Chapter 7
Stones of Sumer:
Jemdet Nasr and "Early Dynastic" (1970-1604 bc/ *3100-2370)
There are no stones in Sumer. The region is a flood plain, formed of silt. Sumer was effectively without natural resources other than agriculture, and extensive trade was a necessity, even to the importation of stones. It is for this reason that statues and bas reliefs are so rare. It is for this reason that the rebels of Babel said (Gen 11:3) “'Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.' And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.” It is in part for this reason that Nimrod made his capital outside of Sumer — in Assyria, and later in Egypt.
Nimrod's dynasty ended in the days of Lot. After the war in which the four kings of the east were defeated by Abram, native control of Mesopotamia was lost, and it seems that Elamites (presumably the heirs of Chedorlaomer) dominated the region. But further afield, and for many hundreds of years, it is a provocative fact that external verifications for the Sumerian and Akkadian periods are not found: there is no reference to or explicit contact with Egypt; methods such as radiocarbon dating are too rare and confusing to clarify matters. “In short, the chronology of the first half of the *3rd millennium is largely a matter for the intuition of the individual author.” The certainty which history demands in terms of chronology has not been established for the centuries before Sargon.
Archaeologically, the days of Nimrod to Abraham spanned the periods of Uruk IV, Jemdet Nasr, and Early Dynastic I & II — lasting from c. *3100 to c. *2600 bc, supposedly at the end of which time Gilgamesh ruled. In actuality, however, Uruk IV marks the end of the line of Nimrod, Jemdet Nasr marks the upheaval of the 1900's (c. 1970-1900/ *3100-2900), and ED I (c. 1940-1890/ *2900-2750) & ED II (1910-1860/ *2750-2600) seem to have some shadowy reality, but for the most part act as a saving device for the standard chronology.
The "incipient internationalism" of the post-Sodom (Jemdet Nasr and Early Dynastic) period is notable in Syria as Amuq G (c. 1970-1860/ *3000-2700). Predictably, cylinder seals are found here from Elam, as well as from Iran in general, and Syria and Egypt also. This is the effect of the domination of Palestine by the forces of Chedorlaomer.
One of the few types of evidence of Early Dynastic I are seal impressions in levels from Ur and Uruk, “based on signs of the cuneiform script.” Similar cylinders “were frequent also at Byblos and at other cites in Syria, Palestine, Cilicia, and at Troy.” Early Dynastic II, although grossly exaggerated in duration, “marks the beginning of the historical age of Mesopotamia. The predominantly Sumerian records written with cuneiform signs on clay or stone are truly intelligible to scholars only from about this time onward.” Some scholars believe the changes which brought about the new conventions were introduced by “the influx of an important Semitic element (the Akkadians) from the northwest. ” In any case, in Sumer urbanization increased, and major building projects were completed.
The history of this era has been misplaced with regard to its archeology. This grave mistake was possible because we are dealing with the proto-literate period, during which we simply do not find very much writing at all, to guide us. I am not the first to note that without the testimony of the written word, archeology finds as many riddles as it solves. The archeology of the Bronze Age has even greater confusion in this regard. It is only with the rise of the Sumerians that "history", as it is commonly understood, begins.
race: The origin of the Sumerians is, of course, a complete mystery to standard historians. Because Sumer had ties to the culture of the Indus Valley, scholars have been mislead into thinking that the Sumerians approached from this direction. In actuality, after the Confusion the newly created Sumerian language group remained in what is now southern Iraq.
The Sumerians themselves have told us where they came from. Two Sumerian epics about En-Me-Kar (Ashur?), and two about Lugal-Banda (Cush), relate that the Sumerians originated in the land of Aratta, "beyond the mountain ranges". This is, of course, Ar-Arat or Har-Irad ("the Place of Descent") — which we know as Ararat, the landing place of the Ark. This mountain was remembered, for instance, in the name of the chief Sumerian temple, Ekur ("the mountain house"), harkening after that first shrine which Noah set up after the Flood. The upshot is that the Sumerians were our ancient uncles, descendants as we all are of Noah.
The name Sumer is not a self-description, but rather derives from Semitic Akkadian, Shu-Me-Ru. The Sumerians described themselves by the name kengir. Before I had refined this chronology, I had assumed that Nimrod was a Sumerian — that is, his new language and culture was that which we know of from Sumer. This need not be the case, since a look at the biblical table of nations gives no explicit mention of the Sumerians. However, we may suppose that the Sumerians were of Nimrod's clan.
Sumerians related that kingship first came to Eridu, below Ur — the southmost Sumerian city; archeology confirms that this place was a primal site of settlement. That kingship originated in a Sumerian city tells us that we are hearing from a post-Babel perspective — an "ethnocentric" creation account, in which the Sumerians considered themselves to be the favored race. This also tells us that immediately after the Confusion, the tribal center of the first Sumerians would have been Eridu.
language: In Mesopotamia in the years after the Confusion, the evidence reveals that the earliest place-names were semitic. Thus, the first inscribed monuments are in the language of the ethnic Sumerians, who came to dominate the civilization, but we find equally early inscriptions in Semitic Akkadian, and also Subarian (related to Hurrian). Mesopotamia was a melting pot, as we would expect, remembering the events at the Tower of Babel.
Through their writings, it appears that the Sumerians retained the original names for the Tigris and Euphrates (as Americans have retained the name of the Mississippi); they also adopted non-Sumerian words for such workaday terms as "farmer", "herdsman", "fisherman", "plow", and "potter". Given the Confusion at Babel, of course, it is only to be expected that the Sumerians would retain some words of the mother tongue; this principle rather invalidates the evolutionary suppositions of linguistics.
We have met already some alien, hyphenated Sumerian names: each syllable is a word, so a name is effectively a sentence. The Sumerian term lugal, "king", literally means "big man", and was first used in Kish. En was the title used in Uruk, meaning a "city ruler" — its etymology is unknown.
The Sumerian tongue has no known relatives, in either modern or ancient languages. This implies that after the Confusion, the entire ‘Sumerian’ population remained in its original homeland — it was utterly unique in this regard — even the Semites scattered. The price of this privilege, however, was eventual linguistic extinction. We cannot even say what the language of Sumer sounded like, and some of its sounds must remain unknown, since only sounds used in Semitic languages have been communicated to us, and distinctively Sumerian phonemes have been lost. However, the great number of homophones suggests that the language was tonal, like Chinese.
Only a few examples are known of the ancient literature, due to “inadequate knowledge of the languages: insufficient acquaintance with the vocabulary and, in Sumerian, major difficulties with the grammar. . . .the structure of Sumerian words themselves is far from adequately investigated . . . . Attempts to identify Sumerian more closely by comparative methods have as yet been unsuccessful and will very probably remain so, as languages of a comparable [agglutinative] type are only known from ad 500 (Georgian) or ad 1000 (Basque).” Although Sumerian words can still be found in living languages, such as Armenian, attempts to find a genetic relationship between Sumerian and, say, Hungarian have been judged unsuccessful.
In any event, if a descendant of the Sumerian tongue has survived, I suggest — given the scattering at Babel — that scholars have been looking in the wrong part of the world. If Sumerian is to be found, it would be in South America, or Australia, or some other ‘unlikely’ place. After the scattering, any speakers of a related language may as likely have ended up in southern Africa as anywhere else — indeed, if the Sumerians were of Nimrod's clan, they were Cushites, and so Hamitic, which describes the African languages.
cuneiform: With regard to writing, cuneiform is considered to be the earliest known form. Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, seem to have been a Dynasty I innovation, which makes them at least as old as cuneiform. In any case, although some other system may have been used by the pre-Flood patriarchs, it seems more likely that there was no true writing before the Flood, given that we find only an evolving pictographic script prior to the development of cuneiform (and hieroglyphs). Along with the incredible life-spans of the pre-Flood race, these people would have had incredibly long-reaching memories: writing became necessary only after the language of mankind had been divided. We have already speculated that as part of the cognitive transformation which implanted new languages, memory was also affected.
In Mesopotamia, the language of the earliest inscriptions cannot be identified, because of their "extreme" brevity and archaic signs. “Writing appeared on small tablets of Uruk IVa. In contemporary Susa C-a, tablets have only numbers and seal impressions.” We take this to be the invention of writing in Nimrod's time. His father Cush, in various mythic guises (Hermes, Thoth, etc.), is remembered as having invented the art of writing. Whether or not this is true I cannot say, but the fact remains that writing appears in the time of his son. Be that as it may, the very first form of pictographic cuneiform appears in Uruk IVb, known by now to us as the city of Gilgamesh and Amraphel. Both Kish and Erech/ Uruk shared the same archaic symbols, implying a single or unified intellectual source, which we may identify as the very empire of Nimrod.
At first, a vocabulary of about 2,000 simple pictures was scratched into clay, but over time the characters were formed by pressing into the clay with a wedge, and the images were simplified and stylized. Our own alphabet underwent an analogous process: for example, the letter ‘A’ was originally a picture of the head of a bull, now turned with its horns downward. Out of this process, Sumerian cuneiform was born.
There is no doubt but that it was the Sumerians who developed cuneiform, enough so that it may be said they invented it. We deduce this from several facts. Cuneiform signs are stylizations of the original pictographs, and so represent the first generation of true writing, where a specific word is meant by a sign. It was Sumerians who were present during this evolution, and this writing appears only after Sumerian dominance. Furthermore, as “far as they can be assigned to any language, the inscribed documents from before the dynasty of [Sargon's] Akkad are almost exclusively in Sumerian.”
Eventually, the ideographic nature of cuneiform (where the symbol represents an idea rather than a sound) was replaced by a system of phonics (where the symbol became associated with a specific syllable). Since Sumerian is almost totally monosyllabic, with many homophones, it was actually a small step for the pictures to lose their representational value, and come instead to stand for the sound of a word. Thus, when a scholar of another race used cuneiform to write his language, he would actually be pronouncing Sumerian; to a Sumerian, it would have sounded like meaningful words randomly strung together. This was a rapid development, and within a few generations, in the time of the Elamite/ Sumerian culture of Jemdet Nasr and Early Dynastic (c. 1900/ *2900-2600), connected prose was being recorded. The earliest surviving example of literature, however, is from 300 years later, in Sargon's day (c. 1600/ *2350 bc).
From tablets we glean most of our knowledge of the Sumerians, and through their legends, something of the period of Nimrod. Here we might address the question as to why contemporary scholars teach that Sumer is older than semitic Akkad or Babylon. The answer is that they claim a debt may be found, where Semites supposedly borrowed the myths of Sumer. But this is the illusion of false perspective. I will not discuss axioms here — this is not a deductive study. The error of modernists will become increasingly apparent, inductively, as I lay out the evidence.
A final observation is of the largely-unrestored literature of ancient Mesopotamia. Many clay tablets endure only as fragments, and duplicates have not been found. Practical considerations ensured that only rarely would a text be recopied. Aside from the inconvenience of working in clay, and aside from the sheer weight of the material, there is the important factor of storage space. Assuming that the same number of words were put onto each side of a half-inch thick tablet, as on a book page (about 400 words), the cuneiform equivalent of a 200 page book would be a pillar of clay about 5 feet tall.
culture: Remembering that the earliest place-names were Semitic, we might suppose that after the Confusion at Babel, for some decades the apostate Tower-builders had lost credibility, and Shem (patriarch of the Semites) and his tribe controlled the region. This situation would have continued until Nimrod rallied his forces, at which time he started upon his conquests. We find loose support for this speculation in the fact that the Bible tells us that Nimrod went into Semite-controlled Assyria. Remember, Terah — Abraham's father — was a Semitic agent of Nimrod and an idolater, prior to his being called out from Ur.
The culture of Sumer was not invented by this race, but rather was inherited from unified mankind. Its initial institutions were Babelian, if I may coin the word, common to the civilization of Shinar. Its symbols, poetry, architecture, crafts and so on were, ultimately, handed down from the pre-Flood culture, although in the 450 years since the Flood, significant modifications would have occurred.
After the collapse of Nimrod's empire, with the destruction of the first dynasties of Kish and Erech (Uruk IV), Elamites and Sumerians took power. Southern Mesopotamia “became studded with a complex pattern of cities, many of which were the centres of small independent city-states”; 13 such fragmentations are known. While cities of course had sprung up before and after the events at Babel, the tyranny of Nimrod did not allow for their independence. Archeology in no way refutes the Bible, although the ideology of most archaeologists would certainly have it otherwise.
We may deduce something of the government of Shinar under Nimrod from the fact that by the 1900's, when the Sumerians gained control of Mesopotamia, the land had already been organized with agricultural towns and villages, each with its own shrine and officers. When armed conflicts arose, a general was elected, called lugal, "great man"; this term came to mean ‘king’, and then ‘owner’. In important civic matters, a governing council shared power with a leader; the empire of Nimrod was, no doubt, administered through these local councils. This arrangement was surprisingly democratic, and seems very like that of the Nordic tribes several thousand years later. Aside from the direct effect of the domination by Nimrod, the need for supervision — given the complexity of the system of irrigation canals which was so important to the region — caused this initially communal government eventually to become authoritarian.
historiography: It seems likely that in the time of Nimrod, the kings of Ur and other prominent cities were ethnic Sumerians — but as we have seen, they did not become dominant until after the disruption of Nimrod's empire, which ended at the war of Amraphel and Chedorlaomer of Elam. It seems to have been after the tectonic upheaval at Sodom, twenty years later, that the age of the Sumerians really got started.
The Sumerian King List focuses on cities, upon which the ‘kingship’ descended. “According to the theory — or rather ideology — of this work, there was officially only one kingship in Mesopotamia, which was vested in one particular city at any one time; hence the change in dynasties brought with it the change of the seat of kingship . . .” Notice the contrast made here between ‘theory’ and ‘ideology’: it is a false distinctions. Although it is clear that the Sumerian scribe who composed the King List was in error in his teaching that the dynasties were consecutive rather than contemporary, yet as an example of historiography, it is not fair to call it an ideology. The conventional reconstruction of earliest history is as much a theory (or ideology) as that of some ancient author. The Sumerians sought to teach the primacy of their people, as the creators of civilization; the modern construct seeks to prove the Evolutionary conception of endless time and the rise of mankind from bestiality.
The standard chronology of this time is hopelessly muddled, but the era of Sumerian dominance — called the Early Dynastic period — is given !600 years by the modernists, whereas it actually took up something less than 350 years. How did this confusion originally arise? We have already seen the false assumptions which modernists make. As for the scribes, they envisioned their past as a series of successive dynasties, each centered in a given city. “The king list gives as coming in succession several dynasties that now are known to have ruled simultaneously.” These scribes were writing many centuries later, and it is clear that they misunderstood their data, most obviously by ignoring the fact that while a given city may have come into prominence for a time, only a few, rather than all the kings of its dynasty enjoyed expanded power. It has long been recognized that the “problem of parallel dynasties is one of the most troublesome for Babylonian chronologists.” Dynasties which were supposedly successive were actually contemporary. This is exactly the same problem which has so disastrously ruined our understanding of Egyptian chronology, but because the Egyptian dynasties came to us already numbered — and that, dogmatically — this error has not been recognized.
Archeology has uncovered monuments, and tablets from temple archives, which tell us the history of some of the cities of Sumer. It is from such sources that we get the specifics, in contrast to the stark lists of kings which have been preserved by such ancient historians as Berosus. The proliferation of writing and the recovery of documents from this period allow us to build a coherent, if still incomplete picture.
It was during the 1900's that the Sumerians rose, and the Elamites also. Apparently the Elamites who invaded Mesopotamia — perhaps several generations after the death of Chedorlaomer — did not hold the land in a firm grip. Conflict was common among the city-states of Shinar during the three and a half centuries between the end of Uruk IV and the start of Sargon's Akkadian empire (c. 1620's).
Early Dynastic I & II are grossly distorted artifacts of a faulty paradigm, as we have seen. When we enter real time (if not real dates), with ED IIIa & IIIb, the picture comes into focus, and it is no surprise that the “archaeological remains of the Third Early Dynastic period are more numerous than those of any other period of ancient Mesopotamia.” It is only at the start of the Early Dynastic IIIa period (c. 1900-1800/ *2600-2500) that we get a fair idea of the chaos of the political scene in Sumer. We find the politics of this age exemplified by the rivalry between two cities, Lagash and Umma, for control of irrigation canals and farm land — which conflict is the most common topic in the relevant tablets.
History: Such a dispute was mediated around 1900 bc/ c. *2600, by king Mesilim, who dictated the boarders of the rivals. Mesilim appears in no king list, but he called himself "king of Kish" — which may be an honorific, or may describe his actual kingdom. The fantastical lengths of the kings of Kish I and II may have something to do with the fact that later kings in southern Mesopotamia, when trumpeting their greatness in the north, claimed for themselves the title "King of Kish" — even if they did not control that city. This may tell us that "Kish" was a race rather than only a city.
| 1 Table 7-1 | Erech II / Uruk III | | c. 1980's-1970's | Utul-Kalamma, son of Ur-Lugal? | 15 | | c. 1970's | Laba-?-Um | 9 | | c. 1960's | E-Nun-Dara-Anna | 8 | | c. 1950's-1920's | Mes-He; "a smith" | 36 | | c. 1920's | Melam-Anna | 6 | | c. 1910's-1880's | Lugal-Ki-Tun; last king of Shinar till Merodach-Baladan | 36 | |
In any event, Mesilim may be listed under another name, in one of the several city-state dynasties of this era. Indeed, from the similarity of the names, he may be identified as the contemporary Mes-He, or Melam-Anna, of Erech/ Uruk III (see Table 7-1). But in terms of chronology, all we really know is that he was a contemporary of king Lugal-Shagengur of Lagash. Ur-Nanshe (c. 1860/ c. *2540) of Lagash appears to have become the most influential Sumerian king of his day, at the expense of Ur and Uruk.
The tombs of Ur I, called the "A-Anne-Pada Cemetery", are important chronologically, because some of these tombs contained cylinders of the ED IIIa period, “inscribed with the names of Meskalamadug, Akalamdug, and Puabi (formerly Shubad).” On stylistic grounds, these cylinders are considered to represent an earlier time than those found in the tomb of “Nin-banda (formerly Nin-tur), wife of Mesanepada [2090-2010/ c. *2600], first recorded ruler of the First Dynasty of Ur.” Whether or not the (presumably "predynastic") graves are truly earlier than that of Nin-Banda is debatable, since “the stylistic development of the cylinders . . . remains to be analyzed in greater detail.” What is clear is that I have Mes-Anne-Pada ruling in the Uruk period, and the standard paradigm has him in ED IIIa — and between these two distinct periods, the equally distinct Jemdet Nasr culture intervened.
How can I explain this apparent anachronism, of the missing Jemdet Nasr? Well, first, “the archaeological evidence for the date of Mesanepada is very tenuous . . .” But more to the point, we need only notice that the dynasty of Ur I extends to the end of the Jemdet Nasr period. Thus, the vulgar artifacts of Jemdet Nasr were simply not interred with the royal dignitaries of the tombs, and so the Uruk graves can appear with ED IIIa artifacts — especially when we remember the archeological vagueness of this latter period.
In Egypt, the "Archaic" Dynasty II of Egypt had started several decades after the Sodom catastrophe, and starting in 1918 bc, Dynasty XII of the so-called "Middle Kingdom" was ruling. The 1800's ended while Sesostris III was ruling, and his conquests were aided, no doubt, by the turmoil in the east. In Palestine, the Egyptian adventurer Sinuhe was sojourning, as we shall see, and Jacob was wrestling with God.
With Ur-Nanshe's grandson, Eannatum (E-Anna-Tum — c. 1780/ c. *2480), the period designated as Early Dynastic IIIb begins. Eannatum ruled Ur and Kish and fought off the Elamites; he was a contemporary of king Zuzu of Akshak, and perhaps of king Galbum of Kish. The boarder with Umma, which had been dictated by Mesilim, did not endure, and Eannatum relates in the Stele of Vultures how he forced the king of Umma to swear not to cross the frontier of their two states. During this period, Kish, Umma and early Mari are all listed as embroiled in such conflicts — presumably employing the contemporary tactics of warfare, i.e., mostly infantry, with some use of chariots.
The dispute between Lagash and Umma was continued by Eannatum's nephew, Entemena (c. 1730/ c. *2450), contemporaneous with Urlumma and Il, kings of Umma. Entemena eventually made a treaty with king Lugal-Kinishe-Dudu (an inter-dynastic ruler of Erech). In the tablets, he boasts of the victory of Lagash over Mari (which had a population of the West Semitic type, but ‘Sumerian’ culture).
The third king to follow him was Lugalanda (c. 1638-1632/ *2384-2378), followed by the last king of Lagash, Uru-Inimgina (or Uru-Ka-Gina — c. 1632-24/ *2378-2371), a contemporary of Lugalzaggisi of Umma. “Tablets of Lagash from about the middle of the *third millennium bc record trade by professional merchants for the ensis Lugalanda and Urukagina.” Silver, timber and cattle were received from Elam, and later texts mention bitumen, gypsum, copper and perhaps tin, for which Sumer traded barley, oil, flour, and textiles. Since Sumer had no stones, these were imported from Iran.
Under Uru-Inimgina, the state of Lagash enjoyed a resurgence. His inscriptions record the customs of the land, and celebrate his benevolent reforms and the dedication of the temple of Baba. He is the first law-giver known from archeology; although he did not invent the idea of a law code, it is his code which is the earliest to have survived. (Later we will look at two other law-givers — Moses and Hammurabi — and see that there is great misunderstanding as to who influenced whom, and just who it was that preceded the other by half a millennium.) Be that as it may, under Uru-Inimgina, the state under his control extended 125 miles from the sea, which was probably as large as these Sumerian powers got. All this was concurrent with the rule of Joseph in Egypt and with the first half of the Bondage of the Hebrews.
In the 1620's, Lagash was destroyed by Lugalzaggesi (1624-1600 or 1629-1604??/ *2371-2347), king of Umma. He left a long inscription in Nippur, in which he speaks of having done “great damage” to the land and holy places of Lagash, ending its dynasty. Lugalzaggesi also conquered Uruk and Nippur, claiming that his kingdom stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. As lord of this empire, he established himself as the sole king of the third dynasty of Erech (Erech III).
Finally, Lugalzaggesi himself was overthrown by Sargon I (the Great) of Akkad around 1604 bc/ *2347. Early Dynastic IIIb ended with his defeat, and the dominance of the ethnic Sumerians was broken. Their cultural legacy lasted into the next millennium, however, and their language in Babylonia was the equivalent of Latin, to us — scholarly and prestigious.
You may have noticed that I have assumed an average length of rule for the kings of Lagash of about 30 years. There is of course a wide margin of error, but averages are the best we can do. It is significant that those specifics which we do have fit precisely into place when interpreted through our reconstructed chronology, with no need for any saving device such as the "dark ages" which the standard paradigm often requires. Be that as it may, the dates become definite in the 1600's, because they can be keyed to Sargon the Great.
To summarize, we have seen that the culture called Jemdet Nasr appeared in the 1900's, apparently inaugurated by the war of Chedorlaomer against Sodom, and later by the catastrophe at Sodom. "Early Dynastic I & II" is an empty label to save the standard paradigm, but we can correlate it too with the post-Sodom era. During this time, Abraham went out from Haran and his son lived among the Canaanites. Early Dynastic IIIa-b is the age of the Sumerians — when this linguistic group dominated Mesopotamia. Later we will see that it was during the time of the Sumerians that Jacob and Joseph thrived, and the first part of the Egyptian Bondage passed.
Ch. 7 — Stones of Sumer: Jemdet Nasr & "Early Dynastic"
D.E. Edzard, "Mesopotamia and Iraq, History of: Sumerian Civilization," Ency. Brit., Vol. 11, p. 969.
E. Porada, "The Relative Chronology of Mesopotamia. Part I. Seals and Trade (*6000-1600)," p. 158; in COWA.
E. Porada, p. 160 — citations ignored.
Porada, p. 160 — citation ignored.
Porada, p. 161 — citation ignored.
Edzard, Vol. 11, pp. 965, 968, 969.
Porada, pp. 155-156 — the hyphen is added to "Ca" for clarity.
Edzard, p. 969; parenthetical dates are excluded after ‘Akkad’.
F.R. Steele, "Sumer," in ISBE, Vol. 4, p. 658.
L. Legrain, Publication of the Babylonian Section of the University of Pennsylvania, (XIII, 17, 1922); in Hoeh, p. 236.
Weidner, Archiv fuer Keilshcrift-forschung (I, 1923), p. 95; Weidner, Archiv fuer Orient-forschung (III, 1926), p. 198; cited in Hoeh, p. 236.
Porada, p. 136 — emphasis added for clarity.
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