin Henry Layard. On his way overland to Ceylon (as Sri Lanka then was), he stopped off in the Middle East and got no further than western Persia (now Iran). ‘After undertaking some unofficial intelligence work for the British Ambassador in Istanbul, he won his backing for a period of excavation in Iraq, where he chose a huge mound called Nimrud, twenty miles south of Mosul.’²⁸ Though he was not a trained archaeologist (hardly anybody was in those days), Layard was blessed with luck. He discovered a series of huge slabs, great limestone bulls up to fourteen feet high, images so striking that his account of his researches became a best-seller. But Layard also found many examples of what appeared to be wedge-shaped inscriptions on stone, and the dating of the site – 3500–3000 BC – made this the earliest known form of writing. Sumerian was not finally understood until the twentieth century but once it was, the discoveries came thick and fast.²⁹

Our new understanding shows that there were in Mesopotamia several forms of ‘proto-writing’ in use before writing proper. Of these, stone cylinder seals were both more permanent and at the same time more flexible versions of the clay ‘envelopes’ examined by Schmandt-Besserat. The seal itself took the form of a hollow cylinder, on which was inscribed a set of engravings. The cylindrical seal would be rolled over wet clay, which therefore reproduced the engraved inscription as a reversed, embossed image.³⁰ The clay seals were used everywhere: they could be moulded over the knot of a rope tied around a bundle; or over the rope fastening of a door. The idea was that the seal should bear a clear mark, identifying its owner.³¹ Like the clay envelopes studied by Schmandt-Besserat, seals were instruments of economic control, guaranteeing the supervision of proceedings, or confirming that a transaction had taken place. In practice, the Sumerians produced some very imaginative devices with which to identify owners: worshipping at a temple, processions of boats, prisoners before a ruler, the feeding of animals. They were, in effect, pictographical signatures.³² Later, a new type of seal emerged, produced by cutting machines. This clearly suggests that trade was increasing and that the need for identifying marks was likewise growing.

So much for proto-writing. But cuneiform actually developed out of the archaic Uruk pictographic system, which took over many of the signs used with the earlier tokens, such as the sign for sheep, and wavy lines for water. The birth of writing proper is clearly shown by the use the first scribes made of the so-called ‘bevel-rimmed’ bowls of Uruk. These were cheap, coarse and very porous. They could not have been made to hold water and yet they were so common that, at some sites, they made up three-quarters of the pottery found. The fact that they were so porous – suitable only for containing solid matter – and were all the same size, provides a key to their use. Texts that have been deciphered tell us that the workers of Uruk, at least the workers on the large temple projects, were paid in kind – i.e., with a daily ration of food. Since the bulk of the workers’ rations would have been grain, it stands to reason that these were the ‘standard’ bowls by which the workers were paid.³³

Shown in Figure 4, is the very ancient sign for ‘eat’. This quite clearly shows a head, with an open mouth, receiving food from one of these ‘bevel-rimmed bowls’. It was, in other words, a picture, or pictograph. Many other words began as pictographs, too (see Figure 5, below).

This was only the beginning. Just as cylinder seals became simpler and easier to mass-produce – to cope with busy life – so too did writing evolve. Writing on moist clay made it awkward to draw these images clearly and quickly (a problem which the Egyptians never had, with their smooth, dry surfaces, which is why they stuck with hieroglyphics), and so signs, words, became more abstract, fewer, aligned much more in the same direction, all developments that enabled the speed of writing to be increased. Figure 6 shows how a few words changed in appearance, over a millennium and more, from the earliest days in Uruk, to the height of Ur’s power, that is, between c. 3800–3200 and c. 2800–2100 BC. We still don’t know why the images were turned through ninety degrees, but this would surely have made the images less legible and that in turn may have provoked a more simple way of writing. Circular and curved marks were always more difficult to produce in wet clay and this is why cuneiform emerged as a system of simple strokes and wedges. The repertoire of signs was reduced and homogenised by the first third of the third millennium.

Figure 4: A bevel-rimmed bowl and the early sign for ‘to eat’ (left); as it begins to be represented in early cuneiform (right)³⁴

[Source: Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East: 9000–2000 BC, translated by Elizabeth Lutzeier with Kenneth J. Northcott. © 1988 by the University of Chicago]

Figure 5: Early pictographs: (a) a group of reeds; (b) an ear of corn; (c) a fish; (d) a goat; (e) a bird; (f) a human head; (g) a form of pot; (h) a palm tree; (i) a ziggurat³⁵

[Source: H. W. F. Saggs, Civilisation Before Greece and Rome, London: B. T. Batsford, 1989, page 62]

Figure 6: The development of pictographs into Babylonian cuneiform script³⁶

[Source: Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East: 9000–2000 BC, translated by Elizabeth Lutzeier with Kenneth J. Northcott. © 1988 by the University of Chicago]

In these early phases, the uses of writing were limited and, because of its basis in trade, consisted just as much of numbers as of words. Among the signs, for example, there was one which had a D-shape: there was a straight edge which was deep-cut and a round end which was much shallower, reducing to nothing. What gave the game away was that these Ds were grouped into clusters, ranging from one to nine. Here then was the making of a decimal system. In some cases, a circular punchhole, formed by means of a cylindrical reed pressed into the clay, was associated with the Ds. ‘It is a reasonable assumption that these “round holes” represent tens.’³⁷ It was common for the early tablets to have a list of things on one side, and the total on the other.³⁸ This helped decipherment.

A system of signs was one thing. But, as we have seen in examples from elsewhere, such a system does not fully amount to writing as we know it. For that, three other developments were necessary: personal names, grammar, and an alphabet.

Personal identification was a problem and a necessity from the moment that economic organisation went beyond the extended family, where everyone knew each other and property was owned communally. Certain names would have been easy, ‘Lionheart’, say.³⁹ But how would one render an abstract name, such as ‘Loved-by-God’? Pictographs would have been developed, much as the heart shape,, has come to mean ‘love’ in our time. In this way, multiple meanings overlapped: the sun,, for example, might mean ‘day’, ‘bright’, or ‘white’, while a star,, might mean ‘god’ or ‘sky’, depending on context. The ‘doctrine of the name’ was important in Babylon, where thought worked mainly by analogy, rather than by inductive or deductive processes as we use in the modern world.⁴⁰ For both the Babylonians and the Egyptians the name of an object or a person blended in with its essential nature.⁴¹ Therefore, a ‘good’ name would produce a ‘good’ person. For the same reason, people were named after the gods and that was also the case with streets (‘May the enemy never tread it’) and canals and city walls and gates (‘Bel hath built it, Bel hath shown it favour’). To cap it all, the practice evolved to adopt a certain tone when uttering proper names. This was especially true when speaking gods’ names and it is still true today, to a certain extent, when people use a different tone of voice when praying out loud.⁴²

To begin with, there was no grammar. Words – nouns mainly, but a few verbs – could be placed next to one another in a random fashion. One reason for this was that at Uruk the writing, or proto-writing, was not read, as we would understand reading. It was an artificial memory system that could be understood by people who spoke different languages.

Writing and reading as we know it appears to have been developed at Shuruppak in southern Mesopotamia, and the language was Sumerian. No one knows who the Sumerians were, or where they originated, and it is possible that their writing was carried out in an ‘official’ language, like Sanskrit and Latin many thousands of years later, its use confined only to the learned.⁴³ This next stage in the development of writing occurred when one sound, corresponding to a known object, was generalised to conform to that sound in other words or contexts. An English example might be a drawing of a striped insect to mean a ‘bee’. Then it would be adapted, to be used in such words as ‘be-lieve’. This happened, for example, with the Sumerian word for water, a, the sign for which was two parallel wavy lines. The context made it clear whether a meant water or the sound. This was when the signs were turned through ninety degrees, to make them easier to write in a hurry, and when the signs became more abstract. This form of writing spread quickly from Shuruppak to other cities in southern Mesopotamia. Trade was still the main reason for writing but it was now that its use was extended to religion, politics and history/myth – the beginnings of imaginative literature.

Such a transformation didn’t happen overnight. In the early schools for scribes, we find lexical lists – lists of words – and lists of proverbs. This is probably how they were taught to write, and it was through well-known proverbs and incantations, even magic spells, that abstract signs for syntactical and grammatical elements became established (the proverbs had a simple, familiar form). And it was in this way that writing changed from being a purely symbolic system of information-recording and exchange, to a representation of speech.

Although the first texts which contain grammatical elements come from Shuruppak, word order was still highly variable. The breakthrough to writing in the actual order of speech seems to have occurred first when Eannatum was king of Lagash (c. 2500 BC). It was only now that writing was able to convert all aspects of language to written form.⁴⁴ The acquisition of such literacy was arduous and was aided by encyclopaedic and other lists.⁴⁵ People – in the Bible and elsewhere – were described as ‘knowing the words’ for things, such as birds or fishes, which meant they could, to that extent, read. Some lists were king lists, and these produced another advance when texts began to go beyond mere lists, to offer comment and evaluation on rulers, their conflicts, the laws they introduced: history was for the first time being written down.⁴⁶ The list about the date-palm, for instance, includes hundreds of entries, not just the many parts of the palm, from bark to crown, but words for types of decay and the uses to which the wood could be put. In other words, this is how the first forms of knowledge were arranged and recorded. At Shuruppak the lists included: bovines, fish, birds, containers, textiles, metal objects, professions and crafts.⁴⁷ There were also lists of deities, mathematical and economic terms. (In the names for gods, females still predominate.)

Lists made possible new kinds of intellectual activity. They encouraged comparison and criticism. The items in a list were removed from the context that gave them meaning in the oral world and in that sense became abstractions. They could be separated and sorted in ways never conceived before, giving rise to questions never asked in an oral culture. For example, the astronomical lists made clear the intricate patterns of the celestial bodies, marking the beginning of mathematical astronomy and astrology.⁴⁸

The texts repeatedly mention other cities, with which Shuruppak had contact: Lagash, Nippur, Umma and Uruk among them. The very first idea, apart from economic tablets and proper names, that we can decipher among the earliest writing is that of the battle between ‘kings’ and ‘priests’. At one stage it was believed that all of a city’s inhabitants and all of its land ‘belonged’ to the supreme city god and that the high priest or priestess administered the city on behalf of this deity, but such a view is no longer tenable: land holding was much more complex than this. The high priest or priestess was known as the en, or ensi. Normally, and to begin with, the en or ensi was the most powerful figure, but there was another, the lugal – literally speaking, the ‘great man’. He was in effect the military commander, the fortress commander, who ran the city in its disputes with foreign powers. It does not take much imagination to envisage conflict between these two sources of power. The view preferred now is that Mesopotamian cities are better understood not as religious but as corporate entities – municipalities – in which people were treated equally. Their chief characteristic was economic: goods and produce were jointly owned and redistributed, both among the citizens themselves but also to foreigners who provided in exchange goods and commodities which the cities lacked. This is inferred from the writing on seals, references to ‘rations’, the fact that everyone was buried in the same way, certainly to begin with, and the discovery of locks by which goods were sequestered in warehouses. To begin with, the en administered this system though, as we shall see, that changed.⁴⁹

Apart from lists, the other major development in writing was the switch from a pictographic system to a syllabary and then to a full alphabet. Just as it was in the busy trading cities of Sumer that writing began, because it was needed, so the alphabet was invented, not in Mesopotamia but further west where the Semitic languages lent themselves to such a change. A pictographic system is limited because hundreds if not thousands of ‘words’ need to be remembered (as with Chinese today). In syllabaries, where a ‘word’ corresponds to a syllable, only around eighty to a hundred entities need to be remembered. But alphabets are even better.

Hebrew and Arabic are the best-known Semitic languages today but in the second millennium BC the main tongue was Canaanite, of which both Phoenician and Hebrew are descendants. What made the Semitic languages suitable for alphabetisation was that most nouns and verbs were composed of three consonants, fleshed out by vowels which vary according to the context, but which are generally self-evident. (Professor Saggs gives this English equivalent: th wmn ws cryng and th wmn wr cryng. Most readers have no difficulty in deciphering either phrase.⁵⁰)

The earliest alphabet so far found was discovered in excavations made at Ras Shamra (‘Fennel Head’) near Alexandretta, the north-east corner of the Mediterranean that lies between Syria and Asia Minor. Here, on a hill above a small harbour, was an ancient site excavated in 1929, which in antiquity was known as Ugarit. A library was discovered at the site, situated between two temples devoted to Baal and Dagon. The library belonged to the high priest and consisted mainly of tablets in writing in a cuneiform style but which comprised only twenty-nine signs. It was, therefore, an alphabet. The scholars making the excavation guessed that the language was probably related to Canaanite or Phoenician or Hebrew and they were right: the script was rapidly deciphered. Many of the events portrayed, as we shall see, prefigure stories in the Old Testament.⁵¹ This system appears to have been deliberately invented, with no real precursors. As Figure 7 shows, the signs fit into five groups, with patterns of increasing complexity, indicating an order for the letters.

Figure 7: Signs of the Ugaritic alphabet⁵²

[Source: H. W. F. Saggs, Civilisation Before Greece and Rome, London: B. T. Batsford, 1989, page 81]

Although the first alphabet occurred at Ugarit, it was restricted mainly to north Syria and a few Palestinian sites. After the twelfth century BC, it died out and the future lay with descendants of the proto-Canaanite language. This alphabet took time to stabilise, with the letters facing either way, and the writing often taking the boustrophedon form.³ However, shortly before 1000 BC, proto-Canaanite did become stabilised into what is generally referred to as the Phoenician alphabet (the earliest inscriptions occur at Byblos – now Jublai, north of Beirut in Lebanon – many on bronze arrow heads, saying who the head belonged to). By this time the number of letters was reduced to twenty-two and all the signs had become linear, with no traces of pictographs. The direction of writing had also stabilised, consistently horizontal from right to left. By common tradition, it was the Phoenician alphabet which was imported into classical Greece.

In both Mesopotamia and Egypt literacy was held in high esteem. Shulgi, a Sumerian king around 2100 BC, boasted that

As a youth, I studied the scribal art in the Tablet-House, from the tablets of Sumer and Akkad;

No one of noble birth could write a tablet as I could.⁵³

Scribes were trained in Ur since at least the second quarter of the third millennium.⁵⁴ When they signed documents, they often added the names and positions of their fathers, which confirms that they were usually the sons of city governors, temple administrators, army officers, or priests: literacy was confined to scribes and administrators. Anyone in authority probably received some sort of scribal education and it has even been suggested that the Sumerian term dub.sar, literally ‘scribe’, was the equivalent of Esquire, or BA, applied to any educated man.⁵⁵

Two schools, perhaps the first in the world, were founded by King Shulgi at Nippur and at Ur in the last century of the third millennium BC, but he referred to them without any elaboration, so they may have been established well before this. The Babylonian term for school or scribal academy was edubba, literally ‘Tablet-House’. The headmaster was called ‘Father of the Tablet-House’, and in one inscription a pupil says this: ‘You have opened my eyes as though I were a puppy; you have formed humanity within me.’⁵⁶ There were specialist masters for language, mathematics (‘scribe of counting’) and surveying (‘scribe of the field’) but day-to-day teaching was conducted by someone called, literally, ‘Big Brother’, who was probably a senior pupil.

Cuneiform extracts have been found in several cities which show that there were already ‘standard texts’ used in instruction. For example, there are tablets with the same text written out in different hands, others with literary texts on one side, maths exercises on the reverse, still others with the teacher’s text on one side, the pupil’s on the other, together with corrections. On one tablet, a pupil describes his workload:

This is the monthly scheme of my school attendance:

My free days are three each month;

My religious holidays are three each month;

For twenty-four days each month

I must be in school. How long they are!⁵⁷

Scribes had to learn their own trade, too – they needed to know how to prepare clay for writing and how to bake the texts that were to be preserved in libraries. Limestone could be added to make the surface of the clay smoother, and the wedges clearer.⁵⁸ Besides clay, boards of wood or ivory were often coated with wax, sometimes hinged in several leaves. The wax could be wiped clean and the boards reused.⁵⁹

The scribal tradition spread far beyond Mesopotamia, and as it did so it expanded.⁶⁰ The Egyptians were the first to write with reed brushes on pieces of old pottery; next they introduced slabs of sycamore which were coated with gypsum plaster, which could be rubbed off to allow re-use.⁶¹ Papyrus was the most expensive writing material of all and was available only to the most accomplished, and therefore least wasteful, scribes. Scribal training could take as long as for a modern PhD.

Not all writing had to do with business. The early, more literary texts of Sumer, naturally enough perhaps, include the first religious literature, hymns in particular. In Uruk there was a popular account of the king’s love affair with the goddess Inanna (Ishtar in Babylon, Astarte in Greece). Other texts included a father’s instructions to his son on how to lead a useful and rewarding life, accounts of battles and conquests, records of building activity, cosmogonies, and a vast corpus to do with magic. By the time Ashur flourished, roughly 1900–1200 BC, there were many private archives, in addition to the public ones, some of which contained as many as 4,000 texts. By now, the most prestigious form of learning was astronomy/astrology, omen literature, and magic. These helped establish Ashur’s reputation as al nemeqi, ‘City of Wisdom’.⁶²

We should never forget that in antiquity, before writing, people performed prodigious feats of memory. It was by no means unknown for thousands of lines of poetry to be memorised: this is how literature was preserved and disseminated. Once writing had evolved, however, two early forms of written literature may be singled out. There was in the first place a number of stories that prefigured narratives which appeared later in the Bible. Given the influence of that book, its origins are important. For example, Sargon, king of Akkad, emerged from complete obscurity to become ‘king of the world’. His ancestry was elaborated from popular tales, which tell of his mother, a priestess, concealing the fact that she had given birth to him by placing him in a wicker basket, sealed with bitumen, and casting him adrift on a river. He was later found by a water drawer who brought Sargon up as his adopted son. Sargon first became a gardener . . . and then king. The parallels with the Moses story are plain. Sumerian literature also boasts a number of ‘primal kings’ with improbably long reigns. This too anticipates the Old Testament. In the Bible, for example, Adam begot his son Seth at age 130 and is said to have lived for 800 more years. Between Adam and the Deluge there were ten kings who lived to very great ages. In Sumer, there were eight such kings, who between them reigned for 241,200 years, an average of 30,400 years per king. The texts unearthed at Ras Shamra/Ugarit speak of the god Baal fighting with Lotan, ‘the sinuous serpent, the mighty one with seven heads’, which anticipates the Old Testament Leviathan. Then there is the flood literature. We shall encounter one version of the flood story in the epic of Gilgamesh, which is discussed immediately below. In that poem, the flood-hero was known as Utnapishtim, ‘Who Found [Eternal] Life’, though he was also known in similar legends as Ziusudra or Atra-hasis. In all the stories the flood is sent by the gods as a punishment.⁶³

The very name, Mesopotamia, between the rivers, suggests that floods were a common occurrence in the area. But the idea of a Great Flood seems to have been deeply embedded in the consciousness of the ancient Middle East.⁶⁴ There are three possibilities. One is that the Tigris and Euphrates flooded together, creating a large area of water. According to Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Ur, referred to at the beginning of this chapter, the flood revealed in the silt he found there could have meant an inundation twenty-five feet deep that was 300 miles long and 100 miles across.⁶⁵ This has been called into question because Uruk, fifteen miles from Ur, and situated lower, shows no trace of flood. A second possibility, discussed in more detail in the next chapter, is that a terrible earthquake hit the Indus valley area of India in about 1900 BC and caused the diversion of the river Sarasvati. This, the mighty river of the ancient Hindu scripture, the Rig Veda, was ten kilometres wide in places but is now no more. The event that triggered this great catastrophe must have caused huge floods over a very wide area. The last possibility is the so-called Black Sea flood. According to this theory, published in 1997, the Black Sea was formed only after the last Ice Age, when the level of the Mediterranean rose, around 8,000 years ago, sluicing water through the Bosporus and flooding a vast area, 630 miles from east to west, and 330 miles from north to south.⁶⁶

The greatest literary creation of Babylon, the first imaginative masterpiece in the world, was the epic of Gilgamesh, or ‘He Who Saw Everything to the Ends of the World’, as the title of the poem has it. Almost certainly, Gilgamesh ruled in Uruk around 2900 BC, so some of the episodes in his epic are rooted in fact.⁶⁷ His adventures are complicated, often fantastic and difficult to follow. In some respects, they recall the labours of Hercules and, as we shall see, are echoed in the Bible. In the poem, he himself is two-thirds god and one-third man. In the first verses, we learn how Gilgamesh has to overcome the resistance of the people of Uruk and push through ‘a wondrous feat’, namely the building of the city wall. This, 9.5 kilometres long, boasted, it is said, at least 900 semi-circular towers. Some of this part of the story may be based on fact, for excavations have identified semi-circular structures in the Early Dynastic period (i.e., around 2900 BC) using a new type of curved brick.⁶⁸ Gilgamesh is a hard taskmaster, so much so that his subjects appeal to the gods to create a counterforce, who will take on Gilgamesh and let the citizens have a quiet life. Sympathetic, the gods create Enkidu, a ‘hairy wild man’. But here the plot twists and Enkidu and Gilgamesh become firm friends and from then on undertake their adventures as companions.⁶⁹ The two return to Mesopotamia where the goddess Inanna falls in love with Gilgamesh. He spurns her attentions and in retaliation she sends the awesome ‘bull of heaven . . . which even a hundred men could not control’ to kill him.⁷⁰ But Enkidu joins forces with Gilgamesh and together they defeat the bull by tearing off its limbs.

This early part of the poem is in general positive, but it then turns darker. Enlil, the god of the air and of the earth, decides that Enkidu must die for some of the heroic killings he has performed. The loss of Enkidu affects Gilgamesh badly:

All day and all night have I wept over him

and would not have him buried –

my friend yet might rise up at my (loud) cries,

for seven days and nights –

until a maggot dropped from his nose.

Since he is gone, I can no comfort find,

keep roaming like a hunter in the plains.⁷¹

Until this point, Gilgamesh has given little thought to death. From now on, however, his sole aim is to find everlasting life. He recalls the legend that, at the end of the world, beyond ‘the waters of death’, lives an ancestor of his, Utnapishtim, who is immortal and therefore must know the secret. Alone now, Gilgamesh sets out to reach the end of the world, beyond the mountains where the sun sets. He finds the dark passage through which the sun disappears at night, and eventually arrives on the shore of a wide sea.⁷² There, he meets Utnapishtim’s boatman, who agrees to ferry him over the waters of death, ‘a single drop of which means certain destruction’.⁷³ When, finally, Gilgamesh reaches Utnapishtim he is disappointed. The ancestor’s immortality, he tells Gilgamesh, is due to unique circumstances that will never be repeated. He confides that, in an earlier age, the gods had decided to destroy mankind and had caused a flood. Utnapishtim and his wife were the only ones allowed to survive: they were forewarned and built a large boat, in which they stored pairs of all living things. After the storm had lashed the boat for six days and nights, and when all was quiet, Utnapishtim opened a window, and saw that his boat was beached on an island, which was in fact the top of a mountain. He waited for another six days, then sent out a dove, followed by a swallow. Both returned. Finally, he let loose a crow, which did not come back.⁷⁴ Later on, Utnapishtim reports, Enlil regretted his rash decision and rewarded Utnapishtim with immortality for saving life on earth. But the gods will never repeat this act.

The first libraries were installed in Mesopotamia, though to begin with they were more like archives than libraries proper. They contained records of the practical, day-to-day activities of the Mesopotamian city-states. This is true whether the library was in Nippur, in the middle of the third millennium BC, or Ebla, where two thousand clay tablets were found in 1980, dating to roughly 2250 BC, or to later libraries. We have to remember that in most cases the libraries served the purposes of the priests and that in Mesopotamian cities, where the temple cult owned huge estates, practical archives – recording transactions, contracts and deliveries – were as much part of the cult as were ritual texts for the sacred services. But the propagandistic needs of the cult and the emerging royal elite – hymns, inscriptions – provoked a more modern form of literacy. Texts such as the epic of Gilgamesh, or the epic of Creation, may therefore have been used in ritual. But these works, which involved some form of mental activity beyond flat records of transactions, appear first in the texts at Nippur in the middle of the third millennium. The next advance occurred at Ebla, Ur and Nippur.⁷⁵ Each of these later libraries boasted a new, more scholarly entity: catalogues of the holdings, in which works of the imagination, and/or religious works, were listed separately. Later still, there was a further innovation: several lines of writing, added at the end of the text on the back surface, identifying what the text contained, more or less as a table of contents does today. This acquired the term colophon, derived from the Greek kolophon, meaning ‘finishing touch’. One, for example, was written thus: ‘Eighth tablet of the Dupaduparsa Festival, words of Silalluhi and Kuwatalla, the temple-priestess. Written by the hand of Lu, son of Nugissar, in the presence of Anuwanza, the overseer.’ The colophons were numbered, and recorded how many tablets the text was comprised of. Some of the catalogues went beyond the detail in the colophons, so that the scribes could tell from perusing just this document what was in the library. The ordering of the list was still pretty haphazard, however, for alphabetisation was not introduced for more than 1,500 years.⁷⁶ As time went by, the number of religious titles began to grow. By the time of Tiglath-Pileser I, one of Assyria’s greatest rulers (1115–1077 BC), the biggest component of the texts dealt with the movements of the heavens, and prediction of the future based on a variety of omens. There were some hymns and a catalogue of musical compositions (‘5 Sumerian psalms comprising one liturgy, for the adapa [possibly a tambourine]’). Ashurbanipal, Assyria’s last important ruler (668–627 BC), also had a fine library and was himself literate. Here too the mass of archival material comprised the bulk of the library; next in number came the omen texts; next largest were the lists, words and names, dictionaries for translating; and finally literary works, such as the epic of Gilgamesh. In all there were about 1,500 separate titles.⁷⁷ A curse was inscribed on many Assyrian tablets to deter people from stealing them.⁷⁸

Libraries undoubtedly existed in ancient Egypt, but because they wrote on papyrus (the ‘bullrushes’ in which the infant Moses was supposed to have been sequestered), little has survived. In describing the building complex of Ramses II (1279–1213 BC), the Greek historian Diodorus says that it included a sacred library which bore the inscription ‘Clinic for the Soul’.

In the early cities there were two types of authority. There was first the high priest, known as the en. He (and sometimes she) administered the corporate entity, or municipality, interceding with the gods to guarantee the continued fertility of enough land to provide everyone with food/income, and the en also administered its redistribution, both among the citizens and for foreign trade. The en’s consort was nin and, in Petr Charvát’s words, they comprised the ‘pontifical couple’.⁷⁹ The second form of authority was the lugal – the overseer, fortress commander, literally the ‘great man’, who administered military matters, foreign affairs as we would say, relations with outsiders. We should not make too much of this division, however: not every city had two types of leader – some had ens and others had lugals, and in any case where there were two types of authority the military leaders would have sought the backing of the religious elite for all of their military exploits. But this early arrangement changed, for the records show that, at some point, nin detached herself from en and realigned herself with the lugal.⁸⁰ At the same time, the role of the ens shrank, to become more and more ceremonial, whereas the lugal and the nin took on the functions of what we would call kings and queens. There now developed a greater division between temporal and spiritual power, and more of an emphasis on masculinity,⁸¹ a change that may have been brought about by war, which was now more of a threat and for two reasons. First, in an area that was circumscribed between two mighty rivers there would have been growing competition among rival cities, rivalry for land and for water, as population expanded; and second, with increasing prosperity and the accumulation of material possessions, produced by increasing numbers of specialists, there would have been more to gain from successful plunder. In war, a warrior was his own master, much more so than in peacetime, and the charisma and success of a clever lugal would have had a forceful impact on his fellow citizens. It would have been natural, following the victory of one city over another, for the lugal to have administered both territories: it was he who had achieved the victory, and in any case the gods of the rival city might well be different from those in his native city. The en from city A, therefore, would have little or no authority in city B. In this way, lugals began to overtake ens as the all-powerful figures in Sumerian society. Petr Charvát notes that the worship of the same god in different Sumerian cities did begin to grow, confirming this change. The growing power of the lugals was recognised in the practice whereby they acquired the prerogative to control systems of measurement (perhaps a relic of building defences) and the right to leave written records of their deeds. This was part-propaganda, part-history, so that people would remember who had done what and how.⁸² Thus the more-or-less modern idea of kingship grew up in Mesopotamia and, parallel with it, the idea of the state. Lugals who became kings administered more than one city, and the territory in between. The first supra-regional political entity in the ancient Middle East was the Akkadian state, which began with Sargon, c. 2340–2284 BC, the first king in the sense that we still use the term.

Kingship, then, was forged in part by war. War, or the institutionalisation of war, was the crucible or the forcing house for a number of other ideas.

The wheel may or may not have been invented in Mesopotamia. The first vehicles – sledges – were used by early hunter-fisher societies in near-Arctic northern Europe by 7000 BC, presumably pulled by dogs.⁸³ ‘Vehicle’ signs occur in the pictographic script of Uruk in the late fourth millennium BC, and actual remains of an axle-and-wheel unit were found at a similar date at a site in Zurich in Switzerland. These vehicles had solid wheels, made from either one or three pieces of wood. From archaeological remains at sites before 2000 BC, these so-called disc wheels stretch from Denmark to Persia, with the greatest density in the area immediately north of the Black Sea.⁸⁴ So this may indicate where the wheel was first introduced. Oxen and donkeys appear to have been used at first.

These (four-wheeled) wagons were very slow – 3.2 kph, on one estimate. The (two-wheeled) chariot, however, was a good bit faster – 12–14 kph when trotting, 17–20 kph when galloping. In the cuneiform texts, Sumerian refers to the ‘equid of the desert’, meaning an ass or donkey, and to the ‘equid of the mountains’, meaning horse.⁸⁵ Three words were used for wheeled vehicles: mar-gid-da, for four-wheeled wagons, gigir, for two-wheeled vehicles, and narkabtu which, as time went by, came to mean chariot. With narkabtu, says archaeologist Stuart Piggott, ‘We come to the beginning of one of the great chapters of ancient history: the development of the light two-wheeled chariot drawn by paired horses as a piece of technology and as an institution within the social order as an emblem of power and prestige.’⁸⁶ After the first solid wheels were invented, the spoked wheel was conceived. This had to be built under tension, with shaped wood, but its lightness made much greater speeds possible.⁸⁷ Chariot warfare flourished between 1700 and 1200 BC – i.e., at the end of the Bronze Age and in the Iron Age.

A word about the equid of the mountains. It is fair to say that, just now, no one knows exactly where or when the horse was domesticated and when or where the idea of riding was conceived. Until recently, it was assumed that settlement of the Eurasian steppe depended on the domestication of the horse, and that the steppe pioneers were ‘pastoral horsemen of warlike disposition’. Among archaeologists, the earliest example of horse domestication was for many years attributed to Dereivka, 300 kilometres north of the Black Sea, and now in Ukraine, and which formed part of the Sredny Stog culture – i.e., much the same location as where the wheel may have been invented. This site, dated to between 4570 and 3098 BC, is located on the right bank of the river Omelnik, a tributary of the Dnepr. The evidence for this interpretation came from the presence of horse bones in human burials, the remains of pre-molar teeth apparently worn down by bits, perforated antler tines interpreted as cheek pieces, and the preponderance of male horse bones at ancient sites, suggesting that they were preferred in a traction and riding context. There is also the indirect evidence of the emergence of horse-headed sceptres, made of bone, which indicate a horse cult, if not, strictly speaking, riding.⁸⁸

Reanalysis of the material in the past few years has by and large vitiated these conclusions. The so-called cheek pieces have never been found in place on a horse’s skull and are only rarely associated with horse remains at all. The wear of the pre-molars on wild horses turns out to be no different from that on so-called domesticated animals, and the profile of bones found at ancient sites, both inside and outside tombs, is no different from wild populations (which are known to exist, for example, in ‘bachelor groups’). We now know that the only area where changes in bone structure are incontrovertibly brought about by domestication, in this case by riding, is to the mid-backbone of a horse, where the rider would sit. Vertebrae of ancient horses that undoubtedly were ridden characteristically show minute stress lesions (cracks) on their epiphyses, the outer harder parts. Such lesions are completely absent in wild horses. So far, these lesions on ancient horses have been traced back no earlier than the fifth century BC.⁸⁹ The earliest unambiguous dateable textual and artistic evidence for horse domestication goes back to the end of the third millennium BC. Evidence of horse graves, accompanied by artefacts unambiguously associated with riding or traction, is even more recent, dating to probably no later than the end of the second millennium BC, when horses were widely used to pull chariots in both the Near East, the Eurasian steppe and in Greece. There is thus no reliable textual or artistic evidence for horse-riding earlier than the end of the second millennium BC.⁹⁰

The Latin poet Ovid was just one author in antiquity who was convinced there had once been a primeval golden age, free of aggression and rancour: ‘With no one to impose punishment, without any laws, men kept faith and did what was right . . . The people passed their lives in security and peace, without need for armies.’⁹¹

If only . . . In 1959 Raymond Dart published an analysis of an Australopithecine chin and concluded that ‘it was bashed in by a formidable blow from the front and delivered with great accuracy just to the left of the point of the jaw’. The instrument, in his view, was an antelope humerus.⁹² In the proto-Neolithic period, four ‘staggeringly powerful’ new weapons appeared ‘that would dominate warfare down to the present millennium: the bow, the sling, the dagger and the mace’.⁹³ Cave paintings from Spain show warriors carrying bows and arrows, the leader marked out by a more fancy headdress. Other paintings show archers arrayed into a firing line. ‘The appearance of the column and line, which imply command and organisation, is synonymous with the invention of tactics.’⁹⁴ Other paintings depict what appears to be protective clothing – armour – over the warriors’ knees, genitals and shoulders. Slings are shown being used at Çatal Hüyük and the spread of fortified sites took place all over the Middle East from 8000–4000 BC.⁹⁵ There was no golden age of peace.

By the time of the New Kingdom in Egypt, the pharaohs could put armies of up to 20,000 in the field. This implied vast organisation and logistical support. For comparison, at Agincourt (1415) 6,000–7,000 Englishmen defeated a French force of 25,000 and in the battle of New Orleans (1815) 4,000 Americans defeated 9,000 British troops. The introduction of the chariot meant that rapid reaction was more necessary than ever, which in turn provoked the idea of standing armies. In Egypt the army comprised professional soldiers, foreign mercenaries (Nubians, in this case) and, sometimes, conscripts. The title, ‘overseer of soldiers’ was equivalent to our term ‘general’, of whom, at any one time, there were about fifteen.⁹⁶ Conscripts were recruited by special officers who toured the country and were empowered to take one in a hundred men. Assyria’s awesome power as a fighting nation was due to two factors over and above the chariot: iron and cavalry. Iron, in particular the Assyrians’ discovery of how to introduce carbon into red-hot iron to produce carburised, or steel-like, iron, favoured the development of the sword – with a sharp edge – as opposed to the dagger, with a point.⁹⁷

Given that the horse was not indigenous to Assyria, the measures they adopted to acquire animals were extraordinary. This was revealed in 1974 by Nicholas Postgate, a professor at Cambridge, in his Taxation and Conscription in the Assyrian Empire. He showed that around 2,000 ‘horse reports’ were written daily, addressed to the king, who had two men in every province specifically searching out horses and transporting them to the capital. Collectively, these agents, or musarkisus, sent around one hundred animals per day to Nineveh over a period of three months. Nearly three thousand animals are mentioned in the Horse Reports, of which 1,840 are ‘yoke’ or chariot horses, and 787 are riding or cavalry horses. ‘Though the Assyrians were the classic charioteers of all time, the more mobile cavalry would soon displace them, and from around 1200 BC formed the elite of the world’s armies until the arrival of the tank in the First World War, in 1918.’⁹⁸

One of the duties of the king in Mesopotamia was the administration of justice. (In the early cities, injustice was considered an offence against the gods.⁹⁹) For centuries, it was thought that the most ancient laws in the world were those of the Old Testament, concerning Moses. At the start of the twentieth century, however, this idea was overturned, when French archaeologists excavating at Susa in south-west Iran in 1901 and 1902 unearthed a black basalt stele over eight feet high (now in the Louvre), which proved to be inscribed with the law code of the Babylonian king, Hammurabi, who ruled early in the second millennium. The upper section showed the king praying to a god, either Marduk, the sun-god, or Shamash, the god of justice, seated on a throne. The rest of the stone, front and back, was carved with horizontal columns of the most beautiful cuneiform.¹⁰⁰ Since the French discovery, the origins of law have been pushed back a number of times but it suits us to consider this sequence in reverse order because the evolution of legal concepts becomes clearer.

Hammurabi (1792–1750 BC) was an adventurous and successful king. His capital was at Babylon, where he centralised the local cults in the worship of Marduk.¹⁰¹ As part of this he simplified and unified the bureaucracy throughout his realm, including the legal system. Altogether, nearly three hundred laws are now known from Hammurabi’s code, sandwiched between a prologue and an epilogue. They are arranged in this way: offences against property (twenty sections), trade and commercial transactions (nearly forty sections), the family (sixty-eight sections, covering adultery, concubinage, desertion, divorce, incest, adoption, inheritance), wages and rates of hire (ten sections), ownership of slaves (five sections). Hammurabi’s laws, as H. W. F. Saggs tells us, take one of two forms, apodictic and casuistic. Apodictic laws are absolute prohibitions, such as ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Casuistic laws are of the type: ‘If a man delivers to his neighbour money or goods to keep, and it is stolen out of the man’s house, then, if the thief is found, he shall pay double.’ The prologue makes it plain that Hammurabi’s laws were intended to be exhibited in public, where citizens could read them, or have them read out.¹⁰² They are not what we would understand as statutes: they are royal decisions, a range of typical examples rather than a formal statement of principles. Hammurabi meant the code to apply across all of Babylonia, replacing earlier local laws that differed from area to area.

From the code we can see that, legally speaking, Babylonian society was split into three classes: free men (awelu), mushkenu, and slaves (wardu). The mushkenu were privileged, in that some military or civilian duty was performed in exchange for certain advantages. For instance, the fee for a life-saving operation was set at ten shekels of silver for an awelum, five for a mushkenum and two for a slave (§§ 215–217). Similarly, ‘if a man has pierced the eye of an awelum, they shall pierce his eye’, but ‘if he has pierced the eye or broken the bone of a mushkenum, he shall pay one mina of silver’ (§§ 196–198). Punishments were cruel by our standards but the objectives were not so different. Family law was designed to protect women and children from arbitrary treatment and to prevent poverty and neglect. Thus, although a wife’s adultery was punishable by death, her husband could always pardon her and the king could pardon her lover. This saved them ‘from being bound together and thrown into the river’ (§ 129).¹⁰³ Just as many Sumerian and Babylonian literary narratives prefigured those in the Bible, so did Hammurabi’s laws anticipate Moses’. For example: Hammurabi’s Laws, § 117 reads: ‘If a debt has brought about the seizure of a man and he has delivered his wife or his son or his daughter for silver, or has delivered them as persons distrained for debt, for three years they shall serve in the house of the buyer or distrainer; in the fourth year their freedom shall be established.’ Compare that with Deuteronomy 15:12, 18: ‘If your brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall let him go from you.’

In places the Hammurabi code refers to judges and discusses the conditions under which they could be disqualified. This sounds as though they were professionals, who were paid by the state. They worked either in the temples or at the gates, in particular those dedicated to the god of justice, Shamash. However, the king was always the court of appeal, and intervened whenever he wanted to. The Babylonians were less concerned with an abstract theory of justice, and more with finding an acceptable solution that did not disrupt society. For example, the two parties in a case were required to swear they were satisfied with the verdicts and would not pursue vendetta.¹⁰⁴ When a case came before the judges, there was no advocacy, and no cross-examination. The court first examined any relevant documents and then heard statements by the accuser, the accused and any witnesses. Anyone giving evidence took an oath by the gods and if a conflict of testimony arose, it was settled by recourse to the ordeal – that is, the rival witnesses were forced to jump into the river, the idea being that the fear of divine wrath would pressure the lying party to confess. It seems to have worked, since the practice of ordeal was still in use in biblical times where it is mentioned in Numbers.¹⁰⁵

This all sounds very well organised and carefully thought out. It is important to add, therefore, that there is no direct evidence that Hammurabi’s code was ever adopted, and that no extant legal rulings of the period refer to his system.

But Hammurabi’s famous code is no longer the oldest set of laws we have. In the 1940s an earlier code, written in Sumerian, was discovered.¹⁰⁶ This had been set down by Lipit-Ishtar (1934–1924 BC) of Isin, a city which was prominent in southern Mesopotamia after the fall of Ur. It too contains a prologue which speaks of the gods raising Lipit-Ishtar to power ‘to establish justice in the land . . . to bring well-being to the people of Sumer and Akkad’. The two dozen or so laws are more limited in scope than Hammurabi’s, covering ownership of land, including theft from or damage to an orchard, runaway slaves, inheritance, betrothal and marriage, injury to hired animals. Land ownership brought privileges but also responsibilities. For example, § 11 reads: ‘If next to a man’s estate, another man’s uncultivated land lies waste and the householder has told the owner of the uncultivated land, “Because your land lies waste someone may break into my estate; safeguard your estate”, and this agreement is confirmed by him, the owner of the uncultivated land shall make good to the owner of the estate any of his property that is lost.’¹⁰⁷

In the 1950s and 1960s even earlier laws were discovered, deriving from Ur-Nammu, who founded the Third Dynasty of Ur at about 2100 BC. The fragment discovered deals with abuses in taxation and setting up standard weights and measures, but it also has a strong statement of principle, in this case to block the exploitation of the economically weak by the strong: ‘The orphan was not given over to the rich man; the widow not given over to the powerful man; the man of one shekel was not given over to the man of one mina.’¹⁰⁸ The laws of Ur-Nammu make no attempt at being a systematic code, governed by abstract legal principles. They are based on actual cases. Also, unlike the laws of Hammurabi and the Bible, there is no idea of the lex talionis, the principle of an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth, as punishment for causing bodily injury.¹⁰⁹ Talion seems to have been a more primitive form of law, despite its presence in the Bible (a relatively late document, legally speaking). In the Hittite laws (c. 1700–1600 BC), for example, the penalty for stealing a beehive was ‘exposure to a bee sting’, but this was replaced later by a fine.¹¹⁰

But again, all this may make ancient justice sound more organised, and more modern, than it really was. The earliest ‘code’ we now have is that of Uruinimgina of Lagash but he, like the others, may simply have attempted to alleviate the traditional injustices of ancient society, which were always threatening to get out of hand. Uruinimgina’s reforms, like the others, may have been as much royal propaganda as real. Kingships emerged in societies that were changing rapidly and were very competitive. Kings themselves liked to interfere in the administration of justice – it was one of the ways they showed their power. Justice was probably nowhere near as clearly organised as the idealised codes make it appear.

There is evidence of a development in abstract thought in the Mesopotamian cities. To begin with, for example, early counting systems applied only to specific commodities – i.e., the symbol for ‘three sheep’ applied only to sheep and was different from that for ‘three cows’. There was no symbol for ‘3’ in and of itself (in Umberto Eco’s well-known phrase, ‘There were no nude names in Uruk times’).¹¹¹ The same was true of measuring. Later, however, words for abstract qualities – such as number, the measurement of volume in abstract units (hollow spaces), and geometrical shapes (such as triangularity) – emerged. So too did the use of the word LU, to mean ‘human being, individual of the human species’.¹¹² Hardly less momentous was the development of the concept of private property, as evidenced by extra-mural cemeteries which, it seems, were confined to individuals from particular communities.¹¹³ Yet another important ‘first’ of the Babylonians.

It was thus in these first cities that LU, human beings, discovered a genius for art, literature, trade, law – and many other new things. We call it civilisation and we are apt to think of it as reflected in the physical remains of temples, castles and palaces that we see about us. But it was far more than that. It was a great experiment in living together, which sparked a whole new psychological experience, one that, even today, continues to excite many more of us than the alternatives. Cities have been the forcing houses of ideas, of thought, of innovation, in almost all the ways that have pushed life forward.