Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [64]
There is even a Sumerian legend to explain this invention. A messenger of a king of the city of Uruk arrived at the court of another king, but was so winded from his journey that he was unable to deliver his message. The clever king wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again, so when he needed to send another message, he patted some clay and set down the words of his next messages on a tablet. The king of Uruk had invented writing. How the person at the other end could read this message was not explained in the legend.
There is still disagreement in the scholarly world as to why writing developed in Sumer, and whether it happened in other places, such as Egypt or China, either earlier or at the same time. One leading theory holds that Sumerian writing grew out of accounting, as molded clay “tokens” were used to represent quantities of different trade goods, such as oil, grain, or livestock. Early evidence does suggest that Sumerian cuneiform was used almost exclusively for these accounts for its first five hundred years. But eventually, writing evolved to express the spoken word, and among its earliest uses in Sumer was to record the ingredients of beer. There is no evidence that the ancient symbol for beer was two women in bikinis wrestling in mud.
How do we know what the Mesopotamians believed?
Here’s a sobering thought. Long after most of the books we produce today are gone, the writings of these ancient Mesopotamians will still be around. Why? Because their literature, business accounts, and other writings were literally “written in stone,” the hardened clay tablets that have been found in the tens of thousands in a variety of sites in what once was Mesopotamia.
Like their Egyptian neighbors, the Mesopotamians created an enormous trove of art, architecture, and, most significant, written records that have survived the ages and thousands of years of conquest, right down to modern times. The widespread chaos and subsequent looting of Baghdad’s museums and ancient archaeological sites in the days following Saddam Hussein’s ouster in 2003 provided a vivid reminder of the area’s extraordinary history. Some of the world’s oldest artworks, including a five-thousand-year-old sculpture of a woman’s face called the Sumerian Mona Lisa, were stripped away by looters, along with thousands of antiquities. Fortunately, many of the country’s most valuable pieces had been stored out of harm’s way in the run-up to the war, and thousands of other stolen items have since been returned. But there are still many missing relics, and the art world was put on high alert for these looted artworks, many of which may likely end up in a secretive and lucrative black market.
In spite of those losses, and with hopes that Iraq will eventually be reopened to a new era of scholarly archaeology, much is already known about Mesopotamia’s past. The surprising secrets of Mesopotamia’s history were first opened in the mid-nineteenth century, when the first great cache of cuneiform tablets was unearthed in Nineveh. An ancient city located near the modern city of Mosul in northern Iraq, Nineveh was once the capital of the Assyrian Empire. Discovered in the ruins of the library of a king named Ashurbanipal were more than 24,000 clay tablets that included business documents, personal letters, and some of the world’s oldest known literature, including the epic of Gilgamesh. This treasure trove gave the world its first look at the myths and history of Sumer. Since then, many more thousands of tablets have been found in the sites of such ancient cities as Nippur, Ur, and Ebla (in modern Syria), giving archaeologists a comprehensive source of written materials from very early times in Mesopotamia, as well as their first hints of the astonishing connection of Sumer’s myths to the Bible.
When Sumer disappeared, where did its myths go?
Around 2350 BCE, the peace and relative tranquility of the Sumerian civilization was dealt a blow when people from the west (probably the Arabian Peninsula) swept in, settled in the northern area of Mesopotamia,