Chapter 2
When planning was underway for the Stone Cone Temple and wood had to be acquired to roof its wide hallways, it’s possible that the Urukians were not dealing with foreigners when they negotiated to buy the logs. Yes, the providers of the timber lived hundreds of miles away—far to the north up the Euphrates, near the modern border between Turkey and Syria—but they may have lived in a city that would have felt just like home to someone from Uruk. They may, in fact, have lived in a colony that had been founded by southern Mesopotamians, a place now called Habuba Kabira (its ancient name isn’t known). This may sound like science fiction—how could a people without a writing system, without any form of long-distance communication except heading out in person—have come up with the idea of colonizing a distant land hundreds of miles from home? But that is just what happened, and not just at Habuba Kabira. In the first half of the fourth millennium BCE, all across the Near East, people from Uruk were not just trading with distant lands but they were showing up, in person, and settling in.
Uruk Expansion
Map 1 The Near East, third millennium bce
Habuba Kabira seems to have been an unoccupied place next to the Euphrates with no local settlement at the time the Urukians got there.1 What was built on that empty land was a mini-Uruk, a rectangular city with an imposing (and presumably effective) city wall that was studded with square defensive towers. The two main gates on the east side of the city had guardhouses on both sides, so the colonists were well protected. They lived in tripartite-style houses that seem to have packed the area inside the walls, where they ate their meals from Uruk-style pottery, received their bread or rations in beveled-rim bowls, rolled their Uruk-style cylinder seals on clay bullae containing tokens, and even decorated some of the walls of public buildings with clay cone mosaics.2 Their city was nothing like the local settlements nearby. They were strangers there, perhaps sent specifically by the government of Uruk to set up a post on the Euphrates and to facilitate the acquisition of goods like timber and metal ores from regions farther north and west.3
Other people from Uruk chose to settle not in new colonies but in existing cities. During the previous millennium, the fifth millennium BCE, towns had flourished across the Near East during what is called the Ubaid period. These towns all had distinct local traditions in buildings, stamp seals, and some other objects, but they already were in contact with one another—the pottery of the Ubaid period was similar everywhere. So, some of the places where Uruk colonists wanted to live were already occupied, and by people with whom they probably already had relationships.
The city of Susa, to the east of Mesopotamia in what is now western Iran, was something of a twin to Uruk. There, as in Habuba Kabira, the public buildings were adorned with vertical niches and clay cones, and archaeologists found Uruk-style cylinder seals, clay bullae with tokens, beveled-rim bowls, and other Uruk-style pottery.4 It seems likely that some people from Uruk had crossed the marshy expanse that separated the Mesopotamian river valley from Susiana (the land around Susa) and had settled, bringing their material culture with them. But, unlike Habuba Kabira, Susa had existed for centuries before the Urukians got there, and after they left, the people of Susa returned to their local culture and the city remained an important metropolis for millennia afterward. The Susians were enthusiastic adopters of ideas and technologies from Uruk, but only for a limited time.
In other communities that were distant from southern Mesopotamia, a little enclave of Uruk colonists can be made out in the midst of a town; you can see them insisting on their familiar architecture and housewares, even their cone mosaics and cylinder seals, but surrounded by people who lived differently.5 And in some communities, the beveled-rim bowls or bullae with tokens that were found may just be the result of Uruk’s powerful influence, rather than a sign of the presence of actual colonists.
This explosion of Urukian culture wasn’t an empire. There’s no sign that the en of Uruk—the net-skirted priest-king who seems to have played such an important role there—was ruling these far-flung regions directly. It seems, instead, to have represented an era when the people of Uruk looked outward and set off in search of the raw materials they needed and desired, settling in areas and communities that would be useful and, ideally, not hostile to them.
On the other hand, colonization was not exclusively a peaceful process and, not surprisingly, the Urukians may have been unwelcome in some regions. In northern Syria, two cities, Tell Brak and Tell Hamoukar, seem to have been attacked right before the Uruk people settled there, around 3500 BCE. The attacks were quite possibly by their prospective colonizers.6 Both cities were thriving beforehand, with city walls and a very distinct local culture. Tell Brak at this time is well known for flat little stone figurines with schematic shoulders and giant eyes. They look like cartoon renditions of space aliens (though without noses or mouths), and they’re called “eye idols,” but no one is entirely sure whether they represent gods or not.
The Uruk colonists (if that is who attacked) fired clay balls over the wall at Hamoukar—1,200 small ones, and 120 more the size of softballs. Then they burned the buildings. They built their Uruk-style structures on top of the ruins.7 Or did they? The clay balls were pretty soft—could they have been ready for some duller purpose, such as administration? Could the fire have had another cause? It does seem telling, though, that much of the local culture was replaced after the fire.
The farthest reach of the people of Uruk seems to have been—incredibly—to Egypt. Egypt was flourishing and had already developed its own architectural and pottery styles, burial traditions, economy, and so on. This was still 1,000 years before the construction of the Great Pyramids, and the Egyptians were moving on a parallel course with the Mesopotamians toward urbanism, kingship, and writing. But during a period known as the Naqada II phase (which lasted from around 3500 to 3200 BCE), clear signs of contact with Mesopotamia began to appear in Egypt. In an ancient community at a site now called Buto, near the Mediterranean coast, colored clay cones in red, black, and white were apparently used to make mosaics.8 They could have obtained these by trade; there’s not much else in northern Egypt to suggest contact with Uruk. But farther south along the Nile the connections are clear. People in several towns adopted cylinder seals, using imported ones from Mesopotamia or making their own. They began building with mud bricks, which had not previously been a tradition in Egypt, and using them to create Mesopotamian-looking monumental buildings with lines of vertical niches. The classic façade of an Egyptian palace retained these niches for centuries.
Some Egyptian artisans even incorporated Mesopotamian motifs into artworks—a man flanked by two rearing animals, for example, or a high-prowed Mesopotamian boat.9 No Uruk colony has been found among the Egyptian sites, but it does seem likely that Urukians were living there somewhere, if temporarily, as they did in other cities across the Near East. A fascinating, but perhaps unlikely, theory is that people from Uruk sailed their high-prowed boats south down the Euphrates, continuing through the Persian Gulf and right around Arabia, then north along the Red Sea, disembarking somewhere on its western shores and trekking across the desert to Upper Egypt.10 This is an almost incomprehensibly long and difficult sea journey for such an early period, but it would at least explain how Uruk period objects wound up in the Nile river valley while leaving the northern part of Egypt unaffected (other than those few clay cones from Buto). Perhaps it is more likely that the influence on Egypt came through western Syria, rather than directly from Uruk.11 In this scenario, Urukian goods from Habuba Kabira passed westward to the Syrian coast, were traded south through the Levant (the lands that border the eastern shores of the Mediterranean) to Egypt, and from there up the Nile.
No matter how it happened, or what exact form the various colonies and communities took, the people of Uruk had a tremendous impact on people living all across the Near East and into Egypt during the same few centuries that their hometown was growing into an impressive city.
The Eanna in Later Centuries
At the beginning of Level IV at Uruk, many new monumental buildings were constructed in the sacred precinct of the Eanna in the heart of the city.12 By now, the complex was immense; it covered about 9 hectares (22 acres).13 To give you a sense of scale, that is an area about three times larger than the much later acropolis in Athens. The buildings in the temenos area were designated by the excavators as Building A, Building B, Building C, and so on, but it’s unclear which were temples, which (if any) were palaces, which (if any) were open to the public, and which were private—just for priests and officials.
At this point, around 3300 BCE, a visitor might have approached the new structures by walking past the brick tomb that incorporated the ruins of the Stone Cone Temple. Many of the buildings featured crisp buttresses separated by niches that created the same striped exterior appearance as the wall around the earlier Stone Cone Temple. These types of buttresses were a distinctive feature of Mesopotamian temple architecture for centuries to come. Everything was now built of mudbrick; there was not a concrete wall or a stone cone to be found.
A visitor might have been struck by how accessible it all seemed. There were, for example, three or more doorways on each of the long sides of every building—and once you ventured inside a building, into the shady interior, multiple doorways allowed entry into the main hallway, one from each of the side rooms.14 The builders don’t seem to have been preoccupied with defending the structures. Although the temple precinct as a whole was walled, within it, people could move easily between one building and another, and there were many entry points to the heart of each structure. Unlike later Mesopotamian temples, each of which had a holy shrine usually accessed by just one door and open to only a few high-ranking priests and priestesses, the Eanna buildings, including whichever one was the main temple, seem to have been open and inviting.
Many of them were decorated with the same type of cone mosaics first created in the Stone Cone Temple. But the builders had found that they could create the same dazzling visual effect, which had previously been achieved with stone cones, by using baked clay cones with painted ends. (These, sadly, have faded over the millennia and don’t retain the vivid colors of the stone cones or the glazed cones of the Stone Cone Temple.) In one courtyard area, a row of large columns with no spaces between them each had a different mosaic design, alternating big diamonds, then zig-zag lines, then small triangles, back to big diamonds, and so on. The effect would have been almost dizzying.15
The entire complex was beautifully designed. Nothing about it was slipshod or incomplete; details had been considered carefully and executed with masterly artistry. The complex was an appropriately spectacular home for Inana, and she continued to live there for thousands of years.
Beginning of Writing
As the Level IV buildings rose, and their halls filled with priests, priestesses, artisans, workers, and administrators, all the work of running the Eanna must have become a growing headache for those in charge. The people who worked for the temple and its estates had to be provided with payment or rations, and any number of administrative details had to be committed to memory: the amounts of crops produced by the fields, the numbers of animals in the herds, the quantities of goods to be presented to the goddess, and countless other details. At some point, someone in power came up with a system to help keep track of things. Clay tablets used for this system were found in Uruk, within the Eanna, discarded in trash heaps after they were no longer useful.
With the benefit of hindsight, we moderns herald these clay tablets as representing the first writing (and the tablets found in the Eanna do indeed seem to have been the earliest in the Near East). It seems like a great leap forward. People were beginning to commit words to written form! But the truth is that this early system had little in common with what writing later became. It did not, in fact, represent an attempt to record language, nor was it a system used to express ideas.16 The signs did not even appear in the order in which words were spoken. They had more in common with clay tokens and bullae than with the words on this page that you are reading. The system the Uruk people created has been dubbed “proto-cuneiform,” because the later script is known as cuneiform, but the people who developed it had no idea that their innovation was “proto” anything, that it would develop further in the future. It was simply a useful tool that one could use to keep track of commodities, and it worked fine.
The date when those first proto-cuneiform tablets were written is unclear; we only know that they were thrown away as useless trash at a time when the Stone Cone Temple was no longer in use but the later Eanna temples were thriving. Scholars have suggested that the first ones might have been written as early as 3500 BCE,17 or as late as 3200 BCE (though the latter seems too late, given the level in which they were found).
Whatever the date, the new system for recording administrative details met a pressing need. In an influential book published in 1992, Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, proposed that the tokens and clay balls of earlier periods were precursors to writing, that administrators had moved from placing clay tokens inside bullae, first to creating the same record by pressing the clay tokens on a clay lump without it having to be hollow, and next to pressing the end of a stylus onto clay to indicate numbers and drawing pictures (sometimes pictures of the tokens) with a sharp point, to indicate nouns.18 It’s an ingenious theory that has influenced scholars in this field for decades. Archaeologists working at the site of Tell Sabi Abyad, far from Uruk in north Syria, have found tokens used as some kind of counting device as early as 6000 BCE, though they didn’t see any sign of them evolving or increasing over time.19 What is clear is that, by the early Uruk period, the way administrators thought about numbers and commodities when using tokens was very similar to the way they thought about numbers and commodities when using proto-cuneiform.20 Neither system really had anything to do with language.
On the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets, the administrators included numerical signs impressed with a stylus, in various shapes, with no indication of what was being counted. After a while, they began to divide up the surface of the clay tablet with incised lines, and to add pictograms to identify commodities (see Fig. 2.1). Each box on the front of the tablet—the obverse—usually contained a number and a picture. Some of these were little sketches of the thing being tracked—a fish, a stalk of grain, or a pot, for example—and some reproduced the shape of a token that had been used for a commodity, such as a circle with a cross in it, to represent “sheep.” Signs sometimes also indicated the profession or name of a person, perhaps the one receiving the things listed. The back of the tablet usually featured nothing more than the sum total of the goods shown on the front.
Fig. 2.1 Proto-cuneiform tablet with seal impressions, recording the distribution of barley, c. 3100–2900 bce. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
The vast majority of proto-cuneiform tablets found in the debris at Uruk comprised administrative lists of goods and people, lists that were produced during the day-to-day running of the temples. Most recorded a single set of transactions, and a few combined information from several of the smaller tablets into a larger ledger.21 The tablets aren’t completely deciphered yet, but it’s clear that the mechanisms of the administration were already quite sophisticated.22
The goods listed can tell us quite a bit about life in the temple storerooms, and more broadly in the city of Uruk during this period. Not surprisingly, wheat and barley are mentioned a great deal, and a lot of it was distributed as rations for workers employed by the temple.23 The ration system took a person’s status into consideration: supervisors received more than ordinary male workers, who in turn received more than women. The temple also dealt with dairy products24 and with meat.25 Higher-ranking individuals again got preferred treatment in distributions of meat, which seems to have been provided for feasts. A striking revelation from these apparently dull lists is just how centralized the economy seems to have been at such an early time. The temple employed and provided for a great many people and must have had a lot of food stored in granaries and warehouses.
Not all of the tablets pertained to food and animals, though. Many others recorded the production of textiles made of wool. Each of fifteen different types of sheep was identified with its own pictogram, including one that was specified to be the “wool sheep.”26 Over time, as you will see in later chapters, cloth became one of the most important exports from Mesopotamia. Already, right at the beginning of urban culture, its production was at least partly controlled by the temples, and it was essential to the Mesopotamian economy.27 Prior to the Uruk period, linen seems to have been more commonly used as a fabric, but it was more labor-intensive to make than wool, and it was made from flax plants that had to be grown in fields that could otherwise have produced food. Sheep, in contrast, could graze in lands that weren’t at all suitable for agriculture, so once some types of sheep had been bred to produce wool that could be spun and woven, cloth production switched overwhelmingly to wool.28
Fortunately for us, all of this production was being tracked by officials, using clay tablets impressed with proto-cuneiform pictograms and number signs. Without them, we would know little about the remarkable mechanisms that had been created to make everything work smoothly.
Who were the people of Uruk? A pictogram can be read in any language, so it’s impossible to be sure of the language spoken by the users of proto-cuneiform. Over the centuries that the signs were in use, the pictograms gradually became less like drawings. The reed stylus that they used in order to write had a tip much like the square end of a modern mass-produced wooden chopstick. If you press the edge of the square end into clay it makes a sharp line, with a little triangle at the top, and if you press the corner into the clay it just makes the triangle. Hurried scribes found that they could make the shapes of the pictograms out of straight lines and triangles by pressing the stylus into clay in this way. At some point, the signs, each made of combinations of lines and triangles, were no longer recognizable as anything at all. They were no longer pictograms.
The thing that strikes a viewer most about these more developed signs is the omnipresence of the triangle shapes. They give the script a rather extravagant look, like a medieval manuscript on steroids—there seem to be triangles everywhere. But they were not unnecessary curlicues. They were all needed in order for signs to be distinguished from one another. In the late seventeenth century of our era a German physician and world traveler named Engelbert Kämpfer spent time in Persia and produced a beautiful copy of an example of this wedge-shaped writing (though one written long after the Uruk period). The script wasn’t deciphered in his lifetime, so he never knew what it recorded, but he came up with a name for it: “cuneiform,” because “cuneus” means wedge in Latin. The term stuck.29
The users of proto-cuneiform seem to have managed well with their system, even though it was very limited in its range of expressions. Number-noun-person, number-noun-person, number-noun-person. Total. Person responsible. This was enough to relieve the administrator of the burden of memorizing innumerable details, and of making vast numbers of tokens and clay balls.
There were a few words that they needed to record, though, that were not nouns. One was the verb “to return,” but there’s no obvious way to draw “return.” For this, the administrators ingeniously began to use the sign that meant “reed.” And once they did this, we can detect the language hiding behind the script. This tiny detail tells us that they were thinking and speaking in the language known as Sumerian, because the word for “reed” in Sumerian was “gi,” and that was also the word for “to return.”30 They used the sign for the sound of the word here, not the meaning of the picture, and this marked the start of writing words phonetically.
Later written documents reveal that Sumerian was the native tongue of most people in Uruk and throughout southern Mesopotamia—the area they called Sumer—during the late fourth millennium BCE and through most of the third. It continued to be the language of religion and learning long after that; Sumerian was considered to be a singularly prestigious and important language for thousands of years. Sadly, though, it left no descendants and is unrelated to any modern language.
In the proto-cuneiform system, writers used a huge number of individual signs—around 1,500.31 About a third of these have been found only once on any of the tablets, which means that these signs were used very, very rarely, because about 6,000 tablets are known. It’s possible that these singleton signs may have been made up on the spot by an official needing to record some obscure commodity. But about 100 of the signs were in frequent use, each showing up more than 100 times, and another 370 signs appear between 11 and 100 times.32 So although some signs seem to have been invented somewhat spontaneously, it’s clear that many signs formed a shared system and that the writers had learned these ones so that they could communicate with other people.
The signs that recorded numbers were also consistent—remarkably so. They were ordered in complicated numerical systems. We will come back to Mesopotamian mathematics in a later chapter, but for now you should know that it was based on the number 60, and is therefore referred to as a sexagesimal system. The main units were at what we would designate 1, 10, 60, 360 (60 × 6), 3,600 (60 × 60), and 36,000 (60 × 60 × 10). A separate numerical sign existed for each of these numbers.33 This sounds confusing, but we still use it, in a way. There are 360 degrees in a circle, 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour, because the Mesopotamians came up with this system and, in a long and convoluted way, we inherited it. The sexagesimal system works particularly well for fractions. The number 60 can be divided evenly by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, and since the Mesopotamians dealt with commodities in large numbers, fractions were in constant use and no decimal points were needed (which was good, because they hadn’t invented them). The weird thing is that, in proto-cuneiform, the sexagesimal system was used for keeping track of some things—but not for everything. Some other items were counted using a bisexagesimal system, with the units at 1, 10, 60, 120 (60 × 2), 1,200 (60 × 2 × 10), and 7,200 (60 × 2 × 60), again with separate signs for each. It got even more complicated, because different signs were used depending on what type of countable object was being counted, so that thirteen different systems of counting goods and people were in use at the same time.34
Kushim: Controller of the Barley Warehouse
The people whose names appear in the proto-cuneiform tablets from Uruk are a little like the everyday people who posed for some of the earliest photographs, thousands of years later. Suddenly, there they are, fellow humans, named, but the mark they have left on history is almost vanishingly faint. We can’t even be sure how to pronounce their names. But their appearance on the clay tablets testifies to the fact that they were real people who lived more than 5,000 years ago, that they were as real as you and I are, and that they were the first named individuals in history.
One such man seems to have been named Kushim—at least that’s how the signs in his name would have been read later on, when Sumerian was definitely the language being represented. Scholars were able to reconstruct some details of Kushim’s professional activities and to analyze the tablets he drew up.35 He was a high-ranking temple administrator with the official title “sanga,” who worked in the Eanna complex around 3000 BCE. We don’t know which building housed the rooms where he worked, but one can imagine him, at home in that immense complex, talking with other officials, counting jars of goods, writing and sealing tablets, and thinking through how he could get his deliveries completed.
Eighteen of the proto-cuneiform tablets found at Uruk were “signed” by him (that is, his name appears at the end) and tell us a little of what occupied his days. Kushim had a role in the distribution of ingredients for an all-important item of the Mesopotamian diet: beer. Specifically, he oversaw a warehouse and kept track of the malt and cracked barley that were kept there. Large deliveries came and went on a regular basis and had to be recorded—and almost all the grain in his domain was destined to become beer, which was essential to life, in the Mesopotamian view.36 His tablets show that beer was not just brewed at home by farmers; it was produced by the temple and was integral to the city’s economy.37
Beer had been brewed and drunk in the Near East long before scribes began writing about it, possibly as early as the Neolithic.38 Fermentation made beer safe to drink, free from the germs and impurities that could infest river water, and the alcohol content of most beers (though not all) seems to have been lower than today; people drank beer a lot. As in colonial America, and in many other places and times, low-alcohol beer was safe to drink and considered to be an important part of a meal.39 It’s possible that some Near Eastern beers had no alcohol content at all, though some types certainly were associated with drunkenness, as plenty of later tales confirm.40 We know from images on early cylinder seals that a favorite social event involved arranging chairs around a big pot of beer, gathering friends or family members together, and drinking it through long straws (see Fig. 2.2). Kushim might well have done this himself, though presumably not when he was working. Their beer must have tasted very different from its modern equivalents because it was brewed without hops but with a number of aromatic herbs and, sometimes, date syrup.41
Fig. 2.2 Cylinder seal impression showing people at a banquet drinking beer through straws, c. 2600–2350 bce. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Charged with keeping track of the vital ingredients in his warehouse, Kushim carefully wrote lists of the amounts of cracked barley and malt that were being distributed to particular individuals. Sometimes these amounts were vast. One tablet refers to a delivery of 135,000 liters of barley.42 Another, written by a scribe who worked for Kushim, detailed the ingredients that were needed for eight different types of beer, and for nine other products made of cereals. In this tablet alone, the scribe used five of the different number systems.43 Kushim’s job extended to the distribution of finished beer, as well; one tablet notes that his office delivered thirty-five jars of beer, of three different types, to a single person.44 Kushim did have an Achilles heel, though. He was a powerful man, but he wasn’t necessarily at his best when it came to mathematics. He made quite a few mistakes in the totals that he recorded on his tablets.
Kushim, along with other administrators and scribes, must have been educated. His mathematical mistakes notwithstanding, he had learned to add, subtract, divide, and multiply, presumably in all thirteen of the different numerical systems. He had also learned to copy and memorize the hundreds of commonly used pictographic signs and numerals and to create records that could be understood by others. This would have been a lot to pick up on the job, so schools almost certainly existed to prepare aspiring administrators for their work.45 The schools might in fact have been the institutions that had systematized the script and decided on the signs that would be used in the first place.
Luckily for us, the very few tablets that weren’t written in service of the administration seem to have been products of these schools, and they provide some clues about the curriculum.46 They show that students had to write and memorize long lists of the nouns they would need during their careers; these are known as lexical lists. One of these tablets was found in Level IV of the Eanna temple complex and featured a list of professions.47 It’s small, just 8.7 by 6.1 centimeters (3.4 by 2.4 inches) in size, but was divided into four vertical columns on each side, with nine or ten boxes per column, and each box included the number one, followed by the sign for an occupation. These are listed in hierarchical order from the most important functionaries to the least. At the top, where you might have expected to find the en, the most powerful man in Uruk, is instead the nameshda, who seems to have been the top-ranked official.48 Curiously, the title of en doesn’t appear. Perhaps his exalted role was in a different category entirely from those of temple officers. It’s unclear, though; the term nameshda was later equated to the word for “king,” so it could already have been one of the en’s titles.
This is far from the only known copy of this list of professions, but it is the earliest. Scribes in schools continued to copy the standard list of professions for hundreds of years after this, long after most of the professions they had to memorize were completely obsolete. Schooling, like many things in the ancient Near East, was marked by a deep conservatism, or at least this was the case after the explosion of new ideas and institutions that occurred during the Uruk period.
The same was true of the accounting system, which seems to have appeared at Uruk, almost fully realized, during Levels IV and III. For thousands of years after this, scribes kept on performing the same routine: they recorded exact amounts of goods in a particular consignment, along with the name of the person they would be delivered to or were being received from, and (later) the use to which they would be put, then they totaled them up, sealed the tablet, and sometimes dated it. Groups of small tablets like this were stored together. Periodically, scribes transferred the information from the small tablets to big ledgers, which were then archived.
Admittedly, not everything stayed the same as in the Uruk period. In later centuries most of the byzantine numerical schemes were simplified so that the same number signs could be used for many different weights and measures and many different goods, and the number of cuneiform signs in regular use dropped to around 600, following a fairly quick abandonment of all the eccentric, one-use-only signs. But the basic system invented by the Eanna administrators was sound. It provided Mesopotamia with the foundation for an economic system that functioned effectively for a very long time. (I should add that most subsequent administrators did better than Kushim at adding up quantities of goods.)
The Fields of the En
The earliest tablets from Level IV at Uruk have no parallels elsewhere. But tablets like the ones from Level III, which started to be written around 3100 BCE—the ones with numbers, commodities, and possible names—have shown up at a number of ancient cities, including places hundreds of miles from Uruk.49 One late Uruk period tablet from a site called Jemdet Nasr has been singled out in particular as among the most important documents in all of Mesopotamian history.50 It’s not exactly a literary masterpiece, though. It’s a list of fields, and for each field, the scribe provided its dimensions—the length, the width, the perimeter or the area of the field—along with the profession of the person who controlled it. They were all important officials. At the end, of course, is a total of all the land listed.
The first five fields listed were rectangular, of about the same large size, and three times as long as they were wide. Throughout Mesopotamian history, fields were generally long and narrow.51 The landscape seems to have been divided up pretty regularly, even at this remarkably early date. A centralized authority hides behind this fact; the division of the land was not organic or arbitrary. But this isn’t the main reason for the tablet’s importance. Those first five fields, between them, make up only one-third of the allocated land. The other two-thirds of the land are listed in a separate box, and the cuneiform sign used to identify their owner is the one that looks like a tray holding a pile of beveled rim bowls: the sign for “lord”—the en.52 This was our friend the priest-king, the man who, in Uruk, was so closely associated with the goddess Inana. In Jemdet Nasr, we see that the man in the same role controlled ten times as much land as any of the first five individuals.
This tablet provides some of the earliest proof of power and wealth being consolidated by one man, the en, in each city, and of the dramatic social stratification that was a feature of the new urban world of the Uruk period. It’s also interesting to note that among the recipients of the other fields—who included men with the titles “chief exchange agent,” “equid herder,” “chief justice,” and “priest”—was the “wife of the en.” Queens played a major role in Mesopotamian history, as you will see in future chapters. Although the “wife of the en” seems to have controlled only a tenth of the land of her husband, she was clearly an important public figure.
A whole lot of developments had been taking place at Uruk and other cities in Mesopotamia in the years leading up to 3100 BCE. We’ve already seen their advances in monumental architecture, organization and provisioning of workers, management of the economy, division of the landscape, development of a writing system, use of the wheel (and of the pottery wheel), creation of cylinder seals to identify individuals or offices, imports of large amounts of raw materials from distant lands, and development of an artistic style with figures shown in registers, as on the Uruk Vase. We’ve also seen changes in society, such as an increased separation between rich and poor, and consolidation of power by the en priest-king. But there were even more innovations. The plow was in wide use: it’s pictured on cylinder seals. Metalworking had become more sophisticated. Objects of gold, silver, and especially copper have been found in the Uruk period levels of a number of sites—metalworkers were casting utensils, tools, vessels, jewelry, and statuettes.53 To see so many changes in a relatively short time is extraordinary given the slow pace of change in culture before the Uruk period and, surprisingly, after it as well.
There’s a reason that the focal point of much of this activity was the Eanna temple complex. Many of the innovations at Uruk, probably most of them, were in the service of the goddess Inana.
How They Understood Their World and Their Deities
On the surface, life in Uruk was surprisingly similar to life today. The buildings of the Eanna would be impressive even to modern visitors if we could have visited them in their original condition. We, too, recognize the impulse to make a glorious space for the divine—a temple, church, or mosque, for example. We share a surprising number of other life experiences with people who lived in Uruk five and a half thousand years ago. We have inherited many of the same institutions: farming, trade, marriage, and taxation, for example. Like us, people in the Uruk period lived in rectangular houses that opened onto streets. Although houses haven’t been excavated at Uruk itself, we know from other Mesopotamian cities of the same period that their houses had rooms, furniture, doors, and windows (though without glass, which had not yet been invented). They cooked their meals in ovens and ate from pottery bowls. Their diet was based on bread, fish, vegetables (they loved onions and garlic), fruits, and some meat (beef, pork, lamb, goat). They drank beer. They wore clothes made of wool and linen. Sometimes their community, as a whole, got into a dispute with another one, and sometimes these disputes led to warfare. In all these ways, life hasn’t changed dramatically from earliest times. I suspect that it will change a great deal more in future and that “ancient history” will come to be seen as everything up to about the beginning of the eighteenth century CE when technology began to leap forward.
On the other hand, the ancient Near Eastern conception of the universe was completely different from ours. They would not have understood how we think, and it’s very difficult for us to understand them. Partly this is because modern science has provided us with an explanation for almost every natural phenomenon, but there’s more to it than that. How the Mesopotamians explained their world is usually termed their “religion,” but most modern religions are so different from ancient ones that we need to shed our preconceptions about religion in order to try to grasp their conceptions of the divine.
Some of what they experienced in life was predictable, even beautiful, in its regularity and orderliness, such as the way the sun rose, without fail, every morning; the way the moon waxed and waned, without fail, every 29½ days; the way the seasons reliably shifted through the year; the way the rivers provided an endless source of fresh water to sustain crops. On the other hand, the people of Mesopotamia during the Uruk period—actually, the people of the whole Near East throughout ancient history—were confronted with any number of inexplicable phenomena, many of which could cause them immense grief and loss. Flood damage, dust storms, epidemics, crop diseases, swarms of locusts, earthquakes, droughts—humans did nothing to bring these on. How could they be explained? How could they be prevented? In every family, loved ones got ill and died, sometimes in infancy, sometimes in old age, or at any time in between. Why?
The answer to all these questions was so obvious to them that it didn’t need a book or a creed to explain it. The peoples of the ancient Near East didn’t even have a word for religion; the source of all these phenomena was as much a part of the observable world as was a tree or a river. Think of it this way: people could see causes and effects in the things they themselves did every day; a human could plant crops in a field, tear down a house, or eat a meal. The outcomes of these actions were obvious—plants grew, walls fell, hunger was satiated. So, something, or someone, must be causing the phenomena that humans didn’t control, and it was clear that this someone (or someones) lived longer than any human and had vastly more power. It was also clear to the people that there were many of these powerful beings. The one that provided water for their crops was not the same one that caused the sun to rise in the eastern sky every morning, and so on. These powerful beings were real and they were everywhere. They also seemed to have human characteristics—love, anger, generosity—and at some point before the Uruk period they had been anthropomorphized and imagined to be human in temperament and even in appearance.
To a Mesopotamian, family was all-important, as was respect for hierarchy. Parents cared for their children; children obeyed and respected their parents; siblings watched out for one another and could be relied upon to be there when needed. A workplace emulated a family, with the supervisor as the father. So, later, did a state, but with the king as the father. It’s not surprising, then, that gods and goddesses (because that is what the powerful beings obviously were) had families—husbands, wives, and children—and that some had more clout than others. It was the gods’ universe, and humans represented nothing more than a cosmic afterthought, far down in the hierarchy, as slaves to the immortals. The gods and goddesses had created the universe for themselves. Humans could enjoy its gifts, taking advantage of the food, water, and raw materials available to them, but their lives were subject to the whims of their unseen masters. And when these masters decided to unleash erratic storms of chaos from time to time, humans just had to ride them out and try to survive.
Throughout the ancient Near East, a few gods were worshiped almost everywhere. Four of the most important deities were just what you might expect: the heavens (called An, in the Sumerian language), the sun (Utu), the moon (Nanna), and the storm (Ishkur). They weren’t just gods of these phenomena—they were the phenomena. Each divine name was the same as the word for the realm that god controlled. There was no way to say that the sun rose without saying that the god of the sun rose. There was no way to say that a storm might be coming without invoking the name of the storm god. Not surprisingly, we have no evidence of atheists. One could no more deny the existence of the sun god than the existence of a sheep or a goat. Another major god, Enki, embodied fresh water, which was imagined to fill a great underground sea, the Abzu, and to seep up through the ground in springs. His name, curiously, does not mention water; it seems to have meant “lord of earth.” Enlil, the king of the gods, has a name that seems to mean “lord of air” though he wasn’t associated with the air or wind, at least by the time writing developed. Among the greatest of the deities, only one was female. This was Inana, to whom the Eanna temple in Uruk was dedicated. Her name seems to have originally been Ninana, meaning “Lady of Heaven,”54 hence the name of her home. Eanna meant “House of Heaven” (e meant “house,” ana meant “of heaven”).
The deities had areas of expertise, just as a human might. The sun god, Utu, was the god of justice. The storm god, Ishkur, was a warrior. The moon god Nanna helped bring fertility to animals. The freshwater god, Enki, was considered the wisest of the gods and perhaps the kindest to humans, and so on. To the north of Sumer, in central Mesopotamia, the gods had different names but the same attributes. Inana was known as Ishtar there, Utu’s name was Shamash, Nanna was Sin, Ishkur was Adad, Enki was Ea, but no one seems to have thought of these as different gods, just different names for the same familiar figures. Much later, the Greeks and Romans worshiped similar gods—anthropomorphic, related to one another in families, each having control over some specific aspect of the cosmos. In their time, too, the deities had different names in Greek than in Latin, so, for example, the god of the sea and storms was called Poseidon in Greek and Neptune in Latin.
Other gods and goddesses had local followings in the cities in which they resided. Their existence wasn’t denied by people from other regions—all deities were regarded as real—they just weren’t all that important outside their home area.
Caring for the Gods
Let us return to the Eanna temple complex, in Level IV, around 3200 BCE. Inana’s own personal shrine was not a gathering place for the people of Uruk to worship her; the goddess would not have wanted all that fuss and noise. It was the goddess’s home, and she was physically present there. Commoners might have had access to some areas, but not to the goddess herself. This was true of all major temples. Unfortunately, we can’t be sure where exactly, in the Eanna, Inana was housed. She was associated with the planet that we know as Venus, but she was present not only in the night sky. Somewhere in the Eanna was a statue of her that embodied her power, that was her, right here on Earth. The statue would have been a life-size representation of a woman, probably seated on a throne, wearing sumptuous clothes, and bedecked in jewelry. Her face was probably carved from marble.
Although we can read of countless statues of gods and goddesses that resided in temples across the Near East, and across the three and a half millennia of ancient Near Eastern history, almost none of them has survived. Except, that is, for the face of the oldest of them all, that of Inana in the Eanna temple (see Fig. 2.3). Excavators found a life-size marble face during the excavations there that is surely too carefully made to be anything but a representation of the goddess herself.55 It now resides in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad: a strikingly naturalistic marble representation of a woman whose eyes, eyebrows, and hair would have been inlaid with gold and semi-precious stones (though these inlays are lost). Her body would have been made of wood or precious metals.
Fig. 2.3 Uruk head, made of marble with missing inlays, late fourth millennium bce. (Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo)
When a priest or priestess set eyes on this figure, he or she was in the actual presence of the mighty, immortal goddess. Inana ruled over many realms—sexual love, warfare, and violence—she was volatile, and she was feared. A visitor would have brought her an offering and said a prayer. People visiting or working in the Eanna didn’t see her as a lifeless statue because, to them, the gods were absolutely real. She watched and listened. She appreciated gifts. She got hungry and thirsty. She would have been angry if she had been neglected, and no one wanted to witness what might happen then.
An unquestioning belief in the divine was the only way to account for pretty much every occurrence in one’s world. The deities caused everything from dreams, to luck (or lack thereof), to thunderstorms, to the fertility of sheep, to the movements of flocks of birds. These were shared beliefs, over the entire region.
Suppose a priestess had arrived in Uruk, having traveled from northern Mesopotamia, or Iran, or even Anatolia or Egypt. Even she would not have doubted the power of Inana. Back at home, this goddess probably had a different name, or she might not even have been worshiped at all, but this didn’t make Inana a false deity in the mind of the visiting priestess. No gods were false; all were members of a single community of gods that extended to all lands. They could not be separated from the world they controlled, and the products of that world all existed, primarily, to satisfy their needs.
For these reasons, religion, politics, society, and economy were not separate institutions in the ancient Near East; they were all bound together, because the service of the gods was all-important.56 All the deities (taking the form of their statues) needed housing, food, drink, clothing, praise, and riches, just like very demanding humans. Everyone knew this. These were some of the central demands, not just of the belief system, but of life; all people were servants of the gods, all the time. One’s role, as a human on Earth, was to serve them, placate them, provide for them, try to divine their needs, and then meet those needs. That was pretty much it.
On the other hand, the ancient Near Eastern people seem to have been unconcerned with what we would call spirituality, and it didn’t occur to them that they might be rewarded in the afterlife for virtuous acts during their lives. They believed that the gods could (and did) punish people for doing evil, but also that the gods could punish people for no reason at all, and neither of these types of punishments had anything to do with the afterlife. We will come back to the afterlife later; but whatever they may have believed about it, it was not a heaven.
Perhaps because the gods could unleash such chaos on the world, the people seem to have craved structure in their lives. They could never control disease, they could never predict weather, they could never anticipate a devastating flood, and they could die apparently for no reason at any time. What we talk about as their “religion” was an ongoing, lifelong attempt to try to tame, or at least influence, the gods and goddesses by providing for them.
They also believed that the gods planted clues about their plans in the world around them, which constituted a form of advice for humans. Specially trained diviners could decipher the clues. By following this advice and providing for the gods, the people hoped that the gods would, in return, be kind, or at least leave them alone. We will come back to diviners as well, in a later era when their activities can be traced in the documents they wrote.57
It followed that, as Uruk grew and prospered, the people who lived there would have seen its prosperity as a sign of divine favor, specifically from the goddess Inana and the god An who lived right there in the city among them. Every city had a resident god who was particularly venerated and whose temple was also his or her physical home. Uruk had these two resident deities, An and Inana, probably because two earlier villages had merged to become a single city.
The people were compelled to share their prosperity by creating ever bigger and grander homes for the two deities and working to expand the gods’ estates and wealth. In a way, they had no choice. The Eanna was more than Inana’s temple, more than the complex of shrines and buildings created for her in the center of the city; it was a vast economic and social institution, supported by its farms, herds of animals, orchards, and fisheries, and run by hundreds of workers, from shepherds to plowmen, weaving women to cooks, brewers to barbers.58 It’s possible that some land in the territory of Uruk was privately owned, but the evidence suggests that the gods were the main landowners and employers in the city. To Urukian minds, this was as it should be. The people believed that the gods had originally constructed the city and its temples for themselves, long before humans were even thought of. It was their land; humans only lived there because they were useful to the gods.