2. Economic Life

The soil—Industry—Trade—Classes—Science

But Sumerian civilization remained. Sumer and Akkad still produced handicraftsmen, poets, artists, sages and saints; the culture of the southern cities passed north along the Euphrates and the Tigris to Babylonia and Assyria as the initial heritage of Mesopotamian civilization.

At the basis of this culture was a soil made fertile by the annual overflow of rivers swollen with the winter rains. The overflow was perilous as well as useful; the Sumerians learned to channel it safely through irrigating canals that ribbed and crossed their land; and they commemorated those early dangers by legends that told of a flood, and how at last the land had been separated from the waters, and mankind had been saved.²³ This irrigation system, dating from 4000 B.C., was one of the great achievements of Sumerian civilization, and certainly its foundation. Out of these carefully watered fields came abounding crops of corn, barley, spelt, dates, and many vegetables. The plough appeared early, drawn by oxen as even with us until yesterday, and already furnished with a tubular seed-drill. The gathered harvest was threshed by drawing over it great sledges of wood armed with flint teeth that cut the straw for the cattle and released the grain for men.²⁴

It was in many ways a primitive culture. The Sumerians made some use of copper and tin, and occasionally mixed them to produce bronze; now and then they went so far as to make large implements of iron.²⁵ But metal was still a luxury and a rarity. Most Sumerian tools were of flint; some, like the sickles for cutting the barley, were of clay; and certain finer articles, such as needles and awls, used ivory and bone.²⁶ Weaving was done on a large scale under the supervision of overseers appointed by the king,²⁷ after the latest fashion of governmentally controlled industry. Houses were made of reeds, usually plastered with an adobe mixture of clay and straw moistened with water and hardened by the sun; such dwellings are still easy to find in what was once Sumeria. The hut had wooden doors, revolving upon socket hinges of stone. The floors were ordinarilythe beaten earth; the roofs were arched by bending the reeds together at the top, or were made flat with mud-covered reeds stretched over crossbeams of wood. Cows, sheep, goats and pigs roamed about the dwelling in primeval comradeship with man. Water for drinking was drawn from wells.²⁸

Goods were carried chiefly by water. Since stone was rare in Sumeria it was brought up the Gulf or down the rivers, and then through numerous canals to the quays of the cities. But land transportation was developing; at Kish the Oxford Field Expedition unearthed some of the oldest wheeled vehicles known.²⁹ Here and there in the ruins are business seals bearing indications of traffic with Egypt and India.³⁰ There was no coinage yet, and trade was normally by barter; but gold and silver were already in use as standards of value, and were often accepted in exchange for goods—sometimes in the form of ingots and rings of definite worth, but generally in quantities measured by weight in each transaction. Many of the clay tablets that have brought down to us fragments of Sumerian writing are business documents, revealing a busy commercial life. One tablet speaks, with fin-de-siècle weariness, of “the city, where the tumult of man is.” Contracts had to be confirmed in writing and duly witnessed. A system of credit existed by which goods, gold or silver might be borrowed, interest to be paid in the same material as the loan, and at rates ranging from 15 to 33% per annum.³¹ Since the stability of a society may be partly measured by inverse relation with the rate of interest, we may suspect that Sumerian business, like ours, lived in an atmosphere of economic and political uncertainty and doubt.

Gold and silver have been found abundantly in the tombs, not only as jewelry, but as vessels, weapons, ornaments, even as tools. Rich and poor were stratified into many classes and gradations; slavery was highly developed, and property rights were already sacred.³² Between the rich and the poor a middle class took form, composed of small-business men, scholars, physicians and priests. Medicine flourished, and had a specific for every disease; but it was still bound up with theology, and admitted that sickness, being due to possession by evil spirits, could never be cured without the exorcising of these demons. A calendar of uncertain age and origin divided the year into lunar months, adding a month every three or four years to reconcile the calendar with the seasons and the sun. Each city gave its own names to the months.³³