Sumerian Innovations
During the fourth millennium BCE, people settled the fertile river valley of Mesopotamia. Writing, art, political systems and architecture on a monumental scale soon followed. The earliest documents from Mesopotamia set forth the administration of temple communities, which dealt not only with the religious needs of the people, but also with economic matters. Art and architecture was primarily concerned with religious themes and civilization crystallized in distinctly autonomous cities with surrounding lands developed to sustain the city.
To the west, Ancient Palestine, land of the Phoenicians and Syria connected Mesopotamia to the developing civilization in the Nile River Valley and Iran lay to the east linking Mesopotamia to the civilization of the Indus Valley region in northern India. For centuries, trade and war between these cultures allowed for a cultural diffusion that enriched each culture.
At the dawn of recorded history, the Sumerians occupied southern Mesopotamia. Researchers are unsure of the origins of the Sumerians; some theorize that they migrated from the area bordering the Persian Gulf in what is now northwest Iran. However, they were not the first people to inhabit the Fertile Crescent. A pervious culture, named Jamdat Nasr after its cultural type site in Iraq, has left artifacts as evidence of their occupation. The Kneeling Man-Bull, dated to 3,000 BCE, is assigned to the Jamdat Nasr period. Rendered in soldered silver, the figure is sitting on its heels and holding an offering vessel between its outstretched fore-hooves. The sculpture exemplified the artisan’s understanding of the form of both man and bull that enables him to bring the two together with sweeping, natural contours. Its gesture of ritual offering is both solemn and graceful. The mastery of the work alludes to a long prior tradition of metal working and the religious import of the figure implies a lengthy tradition of religious themes in art. The combination of man and bull, rendered in one creature is a universal theme in Ancient Near Eastern art and was well received and adopted by the Sumerians and the cultures the succeeded them.
The Sumerians were an agricultural people who learned to control floods and built strong walled cities such as Warka (ancient Uruk) and Al Hiba (ancient Lagash). Their influence extended eastward to Susa in Iran, north to Assur and westward to Syria. Recently, clay tablets written in the Sumerian language were discovered in Syria, testifying to the far-reaching network of contacts cultivated by the Sumerians throughout the Near East. After several centuries, Semitic nomad shepherds came from the west. They adopted much of Sumerian culture, including systems of agriculture, and built cities farther north, including Kish, Akkad, Mari and Babylon. For centuries to follow, the reigns of power would alternate between the Sumerians and the Semitic (in origin) cultures.
Formal religion, a kind of transaction system between gods, who were both malevolent and benevolent, and man may have begun with the Sumerians who codified the practices of ritual, prayer and sacrifice. Their primary deities were: Anu, god of the sky; Enlil, creator and god of earth; Ea, god of waters; Nannar, god of the moon; Utu, god of the sun; and Inanna, goddess of fertility and love who was associated with the planet Venus.
Religion dominated Sumerian life and infused it with meaning and purpose. In their cosmology, man was created in order to serve the needs of the gods. In exchange, the gods protected the people in accordance with their various areas of influence. Each city-state was protected by a deity and the king was the earthly representation of the god. The temple of the city’s god was the nucleus of the city. Centrally located, the temple served as a religious, administrative and economic center. A staff of priests (or priestesses) and scribes carried out city business and looked after the treasures of the god and the possessions of the king. The earliest examples of writing are account records dealing with business transactions and inventory lists.
Two types of temples, both dealing from the fourth millennium BCE, can be distinguished. One type, classified as “low” stands at ground level. The other, termed “high”, is built on a raised platform and may have evolved into the famous ziggurats, stepped pyramids surmounted by shrines. Today, the mud brick structures have largely been eroded and only the bases of early Mesopotamian temples can be seen, with rare exceptions. A low temple, its corners oriented to the cardinal points, centered around a T-shaped or rectangular central, open air courtyard that contained an offering table and a cult statue of the god which was housed in a niche to protect it from the elements. This central core was surrounded by storage rooms, offices and lodging for the temple’s staff. The high temples were laid out in much the same way, with a few deviations.
The White Temple of Warka (ancient Uruk) dates from between 3,200-3,000 BCE and is an exceptionally well preserved example of a high temple. The temple sits on a raised platform, composed of the ruins of earlier temples filled in with brickwork, 40 feet above street level in the heart of the city. Raising of the temple not only symbolically raised the god closer to heaven and above the people, but had a practical application as well in that it elevated the structure above rising flood waters. The platform of the White Temple has sloping sides of paneled brickwork and the temple retains traces of whitewash. Despite imposing gateways on either end, the sanctuary was entered from one of its sides, which displaced the altar from its former central location. This arrangement was explained by identifying the high temple as the portal through which the god could pass on visits to earth while in the low temple his (or her) presence was symbolized by a cult statue.
The function of the ziggurats, which have come to symbolize Mesopotamian architecture, remains uncertain. They may have been stairways by which the gods ascended to heaven every night, celestial observatories or the sites of ritual and sacrifice. Shrines, believed to have once existed atop the stairways have been decimated by time and few clues remain as to their exact purpose, but an old Babylonian text from between 1,900-1,600 BCE reads:
The gods and goddesses of the country, Shamash, Sin, Adad and Ishtar, Have gone home to heaven to sleep. They will not give decisions or verdicts tonight.
The ruined cities of Ur, Nippur, Larsa, Eridu and Warka are still dominated by their ruined ziggurats. The ziggurat of Ur dates from the Neo-Sumerian period (2,100 -2,000 BCE) when builders sought to reach the highest possible levels, in Babylon the ziggurat reached 270 feet into the air. The base of the structure at Ur is a solid mass of mud brick 50 feet in height. It has been theorized that two successively smaller structures once topped the base, with the uppermost structure serving as a pedestal for a shrine, but these upper levels have been lost to weather and erosion. Three ramp-like stairways of 100 steps each converge on a central point, allowing access to the top of the base. From there, additional stairways once ascended to the second and third levels and eventually to the shrine itself, which only the priests were allowed to enter.
Sculpture took on a new form in Sumerian society. Formerly human figures were rare, while animal figures where plentiful and those renderings of humans that we do find were schematic and minimal but in the Protoliterate period, when writing first appeared, sculptures of humans took on a beautiful, finished quality. Female Head from Warka is dated to between 3,500 and 3,000 BCE. It is alabaster and not intended to stand alone as a sculpture but rather to be mounted on a wood backing and adorned with a wig and jewelry. The recessed eyebrows were once filled with colored shell or stone as were the large, empty eyes. The subject or model for the mask is unknown, but her features and expression are exquisitely refined. Her cheeks are softly modeled, her mouth sensitive and her expression both sweet and somber. Her disproportionately large eyes are a feature that is repeated in a group of figurines from the Abu temple at Tell Asmar, dated to 2,700-2,600 BCE. The reason fro the characteristic is unsure, but it can be assumed that the Sumerians recognized the power of vision as not only a physical sense, but as a spiritual, intellectual and theistic sense as well. In the Tell Asmar group, the two largest figures have been identified as gods and the smaller figurines as worshippers, both priests and laymen among them. The eyes of the gods are larger in relationship to their heads than are the eyes of the worshippers, perhaps illustrating an association between vision and supernatural power. The intent of the worshippers seems to be to offer constant prayers to the gods on behalf of their donors; their open eyes illustrating the eternal wakefulness necessary to fulfill their purpose.
Sumerian writing had been invented by simplifying pictures into wedge-shaped (cuneiform) strokes in various combinations. The forms were pressed into wet clay tablets using a stylus. This process of simplification is variously known as schematization, stylization, conventionalization, generalization or formalization. The Sumerians also established conventions for the construction of the human figure. The large eyes are but one characteristic. In the small figures of a shell inlaid box called the Standard of Ur (2,700 BCE) several devices of representation simplify the story being told, explain the action and convey the impression of motion. The panel Scenes of War depicts a Sumerian military victory, complete with advancing foot soldiers and charging chariots. A second panel illustrates the aftermath of the battle, shoeing lines of prisoners and servants carrying booty as the king and nobles relax, drinking and listening to song and harps. The figures are arranged in strips, similar to our modern day comic strips, in order to achieve a continuous narrative effect. Each individual figure is carefully spaced and poses are repeated to suggest great numbers. The horses of the chariots, with lines of their legs repeated to suggest teams of horse, change from a walk to a gallop as they attack. The figures are all essentially in profile, but the characteristic large eyes and their torsos in front view indicate the parts of the human body that form our concept of what the human form looks like. The artist seeks to illustrate not what the eye would see, but the distinguishing, abiding properties of the human body.
On the inlaid sound box of a royal lyre from the tomb of Queen Puabi of Ur (2,600 BCE) the figures in the top register represent a Sumerian hero wrestling two man-headed bulls. In the lower panels, real and fantastic animals prepare a feast. The top panel presents the figures symmetrically with their heads in front view, similar to the standardized pose in the Standard of Ur. The animal figures depicted below exhibit a relaxed formalism. The dog wears a dagger and carries a fully laden table, the lion brings the wine, the ass plays the lyre while the bear steadies it, the jackal plays the zither and the gazelle offers goblets of wine to scorpion men. All are shown in profile, their torsos naturally cut off the view of the far arms and the near legs hide the far legs. Their features are carefully detailed and their shoulders are properly turned to show profile stances. While the figures in the top are formal, the animals below seem relaxed, they seem to look and move much as they would in nature, while representing the timeless theme in which animals act as people would and do the things people would do. The entire panel is inlaid with gold, lapis lazuli and shell, but it only makes up one panel of the lyre box. Above the panel, sits a golden bull head detailed with lapis lazuli horn tips, eyes and bear. The beard may represent a supernatural amplification of the bull’s powers of fertility and protection.
The battle between natural and supernatural forces was expressed as a struggle between animals and monsters in the Mesopotamian world. Such a struggle is represented in exquisite detail on a 1 ˝ inch high cylinder seal dating from the Akkadian period circa 2,300 BCE. A seal was a cylindrical piece of stone pierced to allow for the threading of a cord which enabled the seal to be carried around. The stone was variously rock crystal, agate, carnelian, jasper, lapis lazuli, marble or alabaster. The seal was decorated with an incised design, in this case man fighting bulls and lions, that left a raised pattern when the seal was rolled over soft clay. In this manner, the Sumerians sealed, signed and identified their letters and documents which were written on clay tablets.
The three great inventions of the Sumerians, a system of gods and man’s relationship with those gods, the structure of the city-state and the art of writing provided a basis for a new order of human society. In the city-state, protected by a deity, mortals experienced interrelationships with the god and with each other and gave these relationships permanence by documenting them. Life became regularized and the community took on duties, such as defense and sustainability, which had once been left to the individual. This assumption of duties and the specialization of the labor force, with some individuals providing medical care, construction and so on, to the greater community freed people to develop and apply skills and talents previously unthinkable. The written language allowed people to be named, increasing the sense of self and relationship to others and these names could be left behind as a historical record of the individual, their achievements and character. We continue to do the same things today.
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