Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [32]
It has been speculated that Sumer and Akkad’s struggles for control of the mountains behind Elam, with their raw material riches in stone, timber and metals, may be reflected somewhat abstractly in the surviving literature of the period.20 In the poem Lugale u melambi nirgal, known in English as The Exploits of Ninurta, the god greets his mother, who has come to visit him in his mountain conquests:
Since you, Madam, have come to the rough lands,
Since you, Noble Lady, because of my fame, have come to the enemy land,
Since you feared not my terrifying battles,
I, the hero, the mound I had heaped up
Shall be called hursag, and you shall be its queen,
From now on Ninhursag is the name by which you shall be called—thus it shall be.
…
The hursag shall provide you amply with the fragrance of the gods,
Shall provide you with gold and silver in abundance,
Shall mine for you copper and tin, shall carry them to you as tribute,
The rough places shall multiply cattle large and small for you,
The hursag shall bring forth for you the seed of all four-legged creatures.21
In fact the king who had achieved the conquest of Elam and Anshan had been Gudea of Lagash (2141-2122 BC): and he served the god Ningirsu, not Ninurta. Still, Ninurta was the god of Nippur, which later became the cultural centre of the Sumerian cities, and so the change of central god would have given the piece a certain disinterested grandeur, which fitted it to be the literary classic it became.
Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy
Now all the earth had one language and words in common. And moving east, people found a plain in Shinar and settled there. And they said to each other: ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly!’ They used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar. Then they said: ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’ But Yahweh came down to see the city that the sons of man were building. And Yahweh said: ‘So this is what they can do when all share one language! There will be no limit on what they can accomplish if they have a mind for it. I shall go down and stupefy their languages so that they may not understand one another.’ So Yahweh scattered them from there all over the earth. And they stopped building the city. That is why it is called Babylon (bāběl) because there he mixed up (bālšl) the language of all the earth. And from there Yahweh scattered them all over the earth.
Hebrew scriptures, Genesis x
This Jewish myth, evidently inspired by the stupendous architecture on show in the cosmopolitan city of Babylon, and the polyphony of languages to be heard on its streets, is still deeply symbolic for European culture. But somehow the central mechanism of conflict between an arrogant superpower and a jealous god has been lost. It is now taken as a story of how a single language can give unity, the kind of unity that is necessary to bring off a magnificent enterprise: just confound their languages, and cooperation becomes impossible. As such, it is bizarrely ill placed as a fable of Babylon, which was notable throughout its history for the leading role of a single language. For almost two thousand years this language was Akkadian, although in the last few centuries of its empire, as already seen, it yielded to Aramaic.
Perhaps the dream of Babylonians scattered and disorganised was a comforting exercise in wish fulfilment for the sixth-century Jews who had been shattered and driven from their homeland by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadrezzar II. Perhaps it might even be taken as an ironic comment on how the Assyrian Asshurbanipal had been able to sack