Scribes were trained in Ur since at least the second quarter of the third millennium.54 When they signed documents, they often added the names and positions of their fathers, which confirms that they were usually the sons of city governors, temple administrators, army officers, or priests: literacy was confined to scribes and administrators. Anyone in authority probably received some sort of scribal education and it has even been suggested that the Sumerian term dub.sar , literally 'scribe', was the equivalent of Esquire, or BA, applied to any educated man.55 Two schools, perhaps the first in the world, were founded by King Shulgi at Nippur and at Ur in the last century of the third millennium BC, but he referred to them without any elaboration, so they may have been established well before this. The Babylonian term for school or scribal academy was edubba , literally 'Tablet-House'. The headmaster was called 'Father of the Tablet-House', and in one inscription a pupil says this: 'You have opened my eyes as though I were a puppy; you have formed humanity within me.'56 There were specialist masters for language, mathematics ('scribe of counting') and surveying ('scribe of the field') but day-to-day teaching was conducted by someone called, literally, 'Big Brother', who was probably a senior pupil. Cuneiform extracts have been found in several cities which show that there were already 'standard texts' used in instruction. For example, there are tablets with the same text written out in different hands, others with literary texts on one side, maths exercises on the reverse, still others with the teacher's text on one side, the pupil's on the other, together with corrections. On one tablet, a pupil describes his workload: This is the monthly scheme of my school attendance: My free days are three each month; My religious holidays are three each month; For twenty-four days each month I must be in school. How long they are!57 Scribes had to learn their own trade, too-they needed to know how to prepare clay for writing and how to bake the texts that were to be preserved in libraries. Limestone could be added to make the surface of the clay smoother, and the wedges clearer.58 Besides clay, boards of wood or ivory were often coated with wax, sometimes hinged in several leaves. The wax could be wiped clean and the boards reused.59 The scribal tradition spread far beyond Mesopotamia, and as it did so it expanded.60 The Egyptians were the first to write with reed brushes on pieces of old pottery; next they introduced slabs of sycamore which were coated with gypsum plaster, which could be rubbed off to allow re-use.61 Papyrus was the most expensive writing material of all and was available only to the most accomplished, and therefore least wasteful, scribes. Scribal training could take as long as for a modern PhD. Not all writing had to do with business. The early, more literary texts of Sumer, naturally enough perhaps, include the first religious literature, hymns in particular. In Uruk there was a popular account of the king's love affair with the goddess Inanna (Ishtar in Babylon, Astarte in Greece). Other texts included a father's instructions to his son on how to lead a useful and rewarding life, accounts of battles and conquests, records of building activity, cosmogonies, and a vast corpus to do with magic. By the time Ashur flourished, roughly 1900-1200 BC, there were many private archives, in addition to the public ones, some of which contained as many as 4,000 texts. By now, the most prestigious form of learning was astronomy/astrology, omen literature, and magic. These helped establish Ashur's reputation as al nemeqi , 'City of Wisdom'.62 We should never forget that in antiquity, before writing, people performed prodigious feats of memory. It was by no means unknown for thousands of lines of poetry to be memorised: this is how literature was preserved and disseminated. Once writing had evolved, however, two early forms of written literature may be singled out. There was in the first place a number of stories that prefigured narratives which appeared later in the Bible. Given the influence of that book, its origins are important. For example,
Sargon, king of Akkad, emerged from complete obscurity to become 'king of the world'. His ancestry was elaborated from popular tales, which tell of his mother, a priestess, concealing the fact that she had given birth to him by placing him in a wicker basket, sealed with bitumen, and casting him adrift on a river. He was later found by a water drawer who brought Sargon up as his adopted son. Sargon first became a gardener...and then king. The parallels with the Moses story are plain. Sumerian literature also boasts a number of 'primal kings' with improbably long reigns. This too anticipates the Old Testament. In the Bible, for example, Adam begot his son Seth at age 130 and is said to have lived for 800 more years. Between Adam and the Deluge there were ten kings who lived to very great ages. In Sumer, there were eight such kings, who between them reigned for 241,200 years, an average of 30,400 years per king. The texts unearthed at Ras Shamra/Ugarit speak of the god Baal fighting with Lotan, 'the sinuous serpent, the mighty one with seven heads', which anticipates the Old Testament Leviathan. Then there is the flood literature. We shall encounter one version of the flood story in the epic of Gilgamesh, which is discussed immediately below. In that poem, the flood-hero was known as Utnapishtim, 'Who Found [Eternal] Life', though he was also known in similar legends as Ziusudra or Atra-hasis. In all the stories the flood is sent by the gods as a punishment.63 The very name, Mesopotamia, between the rivers, suggests that floods were a common occurrence in the area. But the idea of a Great Flood seems to have been deeply embedded in the consciousness of the ancient Middle East.64 There are three possibilities. One is that the Tigris and Euphrates flooded together, creating a large area of water. According to Leonard Woolley's excavations at Ur, referred to at the beginning of this chapter, the flood revealed in the silt he found there could have meant an inundation twenty-five feet deep that was 300 miles long and 100 miles across.65 This has been called into question because Uruk, fifteen miles from Ur, and situated lower, shows no trace of flood. A second possibility, discussed in more detail in the next chapter, is that a terrible earthquake hit the Indus valley area of India in about 1900 BC and caused the diversion of the river Sarasvati. This, the mighty river of the ancient Hindu scripture, the Rig Veda , was ten kilometres wide in places but is now no more. The event that triggered this great catastrophe must have caused huge floods over a very wide area. The last possibility is the so-called Black Sea flood. According to this theory, published in 1997, the Black Sea was formed only after the last Ice Age, when the level of the Mediterranean rose, around 8,000 years ago, sluicing water through the Bosporus and flooding a vast area, 630 miles from east to west, and 330 miles from north to south.66 The greatest literary creation of Babylon, the first imaginative masterpiece in the world, was the epic of Gilgamesh, or 'He Who Saw Everything to the Ends of the World', as the title of the poem has it. Almost certainly, Gilgamesh ruled in Uruk around 2900 BC, so some of the episodes in his epic are rooted in fact.67 His adventures are complicated, often fantastic and difficult to follow. In some respects, they recall the labours of Hercules and, as we shall see, are echoed in the Bible. In the poem, he himself is two-thirds god and one-third man. In the first verses, we learn how Gilgamesh has to overcome the resistance of the people of Uruk and push through 'a wondrous feat', namely the building of the city wall. This, 9.5 kilometres long, boasted, it is said, at least 900 semi-circular towers. Some of this part of the story may be based on fact, for excavations have identified semi-circular structures in the Early Dynastic period (i.e., around 2900 BC) using a new type of curved brick.68 Gilgamesh is a hard taskmaster, so much so that his subjects appeal to the gods to create a counterforce, who will take on Gilgamesh and let the citizens have a quiet life. Sympathetic, the gods create Enkidu, a 'hairy wild man'. But here the plot twists and Enkidu and Gilgamesh become firm friends and from then on undertake their adventures as companions.69 The two return to Mesopotamia where the goddess Inanna falls in love with Gilgamesh. He spurns her attentions and in retaliation she sends the awesome 'bull of heaven...which even a hundred men could not control' to kill him.70 But Enkidu joins forces with Gilgamesh and together they defeat the bull by tearing off its limbs. This early part of the poem is in general positive, but it then turns darker. Enlil, the god of the air and of the earth, decides that Enkidu must die for some of the heroic killings he has performed. The loss of Enkidu affects Gilgamesh badly: All day and all night have I wept over him