Slowly, priests took on a governing role. Climate change intervened in this simple form of governance. In order for farming to continue producing adequate food, the villagers had to begin irrigating the crops. Irrigation required a substantial amount of labor in building and maintaining canals and dams. Organizing this labor required intelligent leadership. While priests were capable men, they now needed assistance from a secular leader who could guide communal labor.
By the time farming villages had grown into the great Mesopotamian cities, both priests and secular leaders were involved in governing the increasingly complex society of a city. The secular leader was called the lugal, the strongman.
The kings were just as eager and just as responsible for keeping the gods happy as were the common people. So, it made sense to these early people that a Council of Elders, an assembly of wise men called the Assembly , should be elected so that the people would have someone to check with, to make sure that what they were planning to do would not anger the gods.
The king sought approval for his actions from this assembly, just like everyone else. The assembly might say to a king, 'No king, you can't do that. That would anger the gods. Even the gods had to seek the approval of the assembly.
The gods didn't actually appear in front of the assembly and wouldn't that be a neat trick! Assyrian Laws: Things were quite different in ancient Assyria. Assyria was a powerful military state in northern Mesopotamia in what is today northern Iraq. The Assyrian government was led by a king. The king ruled as the earthly representative of the god Ashur, the most powerful god to the ancient Assyrians. Military officers were in charge of local government.
The king had other advisers as well, pulled from the nobles. The most important advisor was the chief of staff. The chief of staff decided who could talk to the king on any one day, and who couldn't. Scribes were the only people who could read or write. Like all the ancient Mesopotamians, the Assyrians liked to keep lists and write things down.
At one time, the Assyrian Empire stretched all the way from Mesopotamia to Egypt. But in ancient Assyria, there was no assembly that could overrule the king. The king's word was law. The published version of my Sumerian Lexicon will include all the variant Emesal dialect words. Emesal texts have a tendency to spell words phonetically, which suggests that the authors of these compositions were farther from the professional scribal schools.
A similar tendency to spell words phonetically occurs outside the Sumerian heartland. Most Emesal texts are from the later part of the Old Babylonian period. The cultic songs that were written in Emesal happen to be the only Sumerian literary genre that continued to be written after the Old Babylonian period. In addition to the Sumerians, who have no known linguistic relatives, the Ancient Near East was the home of the Semitic family of languages.
The language of ancient Egypt may prove to be Semitic; or, it may be a member of a super-family to which the Semitic family also belonged. There were also "The Old Ones," whose languages are unknown to us. Some presume their speech ancestral to modern Kurdish, and Russian Georgian, and call them Caucasian. Let's call these peoples Subartu, a name given to them after they were driven northward by the Sumerians and other conquerors of Mesopotamia.
Indo-Europeans spoke languages ancestral to all modern European languages except Finnish, Hungarian, and Basque. It was also ancestral to modern Iranian, Afghan, and most of the languages of Pakistan and I ndia.
They were not native to the Near East, but their intrusions into the area made them increasingly important after B. Though writing is still presumed to have evolved in Mesopotamia, it seems likely that the pre-Sumerian inhabitants of the valley, and not the Sumerians themselves, were the first to use it there. New evidence from Egypt re-opens the possibility that Egyptians may have started writing as early as the Mesopotamians.
By B. To the contrary, the vast majority of the peoples who lived before A. Because literacy was so narrowly confined to a small elite of lords and scribes, it was easy for entire civilizations to lose literacy. Such a loss was experienced by India from about B. The Sumerian are credited with inventing writing around B. What distinguished their markings from pictograms is that they were symbols representing sounds and abstract concepts instead of images. No one knows who the genius was who came up with this idea.
The exact date of early Sumerian writing is difficult to ascertain because the methods of dating tablets, pots and bricks on which the oldest tablets with writing were found are not reliable. By around B. A cow, for example, was represented with a stylized picture of a cow. But sometimes it was accompanied by other symbols. A cow symbols with three dots, for example, meant three cows. A stylized arrow, for example, was used to represent the word "ti" arrow as well as the sound "ti," which would have been difficult to depict otherwise.
This meant individual signs could represent both words and syllables within a word. The first clay tablets with Sumerian writing were found in the ruins of the ancient city of Uruk. It is no known what the said. They appear to have been list of rations of foods. The shapes appear to have been based on objects they represent but there is no effort to be naturalistic portrayals The marks are simple diagrams.
So far over a half a million tablets and writing boards with cuneiform writing have been discovered. Cuneiform writing remained the dominant form of writing in Mesopotamia for 3, years when it was replaced by the Aramaic alphabet. It began mainly as a means of keeping records but developed into a full blown written language that produced great works of literature such as the Gilgamesh story. In the period before B. The Gilgamesh of the epic was predominantly an Heroic, but tragic, figure.
He was no god. Some early Sumerian tales about Gilgamesh make him appear ambivalent. He was not a great king. The were expert metal workers adept at fashioning silver and gold. An inlaid gold vessel in the form of an ostrich egg might have held food and drink. Most of the Sumerian works of art have been excavated from graves.
The Sumerians often buried their dead with their most prized objects. They also produced some of the first portraits. Gudea, the Sumerian king of Lagash, who lived around B. A life size one made of black diorite is particularly nice. Some is at the Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
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