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8. The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities — Transcript

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0:14In the year 1625, an Italian nobleman named Pietro della
0:19Valle went on a tour of the Middle East.
0:24Della Valle was a prolific traveller. He journeyed around Asia, North Africa,
0:30and even India. He married an Assyrian Christian
0:34princess in Damascus, and now the two of them traveled
0:37together, journeying by horseback and camel,
0:41accompanied by local guides. At this time, travel in this region
0:47couldn't have been more dangerous. The Ottoman and Persian Empires were at
0:52war, fighting over who would rule in Baghdad,
0:56and meanwhile, local bandits took advantage of the chaos to prey on
1:01travelers. In those days, lions even roamed in these
1:06hills. Due to these various dangers, Della
1:10Valle's guides were constantly on edge. It was June the 18th,
1:161625, when they spotted a distant group of tribesmen
1:21on the horizon. Their guides decided that they might be in danger, and
1:26began to search for a place to hide. In the distance, they spotted the looming
1:33mass of a series of enormous ruins, as Della
1:37Valle later wrote in his memoirs.
1:42Being suspicious to some Arabian vagrants or vagabonds,
1:45for more security we removed a mile further,
1:48and took up our station under a little hill near some ruins of buildings
1:53which we saw from far away.
1:57Della Valle’s group stayed in those ruins for several nights
2:01while their guides negotiated with the local ruler,
2:04asking for safe passage. During the day, under the baking Iraqi
2:10sun, Della Valle passed his time by walking
2:14among those monumental ruins.
2:19Our removal hence being still deferred, I went in the forenoon to take a more
2:23diligent view of the ruins of the above said ancient
2:27building. What it had been, I could not understand,
2:31but I had found it to have been built with very good bricks,
2:35most of which were stamped with certain unknown letters which appeared very
2:40ancient. I observed that they had been cemented
2:43together not with lime, but with bitumen or pitch.
2:47Della Valle was fascinated by the broken fragments of writing that littered the
2:52ground of this ruined place. He explored further and wrote down some
2:57of the symbols that he saw again and again stamped
3:01into the stones and pieces of clay brick. Surveying the ruins again, I found on the
3:09ground some pieces of black marble, hard and fine, engraven
3:14with the same letters as the bricks which seemed to me to be a kind of seal.
3:20Amongst other symbols which I discovered in that short time,
3:23two I found in many places. One was like a pyramid, and the other
3:29resembled a star of eight points.
3:34Della Valle and his wife didn't know it, but they had stumbled
3:38across the ruins of Ur, a city that had formed the center of one of
3:43mankind's first civilizations. This society
3:48was known as Sumer, and it was where so much of the world we know today first
3:54began.
3:57Eventually, negotiations with the local leader
4:01fell apart, and Della Valle's guides no longer felt safe camped out there in
4:06the ruins. They departed in the dead of night and
4:10fled to safety across the desert. In Della Valle’s bags were a few of the
4:16clay tablets that he had found scattered around the
4:20ruins of Ur. These would be the first examples ever
4:25seen in Europe of a language that had been dead and
4:28forgotten for thousands of years. All the way home, Della Valle must have
4:35turned those tablets over in his hands, gazed at their mysterious ancient
4:40symbols. He must have wondered to himself, who had
4:44built those enormous mounds of brick and earth,
4:49all alone out there in the middle of the desert?
4:52What did the symbols on those broken pieces of clay mean,
4:56and if such a great city had once stood there,
5:00what in all the world could have happened to it?
5:36My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations
5:40podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of
5:44the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of
5:48history. I want to ask, what did they have in
5:52common? What led to their fall, and what did it
5:55feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end
6:00of their world?
6:03In this episode, I want to go back to the very beginning
6:07and look at a society that is one of the candidates
6:10for the first-ever technological human civilization.
6:15These are the people of Sumer who we call the Sumerians. I want to show how,
6:23over the course of millennia, the Sumerians would build a society
6:27that would form the blueprint for all that followed after.
6:31I want to show how they rose to invent writing,
6:34mathematics, and the wheel, and built the largest cities that humanity
6:39had ever seen. I want to explore what happened
6:43to cause their final and devastating collapse.
6:56In the highlands of Southeastern Turkey, a range of snow-topped limestone peaks
7:03rise over 3,000 meters above the flat plains beneath.
7:09These are the Taurus mountains. The mountains of Turkey rise so sharply
7:16that rain clouds find it difficult to pass over them.
7:20Instead, these clouds pool in their hollows and valleys,
7:24and give these hills an exceptionally high rate of annual rainfall.
7:30In spring and summer, the warm air means that the clouds are even denser,
7:36and violent thunderstorms rock these mountains, too,
7:40echoing of the stones of the valleys. As a result, this is a landscape shaped
7:47by water. The steep sides of the Taurus mountains
7:51have been eroded to form streams and waterfalls, while underground
7:56rivers have cut into the rock and hollowed out
7:59some of the largest caves in Asia.
8:04Just as it has shaped the rocks, water has also shaped the beliefs
8:09of this region's people. The name of these mountains,
8:14Taurus, comes from the Latin word for bull,
8:17and the reason for this isn't hard to see.
8:20Temples have been unearthed all across these mountains,
8:24decorated with terracotta statues of bulls.
8:29Since ancient times, the people who lived here worshipped the storm god
8:33Teshub. They believed he rode on the back of a bull,
8:38perhaps because the sound of the thunderstorms reminded them
8:42of the thumping of enormous hooves.
8:49Accompanied with the cracking and booming of these thunderstorms,
8:53these heavy spring rains drain into streams,
8:57and join rivers already flowing down from the snowy mountain passes of
9:02Armenia. Soon, these small rivers join together
9:07and flow down from the mountains and out onto the wide, flat plains
9:12beneath in two great majestic watercourses
9:16that run together in near parallel for nearly 2,000
9:20kilometers. The vast floodplain of these rivers
9:25is today the land we call Iraq. In Arabic, this area is called Bilad
9:32al-Rafidayn, the land of the two rivers. In the
9:36west, it has been known since ancient times
9:39by its Greek name, combining the words mesos,
9:43or middle, and potamos, or river. Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers.
9:52These two great waterways are known as the Tigris and the Euphrates.
10:00For millennia, these rivers have brought life
10:03down into the flat floodplain of Iraq, and the source of that life comes from
10:08some of the most lifeless things; the rocks of the mountains themselves.
10:16Virtually all rocks are held together with tiny flecks of two different
10:21materials called quartz and feldspar.
10:25Quartz is a clear, glittering crystal formed from oxygen and silicon,
10:30while feldspar is a complex mineral derived from silicon.
10:36Together, they make up over 60 percent of the earth's crust,
10:41and when rivers cut their roots through the mountain gullies
10:44and underground streams, their waters wash
10:47over the rocks, and dissolve their soluble parts.
10:51But quartz and feldspar don't dissolve in water,
10:55and so, these tiny crystals are carried along by the river
10:59in a cloud of glittering particles. We call this substance silt.
11:06Silt is sometimes known by the more poetic name,
11:10rock flower, and its particles are smaller than a grain of sand.
11:16But these tiny specks can have an enormous impact.
11:21Soil with a high silt content tends to hold water better,
11:26and promotes air circulation. For this reason, silty soil forms the
11:32perfect habitat for most plants.
11:36The rivers Tigris and Euphrates transport
11:39vast amounts of silt down into the lowlands of Iraq
11:43every year, and as a consequence, this flat stretch of otherwise arid
11:49desert has become exceptionally fertile.
11:54For the history of this region and the history of all humanity,
11:58these tiny particles would prove immensely significant.
12:12Other than its rich clay soil, the desert plains of southern Iraq
12:16are an inhospitable landscape. In fact, this is perhaps the last place you might
12:23expect the first human civilizations to arise.
12:28For one thing, the climate of this region is extremely hot
12:32and dry. Summer temperatures can reach over 52 degrees centigrade or
12:38126 degrees Fahrenheit. Rainfall is rare, especially in
12:45summer. Coupled with the strong winds that blow
12:48across these plains, this means that the soil is arid and
12:53windswept. Although the seasonal flooding of
12:57the rivers brings life to the earth, these floods are also unpredictable.
13:03In Egypt, the River Nile flows directly from the Great Lakes of Africa
13:08which act as a stabilizing and regulating force.
13:12But the Tigris and Euphrates depend on the amount of rain
13:16that fell on the mountains of Turkey, Armenia, and Kurdistan,
13:20a quantity that varies greatly from year to year.
13:25Years of drought can often be followed by years of devastating floods,
13:30and during winter, the whole plain is covered
13:33with a thick layer of mud. The region of southern Iraq is also poor
13:39in natural resources. The land is essentially nothing but a flood plain
13:45made of clay and silt. There were no metals to be mined here,
13:50and virtually no stone. Because of all these challenges,
13:54it took early humans a long time to reach
13:58this hostile environment. In the far prehistoric, archaic humans
14:05like Homo Erectus vied for survival in the upper reaches
14:09of the rivers. Archaeologists have found stone axes and
14:14other artifacts dating back to nearly half a million
14:17years ago. But the river lands of southern Iraq
14:22weren't suitable for this hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
14:26But about 13,000 years ago, things began to change.
14:32The first nomadic hunter-gatherers began to settle down
14:36in permanent villages. These early innovators
14:41had noticed something interesting; they saw that when they threw away the
14:46discarded seeds of edible plants, that same plant would later sprout out
14:51of their rubbish dumps. This gave them an idea.
14:56They realized that if you buried plant seeds in the earth,
15:00fed them and watered them, more of the same plants would grow.
15:05These were some of the first farmers, and once they found a good patch of land,
15:10they quite understandably didn't want to move.
15:15They soon built houses nearby, and storehouses to keep
15:19food through the winter. They banded together
15:22into larger communities in order to divide the labor of farming
15:26and to protect their grain should anyone else try to take it.
15:31They learned how to take the clay from the ground and shape it into pots,
15:37but they were still limited to areas where the rains were plentiful,
15:41to the mountains and the foothills. From about the year 6500 BC,
15:48these human settlements began to spread. Century by century, millennium by
15:55millennium, they worked their way down the courses
15:58of the two great rivers, and into the inhospitable land of
16:03southern Iraq. Who these people were, what language they spoke, and what they
16:11called themselves, we have no idea. Today,
16:16we call this stretch of several thousand years
16:19the Ubaid Period, named quite arbitrarily after the site where their first
16:25artifacts were found.
16:28As the Ubaid people moved down the rivers of Iraq,
16:32they began to notice other things, too. They noticed that date palms grew
16:38in some areas of the river, providing them
16:41with a rich and delicious source of calories.
16:45They soon found out that these, too, could be cultivated
16:48and planted in orchards. They also noticed that these palms
16:53could provide shade for other more fragile plants,
16:56allowing them to be grown, too, beneath the harsh Iraqi sun.
17:02They made another crucial discovery, too.
17:07They realized that they didn't have to grow their plants only on the banks of
17:11the river. With a bit of hard work, they could dig
17:15channels that diverted the life-giving water
17:18inland. Now, they could grow crops just about
17:22anywhere, so long as you could dig a canal long
17:26enough. The people of this region would soon
17:30become very good at digging canals.
17:35Worked properly in this manner, this landscape
17:38could be immensely productive. In their fields, the people here grew
17:43wheat, millet, and sesame. In gardens beneath the
17:47shade of their date palms, they also grew pomegranates, grapes, and
17:52figs, as well as chickpeas, lentils, leeks,
17:56garlic, cucumbers, and watercress.
18:02But there was one noticeable patch of green
18:05in the midst of all this desert. In the south of Iraq, the rivers Tigris
18:11and Euphrates branched into deltas and shallow lakes
18:15before they meet the ocean, creating an ancient marsh landscape.
18:21Here, dense thickets of reeds grow, so tall you can't see over the tops of
18:26them, populated with buffalo, wild boar, and marshland birds.
18:32Since ancient times, the people here have built their houses out of reeds,
18:38binding them together into incredibly strong beams of up to a meter thick,
18:43and building large, vaulted houses out of nothing but reeds.
18:48It's in this marshy southern landscape that the greatest Sumerian
18:52cities
18:54rose.
19:03Just as Mesopotamia was watered by two great rivers,
19:08its lands were also populated by two great peoples.
19:13These were the people of Sumer and the people of Akkad.
19:18Over the course of their history, the Sumerians and the Akkadians
19:22grew together in such a symbiotic way that it's impossible to tell the story
19:27of one without the other. We know
19:31a decent amount about the Akkadian people in the north.
19:35They spoke a language in the Semitic family,
19:38meaning that it's in the same language family as the Aramaic of the Bible,
19:42and later Hebrew and Arabic. This language seems to have been
19:48indigenous to the region, and it shares grammar and words with
19:52many other languages that surrounded it. But the Sumerian people are much more
19:58mysterious. In fact, they are such a mystery that
20:02they have caused archaeologists to refer to what's called The Sumerian Problem.
20:09Sumerians spoke what we call a language isolate.
20:14That is, it has no relation to any of the languages around it,
20:18and it's essentially in a language family all of its own.
20:23Sumerian was so alien to the region that early scholars who discovered its first
20:28texts didn't believe it could be a real language at all.
20:32They thought it must have been a kind of code used to communicate in secret.
20:38This alone has led some historians to ask
20:42whether the Sumerians may have arrived in southern Iraq
20:45from somewhere else.
20:50The Sumerian culture centered on the sea coast
20:53of Iraq's far south, and so, some have suggested
20:57that they may have arrived by boat. Some backing for this theory may come in the
21:04writings of Roman historian Flavius Josephus, who
21:08wrote down a Babylonian legend that he heard in the first century AD.
21:15It relates the story of a half-man, half-fish
21:18called Oannes who walked out of the sea and taught the people of Mesopotamia the
21:24secrets of culture. He brought them the knowledge of letters,
21:29sciences, and all kinds of techniques. He also taught them how to found cities,
21:34build temples, create laws, and measure plots of land. He
21:38revealed to them how to work the land and gather fruits.
21:43After teaching mankind all these secrets, Oannes leaps back into the sea and swims
21:49away. It's possible that in this myth, ancient
21:54storytellers have preserved some memory of the arrival of the
21:57Sumerians landing en masse by boat, and bringing
22:02with them their advanced urban culture.
22:06Some have even argued that the Sumerians may have come
22:09from as far afield as India.
22:14More evidence for the migration theory seems to come from the words
22:18that the Sumerians used for their professions.
22:22For more common jobs, the ones that involved manual labor,
22:26the Sumerians used old, pre-Sumerian words.
22:31Meanwhile, they brought new words with them to describe more sophisticated
22:36and urban occupations. For instance, the words for ‘scribe’ and ‘winemaker’ are
22:42both distinctly Sumerian.
22:46But others have proposed a more interesting theory
22:50which does seem to solve some of these contradictions.
22:54Although it does seem a little far-fetched, I think it is worth
22:58mentioning here. The clue to this theory comes, once again,
23:03from mythology.
23:14The Sumerian version of history was dominated
23:17by a devastating event of apocalyptic proportions.
23:22If you were brought up reading Bible stories, you may
23:25find it familiar. The Sumerians believed that in a time long before,
23:31in the time of their most distant ancestors,
23:34a great flood had washed over the world. This same story would later pass on into
23:41the legends of the Babylonian Empire, and from there, to the Hebrew poets who
23:47wrote the first books of the Bible. For this reason, the story of the flood
23:53is perhaps the oldest, continuously-told story, and it's in this
23:58legend that the clue to the origin of the
24:01Sumerians might lie. The story of the flood is so striking
24:07that many historians with varying degrees of credibility have
24:11tried to come up with some historical event
24:14that may have inspired it, and history is actually
24:18full of great inundations.
24:24When the last ice age ended around 10,000 BC,
24:28global temperatures rose between four to seven degrees
24:33over a period of about five thousand years.
24:37Up until that point, vast ice sheets had covered the land in the north of the
24:42planet, reaching as far south as Berlin.
24:46But as temperatures rose, these ice caps melted,
24:50and their water poured back into the oceans.
24:55Global sea levels rose an average of two- -and-a-half centimeters a year,
25:00until by the end, the sea had risen an incredible
25:04120 meters, or enough to completely swallow
25:08a 30-storey building. Around the world, the sea engulfed vast
25:15regions of the coast. The land bridge that had once connected
25:20Russia and Alaska was submerged, separating Asia and the
25:25Americas forever. Low-lying regions of what is now
25:29Europe's North Sea flooded, turning Great Britain into an
25:33island. In the Middle East, the effects were
25:38felt just as dramatically. During the low sea levels of the ice age,
25:44the Tigris and Euphrates had flowed for a further 600 kilometers,
25:50joining into a single river, and meandering along a stretch of low-lying
25:55valley wedged between what is now Iran and
25:58Saudi Arabia. This grand river would have met the
26:03Indian Ocean around the region of Dubai today.
26:08Some historians have argued that Neolithic humans
26:11may have made their home in this fertile valley,
26:14having journeyed down from the mountains of Iran.
26:19But as the glaciers melted, the sea advanced. Slowly at first, but with an
26:25increasing speed. Over the next five thousand years, the
26:30coastline would have moved an average rate of 120
26:35meters a year. That's over a kilometer
26:38every ten years, or one meter every three days. If there were humans
26:45living in this low-lying region at the time,
26:48this event must have been utterly terrifying.
26:53The next centuries would see these people driven north
26:56by the encroaching waves which swallowed whole forests and villages.
27:03These people would have been pressed into ever-denser populations,
27:07forced to adapt as they went. They would have been
27:11a roving band of refugees, never able to settle anywhere for long
27:16before the sea made its next advance. This exodus would have continued until
27:22the planet's temperature stabilized and the sea coast reached its
27:27furthest point, right around the year 5000 BC,
27:31just at the time that Sumerian culture as we know it
27:35burst onto the historical stage.
27:40This is a theory that I think deserves some consideration;
27:45that as the waves of Semitic-speaking farmers
27:49moved down the rivers from the mountains to the north,
27:52they met another population coming up from the south,
27:56a ravaged and devastated people speaking a language
28:01that had evolved independently, and telling tales
28:05of a flood that had drowned the whole world.
28:11This theory could be supported by that legend
28:14of the amphibious fish-man Oannes. Is it possible that the Sumerians came
28:20to southern Iraq not by boat, but actually walking out of
28:24a land that was now at the bottom of the sea?
28:29Another legend called The Myth of Enki and Ninhursag
28:34relates a creation story in which the god Enki
28:37creates man in a land called Dilmun. Like the Garden of Eden, Dilmun is an
28:44earthly paradise.
28:48In Dilmun, the crow does not utter its cry, the lion does not kill,
28:53the wolf does not seize the lamb, the wild dog,
28:56devourer of kids, is unknown.
29:01Dilmun is thought to have been what is now Bahrain,
29:05an island in the middle of the Persian Gulf,
29:08that body of water that was once a fertile river valley.
29:14All we have on this subject is speculation,
29:18and until any further evidence is found, this
29:21will remain just a theory. But as a storyteller,
29:26I can't help but be drawn to this colorful explanation.
29:31When we try to work out the truth of what happened
29:34in this incredibly distant past, we are reminded that history is not a rigid
29:40set of dates and facts, but a continuing
29:43process of inquiry and debate. It can sometimes
29:48feel like mapping the surface of a planet in
29:51another solar system, or like exploring the dark depths of the
29:55deep sea, and all we have to work with are the
29:59small spots of light that history provides.
30:12We may never know the truth about where the Sumerians came from,
30:16but there is plenty that we do know.
30:20The Sumerians referred to themselves as ùĝ saĝ gíg ga,
30:24or ‘the black-headed people’, and the Akkadians called them tsalmat-qaqqadi,
30:29which meant the same thing in their own language.
30:33From carvings that depict Sumerians, we can see how they wore their hair;
30:37curly on top, and cut short on the sides. Common men wore sheepskin kilts while
30:45the richer people would have worn coloured fabrics spun
30:48from wool, decorated with tassels and beads.
30:54Among the wealthy, both men and women wore jewelry;
30:58anklets, bracelets, necklaces, and ear ornaments,
31:02made of copper and sometimes gold. Remarkably, we also have a great deal of
31:08evidence about Sumerian music. Like everything
31:13else, the Sumerians wrote their music down on
31:16clay tablets, and we've also discovered other texts
31:20that explain how to play it, including how to tune the instruments.
31:26Today, we're able to hear the sounds of the music
31:30that once played in the temples and courtyards
31:33of cities like Eridu, Ur, and Uruk.
31:42These two great peoples, the Semitic Akkadians
31:46and the Sumerians, formed a symbiosis over the next centuries
31:50that would see their cultures run in parallel,
31:54just like their two great rivers. They shared their successes and advances,
32:01they shared the cities that were even now growing
32:04to become the largest ever seen, but they also shared
32:08their failures. As a result, their fates became inextricably
32:15intertwined.
32:23The Sumerians believed that the world was a roughly
32:27circular landmass surrounded on all sides by a huge body of water.
32:34They believed that another ocean also lay above their heads,
32:39held in place by the solid structure of the sky
32:42which occasionally let some of this water through as
32:46rain. They divided water into two types; that of the rain and rivers, sweet water,
32:54and that of the sea, bitter water. Sumerians called their homeland
33:00ki-en-gi(-r), which means ‘the land of the noble lords’.
33:05To describe the settled societies of the Sumerians and Akkadians,
33:10they used the word ‘kalam’, meaning ‘civilized’,
33:14while they used the word ‘kur’ to describe the mountainous zones
33:18bordering the plains. ‘Kur’, in the Sumerian language,
33:23meant ‘mountain’, but it also came to mean ‘rebellious’, ‘barbarous’, and ‘wild’.
33:30At this time, that's how the outside world must have looked to them.
33:35To their south and west, the vast desert of Arabia yawned,
33:40a rolling sea of sand dunes where nothing grew,
33:44home to fierce nomadic tribes. To the north, the rocky Taurus mountains
33:51of Turkey and Kurdistan hemmed them in, full
33:55of hardy mountain people, while the Zagros mountains of Iran
34:01formed the edge of their world to the east.
34:05Today, the Arabic word for the region of upper Mesopotamia
34:09still holds within it a sense of this feeling of isolation.
34:14They call it Al-Jazeerah, meaning ‘the island.’ But despite the challenges of
34:22their landscape, the Sumerians flourished. They had no
34:27stone to build with, so instead they learned to make bricks
34:31from the river mud, mixing them with straw, gravel, and broken
34:35pottery, and baking them. With clay, they made
34:39everything from pots and plates to sickles and writing
34:43tablets. They had no wood, so instead they
34:46harvested vast numbers of reeds, tying them together into bundles, and
34:51platting them together into mats.
34:56The Sumerians invented or adopted the pottery wheel,
34:59the wagon wheel, the plow, and the sailboat.
35:03Their buildings used complex arches and domes.
35:07They worked out how to cast metals such as copper,
35:10and later, bronze. The Sumerians were also
35:14avid mathematicians. They developed complex systems of measurement,
35:19as well as methods for dividing, multiplying, and calculating angles,
35:24even writing down the first-ever multiplication tables on clay tablets.
35:31We actually use Sumerian mathematics every day.
35:35It was the Sumerians who divided time into the minutes and seconds we still
35:40use, and since their number system worked on
35:43a base of 60 rather than our system of 10, that's why
35:47we have 60 minutes in an hour. The reason for using 60 as
35:52the base of a number system is actually quite simple, and it's rooted
35:57in the design of our bodies. If you hold your hand out
36:01in front of you right now, you'll notice that each of your four
36:05fingers is divided into three segments. It's thought that ancient people would
36:11use the thumb of their right hand to tap each segment of the finger
36:16counting up to 12. When they reached 12, they would raise a
36:20finger on their left hand, counting up the 12s. When you had
36:25five fingers raised on your left hand you had 60, and you had to start again.
36:33The fact that there were 12 cycles of the moon in each year
36:36would have confirmed for the Sumerians that this was the number system
36:40intended by the gods. The 360 degrees we still use in angle measurement
36:47is another relic of this system.
36:51Due to this spark of ingenuity, Sumerian society grew
36:55at a slow but steady pace. They dug vast networks of irrigation
37:02canals that extended the agricultural zone
37:05around the rivers, and also allowed them to transport goods
37:08in canal boats. They built dams to regulate the flow of
37:13the rivers and ensure that the spring floods came
37:16in a more controlled way. In fact, the Sumerian language has a vast
37:22array of words to describe the different kinds of
37:25canals, reservoirs, dams, and lock gates required to control
37:31their water. Gradually, the landscape of southern Iraq
37:35transformed from dusty salt flats and marshy swamps
37:40to a green patchwork of farmland.
37:45Many historians have argued that it was the digging of these canals and
37:49watercourses that originally led to the greater
37:52social organization we see during the Sumerian period.
37:56These extensive systems of water management needed careful planning,
38:01engineering expertise, and mathematical calculations.
38:06Work teams needed to be organized, and paid in
38:09food and beer. Foremen and overseers needed to be appointed, and all of this
38:16led to a kind of early bureaucracy that gave rise to the first
38:20true states. In the 1930s, historian Arnold Toynbee famously argued
38:27that it was just these environmental challenges in southern Iraq
38:31that created the conditions in which civilization
38:34could be created.
38:37The desiccation of the region impelled the fathers of the Sumeric civilization
38:42to come to grips with the jungle swamp of the lower valley of the Tigris and
38:46Euphrates, and to transform it. The ordeal through
38:49which the fathers of the Sumeric civilization
38:52passed is commemorated in Sumeric legend.
38:56The slaying of the dragon Tiamat by the god Marduk
38:59and the creation of the world out of her mortal remains
39:02signifies the subjugation of the primeval wilderness
39:05and the creation of the land by the canalization of the waters and the
39:09draining of the soil.
39:13The tough semi-desert landscape created what he called
39:17a ‘stimulus and response effect’ in these early people.
39:22Toynbee argues that in conditions that are too comfortable,
39:25people have little need of increased social organization
39:28or technological development. In conditions that are too harsh,
39:33society finds it impossible to develop. He argues that it's in environments such
39:39as southern Iraq, where the challenges are numerous but
39:42not overwhelming, that a cradle of civilization can occur.
39:54According to Sumerian texts, the first city in the region
39:58was the city of Eridu. One controversial document known as the
40:04Sumerian King List describes Eridu as the place where the
40:09god Enki first decided that a king should rule.
40:14When kingship from heaven was lowered, the kingship was in Eridu.
40:19In Eridu, Alulim became king. He ruled for 28,800
40:25years. Alalngar ruled for 36,000 years.
40:33For obvious reasons, many historians have questioned
40:36the reliability of this source. Some have even gone so far as to call it
40:42a piece of utter fiction, or a later piece of propaganda
40:47designed to legitimize a usurper to the throne.
40:51But the King List does tell us how the Sumerians,
40:54of at least one point, thought of their history,
40:58and many have argued that Eridu may well have been
41:02the world's first city. Eridu was founded around the year
41:105400 BC. That's nearly seven and a half millennia
41:14ago. At this time, populations of woolly
41:19mammoths, survivors of the end of the ice age,
41:22still roamed in remote parts of the world.
41:28Eridu was populated by Sumerian speakers, and soon it would make up just one of a
41:34whole constellation of small cities that dotted the
41:37landscape of southern Iraq. These independent
41:41city-states were centered around their temples,
41:45and ruled by priest kings known as the Ensi. Records show that these
41:51Ensi were often assisted by a council of elders
41:55which included both men and women. Most of the largest cities in this
42:00period were probably no bigger than about 10,000
42:03people. The borders of these city states
42:08were defined by the courses of canals and specially-created boundary stones,
42:14carved monuments left jutting out of the earth to mark
42:18the line between one territory and another.
42:21Slowly, these cities began to eclipse the old Ubaid culture that had preceded them.
42:28Art and architecture began to take on the form that we would truly call
42:32Sumerian, and technology also began to take huge leaps forward.
42:40This first period seems to have been a time
42:43of relative peace. There's little evidence of
42:47organized warfare or the keeping of professional soldiers
42:51in these early cities. Most towns during this period went without
42:57walls. One exceptionally ancient Sumerian myth
43:02called The Gifts of Inanna seems to capture
43:06some of the spirit of this period of transition.
43:11It describes technology and the refinements of civilization
43:15being handed down by Enki, the king of the gods,
43:19to his daughter, the goddess Inanna. She later passes them down to the people
43:25of Sumer. Holy Inanna received the craft of the
43:30carpenter, the craft of the coppersmith, the craft
43:33of the scribe, the craft of the smith, the craft of the
43:37leatherworker, the craft of the builder, the craft of
43:40the reed worker. Holy Inanna received wisdom, the
43:44shepherd's hut, the knowledge to pile up glowing
43:47charcoals, the sheepfold.
43:51Enki teaches Inanna about family, the proper laws of inheritance,
43:56and the art of good judgment. But he also goes on to give her other gifts,
44:03some of which show that the darker side of civilization
44:07was already beginning to make itself known.
44:11Holy Inanna received deceit and the rebel lands.
44:15Holy Inanna received heroism, power, wickedness, the plundering of cities, and
44:21the making of lamentations. It may be that the ancient Sumerians
44:26already recognized, right at the dawn of settled human
44:30society, what the scholar Walter Benjamin would
44:33one day write, that there is no record of civilization
44:38that is not at the same time a record of barbarism.
44:44It's true that during this period, the Sumerians began
44:47practices that would begin a sorrowful phase
44:51of human history. Among them is the use of slave labor.
44:56They captured men and women from the hill countries outside their borders,
45:01and used their labor to fuel the growth of their own
45:04economy.
45:07In the last episode, I used the metaphor of the death of stars
45:12to talk about the life cycle that empires often pass through,
45:16but we might also think about the birth of civilizations
45:20in this way. The first stars were born from gas clouds compacted
45:26together under the weight of their own gravity
45:29into a spinning ball of matter. Under enough pressure, the temperature of
45:34the star's core increased and finally, nuclear fusion
45:39began. The first stars burst into light.
45:46When enough people gather together in one place, that settlement obtains a kind
45:51of gravity. It draws other people towards it, and as
45:55the size of the settlement increases, so does pressure on its various systems.
46:01In some cases, this pressure results in those people
46:05being fused together into more complex forms of organization.
46:11Sometime around the year 3200 BC, the first stars of these human
46:17settlements began to burst into light. That light was the invention of
46:26writing.
46:31One Sumerian epic poem called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta
46:37gives the first known story about the invention of writing.
46:42This poem attributes the invention to a king
46:45who has to send so many messages that his messenger can't remember them all.
46:51Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat the message,
46:55the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it like a tablet.
47:00Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.
47:05The Sumerians had two things around them in virtually
47:09limitless abundance; that's the clay beneath their feet,
47:13and the reeds that grew in the marshes and along the banks of the rivers.
47:19It's these two resources that combined to form
47:22the first human writing. Sumerian scribes would pick up a lump of
47:29clay big enough to fit in their hand. In fact, about the size of
47:34a modern smartphone. They would take a piece of reed cut
47:39into the shape of a wedge, and print it over and over into the clay
47:44to form symbols. The distinctive wedge shapes of the
47:48reeds give this form of writing its name. We call it
47:52cuneiform.
47:57The oldest cuneiform clay tablets come from the city of Uruk, and date to the
48:04late fourth millennium, probably around the
48:0732nd or 31st centuries.
48:12This script originally consisted of pictographs,
48:15small pictures designed to depict objects so everyone could understand
48:20what they represented. These were first used to keep track of
48:25everyday things like rations and supplies. On some of
48:29these very early tablets, you can still see very clearly what they
48:33mean. A bowl of food is depicted with an
48:36eating mouth next to six impressions, and a sheaf of
48:40wheat next to five. This indicates that a worker can
48:44exchange this tablet for six bowls of food and five sheaths
48:49of wheat. Scribes would have had to work fast,
48:53copying hundreds of documents throughout their day.
48:57Slowly, this pressure meant that the signs
49:00had to become simpler and more abstract. Before long, they no longer looked like
49:06the objects they described. After the year 3000, the number of
49:12symbols was reduced from around 1,500 to about 600,
49:18and someone else had the bright idea that each symbol
49:21could stand for a certain sound instead of a whole idea.
49:26This was the beginning of the first alphabet,
49:29but it meant that now only an educated few
49:32could understand writing, and soon, a separate class of scribes emerged.
49:39The human brain would never be the same again.
49:44People could now read the words of kings and scribes
49:48who had died hundreds of years before. They could also begin to write down
49:53everything that they had learned so it could be remembered, and more
49:57importantly, it could be built upon.
50:02Partly due to this ability to record knowledge, the technology of Sumer around
50:07this time began to take even greater leaps forward.
50:15This next period of history would be known as the Period of Uruk.
50:21The period is named after the city of Uruk,
50:25which by the middle of the 4th millennium BC,
50:28had grown into the largest and most powerful city
50:31in southern Mesopotamia. One of the key ways that historians mark
50:37the shift into the Uruk Period is by observing a dramatic change that
50:42occurred around this time in the region's pottery. If you're
50:47thinking that the pottery must have got more sophisticated and ornate as
50:51technology improved, then you're mistaken. In fact, the ancient
50:56pottery of the Ubaid Period was exceptionally beautiful. It was made
51:01on a device known as a slow wheel, and painted with distinctive geometrical
51:06designs in brown or black. It was a luxury item
51:11for the select few. The shift to the Uruk Period
51:16saw a great increase in the amount of pottery produced,
51:20but the quality fell dramatically. Thanks to a technology known as the fast
51:25wheel, clay jars and pots could now be made in
51:29great numbers by workmen in intensive workshops.
51:33This was the first era of mass production.
51:39The booming economy of the Sumerian cities
51:42comes to life in their documents. The clay tablets tell us that in the
51:48city of Girsu, for instance, fifteen thousand women were employed in
51:53the textile Industry. One factory produced eleven hundred tons
51:59of flour a year, as well as bread, beer, and linseed oil.
52:04This factory employed 134 specialists and 858 skilled workers,
52:11of which the vast majority were women. Since there was no currency at this time,
52:17workers were paid directly in food and other goods. The minimum ration
52:23of an unskilled factory worker consisted of 20 liters of barley a month,
52:29along with 2 litres of oil, and two kilos of wool per year.
52:34Meanwhile, their supervisor would earn roughly twice this ration.
52:39The poor in Sumerian society were downtrodden
52:43and were probably pretty miserable. They often had to borrow
52:48food or silver from predatory money lenders
52:51at crushing interest rates of as high as 30 percent.
52:56But despite this rising inequality, by the middle of the
53:00fourth millennium BC, economic advancement
53:03meant that the city of Uruk had grown into the largest and most powerful city
53:08in southern Mesopotamia. This was around the year 3500 BC,
53:15or over 5,000 years ago.
53:21By this time, nearly 2,000 years had already passed
53:25since the original founding of the first city at Eridu.
53:30That's enough time to take us from the present moment to the age of Julius
53:34Caesar. By this time, Sumerian civilization was
53:39already ancient, but the very earliest of the pyramids of
53:43Egypt would still not be built for another 900 years.
53:49In Britain, the Neolithic monument Stonehenge
53:53was at this time just a series of barrows and earthworks,
53:57and its large stones would not be moved into place
54:00for another 1,300 years. When writing was invented in Uruk in the
54:0632nd century BC, the last population of woolly
54:10mammoths to survive the end of the ice age
54:13were still clinging to life on a rocky outcrop
54:16in the East Siberian Sea known as Wrangel Island.
54:24By this time, Uruk would have had about 50,000
54:28inhabitants. That's only enough to fill
54:31a modern medium-sized football stadium. But at this time, it was the largest city
54:37that the earth had ever seen. The world's earliest surviving piece of
54:43literature, known as the Epic of Gilgamesh, begins in
54:48this city. It is the story of a king of Uruk named
54:54Gilgamesh, who likely ruled some time in the third
54:58millennium. Whatever the historical facts of his
55:02reign are, Gilgamesh made enough of an impression as a ruler
55:06that he went down into legend as a mythical hero,
55:10two-thirds god and one-third man. Although there's much more myth than
55:16fact in this ancient tale, the Gilgamesh epic does tell us a
55:20little about how Sumerian society changed
55:23in the early centuries of the third millennium.
55:28For one thing, it's clear that warfare had begun to increase
55:31in the region. The tale opens in the powerful city of Uruk,
55:37and one feature of the city is mentioned as a great source of pride.
55:42That's a ring of enormous fortified walls,
55:46as these lines from the epic of Gilgamesh show.
55:52Behold the outer walls which gleam like copper!
55:56See the inner wall which none can rival! Touch the threshold stone – it is from
56:02ancient days! Go up and walk on the wall of Uruk!
56:07Inspect the cornerstone, and examine its brickwork!
56:11Is it not built of baked brick? It's clear that city walls were now a
56:19necessity, but we can tell from the great pride
56:22shown in Uruk’s fortifications that they may have also been quite rare.
56:28In fact, throughout the story, the city is referred to repeatedly
56:32as ‘strong walled Uruk.’ We also get a sense of how the city was
56:37divided during this time, suggesting some level of urban planning
56:42from its rulers. These parts comprise Uruk. One-third for
56:48city, one-third for garden, one-third for field,
56:52and a precinct for the temple of Ishtar. At the height of the Uruk Period, the
56:58city covered an area of two and a half square kilometers.
57:03It had a port on the river, along with workshops and cluttered houses.
57:08At the center of the city was Uruk's famous White Temple.
57:13It was elevated 21 meters, and covered in white
57:17gypsum plaster that reflected the sunlight
57:20and would have caused the temple to glow during the day.
57:26If you walked the streets of Uruk during this time,
57:29you would have seen markets full of produce like beans and lentils,
57:34pomegranates and dates, jars of date syrup, and oil.
57:39In the richer parts of town, houses would be built from baked bricks.
57:44But elsewhere they would be mud and clay, dried in the sun. The houses would likely
57:50be arranged in a chaotic way, creating a labyrinth of alleys and
57:55warrens, covered by reed matting to keep them
57:58cool in the heat of the day. Farmers would be carrying large bundles
58:04of reeds and wheat on their backs, and herders would bring their
58:08long-haired sheep and oxen into the city.
58:12Here and there, you would see men sitting in circles
58:15in shaded courtyards, sharing a large jar of beer in the center,
58:21all sipping it through long straws made of hollow reeds.
58:26While the Sumerians did import some wines from the northern regions,
58:30it was beer that they loved most of all. They had over 30 different varieties,
58:36with names like ‘white’, ‘dark’, ‘cloudy’, and ‘sweetened with honey’.
58:43Some of their beer was flavoured with herbs. It was brewed directly from the
58:47wheat and barley of the fields, and if you bought the cheapest kind, it
58:52would often still have seeds of grain floating at the bottom. One cuneiform
58:58text has even preserved a kind of drinking
59:02song. I will summon brewers and cupbearers to
59:07serve us floods of beer and pass it around!
59:10What pleasure! What delight! Blissfully to take it in,
59:14to sing jubilantly of this noble liquor, our hearts enchanted and our souls
59:22radiant.
59:25We can imagine the conversations that these ancient people would have had
59:29around their jars of beer; probably not that different to the conversations
59:34you'd find in any bar or pub today.
59:40Some of these everyday concerns have been preserved in lists of ancient
59:44Sumerian proverbs. These groups of beer-drinkers would
59:48doubtless have complained that they were not appreciated at work.
59:54I am a thoroughbred steed but I am hitched to a mule,
59:58and must draw a cart and carry reeds and stubble.
1:00:03Others would have commiserated about one of the oldest human concerns;
1:00:08not having enough money.
1:00:12The poor man is better dead than alive; if he has bread,
1:00:16he has no salt. If he has salt, he has no bread.
1:00:22As with drinkers in all parts of history, they would have fallen out,
1:00:26and shouted insults at each other in the streets.
1:00:31If you were put in water, the water would become foul.
1:00:34If you were put in a garden, the fruit would rot.
1:00:40At night, people usually slept on their rooftops,
1:00:43since the heat inside the houses would have been too much for them.
1:00:48The city would have been a pungent mixture of smells.
1:00:53Pottery kilns and brickworks would have belched smoke throughout the day.
1:00:57There were no drainage systems in the roads, and people would have thrown their
1:01:01waste out into the street. In the houses,
1:01:05people laid down layers of clay, crushed gypsum dust,
1:01:10and reed mats to create a soft, carpet-like effect.
1:01:18From the epicentre of this great metropolis,
1:01:21the Uruk civilization sent out ripples across the world,
1:01:26and eventually, a number of similarly great cities
1:01:29rose up around it. But as the fourth millennium drew to a close,
1:01:35another Sumerian city was rising in power,
1:01:38and soon, it would take Uruk's place as the new
1:01:42center of Sumerian culture. It would flourish into realms of untold
1:01:48wealth, and push the boundaries of what humanity
1:01:51thought possible in the realms of art and architecture.
1:01:56It's the city whose ruins we opened this episode with,
1:02:00and the name of that city was Ur.
1:02:12Ur was situated right at the point where the Euphrates River met the sea.
1:02:18It was a trading port and fishing town where seagulls would have circled,
1:02:23and fishermen came in with their catches of fish,
1:02:27oysters, and turtles. Its position both on the sea
1:02:31and the river would have made it a booming hub
1:02:34of the region's trade. As we've already seen, if you needed clay
1:02:41or reeds, southern Iraq was the place to be.
1:02:44But for virtually everything else they needed, the Sumerians had to import
1:02:49from other lands. But luckily for them, they always had something to trade.
1:02:56They were alone among almost all the nations of the ancient
1:02:59Middle East, in that they produced a large surplus and variety of food.
1:03:06Archaeology shows that due to their farming abilities,
1:03:09the Mesopotamians of antiquity enjoyed a far more rich and varied diet
1:03:15than their neighbors in either Turkey or Iran.
1:03:19We have even uncovered some ancient Sumerian recipes
1:03:23written down on clay tablets. This is the recipe for a dish they
1:03:28called Tuh’u, and it gives you a sense of the variety
1:03:32they enjoyed.
1:03:35Get the water ready. Add fat, salt, beer, onion, rocket, coriander,
1:03:42semolina, cumin, and beetroot. Add them to the cooking pot, then pound
1:03:48leek and garlic together, and add. Let all blend and reduce to a pulp, then
1:03:52sprinkle with coriander and carrot.
1:03:57Boats full of wheat and grains, dried reeds, and figs
1:04:01were now forging up the rivers, bringing food to all the neighboring lands.
1:04:07In return, other resources flowed back.
1:04:12Copper came down from the mountains of northwestern Iran,
1:04:15and later by ship from the island of Cyprus.
1:04:19Tin travelled through the long mountain passes from Afghanistan,
1:04:23as it would throughout the later Bronze Age.
1:04:27Silver came down the Euphrates on barges from Turkey's Taurus mountains, while
1:04:32gold came over land from Egypt, and by ship from India. Ordinary wood for
1:04:39everyday building could be chopped in the Zagros mountains
1:04:42of Iran to the east. But for finer constructions; for palaces
1:04:47and ornate city gates, only the prized wood of the cedar tree
1:04:51would do. This was brought by ship from Lebanon,
1:04:55where it grew among the high mountain passes.
1:04:59In fact, one episode in the epic of Gilgamesh
1:05:03relates the king's quest to slay a monster in the mountains of Lebanon,
1:05:07and steal this beautiful wood from its forest.
1:05:12The ancient Sumerians traded in what we would consider a truly globalized way.
1:05:18From their tiny coasts on the Persian Gulf, their ships sailed out to trading
1:05:23ports in modern Bahrain and Oman. From there, they sailed along the
1:05:28coast to trade with another of the world's most ancient and mysterious
1:05:32cultures, the people we know today as the Indus
1:05:35Valley Civilization.
1:05:39From there, the Sumerians got all kinds of spices,
1:05:43and gemstones like carnelian, as well as the brilliant blue Lapis Lazuli
1:05:48that the Sumerians adored. They used it to make jewelry and amulets,
1:05:53inlays in gaming boards, musical instruments, and sculptures of
1:05:58astonishing beauty.
1:06:02All of this trade would have passed through Ur
1:06:05and swelled the city to a wealth that likely no
1:06:08other human habitation had ever achieved. Grave goods uncovered in Ur show not
1:06:15only the incredible wealth of its rulers, but also magnificent craftsmanship that
1:06:20suggests an advanced community of artists.
1:06:25One such artifact found in a royal tomb in Ur has given us an incredible insight
1:06:31into the lives and manners of the ancient Sumerians.
1:06:36It's an ornate, decorative piece of furniture,
1:06:39inlaid with a mosaic of shell, red limestone, and Lapis Lazuli.
1:06:44Its images show detailed scenes from everyday life
1:06:48around 4,600 years ago.
1:06:54Today, it is called the Standard of Ur.
1:06:59On one side, the artifact shows images of the Sumerians at war;
1:07:04the chariots pulled by donkeys, the soldiers wearing leather capes and
1:07:08helmets, the men carrying spears and axes.
1:07:13On the other side, it depicts the Sumerians at peace;
1:07:17farmers and herders working on one level, and above them, the scribes with their
1:07:22shaved heads sitting at their desks.
1:07:27At this time, urbanism in the Sumerian world was reaching its peak.
1:07:32By the end of the third millennium, a majority of the region's population
1:07:37would live in cities, and in this newly urbanized
1:07:40world, the economic power of Ur remained king.
1:07:45Over the next centuries, its power expanded and contracted,
1:07:49and at one point, some of its kings wrote inscriptions
1:07:53calling themselves both the King of Ur and the King of Kish,
1:07:57another city that lay nearby. This suggests that Ur
1:08:02may have subdued some of its neighbors under its political control.
1:08:07But by the mid-third millennium, it seems the influence of Ur
1:08:11began to wane. This was a new militarized age, when the power of trade
1:08:17and diplomacy seems to have no longer been enough.
1:08:22One city called Lagash truly came into its own
1:08:26in this era of violence.
1:08:32Lagash was a slaving city. It had grown rich by raiding villages in
1:08:37the hills, kidnapping people, and selling them
1:08:40across the region. Sometime around the year 2500 BC,
1:08:46Lagash fell out with its neighbor, a city called Umma. The dispute seems to have
1:08:53been over a stretch of farmland along the river,
1:08:56and it caused the two cities to go to war.
1:09:00One carved stone monument from this time, known as a stelae, captures something of
1:09:06the spirit of this age. It is known as the Stelae
1:09:11of the Vultures. The upper part of the stone is normal enough.
1:09:17It shows the King of Lagash, a man named Eannatum,
1:09:21leading his soldiers into battle. They wear leather helmets and skirts made of
1:09:26reeds, shouldering their spears. These spears
1:09:31would have likely been topped with blades of copper or bronze,
1:09:34and would have flashed red in the sun as they marched.
1:09:38The king is riding ahead of them in an early chariot,
1:09:41wearing an animal skin slung across his chest,
1:09:45with a spear and a container of javelins beside him.
1:09:50When the armies met, the stelae shows King Eannatum of Lagash
1:09:54dismounting from his chariot, and proceeding to lead his men
1:09:58on foot. They advance in a phalanx, a tight square of men with broad shields
1:10:04protecting their fronts, and a porcupine of short spears jutting
1:10:08out ahead. The fighting was bitter. Eannatum was
1:10:13struck in the eye by an arrow, but he lived on to see his army to
1:10:18victory, as the inscription on the stelae records.
1:10:23Eannatum struck at Umma. The bodies were soon
1:10:283,600 in number. I, Eannatum, like a fierce storm wind,
1:10:34I unleashed the tempest!
1:10:39As the soldiers of Umma tried to flee the bloody battlefield,
1:10:43the stelae shows the soldiers of Lagash cutting them down
1:10:47and trampling them beneath their feet. There's something to this carving that
1:10:52to me, embodies something of a change in the spirit of Sumerian warfare.
1:10:57It's a particular kind of nastiness that revels in the suffering of your enemies,
1:11:04and this is shown most clearly in the part of the carving
1:11:07that gives it its name. These are the vultures flying overhead,
1:11:14carrying the severed heads of the soldiers of Umma
1:11:17in their beaks, picking at their tongues and eyes.
1:11:22It clearly shows a kind of massacre perpetrated by the
1:11:26city of Lagash, and it does so with relish.
1:11:35Due to military victories of this kind, the slaving city of Lagash
1:11:40went on to conquer much of southern Mesopotamia.
1:11:44Lagash established what some historians have called the first
1:11:48true empire in the world, but its rule was short-lived. In these ancient times,
1:11:55administrating even one city was difficult,
1:11:59and the Empire of Lagash, despite its military success,
1:12:03was soon critically overstretched. To make matters worse, King Eannatum
1:12:09seems to have ruled through what amounts to a campaign of
1:12:12terror. Unsurprisingly, his rule was unpopular,
1:12:17and revolts rose up against him.
1:12:21As the hated Empire of Lagash fractured and collapsed,
1:12:26the ruler of one of its subjugated cities seized his
1:12:29chance. He was the King of Umma, the city whose defeat and humiliation is
1:12:36depicted with such relish on the Stelae of the Vultures, and his
1:12:41name was Lugalzaggesi.
1:12:46It's not clear exactly what made Lugalzaggesi so
1:12:50successful, but it's clear he was animated
1:12:54by an ardent desire for revenge against the Empire of Lagash.
1:12:59Perhaps he had even been at the battle when King Eannatum
1:13:03had slaughtered thousands of his fellow citizens.
1:13:08He rose in rebellion against Lagash, and quickly toppled kings that were
1:13:14still loyal to the empire in the cities of Kish and Larsa.
1:13:18Then he marched on the great city of Ur itself,
1:13:22and the mighty walled fortress of Uruk. These both fell in turn, and the rebel
1:13:29Lugalzaggesi moved his capital to Uruk.
1:13:35Finally, he marched on the city of Lagash itself,
1:13:39the heart of the empire, and it's here that that fiery vengeance in his heart
1:13:44burst out. The city didn't hold out for long.
1:13:50Lugalzaggesi burst over its walls, sacked the city, and burned it to the
1:13:56ground.
1:13:58Even by the standards of the time, this seems to have been a shocking
1:14:02act, as one piece of Sumerian poetry recalls with sorrow.
1:14:09Because the man of Umma destroyed the bricks of Lagash, he committed a sin
1:14:13against the city's god. The god will cut off any hand raised against him.
1:14:18May Nidaba, the personal goddess of Lugalzaggesi,
1:14:21make him bear all these sins.
1:14:25After sacking Lagash, Lugalzaggesi’s momentum
1:14:29seems to have been unstoppable. He worked his way north,
1:14:33up the course of the two rivers, and soon, he had conquered all the regions that
1:14:38Lagash had once claimed. One inscription written by him even
1:14:43claims to have conquered all the lands between what he calls the
1:14:47upper and the lower seas, meaning from the
1:14:50Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean coast. The great god Enlil gave kingship of the
1:15:00land to him, the region from the lower sea through
1:15:03the Tigris and Euphrates, to the upper sea. Thirty-two kings
1:15:08gathered against him, but he defeated them and smote their
1:15:11cities, and prostrated their lords, and destroyed the whole countryside as
1:15:16far as the silver mines.
1:15:21Admittedly, this is probably something of an exaggeration.
1:15:25The Sumerians had never been able to maintain distant colonies
1:15:29or occupy far-off lands for very long. It's more likely that Lugalzaggesi
1:15:36pulled off something like a successful raiding party on the coast, perhaps
1:15:40looting some towns and cities, and bringing treasure back to Uruk.
1:15:46But this was the first time that a Sumerian prince had ever made this claim.
1:15:51For them, this upper sea was the western edge of their entire world,
1:15:57and the idea of a king who might conquer all the lands between the seas
1:16:01began to possess the imaginations of all the kings who came after.
1:16:07But King Lugalzaggesi, like the rulers of Lagash before him,
1:16:12had made the critical mistake of overstretching his resources.
1:16:17This empire was simply too big. Before long, civil wars and rebellions
1:16:23broke out between the various Sumerian cities.
1:16:27In this time of chaos, the other great people of Mesopotamia
1:16:32began to fancy their chances at ruling.
1:16:37These were the people who, up until this moment, had been something of a junior
1:16:41partner in the civilization of southern Iraq.
1:16:45These were the people of Akkad.
1:16:50One man would soon lead them in an outright rebellion
1:16:54against the Sumerian Empire. He would go down in history with a name
1:16:59that in Akkadian means ‘the one true king’. That name
1:17:04was Sargon, and he ushered in the twilight
1:17:08of the Sumerian age.
1:17:19Like many episodes in Sumerian history, the origin story of Sargon of Akkad is
1:17:26one you might find familiar if you were brought up on the stories of
1:17:29the Bible. He was born sometime in the middle of
1:17:33the 24th century BC, and legend has it that as a baby, he was
1:17:39found in a reed basket on the banks of the Tigris. He was found
1:17:44by a gardener who worked in the palace in the city of
1:17:47Kish, and who brought him up as his son.
1:17:52But like the biblical Moses, this foundling child
1:17:56had big ambitions.
1:18:00There seems to have been something special about him.
1:18:03Something about his charming manners meant that he was soon taken on as a
1:18:08cupbearer in the palace, bringing wine to the lords and royalty
1:18:12of the kingdom. This was a position of high honor, and a
1:18:17way for a young man to gain influence at court. The young Sargon
1:18:23must have proven himself in other ways, too.
1:18:27That's because he was soon entrusted with a mission of the utmost secrecy
1:18:32and importance.
1:18:35At this time, Kish was still part of Lugalzaggesi’s Sumerian Empire,
1:18:40stretching over all the lands between the two seas.
1:18:45The Sumerian King Lugalzaggesi was away on a distant campaign,
1:18:50possibly fighting in the lands of Syria or putting down a rebellion
1:18:54in a far-flung province. The young Sargon was given a small band of fighting men
1:19:01and told to travel to the city of Uruk, where Lugalzaggesi kept his royal court.
1:19:08Their plan was to strike the city in a surprise attack,
1:19:12to knock out the capital of this new empire,
1:19:15and free the city of Kish from imperial control.
1:19:20It was a daring plan. The tall city walls of Uruk,
1:19:25immortalized in legend, must have looked daunting to the young Sargon
1:19:30and his men as they readied for their attack.
1:19:33But Lugalzaggesi had taken much of his army with him on campaign,
1:19:38and left few behind to defend his capital.
1:19:42The attack came as a complete surprise. Sargon's men overcame their defenses,
1:19:48poured over their walls, and the defenders fled. Sargon captured
1:19:53the city, and before reinforcements could arrive,
1:19:57he broke down several sections of those famous city
1:20:00walls. It was a deeply symbolic act, and a
1:20:04strike against the might of Lugalzaggesi’s empire.
1:20:09King Lugalzaggesi must have been enraged.
1:20:13He swung around from his distant war- -making and marched back home,
1:20:18gathering all his subject kings to him as he went.
1:20:22Inscriptions record that as many as 50 kings may have marched under his banner,
1:20:28and their task was easy enough; to crush the forces of one
1:20:32small city-state. But Sargon seems to have been one of those characters from
1:20:38history, one of those geniuses like Hannibal or
1:20:41Napoleon, who are able to turn battles in their
1:20:44favor no matter the odds. We don't know how he did it,
1:20:50but in a pitched battle with the whole amassed force of the empire,
1:20:54it was Sargon's army that emerged
1:20:58victorious. Lugalzaggesi was captured, and Sargon
1:21:04marched him through the gates of the Holy city of Nippur
1:21:07wearing a neck stock, a heavy piece of wood
1:21:10clapped around his neck and shoulders like an oxen.
1:21:14This would have been humiliating of course, but here again
1:21:18is where Sargon sets himself apart from other rulers of the time.
1:21:24That's because he seems to have had something of a merciful streak.
1:21:28The old King Lugalzaggesi wasn't killed. Incredibly, he was allowed to continue on
1:21:34as the governor of Uruk, so long as he swore an oath to the high
1:21:39King Sargon. Sargon founded a new city to act as his
1:21:45empire's capital, and he named it Akkad.
1:21:51From there, he would go on to conquer much of what the preceding empires
1:21:56had before, as one inscription beneath a statue in the city of Nippur
1:22:01claims. Sargon, the King of Kish, triumphed in 34 battles over the cities,
1:22:09up to the edge of the sea, and destroyed their walls.
1:22:12He bowed down to the gods, and the gods gave him the upper land
1:22:16up to the cedar forest, and up to the silver mountain.
1:22:21Sargon didn't make the mistakes of his predecessors.
1:22:26At each city he conquered, he made a point of destroying the city's walls,
1:22:31reducing its ability to defend itself, and therefore reducing the likelihood
1:22:35of it rebelling against his rule. He conducted a ceremony to symbolize his
1:22:42mastery over the whole land. He washed his
1:22:46weapons in the waters of both the Persian Gulf and the
1:22:49Mediterranean Sea. But once the dust of war had settled, his
1:22:56achievements went on. He made efforts to centralize the
1:23:00empire's administration, and even reformed the dating system. His
1:23:05reforms strengthened the central state and
1:23:08increased the stability of the empire. In many ways, he was something of a
1:23:14progressive and enlightened ruler. But Sargon was also Akkadian,
1:23:21and he was what we today might call a nationalist.
1:23:27Until now, Sumerian had been the official language of royal inscriptions
1:23:32on palaces and temples. But during Sargon's reign,
1:23:36Akkadian began to be used in official inscriptions for the first time.
1:23:41The cuneiform alphabet was now re-engineered to write Akkadian,
1:23:47and Sargon also gave himself the new title,
1:23:50King of Akkad. He appointed only his fellow Akkadians to key
1:23:55positions in the government, and garrisoned Sumerian cities with
1:24:00Akkadian troops to ensure their loyalty.
1:24:06The two people of Mesopotamia who had lived and grown together for millennia,
1:24:11were now beginning to drift apart. Resentment in the southern
1:24:16Sumerian-speaking cities began to reach a boiling point.
1:24:22Sargon ruled for 55 years, and towards the end of his reign, this
1:24:27resentment bubbled over, as one later Babylonian text recalls.
1:24:34In his old age, all the lands revolted against him,
1:24:37and they besieged him in Akkad the city. But he went forth to battle, and defeated
1:24:43them. He knocked them over and destroyed their vast army.
1:24:48For the meantime, it's clear that Sargon's flair for battle
1:24:52kept his empire together, but as the old king weakened,
1:24:56virtually all the southern cities burst out in open rebellion.
1:25:04When Sargon of Akkad died around the year 2284,
1:25:09his two sons had to take over and try to fix the mess he had left behind.
1:25:15The first of these sons was called Rimush. He ruled for nine years
1:25:20and spent most of them in bitter battles to reconquer the rebellious Sumerian
1:25:25cities of the south. He crushed rebellions in Ur, Umma, Lagash,
1:25:30and Adab, and one of the years in which he ruled
1:25:34is even known as ‘the year that Adab was destroyed’.
1:25:39When Rimush died, Sargon's other son, Manishtushu,
1:25:43took over. He seems to have resorted to the kinds of terror tactics
1:25:49that had once made the kings of Lagash so hated.
1:25:54It was Sargon's grandson, a man named Naram-Sin,
1:25:58who would return the empire to its former greatness.
1:26:06He managed to quell the Sumerian rebellion in its southern heartlands,
1:26:11and returned the Empire of Akkad to stability.
1:26:15Naram-Sin didn't rule only by force; it seems he made some effort to
1:26:21reconcile the two intertwined peoples of Mesopotamia,
1:26:26breaking from his grandfather's title, King of Akkad, and ruling under the more
1:26:31diplomatic title King of Sumer and Akkad.
1:26:38But this didn't entirely heal the rift there was even now
1:26:42continuing to grow between these two peoples.
1:26:48Part of the problem was that the Sumerian people were no longer the
1:26:52primary cultural force in the region. For centuries,
1:26:57Akkadian had been gradually replacing Sumerian as a spoken language.
1:27:03Some of this may have been down to the official policies of the Akkadian Empire,
1:27:08discouraging the use of Sumerian in official documents.
1:27:12But it was also affected by the increasingly cosmopolitan makeup of the
1:27:17empire. Sumerian, as we've seen, was a language
1:27:22isolate with a different structure and sound to
1:27:25all the languages around it. But the people who lived in all the
1:27:30surrounding lands spoke languages that were linguistic
1:27:33cousins of Akkadian, all in the Semitic family of languages.
1:27:39They had the same grammar, and even shared sounds and words with Akkadian.
1:27:45Learning Akkadian for them would have been like an English speaker
1:27:49learning French or Spanish, while Sumerian
1:27:52would have been like learning Korean. Akkadian was just easier to learn for
1:27:58these people, and so, it would naturally become the
1:28:01language of trade and commerce. The people of Mesopotamia had been
1:28:07largely bilingual for centuries, but gradually, all Sumerians would have
1:28:12learned to speak Akkadian, and fewer and fewer Akkadians would have
1:28:17needed to learn Sumerian. Slowly, the Sumerian language
1:28:21began to fade. But the days of the Akkadian Empire
1:28:27were also numbered, and the Sumerians would get
1:28:31one more chance to leave their mark on the world's history.
1:28:43When the great Akkadian King Naram-Sin died,
1:28:46his son Shar-Kali-Sharri took over. He was Sargon of Akkad's great grandson,
1:28:55and four years into his reign, a great celestial sign
1:28:59would have appeared in the skies overhead.
1:29:04Far out in the depths of space, nearly 200 million kilometers away from Earth,
1:29:10a giant ball of ice and dust 40 kilometers across
1:29:15flew past, sometime around the year 2213 BC. This
1:29:24was the comet Hale-Bopp. It would spend the next four millennia
1:29:29or so flying through our solar system on a
1:29:32deep elliptical orbit, until it flew past the Earth again as a
1:29:38blazing streak of light in the year 1997.
1:29:44It was the brightest comet with the longest tail
1:29:47that has ever been observed in our night skies.
1:29:51It remained visible with the naked eye for 18 months.
1:29:56In 1997, the site of the comet in San Diego, California caused 39
1:30:02members of an apocalyptic cult called Heaven's Gate to commit
1:30:07suicide by drinking a lethal mixture of vodka
1:30:10and phenobarbital. They believed that their souls would be
1:30:14carried away on a spaceship that was hidden behind the iridescent
1:30:19tail of the comet, and we can only imagine what effect the
1:30:23sight of this comet may have had on ancient people.
1:30:28Some may have looked up and seen the blessings of the gods,
1:30:31smiling on the lands of Sumer and Akkad. Others may have stared up at that lonely
1:30:38cosmic traveler and seen a sign of doom.
1:30:42Ultimately, it was these latter who would prove correct.
1:30:55During the reign of King Shar-Kali-Sharri,
1:30:58the world's climate underwent a mysterious
1:31:02and sudden shift. This change is known only by the cryptic
1:31:07name, the ‘4.2 kilo year event’. It has been tentatively linked to
1:31:13changes that took place in the sea ice of the North Atlantic,
1:31:17causing ripples throughout the world's delicate and intimately interlinked
1:31:22climate systems. But whatever the causes, its effects were
1:31:26dramatic. In various places around the world, it
1:31:31coincided with periods of reduced rainfall.
1:31:35Studies of dust layers in Iraq and the Middle East
1:31:38have shown that around this time, annual rainfall dropped dramatically,
1:31:42and the climate became much more arid. The annual floods of the rivers on which
1:31:48so much of the agriculture of the region depended
1:31:51would now routinely fail, and famine would set in.
1:31:55This dry period wasn't brief. In fact, it would last for well over a
1:32:01century, and some think it may have even lasted
1:32:04for the next 300 years. This period of drought and the famines
1:32:09it caused were mentioned in Egyptian texts of the time,
1:32:13too, and has affected cultures all around the globe.
1:32:17It's been linked to civilizational collapses in Egypt's old kingdom,
1:32:22the Indus Valley Civilization in India, and the Liangzhu culture in China.
1:32:29In Mesopotamia around this time, still ruled by the Akkadian Empire,
1:32:34it's clear that resources became suddenly scarce.
1:32:38The days of a booming surplus of food were over,
1:32:42and it's around this time that the first towns and cities
1:32:46began to be abandoned in the drier zones of the north.
1:32:51After the death of King Shar-Kali-Sharri around the year 2193 BC,
1:32:57a period of chaos and bitter civil war descended on the Empire of Akkad.
1:33:04The Sumerian King List records this period
1:33:07with an almost sarcastic tone. Then who was king? Who was not the king?
1:33:14Four of them ruled in only three years.
1:33:18All this chaos did not go unnoticed. In the mountains overlooking the plains
1:33:25of Mesopotamia, a nomadic tribal people known as the
1:33:29Guti were watching.
1:33:33Who the Guti were, what language they spoke, and which gods they worshipped,
1:33:38we don't know. They seem to have been an unsophisticated nomadic people,
1:33:44and the ancient Sumerian texts reserve particular contempt for them.
1:33:51The Guti were unhappy people, unaware of how to revere the gods,
1:33:57and ignorant of the right religious practices.
1:34:03The Guti had raided and plundered along the borders of the Akkadian Empire for
1:34:08years, burning villages and stealing cattle.
1:34:13One remarkable letter, dating from the reign of King
1:34:16Shar-Kali-Sharri, was written by an Akkadian lord who owned land on the borders of
1:34:22the Guti territory. He tells his workers to ignore the Guti
1:34:27attacks and keep working, although it's clear he
1:34:30does this while keeping himself at a safe distance.
1:34:37Cultivate the field and watch over the cattle.
1:34:40Do not tell me, ‘the Guti enemies are around. I could not cultivate the field.’
1:34:45Post sentries at one-mile intervals, and if the Guti try to attack you,
1:34:48take all the cattle into the village. Now, I swear on the life of King Shar-Kali-
1:34:54-Sharri that if the Guti men drive off the cattle and you cannot pay for them
1:34:57yourself, I won't pay you any silver when I come
1:35:00to town.
1:35:04For years now, these hill people had watched
1:35:07as drought ravaged the settled societies of the river valley.
1:35:12They watched as the city-dwellers fought over the increasingly scarce farmland,
1:35:18and it's in this moment of weakness that they chose to strike.
1:35:24The Guti gathered their forces and marched down from the hills
1:35:28into the lands of Sumer, this time not to raid, but to invade and take these
1:35:35lands for themselves.
1:35:38One remarkable literary text relates the tragic events of those days.
1:35:45It was written a few centuries later, and is called
1:35:49The Curse of Akkad. In this version of the story, the great
1:35:54god Enlil is angry at the king of Akkad for
1:35:58disrespecting the gods, and he summons the Guti as a punishment.
1:36:03The hill people are imagined as monstrous creatures,
1:36:07half-animal, with a language that sounded to the Sumerians
1:36:11like the barking of dogs.
1:36:15Enlil…what destruction he wrought. He raised his eyes to the mountain, and
1:36:21mustered the whole mountain as one. The rebellious people, the land whose
1:36:26people is without number. Gutium, that land that brooks no control,
1:36:31whose understanding is human, but whose appearance and stuttering words are that
1:36:36of a dog. Enlil brought them down from the
1:36:39mountain in vast numbers. Like locusts, they covered the earth.
1:36:44Nothing escaped their arm. No one escaped their arm.
1:36:49All the lands raised a bitter cry on their city walls.
1:36:55It's not clear how many men were in the Guti army,
1:36:59but they were enough to quickly overwhelm the weakened forces of
1:37:03Akkad. It seems the Guti practiced hit-and-run tactics,
1:37:08raiding supply lines, and leaving scorched earth behind them.
1:37:13Their attacks devastated the economy of Akkad,
1:37:16and the already drought-ridden and war-torn society
1:37:20began to fall apart.
1:37:25For the first time since cities were built and founded,
1:37:28the great agricultural tracks produced no grain,
1:37:32the inundated tracts produced no fish, the irrigated orchards produced neither
1:37:38syrup nor wine. The gathered clouds did not rain, the
1:37:42plants did not grow. He who slept on the roof died on the
1:37:46roof. He who slept in the house had no burial.
1:37:51People were flailing at themselves from hunger.
1:37:55The weakened Akkadian society folded completely
1:37:59beneath the pressure of the Guti attacks. The demoralized Akkadian army went out
1:38:05to meet this fearsome enemy in battle, and was defeated. Soon after,
1:38:12the Gutis swept down on the city of Akkad,
1:38:15and burned it to the ground. They destroyed Sargon city
1:38:19so utterly that its ruins have never been
1:38:23found. The Guti attempted to set up their own dynasty
1:38:28and rule over the lands of Sumer, but for a number
1:38:32of reasons, they were not successful. After all,
1:38:37as empires in our own day have found out, it's much easier to conquer a country
1:38:42than it is to rule it. Cuneiform sources suggest that the Guti administration
1:38:49showed little concern for maintaining agriculture, written records, or public
1:38:54safety. The Guti were not literate, and would
1:38:58have struggled to administrate an empire that for over a millennium, had
1:39:02relied on the power of the written word. For reasons known only to them, and
1:39:08perhaps relating to their nomadic lifestyle,
1:39:11they didn't believe in keeping animals in pens.
1:39:15They released all of the land's livestock to roam about the countryside
1:39:19freely. Their policies soon brought even further
1:39:23famine, and caused a massive increase in the
1:39:27price of grain. Under neglect and lack of investment, the
1:39:33land's infrastructure began to crumble.
1:39:36The poetry of The Curse of Akkad shows how the roads of the kingdom began to
1:39:41fall apart, and become overgrown with weeds, while
1:39:46long grass grew on the towpaths where oxen used to pull
1:39:50barges. The grass grows long on your canal-bank towpaths, the grass of
1:39:58mourning grows on your highways laid for wagons!
1:40:01Wild rams and snakes of the mountains allow no one to pass on your towpaths
1:40:07built up with canal sediment.
1:40:10The destruction of the central authority of the Akkadian Empire
1:40:15meant that during this time, a number of Sumerian city states
1:40:19reasserted their independence. It seems the Guti, weakened by their
1:40:25failing attempt to hold an empire together, don't seem to
1:40:28have been able to do much to stop them. The Guti occupied southern Iraq for more
1:40:34than 150 years, and this period was by all accounts a
1:40:39time of suffering. It was a miniature dark age where
1:40:44written records are unsophisticated, as well as few and far between.
1:40:50But as resentment to their rule grew, rebellions rose around the country,
1:40:55and one Sumerian man would see the opportunity this period of crisis
1:41:00provided. He was filled with a desire to return the lands of Sumer
1:41:05to the rule of a Sumerian king, and his name
1:41:09was Utu-Hengal.
1:41:16Little is known about the life of Utu-Hengal.
1:41:19He was a Sumerian, and may have been the governor of Uruk
1:41:23during the final years of the Gutian Period.
1:41:28He must have watched as the ongoing famine ravaged his people,
1:41:32and the arrogant Guti kings refused to do anything about it,
1:41:36violently punishing any resistance to them.
1:41:40At this time, a new Guti king had just ascended to the throne of Sumer and
1:41:45Akkad. His name was Tirigan, and he seems to
1:41:50have been typical of the Guti rulers. He cared
1:41:53little for maintaining the land's infrastructure,
1:41:56and even destroyed elements of it to punish populations who rebelled against
1:42:01him, as recalled in the Sumerian King List.
1:42:06Tirigan's troops established themselves everywhere.
1:42:10Nobody would leave their cities to face him. In the south,
1:42:14in Sumer, he blocked the water from the fields.
1:42:17In the uplands, he closed off the roads. Because of him,
1:42:21the grass grew high on the highways of the land.
1:42:25Tirigan had been on the throne for only forty days,
1:42:29and he was still in the middle of consolidating his rule.
1:42:34It's clear that Utu-Hengal, the governor of Uruk,
1:42:38thought that this was the time to make his move.
1:42:42His plan may have been in place for years.
1:42:45Perhaps he sent out secret envoys to the other Sumerian cities of the south,
1:42:51telling them to prepare for war the moment a new king
1:42:54ascended to the throne. Then when everything was in place
1:42:58and his moment came, he struck.
1:43:03When Tirigan heard of this rebellion, he must have been enraged.
1:43:08But he doesn't seem to have been the bravest of kings.
1:43:12He sent two of his generals, men named Ur-Ninazu and Nabi-Enlil,
1:43:17to lead his armies in his place while he stayed back home in the palace.
1:43:24Meanwhile, the rebel leader Utu-Hengal massed his forces, and marched to meet
1:43:30the two Guti generals on the field. On his way to the decisive battle, he
1:43:36stopped at the temple of Iškur, the Sumerian god of storms, and made an
1:43:42offering.
1:43:45He may have sacrificed a lamb or goat, and sang an ancient prayer in the
1:43:50Sumerian tongue before the altar of the god. Then,
1:43:55he marched out to meet Tirigan's armies.
1:44:01After departing from the temple of Ishkur, on the fourth day, he set up camp
1:44:06in Naĝsu on the Surungal canal. He captured the generals of Tirigan sent
1:44:11as envoys to Sumer, and put chains on their hands.
1:44:18Utu-Hengal was victorious, and here again, we see that the Guti King Tirigan wasn't
1:44:24the courageous sort. After getting the news that his generals
1:44:28had been defeated, he fled north to a city called Dabrum.
1:44:33The Sumerian King List records what happened next.
1:44:39Then Tirigan, the King of the Guti, ran away,
1:44:43alone, on foot. He thought himself safe in Dabrum,
1:44:47where he fled to save his life, but since the people of Dabrum knew that Utu-Hengal
1:44:52was a king endowed with power by Enlil, they did not
1:44:56let Tirigan go, and an envoy of Utu-Hengal arrested
1:44:59Tirigan, together with his wife and children, in
1:45:02Dabrum. They put handcuffs and a blindfold on him.
1:45:07After centuries, the Sumerians finally rejected
1:45:11both Guti and Akkadian rule. For the first time since the reign of
1:45:18Sargon, a Sumerian king would once again rule over the lands of
1:45:23Sumer.
1:45:25Utu-Hengal made the Guti, the fanged snakes of the mountains, go back to drink again
1:45:31from the rocky crevices. He brought back the kingship of Sumer.
1:45:38Utu-Hengal’s successful rebellion ushered in an era
1:45:42known today as the Third Dynasty of Ur, and sometimes called the Neo-Sumerian
1:45:48Empire. Others have even called this the
1:45:52Sumerian Renaissance. It was the final flourishing of Sumerian
1:45:58culture, but it was a flourishing that would
1:46:01leave an indelible mark on human history.
1:46:11Despite bringing the kingship back to Sumer,
1:46:14the rebel king Utu-Hengal didn't rule for long.
1:46:19He died in unusual circumstances after only seven years,
1:46:23apparently killed when a river dam that he was inspecting
1:46:27burst, sweeping him away in a flood. If you think this sounds suspicious, it's
1:46:33because it probably is. One of Utu-Hengal’s more ambitious
1:46:38governors, a man named Ur-Nammu, came to the throne
1:46:43soon after, and some historians have certainly raised questions
1:46:47about whether he had a hand in that dam bursting,
1:46:51if indeed any dam burst at all.
1:46:55Regardless of the way he rose to power, Ur-Nammu proved to be an effective ruler,
1:47:01and an outstanding administrator. He standardized bronze weights that
1:47:06merchants used in the market, and created a standardized weight that
1:47:11would lay down the foundations for the first currencies.
1:47:15He divided silver into a unit known as the mina,
1:47:19which was made up of 60 shekels. Ur-Nammu also wrote down a code of laws
1:47:25that today is the earliest surviving example of a legal code,
1:47:30three centuries older than the more famous Code of Hammurabi.
1:47:35Here are a few examples of the laws contained within.
1:47:41Number 17: if a slave escapes from the city limits and someone returns him,
1:47:46the owner shall pay two shekels to the one who returned him.
1:47:49Number 18: if a man knocks out the eye of another man,
1:47:52he shall weigh out half a mina of silver. Number 19:
1:47:56if a man has cut off another man's foot, he has to pay 10 shekels.
1:48:05Among all his other achievements, Ur-Nammu was also a prodigious
1:48:09builder. He constructed buildings at the cities of Nippur,
1:48:14Larsa, Kish, Adab, and Umma. He rebuilt the kingdom's roads and
1:48:20irrigation ditches after the long decades of neglect under
1:48:24the Guti rule. But more than anything, Ur-Nammu loved to
1:48:28build ziggurats. These are the distinctive
1:48:32stepped towers that were the hallmarks and
1:48:35pinnacle of Sumerian architecture.
1:48:39Each one rose in three layers like a wedding cake,
1:48:44with steps leading up to the top. They would have been painted with white
1:48:48gypsum paint. The priests who kept them may have grown
1:48:53plants and trees on the terraces that lined
1:48:56them, and birds would have roosted high up in
1:49:00these tall towers. Under Ur-Nammu,
1:49:05soon every Sumerian city would have a ziggurat,
1:49:08and they formed the focal point of the cities.
1:49:12The greatest of these was the ziggurat that Ur-Nammu built
1:49:16in his home city of Ur.
1:49:20The ziggurat of Ur is enormous. In its day, it would have soared up to a
1:49:26height of 30 meters or nearly 10 stories, towering
1:49:31over all the other low-lying buildings in the city.
1:49:37It was built purely from baked clay bricks,
1:49:40and held together with the tarry substance bitumen.
1:49:46It's thought that it would have taken at least 1,500 workers
1:49:50more than five years just to build its base.
1:49:54Farmers up to 20 kilometers away would have been able to see this enormous
1:49:59shape rising on the horizon. To them,
1:50:03it would have testified to the power of the city of Ur,
1:50:07and the god who lived there. But despite this late flourishing, the
1:50:13age of the Sumerians was passing, and part of the reason for
1:50:17this lay in the soil beneath their feet.
1:50:32All river water contains small amounts of salts
1:50:36and other minerals, and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers,
1:50:40flowing over the limestone rocks of the Taurus mountains,
1:50:44contain more than most. When ancient farmers diverted this water
1:50:49into their fields to feed their crops, the hot sun would evaporate this water,
1:50:55and traces of salt would be left behind.
1:51:00In places with a reasonable amount of rainfall, the rain would wash this salt
1:51:04away, but in the arid conditions of Iraq, the salt stays right where it is.
1:51:11Over time, this small amount builds up on the surface of the soil,
1:51:15and eventually, plants find it difficult to grow.
1:51:20The records of the Sumerian scribes paint a bleak picture.
1:51:25They kept meticulous notes of crop yields,
1:51:29year on year. From around 2350 BC, their texts show the gradual reduction
1:51:37of crops across the region. One telltale detail shows us that the salt
1:51:43content of the soil might have been to blame.
1:51:48While their main crop of wheat gradually reduced over the centuries,
1:51:52the rates of barley production remained constant.
1:51:56Barley, as we know today, is particularly resistant
1:52:00to salt-rich soil.
1:52:04Texts uncovered from the city of Girsu show that around the year 3550 BC,
1:52:11wheat and barley were being produced in equal amounts. But after a thousand years
1:52:17of irrigation, wheat accounted for only one-sixth of
1:52:20the crop. Only a few centuries later, in the
1:52:2421st century BC, wheat was less than two percent of the
1:52:28annual harvest. This all points to a sharp increase in
1:52:33the salt content of the soil.
1:52:38You can sometimes hear very simplistic narratives surrounding soil
1:52:42salination in the south of Iraq. The Sumerians are sometimes portrayed as
1:52:47stupid or greedy, damaging the land in their ignorance, but
1:52:52that's not entirely fair. Although they didn't have our modern
1:52:56understanding, they did know that soil needed to be rested for
1:52:59several seasons if it was to remain fertile, and they did take steps to adapt
1:53:06to the changing condition of the soil, switching
1:53:09almost exclusively to barley, and replacing the role of wheat in their
1:53:13diet. They also developed methods for draining
1:53:17the soil and reducing the rate of salination,
1:53:20but soil salinity is a challenge that still causes problems for farmers in
1:53:24Iraq today, despite all our technology and
1:53:28scientific knowledge. While the ancient people worked hard to
1:53:33mitigate the decline, the overall trend as the centuries wore
1:53:37on was slow but unstoppable.
1:53:41The soil was gradually failing, and with the population of Sumerian
1:53:46cities growing, and the long drought dragging on, the
1:53:50demands on this farmland were only increasing.
1:53:55Eventually, a thick layer of salt would encrust the topsoil,
1:53:59and little would grow at all.
1:54:03Today when you walk around the deserts of Iraq,
1:54:06the soil in some areas has a crumbly crust
1:54:09that cracks underfoot, peeling like old varnish.
1:54:14This is the salt that slowly began to choke the life from the earth,
1:54:18and in turn, choke the life from the civilization
1:54:22of Sumer. But the end of Sumerian culture would come not from the soil, but at the
1:54:30tip of a spear.
1:54:37As the Sumerians struggled to eat ever-decreasing barley crops from the
1:54:42salty soil, it seems that once again, hostile outside
1:54:47forces began to sense weakness in this
1:54:50once-great empire. After their failed attempt at
1:54:54empire building, the nomadic Guti had retreated to their
1:54:58mountains, and returned to their nomadic ways.
1:55:02But they still posed a threat to Sumerian lands,
1:55:06just as they always had; raiding towns and making away with cattle.
1:55:12Putting a stop to these raids was the focus of much of the king Ur-Nammu's reign.
1:55:19He raised an army and marched into the Guti lands
1:55:23with the aim of putting a stop to the threat forever.
1:55:27It's unclear whether he actually met them in battle
1:55:30or whether he was struck by one of their characteristic
1:55:33ambushes. Either way, Ur-Nammu was killed in the mountains far from home.
1:55:42The death of this king, which would begin the
1:55:46final death spiral of Sumerian culture, was commemorated in a lengthy epic poem
1:55:52known as the death of Ur-Nammu. He who was beloved by the troops could
1:55:59not raise his neck anymore. The wise one lay down. Silence descended
1:56:05as he, who was the vigor of the land, had fallen.
1:56:08The land became demolished like a mountain. Like a cypress forest,
1:56:12it was stripped, its appearance changed.
1:56:18The poem tells the story of Ur-Nammu descending into the underworld, and
1:56:24giving his offerings to the gods who lived there.
1:56:28In the afterlife, the poem gives Ur-Nammu himself
1:56:32this final lament.
1:56:36Now, just as the rain pouring down from heaven cannot turn back,
1:56:40I can never return to see the beautiful bricks of Ur!
1:56:46Four Sumerian kings would follow Ur-Nammu. Some, like the King Shulgi, enjoyed
1:56:52successes on the battlefield, and developed and reformed the economy
1:56:56as much as they could. But their reigns were characterized by
1:57:01ongoing threats from the wild mountain regions.
1:57:06The drought was still biting. The soil was becoming
1:57:10increasingly choked by salt, and as food got scarce,
1:57:15more and more nomadic people were driven to raiding and plundering to feed
1:57:19themselves. By now, the Guti were far from the only
1:57:25people who threatened the border of Sumer and
1:57:28Akkad.
1:57:32One tribe in particular, known as the Martu,
1:57:35posed a particular threat. The Martu were a Semitic sheep-herding
1:57:41people from the mountains of Syria and Lebanon.
1:57:45Like the Guti, the Sumerians considered them to be wild and barbarous,
1:57:50and tended to describe them in contemptuous,
1:57:53but also fearful terms. The Martu, the powerful south wind, who,
1:58:00from the remote past, have not known cities.
1:58:04The Martu, who know no grain. The Martu, who know no house or town. The savages of
1:58:11the mountains. The Martu, who eat raw meat, who are not
1:58:16buried after their death. Another text describes them in similar
1:58:23animalistic terms as the Guti. The hostile Martu have
1:58:28entered the plains. The Martu, a ravaging people with canine
1:58:32instincts like wolves. It's clear that around this time of
1:58:38drought and famine, the Martu were finding their way of life
1:58:42in Syria increasingly impossible. Environmental
1:58:47pressures were pushing them further south into the
1:58:50rich farmland of the river valley into the lands
1:58:54of the Sumerians. Despite the weakened power of the
1:59:05Sumerian state, the later kings of Sumer were determined
1:59:09to stop the Martu incursions. One king named Shu Sin even ordered the
1:59:16construction of a wall that stretched almost 300 kilometers
1:59:21between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. It would be called the Martu Wall, and
1:59:28sometimes ‘The Wall Facing the High Lands’.
1:59:32What form exactly this wall took is unknown,
1:59:36since its remains have never been found, but it was likely an earthwork rampart
1:59:42dotted with forts, and perhaps fronted with a moat fed by
1:59:46canals. It was more than twice the length of
1:59:51Hadrian's Wall, and essentially turned the rich farmland
1:59:55between the Tigris and Euphrates into an island fortress, with the rivers
2:00:00on either side, the sea to the south, and the wall to the
2:00:04north. It would have been an enormous
2:00:08engineering work, and shows that even in its final years,
2:00:12the Sumerian state still commanded considerable manpower
2:00:16and energy. But ultimately, the wall would prove
2:00:20useless.
2:00:23Like all walls, it was only effective with a constant garrison manning it.
2:00:29Soon, it would become clear that the building of this wall
2:00:33was not an act of strength, but the last resort
2:00:36of an empire falling in on itself.
2:00:44The last Sumerian king was a man named Ibbi-Sin,
2:00:48who took the throne in the year 2028. Virtually as soon as he was crowned, the
2:00:56empire began to fall apart.
2:01:01In his first year of ruling, the eastern city of Eshunna
2:01:05broke free from the empire, and Susa, a city in the region of Elam in the
2:01:11Iranian lowlands, successfully rebelled in the third year.
2:01:18These Elamites were an ambitious people. They were rivals for the later Assyrian
2:01:23and Babylonian Empires, but at this stage, were only just
2:01:27beginning to flex their muscles. Their rise would spell the end of the
2:01:32Sumerian age. The fracturing Sumerian Empire could no
2:01:40longer maintain its defenses along the 300 kilometers of the great
2:01:44Martu Wall, and so, in the fifth year of his reign,
2:01:50the wall that Ibbi-Sin's father had built, failed.
2:01:55The Martu poured over the defenses and overran the rich farmlands that lay
2:02:00behind. The effects of this loss were immediate
2:02:05and devastating. Food shortages ran rampant.
2:02:11In years seven and eight of Ibbi-Sin's kingship,
2:02:15the price of grain increased to 60 times the usual cost.
2:02:19People would have starved in the streets. The famine was hitting the capital city
2:02:26of Ur especially hard, and it's clear that at
2:02:30this point, the king Ibbi-Sin really began to panic.
2:02:36Desperate to feed his people, King Ibbi- -Sin summoned one of his generals
2:02:41and told him to travel north to the city of Isin
2:02:44to buy grain, and pay many times its usual cost.
2:02:51This general was a man called Ishbi-Erra, and it's clear that he wasn't the most
2:02:56trusted of the king's generals. In another letter, the king had even
2:03:01complained that Ishbi-Erra was Akkadian, not Sumerian, inferring that his loyalty
2:03:07may have been in question. But at this point,
2:03:11it's clear the king didn't have much choice.
2:03:16One remarkable letter from this moment has survived.
2:03:21It was sent to the King Ibbi-Sin by this general Ishbi-Erra,
2:03:26once he reached the city of Isin. It paints a vivid picture of Sumerian
2:03:32society's collapse.
2:03:36You ordered me to travel to Isin and Kazallu to purchase grain.
2:03:40With grain reaching the exchange rate of one shackle of silver per
2:03:44gur, 20 talents of silver have been invested in the purchase.
2:03:48But I heard news that the hostile Martu have entered inside your territories.
2:03:55I entered with the entire amount of grain. Now,
2:03:58I have let the Martu, all of them, penetrate inside the land.
2:04:03Because of the Martu, I am unable to hand over this grain for threshing.
2:04:07They are stronger than me, while I am condemned to
2:04:11sitting around. This letter shows that the twin pressures of the Martu
2:04:17invasions, coupled with the famine at home,
2:04:20were beginning to tear the very fabric of the kingdom
2:04:23apart. The Akkadian general Ishbi-Erra urges the king to send a fleet of 600
2:04:31boats up the river to transport the grain. He also
2:04:36kindly offers to stay behind in Isin, and help to defend it against the
2:04:41invasion. That I should guard for you the cities
2:04:45of Isin and Nibru; let it be my responsibility. My lord
2:04:50should know this! It's possible that Ishbi-Erra knew that the
2:04:55request for 600 boats was impossible. In fact, he had no
2:05:01intention of ever heading back to the starving city of Ur.
2:05:06He stayed in Isin with all the grain, and soon declared himself its king.
2:05:13This is just one story out of many that shows the Sumerian state truly
2:05:19beginning to come apart.
2:05:26Facing threats on multiple sides, the king Ibbi-Sin
2:05:30entered into a frantic series of last-ditch
2:05:34measures. He ordered fortifications built at the important cities of Ur and
2:05:40Nippur, but these efforts were in vain.
2:05:45Ultimately, the Sumerian Empire fell apart
2:05:49one city at a time, until only the capital of Ur
2:05:52remained, surrounded by hostile forces.
2:05:59Soon the Elamite people, those former subjects of the Sumerians
2:06:04in the foothills of Iran, marched down along the hill paths,
2:06:08gathering with them an army of tribesmen, and laid siege to the great city of Ur.
2:06:18King Ibbi-Sin tried one last attempt to beat them back, and it's clear at this
2:06:24point how desperate he was. He tried to enlist
2:06:28the help of his great enemy, the wild Martu, who had
2:06:32poured over his father's wall. He offered to pay them in exchange for
2:06:37their help. He even swallowed his pride and begged
2:06:41for the help of Ishbi-Erra, the general who had stabbed
2:06:45him in the back on that journey for grain, and was now
2:06:49ruling as the king of Isin. But it was all
2:06:54useless. The Elamites broke through the walls of Ur, and set
2:07:00the city on fire. They poured into its sacred precinct, and
2:07:05looted it of all its valuables. We can imagine them storming up the
2:07:10steps of Ur's great ziggurat, killing priests, and plundering its
2:07:15treasures as they went. The surrounding fields were burned, and
2:07:21the waterways became contaminated with disease.
2:07:26The armies of Elam stormed the royal palace,
2:07:29and captured the king Ibbi-Sin. They took him away in chains, marched him
2:07:36back to their homeland, and imprisoned him there. This was the
2:07:40last king of Sumer, a civilization that had endured
2:07:45for millennia, and he would die in chains, imprisoned by
2:07:49his enemies in a foreign land.
2:07:56The ancient Sumerians who saw the destruction of their cities
2:08:00reacted to their sorrow in the same way that humans always have;
2:08:05they wrote poetry. In fact, for each of their great ruined cities,
2:08:11they wrote a lament.
2:08:17One of these poems, called The Lament for Ur,
2:08:21relates with tangible anguish the horror of that time.
2:08:28The gods have abandoned us. Like migrating birds,
2:08:33they have gone. Ur is destroyed. Bitter is its lament. The country's blood
2:08:40now fills its holes like hot bronze in a mold. Bodies
2:08:44dissolve like fat in the sun. Our temple is destroyed.
2:08:49Smoke lies on our city like a shroud. Blood flows as the river does,
2:08:54the lamenting of men and women. Sadness abounds.
2:08:58Ur is no more.
2:09:03The fall of Ur was one of the great turning points
2:09:06in ancient history. It marked the end of the unified Sumerian state,
2:09:13and the region entered a small dark age in which individual city states once
2:09:18again vied for control over the ruins of the former empire.
2:09:24The wars of this period turned Sumerian cities
2:09:28to blackened heaps of burnt brick. The people mourn. Its people like broken
2:09:36potsherds littering the approaches. The walls were gaping. The high gates, the
2:09:41roads, were piled with dead. In all the streets
2:09:44and roadways, bodies lay. In open fields that used to fill with
2:09:49dancers, the people lay in heaps.
2:09:53Meanwhile, the drought dragged on, and the salt-ridden fields were no
2:09:59longer producing enough barley. Faced with these problems, the Sumerian
2:10:05people began to flock out of the region in huge numbers;
2:10:09refugees carrying with them their meager
2:10:12belongings, and weeping for the home they had left behind.
2:10:21Over the next centuries, a vast population movement
2:10:25took place from the south of Mesopotamia to the north. Some of these Sumerian
2:10:32speakers would settle in the Akkadian lands,
2:10:36but with their connection to their homeland severed, their cultural identity
2:10:40went with it. They learned the Akkadian language of the northerners,
2:10:45and left theirs behind in the smoking ruins of their cities.
2:10:52The Martu, those wild hill people so detested by the Sumerians,
2:10:57would themselves settle down in the cities they conquered
2:11:01along the river valley. The migrating Martu,
2:11:04the fleeing Sumerians, and the native Akkadians
2:11:08would mix together. They would blend their cultures
2:11:11as the people of this region always had. The foundations they laid would give
2:11:17rise to the next chapter of Mesopotamian and human history, and forge the region's
2:11:23next superpowers. These would rise as the legendary
2:11:28empires of Babylon and Assyria, but those
2:11:32are stories that I will save for another time.
2:11:38Sumerian was now a dead language. It would never again be heard spoken
2:11:44in the streets and the markets, but it did remain in use
2:11:48for at least another 2,000 years, preserved in the temples and scriptures
2:11:54of later empires, just as Latin once survived in the
2:11:59churches of medieval Europe after the fall of Rome.
2:12:05For these later people, Sumerian became the language of the gods,
2:12:10the language of myth and magic.
2:12:15The kings of Ur, those great Sumerian rulers
2:12:19themselves passed into legend, and some of them would later be revered
2:12:24as gods themselves. All the kings of Mesopotamia in
2:12:30Babylon and Assyria for the next two thousand years,
2:12:33would rule under a title that gave them a kind of ancient legitimacy,
2:12:39reaching right back to the first age to the dawn of mankind's journey into
2:12:45civilization; King of Ur, King of Sumer
2:12:50and Akkad.
2:12:57Even after the fall of the Sumerian Empire,
2:13:00many of its great cities would continue as population centers
2:13:05into the post-Sumerian era. Among these was the great coastal city
2:13:11of Ur, situated at the mouth of the Euphrates,
2:13:15which would rise and fall a number of times over its history.
2:13:20But ultimately, it was the landscape that had given birth to Ur,
2:13:24and it was the landscape that would bring about its demise.
2:13:29Today, if you stand in the ruins of Ur, the sea that once lapped its shores is
2:13:35nowhere to be seen. In fact, early archaeologists were
2:13:40astonished to see the remains of millions of
2:13:43seashells scattered in the sand here on this
2:13:46lonely stretch of desert. As the millennia passed, the continued
2:13:53depositing of silt, along with changes in global sea levels,
2:13:57have combined to push Iraq's gulf coast back
2:14:01to its present position, about 150 kilometers to the south.
2:14:08The Euphrates River that once brought the rich bounties of trade down from the
2:14:13north has also disappeared, its course having
2:14:17changed over the centuries. In fact, around the barren mounds of
2:14:22earth where the city of Ur once stood, there's
2:14:26nothing at all but the lone and level sands of the
2:14:30Iraqi desert, boundless and bare for miles around.
2:14:37Water had always been this city's lifeblood,
2:14:40and the loss of the river and the sea meant the slow death
2:14:44of Ur. People soon left its houses and its streets. They stopped
2:14:51working its fields and maintaining its irrigation
2:14:54canals, and soon, the land dried up and the topsoil blew away in the wind.
2:15:02The priests extinguished the fires that burned
2:15:05in the top chamber of Ur's great ziggurat,
2:15:08and stopped leaving their offerings there to the moon god Sin.
2:15:13The markets closed, and the mud brick buildings of the city
2:15:17began to crumble.
2:15:21The wooden beams of the roofs rotted and fell in.
2:15:25The sands and desert winds rolled through its streets,
2:15:29and the dunes buried its fallen walls. Before long, the greatest city the world
2:15:37had ever known was just a mound of ruins where the
2:15:40occasional desert traveller would pass by,
2:15:44and where the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle
2:15:47would one day shelter with his wife from a threatening group of bandits,
2:15:52and discover the scattered fragments of writing
2:15:55that the Sumerians had left behind in their forgotten language.
2:16:01Somewhere buried in the ruins lay the clay tablets
2:16:05on which the lament for the city's destruction was written.
2:16:11May that storm swoop down no more on your city.
2:16:14May the door be closed on it like the great city gate at night time.
2:16:19Until distant days, other days, future days.
2:16:24In your city reduced to ruin mounds may a lament be made to you.
2:16:28O Nanna, may your restored city be resplendent before you.
2:16:34Following the sacking of Ur around the year 2000 BC,
2:16:39the city of Uruk went into a steep decline,
2:16:43and much of its population fled. Uruk did have another period of
2:16:49flourishing when the later Assyrian Empire rebuilt
2:16:53it as a regional capital. But as the Euphrates River changed its
2:16:58course, Uruk, too, would be completely abandoned.
2:17:04Today, the walls of Uruk, the same walls that are boasted about
2:17:08in the epic of Gilgamesh, are still visible,
2:17:12heaps of ancient brickwork lining the flat,
2:17:16lunar landscape of the desert. But they are still
2:17:2015 meters tall, encircling the whole city now washed by a tide of broken
2:17:27pottery and bones. The English archaeologist
2:17:31William Loftus was the first European to rediscover the ruins of Uruk.
2:17:37He was impressed with the haunting sight of the vast mounds
2:17:42rising out of the desert, and he later wrote
2:17:45about how the sight affected him.
2:17:49Of all the desolate sights I ever beheld, that of Uruk incomparably surpasses all.
2:17:59The process of decay in all the cities of ancient Sumer,
2:18:02in Nippur, Eridu, Lagash, Ur, and Uruk, would have been gradual but unstoppable.
2:18:11Wind-borne sand and earth would pile up against the walls that still stood,
2:18:17and filled in the streets. Meanwhile, rain water and wind wore down any
2:18:23remaining structures. The sight of these ruins amazed
2:18:28travellers who, like the Italian Della Valle, passed
2:18:32by them and saw their lonely shapes on the
2:18:35horizon. People told stories about what must have
2:18:39happened to those people who built such enormous constructions
2:18:44and then disappeared forever. Echoes of these stories still survive in
2:18:50tales like the Tower of Babel, about a people
2:18:54who built a tower that would reach to the heavens, and who were struck down by
2:18:58god on account of their pride.
2:19:03With their cities lost, the Sumerian people passed out of history.
2:19:09The civilizations who replaced them, who kept their language alive
2:19:13in their temples and still told stories of their kings,
2:19:17would themselves pass into ruin. The knowledge of how to read Sumerian
2:19:22was forgotten entirely, and its history turned to dust.
2:19:28Only their clay tablets remained, buried in the sands of Iraq,
2:19:34fragments containing the voices of a whole people,
2:19:38waiting for archaeologists to discover them and,
2:19:41through arduous and painstaking work, to find out how to read them.
2:19:47These fragments give us little bursts of light,
2:19:51illuminating the dark ocean floor of this most
2:19:54distant past, giving us the records and recipes of the Sumerian people,
2:20:00their music and their prayers, their loves and grief,
2:20:04their triumphs, and their beautiful, sorrowful lamentations
2:20:08for the loss of the world's first cities. It gives us, too, the wistful
2:20:14philosophies of these ancient people, as these lines from the epic of
2:20:19Gilgamesh show.
2:20:22Nobody sees Death, nobody sees the face of Death,
2:20:27nobody hears the voice of Death. Savage Death just cuts mankind down.
2:20:34Sometimes we build a house, sometimes we make a nest,
2:20:38but then brothers divide it upon inheritance.
2:20:42Sometimes there is hostility in the land, but then the river rises and brings
2:20:48flood water. Dragonflies drift on the river, their
2:20:52faces look upon the face of the sun, but then suddenly there is nothing.
2:21:02Sometime around the year 1700 BC, when the last kings of Ur
2:21:09were already a distant memory, somewhere on the other side of the world, on a
2:21:14small rocky island on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, the last
2:21:20woolly mammoth to ever live on earth lay down and died.
2:21:26Sumerian society, in its imperial form, rose, lived out its golden age,
2:21:32and died, outlived by the woolly mammoth. I want to end the episode with an
2:21:42excerpt from that great Sumerian poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh. This section
2:21:49relates an episode that I think is one of the most incredible sequences
2:21:53in any piece of ancient literature. It shows the king Gilgamesh weeping over
2:21:59the loss of his dying friend, and his friend reaches up to him and
2:22:04tells him that he has dreamed of the afterlife,
2:22:08that he has seen what awaits him after death.
2:22:12This passage is a melancholy meditation on
2:22:16loss. It shows all the kings of the earth who have ever ruled,
2:22:21living on in this dark and silent place, their crowns put away forever.
2:22:28As you listen, imagine what it would have felt like to live
2:22:31in the great cities of Ur and Uruk, watching the twilight begin to fall over
2:22:37the Sumerian age. Imagine what it would feel like to see
2:22:42the crops grow weaker every year as the white crust of salt begins to
2:22:46form on the ground, and the city's people go hungry in the
2:22:50streets, wailing year after year for the gods to
2:22:54help them. Imagine how it would have felt to see
2:22:58the armies of the mountain people gathering on the horizon, having to flee
2:23:03the city with your possessions on your back,
2:23:06leaving your home behind forever as the wind rustles through the dying reeds,
2:23:12and the chanting of the priests still goes on in the ziggurat’s tall
2:23:16tower as the sun begins to set over the desert.
2:23:30Listen, my friend. This is the dream I dreamed last night.
2:23:35I stood before an awful being, the somber-faced man-bird.
2:23:39He turned his stare towards me, and he led me away to the palace of
2:23:43Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness, to the house from which
2:23:46none who enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no coming back.
2:23:52There is the house whose people sit in darkness;
2:23:56dust is their food, and clay their meat. They are clothed
2:24:00like birds with wings for covering. They see no light,
2:24:03they sit in darkness. I entered the house of dust,
2:24:08and I saw the kings of the earth, their crowns put away forever;
2:24:12rulers and princes, all who once wore kingly crowns and ruled the world in the
2:24:17days of old. They who had stood in the place of the
2:24:21gods stood now like servants. In the house of dust were high
2:24:26priests and acolytes, priests of the incantation and of
2:24:30ecstasy, and there was Ereshkigal, the Queen of the
2:24:35Underworld, she who keeps the books of the dead.
2:24:39She raised her head; she saw me and spoke, ‘Who has brought this one here?’ Then I
2:24:46awoke like a man drained of blood, who wanders
2:24:50alone in a waste.
2:25:01Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.
2:25:06I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode Rhy Brignell,
2:25:10Jake Barrett-Mills, Shem Jacobs, Nick Bradley, and Emily Johnson.
2:25:18I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and
2:25:21tell me what you thought. You can follow me at PaulMMCooper, and
2:25:26if you'd like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well
2:25:30as images, maps, and reading suggestions, you can
2:25:34follow the podcast at Fall_of_Civ_Pod, with underscores separating the words.
2:25:40This podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers
2:25:45on Patreon. You keep me running, you help me cover my
2:25:48costs, and you help keep the podcast ad-free. You also let me dedicate more
2:25:54time to researching, writing, recording, and
2:25:57editing to get the episodes out to you faster, to
2:26:00make them longer, and bring as much life and detail to
2:26:03them as possible. I want to thank all my subscribers for
2:26:07making this happen. If you enjoyed this podcast, please
2:26:11consider heading on to patreon.com/fallof
2:26:16civilizations_podcast, or just Google Fall
2:26:20of Civilization's Patreon. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.
2:26:27This episode has touched a number of times on the power and necessity of the
2:26:31written word, a gift that ancient Iraq once gave to
2:26:35the world, and I thought it would be fitting to
2:26:38take a moment here to promote a charity that really needs your help today. Its
2:26:43name is Book Aid. In 2015,
2:26:47the terrorist group ISIS burned over one million books
2:26:51in the library of Iraq's Mosul University.
2:26:55Today, the Book Aid team is trying to rebuild that library,
2:26:59and give the students of Mosul some hope for their future.
2:27:04If you think you can spare anything, please head onto bookaid.org
2:27:08and see how you can help today. For every two pound you give, they can
2:27:13send another book to Mosul's university library.
2:27:17There's also a list of other ways you can help to provide resources,
2:27:20equipment, and even training to bring the gift of the written word
2:27:24back to the place where it first began. For now, goodbye and thanks for listening.

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