It was against this background that a Frenchman, Ernest de Sarzec, excavated a mound at Telloh, near Ur and Uruk, north of modern Basra in Iraq, and found a statue of a hitherto unknown type.27 This naturally sparked fresh interest in the ‘Sumerians,’ and other digs soon followed, carried out mainly by Americans and Germans. These unearthed among other things huge ziggurats, which confirmed that the ancient civilisation (then called Lagash) was sophisticated. The dating was provocative too: ‘It seemed almost as if its beginnings coincided with the times described in Genesis. The Sumerians might well be the same people, it was thought, who populated the earth after the punitive deluge that wiped out all humankind but Noah and his kin.’ These excavations revealed not only how early civilisations evolved but also how early man thought, which is why, in 1927, the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley began to dig in the biblical Ur of Chaldea, the alleged home of Abraham, founder of the Jews.
Woolley, born in 1880, was educated at Oxford. He was a friend and colleague of T. E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’); together they excavated Carchemish, where the Euphrates flows from modern Turkey into Syria. In World War I Woolley did intelligence work in Egypt but then spent two years as a prisoner of war in Turkey. He made three important discoveries at Ur: first, he found several royal tombs, including the grave of Queen Shub-ad, which contained almost as many gold and silver vessels as the tomb of Tutankhamen; second, he unearthed the so-called mosaic standard of Ur, which featured a cluster of chariots, showing that it was the Sumerians, at the end of the fourth millennium BC, who had introduced this device into warfare; and third, he discovered that the royal corpses in Ur were not alone.28 Alongside the king and queen, in one chamber, lay a company of soldiers (copper helmets and spears were found next to their bones). In another chamber were the skeletons of nine ladies of the court, still wearing elaborate gold headdresses.29 Not only were these very grisly practices, but more significant, no text had ever hinted at this collective sacrifice. Woolley therefore drew the conclusion that the sacrifice had taken place before writing had been invented to record such an event. In this way the sacrifices confirmed the Sumerians, at that stage, as the oldest civilisation in the world.
It was only after these astounding discoveries that Woolley reached the forty-feet level. And here he came upon nothing.30 For more than eight feet there was just clay, completely free from shards and rubbish or artefacts of any kind. Now, for a deposit of clay eight feet thick to be laid down, a tremendous flood must at some time have inundated the land of Sumer. Was this, then, the deluge mentioned in the Bible?31 Like all classical archaeologists, Woolley was familiar with the Middle Eastern legend of Gilgamesh, half-man, half-god, who endured many trials and adventures, including a massive flood (‘the waters of death’).32 Were there other correspondences between the Sumerians and the early Bible? When he looked, Woolley found many of them. The most intriguing was the account in Genesis that between Adam and the Deluge there were ten ‘mighty forefathers which were old.’ The Sumerian literature also referred to their ‘primal kings,’ which were eight in number. Moreover, the Israelites boasted improbably long life spans. Adam, for example, who begot his first son at the age of 130, is said to have lived for 800 years. Woolley found that the life spans of the ancient Sumerians were supposed to have been even greater.33 According to one account, the reigns of eight ancestral kings stretched over 241,200 years, an average of 30,400 years per king.34 The central point was this: the more he looked, the more Woolley found that the Sumerians overlapped with the early biblical account of Genesis, and that Sumer occupied a pivotal point in human development.35 For example, they boasted the first schools and were the first to use gardens to provide shade. The first library was theirs, and they had the concept of the ‘Resurrection’ long before the Bible. Their law was impressive and in some respects surprisingly modern.36 ‘The astounding thing about this legal code from a modern point of view, is the way it is governed by a clear and consistent concept of guilt.’37 The juristic approach was emphasised at all times, with a deliberate suppression of religious considerations. Vendettas, for example, were all but abolished in Sumer, the important point being that the state took over from the individual as the arbiter of justice. This justice was harsh but did its best to be objective. Medicine and mathematics were also highly regarded professions in Sumer, and the Sumerians appeared to have discovered the arch. Like we do, they polished apples before they ate them, and the idea that a black cat is unlucky comes from Sumer, as does the division of the clock face into twelve hours.38 Sumer was, then, a missing link in the evolution of civilisation. From what Woolley was able to deduce, the Sumerians were non-Semitic, a dark-haired people who displaced two other Semitic peoples in the Mesopotamian delta.39
Though Woolley could go no further than this, more light was thrown on Hebrew origins, and on the evolution of writing, by discoveries made at Ras Shamra. Ras Shamra lies in northwestern Syria, near the Mediterranean bay of Alexandretta, at the angle between Syria and Asia Minor. Here, on a hill above a small harbour, was an ancient settlement excavated in 1929 by the French, led by Claude Schaeffer. They were able to construct a full chronology of the site, in which was embedded Ras Shamra’s written records, dating to the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC. This showed the site to have been named Ugarit, and that it was occupied by a Semitic people of the Amorite-Canaanite class.40 According to the Bible, this was the period when the Israelites were entering Palestine from the south and beginning to spread among Canaanites, kinsmen of the inhabitants of Ugarit. The library was discovered in a building that stood between the temples of Baal and Dagon. Belonging to the high priest, it consisted mainly of tablets with writing in a cuneiform style but adapted to an alphabetic script, comprising twenty-nine signs. This made it the earliest known alphabet.41
The contents of the texts proved to be legal works, price lists, medical and veterinary treatises, and a huge number of religious writings. These showed that Ugarit’s supreme god was El, a very familiar name from the Old Testament as one of the names of the God of Israel. For example, in chapter 33, verse 20, of Genesis, Jacob erects his altar to E1, the God of Israel.’ In the Ras Shamra tablets, E1 is the king, the supreme judge, the father of years’ and ‘He reigns over all the other gods.’42 The land of Canaan is referred to as ‘the whole land of El.’ El has a wife, Asherat, with whom he has a son, Baal. El is often represented as a bull, and in one text Crete is described as the abode of El. Thus there are overlaps not only between Ras Shamra and Sumeria, Assyrian and Cretan ideas, but also with Hebrew concepts. Many of the writings describe Baal’s adventures – for example, his fights with Lotan, ‘the sinuous serpent, the mighty one with seven heads,’ which recalls the Hebrew Leviathan, and whose seven heads remind us of the beast with seven heads in Revelation and in Job.43 In another set of writings, El gives Keret command of a huge army, called the ‘army of the Negeb.’ This is recognisable as the Negev Desert area in the extreme south of Palestine. Keret’s orders were to conquer some invaders who are called Terachites, immediately identified as the descendants of Terah, the father of Abraham – in other words the Israelites, who were at that time (according to the then generally accepted chronology) occupying the desert during their forty years’ wanderings.44 The Ras Shamra/Ugarit texts contained other parallels with the Old Testament and provide a strong if not entirely clear link between the bull cults dated to circa 2,000–4,000 BC throughout the Middle East, and religions as we recognise them today.