Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [44]
Etana, King of Kish, is the first king whose deeds were recorded; he probably ruled at the beginning of the third millennium BCE. He is described in a later document as the person who stabilized all the lands, probably meaning that he was the first empire-builder. Shortly thereafter, the city of Uruk took over the rulership of the area under a man named Lugalbanda, ancestor of Gilgamesh. The deeds of the kings of Uruk occupied the epic imagination of the Sumerians and their descendants. The Sumerians were surpassed in turn by the city of Kish, returned to power to be surpassed by Ur, and finally again by Lagash. They were conquered by semitic groups and then Sumerian rule revived for a final time (2100-1720 BCE), when Gudea of Lagash ruled and produced a famous, pious statue of himself, now synonymous with Sumerian art in the modern world. So the most famous Sumerian face comes from the very last era of Sumerian rule. Mesopotamia was indeed noticeably different from Egypt in that it was impossible to create the kind of stability and freedom from attack that the Nile River system gave the Egyptians.1
Long before the Hebrews’ entrance on the world stage, the Sumerians were supplanted by many groups of semitic-language speakers, who partly inherited the culture of their forebears and partly innovated it into their culture (ca 2300-2100 BCE). These groups sometimes use a word cognate with the Biblical word “Amorite” to describe themselves. Although they seem to have been forced out of the Arabian peninsula, the continuous change of political fortunes in Mesopotamia insured a thorough mixture of cultures. Though the semites (that is, the people who spoke semitic languages, not a race of people) inherited the writing of their forebears, they used it to express their own language. The texts of the classical period in Mesopotamia were written in a semitic language which we call “Akkadian” (after Akkad, the city of the first great semitic king, Sargon), the language name signifying the family of dialects which include most prominently Babylonian and Assyrian. These closely related tongues each became imperial languages as the political and military role of Babylonia and Assyria expanded, one at the expense of the other. As a result even the semitic texts of the area show, in their enormous variation, the development of the long history of the ancient Near East.
Climate, Geography, and the Babylonian Creation Stories
AS IN EGYPT, the geography of Mesopotamia had an effect on its religious life. Civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates valleys also depended upon rivers but less on floods than it did in Egypt. We think of these areas as arid, desert Arab locations, and much of the countryside is empty waste now. But the Tigris and Euphrates river deltas are marshy and swampy, full of reeds growing in brackish water. In Mesopotamia, floods were normally seen as evil. Good order depended upon the effective use of canals to drain swamps, irrigate crops, and avoid floods, which destroyed rather than replenished fields, as in Egypt.
As in Egypt, many creation stories developed, stressing different factors, which seemed to coexist without much logical difficulty. Most understood creation as based on the sexual reproduction of animals and humans. Others used the notion of separation and distinction to talk about creation. The most famous creation story, Enuma Elish (literally “When on high …”), combines these same factors, using more ancient traditions to produce yet another variation on the themes.2 Indeed, because this myth parallels the