A favorite image that kings chose forthemselves in statues from the Early Dynastic period shows themonarch with a basket of earth for construction on his head. Hemight be a mighty ruler, but he was also a builder, erectingmonuments to his gods and taking care of his people.

Surprisingly,though, the Mesopotamians rarely wrote about the afterlife. Literarydescriptions suggest that the netherworld was a gloomy place—dark, with bad food, and no way out—and there was little about itthat suggested either a reward or punishment. It simply existed.And yet, since these kings (and many commoners whose burials alsocontained gifts and food) took their worldly possessions with them,perhaps they believed that they could improve their lot in theafterlife.

The king of Kish even sometimes enforced order inSumer. For example, Enannatum’s son, Enmetena, wrote that theborder between Lagash and Umma had been determined by thegreat god Enlil himself and had been confirmed by the king of Kish:“Mesalim, king of Kish, at the command of (the god) Ishtaran,measured the field and set up a (boundary-) stone there.” Theauthority of the king of Kish was therefore acknowledged, at leasttemporarily, by both the king of Umma and the king of Lagash.

At around the same time that they invented inscriptions by which tocommunicate with gods and with future kings, the kings’ scribesbegan to use writing for addressing those at a different kind ofdistance from themselves—kings of other lands.

Not far from the Ibgal temple of Inanna where the dedicatory tabletwas found, archaeologists excavated the earliest known breweryanywhere in Mesopotamia (a tablet found there even mentioned thebrewer).

all of the 1,700administrative tablets that were found at the later capital of Lagash,called Girsu, came from the queen’s palace.

The kings had, however, begun to realizeits potential for extending communication, in an almost magical way,beyond what could be accomplished with the spoken word. Writingcould perpetually and eternally address an audience on a king’sbehalf; the words were always there, even when the king was notthinking about them. Given that the population was almost entirelyilliterate, such an audience was mostly made up of gods. Thestatuette of the king’s personal god (or sometimes of the kinghimself), inscribed with the same text as the tablet, could thereforepray continuously in a way that a real person could not.

The scribes did not, however, try toexpress every part of speech; their script was still a shorthandversion of language.

The tablet wasfound by archaeologists in the foundations of the temple of Inannain Lagash, called the Ibgal. This extensive complex was oval inshape, as were many Early Dynastic temples in other cities, with alarge courtyard and a platform on which Inanna’s temple wasconstructed.

Lagash (modern Al Hiba in Iraq), hometo the god Ningirsu and to a dynasty of kings who squabbled forgenerations with their counterparts in the neighboring city-state ofUmma.

Every human alive, the king included, was just a servant to thegods, and those gods could choose to treat him or her however theywanted.

And just as professions tended to run in families, the kingmight have trained his son in the arts of leadership, grooming himfor the throne.

The Sumerian term for king, “lugal,” literally meant “big man.”

Order was maintained in the universe because the king of the godspossessed an object called the “Tablet of Destinies” on which wereinscribed theme (pronounced “may”). Theseme were never writtendown on any earthly tablet, as far as we know, for humanedification. But they encompassed all that kept chaos at bay.

Eventhe gods themselves had a king—the great god Enlil, who lived inthe city of Nippur.

ngship seemed so obvious and right to the Mesopotamians thatthey believed that it had been invented by the gods, that it hadcome “down from heaven.” Some later scribes made a grand list ofall the kings from the beginning of time to their own era. Theycalled it “When kingship came down from heaven,” which was itsfirst line. To modern scholars it is the Sumerian King List.

Yet othersdeveloped the skills to carve intricate cylinder seals used bymembers of the elite to identify their goods.

Other men and womenwent off to distant lands and set up smaller versions of Uruk,certainly keeping in touch with home through messengers, andpresumably sending goods that could be useful to their mothercities.

Whereas earlier peoples had manufactured their pottery by hand,adding eye-catching designs and glazes, the Uruk craftsmen mostlyproduced pottery on the newly invented wheel, rarely adding anyadornments. Quantity, now possible with a type of mass production,seems to have taken priority over quality in ceramic manufacture.

The sign for “food” (also for“bread”) in proto-cuneiform is the shape of a beveled-rim bowl.

A cylinder seal was a stone cylindrical beadcarved in relief with a scene, so that when rolled on a piece of clay itproduced an endless tiny frieze of figures or patterns.

The scribes do not seem to have thought of this scriptthat they had invented as a representation of language.

The people of Uruk started out with at least thirteen differentnumerical systems; they counted differently depending on what theywere counting, and the signs indicated different numbers fordifferent commodities. And about 30 percent of the signs they firstcreated to represent nouns had no later equivalents, so scholars donot know how to read them.

This proto-cuneiform tablet from Uruk includes signs forsheep and the goddess Inanna, but its meaning is unclear.

The investment of time and manpower devoted to the constructionof this complex would have resembled the work on a medievalcathedral. As early as 3600 BCE work had begun on the so-calledLimestone Temple in the Eanna precinct. Quarrymen and masonsremoved limestone from a rocky outcrop around fifty kilometers (31mi) to the southwest. Other men transported the stone to Uruk. Stillothers formed hundreds of thousands of mud bricks and clay cones,and set them out to harden in the sun. Others brought timber fromfar to the north for the roofs. Someone supervised all the workmenwho set the bricks and stones and mosaic cones in place. The menwould have been fed and provided for during the construction. Thebuilders were all probably residents of Uruk, united in their desire tocreate a magnificent home for their beloved divine queen.

It is writtenin a script known as proto-cuneiform, a script that did not representsounds or even language at all; signs served as memory aids.

facts that no one couldconceivably commit to memory.

Datesafter ca. 1400 BCE are fairly reliable and uncontroversial (the morerecent, the less controversial). For dates before 1500 BCE, however, adebate revolves around the Middle Chronology. Some scholars proposelower dates (from eight years to as much as a century later). But until aconsensus is reached, it seems best to use the dates that are familiar, ifprobably wrong.

The widely used Middle Chronology—which gives the dates ofHammurabi’s reign as 1792 to 1750 BCE—is followed in this book.

Later letters, inscriptions, and prayers, in which one mightexpect to see frequent references to flooding if it had been a majorconcern, mostly describe the rivers as a blessing.

cuneiform was occasionallyemployed in both Canaan and Egyp

These lands were Mesopotamia (modernIraq, with its variously named regions: Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, andAssyria), Syria, Elam (part of what was later known as Persia), andAnatolia (modern Turkey).

The ancient Near East is defined here as comprising the “cuneiformlands,”

to the waysthat documents were organized in archives,

Law, for example,once invented in Mesopotamia around 2100 BCE, was never forgotten,even though the actual laws of the Mesopotamians bear littleresemblance to those in use today.

For example, women in early times had many rights andfreedoms: they could own property, run businesses, and representthemselves in court.

The popularimage of history as a story of progress from primitive barbarism tomodern sophistication is completely belied by the study of the ancientNear East.