The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character

by Samuel Noah Kramer

THE

ISBN: 0-226-45238-7 (paperbound) LCN: 63-11398 04 03 02 01 00 99 14 15 16 O

To the UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA and its UNI...

PREFACE The year 1956 saw the publication of my book From the Tablets of Sumer, since revised, reprinted, and translated into numerous languages under the title History Begins at Sumer. It consisted of twenty-odd disparate essays united by a common theme-"firsts" in man's recorded history and culture. The book did not treat the political history of the Sumerian people or the nature of their social and economic institutions, nor did it give the reader any idea of the manner and method by which the Sumerians and their language were discovered and "resurrected." It is primarily to fill these gaps that the present book was conceived and composed. The first chapter is introductory in character; it sketches briefly the archeological and scholarly efforts which led to the decipherment of the cuneiform script, with special reference to the Sumerians and their language, and does so in a way which, it is hoped, the interested layman can follow with understanding and insigh...

detailed treatment of Sumer's political history available to date. Because of the fragmentary, elusive, and at times far from trustworthy character of the sources, not a few of the statements in this chapter are based on conjecture and surmise, and may turn out to be true only in part or even to be entirely false. To help the reader make his own judgments and decisions in the more crucial and doubtful cases, the various kinds of source material at the scholar's disposal are outlined and evaluated at the beginning of the chapter and their shortcomings, handicaps, and pitfalls pointed out. The third chapter treats the social, economic, legal, and technological aspects of Sumerian city life. Sketchy as it is, because of the relative dearth and obscurity of the pertinent sources, it could hardly have been written at all were it not for the very recent contributions of Diakonoff, Falkenstein, and Civil, the three scholars who have done so much to illuminate one aspect or another of this area of research. Chapters iv and v treat Sumerian religion ...

than has hitherto been possible, not to mention the numerous additions and corrections that are introduced in the cited translations. Chapters vi and vii, concerned with Sumerian education and character, are my own "favorites," if an author can be permitted to have favorites. Here are two aspects of Sumerian culture of which practically nothing was known until quite recently, but which, as the two chapters show, can now be sketched and treated in considerable detail. In the chapter on education, for example, will be found four Sumerian essays dealing with school life, which were almost totally unknown only fifteen years ago. Chapter vii tries a comparatively new approach in Oriental studies: it attempts to isolate, analyze, and assess the inner motives and drives which helped to create-and destroy-Sumerian civilization. Chapter viii sketches what may be termed the "legacy" of Sumer to the world and its culture. Beginning with a review of the give-and-take between the Sumerians and the other peoples of the ancient Near East, it continues with a summary of some of the more obvi...

point to a far more intimate connection between the ancient Hebrews and Sumerians than has been suspected. Finally, there are the Appendixes, especially prepared for those readers who prefer going to the original sources whenever possible; they include translations of a number of the more important documents utilized in the chapter on history, as well as several miscellaneous items which are of special interest to a book on Sumer and the Sumerians. The work is dedicated to the University of Pennsylvania and its University Museum. This may seem rather unusual and unorthodox, but the fact is that were it not for these two institutions, this book could never have been written. Not only have the university administration and faculty encouraged my researches in every way, in spite of their rather remote and esoteric character, but the University Museum and its Babylonian Collection provided me with much of the original source material on which this book is based. Its dedication to these tw...

Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Turkey and to the Director of the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul for generously making it possible for me to utilize the Sumerian literary tablets in the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient. To the two curators of the tablet collection of this museum, Muazzez cik and Hatice Kizilyay, I am particularly grateful for their unsparing and ungrudging co-operation, which has been so fruitful for Sumerological research. I am also deeply indebted to the Directorate of Antiquities of the Republic of Iraq for its generous co-operation on numerous occasions. I owe a very special debt of gratitude to the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, in East Germany, which has made it possible for me to study the Sumerian literary tablets in the Hilprecht Collection, in co-operation with its assistant curator Inez Bernhardt. To Cyril J. Gadd, formerly of the British Museum, now professor emeritus of the School of Oriental and African Studies, I wish to express my thanks for generously putting at my disposal his copies of the Sumerian literary documents from Ur,...

give my heartfelt thanks for my first fellowship, which enabled me to go to Iraq in 1929-30. To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Philosophical Society, I wish to stress, as I have in other writings, the very special debt I owe; they were "friends in need" during a crucial period in my scholarly career. And this is a fitting opportunity to mention my debt to William Foxwell Albright, who spoke warmly of my researches-still in their early stages-to the American Philosophical Society, although he and I had then never met. In recent years, the Bollingen Foundation has been most generous with a series of fellowships which have enabled me to obtain at least a minimum of scientific and clerical assistance. The Barth Foundation, too, was of some help in this respect; it provided a grant which enabled me to work for a time in the Hilprecht Collection of the Friedrich-Schiller University. Let me close by expressing my thanks to my former assistant, Edmund Gordon, whose excellent researches in Sumerian wisdom literature were available to me befo...

ways in the preparation of the manuscript and its arrangement. And my very special thanks to Gertrude Silver, a nimble and knowing typist exemplifying the Sumerian proverb: "A scribe whose hand moves as...

ILLUSTRATIONS PLATES FOLLOWING PAGE The Surroundings of Nippur Today The Ziggurat at Eridu Ur-Nanshe, King of Lagash Stele of the Vultures Head of Ur-Nammu Gudea, Ensi of Lagash Map of the City of Nippur Stele of Ur-Nammu Reconstruction of the Temple at Harmal Medical Tablet Head of a Female Statue Bearded Statuette from Khaf aje FOLLOWING PAGE Bull's Head

Chariot Drawn by Four Asses Farmers' Almanac Bas-Relief of Various Dairying Activities Three Mythological Scenes on Cylinder Seals Literary Catalogue

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Sumer, the land which came to be known in classical times as Babylonia, consists of the lower half of Mesopotamia, roughly identical with modern Iraq from north of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. It has an area of approximately 10,000 square miles, somewhat larger than the state of Massachusetts. Its climate is extremely hot and dry, and its soil, left to itself, is arid, wind-swept, and unproductive. The land is flat and river-made, and therefore has no minerals whatever and almost no stone. Except for the huge reeds in the marshes, it had no trees for timber. Here, then, was a region with "the hand of God against it," an unpromising land seemingly doomed to poverty and desolation. But the people that

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inhabited it, the Sumerians, as they came to be known by the third millennium B.C., were endowed with an unusually creative intellect and a venturesome, resolute spirit. In spite of the land's natural drawbacks, they turned Sumer into a veritable Garden of Eden and developed what was probably the first high civilization in the history of man. The people of Sumer had an unusual flair for technological invention. Even the earliest settlers had come upon the idea of irrigation, which made it possible for them to collect and channel the rich silt-laden overflow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and use it to water and fructify their fields and gardens. To make up for the dearth of minerals and stones, they learned to bake the river clay and mud, the supply of which was practically inexhaustible, into sickles, pots, plates, and jars. In lieu of the scarce building timber, they cut and dried the huge and plentiful marsh reeds, tied them into bundles or plaited them into mats, and with the help of mud-plastering fashioned them into huts and byres. Later, the Sumerians invented the brick mold for shaping and baking the ubiquitous river clay and so had no more building-material problem. They devised such useful tools, skills, and techniques as the potter's wheel, the wagon wheel, the plow, the sailboat, the arch, the vault, the dome, casting in

copper and bronze, riveting, brazing and soldering, sculpture in stone, engraving, and inlay. They originated a system of writing on clay, which was borrowed and used all over the Near East for some two thousand years. Almost all that we know of the early history of western Asia comes from the thousands of clay documents inscribed in the cuneiform script developed by the Sumerians and excavated by archeologists in the past hundred and twenty-five years. The Sumerians were remarkable not only for their material progress and technological resourcefulness, but also for their ideas, ideals, and values. Clear-sighted, levelheaded, they took a pragmatic view of life and, within the limits of their intellectual resources, rarely confused fact with fancy, wish with fulfilment, or mystery with mystification. In the course of the centuries the Sumerian sages evolved a faith and creed which in a sense "gave unto the gods what was the gods"' and recognized and accepted as inevitable mortal limitations, especially helplessness in the face of death and divine wrath. On the m...

pre-eminence and prestige, honor and recognition. The Sumerian was deeply conscious of his personal rights and resented any encroachment on them, whether by his king, his superior, or his equal. No wonder that the Sumerians were the first to compile laws and law codes, to put everything down in "black and white" in order to avoid misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and arbitrariness. While the Sumerians thus set a high value on the individual and his achievement, there was one overriding factor which fostered a strong spirit of co-operation among individuals and communities alike: the complete dependence of Sumer on irrigation for its well-being-indeed, for its very existence. Irrigation is a complicated process requiring communal effort and organization. Canals had to be dug and kept in constant repair. The water had to be divided equitably among all concerned. To ensure this, a power stronger than the individual landowner or even the single community was mandatory: hence, the growth of governmental institutions and the rise of the Sum...

military force. So that by the third millenium B.C., there is good reason to believe that Sumerian culture and civilization had penetrated, at least to some extent, as far east as India and as far west as the Mediterranean, as far south as ancient Ethiopia and as far north as the Caspian. To be sure, all this was five thousand years ago and may seem of little relevance to the study of modern man and culture. But the fact is that the land of Sumer witnessed the origin of more than one significant feature of present-day civilization. Be he philosopher or teacher, historian or poet, lawyer or reformer, statesman or politician, architect or sculptor, it is likely that modern man will find his prototype and counterpart in ancient Sumer. Admittedly, the Sumerian origin of the modern offshoot can no longer be traced with directness or certainty: the ways of cultural diffusion are manifold, intricate, and complex, and its magic touch is subtle and evanescent. Even so, it is still apparent in a Mosaic law and a Solomonic proverb, in the tears of job and a Jerusalem lament, in the sad tale of the dying man-g...

literary creations, and value motivations of the civilization created in ancient Sumer that will be briefly sketched in the following pages. First, however, a brief introductory review of the archeological "resurrection" of the Sumerians and their culture and of the decipherment of their script and language. Remarkably enough, less than a century ago not only was nothing known of Sumerian culture; the very existence of a Sumerian people and language was unsuspected. The scholars and archeologists who some hundred years ago began excavating in Mesopotamia were looking not for Sumerians but for Assyrians; these were the people about whom they had considerable, though far from accurate, information from Greek and Hebrew sources. In the case of the Sumerians, however, there was no recognizable trace of the land, or its people and language, in the entire available Biblical, classical, and postclassical literature (or at least so it was thought; see pages 297-99 for the possibility that Sumer is mentioned in the Bible under a slightly variant form). ...

responsible to some degree for the rather slow and troubled progress of Sumerological research. The decipherment of Sumerian actually came about through the decipherment of Semitic Akkadian, known in earlier days as Assyrian or Babylonian, which, like Sumerian, is written in cuneiform script. And for Akkadian in turn, the key was found in Old Persian, an Indo-European tongue spoken by the Persians and Medes who ruled Iran during much of the first millennium B.C.; for some of the rulers of the Persian Achaemenid dynasty-the name goes back to Achaemenes, the founder of the dynasty who lived about 700 B.c.-found it politic to have their cuneiform inscriptions written in three languages: Persian, their own mother tongue; Elamite, an agglutinative language spoken by the natives of western Iran whom they conquered and subjugated; and Akkadian, the Semitic tongue spoken by the Babylonians and Assyrians. This group of trilingual cuneiform inscriptions, which was roughly the counterpart of the Egyptian Rosetta stone, did not come from Iraq but from Iran, although it is Iraq that is the hom...

during the past decades (see Bibliography for specific works)-in order to give the reader at least a glimpse into the picture as a whole and at the same time to make a reverent and grateful bow to those long dead explorers, excavators, and armchair savants who unknowingly and unwittingly, and each in his own way, helped to make the writing of a book on the Sumerians possible. The resurrection of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Sumerian peoples, long buried under their desolate mounds, or tells, is an eloquent and magnificent achievement of nineteenth-century scholarship and humanism. To be sure there were isolated reports of ancient Mesopotamian ruins in the preceding centuries. In fact, as early as the twelfth century a rabbi of Tudela, in the kingdom of Navarre, by the name of Benjamin son of Jonah visited the Jews of Mosul and correctly identified the ruins in the vicinity of that city as those of ancient Nineveh, although his account was not published until the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the identification of Babylon was not made until 1616, when the Roman Piet...