5. Letters and Arts
Writing—Literature—Temples and palaces—Statuary—Ceramics-Jewelry—Summary of Sumerian civilization
The startling fact in the Sumerian remains is writing. The marvelous art seems already well advanced, fit to express complex thought in commerce, poetry and religion. The oldest inscriptions are on stone, and date apparently as far back as 3600 B.C.54 Towards 3200 B.C. the clay tablet appears, and from that time on the Sumerians seem to have delighted in the great discovery. It is our good fortune that the people of Mesopotamia wrote not upon fragile, ephemeral paper in fading ink, but upon moist clay deftly impressed with the wedge-like (“cuneiform”) point of a stylus. With this malleable material the scribe kept records, executed contracts, drew up official documents, recorded property, judgments and sales, and created a culture in which the stylus became as mighty as the sword. Having completed the writing, the scribe baked the clay tablet with heat or in the sun, and made it thereby a manuscript far more durable than paper, and only less lasting than stone. This development of cuneiform script was the outstanding contribution of Sumeria to the civilizing of mankind.
Sumerian writing reads from right to left; the Babylonians were, so far as we know, the first people to write from left to right. The linear script, as we have seen, was apparently a stylized and conventionalized form of the signs and pictures painted or impressed upon primitive Sumerian pottery.* Presumably from repetition and haste over centuries of time, the original pictures were gradually contracted into signs so unlike the objects which they had once represented that they became the symbols of sounds rather than of things. We should have an analogous process in English if the picture of a bee should in time be shortened and simplified, and come to mean not a bee but the sound be, and then serve to indicate that syllable in any combination as in being. The Sumerians and Babylonians never advanced from such representation of syllables to the representation of letters—never dropped the vowel in the syllabic sign to make be mean b; it seems to have remained for the Egyptians to take this simple but revolutionary step.55
The transition from writing to literature probably required many hundreds of years. For centuries writing was a tool of commerce, a matter of contracts and bills, of shipments and receipts; and secondarily, perhaps, it was an instrument of religious record, an attempt to preserve magic formulas, ceremonial procedures, sacred legends, prayers and hymns from alteration or decay. Nevertheless, by 2700 B.C., great libraries had been formed in Sumeria; at Tello, for example, in ruins contemporary with Gudea, De Sarzac discovered a collection of over 30,000 tablets ranged oneupon another in neat and logical array.56 As early as 2000 B.C. Sumerian historians began to reconstruct the past and record the present for the edification of the future; portions of their work have come down to us not in the original form but as quotations in later Babylonian chronicles. Among the original fragments, however, is a tablet found at Nippur, bearing the Sumerian prototype of the epic of Gilgamesh, which we shall study later in its developed Babylonian expression.57 Some of the shattered tablets contain dirges of no mean power, and of significant literary form. Here at the outset appears the characteristic Near-Eastern trick of chanting repetition—many lines beginning in the same way, many clauses reiterating or illustrating the meaning of the clause before. Through these salvaged relics we see the religious origin of literature in the songs and lamentations of the priests. The first poems were not madrigals, but prayers.
Behind these apparent beginnings of culture were doubtless many centuries of development, in Sumeria and other lands. Nothing has been created, it has only grown. Just as in writing Sumeria seems to have created cuneiform, so in architecture it seems to have created at once the fundamental shapes of home and temple, column and vault and arch.58 The Sumerian peasant made his cottage by planting reeds in a square, a rectangle or a circle, bending the tops together, and binding them to form an arch, a vault or a dome;59 this, we surmise, is the simple origin, or earliest known appearance, of these architectural forms. Among the ruins of Nippur is an arched drain 5000 years old; in the royal tombs of Ur there are arches that go back to 3500 B.C., and arched doors were common at Ur 2000 B.C.60 And these were true arches: i.e., their stones were set in full voussoir fashion—each stone a wedge tapering downward tightly into place.
The richer citizens built palaces, perched on a mound sometimes forty feet above the plain, and made purposely inaccessible except by one path, so that every Sumerian’s home might be his castle. Since stone was scarce, these palaces were mostly of brick. The plain red surface of the walls was relieved by terracotta decoration in every form—spirals, chevrons, triangles, even lozenges and diapers. The inner walls were plastered and painted in simple mural style. The house was built around a central court, which gave shade and some coolness against the Mediterranean sun; for the same reason, as well as for security, the rooms opened upon this court rather than upon the outer world. Windows were a luxury, or perhaps they were not wanted. Water was drawn from wells; and an extensive system of drainage drew the waste from the residential districts of the towns. Furniture was not complex or abundant but neither was it without taste. Some beds were inlaid with metal or ivory, and occasionally, as in Egypt, armchairs flaunted feet like lions’ claws.61
For the temples stone was imported, and adorned with copper entablatures and friezes inlaid with semiprecious material. The temple of Nannar at Ur set a fashion for all Mesopotamia with pale blue enameled tiles; while its interior was paneled with rare woods like cedar and cypress, inlaid with marble, alabaster, onyx, agate and gold. Usually the most important temple in the city was not only built upon an elevation, but was topped with a ziggurat—a tower of three, four or seven stories, surrounded with a winding external stairway, and set back at every stage. Here on the heights the loftiest of the city’s gods might dwell, and here the government might find a last spiritual and physical citadel against invasion or revolt.*62
The temples were sometimes decorated with statuary of animals, heroes and gods; figures plain, blunt and powerful, but severely lacking in sculptural finish and grace. Most of the extant statues are of King Gudea, executed resolutely but crudely in resistant diorite. In the ruins of Tell-el-Ubaid, from the early Sumerian period, a copper statuette of a bull was found, much abused by the centuries, but still full of life and bovine complacency. A cow’s head in silver from the grave of Queen Shub-ad at Ur is a masterpiece that suggests a developed art too much despoiled by time to permit of our giving it its due. This is almost proved by the bas-reliefs that survive. The “Stele of the Vultures” set up by King Eannatum of Lagash, the porphyry cylinder of Ibnishar,63, the humorous caricatures (as surely they must be) of Ur-nina,64 and above all the “Victory Stele” of Naram-sin share the crudity of Sumerian sculpture, but have in them a lusty vitality of drawing and action characteristic of a young and flourishing art.
Of the pottery one may not speak so leniently. Perhaps time misleads our judgment by having preserved the worst; perhaps there were many pieces as well carved as the alabaster vessels discovered at Eridu;65 but for the most part Sumerian pottery, though turned on the wheel, is mere earthenware, and cannot compare with the vases of Elam. Better work was done by the goldsmiths. Vessels of gold, tasteful in design and delicate in finish, have been found in the earliest graves at Ur, some as old as 4000 B.C.66 The silver vase of Entemenu, now in the Louvre, is as stocky as Gudea, but is adorned with a wealth of animal imagery finely engraved.67 Best of all is the gold sheath and lapis-lazuli dagger exhumed at Ur;68 here, if one may judge from photographs,* the form almost touches perfection. The ruins have given us a great number of cylindrical seals, mostly made of precious metal or stone, with reliefs carefully carved upon a square inch or two of surface; these seem to have served the Sumerians in place of signatures, and indicate a refinement of life and manners disturbing to our naïve conception of progress as a continuous rise of man through the unfortunate cultures of the past to the unrivaled zenith of today.
Sumerian civilization may be summed up in this contrast between crude pottery and consummate jewelry; it was a synthesis of rough beginnings and occasional but brilliant mastery. Here, within the limits of our present knowledge, are the first states and empires, the first irrigation, the first use of gold and silver as standards of value, the first business contracts, the first credit system, the first code of law, the first extensive development of writing, the first stories of the Creation and the Flood, the first libraries and schools, the first literature and poetry, the first cosmetics and jewelry, the first sculpture and bas-relief, the first palaces and temples, the first ornamental metal and decorative themes, the first arch, column, vault and dome. Here, for the first known time on a large scale, appear some of the sins of civilization: slavery, despotism, ecclesiasticism, and imperialistic war. It was a life differentiated and subtle, abundant and complex. Already the natural inequality of men was producing a new degree of comfort and luxury for the strong, and a new routine of hard and disciplined labor for the rest. The theme was struck on which history would strum its myriad variations.