sheenaghpugh: (Default)
[personal profile] sheenaghpugh








(Pub. OUP 2022)

The people whose names appear on the proto-cuneiform tablets from Uruk are a little like the everyday people who posed for some of the earliest photographs, thousands of years later. Suddenly there they are, fellow humans, named.

I have a weakness for histories that zoom in on named individuals (like Michael Wood’s The Story of China). This is another such, about the areas – Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, the Levant and parts of Iran – where cuneiform writing was used. The method, “we will travel through 3,000 years of history knocking on doors and settling in for a while with individuals whose lives tell us something about the time in which they lived” suits me very well. Tablets in cuneiform script are the bedrock of most of the book, together with cylinder seals.

Most really ancient tablets contain, not poems, legends or histories, but statistics – how much wool was sent from A to B and what did it cost; how many weavers worked in the queen’s palace and what did they earn. It is a great mistake to think of this as tedious information; it is crucial to how people actually lived and can tell us much more than appears on the surface. At Garshana in Umma (present-day Iraq), for instance, a major construction project took place around 2030 BC. Without the records that were kept regarding the brickmakers, their organisation and pay, we should not know, nor I think would we guess, that not only were many of the brickies female, three of the 10-person work teams were supervised by women rather than men. And though we may be aware that families in poverty sometimes had to sell their children into slavery, that mere knowledge can never strike home like this contract drawn up during a famine in Emar, on the Euphrates, in the 13th century BC:

" Zadamma and Ku’e, his wife, have sold their two sons and their two daughters–Ba’la-bia, Ba’la-belu, Ishma’- Dagan, and Ba’la-ummi, a daughter at the breast—into slavery for 60 shekels of silver, the entire price, to Ba’lumalik, the diviner. If anyone sues to reclaim the four children of Zadamma, they must give ten other persons as compensation to Ba’lu-malik. And now Zadamma, their father, and Ku’e, their mother, have pressed their feet into clay."

The last laconic sentence was not metaphorical; the small clay footprints of three children (the baby was too young), duly signed by witnesses to the contract, survive in the National Museum, Aleppo.

Trade and law were the main reasons for recording and keeping information; if you agreed a price with a merchant or owned some land, you needed to be able to produce written proof if necessary. And these records can tell us much about social organisation at the time. It may come as a surprise, for instance, that some of Queen Baranamtara’s weaving women seem to have been paid more, not because they were better at their job, but because they had small children to support. And a sliding scale of doctor’s fees shows that while an awilum (gentleman) was charged 5 shekels to have a broken bone set, a commoner paid only 3 shekels for the same procedure. Record-keeping was also essential to taxation, and knowing who was where, doing what and worth how much was a useful means of control.

But kings and other powerful people soon also became enchanted with the permanence of records, particularly those carved in stone. In this way a king’s name and (alleged) deeds could be immortal. Reading one of King Ashurnasipal’s litanies of self-praise; “I am king, I am lord, I am praiseworthy, I am exalted, I am important, I am magnificent, I am foremost, I am a hero, I am a warrior, I am a lion, and I am virile”, one is forced to conclude that boastful leaders have not changed a whole lot over several millennia…

Indeed human nature does not alter much, which is why so many people here provide moments of rueful recognition, like Kushim, a high-ranking administrator whose job was to keep track of deliveries of malt and barley, but whose recorded totals show that he was apt to make mistakes in his arithmetic. Or the scholars, learning to be scribes by copying ancient texts, who irreverently paired in their exercises a hymn to the goddess of beer, Ninkasi, with a rather less ancient drinking song about a woman innkeeper. Or the pharaoh who, when the king of Babylon wrote to inquire after the health of his sister, one of the pharaoh’s innumerable wives, was forced to admit in veritable “Carry On” style that he could not recall which one she was and couldn’t even be sure she was still alive.

There is a procession of these folk, but the other thing that attracts me to this history is its focus on methods and development of written language. There is a great story from the time of proto-cuneiform, before letters had replaced pictograms. In pictograms, one could very easily represent concrete nouns and numbers, but other parts of speech, particularly verbs and abstracts, were harder:

“There were a few words that they needed to record, though, that were not nouns. One was the verb ‘to return’, but there’s no obvious way to draw ‘return’. For this, the administrators ingeniously began to use the sign that meant “reed.” And once they did this, we can detect the language hiding behind the script. This tiny detail tells us that they were thinking and speaking in the language known as Sumerian, because the word for “reed” in Sumerian was “gi,” and that was also the word for ‘to return.’”

If, like me, you find that solving this sort of mystery excites you more than Agatha Christie ever could, you should enjoy this book. I will admit I’d prefer more weavers and fewer kings, but that’s just me being bolshie.


Profile

sheenaghpugh: (Default)
sheenaghpugh

January 2025

S M T W T F S
    1234
567891011
12131415 161718
19202122232425
262728293031 

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 14th, 2025 10:32 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios