The Story of Mankind [13]
MESOPOTAMIA--THE SECOND CENTRE OF
EASTERN CIVILISATION
I AM going to take you to the top of the highest pyramid
and I am going to ask that you imagine yourself possessed
of the eyes of a hawk. Way, way off, in the distance, far
beyond the yellow sands of the desert, you will see something
green and shimmering. It is a valley situated between two
rivers. It is the Paradise of the Old Testament. It is the
land of mystery and wonder which the Greeks called Mesopotamia--
the ``country between the rivers.''
The names of the two rivers are the Euphrates (which the
Babylonians called the Purattu) and the Tigris (which was
known as the Diklat). They begin their course amidst the
snows of the mountains of Armenia where Noah's Ark found
a resting place and slowly they flow through the southern
plain until they reach the muddy banks of the Persian gulf.
They perform a very useful service. They turn the arid
regions of western Asia into a fertile garden.
The valley of the Nile had attracted people because it had
offered them food upon fairly easy terms. The ``land between
the rivers'' was popular for the same reason. It was a
country full of promise and both the inhabitants of the northern
mountains and the tribes which roamed through the
southern deserts tried to claim this territory as their own and
most exclusive possession. The constant rivalry between the
mountaineers and the desert-nomads led to endless warfare.
Only the strongest and the bravest could hope to survive and
that will explain why Mesopotamia became the home of a very
strong race of men who were capable of creating a civilisation
which was in every respect as important as that of Egypt.
THE SUMERIANS
THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS, WHOSE CLAY
TABLETS TELL US THE STORY OF ASSYRIA
AND BABYLONIA, THE GREAT SEMITIC
MELTING-POT
THE fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries.
Columbus tried to find a way to the island of Kathay and
stumbled upon a new and unsuspected continent. An Austrian
bishop equipped an expedition which was to travel eastward
and find the home of the Grand Duke of Muscovy, a
voyage which led to complete failure, for Moscow was not
visited by western men until a generation later. Meanwhile
a certain Venetian by the name of Barbero had explored the
ruins of western Asia and had brought back reports of a most
curious language which he had found carved in the rocks of
the temples of Shiraz and engraved upon endless pieces of
baked clay.
But Europe was busy with many other things and it was
not until the end of the eighteenth century that the first
``cuneiform inscriptions'' (so-called because the letters were
wedge-shaped and wedge is called ``Cuneus'' in Latin) were
brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor, named Niebuhr.
Then it took thirty years before a patient German school-
master by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four
letters, the D, the A, the R and the SH, the name of the Persian
King Darius. And another twenty years had to go by
until a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous
inscription of Behistun, gave us a workable key to the nail-
writing of western Asia.
Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings,
the job of Champollion had been an easy one. The
Egyptians used pictures. But the Sumerians, the earliest
inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon the idea of
scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded pictures
entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which
showed little connection with the pictures out of which they
had been developed. A few examples will show you what I
mean. In the beginning a star, when drawn with a nail into
a brick looked as follows: {illust.} This sign however was too
cumbersome and after a short while when the meaning of
``heaven'' was added to that of star the picture was simplified