Mesopotamia to the end of the Old Babylonian period
The background
In the narrow sense, Mesopotamia is the area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, north or northwest of the bottleneck at Baghdad, in modern Iraq; it is Al-Jazīrah (“The Island”) of the Arabs. South of this lies Babylonia, named after the city of Babylon. However, in the broader sense, the name Mesopotamia has come to be used for the area bounded on the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and on the southwest by the edge of the Arabian Plateau and stretching from the Persian Gulf in the southeast to the spurs of the Anti-Taurus Mountains in the northwest. Only from the latitude of Baghdad do the Euphrates and Tigris truly become twin rivers, the rāfidān of the Arabs, which have constantly changed their courses over the millennia. The low-lying plain of the Kārūn River in Persia has always been closely related to Mesopotamia, but it is not considered part of Mesopotamia as it forms its own river system.
Mesopotamia, south of Ar-Ramādī (about 70 miles, or 110 kilometres, west of Baghdad) on the Euphrates and the bend of the Tigris below Sāmarrāʾ (about 70 miles north-northwest of Baghdad), is flat alluvial land. Between Baghdad and the mouth of the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab (the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, where it empties into the Persian Gulf) there is a difference in height of only about 100 feet (30 metres). As a result of the slow flow of the water, there are heavy deposits of silt, and the riverbeds are raised. Consequently, the rivers often overflow their banks (and may even change their course) when they are not protected by high dikes. In recent times they have been regulated above Baghdad by the use of escape channels with overflow reservoirs. The extreme south is a region of extensive marshes and reed swamps, hawrs, which, probably since early times, have served as an area of refuge for oppressed and displaced peoples. The supply of water is not regular; as a result of the high average temperatures and a very low annual rainfall, the ground of the plain of latitude 35° N is hard and dry and unsuitable for plant cultivation for at least eight months in the year. Consequently, agriculture without risk of crop failure, which seems to have begun in the higher rainfall zones and in the hilly borders of Mesopotamia in the 10th millennium bc, began in Mesopotamia itself, the real heart of the civilization, only after artificial irrigation had been invented, bringing water to large stretches of territory through a widely branching network of canals. Since the ground is extremely fertile and, with irrigation and the necessary drainage, will produce in abundance, southern Mesopotamia became a land of plenty that could support a considerable population. The cultural superiority of north Mesopotamia, which may have lasted until about 4000 bc, was finally overtaken by the south when the people there had responded to the challenge of their situation.
The present climatic conditions are fairly similar to those of 8,000 years ago. An English survey of ruined settlements in the area 30 miles around ancient Hatra (180 miles northwest of Baghdad) has shown that the southern limits of the zone in which agriculture is possible without artificial irrigation has remained unchanged since the first settlement of Al-Jazīrah.
The availability of raw materials is a historical factor of great importance, as is the dependence on those materials that had to be imported. In Mesopotamia, agricultural products and those from stock breeding, fisheries, date palm cultivation, and reed industries—in short, grain, vegetables, meat, leather, wool, horn, fish, dates, and reed and plant-fibre products—were available in plenty and could easily be produced in excess of home requirements to be exported. There are bitumen springs at Hīt (90 miles northwest of Baghdad) on the Euphrates (the Is of Herodotus). On the other hand, wood, stone, and metal were rare or even entirely absent. The date palm—virtually the national tree of Iraq—yields a wood suitable only for rough beams and not for finer work. Stone is mostly lacking in southern Mesopotamia, although limestone is quarried in the desert about 35 miles to the west and “Mosul marble” is found not far from the Tigris in its middle reaches. Metal can only be obtained in the mountains, and the same is true of precious and semiprecious stones. Consequently, southern Mesopotamia in particular was destined to be a land of trade from the start. Only rarely could “empires” extending over a wider area guarantee themselves imports by plundering or by subjecting neighbouring regions.
The raw material that epitomizes Mesopotamian civilization is clay: in the almost exclusively mud-brick architecture and in the number and variety of clay figurines and pottery artifacts, Mesopotamia bears the stamp of clay as does no other civilization, and nowhere in the world but in Mesopotamia and the regions over which its influence was diffused was clay used as the vehicle for writing. Such phrases as cuneiform civilization, cuneiform literature, and cuneiform law can apply only where people had had the idea of using soft clay not only for bricks and jars and for the jar stoppers on which a seal could be impressed as a mark of ownership but also as the vehicle for impressed signs to which established meanings were assigned—an intellectual achievement that amounted to nothing less than the invention of writing.
The character and influence of ancient Mesopotamia
Questions as to what ancient Mesopotamian civilization did and did not accomplish, how it influenced its neighbours and successors, and what its legacy has transmitted are posed from the standpoint of 20th-century civilization and are in part coloured by ethical overtones, so that the answers can only be relative. Modern scholars assume the ability to assess the sum total of an “ancient Mesopotamian civilization”; but, since the publication of an article by the Assyriologist Benno Landsberger on “Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt” (1926; “The Distinctive Conceptuality of the Babylonian World”), it has become almost a commonplace to call attention to the necessity of viewing ancient Mesopotamia and its civilization as an independent entity.
Ancient Mesopotamia had many languages and cultures; its history is broken up into many periods and eras; it had no real geographic unity, and above all no permanent capital city, so that by its very variety it stands out from other civilizations with greater uniformity, particularly that of Egypt. The script and the pantheon constitute the unifying factors, but in these also Mesopotamia shows its predilection for multiplicity and variety. Written documents were turned out in quantities, and there are often many copies of a single text. The pantheon consisted of more than 1,000 deities, even though many divine names may apply to different manifestations of a single god. During 3,000 years of Mesopotamian civilization, each century gave birth to the next. Thus classical Sumerian civilization influenced that of the Akkadians, and the Ur III empire, which itself represented a Sumero-Akkadian synthesis, exercised its influence on the first quarter of the 2nd millennium bc. With the Hittites, large areas of Anatolia were infused with the culture of Mesopotamia from 1700 bc onward. Contacts, via Mari, with Ebla in Syria, some 30 miles south of Aleppo, go back to the 24th century bc, so that links between Syrian and Palestinian scribal schools and Babylonian civilization during the Amarna period (14th century bc) may have had much older predecessors. At any rate, the similarity of certain themes in cuneiform literature and the Old Testament, such as the story of the Flood or the motif of the righteous sufferer, is due to such early contacts and not to direct borrowing.
The achievements of ancient Mesopotamia
The world of mathematics and astronomy owes much to the Babylonians—for instance, the sexagesimal system for the calculation of time and angles, which is still practical because of the multiple divisibility of the number 60; the Greek day of 12 “double-hours”; and the zodiac and its signs. In many cases, however, the origins and routes of borrowings are obscure, as in the problem of the survival of ancient Mesopotamian legal theory.
The achievement of the civilization itself may be expressed in terms of its best points—moral, aesthetic, scientific, and, not least, literary. Legal theory flourished and was sophisticated early on, being expressed in several collections of legal decisions, the so-called codes, of which the best-known is the Code of Hammurabi. Throughout these codes recurs the concern of the ruler for the weak, the widow, and the orphan—even if, sometimes, the phrases were regrettably only literary clichés. The aesthetics of art are too much governed by subjective values to be assessed in absolute terms, yet certain peaks stand out above the rest, notably the art of Uruk IV, the seal engraving of the Akkad period, and the relief sculpture of Ashurbanipal. Nonetheless, there is nothing in Mesopotamia to match the sophistication of Egyptian art. Science the Mesopotamians had, of a kind, though not in the sense of Greek science. From its beginnings in Sumer before the middle of the 3rd millennium bc, Mesopotamian science was characterized by endless, meticulous enumeration and ordering into columns and series, with the ultimate ideal of including all things in the world but without the wish or ability to synthesize and reduce the material to a system. Not a single general scientific law has been found, and only rarely has the use of analogy been found. Nevertheless, it remains a highly commendable achievement that Pythagoras’ law (that the sum of the squares on the two shorter sides of a right-angled triangle equals the square on the longest side), even though it was never formulated, was being applied as early as the 18th century bc. Technical accomplishments were perfected in the building of the ziggurats (temple towers resembling pyramids), with their huge bulk, and in irrigation, both in practical execution and in theoretical calculations. At the beginning of the 3rd millennium bc, an artificial stone often regarded as a forerunner of concrete was in use at Uruk (160 miles south-southeast of modern Baghdad), but the secret of its manufacture apparently was lost in subsequent years.
Writing pervaded all aspects of life and gave rise to a highly developed bureaucracy—one of the most tenacious legacies of the ancient Middle East. Remarkable organizing ability was required to administer huge estates, in which, under the 3rd dynasty of Ur, for example, it was not unusual to prepare accounts for thousands of cattle or tens of thousands of bundles of reeds. Similar figures are attested at Ebla, three centuries earlier.
Above all, the literature of Mesopotamia is one of its finest cultural achievements. Though there are many modern anthologies and chrestomathies (compilations of useful learning), with translations and paraphrases of Mesopotamian literature, as well as attempts to write its history, it cannot truly be said that “cuneiform literature” has been resurrected to the extent that it deserves. There are partly material reasons for this: many clay tablets survive only in a fragmentary condition, and duplicates that would restore the texts have not yet been discovered, so that there are still large gaps. A further reason is the inadequate knowledge of the languages: insufficient acquaintance with the vocabulary and, in Sumerian, major difficulties with the grammar. Consequently, another generation of Assyriologists will pass before the great myths, epics, lamentations, hymns, “law codes,” wisdom literature, and pedagogical treatises can be presented to the reader in such a way that he can fully appreciate the high level of literary creativity of those times.
The classical and medieval views of Mesopotamia; its rediscovery in modern times
Before the first excavations in Mesopotamia, about 1840, nearly 2,000 years had passed during which knowledge of the ancient Middle East was derived from three sources only: the Bible, Greek and Roman authors, and the excerpts from the writings of Berosus, a Babylonian who wrote in Greek. In 1800 very little more was known than in ad 800, although these sources had served to stir the imagination of poets and artists, down to Sardanapalus (1821) by the 19th-century English poet Lord Byron.
Apart from the building of the Tower of Babel, the Old Testament mentions Mesopotamia only in those historical contexts in which the kings of Assyria and Babylonia affected the course of events in Israel and Judah: in particular Tiglath-pileser III, Shalmaneser V, and Sennacherib, with their policy of deportation, and the Babylonian Exile introduced by Nebuchadrezzar II. Of the Greeks, Herodotus of Halicarnassus (5th century bc, a contemporary of Xerxes I and Artaxerxes I) was the first to report on “Babylon and the rest of Assyria”; at that date the Assyrian empire had been overthrown for more than 100 years. The Athenian Xenophon took part in an expedition (during 401–399 bc) of Greek mercenaries who crossed Anatolia, made their way down the Euphrates as far as the vicinity of Baghdad, and returned up the Tigris after the famous Battle of Cunaxa. In his Cyropaedia Xenophon describes the final struggle between Cyrus II and the Neo-Babylonian empire. Later, the Greeks adopted all kinds of fabulous tales about King Ninus, Queen Semiramis, and King Sardanapalus. These stories are described mainly in the historical work of Diodorus Siculus (1st century bc), who based them on the reports of a Greek physician, Ctesias (405–359 bc). Herodotus saw Babylon with his own eyes, and Xenophon gave an account of travels and battles. All later historians, however, wrote at second or third hand, with one exception, Berosus (b. c. 340 bc), who emigrated at an advanced age to the Aegean island of Cos, where he is said to have composed the three books of the Babylōniaka. Unfortunately, only extracts from them survive, prepared by one Alexander Polyhistor (1st century bc), who, in his turn, served as a source for the Church Father Eusebius (d. ad 342). Berosus derided the “Greek historians” who had so distorted the history of his country. He knew, for example, that it was not Semiramis who founded the city of Babylon, but he was himself the prisoner of his own environment and cannot have known more about the history of his land than was known in Babylonia itself in the 4th century bc.
Berosus’ first book dealt with the beginnings of the world and with a myth of a composite being, Oannes, half fish, half man, who came ashore in Babylonia at a time when men still lived like the wild beasts. Oannes taught them the essentials of civilization: writing, the arts, law, agriculture, surveying, and architecture. The name Oannes must have been derived from the cuneiform U’anna (Sumerian) or Umanna (Akkadian), a second name of the mythical figure Adapa, the bringer of civilization. The second book of Berosus contained the Babylonian king list from the beginning to King Nabonassar (Nabu-naṣir, 747–734 bc), a contemporary of Tiglath-pileser III. Berosus’ tradition, beginning with a list of primeval kings before the Flood, is a reliable one; it agrees with the tradition of the Sumerian king list, and even individual names can be traced back exactly to their Sumerian originals. Even the immensely long reigns of the primeval kings, which lasted as long as “18 sars” (= 18 × 3,600 = 64,800) of years, are found in Berosus. Furthermore, he was acquainted with the story of the Flood, with Cronus as its instigator and Xisuthros (or Ziusudra) as its hero, and with the building of an ark. The third book is presumed to have dealt with the history of Babylonia from Nabonassar to the time of Berosus himself.
Diodorus made the mistake of locating Nineveh on the Euphrates, and Xenophon gave an account of two cities, Larissa (probably modern Nimrūd [ancient Kalakh], 20 miles southeast of modern Mosul) and Mespila (ancient Nineveh, just north of Mosul). The name Mespila probably was nothing more than the word of the local Aramaeans for ruins; there can be no clearer instance of the rift that had opened between the ancient Middle East and the classical West. In sharp contrast, the East had a tradition that the ruins opposite Mosul (in north Iraq) concealed ancient Nineveh. When a Spanish rabbi from Navarre, Benjamin of Tudela, was traveling in the Middle East between 1160 and 1173, Jews and Muslims alike knew the position of the grave of the prophet Jonah. The credit for the rediscovery of the ruins of Babylon goes to an Italian, Pietro della Valle, who correctly identified the vast ruins north of modern Al-Ḥillah, Iraq (60 miles south of Baghdad); he must have seen there the large rectangular tower that represented the ancient ziggurat. Previously, other travelers had sought the Tower of Babel in two other monumental ruins: Birs Nimrūd, the massive brick structure of the ziggurat of ancient Borsippa (modern Birs, near Al-Ḥillah), vitrified by lightning, and the ziggurat of the Kassite capital, Dur Kurigalzu, at Burj ʿAqarqūf, 22 miles west of Baghdad. Pietro della Valle brought back to Europe the first specimens of cuneiform writing, stamped brick, of which highly impressionistic reproductions were made. Thereafter, European travelers visited Mesopotamia with increasing frequency, among them Carsten Niebuhr (an 18th-century German traveler), Claudius James Rich (a 19th-century Orientalist and traveler), and Ker Porter (a 19th-century traveler).
In modern times a third Middle Eastern ruin drew visitors from Europe—Persepolis, in the land of Persia east of Susiana, near modern Shīrāz, Iran. In 1602, reports had filtered back to Europe of inscriptions that were not in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Georgian, or Greek. In 1700 an Englishman, Thomas Hyde, coined the term “cuneiform” for these inscriptions, and by the middle of the 18th century it was known that the Persepolis inscriptions were related to those of Babylon. Niebuhr distinguished three separate alphabets (Babylonian, Elamite, and Old Persian cuneiform). The first promising attempt at decipherment was made by the German philologist Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802, by use of the kings’ names in the Old Persian versions of the trilingual inscriptions, although his later efforts led him up a blind alley. Thereafter, the efforts to decipher cuneiform gradually developed in the second half of the 19th century into a discipline of ancient Oriental philology, which was based on results established through the pioneering work of Emile Burnouf, Edward Hincks, Sir Henry Rawlinson, and many others.
Today this subject is still known as Assyriology, because at the end of the 19th century the great majority of cuneiform texts came from the Assyrian city of Nineveh, in particular from the library of King Ashurbanipal in the mound of Kuyunjik at Nineveh.
Modern archaeological excavations
More than 150 years separate the first excavations in Mesopotamia—adventurous expeditions involving great personal risks, far from the protection of helpful authorities—from those of the present day with their specialist staffs, modern technical equipment, and objectives wider than the mere search for valuable antiquities. The progress of six generations of excavators has led to a situation in which less is recovered more accurately; in other words, the finds are observed, measured, and photographed as precisely as possible. At first digging was unsystematic, with the consequence that, although huge quantities of clay tablets and large and small antiquities were brought to light, the locations of the finds were rarely described with any accuracy. Not until the beginning of the 20th century did excavators learn to isolate the individual bricks in the walls that had previously been erroneously thought to be nothing more than packed clay; the result was that various characteristic brick types could be distinguished and successive architectural levels established. Increased care in excavation does, of course, carry with it the risk that the pace of discovery will slow down. Moreover, the eyes of the local inhabitants are now sharpened and their appetite for finds is whetted, so that clandestine diggers have established themselves as the unwelcome colleagues of the archaeologists.
A result of the technique of building with mud brick (mass production of baked bricks was impossible because of the shortage of fuel) was that the buildings were highly vulnerable to the weather and needed constant renewal; layers of settlement rapidly built up, creating a tell (Arabic: tall), a mound of occupation debris that is the characteristic ruin form of Mesopotamia. The word itself appears among the most original vocabulary of the Semitic languages and is attested as early as the end of the 3rd millennium bc. Excavation is made more difficult by this mound formation, since both horizontal and vertical axes have to be taken into account. Moreover, the depth of each level is not necessarily constant, and foundation trenches may be dug down into earlier levels. A further problem is that finds may have been removed from their original context in antiquity. Short-lived settlements that did not develop into mounds mostly escape observation, but aerial photography can now pick out ground discolorations that betray the existence of settlements. Districts with a high water level today, such as the reed marshes (hawrs), or ruins that are covered by modern settlements, such as Irbīl (ancient Arbela), some 200 miles north of Baghdad, or sites that are surmounted by shrines and tombs of holy men are closed to archaeological research.
Excavations in Mesopotamia have mostly been national undertakings (France, England, the United States, Germany, Iraq, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and the former Soviet Union), but joint expeditions like the one sent to Ur (190 miles south-southeast of Baghdad) in the 1920s have become more frequent since the 1970s. The history of archaeological research in Mesopotamia falls into four categories, represented by phases of differing lengths: the first, and by far the longest, begins with the French expedition to Nineveh (1842) and Khorsabad (the ancient Dur Sharrukin, 20 miles northeast of modern Mosul; 1843–55) and that of the English to Nineveh (1846–55) and Nimrūd (ancient Kalakh, biblical Calah; 1845, with interruptions until 1880). This marked the beginning of the “classic” excavations in the important ancient capitals, where spectacular finds might be anticipated. The principal gains were the Assyrian bull colossi and wall reliefs and the library of Ashurbanipal from Nineveh, although the ground plans of temples and palaces were quite as valuable. While these undertakings had restored the remains of the Neo-Assyrian empire of the 1st millennium bc, from 1877 onward new French initiatives in Telloh (Arabic: Tall Lōḥā, 155 miles southeast of Baghdad, reached almost 2,000 years further back into the past. There they rediscovered a people whose language had already been encountered in bilingual texts from Nineveh—the Sumerians. Telloh (ancient Girsu) yielded not only inscribed material that, quite apart from its historical interest, was critical for the establishment of the chronology of the second half of the 3rd millennium bc but also many artistic masterpieces. Thereafter excavations in important cities spread to form a network including Susa, 150 miles west of Eṣfahān in Iran (France; 1884 onward); Nippur, 90 miles southeast of Baghdad (the United States; 1889 onward); Babylon, 55 miles south of Baghdad (Germany; 1899–1917 and again from 1957 onward); Ashur, modern Ash-Sharqāṭ, 55 miles south of Mosul (Germany; 1903–14); Uruk (Germany; 1912–13 and from 1928 onward); and Ur (England and the United States; 1918–34). Mention also should be made of the German excavations at Boğazköy in central Turkey, the ancient Hattusa, capital of the Hittite empire, which have been carried on, with interruptions, since 1906.
The second phase began in 1925 with the commencement of American excavations at Yorgan Tepe (ancient Nuzi), 140 miles north of Baghdad, a provincial centre with Old Akkadian, Old Assyrian, and Middle Assyrian/Hurrian levels. There followed, among others, French excavations at Arslan Tash (ancient Hadatu; 1928), at Tall al-Aḥmar (ancient Til Barsib; 1929–31), and above all at Tall Ḥarīrī (ancient Mari; 1933 onward) and American excavations in the Diyālā region (east of Baghdad), at Tall al-Asmar (ancient Eshnunna), at Khafājī, and at other sites. Thus, excavation in Mesopotamia had moved away from the capital cities to include the “provinces.” Simultaneously, it expanded beyond the limits of Mesopotamia and Susiana and revealed outliers of “cuneiform civilization” on the Syrian coast at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit; France, 1929 onward) and on the Orontes of northern Syria at Al-ʿAṭshānah (ancient Alalakh; England, 1937–39 and 1947–49), while, since 1954, Danish excavations on the islands of Bahrain and Faylakah, off the Tigris-Euphrates delta, have disclosed staging posts between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization. Short-lived salvage operations have been undertaken at the site of the Assad Dam on the middle Euphrates (e.g., German excavations at Ḥabūba al-Kabīra, 1971–76). Italian excavations at Tall Mardīkh (ancient Ebla; 1967 onward) have yielded spectacular results, including several thousand cuneiform tablets dating from the 24th century bc.
In its third phase, archaeological research in Mesopotamia and its neighbouring lands has probed back into prehistory and protohistory. The objective of these investigations, initiated by American archaeologists, was to trace as closely as possible the successive chronological stages in the progress of man from hunter-gatherer to settled farmer and, finally, to city dweller. These excavations are strongly influenced by the methods of the prehistorian, and the principal objective is no longer the search for texts and monuments. Apart from the American investigations, Iraq itself has taken part in this phase of the history of investigation, as has Japan since 1956 and the former Soviet Union from 1969 until the early 1990s.
Finally, the fourth category, which runs parallel with the first three phases, is represented by “surveys,” which do not concentrate on individual sites but attempt to define the relations between single settlements, their positioning along canals or rivers, or the distribution of central settlements and their satellites. Since shortages of time, money, and an adequate task force preclude the thorough investigation of large numbers of individual sites, the method employed is that of observing and collecting finds from the surface. Of these finds, the latest in date will give a rough termination date for the duration of the settlement, but, since objects from earlier, if not the earliest, levels work their way to the surface with a predictable degree of certainty or are exposed in rain gullies, an intensive search of the surface of the mound allows conclusions as to the total period of occupation with some degree of probability. If the individual periods of settlement are marked on superimposed maps, a very clear picture is obtained of the fluctuations in settlement patterns, of the changing proportions between large and small settlements, and of the equally changeable systems of riverbeds and irrigation canals—for, when points on the map lie in line, it is a legitimate assumption that they were once connected by watercourses.
During the four phases outlined, the objectives and methods of excavation have broadened and shifted. At first the chief aim was the recovery of valuable finds suitable for museums, but at the same time there was, from early on, considerable interest in the architecture of Mesopotamia, which has won for it the place it deserves in architectural history. Alongside philology, art history has also made great strides, building up a chronological framework by the combination of evidence from stratigraphic and stylistic criteria, particularly in pottery and cylinder seals. The discovery of graves and a variety of burial customs has thrown new light on the history of religion, stimulated by the interest of Old Testament studies. While pottery was previously collected for purely aesthetic motives or from the point of view of art history, attention has come to be paid increasingly to everyday wares, and greater insight into social and economic history is based on knowledge of the distribution and frequency of shapes and materials. The observation and investigation of animal bones and plant remains (pollen and seed analysis) have supplied invaluable information on the process of domestication, the conditions of animal husbandry, and the advances in agriculture. Such studies demand the cooperation of both zoologists and paleobotanists. In addition, microscopic analysis of the floors of excavated buildings may help to identify the functions of individual rooms.