4 Cities of Wisdom To Chapter 4 Notes and References In 1927 the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley began to dig at Ur of Chaldea (Chaldea is an alternative name for Babylon). Ur, the home of Abraham according to the Bible, had first been identified in 1854-1855 but it was Woolley's sensational excavations that revealed its wider importance in mankind's history. Among his discoveries was the unearthing of the so-called mosaic standard of Ur, which featured a cluster of chariots, showing that it was the Sumerians (inhabiting what is now the southernmost reaches of Iraq from c . 3400 BC), who may well have conceived the wheel and introduced this device into warfare. Woolley also discovered a practice that royalty in Babylon was not buried alone. Alongside the king and queen, in one chamber, lay a company of soldiers (copper helmets and spears were found next to their bones) and in another chamber were the skeletons of nine ladies of the court, still wearing their elaborate headdresses. Now these were very grisly practices, and quite important enough in themselves, for what they revealed about ancient beliefs. But what particularly attracted Woolley's attention was that no text had ever hinted at this collective burial . He therefore drew the conclusion that the interment had taken place before writing had been invented to record the event. According to the historian H. W. F. Saggs, 'No invention has been more important for human progress than writing', and Petr Charvat has called it 'the invention of inventions'.1 So here we have another major idea, to put alongside farming as 'the greatest ever'. In fact, more important, more fundamental even than writing in the history of progress, is that happy coincidence that the Sumerians also invented the chariot. For once you start making a list of the 'firsts' achieved by this formidable people, it is difficult to know where to stop. For example, in 1946 the American scholar Samuel Noah Kramer began to publish his translations of Sumerian clay tablets and in doing so he identified no fewer than twenty-seven 'historical firsts' discovered or achieved or recorded by the early Iraqis. Among them were the first schools, the first historian, the first pharmacopoeia, the first clocks, the first arch, the first legal code, the first library, the first farmer's almanac, and the first bicameral congress. The Sumerians were the first to use gardens to provide shade, they recorded the first proverbs and fables, they had the first epic literature and the first love songs. The reason for this remarkable burst of creativity is not hard to find: civilisation, as we now call it, occurred only after early man had begun to live in cities. Cities were far more competitive, experimental environments than anything that had gone before. The city is the cradle of culture, the birthplace of nearly all our most cherished ideas. In the classical definition, civilisation consists of three or more of the following: cities, writing, the specialisation of occupations, monumental architecture, the formation of capital.2 But this, while not wrong, ignores the underlying principle. Sometime in the late fourth millennium BC, people came together to live in large cities. The transition transformed human experience for the new conditions required men and women to cooperate in ways they never had before. It was this close contiguity, this new face-to-face style of cohabitation, that explained the proliferation of new ideas, particularly in the basic tools for living together-writing, law, bureaucracy, specialised occupations, education, weights and measures. According to research published in the autumn of 2004, the first urban sites were Tell Brak and Tell Hamoukar in northern Mesopotamia, on the Iraq-Syria border, dated to just before 4000 BC. They had rows of brick ovens for preparing food on an industrial scale and numerous 'seal stamps' used to keep track of goods and to 'lock' doors. But they were relatively small-Hamoukar was twelve hectares-and the first cities proper emerged further south in Mesopotamia about 3400 BC. These sites included Eridu, Uruk, Ur, Umma, Lagash and Shuruppak (more or less in that order). By the end of the third millennium
BC, 90 per cent of southern Mesopotamia was living in urban areas.3 These cities were very large: Uruk, for example, had a population of 50,000. Why did they develop and what was the experience like? Several reasons have been put forward for the development of cities, the most obvious of which is security. But this argument can no longer be supported, and for three reasons. In the first place, there are some large ancient cities-notably in West Africa (such as in Mali)-that never developed walls. Second, even in the Middle East, where city walls were sometimes vast and very elaborate, the walls came after the initial settlement. At Uruk, for example, the city had been largely formed around 3200 BC, but the walls were not built until roughly 2900 BC. (On the other hand, Uru means a walled area.4) Finally, there is a much more convincing explanation, with a great deal of empirical support. What appears to have happened is that, in the middle of the fourth millennium BC, in Mesopotamia, there was a slight but noticeable change of climate, leading to cooler and dryer average conditions. Until that point, agriculture had flourished between the Tigris and the Euphrates for thousands of years. Because of these rivers, the area was relatively secure and irrigation was well developed.5 'The climatic changes documented for the middle of the fourth millennium seem, within a space of two to three hundred years, to have stemmed the floods that regularly covered large tracts of land and to have drained such large areas that in a relatively short period of time, large parts of Babylonia became attractive for new permanent settlements.'6 Excavations show that, associated with this climate variation, there was a sudden change in settlement pattern, from very scattered and fairly small individual settlements to dense settlements of a much larger kind never seen before.7 These geographical conditions appear to have favoured the development of communal irrigation systems-systems that were not elaborate, not at that stage, but which nonetheless brought about marked improvements in the yield of barley (which now evolved from the two-row to the six-row mutant), and at the same time taught people the advantages of co-operation. In other words, it was the particular climatic conditions of Mesopotamia-where irrigation could markedly improve crop yields and where there was enough water available (but in the wrong place) to allow this development fairly easily and obviously. The crucial point was that though the land was now habitable, there was still so much water available that nearly every arable plot had easy and direct access to it. 'This fact...must have produced a "paradise", with multiple, high-yield harvests each year.'8 An added factor was that the southern alluvial plains of Mesopotamia were lacking in other commodities, such as timber, stone, minerals and metals. The food surplus of this 'paradise' could be traded for these commodities, making for a dense network of contacts, and provided conditions for the development of specialist workers in the cities themselves. This may have been a factor leading to the diverse populations that were such a feature of early city life, going beyond simple kin groups. This was an exciting advance: for the first time people could become involved in activities not directly linked with food production. Yet this development would have raised anxiety levels: citizens had to rely on others, not their kin, for essentials. This underlying anxiety may well explain the vast, unprecedented schemes and projects which fostered a community spirit-monumental, labour-intensive architectural undertakings. For these same reasons, religion may well have become more important in cities than in previous configurations. The first city is generally held to have been Eridu, a site just over a hundred miles inland from the Persian Gulf and now called Aby Shahrein. Its actual location was unique, in that it occupied a transitional zone between sea and land. It was near an alluvial plain and close to marshes, which meant that it could easily benefit from three ecological systems-the alluvium, the desert and the marshes, and so profit from three different modes of subsistence: farming, nomadic pastoralism, and fishing.9 But there was also a religious reason for Eridu. The city was located on a small hill ringed by a depression, in which subterranean water collected. This surrounding area was never less than a swamp and in the rainy season formed a sizeable lake.10 It was thus a configuration that conformed neatly to Mesopotamian ideas of the Cosmos, which pictured the earth as a disc surrounded by a huge body of water. In mirroring this configuration, Eridu became a sacred spot. Petr Charvat says that Eridu was believed to contain the source of all wisdom and that it was the seat of the god of knowledge. He says the 'first intelligible universal religion seems to have been born' in Eridu, in which worship involved the use of a triad of colours in the local pottery. Earthly existence was affirmed by the use of red, death by the use of black, and eternal life (and purity) through white.11 In general, towns are defined by archaeologists as occupying 30 hectares or less, whereas cities are 31