Rise and Fall of Ancient Sumer
The City State of Uruk
"In the Early Dynastic I period the city of Uruk covered an area of 400 hectares and was surrounded by a city wall, which according to later accounts was built by Gilgamesh, Uruk's legendary king. Uruk remained an important religious center and its shrines were embellished by many of the later rulers of Mesopotamia.....The modern name of Uruk is Warka and it was recorded in the Bible as the town of Erech. In the Sumerian period it was called Unu..."
"At Uruk, for the first time art was used to illustrate the role of the ruler and to reinforce his position. Art and architecture combined to create an effect of power and wealth to impress the local populace and enhance the stability of the ruling group."
"Nipur was the most important religious center of the Sumerians and contained the main temple of the god Enlil, who in the third millennium BC replaced An, the god of the sky, as head of the pantheon."
Regarding the clay tablets found at Uruk: "The language of these texts is not known and they cannot be 'read'. However, as the script is largely pictographic, they can at least be partly understood. Whether the elaborate writing system of the early Uruk texts with its large number of signs was the result of a long development or of a rapid breakthrough, perhaps by a single individual, is not known. Already, in earlier periods...there were tablets with signs that had been impressed on them rather than written with a stylus. The signs corresponded to the measures of quantity that appeared on the Uruk tablets.
"Stamp and cylinder seals for identifying ownership of property, and tokens for recording commodities, were other possible sources."
- Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia
"The various city gods in whom the early settlers trusted appear to be powers in the basic economies characteristic of the region in which their cities were situated. Thus in the south we find a group of city gods closely related to marsh life and its primary economies, fishing and hunting: Enki, god of the fresh water and of vegetable and animal marsh life in Erred in the west, and, in the east, Nanshe, goddess of fish; Dumuzi-abzu, the power to new life in the watery deep; and others in Nina and Kinirsha. Along the lower Euphrates deities of orchardmen alternate with deities of cowherders. There lie the cities of Ningishzida, 'Lord of the good tree'; Ninazu, 'The Lord knowing the waters'; and Damu, 'the child', power in the sap that rises in trees and bushes in the spring. But here also are the bull god Ningublaga, city god of Kiabrig; the bull god and moon god Nanna in Ur; and, in Kullab, Ninsuna, 'Lady of the wild cows', with her husband Lugalbanda. Farther north, in a half-circle around the central grassland of the Edin lie the cities of the sheepherders (Uruk, Bad-tibira, Umma, and Zabalam) with their chief deities, Dumuzi the shepherd and his bride Inanna. To the north and east lie cities of the farmers, Shuruppak and Eresh, with grain goddesses like Ninlil, Ninshebargunu, and Nidaba; Nippur with Enlil, wind god and god of the hoe, and his son Ninurta, god of the thundershowers and of the plow. Under the local name of Ningirsu, Ninurta was worshipped also in Girsu to the southeast."
- Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness
"Earlier Babylonia [the southern region of Mesopotamia] was made up of two regions: a southern area called by modern archaeologists Sumer (anciently Sumerum) and a northern half called Akkad, and it is from these two areas that the principal languages of Mesopotamia take their names: Sumerian, an agglutinative, ergative language of which no related language is preserved, and Akkadian, a member of the Semitic family of languages (including also Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician and Ugaritic).
"The people who invented writing in Sumer in roughly 3400 BC almost certainly spoke Sumerian.....In time Sumerian spread, as a written language, as far as western Syria, and was widely used as a cultural language throughout Mesopotamian history, its homeland was Sumer, where it was probably spoken as a vernacular until about 2000 BC."
- Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia
Descent into the Dark Age
"1. An early phase representative of the fourth millennium B.C. and centering on worship of powers in natural and other phenomena essential for economic survival. The dying god, power of fertility and plenty, is a typical figure.
"2. A later phase, representative approximately of the third millennium which adds the concept of the ruler and the hope of security against enemies. This phase has as typical figures the great ruler gods of the Nippur assembly.
"3. Lastly, there is a phase representative of the second millennium B.C. in which the fortunes of the individual increase in importance until they rival those of communal economy and security. The typical figure is the personal god.
"In the latter half of the second millennium and in the following first millennium a dark age closed down on Mesopotamia. The old framework within which to understand the workings of the cosmos survived, but it moved from the interplay of many divine wills to the willful whim of a single despot. The major gods became national gods, identified with narrow national political aspirations. There was a corresponding coarsening and barbarization of the idea of divinity, no new overarching concepts arose, rather doubts and despair abounded. Witchcraft and sorcery were suspected everywhere; demons and evil spirits threatened life unceasingly."
- Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness
"Daily mishaps, headaches, toothache and even neighbors' quarrels were attributed to their appropriate demons, many of which, though identified with those disorders, we unnamed and located in the desert on the western horizon. Others might be more particularly personified, such as Namtar of Ashakku, the demon of plague or wasting disease, depicted in Psalm 91:6 as stalking the streets like 'the pestilence that walketh in darkness'. Nightmares and other nocturnal fears and menaces were the activity of lilitu (the 'night-hag'), lilith of Isaiah 34. The sin that would 'lurk' (Hebrew robhes, literally 'crouching') at the door of the fratricide Cain (Genesis 4:7) is an interesting survival of such a belief in Israel, rabisu being a Mesopotamian demon active in nightmares. This is surely a striking figure of bad conscience."
- John Gray, Near Eastern Mythology
Hyperlinks