"07 Mythology, society, Royal Cemetery at Ur"

The world must have seemed very different to people who lived 5,000 years ago. So many things in life and nature were completely chaotic and sometimes terrifying. Imagine, a person could suddenly lose a loved one to a crippling disease or an infection that seemed to have no reason or explanation. Babies often died during or soon after birth, sometimes taking their mothers with them. People could lose their crops or homes in windstorms or floods. And there was no way to predict when these might happen. Droughts began, killed thousands of people and promptly ended, again for no apparent reason. In some years, the fields were thick with grain. In other years, some unseen force killed the plants indiscriminately and families starved. Faced with all this uncertainty, the ancient people told tales, myths and legends that tried to explain things. These stories often revolved around disasters. The Mesopotamians had one story about a flood that had killed almost everyone on earth. The Egyptians had one about a drought that lasted for seven years. These stories were probably based on devastating local events in the distant past. Ancient peoples had no way of knowing whether everyone was affected by a disaster. They didn't have CNN, reporters calling from some other continent to let them know things were fine there, or satellite images that showed the extent of the damage. It was natural for them to believe the whole world was suffering from a flood or a famine. On top of that, storytellers no doubt embellish the tales as generations passed. We all make stories better the more we tell them. And grandchildren remember only the really exciting parts of their grandparents' stories. After a few generations, the details are likely to have become more exciting than the events were at the time. Today, we still fear natural disasters and epidemic diseases. But we take some comfort in the fact that usually at least we can explain them. Science has also helped protect us against many forces of chaos. We have fertilizers and antibiotics, food aid and surgery, weather forecasts and hurricane warnings. We know that the Centers for Disease Control and Drug Companies are working on vaccines and treatments. And our life expectancy is much longer than theirs. For the first time in human history, we moderns don't necessarily expect the chaotic forces of nature to kill us or our loved ones. We tend to obsess more about politics than we do about plagues or floods. We expect fashions to change. And few people want their lives to be just like those of their parents or grandparents. We welcome innovation and cope pretty well with disorder. The ancient Mesopotamians wouldn't have understood us. Since the natural world was almost unbearably unpredictable, it seems as though they didn't want their personal lives to be unpredictable. So the early Mesopotamians created an orderly social world in which you could count on people to behave in predictable and civil ways. And almost everyone seems to have followed unwritten rules. This love of order pervaded everyday life in the early dynastic period from around 2900 to 2300 BCE. One place where you see the desire for order was in religious beliefs. The Mesopotamians believed the gods had control over chaos and order in the universe. The natural world might have seemed completely unpredictable, but they could explain this. They believed that gods and goddesses, who were wildly powerful individuals, who shared our human virtues but had our weaknesses as well, they were in charge of it all. When the gods were angry, they could wreak havoc, causing all manner of natural disasters. When they were happy, they could be stable, maybe even loving. When the gods were content, crops were abundant, herds of sheep expanded, women gave birth to healthy babies, and the rivers rose predictably and didn't overflow their banks. So it was up to human beings to try to keep the gods happy. Being like humans, but on a much bigger scale in every way, the gods needed houses, food, drink, and gifts. Yet there were no guarantees. According to the Mesopotamian flood story, the king of the gods, whose name was Enlil, decided to wipe out human beings because they were just too noisy and he couldn't sleep. He wasn't successful. Another god, Enki, saved humankind by telling a man to build a boat to escape the flood with his family. You couldn't count on the gods to be predictable. The gods and goddesses looked like humans and were members of families. The families provided structure and companionship, just as they do for people. But the gods also fought and squabbled, just like family members. Enlil, as king and father of the other gods, commanded respect, at least most of the time. But sometimes his divine children got rebellious and had to be reined in. One Mesopotamian creation myth tells of a time before humans had been created, when the gods rebelled against Enlil because they had to work too hard to produce their food. They were going to overthrow him in his palace. A wise god came up with a solution. The gods should create humans to take over all their hard work. Humans could feed all the gods with their farming and cooking. So the Mesopotamians saw their relationship to the gods in a unique way. Their sole reason for being on earth, the reason for the creation of the human species, was to provide for the gods. All the chaotic things that the world could unleash, the floods and plagues and earthquakes and storms, those were proof of the power of the gods. The people were just insignificant servants tossed about by their immortal and fickle masters. But there was hope for everyone because the gods, like humans, preferred order to chaos. One of the Mesopotamians' firmly held beliefs was that cosmic order was written on a document, a clay tablet, of course, in the realm of the gods. It was known as the Tablet of Destinies. People believed that it existed, even though it didn't. On this fabled tablet, presumably written in cuneiform, were written different aspects of cosmic order, which they called the Me. So long as a wise god, like Enlil, controlled the Tablet of Destinies, all was well with the world. On the other hand, all hell broke loose when the tablet ended up in the hands of an evil deity. Several myths describe how the good gods would get it back. The Mesopotamians just longed for structure and predictability in their lives and prayed that the tablet would stay safely in the hands of the father of the divine family. The Mesopotamian religion wasn't congregational and it wasn't dogmatic. People didn't gather together to worship the way that believers in religions do today. They didn't expect to get spiritual guidance in a temple. And religious leaders didn't preach. Normal people worshipped the gods privately, in their houses or in small neighborhood shrines. Families were devoted to particular gods, and each individual believed that he or she had a personal god and goddess to watch over them. If you were having a spell of good luck, it meant your personal god and goddess were taking good care of you. If not, perhaps they'd abandoned you. Various incantations, which were like spells, could be recited to help bring back the gods. So, Mesopotamians didn't go to big city temples to pray. A temple was the residence of a god. And where the god actually lived, that is, the sanctuary in the heart of the temple, where his or her statue was located, was as private as the house of a king, off-limits to almost everyone, except for the high priests and priestesses. One thing many people did do in a temple was to work. By the early dynastic period, the temples to the great gods had turned into economic powerhouses. They owned vast estates with fields and orchards and herds of sheep and goats. The priests hired hundreds of workers to farm the land and herd the animals. Other workers processed the harvested wheat and barley into bread and beer. Lots of women worked for the temples to turn wool into textiles. They spun the wool and dyed it, wove it and embroidered it. Textiles produced by women working in the temples and palaces became some of Mesopotamia's most important exports. Not just in the early dynastic period, but for thousands of years after that, people were willing to pay high prices for Mesopotamian fabrics. In Plutarch's Life of Cato the Elder, there's a reference to Mesopotamian tapestries in Roman times. We know about the early dynastic workers because the temples kept records of the people employed there, what they did and how they were paid. Their pay wasn't in the form of money, because it hadn't been invented yet. Instead, they were paid in rations of barley, oil and wool, enough to support not just the worker, but his or her family as well. The workers would use some of the barley to make bread and beer, and some of the wool to make clothes, rugs and blankets for their families. Vegetable oil was used for eating and for light. This was before candles. They only had oil lamps. Sometimes the workers would have rations left over after using what their families needed. They could use this surplus to trade with other people for things they needed, like salt and for cooking utensils and tools. Although grain was the only type of food they received in their rations, the Mesopotamian workers' diet didn't consist solely of bread. They also ate vegetables from their gardens. We know from later recipes that they were particularly fond of onions. They also fished in the rivers and made stews of the meat of wild birds. At religious festivals, they might eat beef or goat meat, though a goat or sheep or an ox was much more useful alive than dead. Dates from date palms, which grow across Mesopotamia, were the sweetest items in their diets. The Mesopotamians cooked dates in bread to make dessert. My students are often surprised to learn that Mesopotamians drank beer all the time. It was safer than drinking water because the fermentation process sterilized it. The beer had calories, that is, a source of energy, and a low alcohol content. It was considered to be one of the most important aspects of civilization. People sometimes drank this beer through straws from big communal pots at banquets. The straws helped you avoid the sediment or the barley husks or even insects that might have fallen in. An early dynastic temple that's been excavated at the ancient city of Lagash in modern-day Iraq had a whole area for brewing beer. There was a courtyard with ovens. One of them was 15 feet in diameter and it filled a whole room. There was a large tank and there were rooms with vats for storing the beer. Beer was made on a huge scale. Some of it went to the goddess Inanna, whose temple it was, and some of it went to the temple dependents and workers. Some of it might also have been sold. Women were often involved in brewing throughout Mesopotamian history as they were involved in weaving. The female innkeeper was a common figure in Mesopotamian life. Actually, women could work in a number of professions. One of the most important roles was as a priestess. A high priestess had many duties and most of them weren't religious. She could be responsible for running an entire temple estate. Just as large numbers of people worked in the great temples of the gods, large numbers of people were also employed in the royal palaces and estates. The king of each city-state had a palace in his capital city. He owned extensive agricultural land and herds of sheep and goats. And so did his wife. About 1,700 cuneiform texts have been found in the palace of the queen at Lagash. The king's palace wasn't excavated, but he would have had archives like this as well. The tablets were carefully written by scribes who kept track of tiny details. Hundreds of tablets listed parcels of land that had been awarded to people who were dependents of the queen's palace. Some of these were important officials, professionals and skilled artisans. Military and cult personnel. The land they received was probably provided instead of the rations that came to workers of lower ranks. So in many cities, quite a large number of citizens worked for the main temples and the palace. They were paid and their wages were recorded. And mostly, it seems to have all gone quite smoothly. Sometimes though, wars between the cities broke out and men were called up to fight. There was no standing army at this time, so battles were fought during the months between harvest and planting when farmers could leave their fields to fight. War was common during most eras of Mesopotamian history, pitting one city or one kingdom against another. The palaces drew up lists of men recruited for military service. Sometimes these were lists of whole towns. They standardized arms and armor and organized a hierarchical system of generals. They even invented the phalanx formation. Thousands of years before the Greeks used it. This probably took away the possibility of individual acts of heroism, but it made the army stronger. If you look at Mesopotamian artworks that depict warfare from the early dynastic period, everything, at least on the winning side, seems to be going according to plan. Identical soldiers line up with their identical shields, helmets and spears, presenting a united front to the enemy. But the enemies are always shown in disarray. They're bleeding, naked, trampled under the feet of the victors. In reality, of course, a Mesopotamian battle wouldn't have looked like this, with one side scattered, rubbed of all their clothing and dead or captured, while the other side was still in perfect formation and unscathed. Battles would have been brutal, with many casualties inflicted on both sides. Deaths in battle, and deaths afterward from infected wounds, added to the ancient fears of chaos. But war wasn't inevitable. The elaborate diplomatic system provided a way to try to solve crises without bloodshed. Unfortunately, the lives of ancient commoners can be hard to reconstruct. They were almost always illiterate, so they didn't leave records, and their homes have rarely been excavated. Archaeologists have traditionally focused more on temples and palaces. And even when an ancient house is excavated, what can you expect to find? The structures are never complete, and that's true of all buildings. Usually, we find only the bottoms of walls or foundations. The buildings were abandoned at some point, and the owners almost always removed any valuable goods inside, so that only trash was left on the floors. Then the walls fell down, the whole thing was eventually leveled, and a new building was constructed on top of the ruins. This happened over and over. So archaeologists usually find layers of ancient floors, foundations, cards, broken pots, and food debris. Occasionally, they come across a site that was abandoned in a hurry, and never reoccupied. Now, the classic case of this is when a volcano erupted, like at Pompeii in Italy, or the island of Santorini in Greece. The ash preserved even fragile items, and was too thick for people to recover their possessions later. So everything would be left right where it was when the eruption took place. There are no volcanoes in Mesopotamia, so we have nothing like that there. But when a building burned down, you find the next best thing. Fire would bake clay tablets, so every written document in a burned building is left just as it was, and most are as hard as bricks. The fire also carbonized wood and other organic materials, so sometimes there's evidence of wooden doorposts or baskets. And the pots and food waste of everyday life were often left there too, just where they were when the fire happened. Another window into ancient life appears when archaeologists uncover a tomb that hasn't been robbed. People were often buried with things they thought would be useful in the afterlife. Often they were dressed in their finest clothes and jewelry. So even modest tombs might contain pots of food, maybe a dagger, a necklace, or a cylinder seal. You can get a tiny sense of who this person might have been, what he or she owned and cared about. Late in 1922, a British archaeologist named Sir Leonard Woolley began leading an excavation at the city of Ur, about midway between modern Baghdad and the Gulf. Woolley had a giant team of workmen, and they found evidence of some extraordinary tombs from the early dynastic period, as well as buildings and temples from later periods of Mesopotamian history. Ur was obviously an important center. Almost from the start, Woolley's men began to uncover some tombs near the major public buildings in the city center. Better still, many of them seemed to be intact, not robbed in antiquity. Some of the tombs Woolley discovered at Ur were much more extravagant than a commoner's burial. The excavators even found gold. Right away, Woolley knew this was going to be an important find. By 1927, the team had discovered about 1,850 burial pits of commoners and 17 much more elaborate and richer tombs. They were from the early dynastic period. Maybe around 2600 BCE. Somehow, they had gone unnoticed by tomb robbers for thousands of years, unlike almost all other tombs of Mesopotamian leaders. So they were found with everything exactly as it had been when the burials took place. These elaborate tombs are very mysterious. I first read about them when I was a child. Some of Woolley's first-hand account of his excavations appear in a book I loved called Hands on the Past. It included excerpts written by archaeologists about their finds. The passage by Woolley made a huge impression on me. It was one reason I became convinced I wanted to study the ancient world. According to Woolley, some of the tombs weren't just for one person. Here's some of what he wrote. The floor of the death pit was covered with bodies in ordered rows. Six men on the entrance side and 68 women in court dress. Red coats with beaded cuffs and shell-ring belts. Headdresses of gold or silver. Great lunate earrings and multiple necklaces of blue and gold. Amongst them was one girl who was not wearing her silver hair ribbon. It was in her pocket, tightly coiled up like a rounded tape, as if she had been late for the funeral and had not had time to put it on. What in the world was going on here? These attendants in what Woolley called the death pit had either killed themselves or been killed to be buried with the main person in the tomb. There were 17 of these royal tombs, as Woolley called them. Each one, he wrote, was the resting place of a semi-divine ruler. Now, we can't be sure who these rich people were or why they were accompanied in death by dozens of attendants. Only one of them has a name we know. A woman named Puabi, whose burial was one of the most extravagant. She was found with a cylinder seal that she would have used in place of a signature. On it was inscribed her name and her title, Nin. Nin can mean queen in the Sumerian language, but it also has the more general meaning of lady. Although it's possible Puabi was a queen, she might have been a priestess instead. There are so many unknowns. Who were the people who died to join their leader in the afterlife? Were they courtiers, commoners, family members of the dead man or woman, or maybe slaves? They were all around the same age, younger than 30, which suggests that they didn't represent a cross-section of palace employees. Were their deaths a sign of incredible devotion to the dead leaders, or did they have no choice? If their presence was voluntary, who convinced them to die? Did they all take poison at once? This was what Willy believed. But recent scans of their skulls show that some of them were hit in the head. Did people really just stand there in the tomb, waiting to be the next one to be bashed in the head and killed? There was no evidence of a fight, and no evidence of people being restrained or forced to stay. So did the attendants take poison first, and then, when they were unconscious, had their heads cracked? It would be fascinating to know. We might get a clearer sense of the relationship between the population and their leaders. But now, here's something of what we can reconstruct. After the death of the leader, a large pit was dug, and a one-room building was constructed at one end. Inside the building, the body of the leader was placed and surrounded with luxury goods. Outside the tomb building, the doomed attendants walked down a ramp into the pit, standing in orderly lines. In some cases, a wagon was backed down the ramp, accompanied by soldiers in helmets and armour. These attendants were all killed, after which the pit was covered up. The objects buried in the tomb would have been worth a fortune even back then. There were musical instruments, mostly lyres and harps, and chariots, armour and weapons, sculptures and bowls. Many objects were made from luxury materials that had been imported. There was gold from Egypt, silver from Anatolia, lapis lazuli, a bluestone from the Hindu Kush mountains, and carnelian from the Indus Valley. Long stone beads had been drilled right through using hand-turned drills. The precision is astounding. Every bead and pendant, and there were thousands of them, is evidence of the artistry of the Sumerian craftsmen, who must have spent months or years producing each object for the tomb. There must be a story behind every object. A necklace worn by a queen or priestess would have been painstakingly created by a palace artisan. You can imagine him hammering the gold into the shapes of leaves, delicately carving and drilling the lapis lazuli to make the beads, and laying stones into a gold frame. Did the queen or priestess wear this regularly before her death, or was it made for her burial? Either way, all this finery was buried underground, and no one went back to steal it. All of this suggests the Mesopotamians had a belief in the type of afterlife that the Egyptians also looked forward to, one in which you could take it with you and be as rich and powerful after death as you were in life. Perhaps the attendants believed they were going to a glorious afterlife with their leader. At this early time, there were no written records of what the Mesopotamians believed about the afterlife. But it's interesting to note that later legends didn't make it out to be a pleasant place at all. Similar types of burials were also found in Egypt and later in China. For a short time, the rulers in all three places were buried with attendants who were sacrificed for the occasion. And then, quite quickly, in all three places, the practice stopped. Later kings might have had models or paintings of attendants, like the terracotta warriors in China or the wooden models in Egyptian royal tombs, but not the real thing. We might know a lot more about the royal tombs in Ur in coming years. There's an exciting project led by the British Museum and the Penn Museum in Philadelphia to put descriptions and images of all the objects from Ur online, along with photographs, archives, and notes from the excavations. People will have access to this data and no doubt scholars will be able to make much better sense of the materials. The early dynastic period set a pattern for the civilization of Mesopotamia for thousands of years. The religion didn't change much after that. The idea that the king had power because he was chosen by the gods remained the main source of every king's legitimacy. The language of the early dynastic period, Sumerian, was considered the language of learning and religion long after it had actually become a dead language. What changed, though, was the size of the kingdom. The small city-states of the early dynastic period would soon be replaced by the world's first empire.