Sumer and the First Cities

Around five and a half thousand years ago, on the hot flat plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a person pressed the cut end of a reed into a tablet of wet clay and made a small wedge-shaped mark. It was not a picture, and it was not, at first, poetry or prayer. It was a receipt: so many measures of barley, so many head of livestock, owed to the temple. But it was the beginning of the most important technology our species has ever devised after language itself, because for the first time in the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of the Earth, a thought could outlive the mind that thought it. Writing had been born, and with it, history. Everything before this chapter we have had to reconstruct from bones and stones and inference, reading the past over its own shoulder. From here on, the dead can speak to us in their own words, and they do.

The place was Sumer, and the marks were cuneiform, and they appeared alongside the first thing we can properly call a city. Uruk, on the Euphrates, swelled across the fourth millennium BCE into something the world had simply never seen: at its height perhaps forty to eighty thousand people living together behind great walls, fed by a countryside of irrigated fields, gathered around monumental temple platforms, and governed by an apparatus of officials and priests and kings. Stop and feel how strange that was. For the whole of the story so far, a human being had lived among a few dozen or at most a few hundred others, nearly all of them known by name and face. Now, suddenly, tens of thousands of strangers had to share water, streets, granaries, and law. To hold that many unrelated people together in one place demanded inventions every bit as profound as the tool or the tamed fire: the bureaucracy, the tax, the written contract, the code of law, the ration and the wage, and above all a shared story large enough to bind people who would never meet into a single people. That binding story was religion, and this is worth saying plainly: the city and organized religion were born as twins, in the same mud, at the same hour. Neither, it seems, could have held together without the other.

The Sumerians filled their world with gods, and their gods were not the serene abstractions of later theology but vivid, quarrelsome, and dangerously near: Anu the remote sky-father, Enlil the storm and the open air, Enki the cunning god of the fresh underground waters and of wisdom, forever solving with cleverness what the others broke with force, and Inanna, later called Ishtar, the electric and terrifying goddess of love and war both, whose worship at Uruk we can follow in the record for three thousand unbroken years. The king ruled as the gods' appointed steward on earth, and a strange document called the Sumerian King List records the line of rulers stretching back before a great flood to a time when, in its own words, kingship first descended from heaven, the earliest kings reigning for tens of thousands of years apiece. We will not build a theory on that arithmetic, but we note the shape of the claim, because we are going to meet it again: the insistence, found at the very dawn of writing, that civilization did not begin with us but was handed down from above.

The Sumerians said so outright. They preserved a memory that the arts of the city, law and craft and writing and agriculture, had been brought to humanity in the deep past by sages they called the Apkallu, seven half-fish beings who rose from the waters of the Persian Gulf to teach a wild humanity how to live, and then returned to the deep. They even had a word for the divine blueprints of civilization itself, the ME, a set of more than a hundred fixed decrees governing everything from kingship and priesthood to weaving and the arts of love, which the gods possessed and could grant or steal. Here at the very beginning, then, is a civilization that understood itself as the recipient of a gift rather than the author of an achievement, and that told a story, the sages from the sea, which we will find echoed, unaccountably, by cultures across the globe that never heard Sumer's name.

And here, on the first written page of the human record, we meet a figure this book has been quietly waiting for since it spoke of primate vision and the serpent, and whose meaning we will not fully confront until its very heart. Among the Sumerian gods was Ningishzida, a deity of the underworld and of vegetation and of healing, whose emblem was the serpent, and who was remembered as a keeper and bringer of knowledge. On a green stone vessel carved for a Sumerian king around four thousand years ago, he is shown as two serpents entwined about a central staff, and that image, the twin snakes coiled around a rod, has never once left us in four millennia. It is, in a direct and traceable line of descent, the emblem painted on the side of the ambulance that may one day come for you. Keep the serpent in the corner of your eye as we travel from here. In Sumer it guards knowledge, healing, and the road to the underworld. We will find it again, and again, and again, in culture after culture that never met one another, coiled around the very same cluster of meanings, until by the middle of this book we will be forced to stop the whole chronological march and ask what, on Earth or beyond it, the snake is doing at the origin of human knowing.

The Sumerians also wrote down the oldest full story we still possess, and it is not a tale of triumph. The Epic of Gilgamesh, set in clay more than four thousand years ago, follows a great king who, broken open by the death of his only true friend, sets out in raw terror to escape death itself, hunts across the world for the secret of immortality, and fails, and comes home at last having learned only that mortality is the price of being human, and that the one thing a person can leave behind is the city they helped to build and the good they did while they lived. Woven into its heart is the account of a man warned by a god to build a great boat and ride out a flood sent to drown all of humanity, a story pressed into clay a thousand years before the Book of Genesis borrowed its very structure. So from the first pages of human writing, before philosophy, before scripture as we know it, we were already asking, in the mouths of gods and across the waters of a world-drowning flood, the exact questions this whole book is built around. What happens when we die? Is there any way out of it? What, in the face of that ending, is a life actually for? The costumes were mythological. The questions were precisely, achingly, ours.

Sumer was the first. It was not, for long, the only one. Far up another great river, at almost the same hour of history, a second civilization was already writing its own answers to the same questions in an entirely different hand.