and would not have him buried- my friend yet might rise up at my (loud) cries, for seven days and nights- until a maggot dropped from his nose. Since he is gone, I can no comfort find, keep roaming like a hunter in the plains.71 Until this point, Gilgamesh has given little thought to death. From now on, however, his sole aim is to find everlasting life. He recalls the legend that, at the end of the world, beyond 'the waters of death', lives an ancestor of his, Utnapishtim, who is immortal and therefore must know the secret. Alone now, Gilgamesh sets out to reach the end of the world, beyond the mountains where the sun sets. He finds the dark passage through which the sun disappears at night, and eventually arrives on the shore of a wide sea.72 There, he meets Utnapishtim's boatman, who agrees to ferry him over the waters of death, 'a single drop of which means certain destruction'.73 When, finally, Gilgamesh reaches Utnapishtim he is disappointed. The ancestor's immortality, he tells Gilgamesh, is due to unique circumstances that will never be repeated. He confides that, in an earlier age, the gods had decided to destroy mankind and had caused a flood. Utnapishtim and his wife were the only ones allowed to survive: they were forewarned and built a large boat, in which they stored pairs of all living things. After the storm had lashed the boat for six days and nights, and when all was quiet, Utnapishtim opened a window, and saw that his boat was beached on an island, which was in fact the top of a mountain. He waited for another six days, then sent out a dove, followed by a swallow. Both returned. Finally, he let loose a crow, which did not come back.74 Later on, Utnapishtim reports, Enlil regretted his rash decision and rewarded Utnapishtim with immortality for saving life on earth. But the gods will never repeat this act. The first libraries were installed in Mesopotamia, though to begin with they were more like archives than libraries proper. They contained records of the practical, day-to-day activities of the Mesopotamian city-states. This is true whether the library was in Nippur, in the middle of the third millennium BC, or Ebla, where two thousand clay tablets were found in 1980, dating to roughly 2250 BC, or to later libraries. We have to remember that in most cases the libraries served the purposes of the priests and that in Mesopotamian cities, where the temple cult owned huge estates, practical archives-recording transactions, contracts and deliveries-were as much part of the cult as were ritual texts for the sacred services. But the propagandistic needs of the cult and the emerging royal elite-hymns, inscriptions- provoked a more modern form of literacy. Texts such as the epic of Gilgamesh, or the epic of Creation, may therefore have been used in ritual. But these works, which involved some form of mental activity beyond flat records of transactions, appear first in the texts at Nippur in the middle of the third millennium. The next advance occurred at Ebla, Ur and Nippur.75 Each of these later libraries boasted a new, more scholarly entity: catalogues of the holdings, in which works of the imagination, and/or religious works, were listed separately. Later still, there was a further innovation: several lines of writing, added at the end of the text on the back surface, identifying what the text contained, more or less as a table of contents does today. This acquired the term colophon, derived from the Greek kolophon , meaning 'finishing touch'. One, for example, was written thus: 'Eighth tablet of the Dupaduparsa Festival, words of Silalluhi and Kuwatalla, the temple-priestess. Written by the hand of Lu, son of Nugissar, in the presence of Anuwanza, the overseer.' The colophons were numbered, and recorded how many tablets the text was comprised of. Some of the catalogues went beyond the detail in the colophons, so that the scribes could tell from perusing just this document what was in the library. The ordering of the list was still pretty haphazard, however, for alphabetisation was not introduced for more than 1,500 years.76 As time went by, the number of religious titles began to grow. By the time of Tiglath-Pileser I, one of Assyria's greatest rulers (1115-1077 BC), the biggest component of the texts dealt with the movements of the heavens, and prediction of the future based on a variety of omens. There were some hymns and a catalogue of musical compositions ('5 Sumerian psalms comprising one liturgy, for the adapa [possibly a tambourine]'). Ashurbanipal, Assyria's last important ruler (668-627 BC), also had a fine library and was himself literate. Here too the mass of archival material comprised the bulk of the library; next in number came the omen texts; next largest were the lists, words and names, dictionaries for translating; and finally literary
works, such as the epic of Gilgamesh. In all there were about 1,500 separate titles.77 A curse was inscribed on many Assyrian tablets to deter people from stealing them.78 Libraries undoubtedly existed in ancient Egypt, but because they wrote on papyrus (the 'bullrushes' in which the infant Moses was supposed to have been sequestered), little has survived. In describing the building complex of Ramses II (1279-1213 BC), the Greek historian Diodorus says that it included a sacred library which bore the inscription 'Clinic for the Soul'. In the early cities there were two types of authority. There was first the high priest, known as the en . He (and sometimes she) administered the corporate entity, or municipality, interceding with the gods to guarantee the continued fertility of enough land to provide everyone with food/income, and the en also administered its redistribution, both among the citizens and for foreign trade. The en 's consort was nin and, in Petr Charvat's words, they comprised the 'pontifical couple'.79 The second form of authority was the lugal -the overseer, fortress commander, literally the 'great man', who administered military matters, foreign affairs as we would say, relations with outsiders. We should not make too much of this division, however: not every city had two types of leader-some had ens and others had lugals , and in any case where there were two types of authority the military leaders would have sought the backing of the religious elite for all of their military exploits. But this early arrangement changed, for the records show that, at some point, nin detached herself from en and realigned herself with the lugal .80 At the same time, the role of the ens shrank, to become more and more ceremonial, whereas the lugal and the nin took on the functions of what we would call kings and queens. There now developed a greater division between temporal and spiritual power, and more of an emphasis on masculinity,81 a change that may have been brought about by war, which was now more of a threat and for two reasons. First, in an area that was circumscribed between two mighty rivers there would have been growing competition among rival cities, rivalry for land and for water, as population expanded; and second, with increasing prosperity and the accumulation of material possessions, produced by increasing numbers of specialists, there would have been more to gain from successful plunder. In war, a warrior was his own master, much more so than in peacetime, and the charisma and success of a clever lugal would have had a forceful impact on his fellow citizens. It would have been natural, following the victory of one city over another, for the lugal to have administered both territories: it was he who had achieved the victory, and in any case the gods of the rival city might well be different from those in his native city. The en from city A, therefore, would have little or no authority in city B. In this way, lugals began to overtake ens as the all-powerful figures in Sumerian society. Petr Charvat notes that the worship of the same god in different Sumerian cities did begin to grow, confirming this change. The growing power of the lugals was recognised in the practice whereby they acquired the prerogative to control systems of measurement (perhaps a relic of building defences) and the right to leave written records of their deeds. This was part-propaganda, part-history, so that people would remember who had done what and how.82 Thus the more-or-less modern idea of kingship grew up in Mesopotamia and, parallel with it, the idea of the state. Lugals who became kings administered more than one city, and the territory in between. The first supra-regional political entity in the ancient Middle East was the Akkadian state, which began with Sargon, c . 2340-2284 BC, the first king in the sense that we still use the term. Kingship, then, was forged in part by war. War, or the institutionalisation of war, was the crucible or the forcing house for a number of other ideas. The wheel may or may not have been invented in Mesopotamia. The first vehicles-sledges-were used by early hunter-fisher societies in near-Arctic northern Europe by 7000 BC, presumably pulled by dogs.83 'Vehicle' signs occur in the pictographic script of Uruk in the late fourth millennium BC, and actual remains of an axle-and-wheel unit were found at a similar date at a site in Zurich in Switzerland. These vehicles had solid wheels, made from either one or three pieces of wood. From archaeological remains at sites before 2000 BC, these so-called disc wheels stretch from Denmark to Persia, with the greatest