Part II

The change in habitat from a hilly country to a flat one was a momentous factor that brought with it an adaptation on the part of the Sumerians to the new conditions. In their mountain homes we may well suppose the Sumerians to have been hunters of which a trace remains in the Biblical tradition that makes Nimrod, pictured as one of the founders of the Euphratean culture, a mighty hunter, whereas the conditions natural to the rich soil of southern Babylonia led to agriculture.

The political feature at the earliest period at present known to us, which may be roughly fixed on the basis of the material at our disposal at 4000 to 3500 B.C., is the existence of a number of cities under the control of Sumerians, each one of which formed a centre for a district of varying extent.

These cities lay along the Euphrates or on one of the various arms into which it divides in the marshy districts. Owing, however, to the choking up of the bed of the river and of its tributaries, the direction of the Euphrates was subject to frequent changes, so that the location of the mounds beneath which cities like Nippur, Cuthah, Uruk, Sippar, Shuruppak lay buried, is at some distance to the east from the bed of the Euphrates, or from one of its branches.

We find the south itself divided into two sections, the southern part, known as Sumer, which is the main stronghold of the non-Semitic . conquerors, and the northern section of the Euphrates Valley, Akkad, where the Semites gradually developed the strength necessary to meet the Sumerians on their own ground. A sharp boundary between Sumer and Akkad probably never existed, but in a general way Nippur may be regarded as the line of demarcation, so that Eridu, Larsa, Ur, Adab, Isin, Lagash, Shuruppak, Umma, Uruk with Nippur, constitute the chief centres in the south, and Cuthah, Opis, Akkad, Kish, Babylon and Sippar the most important cities of the north.

Nor can a sharp line be drawn between the non-Semitic and Semitic settlements, beyond the general proposition that the Semites, while commingling in part with the Sumerians, were also in part driven back to the northern part of the Euphrates Valley. At all events, the south remained the chief seat of Sumerian power, though northern centres like Kish, Cuthah and Opis were for a period of indifferent extent also in the hands of the Sumerians.

We are not able as yet to trace the history of the Euphrates Valley back to the time when the Sumerians were in complete and absolute control. The oldest inscriptions so far recovered already give evidence of a decline of the south, with the tendency towards a growth of power in the northern centres. We know nothing of the earliest history of Eridu and little of such centres as Uruk and Adab ; and until excavations carry us nearer to the beginnings of Sumerian supremacy, we must rest content with the testimony furnished by the material at our disposal that there was no union or, at all events, no permanent union between the cities of Sumer and that no ruler of any Sumerian centre exercised control over all of Sumer and Akkad.

The relationship between the states would therefore be marked by hostilities alternating with treaties that served to keep the peace for a while, and with combinations of some of these city states against other groups. The central feature in each of these cities was the sanctuary dedicated to the local patron deity. So close was the association between the god and his city, that the former either directly gave his name to the place, or the place was known as the city of the god in question. The more precise character of these city gods we will have occasion to consider in the next chapter.

The point of importance to us in an historical survey is to note that the jurisdiction of a deity was coextensive with the district controlled by his followers. The single exception to this general direction taken by the association of a deity with a city is formed by the god Enlil, who, although the god of the city of Nippur, was in this first period of Euphratean history the acknowledged head of the pantheon. ^[1]

In part this no doubt was due to the important position occupied by Nippur when the Sumerians obtained the mastery in the Euphrates Valley, but in large part the special position acquired by Enlil is to be accounted for by the circumstance that as a storm-god having his seat on some mountain-peak, he was the chief of the gods worshipped by the conquerors before they left their mountain homes.

Curiously enough, however, we have not come across any records of a powerful dynasty established in Nippur as a centre. Instead, the earliest traditions of the Euphrates Valley, carrying us back to the mythical age, in which rulers are pictured as deities or of divine descent, ruling for as many centuries as in historical time years, ^[2] give Kish and Uruk as the first two dynasties, after which we come to a series of rulers with Ur as a political centre and the length of whose reigns shows that we have reached a more definite historical tradition.

Beyond names and indications of lengths of reigns, however, and these often uncertain we know nothing further of this earliest period until we come down to about the year 3200 B.C.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

See further, p. 195, seq.

[2]:

See the publication of important lists of early mythical or semi-mythical rulers, followed by historical dynasties, in Poebel's Historical and Grammatical Texts, pages 73 to 96.

These lists show us, during the first two recorded dynasties of Kish and of Uruk, rulers who reign from 410 to 1200 years, and among the names of such rulers are the mythical rulers Etana and Gilgamesh, of the former of whom a story is told of an attempted flight to heaven on the back of an eagle, while the latter is the famous central figure of the great Babylonian epic.

The high figures given for the reigns or lives of these rulers are of the same character as the ages of the antediluvian patriarchs in the fifth chapter of Genesis. Both lists are no doubt based upon some artificially constructed system, though exactly of what nature scholars have not ascertained. To discuss the bearings of these important lists, published by Poebel, in detail would carry us too far and must be left for some other occasion. Suffice it to say that the existence of such lists, which evidently form part of the school archives of ancient Babylonian centres, shows con- clusively that the accounts of early Babylonian rulers given by Berosus (see Cory, Ancient Fragments, page 51, seq.) rest upon actual material which was utilized by Berosus.