Writing, wheeled carts, the 60-minute hour, sailboats and seed plows are among the things a people called the Sumerians invented in the fabled Fertile Crescent some 5,000 years ago. They also left behind evidence of the earliest known wheedling and whining adolescents.
That comes down to us because the Sumerians had the good sense to devise a system of writing called cuneiform. They pressed wedge-shaped indentations into soft clay tablets, drying the tablets in the sun or firing them in ovens. The Sumerians and their descendant cultures were prodigious writers, and millions of their tablets survive, proving etched clay to be history’s most enduring form of record-keeping.
A single tablet often is an intimate window into lives lived long ago, illuminating and vivifying ancient people who were as witty, irritating, industrious, grasping, noble and ignoble as people today. For example, a vain and spoiled kid named Iddin Sin was away at a boarding school for the sons of aristocrats some 4,400 years ago when he sent a crabbing letter home to his mother, Lady Zinu:
“From year to year, the clothes of the (young) gentlemen here become better, but you let my clothes get worse. … Indeed, you persisted in making my clothes poorer and more scanty. At a time when in our house wool is used up like bread, you have made me poor clothes.
“The son of Adad-iddinam, whose father is only an assistant to my father, (has) two new sets of clothes … while you fuss even about a single set of clothes for me. In spite of the fact that you bore me and his mother only adopted him, his mother loves him, while you, you do not love me!”
Last Sunday, the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, one of the world’s leading centers for the translation and preservation of long-dead languages, gave a rare peek into how its scholars decipher the old tablets.
To publicize its work, the institute held an open house, giving tours of its seldom-visited second- and third-floor offices where for decades, researchers have toiled using tablets and copied inscriptions to compile dictionaries of the Sumerian, Hittite, Babylonian, Assyrian and Demotic Egyptian languages.
The multivolumed dictionaries really are encyclopedias, preserving all that the tablets reveal about these long ago people and cultures. The revelations emerge as the tablets, which contain all manner of official, commercial and personal correspondence, religious tracts, codified laws and literary works, are translated and cross-referenced.
There is, for example, the harried message from a Sumerian village official to his boss in a nearby city. The official is perplexed as to what to do with an attic pest–one somewhat more troublesome than a squirrel.
“A short time ago,” noted the official, named Yakim-Addu, in a 4,500-year-old tablet, “I wrote to my lord as follows: `A lion was caught in the loft of a house in Akkaka. My lord should write me whether this lion should remain in that same loft until the arrival of my lord, or whether I should have it brought to my lord.’
“But letters from my lord were slow in coming and the lion has been in the loft for five days. Although they threw him a dog and a pig, he refused to eat them.
“I was worrying: `Heaven forbid that this lion pine away.’ I became scared, but eventually I got the lion into a wooden cage and loaded it on a boat to have it brought to my lord.”
The written word, one of the cornerstones of human civilization, was invented, like almost everything else that is manmade, because there was money involved, says Gene Gragg, the institute’s director.
“The Sumerians made the first tablets (in) 3200 to 3300 B.C., maybe even earlier,” he says. “At first they were used only to keep records of business deals, making pictographs to show that so-and-so paid for his land or whatever with five sheep, two goats and a cow. That sort of thing.”
The record-keeping evolved into much more complex intellectual and literary forms of writing. Had the Sumerians and the civilizations that followed them used paper or papyrus, little record of this evolution would have survived. If they’d invented computers, even less might have endured.
“Cheap, acid-based paper introduced in the last century begins to crumble after several decades,” says Gragg. “You can still pick up some 17th and 18th Century parchment publications, but they are very fragile. Papyrus needs special conditions, that, if met, allows documents to last thousands of years.
“A CD-ROM should last a long time, but the rule of thumb is that electronic media become obsolete every 10 years or so. If you don’t change your disks as technology changes, they will be unusable after a few years because there won’t be any machines left that can read them. The diskettes I was using on my computers in the early 1980s can’t be read by any machine I own now.
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“But oven-fired clay tablets are virtually immortal. If they weren’t shattered in a devastating fire or crushed by chariot wheels, they are as readable today as the day they were written on.”
So many tablets survive that researchers can immerse themselves in Sumerian culture and learn how the first urban “storage” societies evolved in Mesopotamia along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is today’s Iraq.
As men learned how to irrigate fields using river water, food began to be cultivated and stored in surplus. Stored food and goods were used to pay people who, as human technology evolved, no longer were needed to work as farmers and herders, but became specialists, like dam builders, carpenters, priests, doctors and clerks.
Fertile Crescent villages grew into the world’s first city-states, places with now-fabled names like Ur, Kish, Mari, Babylon and Nineveh, the religious, governmental, educational and commercial centers of their age.
The cities, sprouting towered temples, were actually walled fortresses surrounded by villages, hamlets and irrigated fields. Traffic was by foot and donkey. Men walked about the narrow streets both clean-shaven and bearded, wearing skirts, long shirts, cloaks and fringed shawls. Women had their hair in pigtails wound around their heads and wore long dresses.
Children of the well-to-do learned to read and write at the “tablet house.” Training was rigorous and boring, calling for memorizing and copying long lists of words. Kids apparently devised all kinds of clever excuses to outwit teachers and shirk the work.
“The children who sit before you,” warned a school master on a tablet passed around to all his teachers, “must not leave school! Above all, do not let anyone deceive you, telling you `I want to go’ to his father’s. Until you and I discuss a password (and) someone brings it to you, do not let the children out free.”
The tablets that were the bane of long-ago schoolboys who had to practice reading and writing on them were about an inch and a half by two inches. Tablets bearing official documents and correspondence rarely were larger than today’s standard-sized stenographer’s pads. They were inscribed on both sides, then baked, either in the sun or in ovens, to harden them.
“It’s an extraordinarily rich 2,500 years of texts,” says Martha Roth, present editor-in-charge of the Assyrian dictionary.
Compiling such dictionaries is a laborious process of poring over hundreds of thousands of copied tablet inscriptions. Each word is recorded and added to a list showing where and how the word was used, comparing its usage in tablets translated earlier. Eventually, through context, scholars determine the meaning of the words.
Love and sex are much a part of the tablet manuscripts. Most Sumerian marriages were contractual affairs that were organized as business deals between fathers. But Sumerian poetry reveals a people who were nonetheless passionate and sensual. In one poem, a young woman speaks to the man she is promised to:
“Bridegroom, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey,
In the bed chamber, honey-filled,
Let me enjoy your goodly beauty,
Lion, let me caress you . . .”
Heaven forbid the woman caught in illicit love, however. The Mesopotamian cultures were the first to have codified laws, and they dealt severely with adulteresses. King Eshnunna, whose lands lay north of his more famous contemporary, Hammurabi of Babylonia, had laws typical of that time, and they were explicit about married women who committed adultery:
“. . . the day she is seized in the lap of another man, she shall die, she will not live.”
Men, however, seemed by definition, as far as the law went, to be incapable of adultery. It almost always was deemed to be the fault of a temptress. Laws did deal harshly with male rapists, however, as this one in Assyria did 4,100 years ago:
“If a man lays a hand upon a woman, attacking her like a rutting bull, and they prove the charges against him and find him guilty, they shall cut off one of his fingers. If he should kiss her, they shall draw his lower lip across the blade of an ax and cut it off.”
The Chicago dictionary projects have been going on for generations. Young scholars join the enterprises as young post-doctoral students, remain through their entire careers and keep working on them decades later as retired emeritus professors.
Erica Reiner came to the Assyryian dictionary as a young Ph.D in 1953, for example, and eventually took over as editor, working until her retirement in 1996. In 1979, Reiner hired and trained Martha Roth, an assistant who had just received her doctorate. Roth now heads the project.
The Hittite dictionary has been in development since 1976. The Assyrian Dictionary (actually both Assyrian and Babylonian, mixing in Sumerian) is a work in progress since 1921. The Demotic Egyptian dictionary, deciphering a simplified form of hieroglyphs used in Egypt from 700 B.C. to 300 A.D. was started more than 100 years ago in Germany and shifted to Chicago in the 1930s.
As portions of the dictionaries are completed, they are printed and offered for sale to the very limited market interested in them, a few hundred university and seminary scholars around the world.
Roth hopes the Assyrian dictionary will be finished in 2006; it is projected to be a 27-volume, 85-pound work that will cost about $1,200. That won’t even begin to pay the costs, but breaking even isn’t the point, as the project is mostly funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
You don’t hurry good work.
“Don’t pick it now,” says a Sumerian proverb; “later it will bear fruit.”