Sumerians

“ Votive tablets from Nippur, engraved with scenes of worship.—Cf. Hilprecht, Explorations, p. 475, and Old Bab. Inscr., II., pl. xvi.
Man forms his god in his own image, and it is surprising that the gods of the Sumerians should not be of the Sumerian type. If the Sumerian shaved his own head and face, why should he have figured his gods with long beards and abundant hair and have clothed them with the garments of another race? Professor Meyer's answer to the question is that the Semites and their gods were already in occupation of Sumer and Akkad before the Sumerians came upon the scene. ”

“ But the Semites were not the first occupants of Babylonia. The civilisation of the country had been founded by a race which spoke an agglutinative language, like that of the modern Finns or Turks, and which scholars have now agreed to call Sumerian. The Sumerians had been the builders of the cities, the reclaimers of the marshy plain, the inventors of the picture-writing which developed into the cuneiform [pg 200] or wedge-shaped characters, and the pioneers of a culture which profoundly affected the whole of western Asia. ”

“ The Sawâd was first reclaimed by men who had already a mastery of metals, a system of writing, and a mature religion—less civilised men would never have attempted the task. These Sumerians, in the fourth millennium B.C., lived on tells heaped up above flood-level, each tell a city-state with its separate government and gods, for centralisation was the one thing needful to the country which the Sumerians did not achieve. ”

“ These Sumerians were able to defend themselves because of superior intelligence, better weapons, and their extensive system of military canals, which were an adjunct to their irrigation scheme of interconnecting pools. They were a united people because they had a uniform group religion. ”

“ It will be seen that the influence of the Sumerians furnishes us with a key to much that would otherwise prove puzzling in the history of the early races of Western Asia. It is therefore all the more striking to recall the fact that but a few years ago the very existence of this ancient people was called in question. At that time the excavations in Mesopotamia had not revealed many traces of the race itself, and its previous existence had been mainly inferred from a number of Sumerian compositions inscribed upon Assyrian tablets found in the library of Ashur-bani-pal at Nineveh. ”

“ FRAGMENT OF SUMERIAN SCULPTURE REPRESENTING SCENES OF WORSHIP BEFORE THE GODS.—In the Louvre; Déc. en Chald., pl. 23.
It would thus appear that at the earliest period of which remains or records have been recovered, Semites and Sumerians were both settled in Babylonia, the one race in the north, the other southwards nearer the Persian Gulf. Living at first in comparative isolation, trade and war would gradually bring them into closer contact. Whether we may regard the earliest rulers of Kish as Semites like their later successors, is still in doubt. ”

“ He would regard the Semites at this early [Pg 50] period as settled throughout the whole country, a primitive and uncultured people with only sufficient knowledge of art to embody the figures of their gods in rude images of stone or clay. There is no doubt that the Sumerians were a warrior folk, and he would picture them as invading the country at a later date, and overwhelming Semitic opposition by their superior weapons and method of attack. ”

“ A more recent suggestion, that their language is of Indo-European origin and structure, [59] is scarcely less improbable, while resemblances which have been pointed out between isolated words in Sumerian and in Armenian, Turkish, and other languages of Western Asia, may well be fortuitous. With the Elamites upon their eastern border the Sumerians had close relations from the first, but the two races do not appear to be related either in language or by physical characteristics. ”

“ This distinguished ethnologist is frankly of opinion that the Sumerians were the congeners of the pre-Dynastic Egyptians of the Mediterranean or Brown race, the eastern branch of which reaches to India and the western to the British Isles and Ireland. In the same ancient family are included the Arabs, whose physical characteristics distinguish them from the Semites of Jewish type.
Some light may be thrown on the Sumerian problem by giving consideration to the present-day racial complexion of Western Asia. ”

“ The Semites as a ruling race came later, though the occurrence of Semitic names in the Sumerian Dynastic List suggests very early infiltration from Arabia. After a long struggle the immigrants succeeded in dominating the settled race; and in the process they in turn became civilized. They learnt and adopted the cuneiform writing, they took over the Sumerian literature. Towards the close of the third millennium, when our tablet was written, the Sumerians as a race had almost ceased to exist. ”

“ Indeed, the class of temple votaries, who enjoyed a high social position under the Semitic kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon, probably had its counterpart at the centres of Sumerian worship in still earlier times; and there is evidence that at the time of the First Dynasty, the order included members of the royal house. Moreover, tablets dating from the close of Ur-Ninâ's dynasty show the important part which women played in the social and official life of the early Sumerians. ”

“ In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had entered Mesopotamia. They were soon afterwards overpowered by the Akkadians, one of the many tribes from the desert of Arabia who speak a common dialect and who are known as the "Semites," because in the olden days people believed them to be the direct descendants of Shem, one of the three sons of Noah. ”

“ The Babylonian elements of culture which the early Semitic invaders brought with them to Egypt were, then, ultimately of Sumerian origin. Sumerian civilization had profoundly influenced the Semitic tribes for centuries before the Semitic conquest of Babylonia, and when the Sumerians became more and more a conquered race, finally amalgamating with their conquerors and losing their racial and linguistic individuality, they were conquered by an alien race but not by an alien culture. For the culture of the Semites was Sumerian, the Semitic races owing their civilization to the Sumerians. ”

“ But one department of Sumerian activity forms a striking exception to this rule. The arts of sculpture and engraving, as practised by the Sumerians, are well worthy of study on their own account, for while their work in all periods is marked by spirit and originality, that of the later time reaches a remarkable standard of excellence. The improvement in technique observable in the later period may largely be due to the influence of Semitic work, which was derived from Sumer and reacted in its turn on the parent stem. ”

“ But remember they grew slowly and their retrogression is bound to be equally slow. Sumerian culture was unusually virile. Its influence is felt in Asia Minor today. The Sumerians had their civilization when our bloomin' ancestors were scrapping with cave bears and sabertooth tigers, so to speak. At least the Aryans hadn't passed the first milestones on the road to progress, whoever their animal neighbors were. Old Eridu was a seaport of consequence as early as 6500 B. C. From then to 2750 B. C. is a bit of time for any empire. ”

“ It has, of course, long been recognized that the later Semitic inhabitants of Babylonia and Assyria drew most of their culture from the Sumerians, whom they displaced and absorbed. Their system of writing, the general structure of their temples, the ritual of their worship, the majority of their religious compositions, and many of their gods themselves are to be traced to a Sumerian origin, and much of the information obtained from the cylinders of Gudea merely confirms or illustrates the conclusions already deduced from other sources. ”

“ I may add that a parallel is provided by the new Sumerian records to the circumstances preceding the birth of the Nephilim at the beginning of the sixth chapter of Genesis. (1) For in them also great prowess or distinction is ascribed to the progeny of human and divine unions. We have already noted that, according to the traditions the records embody, the Sumerians looked back to a time when gods lived upon the earth with men, and we have seen such deities as Tammuz and Lugalbanda figuring as rulers of cities in the dynastic sequence. ”

“ Of the prehistoric period in Babylonia we know little, but it may be assumed that, already at the time of the Sumerian immigration, rude settlements had been formed around the cult-centres of local gods. This, at any rate, was the character of each town or city of the Sumerians themselves during the earliest periods to which we can trace back their history. At Fâra, the most primitive Sumerian site that has yet been examined, we find the god Shuruppak giving his own name to the city around his shrine, and Ningirsu of Lagash dominates and directs his people from the first. ”

“ But the reappearance of the Sumerians in the rôle of leading race in Western Asia was destined not to last long, and was little more than the last flicker of vitality exhibited by this ancient and exhausted race. Thus the Second Dynasty fell in its turn before the onslaught of the Kassite tribes who descended from the mountainous districts in the west of Elam, and, having overrun the whole of Mesopotamia, established a new dynasty at Babylon, and adopted Babylonian civilization. ”

“ In contrast, the Sumerians had clean-shaven faces and scalps, and noses of Egyptian and Grecian rather than Semitic type, while they wore short, pleated kilts, and went about with the upper part of their bodies quite bare like the Egyptian noblemen of the Old Kingdom period. They spoke a non-Semitic language, and were the oldest inhabitants of Babylonia of whom we have any knowledge. Sumerian civilization was rooted in the agricultural mode of life, and appears to have been well developed before the Semites became numerous and influential in the land. ”

“ It is significant, however, that his enemies are bearded Semites, not Sumerians, proving that the Semitic immigration into Northern Babylonia and the surrounding districts was no new thing; we may infer that kindred tribes had long been settled in this portion of Western Asia, and were prepared to defend their territory from the encroachments of one of their own race. Yet details of Sharru-Gi's sculpture prove that with him we are appreciably nearer to the time of Sumerian domination in the north. ”

“ Babylonia is an alluvial country, subject to constant inundation, and the remains and settlements of the Neolithic period were doubtless in many places swept away, and all trace of them destroyed by natural causes. With the advent of the Sumerians began the practice of building cities upon artificial mounds, which preserved the structure of the buildings against flood, and rendered them easier of defence against a foe. It is through excavation in these mounds that the earliest remains of the Sumerians have been recovered ”

“ These invaders, according to this latter view, adopted the religion and culture of the conquered Sumerians; and, consequently, the Sumerian idiom at a comparatively early date began to be used exclusively in the Semitic temples as the written vehicles of religious thought in much the same way as was the medieval Latin of the Roman Church. The solution of this problem is of vital importance in connexion with the early history of man's development in the Babylonian region. ”

“ The ancient Sumerians had no connection with the western race. They were a mixed people, of Hyrkanian and Shemitish bloods, who were not taken with the conquerors in their retreat. Many tribes of Shem escaped that captivity, and from pure-blooded Shemites, or Shemites mixed with Hyborian or Nordic blood, were descended the Arabs, Israelites, and other straighter-featured Semites. ”

“ The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and conquest. First the Sumerians came from the North. They were a white people who had lived in the mountains. They had been accustomed to worship their Gods on the tops of hills. ”

“ Although Sumerian (early Babylonian) civilization presents distinctively local features which justify the application of the term "indigenous" in the broad sense, it is found, like that of Egypt, to be possessed of certain elements which suggest exceedingly remote influences and connections at present obscure. Of special interest in this regard is Professor Budge's mature and well-deliberated conclusion that "both the Sumerians and early Egyptians derived their primeval gods from some common but exceedingly ancient source". ”

“ But the original impulse to artistic production was of purely Sumerian origin, and it is possible to trace the gradual development of its products from the rudest reliefs of the archaic period to the finished sculpture of Gudea's reign. [21] The character of the Semitic art of Akkad was secondary and derivative, though the Semites certainly improved on what they borrowed; in that of the Sumerians the seeds of its later excellence may be detected from the beginning. ”

“ Foreign invasions might result in the fall of dynasties, and her kings might be drawn from other cities and lands, but Babylon continued to be the centre of their rule. Moreover, after the fresh wave of immigration which resulted in the establishment of her First Dynasty, the racial character of Babylonia became dominantly Semitic. Before the new invaders the Sumerians tended to withdraw southwards into the coastal districts of the Persian Gulf, and from here, for a time, an independent dynasty, largely of Sumerian origin, attempted to contest with Babylon her supremacy. ”