Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [58]
T
he next time you walk into a bar on a Friday night, order up a cold brew, and ask someone what his or her “sign” is, pause a moment and thank the ancient Mesopotamians. At the dawn of history, these people invented the seven-day week, beer, and astrology. (How they overlooked cocktail nuts is a mystery yet to be solved.) If you nurse your drink for an hour and then scribble down someone’s name and number before driving home, consider that the ancient Mesopotamians also deserve credit for the sixty-minute hour, the world’s first writing system, and the wheel. The list goes on. Ancient Mesopotamia was an extraordinary place that pioneered pottery, poetry, sailboats, and schools. The Mesopotamians came up with the 360-degree circle, a poem considered the first piece of written literature, formulas to predict eclipses of the sun and moon, and the mathematical concepts of fractions, squares, and square roots that still torment high school kids.
But there is something else we should not leave off this impressive list of legacies. In this so-called “dead civilization,” the Mesopotamians created a richly imaginative mythic tradition crowded with warring gods, dragon-slayers, the first superhero, and an enticingly libidinous love goddess. These Mesopotamian myths not only played a central role in the daily lives and history of the people in the “cradle of civilization,” but their stories and legends also placed an indelible stamp on the literature and history of the Bible.
The six-day Creation in Genesis, for instance, is widely thought to have been influenced by Mesopotamia’s Creation epic, first translated a little more than a century ago and rattling religious teacups ever since with the suggestion that parts of the Bible were—gasp!—cribbed from another source. The genealogies of Adam and Eve’s descendants suspiciously resemble the lists of early Mesopotamian kings, unearthed in a royal library in the ruins of Nineveh, a fabled city once buried under centuries of sand and featured in the story of Jonah and the whale. (Actually, it was a “large fish.” But that’s another story.) Mesopotamia’s towering, pyramid-like temples, called ziggurats, made a lasting impression as the inspiration for the Tower of Babel. Perhaps most intriguing of all are their flood stories. Composed more than four thousand years ago and told in Gilgamesh—an epic poem written centuries before the Bible was set down—these tales may have influenced the Hebrew storytellers who produced their own flood account featuring a godly man named Noah. All of these ancient Mesopotamian legends would have been familiar to the Hebrews, whose patriarch Abraham came from Mesopotamia, and who often came under the thumb of a collection of aggressive Mesopotamian kings counted among the Bible’s “bad guys.”
Located mostly in what is modern-day Iraq, Mesopotamia was a desirable patch of real estate that became home to some of the world’s first human settlements about ten thousand years ago. Watered by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—the word “Mesopotamia” is Greek for “between the rivers”—this otherwise arid, flat plain blossomed as people learned how to control these somewhat erratic rivers with irrigation dikes and canals. Like beads on a necklace strung along the two rivers, small farming settlements grew into the world’s first cities, flourishing as their surplus food production allowed for expanding trade opportunities. As they developed in wealth and size, these farming and herding communities eventually became “city-states,” with merchants, skilled craftsmen, prostitutes, priests, and tax collectors, and armies of scribes who recorded everything from negotiations over the price of figs to real estate deals, law codes, epic poetry, and the military records and amorous adventures of conquering kings.
Unfortunately, the prosperity of these city-states also attracted attention. Unprotected by the vast stretches of desert that kept Egypt safe from most outsiders, the flat plains of Mesopotamia were like an open chess-board, across which armies moved freely. Mesopotamia