Whispers from the Tigris and Euphrates: A Journey Through Mesopotamia's Trade, Law, Architecture, and Writing

Sacred Surrealism and Ruthless Pragmatism, a place where we can find our origins, laws, trade, money, and bloodshed on a lavish scale. Mesopotamia, this time on the Western Tradition.

If you can recognize this passage...

"And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight or good for food.

And the river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pizan.

The name of the second is Giban. The name of the third river is Ipan. The name of the fourth is Hedekiel, that it is which goes towards the east of Assyria. We call it the Tigris.

And the fourth river is Euphrates".

Of course, this is a passage from the book of Genesis. And it reproduces the image of the garden, an oasis between God's third and fourth rivers.

The garden where the first man lived. He lived with the animals in the midst of a generous nature that grows no problems yet.

It was paradise. And paradise is another name for a garden. And this paradise was ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers.

Responding to emails takes time, but not with Grammarly. In a few clicks, Grammarly's generative AI drafts... But Mesopotamia and the lands around it, from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf, from the Iranian Plateau to the Mediterranean, were a paradise in the shadow of natural disasters, just as the Garden of Eden was paradise in the shadow of the fall.

The region had torrential rains like these. The Egyptians talked about a Nile in the sky. It had hurricanes, terrible sandstorms, uncontrolled rains.

It had terrible floods, as we know from the story of the Great Flood, which the Israelites got from a Babylonian epic.

And when nature was making life hard and unpredictable, people were with fire and sword. The Nile Valley in Egypt was never a highway for invaders.

The sea lay at one end, unorganized savages at the other, so Egypt was able to develop its civilization without a flood.

But the Tigris and the Euphrates are great natural highways, not only for trade, but also for the movement of armies and the migrations of peoples.

And so the Mesopotamians were both soldiers and traders.

Their realism, their cruelty, their ruthlessness can be explained in part by their geographical circumstances. And so can their gods.

Terrible, unpredictable, and likely to manifest themselves in unpleasant ways.

The beginnings of a great many things we use today can be found in a small area, no bigger than Denmark, on the Tigris-Euphrates delta, which we know as Sumer.

Even their endless wars, especially their wars, sparked technological innovations and social, cultural, and economic change.

It was in Sumer, through drainage and irrigation, that the first villages of reed huts and adobe became cities by the fourth millennium BC.

The founders of this first Mesopotamian civilization were called Sumerians. It's in this general area that we think the wheel first appeared, adapted from the potter's wheel, and replacing the sledges that were used to transport heavy loads. Around 2000 BC, someone invented spokes, which made the wheel much lighter, and later still the axle was invented. And so people in the Near East were the first to hunt and make war in chariots, which gave them a significant advantage. At a time, history begins, and that is by the time we start to have written records, around 3000 BC. We find not only cities in Sumer, but also vast temples and a complicated social structure, headed by priests. The social cement is provided not by a river and its water, as in Egypt, but by the temple, which rules and dominates the community, which dominates the countryside, and around which a city grows.

Construction of a temple was a cooperative task. The labor of hundreds of people who took part had to be coordinated, had to be directed, everything had to be planned accurately in advance. And as a matter of fact, the outlines of a temple abyss, the building, were laid out with string before work started on the wall. And we have temple plans from various cities drawn to scale on clay tablets.

The Sumerians believed that such plans were designed by the gods themselves and revealed in dreams. But the real architects were presumably the priests.

Another thing we find connected with the temples, are clay tablets scratched with shorthand pictures and with numerals.

These are accounts kept by the priests who were the administrators of the temple estates, and who had to give account for their stewardship to the gods, more probably to their colleagues.

So they agreed on a conventional method of recording receipts and expenses in written signs that their colleagues and successors would understand. In other words, they invented writing. And writing, as the Mesopotamians developed it, reflects one of the chief differences between them and the Egyptians, their capacity for an inclination to abstraction. The Egyptian hieroglyph, remember, is an image, a picture.

The Egyptians were a very literal people, so even though they used signs to represent a sound, or a syllable, they always wanted to use pictures as well.

Even the alphabetic signs are not simply abstract letters, but little pictures in their own right.

But then the successors to the Sumerians, the Semites, went one step further. The Semites were a people who moved from the Arabian desert to Mesopotamia in the third millennium, and soon absorbed Sumerian culture. It was they who combined the alphabetic and pictorial forms of writing into a single system with abstract signs replacing literal pictures. Many Sumerian statues also tend to be abstract.

And Mesopotamians were good at mathematics too, where Egyptians were much more literal and concrete. This is a clay tablet of math problems for Mesopotamian students.

In religion there were differences as well. Egyptian society claimed to imitate the divine, but in effect it invented a divine world which was the double of the real one, only much grander and finer. This is something we shall find also in ancient Greece. The Semites, on the other hand, invented a divine world which was peculiar to itself, and separate in its divinity. They deliberately used a sort of sacred surrealism to move away from realism, emphasizing the fantastic aspect of their gods, their great hypnotic eyes, their non-human attributes.

You might say that where the Egyptians tried to capture the difference between the human and the divine by enlarging the scale of things, that is, by making bigger tombs and statues and images, the Semites appealed to equality, to mystery and fantasy and essence.

Mesopotamian temples and religious life clearly reflected this tendency to abstract, but they also helped to create abstraction and to structure it.

And that is because Mesopotamian life and society focused on serving the temple, the gods, the priests, at least in the beginning.

But temples and temple servants did not exist in isolation. For one thing, the Sumerian city needed imports, timber, stone for building, metals for tools and weapons, and then gifts for the gods, precious stones from Afghanistan and India, mother of pearl from the Persian Gulf. And so you get trade, trade that is extensive and active, and you get the rise of an independent and very mixed merchant class. The armed caravans and merchant ships of the time were a potent agent in the diffusion of culture.

Three craftsmen might travel with the caravans looking for a market for their skill. Slaves would form part of the merchandise because defeated enemies could be more useful alive than dead. And these slaves, together with the personnel of the caravan or the crew of the ship, would have to be accommodated in various cities.

Foreigners in a strange land would then demand the comforts of their own religion, just as there is an American church in Paris today. And useful arts and crafts, could be diffused just as easily. The socketed axe of Mesopotamian craftsmen, for example, was a great improvement on the old model, which was bound with cords.

Their axes traveled to the Black Sea and to Troy. Their fast-spinning potter's wheels, which turned out jars like this one, went east to India and west to Greece and Egypt. And Egypt also adopted Mesopotamian glassmaking techniques, a thousand years after they were first developed, around 2500 B.C. Most important, perhaps, metal workers from Mesopotamia and from Anatolia to the north found out how to use furnaces to smelt metal ores. Copper in the fourth millennium, bronze in the third, and iron in the second.

This gave the region beautiful new objects, but also tools of war, like this helmet. Stronger metals make for better arms, and a lead over your neighbors in war, and a lead in trade as well, because anything you make better than your neighbors, you can sell.

Trade also made the population of the Sumerian cities more mixed, because merchants moved, craftsmen moved, and slaves moved from place to place, so the blood principle of the earlier societies, that all its members were descended from a common ancestor, this became more and more of a fiction.

As a result, the hold of the temple on the city was loosened, and the god or goddess ruling through the high priest was replaced by a secular governor or king like this one, who ruled in the name of the god. You may think that this is a subtle distinction, but it's the first step towards secular power, not sacred, not priestly, but power wielded by laymen. Although these secular rulers ended by claiming they were almost gods themselves, they were primarily regarded as representatives of the god delegated to carry out his or her will.

When they fought, it was the god who directed their armies, and really fought the battle, which meant that victory in battle confirmed the king's divine commission.

And when they legislated, they simply interpreted and applied the rules that the god had told them he wanted men to follow.

Whereas in Egypt, justice was an aspect of the divine order of which pharaoh was an insufferable power, in Mesopotamia, as in Israel, justice was an expression of God's commands, of God's will, written down by a man whom God had trusted, the way he trusted Moses, for example.

And so the divine creator of the world and the communicator of the law were no longer one and the same.

And with this separation, the law took on a life. A written law, for instance, was a two-sided contract.

The subject had to obey the king, had to obey the king's law, but the king was supposed to abide by his own law, by the same law.

And so no one was above the law, at least in theory. And while the theory was often ignored, and still is today, it was a basic principle.

The great power in the long run, because of which, and so this writing down and codification of the law was going to affect political life and political ideas down the line. For the moment, however, Mesopotamian kings were mostly warlords, and that was a task that must have kept them fairly busy because war played a major part in the life of these ancient societies.

Although these peasants produced a surplus, it was concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of people. This limited the opportunities of an expanding rural population, so the poor peasants had to find new lands still. The Sumerian cities sponsored reclamation works both against the desert and the swamp, but then as now, the most effective labor-saving device was stealing. So there were endless wars between cities, one trying to seize or recapture another's land.

Eventually, a straightforward imperialism would develop from this war. Some city or region would extend its power even further, eliminating all the competition around it and establishing its rule and that of its god over it. So over the centuries, beginning about 2400 B.C., the great power of the king, a series of empires, first dominated by Sumerian cities like Ur or Lagash, then by cities further north, like Akkad of the Semites, the exact location of which is still unknown.

Eventually, by Babylon, the capital of a Semitic people, the Amorites. Babylon was the greatest commercial city in the area. There were an incredible number of languages and dialects babbled in its streets and markets, which inspired the legend of the Tower of Babel or Babel, although the prototypical steppe temple or ziggurat had been created by the Sumerians. Around 1800 BC, the king of Babylon, Hammurabi, on the right, gave his subjects a written code of law, public and legal.

Hammurabi's code, carved here on a monument, became the basis of international commercial law, regulating contracts, interests, forms of mortgage, and every kind of commercial transaction. It also covered criminal cases and rather severely at that.

Law number 8. If a man has stolen ox or sheep or ass or pig or ship, whether from the temple or the palace, he shall pay thirtyfold. If he stole from a commoner, he shall render tenfold. If the thief cannot pay, he shall be put to death.

Law number 110. If a nun, a lady of God who is not living in a convent, has opened the door of a wine shop or entered the wine shop for a drink, that woman shall be burned.

Law number 196: If a man has caused the loss of a gentleman's eye, they shall cause him to lose one eye.

So Mesopotamian civilization was the first to develop things that we take for granted today, including the idea of an eye for an eye and the tooth for a tooth. Both their laws and their standardized writing, which preserved the laws, came out of business practice.

And it was the Sumerians who also developed weights and measures which were necessary for trade and extremely useful for keeping temple accounts and for building public wealth.

And meanwhile, the organized cooperation of an urban population required more accurate divisions of time than you needed in a village.

And so the Sumerians divided day and night into 12 double hours, hence our 24 hours, and they devised instruments to measure these intervals. They and the Babylonians also did this.

They divided the year into weeks of seven days, an idea which the Jews were later to borrow and then were going to improve upon by introducing one weekly day of rest.

And then finally, the Sumerians and their cousins upriver invented a measure that we call money. By the time they had the money, they had already had the money.

By that time, the exchange of goods and services had come to play a really important part in the new economy and the common standard was needed so that different kinds of goods could be measured, could be valued.

What was a cow worth after all? Or a pot? Or a slave?

And this conventional standard of value would also serve as a medium of exchange in which you could purchase commodities and reward services, that is, pay wages.

The first standard so used was apparently barley, which was the staff of life. In fact, wages and rents would be paid most frequently in measures of barley for a couple of thousand years,

even in Hammurabi's time, about 1800 to 1700 B.C. But by then, metal, that is, silver, and for small sums of money, copper was being recognized as the most convenient medium for exchange.

In the 8th century B.C., Assyrian kings began to stamp silver bars, and in the 7th century B.C., Lydian kings began to make coins like this one.

But in the beginning, the units of silver or copper used for exchange were not coins, but quantities of metal that you would weigh out, which was a bit odd.

Still, the adoption of a conventional metallic standard marks the transition from a natural economy in which objects were bought to a money economy in which everything could be priced at so many shekels of silver or so many gers of barley.

And one result of this was that you could estimate wealth not in foodstuffs or in slaves or in commodities that can themselves be consumed, used, enjoyed, but in terms of a general abstract medium which cannot itself be consumed, but which can be exchanged for any consumable commodity or any useful service. And so the producers could consider working just for the market rather than for themselves or for one particular person who ordered something and offered a particular commodity in return.

You could produce for the market, and you could take the price that you got in the market and you could put it away and use it to get something that you might want another time.

Moreover, the new generalized wealth possessed the same property that wheat and barley and cattle had.

It could reproduce itself. It could multiply itself. Like grain, like livestock, like cattle.

Money could be treated as capital and could be used to secure an increase, to become a profit. And if you lent it, you could charge interest.

So that by the time Hammurabi came along 3,800 years ago, he really had something to legislate about, as we shall see in our next program.