Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The texts repeatedly mention other cities, with which Shuruppak had contact: Lagash, Nippur, Umma and Uruk among them. The very first idea, apart from economic tablets and proper names, that we can decipher among the earliest writing is that of the battle between ‘kings’ and ‘priests’. At one stage it was believed that all of a city’s inhabitants and all of its land ‘belonged’ to the supreme city god and that the high priest or priestess administered the city on behalf of this deity, but such a view is no longer tenable: land holding was much more complex than this. The high priest or priestess was known as the en, or ensi. Normally, and to begin with, the en or ensi was the most powerful figure, but there was another, the lugal – literally speaking, the ‘great man’. He was in effect the military commander, the fortress commander, who ran the city in its disputes with foreign powers. It does not take much imagination to envisage conflict between these two sources of power. The view preferred now is that Mesopotamian cities are better understood not as religious but as corporate entities – municipalities – in which people were treated equally. Their chief characteristic was economic: goods and produce were jointly owned and redistributed, both among the citizens themselves but also to foreigners who provided in exchange goods and commodities which the cities lacked. This is inferred from the writing on seals, references to ‘rations’, the fact that everyone was buried in the same way, certainly to begin with, and the discovery of locks by which goods were sequestered in warehouses. To begin with, the en administered this system though, as we shall see, that changed.⁴⁹

Apart from lists, the other major development in writing was the switch from a pictographic system to a syllabary and then to a full alphabet. Just as it was in the busy trading cities of Sumer that writing began, because it was needed, so the alphabet was invented, not in Mesopotamia but further west where the Semitic languages lent themselves to such a change. A pictographic system is limited because hundreds if not thousands of ‘words’ need to be remembered (as with Chinese today). In syllabaries, where a ‘word’ corresponds to a syllable, only around eighty to a hundred entities need to be remembered. But alphabets are even better.

Hebrew and Arabic are the best-known Semitic languages today but in the second millennium BC the main tongue was Canaanite, of which both Phoenician and Hebrew are descendants. What made the Semitic languages suitable for alphabetisation was that most nouns and verbs were composed of three consonants, fleshed out by vowels which vary according to the context, but which are generally self-evident. (Professor Saggs gives this English equivalent: th wmn ws cryng and th wmn wr cryng. Most readers have no difficulty in deciphering either phrase.⁵⁰)

The earliest alphabet so far found was discovered in excavations made at Ras Shamra (‘Fennel Head’) near Alexandretta, the north-east corner of the Mediterranean that lies between Syria and Asia Minor. Here, on a hill above a small harbour, was an ancient site excavated in 1929, which in antiquity was known as Ugarit. A library was discovered at the site, situated between two temples devoted to Baal and Dagon. The library belonged to the high priest and consisted mainly of tablets in writing in a cuneiform style but which comprised only twenty-nine signs. It was, therefore, an alphabet. The scholars making the excavation guessed that the language was probably related to Canaanite or Phoenician or Hebrew and they were right: the script was rapidly deciphered. Many of the events portrayed, as we shall see, prefigure stories in the Old Testament.⁵¹ This system appears to have been deliberately invented, with no real precursors. As Figure 7 shows, the signs fit into five groups, with patterns of increasing complexity, indicating an order for the letters.

Figure 7: Signs of the Ugaritic alphabet⁵²

[Source: H. W. F. Saggs, Civilisation Before Greece and Rome, London: B. T. Batsford, 1989, page 81]