Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [63]
How did a swamp inspire Mesopotamia’s myths?
Around 5000 BCE, settlements sprang up in a place called Eridu on the Euphrates River, a southern site near the marshes that mark the transition from land to sea. The people here, who are considered the first city-dwellers, also built some of the first known religious shrines, and ruins of a small temple with an offering table and a niche for statues have been found here. This marshy, or swampy, area, where freshwater mingled with salt water, would inspire the core of the Mesopotamian Creation myths, in which the freshwater and salt water were actually imagined to be deities who created the world. Water, especially freshwater, was the key to existence in this otherwise arid, hot plain. Not surprisingly, then, in some of the world’s earliest Creation stories and myths, the earth, the gods, life, and humanity emerged from these primordial Mesopotamian waters.*
Sometime before 3500 BCE, a new group moved into the region and settled on the banks of the Euphrates. Although it is not known where these people originated—most historians surmise that they came from the east—the area they settled became known as Sumer, and the civilization they built is called Sumerian. The Sumerians began to build cities that gradually became city-states, including Ur (presumed home of the biblical Abraham), Uruk (the biblical Erech), Kish, and Nippur. The preciousness of water led to “water-wars” between these city-states until the more powerful ones gradually swallowed the smaller ones. Over the next fifteen hundred years, the Sumerians gradually harnessed animals to plows, drained marshlands, and irrigated the desert to extend areas of cultivation. Their increased agricultural efficiency eventually led to the first “leisure class,” allowing for the development of commerce, and with it merchants, traders, artisans, and priests, to make sure that the gods approved of everything that was going on. By 3000 BCE, the first walled cities were built in Mesopotamia, always including temple complexes within the city walls.
Although political power in these cities was initially held by free citizens and a governor, as the city-states grew and vied for power, the Sumerians also may have developed one of the world’s first systems of monarchy, headed by a priest-king. Sumer’s first known king—in Sumerian, the word was lugal and meant “big man”—was Etana of Kish (c. 3000 BCE), described in ancient writings as “the man who stabilized all the lands.” But in one of these Sumerian cities, long before the Greeks coined the word “democracy,” the “first bicameral congress” met in 3000 BCE. Prominent Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer points out that in the city of Uruk, one council made up of elders and another of arms-bearing men both met to decide whether or not to go to war with the neighboring city of Kish. This “congress” voted for war and the king approved.
The Sumerians are also credited with inventing a form of bureaucracy around the same time that the Egyptians did. Devised to manage the land, Sumer’s bureaucracy consisted of a priesthood that was responsible for surveying and distributing property and collecting taxes. To make sure that everything worked, the Sumerians also invented every bureaucrat’s best friend—records. That required the invention of writing, and the Sumerians are also credited with introducing the world’s first system of writing around 3200 BCE, word-pictures that developed into wedge-shaped characters known as cuneiform, which comes from the Latin word cuneus, meaning “wedge.” Cuneiform characters consisted of small indentations made with a wedge-shaped tool called a stylus, impressed in wet clay. The Sumerians used about six hundred characters, which ranged from a single wedge to complicated signs consisting of thirty or more wedges. The clay hardened, and the cuneiform tablets became the first known “official records” in