The World

Around 3100, the people of Uruk – which meant the Place – may have invented writing, initially pictograms, but then took to marking clay with the wedge-end of a reed, a process that we call cuneiform, which means wedge-shaped. The first named people in history are an accountant, a slave master and two enslaved persons. The first receipt, confirmed by the first signature of the first named person – the accountant – reads:

‘29,086 measures barley. 37 months. Kushim.’

Another records the ownership of En-pap X and Sukkalgir, the first named enslaved people. These were slave-owning societies. We do not know when slavery started, but it was probably at the same time as organized fighting. Most enslaved people were war captives or debtors. Royal taxes paid for soldiers who captured the slaves who now built the cities or toiled within family households: a history of family is also a history of slavery.

Towards 2900, kings – starting as Big Men, Lugalene in Sumerian – appear as rulers of all the Iraqi cities that now engaged in vicious wars: ‘Kish was defeated and the kingship taken to Uruk. Then Uruk was defeated and the kingship taken to Ur.’ Kingship ‘descended from heaven’ and it soon became hereditary. The crown was not inherited by eldest sons; kings had many children by chief wives and junior women. They chose the most able – or the more ferocious son killed his brothers. What they gained in ability they lost in stability for the children fought for power, and often destroyed the very realm they coveted. As people in Britain celebrated their rites at Stonehenge,^* one of the first family rulers, around 2500, was Kubaba of Kish, the world’s first female potentate that we know of, who owned taverns and brewed beer, and who was succeeded by her son and grandson. We know nothing else about them but a lot about their world.

These kings now built palaces alongside the rich temples; they ruled with a hierarchy of courtiers, generals, tax collectors. Writing was a tool for ruling, recording the ownership of property, transactions in grain and promulgation of laws. The Sumerians created pictures of themselves, men and women, not just praying but also drinking – and loving. They recorded recipes, and both men and women celebrated their enjoyment of sex; they drank beer through straws and imbibed opium. Later they studied mathematics and astronomy.

Thousands of cuneiform texts survive to reveal a world where taxes, war and death were certain, but so were the prayers of the priests to ensure that the sun would shine and rain would fall, crops would grow, sheep would make more sheep, the palm trees would be beautiful at dawn, the canals full of fish.

Uruk and the Sumerian cities were neither unique nor isolated. Cities became the marketplaces, information exchanges, marriage agencies, sexual carousels, fortresses, laboratories, courts and theatres of human community, but there were compromises: city folk had to conform; they could not feed themselves, having lost the skills of the wild and the thrills of the steppe. If the harvests failed, they starved; in epidemics, they died in droves. Sumeria was already in contact with other worlds. Lapis lazuli, the first international luxury commodity, tells the story: mined in Afghanistan, it was traded via the cities of India/Pakistan, to Sumer – mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh^* – then on to Mari in Syria and all to the way to Egypt, where objects were made with lapis, found in the Abdju temple city.

Around 3500 BC, the villages of Egypt started to consolidate into larger polities. Fifty years later, the king of the south, Tjeni, who was known as Narmer – Catfish – united Egypt under one crown, celebrating his victory with religious festivals, where sacred beer was quaffed, and commemorated in objects: a palette, used to grind and mix male and female cosmetics, shows him killing his enemies with a raised mace, watched by a cow goddess, while on its other side Narmer, shown as a powerful sacred bull, tramples rebels under hoof. Nearby, Narmer marches to view his fallen enemies, who have been beheaded, their penises sliced off. Our first real glimpse of the refinement and brutality of Egypt is a cosmetics artefact – and a pile of penises.

KHUFU AND MOTHER: THE PYRAMID BUILDERS

Egypt was the first African kingdom that we can observe: Egyptian kingship reflected a life where everything depended on the Nile and the sun. Its towns and villages were spread along the thread of the river which gave the soil its richness. The sun crossing the sky every day was regarded as a god, and all life was played out in that daily journey. Kings travelled up and down the Nile – and to the underworld – on splendid boats.

Narmer and his family lived in mudbrick palaces and were buried in mudbrick tombs in the desert at Abdju, where large mudbrick enclosures contained boats to carry them across the sky on their journey to join the sun.