Overview of Mesopotamian Civilization

Although the cultures in both Mesopotamia and Egypt grow around the same time, we're going to start over in Mesopotamia. The word Mesopotamia literally means the land between the rivers, and here we go with the creative naming again. It's called Mesopotamia because it is a sliver of land directly between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Even though it's a reasonably small geographic area, Mesopotamia was populated by a wide group of cultures and different groups of peoples. That narrow sliver of land between the Tigris and Euphrates hosted a broad number of different civilizations and cultures for a number of reasons, but one of them is very, very easy. It's really the only habitable stretch of land in that immediate area. If you look at the map on your screen and you look to the east of Mesopotamia, you're going to see Zagros Mountains. That would be inhospitable, difficult. It's not a place where farming is actually really possible. To the west of Mesopotamia, you're going to see the Syrian desert. Again, a location where farming would be difficult to impossible. That made Mesopotamia prime land. It made it a place with fresh water. Access to that water not only allowed groups of people to live there, but it allowed them to farm there, although farming wasn't easy. What you're looking at today is parts of modern Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran, and that area to this day can be hot. and inhospitable. Mesopotamia was simply more hospitable than the area around it, and so as many different cultures and peoples as could moved into that area and began to settle down. Those cultures were certainly anything but peaceful with one another. Mesopotamia is politically volatile. Essentially, if you try to trace the details of Mesopotamian history and politics, you're going to get bombarded. with a variety of different conquests, political systems, and who happens to be in charge of Mesopotamia at any given point is up for grabs at times two or three different cultures, different leaders are all fighting over it. I mean, on the map on your screen, you'll see just a quick glance shows you the Assyria, Babylonia, Akkad, Sumer. Each one of those is a different group of people ruling their own region. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Akkadians, the Sumerians. And each one of those groups is, at one point or another, going to conquer the region. Mesopotamia is politically unstable. It is volatile. It's a difficult place to live, not only because of climate conditions trying to get water into hot, arid areas to make sure that farming happens, but it's a difficult area because of political unrest and turmoil. Mesopotamia is almost always at war. Someone is trying to conquer, someone is trying to move in, someone is trying to defend their land. Mesopotamia constantly volatile and changing. Now there's good and bad about that. The bad obviously it's violent, it's horrible, it's not a place that you would necessarily want to live because of the political turmoil, the uprising, but on the other hand it's an area of creativity and opportunity. It is not nearly as staid and stratified. The culture is not as strictly limited as that of Egypt. You have more opportunities for cultural mobility, moving up or down the social chain. Not only that, Mesopotamia is a place with a huge amount of creativity, because that creativity is required for survival. The system is constantly changing, there's a constant struggle for food, for power, for property, and that struggle inspired the people of Mesopotamia to be remarkably innovative and creative in finding ways to survive. Take, for example, the fact that the Mesopotamians were the first ones to actually invent the wheel. Now the wheel, we believe, actually comes out of a much simpler device. This is a quern. A quern is a device that is used around the world for grinding grains into flour for making bread. It's a really simple thing. It's basically two circular stones that are flat on the top and the bottom. I always tell my classes that basically you can think of this as like two pan pizzas most things can be explained in terms of pizza or cake so this is your pizza all right you got two of these one on top of the other the one on top actually has a hole in the middle and then it has a second small hole at the side where a piece of wood or bronze would be inserted as a handle the way that ancient people would use a quern is that they would drop their grain into the hole in the center and then they would grab the handle, insert it into the small hole at the side, and turn it. You can see a young boy doing this at a recreation. At the bottom, he's got a hold of the handle. If you ask me, I think the gentleman beside him is the one actually doing the turning, but it makes the kid feel good. Now as you turn that handle, the top stone turns, it rotates, and it grinds against the stone beneath it. As those two stones rub together, pulverizing the grain, you get a fine powder, a flour, which comes out at a set groove in the stone. That's how ancient peoples would actually make flour for bread. The Egyptians do this, the Mesopotamians do it, as far as we know the Indus River civilization does it. the Yellow River Civilization does it, we see these querns used all over the world. However, the Mesopotamians are the first ones to realize that if you take one of these grinding stones and you turn it on its side, it rolls. Now, the Mesopotamians create these wheels, and based on depictions, the first thing they do with them is they attach them to a horizontal platform, hook them up to animals, oxen or horses, and drive them into battle. They basically create war chariots. Of all the things they could have done, they implement warfare using this new technology because, again, it's a matter of conquest and survival. Mesopotamia is constantly involved in a struggle to survive. Now, that depiction of wheels and what the wheels are used for in battle shows up around 2600 BCE on the Standard of Ur, which I'm going to show you in just a moment. We do not see equivalent depictions of chariots and the use of wheels in Egypt until around 875 BCE. That is a huge difference. Now, there are a number of reasons for that. One is simple practicality. Egypt was predominantly loose sand, so wheels would not have rolled nearly as well, especially stone wheels or heavy wooden wheels. We don't see heavy use of wheels in Egypt-Egyptian artwork until we get spoked lighter weight wheels. such as the ones pictured on your screen. Mesopotamia has a firmer soil which allows them to be used earlier, and secondly Mesopotamia needs them much more. Mesopotamia is involved in a lot more conflict, a lot more warfare. They are more interested in actually using those wheels to defend their land and to fight. Now that's a depiction up at the top, the standard of Ur. That is actually an artifact that we found in a tomb. and we call it the Standard of Ur because the guy who dug it up called it that, but we honestly don't know exactly what it is. What it does do though is tell us about life in Mesopotamia during the Bronze Age. This is the Standard of Ur. It is a box covered in images made of bone, lapis lazuli, and shell depicting two different events in ancient Mesopotamia. One side depicts a peaceful feast. That's the side that you're seeing now. I'll show you a close-up. The other side actually depicts a battle, and that's where we see the pictures of the chariots. Now, the standard of error was actually found in a tomb, and it was initially, the guy who found it decided that it was like a banner that would be carried into warfare. So they would actually put this box up on a pole and carry it into war with them. Most more recent scholars Don't really think the guy was right. They think that it was something else entirely. However, he found it, he named it, so we still use his naming convention for it. Now, the standard of Ur was actually found, as I keep saying, in a tomb. It was actually found near the head of the body in the tomb, and it certainly looked nothing like what was on your screen when we found it. The actual box, the standard of Ur itself, was wooden. And of course, over time, that wood decayed, broke down, so we didn't find a box. What we actually found was the world's worst jigsaw puzzle. We found all the pieces of bone, shell, and stone that were used to create all of these pictures smushed, collapsed into the dirt of the tomb without the wood to actually support them. Over a number of years, several very talented archaeologists reconstructed and based on how far to the side from one another, those pieces of shell were, they were able to determine the width and shape of the wooden box so that they could reassemble the standard as it was originally intended. Now what the standard actually was is questionable. The top contenders right now for its original use, number one, some people think that it's perhaps a resonance chamber for some sort of musical instrument. So think like the actual body of a guitar. That would be what this was used for. The other leading possibility, strange as it may sound, is actually a pillow, an extremely elaborately decorated pillow, since it has this shape that is thinner at one end, thicker at the other, and it was actually found near the head of the body in the grave. Now, what we do know about this is not its use, but we do know what it depicts in its organization. Each side of the standard of Ur is divided up into rows of pictures. Artistically, we refer to those rows of pictures as registers. So on the screen you have a bottom register, a middle register, and an upper register. Much early artwork is divided out using the system of organization. It's divided out into strips or registers. You can think of it like a very early comic strip or graphic novel. It usually depicts rows or series of pictures, usually on their way, the figures that are depicted are usually on their way to a destination, which is often in the top register. or at the top of the series of pictures. Now again, two sides, the war side and the peace side. We're going to flip the standard of Ur around and look at the war side first. This is the war side of the standard of Ur. Now at the bottom in your lower register, you're going to see the chariots that I was mentioning earlier. You can see that we know the chariots were used for crushing enemies because, well, they're enemies being crushed, see? they're right down there at the bottom. I'll show you a close-up of that in a minute because you really, really want to see the people being crushed. Come on, you know you do. Now, the middle register actually shows soldiers pushing prisoners of war forward. You can see the soldiers on your left in the middle register. They're all wearing similar capes, carrying weapons. This is the Bronze Age, so those would be bronze weapons. On the right-hand side of the middle register, you're seeing other soldiers, low-ranking soldiers, think infantry. And then up at the top, in the top register, you can see the prisoners of war. Now, prisoners of war are recognized by the fact that they are nude. That was a form of humiliation, we believe, for the prisoners as they were taken. So all of their equipment, their clothing, our weaponry was all stripped away, and they were forced to march naked to be presented to the king or the commander. The king himself is found in the top. register, the king is identifiable because he is the largest figure. In Bronze Age artwork, it is standard to denote importance based on size, and since the king is the most important figure, he is depicted as the largest figure. In fact, you can see he's so large he actually breaks the top line of the register. Let me give you a close-up of both the king and the figures surrounding him and of those chariots with those guys getting squished down at the bottom here. Now at the top you'll see a close-up of that upper register. Now again, the standard of error was found in pieces in a tomb, so we do not have all of the pieces of shell, bone, that were originally a part of this, so there are pieces missing. You can see that the king is really more of an outline than detail. We're missing a lot of the pieces that would originally have been painted and composed the body of the king. We do know, however, that is the king. largely because of his size and the fact that he appears to be passing judgment on the prisoners that are being marched toward him in humiliation. At the bottom, you can see the image of the chariots. They're those wonderful round solid wheels that the Mesopotamians were the first ones to invent, and those are being used in warfare. Now again, the war side reminds us that Mesopotamia is constantly in conflict. that it is a place of war and struggle, and the war side of the standard of error shows us how the Mesopotamians made war. It shows us the use of their chariots, it shows us how they bring the prisoners of war, and it emphasizes the fact that the king has this incredible power. He is the one who makes the final decisions, who makes the final life or death calls on the people who are brought before him in the wake of this war. Now, this is the judgment, this is the battle, this is death. The other side shows celebration and banqueting. Like the war side, the peace side is broken into three different pieces or three different registers. Once again, the top register is going to include the king and his court. The king is, again, easy to find. He's the largest person in the entire standard. His head is, once again, so large it breaks the top line of the standard itself. Now here again you have three registers and in your bottom register you see the supplies being brought in for the party. You've got livestock being brought in and you've got workers or farmers carrying in bags and piles of food as they come across that bottom register. The center register is more supplies for the party. Again, you can see animals being brought in to be served at the party. And then the very top register is actually the party itself. The nobility are holding cups, they're holding goblets, there is music being played at the side, and then of course the king is sitting officiating over this. Let's go ahead and zoom in, take a close up again. You'll notice here that the king in the upper register is larger than all the figures around him. By the way, the king is sitting in an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic chair. That's why if you're looking at the bottom, you'll notice something that looks like an animal leg. That's actually one of the legs of the chair. Often the bits of furniture that we find or we see depicted will have a combination. They will have animal characteristics on them. So the legs of the chair will be animal legs in the front or an animal head will be carved into the back. So that's what you're seeing. The other thing I really want you to notice about the king up there in the top register, I want you to notice his clothing. That's going to be important and you're going to see it again in a little while. If you'll notice his skirt, his wrap is extremely elaborate. There are multiple pieces of cloth, multiple layers. Anytime you see that multiple layered style of clothing, you know that you are looking at someone of high rank. Higher the rank, more elaborate, more layered the clothing. You will see this on kings and nobility. You will also see it as the Mesopotamians depict their gods and goddesses. They will use that same leveled clothing, the layers of clothing, to depict importance. So tuck that away because you're going to see it over and over again. The other thing I want you to notice here is in the second picture down, I want you to notice the musicians at the right-hand side. If you'll notice, the musician second in from the right is actually holding a musical instrument that is a type of harp called a lyre. He's playing the strings on the instrument with his left hand, but the instrument itself is interesting. It has strings, but there's an angled piece at the front and there appears to be a bull's head decorating the front of the lyre. I want you to tuck that design of lyre away because you're going to see a similar lyre that we actually found near the same gravesite. So I want you to keep that style in mind because what you see depicted here is something that we actually found evidence is a bull's head. a real object that was used in ancient Mesopotamia. Now here you see a close-up of some of the lower registers. You can see the individual people bringing in food and supplies, and once again you'll see that there are pieces of the standard which are missing. They're no longer there. Now all of these depictions are not realistic. I don't think I have to tell you that. They're extremely simplified. And like the caves of Lascaux, we refer to the style of image as conceptual rather than optical. These figures are conceptual in that the position of the body includes the parts that are important to recognize it as a body. They don't include what you would actually visually see. It's not optical. For example, if you look at the little harp player, the lyre player, and the person standing next to him in the picture, you'll notice that their shoulders are facing full front. They're facing directly towards you. However, their heads are turned completely in profile to the side. Their eyes, however, are depicted as looking directly towards you. So the eye is drawn as if the person's face was facing toward you, but the head is shown in full profile. The shoulders are directly forward toward you. The hips are directly forward toward you, but the feet are turned completely to one side. That strange mishmash of poses, side face, forward eye, forward shoulders, forward hips, side feet, that is essentially including parts of the body in the way that they are most immediately recognizable. It's the concept of a body more than what the body actually realistically looks like. This conceptual depiction of human beings is going to remain consistent throughout artwork all the way up until we end up in the Aegean. and in the early, early proto days of Greece. Now, the standard of earth, this huge banquet on the peace side, shows us again how important agriculture is to the Mesopotamians. It is a struggle for power that warfare is largely related to ownership of the land and the food supply. Now, that food supply is a struggle in Mesopotamia, but the Mesopotamians, once again, are incredibly creative and innovative. they have to be to survive. For example, the farming practices in Mesopotamia show that innovation. Now, I know, farming practices Oh, giant yawn. Okay. Thrilling stuff. No, I know, I know. Agriculture is probably not at the top of your excitement list. But when the Mesopotamians design their fields, they encounter incredible barriers to the easily grown crops. For one thing, simple. They've got to get water to their fields. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, their banks are not conducive to setting up farm fields right on the banks of the river. The rivers go up and down. They're not consistent in their flood. They can't set up their fields right on the bank of the river. So they need to get the water from the river to the farm fields. The Mesopotamians actually create a series of canals in order to get the water from the river to their farm fields. Amazing accomplishment, one, without a backhoe or any kind of power tool. Number two, Mesopotamia struggles because they do have floods. They have a lot of rain. but the rain comes at the wrong time of the year for farming. So basically, you plant the seeds, your seeds start to grow, you have adorable little plants a few inches tall, and then, then the rains hit and everything floods out. In order to prevent those crops from being destroyed, in order to prevent the rain from just flooding everything out, the Mesopotamians actually have to figure out how to control water access to their fields. Not only do they dig canals to get the water from the tigers in the Euphrates, but they actually create stepped fields where as you can see at the upper left the field is actually dug down into the soil with a gate or a door that opens onto a canal so they can protect the fields by raising the barrier around the fields almost like a levee around each field and then they have a water access point so they can control when they allow their fields to get water and when they do not allow their fields to get water Not only do they create these walled fields, essentially, that allow them to control the water access and irrigation, but the Mesopotamians are also the first people that we know of to realize the need for crop rotation. Now, to me, that's just mind-boggling because they don't have science. I mean, they don't know about nutrients in the soil. They don't know about potassium and nitrogen. They've got no clue. What they do know is that if you plant the same thing in the same field over and over again, it stops growing. Now today in our modern agriculture we know that's because you've depleted the nutrients in the soil. The Mesopotamians, however, are smart enough and capable enough. They figure out that you need to plant different things in the fields over the year and they actually figure out a four-field crop rotation system where they rotate their crops between different fields and leave one field empty to get the soil replenished so that stuff will grow the following year. We know all of this because we actually have records down on your lower left. That is actually a clay tablet with early pictographic writing on it. We'll talk about the pictographic writing in cuneiform in a little while. And that writing actually is a farmer's notes on his fields. It's actually him keeping track of what he planted in what location from one year to the next so that he will actually get his crop rotation correct and make sure that the crops are irrigated correctly for the types of seeds he's planted. Now Now, this irrigation system, this crop rotation is incredibly important to the Mesopotamians, and they desperately hope that the divine will help them out, that the weather will be good, because for all of their efforts, they need that assistance of good rains, of good weather, and they leave that up to their gods. We see the depictions of the Mesopotamian gods in their artwork. And where we find the largest number of depictions are actually on clay seals from Mesopotamia. We have a lot of clay seals. It's simply the number of them that we find that allows us to see these many depictions of the gods and goddesses. Seals were actually usually cylinders. There were other types. Sometimes they were actually rings or simply a bead, either oval or rectangular, that could be worn. But usually these seals were cylinders, so there's a hole through the middle of the thing you're seeing on the screen. It's like a tube. Some of them, the more permanent ones, were actually carved out of stone. The majority of them were actually made out of baked clay. What the Mesopotamians would do would be carve an image into the cylinder. So you can see in the picture on your screen that cylinder actually has an image carved into the surface of that cylinder. That cylinder could be worn, a necklace, bracelet. It could be carried in a pocket or a pouch. And then what would happen is when an ancient Mesopotamian needed to mark something or sign something, they would actually take that clay seal or take that stone seal and roll it into wet clay. When you roll it, all of the images that are carved into the surface of the seal are then imprinted, raised, on the clay where they're rolled. Now these clay seals were used for a variety of things. They could be used as a certification on some sort of document because most documents were actually written on clay at this point in history. They could also be used as a way of marking something to come back to it later. We know, for example, ancient Mesopotamians, they shopped on layaway. They would go to a marketplace, they would go shopping, and if they picked out something that they had no intention of carrying or taking home, they would get their seal and they would roll their seal onto a clay piece and mark the object that they had purchased with that clay seal. Now every clay seal was unique, so basically it was like signing your name. This was your seal. So then later on you could send people you hired, you could send your servants, and they would go to the marketplace and find the object marked with your seal, that picture that was uniquely yours, that marked something as your property. Because these seals were so individualized, because they were used to mark property, because they were small and fairly common, we have thousands of them. And by looking at the imprints, by looking at the images on these seals, we learn a lot about Mesopotamian beliefs, about what animals, deities are important to them. We learn about their culture. Now the Mesopotamians have lots of gods and goddesses. They are generally what we would call polytheistic. Poly means many, theistic means gods, gods and goddesses. There are many, many Mesopotamian gods. When we see them depicted, often again we see them on clay seals because we have so many of them, we can identify the gods and goddesses in two ways. Number one, the clothing. It will be very, very elaborate. For example, if you look at the bottom right picture over there that's labeled Inanna, you will see that there are tiers of fabric, layers and layers of fabric on her dress. That indicates again that you're looking at someone of high rank, in this case a deity. The other way we recognize gods and goddesses in ancient Mesopotamian depiction is by their hats. If you recall when I showed you the temples at Shetal Chayuk, I showed you the masculine temple and I told you the horns, the horned creatures like bulls, were associated with strength and virility. They were often associated with masculinity and power. That power comes into play here too. Mesopotamian gods and goddesses, when they are carved or painted, when they're depicted, they're painted with horned hats. So anytime you see a figure in Mesopotamia that's wearing a hat with horns on it, you're looking at someone or something that claims deity that is seen as a god or goddess. Now there are a lot of Mesopotamian gods and goddesses. You'll encounter some of them in a quiz in a little while, but there are two in particular that I want to point out to you. I want you to be familiar with them. because they're going to come into play a little bit later. They're both very important deities to the Mesopotamians. The first one is pictured up on the upper left. His name is Shamesh. He is the sun god and the god of justice. Now, you can easily recognize Shamesh because, like, he's totally doing the Captain Morgan rum pose. He's got one foot up there looking all manly and stuff. Now, Shamesh is the sun god, and it's delightful because often when you see Shamesh depicted, On his arms or shoulders will be these long lines. You can see them on the picture and on the screen. He's got these big long spikes coming off of him going upward. Those lines are the rays of the sun. He's the sun god. So just like when a kid or someone like me who's not artistically talented draws the sun, you draw a circle and then you draw lines coming off of it as the rays of the sun. That is exactly what the Mesopotamians are doing for our buddy Shamesh here. Those are actually the rays of the sun coming off of him because he's the sun god. That also, for the record, is why he's standing there with his manly leg up on that mountain. That mountain actually is representative of Zagros Mountains. I mentioned those way back when I showed you the map of Mesopotamia and I said to the east of Mesopotamia are Zagros Mountains, and they're not very hospitable for farming. Shamash is the sun god. He's shown with one foot on Zagros Mountains, which are to the east of Mesopotamia. and in his hand he's depicted with a massive serrated knife. Shamesh is often pictured with that giant knife because the Mesopotamians believe that as the sun god he had to hack his way through the mountains to the east every morning to come up in the sky. They believed him to be brave and proud and heroic because he had to fight every day to appear in the sky. So he hacks his way through Zagros Mountains with his big knife every day. Okay, so you're going to see Shamesh, but not actually because he's the sun god. You're actually going to see Shamesh because of his second job, his other job. His second job is actually as a god of justice. Shamash is the one who sheds light on things. Think of him as the sun god and the bringer of enlightenment, of justice. He's the one who actually makes sure that all actions are seen and revealed. He's going to come back in a little while. The other deity that I want you to remember from Mesopotamia is a goddess who ends up having two different names used. She's called Ishtar sometimes, and she's called Inanna sometimes. Now Ishtar and Inanna are essentially the same goddess. The names are assigned by two different cultures. Again, if you go back to the map, the map of Mesopotamia, I showed you there are many many different groups and cultures all in that very small land area. A lot of those cultures have similar gods and goddesses, but each one has different language and they call them by different names, even though they're very similar in their jobs, in their character, and in the stories that are told about them. Ishtar and Inanna are one of those doublings of a deity. Ishtar slash Inanna is often associated with the moon. She's a moon goddess, and she is the goddess of fertility, love, war, and sex. One of those things is not like the others. The war thing. Yeah, that's okay. Ishtar slash Inanna is an interesting goddess because she is an incredibly important goddess as a fertility goddess. Again, you're dealing with a farming society. that fertility, both in terms of human fertility and in terms of growing the crops, is unbelievably important. Inanna Ishtar is believed to bring the rain for the crops. She is a fertility goddess, but at the same time, she is double-sided. She has an incredible potential for destruction. As I kept mentioning before, Ishtar is a female goddess, and therefore she is the domesticator. She is a goddess of fertility and love, except... fertility and love, it destroys as well as nurturing. When you get to the epic of Gilgamesh, when Ishtar actually proposes that one of the characters be her lover, he says, no way. You loved the lion, and when the lion fell in love with you, it was no longer wild. It lost its power. You tamed it. There is this idea of this female force, this fertility goddess, Being destructive to the wild, she tames things, she takes away their power. She herself is a destroyer. She is the goddess of war. She can destroy things, cast them down, and then once again nurture them and lift them back up. As a goddess of fertility and the harvest, she appears over and over and over again in Mesopotamian artwork and Mesopotamian mythology. One of the places you see her, for example, is on an object called the Warka Vase. Now, the Warka Vase is carved out of a beautiful pale stone alabaster. It is a vase, a hollow object, with different registers. Again, you've got lines of figures going around it. It was smashed. You can see that it's been broken into many pieces and reassembled. We are missing bits and pieces of it. It's basically been filled with blank plaster so that we can still have the shape of the vase. We know that the work of Haze, the images on the three registers, are dedicated to Inanna slash Yishtar, to this goddess. And we know that this represents a fertility, the harvest ritual. There is some conjecture that perhaps the work of Haze was actually used as a giant seal because of its shape. Some scholars believe it could have been rolled like a seal, a cylinder seal, to actually create this picture on clay. We don't know that, but it is possible because as you can see in the picture on your screen, it does create that image when it's rolled. Now, again, you have multiple registers, starting at the bottom. Your bottom register, which is partially broken away, is actually depicting grain. So it's actually depicting crops in a farm field. The register above that shows animals, sheep. So there's your food supply. Inanna is a goddess of fertility, so the fertility having many sheep. the fertility, the rain, having water, having your crops grow, that goes back to Inanna as the goddess of fertility. The second register shows the food itself being brought in by a series of figures carrying baskets and bowls. So essentially they're bringing the harvest, they're bringing the crops as a thanks to Inanna. The top register includes a few more of those figures, but it centers on what appears to be a gateway up there at the top, with a female figure standing in front of it. You can see on your right there are two vertical pieces that we believe are columns on a gateway. A female figure stands in front of them. Some believe that that actually represents the goddess Inanna herself, but most scholars believe that that actually represents a priestess of Inanna. The food is being presented to this priestess, and we believe that this may represent the work of Aes May Picture, some kind of ritual or celebration of the goddess Inanna. where first fruits, where crops were brought as a thank you to the goddess of fertility for blessing them and allowing them to grow. Now, I mentioned that Ishtar and Inanna are the same goddess for two different cultures. She's called by two different names. That double name, Ishtar and Inanna, actually allows the world's first known dictator to create a common point, a commonality. between the cultures that he conquers to try and bring them together by creating the worship of Inanna or Ishtar as a single goddess, a moon goddess who unifies the people he conquers. That leader, that dictator, is a guy by the name of Sargon of Akkad. Now we know about Sargon because we actually have his biography. We have his own description of his life and times. We are not sure how honest The Life and Times of Sargon of Akkad is, it sounds pretty fantastical. So why was it written down that way if it wasn't true? Well, if you are a Mesopotamian dictator who successfully conquers the entire crescent of Mesopotamia, and you tell your court secretary to write your life down in a certain way, it's likely your court secretary is gonna write it down that way, mostly because he doesn't want to get dead. Just, you know, just saying. Now, Sargon of Akkad's life story is a heck of a thing. Let me give you the really quick version of it. It may sound familiar to some of you, depending on your background. According to Sargon, his mother was an intelligent woman. His parents were both intelligent people who worked in the court of a king. Ultimately, his mom worked with... one of the high-ranking court officials, but they were disgraced and fell out of favor. Ultimately, they were forced to go into hiding, and his mother was terrified that Sargon would be hurt or killed because people were hunting for the family, so she actually took tiny baby Sargon and hid him on a raft and floated him down the river, hoping that he would escape. Sargon's tiny little raft was found by a high-ranking noblewoman. who pulled the baby off the raft out of the river and raised him as her own. As Sargon grew older, he was brilliant and wise, and ultimately he became the advisor to the king. And once the king died, Sargon took his place. Sargon became king, and he used his intelligence and his knowledge as having a struggling, difficult life to conquer all of Mesopotamia. He moved from north to south down the peninsula of Mesopotamia, and when he finally reached the sea, he washed his weapons in the water and declared peace for all time as he had unified Mesopotamia. Yeah, um, we're kind of gonna call a bunch of horse hockey on that one. We don't think that that's actually what happened. We don't think that that's actually the way Sargon's life worked. But we do know that Sargon was indeed a very successful leader and dictator. How do we know that? Well, for one thing, We do know that he had the power to have these accounts, his life story recorded. We also know that Sargon had that power because we have parts of sculptures of him, like the one on your screen. Now the part of the sculpture we have is actually Sargon's head. It is a bronze head that was originally attached to a bronze body. We know that because of the holes and residue in the bottom portion of this, the neck portion of this. Now the statue of Sargon is what we call a hollow bronze or a lost wax bronze. we'll talk about that a lot more when we get to Greece, but essentially it's creating a sculpture by casting pieces of it using, you carve it in wax, you melt the wax away, and then you fill the empty cavity left by the wax with molten bronze, and when it hardens you have a hollow bronze sculpture. Usually hollow bronze sculptures, lost wax bronze sculptures, are done in sections. so the head would have been casted differently separately from the body and then attached. We believe the head and the body based on the proportions would have been a little bit over six feet tall, so it would have been life size or a little bit bigger than life size. The detail on it is remarkable. I mean his beard is just completely epic and the hairstyle is pretty darn awesome too. Now we do not have the body of the bronze statue of Sargon and we think we know why. This entire sculpture was made of bronze and this was known as the Bronze Age, so most things in this time period, important things including weapons, were made of bronze. The fact that Sargon dedicates enough bronze to make a large sculpture of himself tells us that he is not overly worried about defense. He's not so worried about making weapons out of bronze that he doesn't use it for anything The other thing that the sculpture tells us, because it's made of bronze, is that it would have been extremely valuable. This would have been a show-off piece for Sargon, and we believe that Sargon was actually trying to create a legacy. He was trying to create a sculpture that would be seen by generations to come. Unfortunately, that evidently didn't work out for him because we don't have the body. All we've got is the head. We found the head in a trash pile. We know that in ancient Mesopotamia, the eyes of sculptures were usually made of precious gold. precious gemstones or valuable rare shells. And if you look at the head of Sargon, it appears that somebody removed those valuable gemstones with extreme prejudice. What we think actually happened, Sargon has the sculpture made, he has it put out on display, his legacy for the future, and basically after his death, they melt down the body and use the bronze for something else. They smash the eyes out of the head and throw the head in a trash pile, which is where we find it thousands of years later. Sargon's bid for immortality, his legacy, does not work out quite the way he planned. However, Sargon does manage to unify a large portion of Mesopotamia. Based on our findings, we believe that Sargon does manage, as he claims in his biography, to unify the entire crescent. And one of the things that he uses to unify these people, not only by military force, but an attempt to unify them culturally, is to create a massive temple to the moon goddess, Ishtar slash Inanna. He tells them that there are two names of this goddess in Mesopotamia, but that she is the same goddess, and he wants everyone to honor and worship her regardless of the name that they call her. He actually views the goddess as so important that he creates this huge temple for her and puts his daughter in charge of that temple. His daughter is a woman named Enheduanna. Enheduanna is the high priestess of Inanna under the rule of Sargon, and she's actually the world's first known author. She's the first one who assigns her name to her writings, and we know who wrote them. Enheduanna writes a series of poetry, hymns, and the most famous of those is the hymn to Inanna, which makes a lot of sense since she's the high priestess of Ishtar slash Inanna. You're going to be reading excerpts from that poem. for a quiz in just a little bit here. Now, this image, a clay seal, actually depicts Enheduanna. You can tell which one she is, again, because of the elaborate nature of her clothing. You can see all the layers of cloth, which implies her rank, her standing. Enheduanna is the high priestess of Inanna, under her father, and she acts as this unifying figure. She honors and loves Inanna. and views Inanna both as the giver of life and fertility and all things, but also a goddess with an incredible destructive potential. You're going to hear her talk about both sides of that goddess, because after the death of Sargon, something horrible happens to Inanna. Her nephew, a guy by the name of Naram-Sin, comes into power, and Naram-Sin basically destroys Sargon's attempt to unify the peoples of Mesopotamia. Instead, he is much more interested in expanding the territory. He is a warrior who is not that interested in Inanna. She's a female goddess, a fertility goddess. In fact, Naram-Sin actually declares himself a god. What you see on the screen over here is actually a steel, a large marker stone. Any large stone that serves as a marker is called a steel. Remember that. That's important. Any large marker stone like this is called a steel. This particular steel, big marker stone, is called a victory steel because it celebrates a military victory by Naram-Sin. Now, again, size indicates importance, so you should be able to find Naram-Sin. He's the largest figure here. Huge figure standing on the mountain. He's got horns on a helmet, which means that he considers himself to be not only the king, but also a god. You can see him defeating his enemies. This is interesting because unlike other artworks in Mesopotamia, there isn't a strong system of registers here. Instead, there is a diagonal series of figures. So there is a register to a degree, there's a line of figures, but instead of going horizontally across the image, they're at a diagonal as if they are incorporated into the actual landscape. They appear to be actually climbing a mountain. Naram-Sin here is shown crushing his enemies beneath his feet. He is shown victorious and in the sky are a pair of sons. Naram-Sin is far more interested in the sun god and in masculine power than in any kind of female power. He actually destroys the worship of Inanna and throws his aunt, Nahaduana, out of her position. He kicks her out of the priesthood. Instead, he bans or ignores, neglects the rule or the worship of Inanna. Naram-Sin dies. We don't know as much as we would like to about how he is killed, defeated, but we do know that when he dies, the worship of Inanna is restored. The reason we don't know as much as we would like to about his defeat, his overthrow, his death, is that the main record we have of it is from his aunt and Hedwana in her writings and her hymn to Inanna. And since he's the guy who kicked her out of her job, she is not very fond of him and she is not very complimentary of him. So you will get to see how she interprets both her elevation to priesthood, her being kicked out of that priesthood by her nephew Naram-Sin, and then finally the restoration of the worship of Inanna as you actually read excerpts from her hymn to Inanna.

It's really the only habitable stretch of land in that immediate area. If you look at the map on your screen and you look to the east of Mesopotamia, you're going to see Zagros Mountains. That would be inhospitable, difficult. It's not a place where farming is actually really possible.

To the west of Mesopotamia, you're going to see the Syrian desert. Again, a location where farming would be difficult to impossible. That made Mesopotamia prime land. It made it a place with fresh water. Access to that water not only allowed groups of people to live there, but it allowed them to farm there, although farming wasn't easy.

What you're looking at today is parts of modern Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran, and that area to this day can be hot. and inhospitable. Mesopotamia was simply more hospitable than the area around it, and so as many different cultures and peoples as could moved into that area and began to settle down.

Those cultures were certainly anything but peaceful with one another. Mesopotamia is politically volatile. Essentially, if you try to trace the details of Mesopotamian history and politics, you're going to get bombarded.

with a variety of different conquests, political systems, and who happens to be in charge of Mesopotamia at any given point is up for grabs at times two or three different cultures, different leaders are all fighting over it. I mean, on the map on your screen, you'll see just a quick glance shows you the Assyria, Babylonia, Akkad, Sumer. Each one of those is a different group of people ruling their own region. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Akkadians, the Sumerians.

And each one of those groups is, at one point or another, going to conquer the region. Mesopotamia is politically unstable. It is volatile. It's a difficult place to live, not only because of climate conditions trying to get water into hot, arid areas to make sure that farming happens, but it's a difficult area because of political unrest and turmoil.

Mesopotamia is almost always at war. Someone is trying to conquer, someone is trying to move in, someone is trying to defend their land. Mesopotamia constantly volatile and changing.

Now there's good and bad about that. The bad obviously it's violent, it's horrible, it's not a place that you would necessarily want to live because of the political turmoil, the uprising, but on the other hand it's an area of creativity and opportunity. It is not nearly as staid and stratified. The culture is not as strictly limited as that of Egypt. You have more opportunities for cultural mobility, moving up or down the social chain.

Not only that, Mesopotamia is a place with a huge amount of creativity, because that creativity is required for survival. The system is constantly changing, there's a constant struggle for food, for power, for property, and that struggle inspired the people of Mesopotamia to be remarkably innovative and creative in finding ways to survive. Take, for example, the fact that the Mesopotamians were the first ones to actually invent the wheel.

Now the wheel, we believe, actually comes out of a much simpler device. This is a quern. A quern is a device that is used around the world for grinding grains into flour for making bread. It's a really simple thing. It's basically two circular stones that are flat on the top and the bottom.

I always tell my classes that basically you can think of this as like two pan pizzas most things can be explained in terms of pizza or cake so this is your pizza all right you got two of these one on top of the other the one on top actually has a hole in the middle and then it has a second small hole at the side where a piece of wood or bronze would be inserted as a handle the way that ancient people would use a quern is that they would drop their grain into the hole in the center and then they would grab the handle, insert it into the small hole at the side, and turn it. You can see a young boy doing this at a recreation. At the bottom, he's got a hold of the handle.

If you ask me, I think the gentleman beside him is the one actually doing the turning, but it makes the kid feel good. Now as you turn that handle, the top stone turns, it rotates, and it grinds against the stone beneath it. As those two stones rub together, pulverizing the grain, you get a fine powder, a flour, which comes out at a set groove in the stone.

That's how ancient peoples would actually make flour for bread. The Egyptians do this, the Mesopotamians do it, as far as we know the Indus River civilization does it. the Yellow River Civilization does it, we see these querns used all over the world. However, the Mesopotamians are the first ones to realize that if you take one of these grinding stones and you turn it on its side, it rolls.

Now, the Mesopotamians create these wheels, and based on depictions, the first thing they do with them is they attach them to a horizontal platform, hook them up to animals, oxen or horses, and drive them into battle. They basically create war chariots. Of all the things they could have done, they implement warfare using this new technology because, again, it's a matter of conquest and survival. Mesopotamia is constantly involved in a struggle to survive.

Now, that depiction of wheels and what the wheels are used for in battle shows up around 2600 BCE on the Standard of Ur, which I'm going to show you in just a moment. We do not see equivalent depictions of chariots and the use of wheels in Egypt until around 875 BCE. That is a huge difference.

Now, there are a number of reasons for that. One is simple practicality. Egypt was predominantly loose sand, so wheels would not have rolled nearly as well, especially stone wheels or heavy wooden wheels. We don't see heavy use of wheels in Egypt-Egyptian artwork until we get spoked lighter weight wheels. such as the ones pictured on your screen.

Mesopotamia has a firmer soil which allows them to be used earlier, and secondly Mesopotamia needs them much more. Mesopotamia is involved in a lot more conflict, a lot more warfare. They are more interested in actually using those wheels to defend their land and to fight.

Now that's a depiction up at the top, the standard of Ur. That is actually an artifact that we found in a tomb. and we call it the Standard of Ur because the guy who dug it up called it that, but we honestly don't know exactly what it is.

What it does do though is tell us about life in Mesopotamia during the Bronze Age. This is the Standard of Ur. It is a box covered in images made of bone, lapis lazuli, and shell depicting two different events in ancient Mesopotamia. One side depicts a peaceful feast. That's the side that you're seeing now.

I'll show you a close-up. The other side actually depicts a battle, and that's where we see the pictures of the chariots. Now, the standard of error was actually found in a tomb, and it was initially, the guy who found it decided that it was like a banner that would be carried into warfare. So they would actually put this box up on a pole and carry it into war with them.

Most more recent scholars Don't really think the guy was right. They think that it was something else entirely. However, he found it, he named it, so we still use his naming convention for it.

Now, the standard of Ur was actually found, as I keep saying, in a tomb. It was actually found near the head of the body in the tomb, and it certainly looked nothing like what was on your screen when we found it. The actual box, the standard of Ur itself, was wooden.

And of course, over time, that wood decayed, broke down, so we didn't find a box. What we actually found was the world's worst jigsaw puzzle. We found all the pieces of bone, shell, and stone that were used to create all of these pictures smushed, collapsed into the dirt of the tomb without the wood to actually support them.

Over a number of years, several very talented archaeologists reconstructed and based on how far to the side from one another, those pieces of shell were, they were able to determine the width and shape of the wooden box so that they could reassemble the standard as it was originally intended. Now what the standard actually was is questionable. The top contenders right now for its original use, number one, some people think that it's perhaps a resonance chamber for some sort of musical instrument. So think like the actual body of a guitar. That would be what this was used for.

The other leading possibility, strange as it may sound, is actually a pillow, an extremely elaborately decorated pillow, since it has this shape that is thinner at one end, thicker at the other, and it was actually found near the head of the body in the grave. Now, what we do know about this is not its use, but we do know what it depicts in its organization. Each side of the standard of Ur is divided up into rows of pictures.

Artistically, we refer to those rows of pictures as registers. So on the screen you have a bottom register, a middle register, and an upper register. Much early artwork is divided out using the system of organization. It's divided out into strips or registers.

You can think of it like a very early comic strip or graphic novel. It usually depicts rows or series of pictures, usually on their way, the figures that are depicted are usually on their way to a destination, which is often in the top register. or at the top of the series of pictures. Now again, two sides, the war side and the peace side.

We're going to flip the standard of Ur around and look at the war side first. This is the war side of the standard of Ur. Now at the bottom in your lower register, you're going to see the chariots that I was mentioning earlier. You can see that we know the chariots were used for crushing enemies because, well, they're enemies being crushed, see? they're right down there at the bottom.

I'll show you a close-up of that in a minute because you really, really want to see the people being crushed. Come on, you know you do. Now, the middle register actually shows soldiers pushing prisoners of war forward.

You can see the soldiers on your left in the middle register. They're all wearing similar capes, carrying weapons. This is the Bronze Age, so those would be bronze weapons. On the right-hand side of the middle register, you're seeing other soldiers, low-ranking soldiers, think infantry.

And then up at the top, in the top register, you can see the prisoners of war. Now, prisoners of war are recognized by the fact that they are nude. That was a form of humiliation, we believe, for the prisoners as they were taken.

So all of their equipment, their clothing, our weaponry was all stripped away, and they were forced to march naked to be presented to the king or the commander. The king himself is found in the top. register, the king is identifiable because he is the largest figure.

In Bronze Age artwork, it is standard to denote importance based on size, and since the king is the most important figure, he is depicted as the largest figure. In fact, you can see he's so large he actually breaks the top line of the register. Let me give you a close-up of both the king and the figures surrounding him and of those chariots with those guys getting squished down at the bottom here.

Now at the top you'll see a close-up of that upper register. Now again, the standard of error was found in pieces in a tomb, so we do not have all of the pieces of shell, bone, that were originally a part of this, so there are pieces missing. You can see that the king is really more of an outline than detail. We're missing a lot of the pieces that would originally have been painted and composed the body of the king. We do know, however, that is the king.

largely because of his size and the fact that he appears to be passing judgment on the prisoners that are being marched toward him in humiliation. At the bottom, you can see the image of the chariots. They're those wonderful round solid wheels that the Mesopotamians were the first ones to invent, and those are being used in warfare.

Now again, the war side reminds us that Mesopotamia is constantly in conflict. that it is a place of war and struggle, and the war side of the standard of error shows us how the Mesopotamians made war. It shows us the use of their chariots, it shows us how they bring the prisoners of war, and it emphasizes the fact that the king has this incredible power. He is the one who makes the final decisions, who makes the final life or death calls on the people who are brought before him in the wake of this war. Now, this is the judgment, this is the battle, this is death.

The other side shows celebration and banqueting. Like the war side, the peace side is broken into three different pieces or three different registers. Once again, the top register is going to include the king and his court.

The king is, again, easy to find. He's the largest person in the entire standard. His head is, once again, so large it breaks the top line of the standard itself.

Now here again you have three registers and in your bottom register you see the supplies being brought in for the party. You've got livestock being brought in and you've got workers or farmers carrying in bags and piles of food as they come across that bottom register. The center register is more supplies for the party.

Again, you can see animals being brought in to be served at the party. And then the very top register is actually the party itself. The nobility are holding cups, they're holding goblets, there is music being played at the side, and then of course the king is sitting officiating over this. Let's go ahead and zoom in, take a close up again. You'll notice here that the king in the upper register is larger than all the figures around him.

By the way, the king is sitting in an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic chair. That's why if you're looking at the bottom, you'll notice something that looks like an animal leg. That's actually one of the legs of the chair. Often the bits of furniture that we find or we see depicted will have a combination.

They will have animal characteristics on them. So the legs of the chair will be animal legs in the front or an animal head will be carved into the back. So that's what you're seeing. The other thing I really want you to notice about the king up there in the top register, I want you to notice his clothing.

That's going to be important and you're going to see it again in a little while. If you'll notice his skirt, his wrap is extremely elaborate. There are multiple pieces of cloth, multiple layers. Anytime you see that multiple layered style of clothing, you know that you are looking at someone of high rank.

Higher the rank, more elaborate, more layered the clothing. You will see this on kings and nobility. You will also see it as the Mesopotamians depict their gods and goddesses.

They will use that same leveled clothing, the layers of clothing, to depict importance. So tuck that away because you're going to see it over and over again. The other thing I want you to notice here is in the second picture down, I want you to notice the musicians at the right-hand side. If you'll notice, the musician second in from the right is actually holding a musical instrument that is a type of harp called a lyre.

He's playing the strings on the instrument with his left hand, but the instrument itself is interesting. It has strings, but there's an angled piece at the front and there appears to be a bull's head decorating the front of the lyre. I want you to tuck that design of lyre away because you're going to see a similar lyre that we actually found near the same gravesite. So I want you to keep that style in mind because what you see depicted here is something that we actually found evidence is a bull's head.

a real object that was used in ancient Mesopotamia. Now here you see a close-up of some of the lower registers. You can see the individual people bringing in food and supplies, and once again you'll see that there are pieces of the standard which are missing. They're no longer there.

Now all of these depictions are not realistic. I don't think I have to tell you that. They're extremely simplified. And like the caves of Lascaux, we refer to the style of image as conceptual rather than optical. These figures are conceptual in that the position of the body includes the parts that are important to recognize it as a body.

They don't include what you would actually visually see. It's not optical. For example, if you look at the little harp player, the lyre player, and the person standing next to him in the picture, you'll notice that their shoulders are facing full front.

They're facing directly towards you. However, their heads are turned completely in profile to the side. Their eyes, however, are depicted as looking directly towards you. So the eye is drawn as if the person's face was facing toward you, but the head is shown in full profile. The shoulders are directly forward toward you.

The hips are directly forward toward you, but the feet are turned completely to one side. That strange mishmash of poses, side face, forward eye, forward shoulders, forward hips, side feet, that is essentially including parts of the body in the way that they are most immediately recognizable. It's the concept of a body more than what the body actually realistically looks like.

This conceptual depiction of human beings is going to remain consistent throughout artwork all the way up until we end up in the Aegean. and in the early, early proto days of Greece. Now, the standard of earth, this huge banquet on the peace side, shows us again how important agriculture is to the Mesopotamians. It is a struggle for power that warfare is largely related to ownership of the land and the food supply. Now, that food supply is a struggle in Mesopotamia, but the Mesopotamians, once again, are incredibly creative and innovative.

they have to be to survive. For example, the farming practices in Mesopotamia show that innovation. Now, I know, farming practices Oh, giant yawn.

Okay. Thrilling stuff. No, I know, I know. Agriculture is probably not at the top of your excitement list.

But when the Mesopotamians design their fields, they encounter incredible barriers to the easily grown crops. For one thing, simple. They've got to get water to their fields.

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, their banks are not conducive to setting up farm fields right on the banks of the river. The rivers go up and down. They're not consistent in their flood.

They can't set up their fields right on the bank of the river. So they need to get the water from the river to the farm fields. The Mesopotamians actually create a series of canals in order to get the water from the river to their farm fields. Amazing accomplishment, one, without a backhoe or any kind of power tool.

Number two, Mesopotamia struggles because they do have floods. They have a lot of rain. but the rain comes at the wrong time of the year for farming. So basically, you plant the seeds, your seeds start to grow, you have adorable little plants a few inches tall, and then, then the rains hit and everything floods out. In order to prevent those crops from being destroyed, in order to prevent the rain from just flooding everything out, the Mesopotamians actually have to figure out how to control water access to their fields.

Not only do they dig canals to get the water from the tigers in the Euphrates, but they actually create stepped fields where as you can see at the upper left the field is actually dug down into the soil with a gate or a door that opens onto a canal so they can protect the fields by raising the barrier around the fields almost like a levee around each field and then they have a water access point so they can control when they allow their fields to get water and when they do not allow their fields to get water Not only do they create these walled fields, essentially, that allow them to control the water access and irrigation, but the Mesopotamians are also the first people that we know of to realize the need for crop rotation. Now, to me, that's just mind-boggling because they don't have science. I mean, they don't know about nutrients in the soil. They don't know about potassium and nitrogen. They've got no clue.

What they do know is that if you plant the same thing in the same field over and over again, it stops growing. Now today in our modern agriculture we know that's because you've depleted the nutrients in the soil. The Mesopotamians, however, are smart enough and capable enough.

They figure out that you need to plant different things in the fields over the year and they actually figure out a four-field crop rotation system where they rotate their crops between different fields and leave one field empty to get the soil replenished so that stuff will grow the following year. We know all of this because we actually have records down on your lower left. That is actually a clay tablet with early pictographic writing on it. We'll talk about the pictographic writing in cuneiform in a little while. And that writing actually is a farmer's notes on his fields.

It's actually him keeping track of what he planted in what location from one year to the next so that he will actually get his crop rotation correct and make sure that the crops are irrigated correctly for the types of seeds he's planted. Now Now, this irrigation system, this crop rotation is incredibly important to the Mesopotamians, and they desperately hope that the divine will help them out, that the weather will be good, because for all of their efforts, they need that assistance of good rains, of good weather, and they leave that up to their gods. We see the depictions of the Mesopotamian gods in their artwork.

And where we find the largest number of depictions are actually on clay seals from Mesopotamia. We have a lot of clay seals. It's simply the number of them that we find that allows us to see these many depictions of the gods and goddesses. Seals were actually usually cylinders. There were other types.

Sometimes they were actually rings or simply a bead, either oval or rectangular, that could be worn. But usually these seals were cylinders, so there's a hole through the middle of the thing you're seeing on the screen. It's like a tube. Some of them, the more permanent ones, were actually carved out of stone. The majority of them were actually made out of baked clay.

What the Mesopotamians would do would be carve an image into the cylinder. So you can see in the picture on your screen that cylinder actually has an image carved into the surface of that cylinder. That cylinder could be worn, a necklace, bracelet.

It could be carried in a pocket or a pouch. And then what would happen is when an ancient Mesopotamian needed to mark something or sign something, they would actually take that clay seal or take that stone seal and roll it into wet clay. When you roll it, all of the images that are carved into the surface of the seal are then imprinted, raised, on the clay where they're rolled. Now these clay seals were used for a variety of things. They could be used as a certification on some sort of document because most documents were actually written on clay at this point in history.

They could also be used as a way of marking something to come back to it later. We know, for example, ancient Mesopotamians, they shopped on layaway. They would go to a marketplace, they would go shopping, and if they picked out something that they had no intention of carrying or taking home, they would get their seal and they would roll their seal onto a clay piece and mark the object that they had purchased with that clay seal.

Now every clay seal was unique, so basically it was like signing your name. This was your seal. So then later on you could send people you hired, you could send your servants, and they would go to the marketplace and find the object marked with your seal, that picture that was uniquely yours, that marked something as your property. Because these seals were so individualized, because they were used to mark property, because they were small and fairly common, we have thousands of them.

And by looking at the imprints, by looking at the images on these seals, we learn a lot about Mesopotamian beliefs, about what animals, deities are important to them. We learn about their culture. Now the Mesopotamians have lots of gods and goddesses.

They are generally what we would call polytheistic. Poly means many, theistic means gods, gods and goddesses. There are many, many Mesopotamian gods. When we see them depicted, often again we see them on clay seals because we have so many of them, we can identify the gods and goddesses in two ways.

Number one, the clothing. It will be very, very elaborate. For example, if you look at the bottom right picture over there that's labeled Inanna, you will see that there are tiers of fabric, layers and layers of fabric on her dress. That indicates again that you're looking at someone of high rank, in this case a deity. The other way we recognize gods and goddesses in ancient Mesopotamian depiction is by their hats.

If you recall when I showed you the temples at Shetal Chayuk, I showed you the masculine temple and I told you the horns, the horned creatures like bulls, were associated with strength and virility. They were often associated with masculinity and power. That power comes into play here too.

Mesopotamian gods and goddesses, when they are carved or painted, when they're depicted, they're painted with horned hats. So anytime you see a figure in Mesopotamia that's wearing a hat with horns on it, you're looking at someone or something that claims deity that is seen as a god or goddess. Now there are a lot of Mesopotamian gods and goddesses.

You'll encounter some of them in a quiz in a little while, but there are two in particular that I want to point out to you. I want you to be familiar with them. because they're going to come into play a little bit later.

They're both very important deities to the Mesopotamians. The first one is pictured up on the upper left. His name is Shamesh.

He is the sun god and the god of justice. Now, you can easily recognize Shamesh because, like, he's totally doing the Captain Morgan rum pose. He's got one foot up there looking all manly and stuff. Now, Shamesh is the sun god, and it's delightful because often when you see Shamesh depicted, On his arms or shoulders will be these long lines.

You can see them on the picture and on the screen. He's got these big long spikes coming off of him going upward. Those lines are the rays of the sun.

He's the sun god. So just like when a kid or someone like me who's not artistically talented draws the sun, you draw a circle and then you draw lines coming off of it as the rays of the sun. That is exactly what the Mesopotamians are doing for our buddy Shamesh here. Those are actually the rays of the sun coming off of him because he's the sun god.

That also, for the record, is why he's standing there with his manly leg up on that mountain. That mountain actually is representative of Zagros Mountains. I mentioned those way back when I showed you the map of Mesopotamia and I said to the east of Mesopotamia are Zagros Mountains, and they're not very hospitable for farming. Shamash is the sun god.

He's shown with one foot on Zagros Mountains, which are to the east of Mesopotamia. and in his hand he's depicted with a massive serrated knife. Shamesh is often pictured with that giant knife because the Mesopotamians believe that as the sun god he had to hack his way through the mountains to the east every morning to come up in the sky.

They believed him to be brave and proud and heroic because he had to fight every day to appear in the sky. So he hacks his way through Zagros Mountains with his big knife every day. Okay, so you're going to see Shamesh, but not actually because he's the sun god.

You're actually going to see Shamesh because of his second job, his other job. His second job is actually as a god of justice. Shamash is the one who sheds light on things. Think of him as the sun god and the bringer of enlightenment, of justice.

He's the one who actually makes sure that all actions are seen and revealed. He's going to come back in a little while. The other deity that I want you to remember from Mesopotamia is a goddess who ends up having two different names used.

She's called Ishtar sometimes, and she's called Inanna sometimes. Now Ishtar and Inanna are essentially the same goddess. The names are assigned by two different cultures. Again, if you go back to the map, the map of Mesopotamia, I showed you there are many many different groups and cultures all in that very small land area. A lot of those cultures have similar gods and goddesses, but each one has different language and they call them by different names, even though they're very similar in their jobs, in their character, and in the stories that are told about them.

Ishtar and Inanna are one of those doublings of a deity. Ishtar slash Inanna is often associated with the moon. She's a moon goddess, and she is the goddess of fertility, love, war, and sex. One of those things is not like the others.

The war thing. Yeah, that's okay. Ishtar slash Inanna is an interesting goddess because she is an incredibly important goddess as a fertility goddess. Again, you're dealing with a farming society. that fertility, both in terms of human fertility and in terms of growing the crops, is unbelievably important.

Inanna Ishtar is believed to bring the rain for the crops. She is a fertility goddess, but at the same time, she is double-sided. She has an incredible potential for destruction. As I kept mentioning before, Ishtar is a female goddess, and therefore she is the domesticator.

She is a goddess of fertility and love, except... fertility and love, it destroys as well as nurturing. When you get to the epic of Gilgamesh, when Ishtar actually proposes that one of the characters be her lover, he says, no way. You loved the lion, and when the lion fell in love with you, it was no longer wild.

It lost its power. You tamed it. There is this idea of this female force, this fertility goddess, Being destructive to the wild, she tames things, she takes away their power. She herself is a destroyer. She is the goddess of war.

She can destroy things, cast them down, and then once again nurture them and lift them back up. As a goddess of fertility and the harvest, she appears over and over and over again in Mesopotamian artwork and Mesopotamian mythology. One of the places you see her, for example, is on an object called the Warka Vase.

Now, the Warka Vase is carved out of a beautiful pale stone alabaster. It is a vase, a hollow object, with different registers. Again, you've got lines of figures going around it.

It was smashed. You can see that it's been broken into many pieces and reassembled. We are missing bits and pieces of it.

It's basically been filled with blank plaster so that we can still have the shape of the vase. We know that the work of Haze, the images on the three registers, are dedicated to Inanna slash Yishtar, to this goddess. And we know that this represents a fertility, the harvest ritual. There is some conjecture that perhaps the work of Haze was actually used as a giant seal because of its shape.

Some scholars believe it could have been rolled like a seal, a cylinder seal, to actually create this picture on clay. We don't know that, but it is possible because as you can see in the picture on your screen, it does create that image when it's rolled. Now, again, you have multiple registers, starting at the bottom. Your bottom register, which is partially broken away, is actually depicting grain. So it's actually depicting crops in a farm field.

The register above that shows animals, sheep. So there's your food supply. Inanna is a goddess of fertility, so the fertility having many sheep. the fertility, the rain, having water, having your crops grow, that goes back to Inanna as the goddess of fertility. The second register shows the food itself being brought in by a series of figures carrying baskets and bowls.

So essentially they're bringing the harvest, they're bringing the crops as a thanks to Inanna. The top register includes a few more of those figures, but it centers on what appears to be a gateway up there at the top, with a female figure standing in front of it. You can see on your right there are two vertical pieces that we believe are columns on a gateway. A female figure stands in front of them.

Some believe that that actually represents the goddess Inanna herself, but most scholars believe that that actually represents a priestess of Inanna. The food is being presented to this priestess, and we believe that this may represent the work of Aes May Picture, some kind of ritual or celebration of the goddess Inanna. where first fruits, where crops were brought as a thank you to the goddess of fertility for blessing them and allowing them to grow.

Now, I mentioned that Ishtar and Inanna are the same goddess for two different cultures. She's called by two different names. That double name, Ishtar and Inanna, actually allows the world's first known dictator to create a common point, a commonality. between the cultures that he conquers to try and bring them together by creating the worship of Inanna or Ishtar as a single goddess, a moon goddess who unifies the people he conquers. That leader, that dictator, is a guy by the name of Sargon of Akkad.

Now we know about Sargon because we actually have his biography. We have his own description of his life and times. We are not sure how honest The Life and Times of Sargon of Akkad is, it sounds pretty fantastical. So why was it written down that way if it wasn't true? Well, if you are a Mesopotamian dictator who successfully conquers the entire crescent of Mesopotamia, and you tell your court secretary to write your life down in a certain way, it's likely your court secretary is gonna write it down that way, mostly because he doesn't want to get dead.

Just, you know, just saying. Now, Sargon of Akkad's life story is a heck of a thing. Let me give you the really quick version of it.

It may sound familiar to some of you, depending on your background. According to Sargon, his mother was an intelligent woman. His parents were both intelligent people who worked in the court of a king.

Ultimately, his mom worked with... one of the high-ranking court officials, but they were disgraced and fell out of favor. Ultimately, they were forced to go into hiding, and his mother was terrified that Sargon would be hurt or killed because people were hunting for the family, so she actually took tiny baby Sargon and hid him on a raft and floated him down the river, hoping that he would escape. Sargon's tiny little raft was found by a high-ranking noblewoman. who pulled the baby off the raft out of the river and raised him as her own.

As Sargon grew older, he was brilliant and wise, and ultimately he became the advisor to the king. And once the king died, Sargon took his place. Sargon became king, and he used his intelligence and his knowledge as having a struggling, difficult life to conquer all of Mesopotamia. He moved from north to south down the peninsula of Mesopotamia, and when he finally reached the sea, he washed his weapons in the water and declared peace for all time as he had unified Mesopotamia. Yeah, um, we're kind of gonna call a bunch of horse hockey on that one.

We don't think that that's actually what happened. We don't think that that's actually the way Sargon's life worked. But we do know that Sargon was indeed a very successful leader and dictator. How do we know that?

Well, for one thing, We do know that he had the power to have these accounts, his life story recorded. We also know that Sargon had that power because we have parts of sculptures of him, like the one on your screen. Now the part of the sculpture we have is actually Sargon's head.

It is a bronze head that was originally attached to a bronze body. We know that because of the holes and residue in the bottom portion of this, the neck portion of this. Now the statue of Sargon is what we call a hollow bronze or a lost wax bronze.

we'll talk about that a lot more when we get to Greece, but essentially it's creating a sculpture by casting pieces of it using, you carve it in wax, you melt the wax away, and then you fill the empty cavity left by the wax with molten bronze, and when it hardens you have a hollow bronze sculpture. Usually hollow bronze sculptures, lost wax bronze sculptures, are done in sections. so the head would have been casted differently separately from the body and then attached. We believe the head and the body based on the proportions would have been a little bit over six feet tall, so it would have been life size or a little bit bigger than life size. The detail on it is remarkable.

I mean his beard is just completely epic and the hairstyle is pretty darn awesome too. Now we do not have the body of the bronze statue of Sargon and we think we know why. This entire sculpture was made of bronze and this was known as the Bronze Age, so most things in this time period, important things including weapons, were made of bronze.

The fact that Sargon dedicates enough bronze to make a large sculpture of himself tells us that he is not overly worried about defense. He's not so worried about making weapons out of bronze that he doesn't use it for anything The other thing that the sculpture tells us, because it's made of bronze, is that it would have been extremely valuable. This would have been a show-off piece for Sargon, and we believe that Sargon was actually trying to create a legacy. He was trying to create a sculpture that would be seen by generations to come. Unfortunately, that evidently didn't work out for him because we don't have the body.

All we've got is the head. We found the head in a trash pile. We know that in ancient Mesopotamia, the eyes of sculptures were usually made of precious gold.

precious gemstones or valuable rare shells. And if you look at the head of Sargon, it appears that somebody removed those valuable gemstones with extreme prejudice. What we think actually happened, Sargon has the sculpture made, he has it put out on display, his legacy for the future, and basically after his death, they melt down the body and use the bronze for something else.

They smash the eyes out of the head and throw the head in a trash pile, which is where we find it thousands of years later. Sargon's bid for immortality, his legacy, does not work out quite the way he planned. However, Sargon does manage to unify a large portion of Mesopotamia.

Based on our findings, we believe that Sargon does manage, as he claims in his biography, to unify the entire crescent. And one of the things that he uses to unify these people, not only by military force, but an attempt to unify them culturally, is to create a massive temple to the moon goddess, Ishtar slash Inanna. He tells them that there are two names of this goddess in Mesopotamia, but that she is the same goddess, and he wants everyone to honor and worship her regardless of the name that they call her.

He actually views the goddess as so important that he creates this huge temple for her and puts his daughter in charge of that temple. His daughter is a woman named Enheduanna. Enheduanna is the high priestess of Inanna under the rule of Sargon, and she's actually the world's first known author.

She's the first one who assigns her name to her writings, and we know who wrote them. Enheduanna writes a series of poetry, hymns, and the most famous of those is the hymn to Inanna, which makes a lot of sense since she's the high priestess of Ishtar slash Inanna. You're going to be reading excerpts from that poem.

for a quiz in just a little bit here. Now, this image, a clay seal, actually depicts Enheduanna. You can tell which one she is, again, because of the elaborate nature of her clothing. You can see all the layers of cloth, which implies her rank, her standing. Enheduanna is the high priestess of Inanna, under her father, and she acts as this unifying figure.

She honors and loves Inanna. and views Inanna both as the giver of life and fertility and all things, but also a goddess with an incredible destructive potential. You're going to hear her talk about both sides of that goddess, because after the death of Sargon, something horrible happens to Inanna. Her nephew, a guy by the name of Naram-Sin, comes into power, and Naram-Sin basically destroys Sargon's attempt to unify the peoples of Mesopotamia. Instead, he is much more interested in expanding the territory.

He is a warrior who is not that interested in Inanna. She's a female goddess, a fertility goddess. In fact, Naram-Sin actually declares himself a god.

What you see on the screen over here is actually a steel, a large marker stone. Any large stone that serves as a marker is called a steel. Remember that.

That's important. Any large marker stone like this is called a steel. This particular steel, big marker stone, is called a victory steel because it celebrates a military victory by Naram-Sin. Now, again, size indicates importance, so you should be able to find Naram-Sin.

He's the largest figure here. Huge figure standing on the mountain. He's got horns on a helmet, which means that he considers himself to be not only the king, but also a god.

You can see him defeating his enemies. This is interesting because unlike other artworks in Mesopotamia, there isn't a strong system of registers here. Instead, there is a diagonal series of figures. So there is a register to a degree, there's a line of figures, but instead of going horizontally across the image, they're at a diagonal as if they are incorporated into the actual landscape. They appear to be actually climbing a mountain.

Naram-Sin here is shown crushing his enemies beneath his feet. He is shown victorious and in the sky are a pair of sons. Naram-Sin is far more interested in the sun god and in masculine power than in any kind of female power.

He actually destroys the worship of Inanna and throws his aunt, Nahaduana, out of her position. He kicks her out of the priesthood. Instead, he bans or ignores, neglects the rule or the worship of Inanna. Naram-Sin dies. We don't know as much as we would like to about how he is killed, defeated, but we do know that when he dies, the worship of Inanna is restored.

The reason we don't know as much as we would like to about his defeat, his overthrow, his death, is that the main record we have of it is from his aunt and Hedwana in her writings and her hymn to Inanna. And since he's the guy who kicked her out of her job, she is not very fond of him and she is not very complimentary of him. So you will get to see how she interprets both her elevation to priesthood, her being kicked out of that priesthood by her nephew Naram-Sin, and then finally the restoration of the worship of Inanna as you actually read excerpts from her hymn to Inanna.

Transcript for:Overview of Mesopotamian Civilization

Transcript for:
Overview of Mesopotamian Civilization