A few years ago, the world discovered Ea-nasir. An article by an archaeologist named Kristina Killgrove in Forbes magazine was titled “Meet the Worst Businessman of the 18th Century BC.”1 Killgrove detailed the financial problems of a merchant, Ea-nasir, who lived in a big house in the city of Ur in what is now Iraq. She made a strong case for his ineptitude, quoting from letters that he had received from unhappy customers, people who were at their wits’ end, trying to get him to send products they had been promised or refunds for goods he hadn’t delivered. Killgrove quoted one letter in full. It had been written by a man named Nanni, and it reads like an angry diatribe to a complaints department. In the middle of his letter, Nanni wrote, “Who am I that you are treating me in this manner—treating me with such contempt? . . . I have written to you to receive my money, but you have neglected [to return] it.”2
The remarkable thing about this frustrating case of incompetence is that both of the men involved have been dead for many thousands of years. Ea-nasir lived almost 3,800 years ago. Just think how long ago that is; it’s hard to wrap your mind around. He lived 2,400 years before the time of Mohammad and the beginning of Islam, 1,300 years, even, before the founding of the Roman Republic. And yet, as the article showed, we recognize Ea-nasir—he’s the vendor who fails to reply to our emails and phone calls, and any of us might have written Nanni’s letter. We just wouldn’t write it in cuneiform script on a clay tablet.
The article clearly resonated with readers and it enjoyed a flurry of interest on social media. Any number of my friends and students sent it to me. Other posts about Ea-nasir appeared, and the long-dead merchant suddenly rose to the top of the news cycle and became (if briefly) a household name. Suddenly something in my obscure field of expertise made sense to people who had been mystified about what I actually study, about what is written on the clay tablets I write and teach about.
But Ea-nasir’s file of complaint letters wasn’t a new discovery when the article appeared. The tablets were found a century ago during excavations at the ancient city of Ur in the 1920s and have been in the British Museum ever since. By the time the Forbes article came out, Ea-nasir had been discussed in at least twenty scholarly articles, the earliest in 1931.3 Already in 1967, the letter from Nanni was translated into English and included in a book called Letters from Mesopotamia.4 Ea-nasir was well known in the field of Assyriology, but he had escaped public notice, so he seemed to be a revelation. Who would have guessed that someone living so very long ago could have been so incompetent in such an ordinary way?
Here’s another surprise, though: he was not alone. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of Ea-nasirs. I don’t mean that everyone in the ancient Near East was incompetent—Ea-nasir was a standout in that respect—just that they were very human and, cumulatively, they left behind hundreds of thousands of documents to prove it. If you could have listened in at any doorway in Ur, or any door in any ancient city in the Near East during ancient times for that matter, you would have heard stories that strike a familiar note. People would have been talking about promising business deals, complicated wedding plans, long-planned trips, unfair bosses, and crazy uncles; you’d have heard arguments over dinner and lullabies at bedtime.
In this book I will take you behind many of those doors to listen in on men and women from the very ancient past. Some of them were famous in their time and wanted to be remembered; they would no doubt be delighted to know that their names have lived on so long after their deaths. Others had no way to make a mark on history; they were illiterate and powerless, subject to the whims of their employers and leaders or the vagaries of the climate and agricultural pests. But we know about them anyway.
This is because scribes wrote about the things that mattered, the things they were asked to write about. Scribes were professionals who had mastered the cuneiform script after years of training; most other people couldn’t read or write. Some of the highest-ranking scribes wrote out royal inscriptions and proclamations at the command of kings and queens—documents that were composed with an eye to impressing the gods and people in the future—but those made up just a tiny percentage of what was written. Most scribes kept track of administrative details for bureaucratic purposes. They made lists of the names of workers and the rations or monthly payments they received, names of taxpayers and the amounts of their contributions, numbers of soldiers called up for a campaign and where they came from, numbers of sheep dedicated for a particular festival, and on and on. Other scribes were hired to record contracts and write down letters, like the ones sent to Ea-nasir.
In some eras of ancient Near Eastern history we know a great deal about the political world of the leaders: kings and queens, priestesses and priests. In some eras we know very little about the rulers and their achievements, glimpsing them only tangentially. An important diplomatic mission may be revealed to us only because of the survival of an administrative text recording the requisition of a gift for a foreign ruler. In this document, the main actors are the artisan who made the gift and the functionary who requested it. In such a situation I couldn’t write a history of the dynasty if I tried—no one could. For all eras in the ancient Near East, the common people named in the lists, contracts, and letters wildly outnumber the kings and queens (though, admittedly, often the names of those commoners are all we know about them).
Ancient Near Eastern history is therefore more of a weathered mosaic than a grand narrative. Parts of it are rich with detail, others frustratingly blank. We are, no doubt, completely unaware of any number of major wars, diplomatic embassies, palace coups, and royal achievements. Our only sources of knowledge are the random documents that have been recovered from archaeological sites, and the physical contexts in which they were found. They shine a bright light on odd corners of the ancient Near Eastern world, but we often can’t even guess what might be in the documents that did not survive or have not been found yet. So I can’t claim that this book covers all the most influential people and events. Instead, we will travel through 3,000 years of history knocking on doors and settling in for a while with individuals whose lives tell us something about the time in which they lived. Some of those individuals were political and religious leaders, some were officials and scribes, and some were weavers, brickmakers, and brewers. Between them, they will help you to see the history of the ancient Near East in a more intimate way than classic political history allows.
Each of the dozens of people whose lives we will visit, in his or her own way, changed the world, from the most powerful king or priestess to the poorest tenant farmer. A direct line can sometimes be traced from their original decisions and innovations to the world we see around us now. They figured out how to live together in cities, how to bake bricks, how to keep track of the calendar, how to make sense of the night skies, how to survey a field, how to examine evidence in a court case, how to negotiate a peace treaty, how to brew beer, how to write, how to trade over long distances, how to create a school curriculum, and so much more. These things happened in other places as well, and I am not claiming that the people of the ancient Near East were the only ones who changed the world, but they were very early to the party and had a tremendous impact. In many cases these innovations were never forgotten; they were passed down from generation to generation.
You may have heard of some of the individuals you will meet in this book but, unless you are a scholar in the field of ancient Near Eastern history, I am quite sure that many of them will be completely new and surprising to you. Many of them were completely new to everyone in the modern world until recently, when ancient texts mentioning them were discovered and read. The lives of these ancient individuals were far from dull; they (like people in all eras) cared passionately about the events of their times, having no idea what the future held, and the humanity they share with us can be disarming.
It is astonishing just how much we know about some people of the ancient Near East and how deeply we can dive into their world, but it is also striking how little this knowledge has penetrated into the wider consciousness of educated people today. In contrast, other ancient cultures that shared the same general region of the world—Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome—are thoroughly familiar and are well represented in books and documentaries about ancient times. This disparity didn’t always exist. In the mid-twentieth century, several books captured the attention of a wide public with their evocative representations of ancient Near Eastern history and archaeology. These included Ur of the Chaldees by Charles Leonard Woolley,5 History Begins at Sumer by Samuel Noah Kramer,6 and Treasures of Darkness by Thorkild Jacobsen.7 The ancient Near East deserves our attention now more than ever because of the extraordinary discoveries of the past few decades, to which I will introduce you in the coming chapters.
This book begins in the city of Uruk, in southern Iraq, around 3500 BCE. Uruk was the first true city anywhere in the ancient Near East, and probably the largest city on Earth at the time. It was also where the region’s wedge-shaped cuneiform writing was invented, and where scribes first began to learn to read and write in scribal schools. We have scribes to thank for so much. Not only did they write the practical documents on clay tablets that have survived—still thoroughly legible—as both mementos and records of the eras in which they were written, but generations of scribes in school also copied important works of literature, hymns, and royal inscriptions that would otherwise be lost to us. Every document that I quote in this book, and the record of every person that we know by name and can spend time with, exists entirely because scribes wrote them down at some point and because the tablets and other written works have been discovered in the ground by archaeologists. It is lucky for us that they wrote on clay and stone, which have endured far better than the papyrus and parchment documents of some other ancient cultures.
The chapters move forward in time from Uruk in 3500 BCE, right through to the fourth century BCE, and as we arrive in each new era, we will stop to meet different people. In the earliest periods, when literacy was monopolized by the great institutions—the temples and palaces—many of the men and women we meet will be kings, queens, officials, and priestesses. As time went on, more and more people hired scribes, fell within the orbit of the great institutions, or became literate themselves, so that we can begin to visit with brickmakers, slaves, soldiers, merchants, musicians, translators, sculptors, diviners, gardeners, brewers, and people in many other professions. Each person’s story becomes a window into their era. Imagine that you could sit down with each of them over a beer (which was the drink of choice for almost everyone), in their house or at a local tavern, and could talk about their lives. You would learn so much more about their world than is possible from a general description in a survey. I hope that I have re-created the lives of each of them well enough to give you the same feeling.
Archaeology is also a crucial contributor to our understanding. The archaeological evidence—pottery, tools, ovens, jewelry, walls, canals, food remnants, anything at all that has survived in the ground—richly complements textual evidence as scholars reconstruct the past. For that matter, the cuneiform documents themselves are archaeological evidence, every one of them having been found buried after being lost and forgotten for thousands of years.
As you might imagine, much changed over the 3,000 years of history covered by this book. One language after another dominated the various regions; people migrated; technologies changed; temples and palaces lost and then regained their prominence in the economies; kingdoms came and went; cities and sometimes entire regions were abandoned but later repopulated; climate crises caused droughts and famines; epidemics ravaged populations but eventually subsided; kings presented themselves sometimes as kind shepherds and sometimes as terrifying warlords. This is not a story of progress; history never really is. For example, women had more prominence and power in society in the third millennium BCE than they did 2,000 years later. Chariots became more maneuverable but treatment of defeated enemies became harsher. A great many examples come to mind—life got better, and then it got worse, and then it got better again, and never for all groups in society at the same time.
But certain things stayed more or less the same and provide threads running through the cultures, like the strands on a loom.
One continuity was the writing system and the system of scribal training. I am limiting the regions covered in this book to those that used cuneiform writing; that is, ancient Iraq (Mesopotamia), Syria, parts of Turkey (Anatolia), northern parts of the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean coastal lands), and parts of Iran (Elam and later Persia). Occasionally cuneiform spread to other regions, such as Egypt, Bahrain (Dilmun), the Lake Van region (Urartu), and the southern Levant, in which cases these regions will make brief appearances. Scribes writing in cuneiform, mostly on clay tablets, will be our guides every step of the way.
Another continuity through the eras was people’s passionate trust in family as the bedrock of society. For most of the time, men and women had little interest in pigeonholing their friends, neighbors, or (in the case of kings) their subjects as members of particular social classes. Identification with a particular group, city, or state came and went. But one’s family was always crucial. Family also served as a metaphor for many other relationships, such as with bosses, subordinates, allies, and rulers, and it helped define hierarchies, which were always important in this era and region.
A third continuity is found in what we now think of as religion. The ancient gods and goddesses who were worshiped in Uruk when it first grew to be a city were still being worshiped when Alexander of Macedon conquered the region more than 3,000 years later. Across the Near East, almost all peoples considered everyone’s deities to be real and powerful. But they didn’t think of the deities as being part of anything that they could separate, in their minds, from the rest of life. They had no abstract concept of religion. To them, the gods and goddesses existed, they were real, they controlled everything, and they made non-negotiable demands of their human subjects. Much of life was spent discerning what they wanted, providing for them, and not getting on their bad side. Oaths provided a way to call on the gods to assess the truth of a claim and to hold people to their promises; oaths were never taken lightly. This system of thought made perfect sense and fit with the evidence of their senses. The world offered no other explanation. Government could not be extricated in even the smallest way from the world of the gods: kings ruled because the gods wanted them to and they had to expend a great deal of energy and wealth on the gods’ needs. Throughout ancient Near Eastern history, temples were home to the gods (in the form of statues) and homes to statues of the kings who worshiped them. Those temple homes often stayed in exactly the same places in the cities for thousands of years, rebuilt from time to time but almost never moved.
The kings provide a fourth continuity across time. The people of the ancient Near East believed that the gods wanted them to be ruled by kings, and in three millennia no viable alternate system of government ever developed. The kings were sometimes advised by councils, or assemblies, or high officials, and those individuals could have considerable clout, but in almost every place and time one can identify a king who was at the top of the administrative hierarchy. Theirs was a world dominated by powerful men, most of whom had inherited their power from their fathers. That said, it was also a world with plenty of powerful women, including queens who advised or even ruled with their husbands or sons. Priestesses, in particular, oversaw many of the human interactions with gods and gained authority and wealth by running vast estates belonging to temples.
We will encounter other continuities as well. Justice was always sought and corruption condemned. One reason so many documents survive is that contracts had to be drawn up for a wide variety of purposes, just in case anyone involved in a transaction needed to go to court. The ownership and use of real estate played a profound role throughout the ancient history of the region, as did the employment and payment of vast workforces by the great institutions. Wide disparities of wealth separated rich court officials from tenant farmers and manual laborers. Slavery existed in all eras (as was true in so many ancient societies), but the economies were not based on slavery. And the weavers mentioned in the title of this book played an important role in all eras. Textiles represented many things: a commodity created by workshops in palaces and temples, a valuable export, a fine art, and a lifelong occupation for just about every woman. Even those who were not professional textile workers spent many of their waking hours spinning thread for their families’ clothing. Anywhere people were living, some of them (usually women) were weaving.
Contrary to popular misconceptions, the ancient Near East was not a perpetually violent place. Wars certainly happened; in some eras they must have seemed endless to the people living through them. But diplomacy was almost always attempted before military conflicts were declared, and combatants almost always sought peace. Conquering forces often treated defeated armies and their leaders harshly but, within cities and communities, people were remarkably civil to one another. Courts existed to prevent vigilante justice, judges weighed evidence carefully, and people accepted their decisions. Laws might have prescribed harsh punishments for crimes, but most actual punishments (as reflected in written accounts of court cases) took the form of monetary fines. Throughout the millennia, random crimes against strangers seem to have been rare, happening mostly in situations outside the context of cities, for example when merchants might be robbed when traveling. Even then, the incensed kings who represented the merchants insisted on justice from the rulers of the land in which the robbery took place.
In sum, you will find that you will be visiting an unfamiliar but exciting, innovative, and generally civil and humane place in this book (excepting, that is, the behavior of some of the more brutal individuals, who seem to show up throughout history). It was a place and time that has had a huge influence on the cultures that followed it. The people of the ancient Near East developed diplomacy around the same time that they developed organized warfare, they wrote legal contracts almost as soon as they could write anything, and for the most part, they cared about their fellow humans. And they wanted to be remembered. I’m pleased to be able to play a small part in making that last wish a reality for a few dozen ancient people who had not even the vaguest notion of the future world in which their names would indeed be remembered. They deserve our attention.
A few additional notes before we go on: first, almost all the dates in the book are BCE, or Before the Common Era, also referred to as BC. Of course, the people of the time had their own ways of identifying years. Sometimes they named the years, either by a great event or the name of a high official. Sometimes they numbered the years within a particular king’s reign. The correlation between their dates and our years BCE is not set in stone; scholars are still working on perfecting the chronology. I am using dates in the so-called Middle Chronology, which is widely used and increasingly seems likely to be correct. The earliest dates in the book are the least certain, but they gradually become more reliable as one approaches the first millennium BCE. The relative order of events that historians have reconstructed is reliable, and dates in the last four chapters of the book are mostly not disputed. I have provided regnal dates for kings in parentheses after their names, if these dates are known.
Second, ancient words seem to have been pronounced pretty much the way they are spelled. I have simplified spellings in this book. For example, I haven’t distinguished between two types of “s” sound (written as “s” and “ṣ” in scholarly works), nor between two types of “t” sound (written “t” and “ṭ”). Many of the ancient Near Eastern languages included a sound similar to the “ch” in the Scottish word “loch” and written “ḫ.” It’s represented just as “h” here, except in a few cases where conventional spelling of a name has it as “kh.” An “e” at the beginning or end of a word was not silent and (at the end of a word) it did not change the sound of any earlier vowel. “E” was pronounced like the sound “ay” in “bay.” So, for example, the name of the god that was spelled Ea was pronounced “Ay-a.”
The ancient names may seem unfamiliar and perhaps difficult to remember, but I encourage you to try saying them aloud so as to get used to them. There is a cast of the main characters at the back of the book in case you need a reminder of who someone was. A few ancient Near Eastern individuals were already known from writings by Greek, Roman, or biblical authors before records from their own times were recovered. In these cases, for simplicity, I use the more familiar names, rather than the ones the individuals used during their lifetimes.
Third, I have quoted from ancient sources throughout the book so that the ancient voices can come through and tell their own tales. But because they wrote on documents that are now often fragmentary or abraded, there are places where words are missing. Such breaks in the original are identified with square brackets. Ancient words that are not translated appear in italics,8 and words in parentheses within a quote have been added to help explain the meaning.
Fourth, I should note that other cultures in adjoining regions also had rich histories with profound impacts on world history, and they were periodically in contact with the peoples on whom this book focuses, especially through trade. This included not just Egypt, Nubia, and much of the Levant, but also the Jiroft culture of Iran; the Harappan culture of the Indus Valley and later cultures of South Asia; the Minoan, Mycenaean, and later Greek cultures of the Aegean; and Magan, along with the Qedarite and other cultures of Arabia. These regions did not, however, use cuneiform as their main medium of written communication, so I made the choice not to include them in this book. This has allowed me to focus on individuals and their lives, and to trace continuities through cuneiform history. But the web of connections among ancient peoples was profound and long-lasting, with influences flowing in all directions.9
And, finally, no, Ea-nasir is not among the people featured in this book. He has had his moment in the sun—feel free to look him up online. Other ancient Near Eastern individuals were just as engaging, as you will find.