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IV - Sumer - Where Civilization Began
Usually depicted in artful statues and statuettes in a devotional stance (Fig. 28), it was the Sumerians who were the first ones to record and describe past events and tell the tales of their gods.
It was there, in the fertile plain watered by the great Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, that Mankind’s first known civilization blossomed out some 6,000 years ago - "suddenly," "unexpectedly," "with stunning abruptness," according to all scholars.
It was a civilization to which we owe, to this day, virtually every ‘First’ of what we deem essential to an advanced civilization:
... it was all first there, in Sumer.
The long and arduous road by which ancient Sumer moved from
complete obscurity to an awed appreciation of its grandeur has a
number of milestones bearing the names of scholars who had made the
journey possible.
Figure 28
Others, who pieced together and classified fragmented artifacts ' during a century and a half of Mesopotamian archaeology, are too many to be listed.
Their work was crucial, for while the usual pattern of archaeological and ethnographic discovery has been to find a people’s remains and then decipher their written records (if they had them), in the case of the Sumerians recognition of their language - even its decipherment - preceded the discovery of their land, Sumer (the common English spelling, rather than Shumer).
And it was not because the language, ‘Sumerian’, preceded its people; on the contrary - it was because the language and its script lingered on after Sumer was long gone - just as Latin and its script had outlived the Roman empire thousands of years later.
His statement was borne out by the discovery of tablets that rendered the same text in two languages, one Akkadian and the other in the mysterious language; then the next two lines were in Akkadian and in the other language, and so on (the scholarly term for such bilingual texts is ‘interlinears’).
The idea (which was not readily accepted) was finally borne out when some of the clay tablets in the Akkadian-language libraries turned out to be bilingual ‘syllabariaV dictionaries - lists that on one side of the tablet gave a cuneiform sign in the unknown language, and a matching list on the other side in Akkadian (with the signs’ pronunciation and meaning added, Fig. 29).
All at once, archaeology obtained a dictionary of an unknown language! In addition to tablets inscribed as a kind of dictionaries, the so-called Syllabaries, various other bi-lingual tablets served as invaluable tools in deciphering the Sumerian writing and language.
The designation has been applied ever
since - although, to this day, museums and the media prefer to name
their exhibits or title their articles and programs "Babylonian" or
at best "Old Babylonian" rather than the unfamiliar "Sumerian."
The interest in Sumer and the Sumerians constituted a chronological as well as a geographical shift: From the 1st and 2nd millennia B.C. to the 3rd and 4th millennia B.C., and from northern and central Mesopotamia to its south.
That ancient settlements lay buried there was indicated not only by the numerous mounds that were scattered over the flat mudlands, mounds that resulted from layers of habitats built upon layers (called strata) of the remains of previous habitats; more intriguing were odd artifacts that local tribesmen dug up out of the mounds, showing them to the occasional European visitors.
What we know now is the result of almost 150 years of archaeological toil that brought to light, to varying degrees, Sumer’s fourteen or so major ancient centers (map, Fig. 30), virtually all of which are mentioned in the ancient texts.
He started excavating at a site locally called Tello (‘The Mound’).
The finds there were so great - and they did go to the Louvre Museum in Paris, where they fill up galleries - and so inexhaustible, that French archaeological teams kept coming back year after year to this one site for more than fifty years, through 1933.
Figure 30
Archaeological strata indicated that it had been continuously settled almost since 3800 B.C.
Sculpted wall reliefs dating from a so-called Early Dynastic Period, stone sculptures bearing inscriptions in immaculate Sumerian cuneiform (Fig. 31), and a beautiful silver vase presented by a king named Entemena to his god (Fig. 32) attested the high level of Sumerian culture millennia ago.
To top it all, more than 10,000
inscribed clay tablets were found in the city’s library (the
importance of which will be discussed later on).
Figure 31 Figure 32
Clay tablets and commemorative stone plaques recorded large construction undertakings, irrigation and canal projects (and named the kings who initiated them); there was trade with distant lands, and even conflicts with nearby cities.
The task, detailed later on, involved divine instructions given in ‘Twilight Zone’ circumstances, astronomical alignments, elaborate architecture, the importation of rare building materials from distant lands, calendrial know-how, and precise rituals - all taking place some 4,300 years ago.
The Lagash discoveries have been summed up by its last French excavator, Andre Parrot, in his book Tello (1948).
Figure 33
The French excavators of Lagash peeked at it too; but there was not much to excavate, for the ancient city that had been there was, at some time, completely destroyed by fire.
A few finds, however, helped identify that ancient city as Bad-Tibira. The ancient city’s Sumerian name, ‘Bad Tibira’, meant ‘The Metalworking Fort’; as other discoveries clarified later, Bad-Tibira was indeed considered to have been a metalworking center.
It had been known, from preceding finds in Mesopotamia, that the most important religious center in Sumer was a city called Nippur; in 1887 John Peters, a professor of Hebrew at the university, succeeded in lining up academic support at the university and financial support from individual donors to organize an "archaeological expedition" to Iraq to find Nippur.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Expedition conducted four excavation ‘campaigns’ at the site from 1888 to 1900, at first under the direction of John Peters, then under the leadership of Hermann Hilprecht, a German-born Assyriologist of international standing.
There, the remains of a high-rising ziggurat (step-pyramid) in the city’s sacred precinct (reconstruction, Fig. 35) attested its dominance above the city.
Figure 34
Called E.Kur (= ‘House which is like a mountain’), it was the main temple dedicated to Sumer’s leading god En.lil (= ‘Lord of the Command’) and his spouse Nin.lil (= ‘Lady of the Command’).
The temple, inscriptions stated, included an inner chamber in which "Tablets of Destinies" were kept.
According to several texts, the chamber was the heart of the Dur.An.Ki (= "Bond Heaven-Earth’) - a Command and Control Center of the god Enlil that connected Earth with the heavens.
Figure 35
Hilprecht planned to publish no less than twenty volumes with the tablets’ most important texts, many with "mythological" context, others dealing with mathematics and astronomy and dating back to the 3rd millennium B.C.
Among the Nippur inscriptions that were transcribed, translated and published was a remnant of the original Sumerian tale of the Deluge, naming its "Noah" Ziusudra (= ‘[His] Lifedays Prolonged’) - the equivalent of the Akkadian Utnapishtim.
The controversy, which divided Philadelphia’s highest echelons and made headlines in the New York Times, raged from 1907 to 1910.
A commission of inquiry formed by the University in the end found the accusations of professional misconduct against Hilprecht to be "unsubstantiated"; but in fact many of the Nippur tablets did end up in Constantinople/Istanbul.
Hilprecht’s private collection ended up in Jena, Hilprecht’s university town in Germany.
But due to the ever-intervening Law of Unintended Consequences, in the end it led to one of the greatest advances in Sumerology, for it provided the first job to a young epigrapher named Samuel N. Kramer who then became an outstanding ‘Sumerologist’.
The existence of walled sacred precincts, each with a skyscraping ziggurat, indicated a high level of ancient building technology that preceded and served as a model for the Babylonians and Assyrians.
The ziggurats - literally ‘That which rises high’ - rose in several steps (usually seven) to heights that could reach 90 meters.
They were built of two kinds of mud bricks - sun-dried for high-rise cores, and kiln-burned for extra strength for stairways, exteriors, and overhangs; the size, shape, and curvature of the bricks varied to fit their function; and they were held together with bitumen as mortar. (Modern laboratory tests show that kiln-burnt mud bricks are fivefold stronger than sun-dried ones.)
In lands like Canaan, where stones were used for building and lime is still used as mortar (for they lack bitumen), the reference to bricks and brick-making technology ("burn them thoroughly") and to bitumen (which seeps out of the ground in southern Mesopotamia) - represent a remarkably detailed and amazing knowledge of past events in a stone- less land like Sumer.
Uncovering ancient Sumer, the archaeologists’ spades were corroborating the Bible.
They included,
Additionally, the existence of scribal schools and temple and royal libraries indicated astounding levels of intellectual and literary achievements.
...and so on - all culled from Sumerian inscribed clay tablets.
Actual archaeological finds of artifacts, and pictorial depictions, enhance and affirm that extensive textual record.
The earliest ruins, dated to the Very Early Dynastic period, included a palace of "monumental size"; the building was columned - a rarity in Sumer. The finds in Kish included remains of wheeled wagons and metal objects. Inscriptions identified two kings by their names - Mes-alim and Lugal-Mu; it was later determined that they reigned at the start of the 3rd millennium B.C.
Among their finds were some of the earliest examples of cylinder seal impressions. (In 2004 the Field Museum launched a project to unify, digitally on computers, the more than 100,000 Kish artifacts that have been dispersed between Chicago, London, and Baghdad.)
A colleague, Theophilus Pinches, correctly identified the city as ancient Sippar - the very city of the god Shamash, mentioned by Berossus in the story of the Flood!
The accompanying inscriptions identified the king being presented to the god as King Nabu-apla-iddin, who in the 9th century B.C. refurbished the Shamash temple in Sippar.
Figure 36
The library’s texts included tablets whose colophons explicitly stated that those were copies of texts from earlier tablets coming from Nippur, from a city called Agade, and from Babylon - or found in Sippar itself; among them were tablets belonging Jo the Sumerian Atra-Hasis text!
No certain answers can be given, except to quote Berossus again:
Was the unique storage in cutout compartments a reminder of the "digging of holes" to preserve the most ancient tablets? We can only wonder.
Among its interesting features were buildings that were, without doubt, public facilities, some serving as schools with built-in mud-brick benches.
There were plenty of inscribed tablets whose contents threw light on daily life, the administration of laws, and the private ownership of houses and fields - tablets that mirrored urban life five thousand years ago. Inscribed tablets asserted that this Sumerian city had a pre-Diluvial predecessor - a place that played a key role in the events of the Deluge.
These were cylinders (mostly an inch or two in length) that were cut from a stone (often semiprecious), into which the artisan engraved a drawing, with or without accompanying writing (Fig. 37).
Figure 37
The trick was to engrave it all in reverse, as a negative, so that when it was rolled on wet clay the image was impressed as a positive - an early ‘rotary press’ invention.
These cylindrical works of art are called ‘seals’ because that was their purpose: The seal’s owner impressed it on a lump of wet clay that sealed a container of oil or wine, or on a clay envelope to seal a clay letter inside. Some seal impressions had already been found in Lagash, bearing the name of their owner; but the ones in Fara/Shuruppak exceeded 1,300 in number, and in some cases were from the earliest times.
It was there that the god Enki revealed to Utnapishtim the secret of the coming Deluge and instructed him to build the salvage boat:
(Enki, it will be recalled, was reported to have been the revealer of the gods’ secret decision also in the Sumerian text mentioned earlier.)
In Divine Encounters I have concluded, based on ancient data and modern scientific discoveries, that the Deluge was a colossal tidal wave caused by the slippage of the eastern Antarctic ice sheet off that continent.
Some of the finds did reach the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Constantinople/Istanbul, revealing that during the war years excavations in Iraq had taken place at Abu Habbah, ancient Sippar; but there was so much to uncover there, that varied excavations have continued into the 1970s - almost a full century after excavations there began.
At all times since at least 3800 B.C., it appeared, every power from Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian to Persian, Greek, and Seleucid wanted to leave a footprint at Uruk. Uruk, it was apparent, was a special place.
Another first was a pavement made of limestone blocks, part of an unusual use of stones rather than mud bricks for construction - unusual because the stones had to be brought from mountains situated more than fifty miles to the east. The archaeologists described some of the city’s stone buildings as of "monumental proportions."
By the time of its excavation it was more like an artificial mound of no less than seven strata of rebuilding.
On top, upon an artificially made platform, there stood a temple.
Called E.Anna (= ‘House/Abode of Anu’) it is also known to archaeologists as the White Temple because - another unusual feature, a first - it was painted white (Fig. 38, a reconstruction).
Next to the E.Anna were remains of two other temples.
Figure 38
One, painted red, was dedicated to the goddess In.anna, Anu’s Beloved’ (better known by her later Akkadian name Ishtar).
The other standing was a temple dedicated to the goddess Ninharsag. Without doubt, the archaeologists’ spade brought to light the city of Gilgamesh, who had reigned there circa 2750 B.C. (or even earlier by another chronology).
The archaeologists’ finds echoed literally the very words of the Epic of Gilgamesh -
Among the "small finds" in the 3200-2900 B.C. stratum were sculpted objects that were designated ‘The Most Prized’ in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad - a life-size marble sculpture of a woman’s head (Fig. 39) - nicknamed "The Lady from Uruk" - that had once been fitted with a golden headdress and eyes made of precious stones, and a large (more than 3 ft. high) sculpted alabaster vase that depicted a procession of adorants bearing gifts to a goddess.
All at once, Sumer’s art of more than 5,000 years ago matched the beauty of Greek sculpture of 2,500 years later!
One of its experts, J.E. Taylor, reported after preliminary diggings that the effort was "unproductive of any very important results." He did bring back with him some of the "unimportant" finds - some mud bricks with writing on them.
Fifty years later, two French Assyriologists determined
from those bricks that the site was ancient Eridu; its name meant
‘House in the Faraway Built’, and it was Sumer's first city.
Figure 39
As the archaeologists dug away occupation stratum after occupation stratum from the latest on top to the earliest at the bottom, they uncovered no less than seventeen levels above the first one; they could count time backward as they kept excavating: 2500 B.C., 2800 B.C., 3000 B.C., 3500 B.C.
When the spades reached the foundations of Eridu’s first temple, the date was circa 4000 B.C. Below that, the archaeologists struck virgin mud-soil.
At one end there was a pedestal, perhaps for a statue. At the other end a podium created an elevated area; the astounded excavators discovered there, at levels VI and VII, large quantities of fish bones mixed with ashes - leading to the suggestion that fish were offered there to the god.
It was he, as his autobiography and many other texts make clear, who had waded ashore from the Persian Gulf at the head of fifty Anunnaki spacemen who had come to Earth from their planet.
Customarily depicted with outpouring streams of water (Fig. 40), it was he who was the legendary Oannes. In time - as explained in the preamble of the Atra-Hasis epic - Ea was granted the epithet En.ki - ‘Lord [of] Earth’.
And it was he who had alerted Utnapishtim/Ziusudra of the coming Deluge, instructing him to build the waterproof boat and be saved.
Figure 40
Less than half preserved (Fig. 41),
this remainder of the original Sumerian Deluge record provides on
the obverse side the bottom part of the first three columns of text;
and turned over, it retains on the reverse the upper part of columns
IV-VI. The extant lines in the latter section relate how Ziusudra had been forewarned (by the god Enki) about the Deluge and the boat he was instructed to build, how the Deluge had raged for seven days and seven nights, and how the gods led by Enlil granted Ziusudra "life, like a god" - thus his name,
The obverse columns I - III, however, considerably expand the tale.
The text describes the circumstances of the Deluge and the events that preceded it. Indeed, the text harks back to the time when the Anunnaki had come to Earth and settled in the Edin - a tale that has led some to call this text The Eridu Genesis.
It was in those early
days, when the
Anunnaki brought ‘Kingship’ down from Heaven, the text asserts (in
column II) that five Cities of the Gods were founded:
Figure 41
The disclosure that some time after they had arrived on Earth - but long before the Deluge - the Anunnaki established five settlements is a major revelation; that the cities’ names, and names of their god-rulers, are stated, is quite astounding.
But what is even more amazing about this list of Cities of the Gods is that four of their sites have been found and excavated by modern archaeologists!
With the exception of Larak, whose remains have not been identified though its approximate location has been ascertained, Eridu, Bad-Tibira, Sippar, and Shuruppak have been found.
Thus, as Sumer, its cities, and its civilization have been brought back to light, not only the Deluge but events and places from before the Deluge emerged as historical reality.
For the answer - provided by the same Mesopotamian texts - we have to pull away the curtains of time and obscurity and reveal the full story of the Anunnaki,
As before, it will be the ancient texts themselves that will tell the story.
The name Shumer by which southern Mesopotamia was known in ancient times stems from Akkadian inscriptions about the kingdom of ‘Shumer and Akkad’ - a geopolitical entity formed after the installation of the Semitic-speaking Sargon I (Sharru-kin = The Righteous King’) as ruler of Greater Sumer, circa 2370 B.C.
(When the kingdom of David split up after his death to the kingdoms of Judea and Israel, the northern region was affectionately called Shomron - ‘Little Shumer’.)
The term matched the ancient Egyptian word for ‘gods’ - Neteru - which stemmed from the verb NTR and meant "to guard, to watch over."
According to Egyptian lore, the Neteru came to Egypt from Ur-Ta, the ‘Ancient Place’; their hieroglyphic symbol was a miners’ ax:
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