Sumer, the land that the classical era called Babylonia, occupied the southern part of Mesopotamia and geographically roughly coincided with modern Iraq, stretching from Baghdad in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south. The territory of Sumer occupied about 10 thousand square miles, slightly larger than the state of Massachusetts. The climate here is extremely hot and dry, and the soils are naturally parched, eroded and infertile. This is a river plain, and therefore it is devoid of minerals and poor in stone. The swamps were overgrown with powerful reeds, but there were no forests and, accordingly, no wood here. This is what this land was like, “which the Lord denied” (displeasing to God), hopeless and, it would seem, doomed to poverty and desolation. But the people who inhabited it and were known by the 3rd millennium BC. e. How Sumerians, was endowed with an extraordinary creative intellect and an enterprising, determined spirit. Despite the natural deficiencies of the land, they turned Sumer into a veritable Garden of Eden and created what was probably the first advanced civilization in human history.

The Sumerians had a special technical inventive talent. Already the earliest settlers came to the idea of ​​irrigation, which gave them the opportunity to collect and channel the silt-rich waters of the Tigris and Euphrates through canals in order to irrigate and fertilize fields and gardens. To make up for the lack of minerals and stone, they learned to burn river clay, the supply of which was practically inexhaustible, and turn it into pots, dishes and jugs. Instead of wood, they used cut and dried giant swamp reed, which grew in abundance here, knitted it into sheaves or wove mats, and also, using clay, built huts and pens for livestock. Later, the Sumerians invented a mold for molding and firing bricks from the inexhaustible river clay, and the problem of building materials was solved. Here such useful tools, crafts and technical means as a potter's wheel, wheel, plow, sailing ship, arch, vault, dome, copper and bronze casting, needle sewing, riveting and soldering, stone sculpture, engraving and inlay appeared. The Sumerians invented a system of writing on clay that was adopted and used throughout the Middle East for almost two thousand years. Almost all of our information about the early history of Western Asia comes from the thousands of clay documents covered in cuneiform written by the Sumerians that have been discovered by archaeologists over the past one hundred and twenty-five years.

Sumer is remarkable not only for its high material culture and technological achievements, but also for its ideas, ideals and values. Vigilant and intelligent, they had a practical outlook on life and, within the framework of their intellectual development, never confused fact with fiction, desire with embodiment, and mystery with hoax. The Sumerian sages developed a faith and creed that, in a sense, left God to God, and also recognized and accepted the inevitability of the limitations of mortal existence, especially their helplessness in the face of death and God's wrath. As for their views on material existence, they highly valued wealth and property, rich harvests, full granaries, barns and stables, successful hunting on land and good fishing in the sea. Spiritually and psychologically, they emphasized ambition and success, excellence and prestige, honor and recognition. The resident of Sumer was deeply aware of his personal rights and opposed any attempt on them, be it the king himself, someone senior in position or equal. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Sumerians were the first to establish laws and compile codes to clearly distinguish “black from white” and thus avoid misunderstanding, misinterpretation and ambiguity.

With all the Sumerians' respect for the individual and his achievements, the strongest spirit of cooperation both between individuals and between communities was stimulated by a certain overriding factor - the complete dependence of the well-being of Sumer, and simply its existence, on irrigation. Irrigation is a complex process that requires joint effort and organization. Canals had to be dug and constantly repaired, and water had to be distributed proportionately to all consumers. This required power that exceeded the desires of an individual landowner and even an entire community. This contributed to the formation of administrative institutions and the development of Sumerian statehood. Since Sumer, due to the fertility of its irrigated soils, produced significantly more grain, while experiencing an acute shortage of metals, stone and timber, the state was forced to obtain the materials necessary for the economy either by trade or by military means. Therefore, there is every reason to believe that by the 3rd millennium BC. e. Sumerian culture and civilization penetrated, at least to some extent, east to India, west to the Mediterranean, south to Ethiopia, north to the Caspian Sea.

Of course, all this happened five thousand years ago and may seem to have little relevance to the study of modern man and culture. In fact, the land of Sumer witnessed the birth of more than one important feature of modern civilization. Whether a philosopher or teacher, historian or poet, lawyer or reformer, statesman or politician, architect or sculptor - each of our contemporaries will most likely find his prototype and colleague in ancient Sumer. Of course, the Sumerian origin of modern realities today can no longer be traced unambiguously or with certainty: the ways of interpenetration of cultures are multifaceted, intricate and complex, and the magic of contact with the past is delicate and volatile. And yet it is evident in the Law of Moses and the Parables of Solomon, in the tears of Job and the lament of Jerusalem, in the sad story of the dying man-god, in the cosmogony of Hesiod and the Hindu myths, in Aesop's fables and the theorem of Euclid, in the sign of the zodiac and the heraldic symbol, in the weight of the mine, the degree of the angle, the outline of the number. It is the history, social structure, religious ideas, teaching practice, literary creativity and value motivation of the civilization of ancient Sumer that the essays on the following pages will be devoted to. But first, a short introduction devoted to the archaeological reconstruction of the culture of Sumer and the deciphering of its writing and language.

It is remarkable that less than a century ago they knew nothing not only about Sumerian culture, they did not even suspect the very existence of the Sumerian people and language. Scientists and archaeologists who began excavations in Mesopotamia about a hundred years ago were not looking for Sumerians, but Assyrians; there was sufficient, although very inaccurate, information about this people from Greek and Jewish sources. About the Sumerians, their lands, people and language, it was believed that not a word was said in all the available biblical, classical and post-classical literature. The name itself - Sumer - remained erased in the consciousness and memory of mankind for more than two millennia. The discovery of the Sumerians and their language was completely unforeseen and unexpected, and this seemingly insignificant circumstance gave rise to contradictions that greatly complicated and slowed down the further development of Sumerology.

Deciphering the Sumerian language was made possible by deciphering the Semitic-Akkadian language, formerly known as Assyrian or Babylonian, which, like Sumerian, used cuneiform. The key to the Akkadian language was, in turn, found in Old Persian, an Indo-European language of the Persians and Medes who ruled Iran for much of the 1st millennium BC. e. Some representatives of the ruling Achaemenid dynasty, named after its founder Achaemen, who lived around 700 BC. BC, considered it politically necessary to keep records in three languages: Persian - their native language, Elamite - the agglutinative language of the inhabitants of Western Iran they conquered and subjugated - and Akkadian - the Semitic language of the Babylonians and Assyrians. This group of trilingual cuneiform documents, similar in content to the inscriptions on the Egyptian Rosetta Stone, was found in Iran, not Iraq, although cuneiform was born there. This brings us directly to the history of research and excavation that made it possible to decipher cuneiform and reconstruct the civilizations of Mesopotamia. We will talk about them briefly (over the past decades this topic has been discussed many times and in detail) in order to give the reader the opportunity to get a complete picture of this subject, and also to pay tribute to long-departed researchers, archaeologists and armchair scientists, each of whom, without knowing it, suspecting, in his own way contributed to the publication of a book about the Sumerians.

Reconstructing the culture of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Sumerian peoples buried under abandoned mounds, or tells, is the highest and most amazing achievement of science and humanism of the 19th century. Of course, in previous centuries there were isolated reports of the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia. So, already in the 12th century. a rabbi from Tudela (kingdom of Navarre) named Benjamin, son of Jonah, visited the Jews of Mosul and unmistakably determined that the ruins near this city were the remains of ancient Nineveh, but his guess became widely known only in the 16th century. Meanwhile, the remains of Babylon were identified only in 1616, when the Italian Pietro della Balle visited the hills near modern Hilla. This keen-sighted traveler not only described the ruins of Babylon superbly, but also brought to Europe clay bricks covered with writings, which he found near a hill that modern Arabs call Tell Muqayar, “a hill with a hole,” hiding the ruins of ancient Ur. This is how the first examples of cuneiform came to Europe.

The rest of the 17th and almost the entire 18th century. numerous travelers with different points of view regarding the location and ruins visited Mesopotamia, each trying to fit what they saw into a biblical context. Between 1761 and 1767 The most significant expedition took place when Karsten Niebuhr, a Danish mathematician, not only copied the writings in Persepolis that made it possible to decipher cuneiform, but also for the first time gave his contemporaries a concrete idea of ​​the ruins of Nineveh in sketches and sketches. A few years later, the French botanist A. Michaud sold to the National Library in Paris a boundary stone found near Ctesiphon south of Baghdad - the first truly valuable original letter to come to Europe. This simple inscription, which actually contained a warning to trespassers, has received several ridiculous translations. Here is one of them: “The heavenly army will pour vinegar on us to generously supply us with a means of healing.”

Around this time, Abbe Beauchamp, governor-general of Baghdad and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, was making careful and accurate observations of what he saw around him, especially in the ruins of Babylon. Employing several local workers under the supervision of a master mason, he actually carried out the first archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia for the sculpture now known as the “Lion of Babylon” and still on display there for modern tourists. He was the first to describe the Ishtar Gate, a marvelous fragment of which can today be seen in the Middle East section of the Berlin Museum; he also mentions the discovery of cylinders made of hard materials with inscriptions similar, in his opinion, to writings from Persepolis. Memoirs of his travels, published in 1790, were almost instantly translated into English and German and became a sensation in the scientific world.

The spark thrown by Abbe Beauchamp had its consequences: the East India Company in London sent its agents to Baghdad to conduct archaeological reconnaissance and find out prospects. And so in 1811, Claudius James Rich, a representative of the East India Company in Baghdad, began researching and mapping the ruins in Babylon and even carried out trial excavations in some places. Nine years later, Rich arrived in Mosul, where he sketched and explored the vast hills of ancient Nineveh. He collected many tablets, bricks, boundary stones and inscribed cylinders; among them were the famous cylinders of Nebuchadnezzar and Sinnachcherib, the inscriptions from which were carefully copied by his secretary Karl Bellino and sent to the epigraphist Grotefend for deciphering. Rich's collection formed the core of the British Museum's extensive collection of Mesopotamian antiquities.

Rich died at the age of thirty-four, but two books of his memoirs about the ruins of Babylon with illustrative material and samples of inscriptions remained and, one might say, marked the birth of Assyriology and the study of cuneiform adjacent to it. He was followed by Robert Ker Porter, who made accurate artistic reproductions of part of the Mesopotamian ruins, as well as a plan of the interior of the ruins of Babylon. In 1828, Robert Mignan made a quick excavation of the ruins of Babylon, where Rich had worked in 1811, he hired 30 men, cleared an area of ​​12 square feet to a depth of 20 feet and was the first to find a cylinder covered with inscriptions engraved on it. Finally, in the 30s. XIX century two Englishmen, J. Bailey Fraser and William F. Ainsworth, visited a number of cities in southern Mesopotamia, but it never occurred to them that this territory was part of ancient Sumer.

We have reached the extensive and relatively systematic excavations in Iraq begun in 1842 by Paul Emile Botta, the French consul at Mosul, and continuing, with some interruptions, to the present day. They were first conducted in northern Mesopotamia, in the area known as Assyria, and thousands of documents found there were written in Akkadian. However, during the excavations this was not yet known; all that could be said was that the style resembled the script of the third class of trilingual inscriptions from Iran, mainly from Persepolis and its environs. In Persepolis there were still the ruins of a luxurious palace with an abundance of tall, well-preserved beautiful columns, as well as various sculptural images scattered here and there. The city was surrounded by magnificently decorated tombs located in the rocks. Many monuments of Persepolis were full of inscriptions; by the end of the 18th century. recognized as similar to the inscriptions on bricks from Babylon. Moreover, by the middle of the 19th century. One of the trilingual inscriptions was deciphered and provided a list of proper names, which contributed to the decipherment of the third group of scripts, which, in turn, made it possible to read the Assyrian tablets found in Iraq. However, in order to follow the progress of the decipherment of the Akkadian script, one must first have an idea of ​​the decipherment of the trilingual inscriptions of the first class from Persepolis and the nature of the information obtained from them.

Europe learned about the ruins of Persepolis in the 16th century, when in 1543 the travel notes of the Venetian ambassador to Persia, Josophatus Barbarossa, were published in Venice, where he spoke with admiration about what he saw. Inscriptions on monuments were first mentioned in the book of Antonio de Gueca, the first ambassador of Spain and Portugal to Persia, published in Lisbon in 1611; he said that the inscriptions do not resemble either Persian, Arabic, Armenian, or Hebrew writing. His successor, Don García Silva Figueroa, in a book published in Antwerp in 1620, was the first to identify the remains of Persepolis with the palace of Darius, a ruler of the Achaemenid dynasty, using the description of Diodorus Siculus. He also points out that the writing on the monuments differs from Chaldean, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek, that their shape resembles an elongated triangle, similar to a pyramid, and that all the signs are the same and differ only in position.

In a letter dated October 21, 1621, Pietro della Balle reports that he examined the ruins of Persepolis and even copied (wrongly, as it turned out) five inscriptions; he also suggested that they should be read from left to right. In 1673, the young French artist André Dolier Deslandes printed the first accurate engraving of the palace at Persepolis, copying only three inscriptions; he placed them in the engraving in such a way that they seemed to serve a purely decorative function, in accordance with the widely accepted in the 18th century. theory. In 1677, the Englishman Sir Thomas Herbert, who had served as British ambassador to Persia for some 50 years, published a rather poor copy of what was supposed to be a three-line passage that turned out to be a hodgepodge of completely different texts. His characterization of the letter, however, is not without historical interest: “Signs of strange and unusual shape - neither letters nor hieroglyphs. We are so far from understanding them that we are not even able to make a clear judgment about whether these are words or signs. Still, I am inclined to the first option, considering them to be full-fledged words or syllables, as in brachiology or shorthand, which we habitually practice.”

In 1693, a copy of the inscription from Persepolis, which consisted of two lines and twenty characters, was published by Samuel Flower, an agent of the East India Company. It was considered genuine, although in fact it contained twenty-three separate characters from different inscriptions, an error that nevertheless did not confuse or baffle any of those who tried to decipher the inscription. In 1700, the letter finally found its name - “cuneiform”, which has since been firmly attached to it forever. This happened thanks to Thomas Hyde, who wrote a book on the history of religion in Ancient Persia; in this book he reproduced Flower's text and described its characters, calling the character of the writing "cuneiform." Unfortunately, he did not believe that signs were intended to convey meaningful speech, but believed that they were only decoration and ornament.

The first complete set of Persepolis inscriptions was not published until 1711 by Jean Chardin, a naturalized Englishman who visited Persepolis three times during his youth. Three years later, Carnel Lebrun published fairly accurate copies of three trilingual inscriptions. However, only Carsten Niebuhr really opened the way to deciphering Persian writings. In 1778, he published verified, exact copies of three trilingual inscriptions from Persepolis; he points out that they should be read from left to right, that each of the three inscriptions contains three different types of cuneiform, which he designates as "Class I", "Class II" and "Class III" and, finally, that Class I is an alphabetic system, because it contains only forty-two characters, in accordance with its systematization. Unfortunately, he was of the opinion that the three classes of writing were not three languages, but were varieties of one language. In 1798 Friedrich Münter, another Dane, made the crucial observation that Niebuhr's class I was an alphabetic system, while classes II and III were syllabic and ideographic respectively, and that each class represented not only a different form but also a different language.

So, now the basis for deciphering was available: exact copies of a series of inscriptions, each of which was both an independent form and language, moreover, the first was correctly identified as alphabetic. But the decipherment itself took a good half century and might not have taken place at all if not for two scientists who unwittingly made a great contribution to this process by publishing scientific works that were not directly related to the cuneiform writing of Persepolis, and thereby provided invaluable assistance to the decipherers. One of them, the Frenchman A.G. Anquetius-Duperron spent a long time in India, collecting manuscripts of the Avesta, the sacred book of the Zoroastrians, and learning to read and translate its language - ancient Persian. His publications on this topic appeared in 1768 and 1771. and gave the cuneiform decipherers some idea of ​​the Old Persian language, which turned out to be invaluable for reading class I trilingual inscriptions, since the dominant position of the text gave every reason to believe that it was Old Persian. Another scholar, Sylvester de Sacy, in 1793 published a translation of the Pahlavi texts found in the vicinity of Persepolis, which, although dating several centuries later than the cuneiform texts of Persepolis, fit into a more or less clear pattern, which probably could also lie at the basis of earlier monuments. The scheme was as follows: X, the great king, king of kings, king..., son of U, the great king, king of kings...

Let's return to deciphering the Persepolis inscriptions. The first serious attempt was made by Olaf Gerhard Tychsen, who, studying the letter of class I, correctly recognized four signs and recognized one of them, the most frequently occurring, as a word separator, which made it possible to establish the beginning and end of each word; in addition to these, he made several more witty observations. However, he mistakenly believed that the inscriptions belonged to the Parthian dynasty, that is, half a thousand years younger than their actual age, so his translations turned out to be pure speculation and were completely incorrect.

Tychsen published his results in 1798. In the same year, Friedrich Münter in Copenhagen presented two papers to the Royal Danish Society of Sciences proving that the Persepolis documents belonged to the Achaemenid dynasty - a fact of extreme importance for deciphering the letter. However, Munter himself was not successful in his attempts to read it. This was done by a Greek teacher at a gymnasium in Göttingen, who managed to do what others could not, and gained fame as a decipherer of Persian cuneiform inscriptions, i.e., the first of the three classes of Niebuhr’s system. He started with the most frequently repeated characters and assumed that they were vowels. He took a sample of Pahlavi's text from De Sasi's publication and used it to identify places where the names of the king who erected the monument and his father, as well as the words "king" and "son", were most likely to appear. He further manipulated the famous names of kings from the Achaemenid dynasty, taking into account first of all their length and placing them in appropriate places; Along the way, he used suitable words from the works of Anquetius-Duperron on the ancient Persian language, trying to read other words of the text. In this way he was able to correctly recognize ten signs and three proper names and offer a translation that, although with a large number of errors, still correctly conveyed the idea of ​​​​the content.

Excerpts from Grotefend's decipherment work appeared in print in 1802, and three years later it was published in full. The work was highly praised by Tychsen, Münter, and especially Rich, who continued to send him copies of cuneiform documents found in the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh. But Grotefend exaggerated his achievements, claiming to have recognized many more signs than actually existed, and presenting complete but unreliable transliterations and translations that could only arouse a sense of bewilderment in some of his colleagues. And yet he was on the right path, which over the next decades was directly and indirectly confirmed by the efforts of a number of scientists who made their own adjustments to the general work. A.Zh. Saint-Martin, Rasmus Rajek, Eugene Burnouf and his closest friend and colleague Christian Lassen are just the most significant names. But for a complete understanding of the ancient Persian language and the final deciphering of all signs, the Persepolis inscriptions were too short and did not provide a vocabulary sufficient in volume and semantics for verification and control. This brings us to a key figure in the early study of cuneiform, a brilliant, intuitive and insightful Englishman named Henry Creswick Rawlinson, and to the remarkable fact that two men independently deciphered a number of documents using almost identical criteria.

G.K. Rawlinson, who served in the British Army in Persia, became interested in the cuneiform inscriptions scattered throughout Persia. He began to copy some of the trilingual examples, especially the inscriptions on Mount Alvand near Hamadan and on the Behistun Rock about twenty miles from Kermanshah.

The first was two short notes that he copied in 1835; and, knowing nothing of the work of Grotefend, de Sacy, Saint-Martin, Rask, Burnouf and Lassen, he was able to read them using the same method as Grotefend and his followers. He, however, understood that in order to recognize all the signs of these inscriptions and read them correctly, a larger number of proper names was needed. And he found them on the Behistun Rock, in an inscription of many hundreds of trilingual lines, carved on a specially prepared rock surface of over 1200 square feet, which was also partially filled with low sculpted relief. Unfortunately, this monument was located more than 300 feet above ground level, and there was no way to get there. Therefore, Rawlinson had to build a special ladder, and from time to time, wanting to get as complete a copy as possible, he dangled on ropes against the rock.

In 1835 he began copying Persian columns from the trilingual Behistun texts; there were five of them, and they contained 414 lines. The work continued, with some interruptions, for more than a year, until 1837, when he had already copied about 200 lines, that is, about half, and with the help of classical authors and medieval geographers was able to read some of the several hundred geographical names contained in the inscription. By 1839, he became acquainted with the works of his European colleagues and, with the help of additional information received, successfully translated the first 200 lines of the Old Persian part of the Behistun text. He wanted to copy the entire inscription from the Behistun rock down to the smallest detail, but his military duties interrupted these efforts, and he was able to return to his favorite pastime only in 1844. That year he returned to Behistun, completely completed the copy of 414 lines of the ancient Persian inscription and copied everything 263 lines of the second, Elamite, as it is now known, version. In 1848, he sent his manuscript with copies, transliteration, translation, commentaries and notes from Baghdad to the Royal Asiatic Society and thus laid an absolutely reliable foundation for the decipherment of ancient Persian texts. This fact was further confirmed when, in the same year, the brilliant Irish linguist Edward Hincks published a paper based on his own report two years earlier, in which he anticipated many of the significant observations made independently by Rawlinson. Since then, only minor changes, additions and amendments have been made, notably the contribution of Lassen's student, Julis Oppert, in 1851. Hinks, Rawlinson and Oppert - the "holy trinity" of cuneiform science - not only laid a solid foundation for the Old Persian language , but also cleared the way for the deciphering of the Akkadian and Sumerian languages, thus opening the dusty pages of clay “books” buried in the vast lands of the Middle East.

Let us turn again to the large systematic excavations in Mesopotamia, which led to the decipherment of the Akkadian and Sumerian languages. In 1842, Paul Emile Botta was appointed to Mosul as the French ambassador. Immediately upon arrival, he began excavations on two hills, Kuyundzhik and Nebi-Yunus, hiding the remains of Nineveh. This did not produce results, and he turned his attention to Khorsabad, a little north of the Kuyunjik hill, where, in the language of archaeologists, he attacked a gold mine: the ruins of Khorsabad hid the palace of the powerful Sargon II, who ruled Assyria in the first quarter of the 8th century. BC e. (although, of course, archaeologists did not yet know about this); the land abounded in Assyrian sculpture, friezes, reliefs, many of which were covered with cuneiform texts. Only three years later, the Englishman Austen Henry Layard first began excavating in Nimrud, then in Nineveh and again in Nimrud. In addition to the royal palace, covered with low reliefs, he found in Nineveh the library of King Ashurbanipal, great-grandson of Sargon II, consisting of thousands of tablets and fragments with lexical, religious and literary works of the ancients. Thus, by the middle of the 19th century. Europe possessed hundreds of cuneiform texts, mainly from Assyria, which begged to be read, but also presented difficulties and obstacles that were insurmountable at that time. And yet, largely due to the genius and insight of Hinks, Rawlinson and Oppert, it took no more than a decade or so for the decipherment to become reliable fact.

In truth, potential transcribers now had an advantage. Long before the expeditions of Bott and Layard, a limited number of texts of one kind or another had arrived in Europe, mainly from the ruins of Babylon, and this writing was classified as class III, in accordance with Niebuhr's classification of the Persepolis trilingual monuments. Unfortunately, this Class III, quite rightly considered a translation of Class I texts, required painstaking work of decipherment.

Firstly, the Persepolis inscriptions were too brief to allow an understanding of the language system. Further, even a superficial analysis of the most extensive Babylonian texts available at that time made it obvious that they consisted of hundreds and hundreds of characters, while the I class of trilingual inscriptions contained only 42, which made it impossible to trace all the names and words that seemed identical . Finally, in the Babylonian list itself, the same signs differed greatly in outline and shape. It is therefore not surprising that the first attempts to decipher the Babylonian writings were fruitless.

In 1847, a noticeable step forward was made, and, quite naturally, by Edward Hinks. Using a copy of a relatively long Old Persian version of the Behistun list, which contained a significant number of proper names, he was able to read a number of vowels, syllables and ideograms, as well as the first Babylonian word that was not a proper name, the pronoun a-na-ku - “I”, practically identical to Hebrew to its analogue. However, his main discovery, which turned out to be a turning point in deciphering, occurred only in 1850 and was to some extent based on the observations of Bott, who, not limiting himself to excavations, published an extremely detailed study of cuneiform signs in 1848. Botta did not attempt to read a word, although he succeeded in understanding the meaning of several ideograms. His main contribution concerned variations. After careful study and detailed documentation, he showed that there are a considerable number of words that, despite having similar sounds and meanings, are written differently. This incidental observation about the presence of variant spellings paved the way for Hincks's 1850 work, in which he was able to explain at one stroke the incredible fact that the Babylonian list contained hundreds of characters, and justified the existence of such a huge number of variants. The Assyro-Babylonian (or, as it was now called, Akkadian) text, Hincks argued, did not have an alphabetic system, but a syllabic and ideographic one, that is, the signs could be syllables (a consonant plus a vowel, and vice versa, or a consonant plus a vowel plus a consonant ), combined in various ways into words, or one sign could denote the whole word.

This new look at Babylonian writing greatly boosted the decipherment. And yet there were still two more important linguistic discoveries ahead, and both of them were the result of the efforts and research of another of our acquaintances, Rawlinson. In 1847 he again traveled from Baghdad to Behistun and, at the risk of life and limb, transferred to paper the Babylonian version, which provided him with 112 lines, ready to be deciphered using the Old Persian text that had already been deciphered. Moreover, in the process of work, he discovered another significant feature of Babylonian writing, “polyphony,” when the same sign could mean more than one sound or “unit” (dignity). As a result, Rawlinson was now able to correctly read about 150 characters; he knew how to read and what almost 200 words of a language that - now it became completely obvious - were Semitic; he could even give a rough grammatical diagram of it.

Rawlinson's ingenious conclusions were published in 1850–1851. In 1853, Hinks, relying on them, successfully added to the list with more than a hundred new meanings of the Babylonian letter, and now it became possible to read almost 350 units of text. But the principle of polyphony, involved in decoding, caused doubts, suspicions and protest in scientific circles, attacks on the translations of Hinks - Rawlinson as biased and worthless. It was difficult to believe that ancient people had a writing system where the same sign could have multiple meanings, as this would presumably confuse the reader to such an extent that the task would seem impossible. At this tragic moment, Julis Oppert, the last of the triumvirate, came to the rescue. In 1855 he gave a general overview of the state of decipherment at that day, pointed out the correctness of the Hincks-Rawlinson readings, and added a number of new signs having more than one meaning. He was the first to give a thorough analysis of the syllabary prepared by the ancient scribes themselves on tablets found during the excavations of the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, and he made extensive use of it in translation.

His numerous treatises, editing of texts and polemics helped to establish a new science, now commonly known as Assyriology(based on the fact that the earliest excavations were carried out in Northern Iraq, the land of the Assyrian people), and inspire deep respect for it.

The year 1857 was fateful and full of bright events for Assyriology. It all started with a speech by a non-professional Assyriologist, V.F. Fox Talbot - mathematician and inventor. His studies of integrated calculations formed the basis of modern photography; but he was also an amateur Orientalist. He studied the publications of Rawlinson and Hincks and even published his own translations of some Assyrian texts. Having obtained somewhere an as yet unpublished copy of an inscription from the time of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I (1116–1076), he completed the translation and on March 17, 1857, sent it in a stamped envelope to the Royal Asiatic Society. At the same time, he proposed to invite Hinks and Rawlinson to prepare independent translations of the same text and also, in sealed form, present them to the Society in order to be able to compare three independent translations. The society did just that, sending an invitation also to Julis Oppert, who was in London at that time. All three accepted the offer, and two months later the seals on the four envelopes containing the translations were broken by a specially appointed committee of five members of the Royal Asiatic Society. A report was published which stated, among other things, that Rawlinson's and Hincks' translations were most similar, that Talbot's translation was vague and imprecise, and that Oppert's translation was heavily annotated and often differed greatly from the version of his English colleagues. On the whole the verdict was favorable to Assyriology; the similarity of the four translations was obvious, and the reliability of the decoding was confirmed.

Two years later, in 1859, Oppert published one of his most important scientific works, The Decipherment of Cuneiform Texts. This was such a clear, accessible and authoritative testimony of Assyriology and its achievements that all attacks ceased. Over the next decades, a number of scientists, especially in France, England and Germany, published articles, monographs and books in all areas of the new discipline: language, history, religion, culture, etc. The texts were copied and published in the thousands. Lists of signs, glossaries, dictionaries and grammatical reference books were compiled, and countless highly specialized articles on grammar, syntax and etymology were written. Thus, the study of the Assyrian language, first called Babylonian and now gradually renamed Akkadian - a term that owes its origin to the self-name of the Mesopotamians - developed and matured. The result was that now, in 1963, two independent multi-volume dictionaries are in the process of publication: the first, in English, is published by the Institute of Oriental Studies of the University of Chicago, the second - in German, under international patronage. This is the crown of more than a century of scientific accumulation.

Babylonian! Assyrian! Akkadian! And not a word about Sumer and the Sumerians, but the book is dedicated specifically to them. Unfortunately, until the middle of the last century, no one knew about the existence of the Sumerians and the Sumerian language. And we should follow step by step the path that led to the rather surprising and unexpected understanding that a people called the Sumerians once inhabited Mesopotamia. In 1850, Hinks made a message to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in which he expressed some doubts about the general assumption that cuneiform writing was invented by the Semites who inhabited Assyria and Babylonia, who used this writing. In Semitic languages, consonants are a stable element, and vowels are extremely variable. It therefore seems unnatural that the Semites invented a syllabic spelling system, where vowels and consonants are equally stable. An essential feature of the Semitic languages ​​is the difference between soft and hard palatal and dental, but the cuneiform syllabary does not adequately reflect this feature. Further, if cuneiform was invented by the Semites, there must be a direct relationship between the meanings of the syllabic marks and the Semitic words. However, such cases are extremely rare; it was obvious that the overwhelming number of syllabic meanings of cuneiform signs went back to words or elements that did not have a Semitic equivalent. And Hinks suspected that the cuneiform writing system was invented by some non-Semitic people who preceded the Semites of Babylonia.

Anyway, enough about Hinks and his suspicions. Two years later, in 1852, from a note published by Hinks, we learn that Rawlinson, having studied the syllabaries excavated at Kuyundzhik, came to the conclusion that they were bilingual, so that the Semitic Babylonian words in them explained the corresponding words of a completely new one, hitherto unknown language. He called this language Akkadian and classified it “as Scythian or Turkic.” Here we learn for the first time about the possibility of the existence of a non-Semitic people and a non-Semitic language in Mesopotamia. In 1853, Rawlinson himself gave a lecture to the Royal Asiatic Society, where he argued for the existence of monolingual cuneiform texts on bricks and tablets in some places in southern Babylonia, written in the “Scythian” language. Two years later, at a lecture at the same Society, he described in some detail the bilingual syllabaries of Kuyundzhik, believing that they “were neither more nor less than comparative alphabets, grammars and dictionaries of the Assyrian and Scythian dialects. The Babylonian Scythians, whose ethnic name is Akkadians, are probably the inventors of cuneiform.” It was these Akkadians, Rawlinson continued, who “built the primitive temples and capitals of Babylon, worshiping the same gods and inhabiting the same regions as their Semitic successors; but they seem to have different nomenclature, both mythological and geographical.” As for the language of these “Babylonian Scythians,” the Kuyunjik tablets, Rawlinson said, “provide volumes of comparative examples and literal translations.” The result of his studies of this “primitive” language in bilingual texts was the conclusion that “there is hardly any direct continuity between this primitive language and any of the existing dialects. The nominal system is somewhat closer to the Mongolian and Manchu types than to any other branch of the family of Turkic languages, but their vocabulary is either little or not similar at all.” In short, Rawlinson absolutely accurately asserted the existence of the Sumerians and their language, although he somewhat erroneously called them, first Babylonian Scythians, and then Akkadians - a term applied today to the Semites of this territory.

The correct name for the non-Semitic people who invented cuneiform writing is due to the genius of Julis Oppert, whose contribution to all aspects of Assyriology, especially to the study of the syllabaries, was outstanding.

On January 17, 1869, Oppert gave a lecture to the ethnographic and historical section of the French Society of Numismatics and Archeology, in which he declared that this people and their language should be called Sumerians, basing his conclusions on the title “King of Sumer and Akkad” found in inscriptions from early times. rulers; for, he quite rightly argued, the name Akkad was used to refer to the Semitic people of Assyria and Babylonia, therefore the name Sumer refers to the non-Semitic population. Oppert even went further with his statements in the lecture: his analysis of the structure of the Sumerian language led him to the conclusion that it was closely related to Turkish, Finnish and Hungarian - a brilliant insight into the structure of a language that, twenty years ago, did not exist for the scientific world.

The name "Sumerian" was not immediately accepted by most cuneiform scholars, and the term "Akkadian" was in use for several more decades. In fact, there was one famous Orientalist, Joseph Halévy, who, despite all evidence to the contrary, denied the very existence of the Sumerian people and language. Since the 1870s. and for more than three decades he published article after article insisting that no people but the Semites had ever possessed Babylon, and that the so-called Sumerian language was but an artificial invention of the Semites themselves, intended for hieratic and esoteric purposes. For a very short period, he was even supported by several venerable Assyriologists. But all this is now nothing more than a historical detail, because soon after Oppert's prescient conclusions regarding the non-Semitic origin of the people of Babylon and their language, excavations began at two points in southern Babylonia. These excavations established the Sumerians on the map: statues and steles told about their physical appearance, and countless tablets and inscriptions told about their political history, religion, economics and literature.

The first large-scale excavations of the Sumerian settlement began in 1877 in the area of ​​Tello, on the ruins of ancient Lagash, by the French under the leadership of Ernest de Sarzec. Between 1877 and 1900 de Sarzec carried out eleven campaigns and successfully recovered many statues, mainly Gudea, steles, of which the most significant are the Gudea cylinders and thousands of tablets, many of which date back to the Ur-Nanche dynasty. In 1884, the publication of a huge volume of Discoveries in Chaldea by Ernest de Sarzec was begun by Léon Husey in collaboration with the eminent epigraphists Arthur Amiot and François Toureau-Dangin. The French periodically resumed excavations in Lagash: from 1903 to 1909 under the leadership of Gaston Cros; from 1929 to 1931 - under the leadership of Henry de Genouillac and from 1931 to 1933 - Andre Parrot. In total, the French conducted 20 field campaigns in Lagash. The results are briefly summarized in Andre Parrot's most valuable reference book, Tello (1948), which also provides a complete detailed bibliography of all publications in one way or another related to these excavations.

The second major excavation of the Sumerian settlement was carried out by the University of Pennsylvania. This was the first American expedition of its kind in Mesopotamia. Throughout the 80s. XIX century In American university circles, there were discussions about the advisability of an American expedition to Iraq, where the British and French made such incredible discoveries. It was only in 1887 that John P. Peters, a professor of Hebrew at the University of Pennsylvania, managed to obtain moral and financial support from university and university officials to supply and support an archaeological expedition to Iraq. The choice fell on Nippur, one of the largest and most important hills of Iraq, where four long and grueling campaigns took place between 1889 and 1900 - first under the leadership of Peters, then J. Haynes (initially the expedition photographer) and finally , under the leadership of the famous Assyriologist H.V. Hilprecht, a former epigraphist on the first trip.

Difficulties and failures plagued the expedition. One young archaeologist died in the field, and there was not a year when one or another member of the group did not suffer a serious illness. Nevertheless, despite the obstacles, the excavations continued, and the expedition achieved enormous, in some ways even unique, results. The main achievements were concentrated in the field of writing. In the course of their work, the Nippur expedition found about thirty thousand tablets and fragments, most of which were written in the Sumerian language and whose age is estimated at more than two thousand years, from the second half of the 3rd to the last century of the 1st millennium BC. e. Publication of some materials began already in 1893 in accordance with Hilprecht’s long-term and long-term plan, where, in addition to himself, the participation of many scientists was expected. Not all planned volumes saw the light of day; As happens with many grandiose projects, unforeseen circumstances and difficulties arose that prevented its full implementation. But an impressive number of volumes nevertheless appeared, and these publications provided invaluable assistance to cuneiform researchers. This brings us back to the conversation about Sumerology and its development in the period following the discoveries of its three pioneers: Hincks, Rawlinson and Oppert.

Before the excavations at Lagash and Nippur, virtually all the source material for the study of the Sumerians and their language consisted of bilingual syllabaries and interlinear books found in the library of Ashurbanipal at the ruins of Nineveh, and then published in various sections of five weighty volumes entitled Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, edited by Rawlinson. But this material dates back to the 7th century. BC e., more than a millennium after the disappearance of the Sumerian people as a political unity and the Sumerian language as a living language. There were, of course, examples of writing from Sumerian sites available in Europe, but they were mostly a series of bricks, tablets and cylinders from the Sumerian and post-Sumerian periods that ended up in the British Museum and were of little substance. Excavations in Lagash and Nippur provided scientists with thousands of directly Sumerian inscriptions, which could now be attempted to be translated and interpreted using very rough grammatical rules and lexical data obtained from the material of Kuyunjik bilingual syllabaries and interlinear dictionaries. The vast majority of inscriptions from Lagash and Nippur were of an administrative, economic and legal nature, with inventories of all types and sizes, written obligations (receipts) and recipes, sales deeds, marriage contracts, wills and court decisions. And from these documents it was possible to get some idea of ​​the social and economic system of Sumerian society. These documents also contained hundreds of names of people, deities, and places that were of some value to the study of Sumerian religion. Even more valuable were the hundreds of oath texts on statues, steles, cones and tablets, which were fundamental to the study of Sumerian political history. Many lexical and grammatical texts, especially those found in Nippur, the predecessors of the later bilingual inscriptions from Kuyunjik, became invaluable material for the study of the Sumerian language. Finally, thousands of tablets and fragments containing Sumerian literary texts have been found in Nippur; and although they remained obscure for many decades after their discovery, Hilprecht, having familiarized himself with and recorded a large number of them, realized their significance for the history of religion and literature. It would not be an exaggeration to say that a direct consequence of the excavations in Lagash and Nippur was the possibility of publishing the epoch-making work of François Toureau-Dangin in 1905 (“Written Monuments of Sumer and Akkad”) and Arnaud Pöbel (“Fundamentals of Sumerian Grammar”) in 1923.

Of course, scientists built both of these works on the efforts and contributions of their predecessors and contemporaries; in science there is no other way to develop productive scientific activity. Let's name just a few of the most prominent personalities. This is the Englishman A.H. Says, who in 1871 published the first monolingual Sumerian document, namely the Shulgi inscription, containing twelve lines, and also pointed out in a detailed philological commentary several important features of the Sumerian language. This includes François Lenormand with his monumental Akkadian Studies (Essays), begun in 1873. There is Paul Haupt, who copied many Sumerian bilingual and monolingual inscriptions in the British Museum and made significant contributions to the study of Sumerian grammar and lexicography. Next, P.E. Brunnov: he compiled a list of Sumerian signs and their readings and, based on the bilingual tablets available at that time, created the most complete dictionary of Sumerian words, which has been of fundamental importance for all lexicographers since its publication in 1905. to this day, although it has been supplemented by a number of glossaries prepared by other scholars to keep up with the times. This is J.D. Prince, who published the first substantial Sumerian lexicon in 1905; and Friedrich Delitzsch, who compiled a Sumerian grammar and a Sumerian glossary based on the roots of words rather than on individual signs and rules for reading them.

But it was Touro-Dangin’s “Written Monuments of Sumer and Akkad” published in 1905 and the translation into German that appeared two years later under the title “Die sumerischen und akkadischen Königsinschriften” (“Inscriptions of the Sumerian and Akkadian kings”) that turned out to be a turning point in the development of science about the Sumerians. This is a brilliant compendium of direct translations and laconic notes, a masterful distillation of the accumulated knowledge of Sumerology at that time, completely devoid of the personal, original contribution of Touro-Dangin; and even after five decades of cuneiform study, this work remains unsurpassed and is likely to remain so. Pöbel's "Fundamentals of Sumerian Grammar" became for Sumerian grammar what Touro-Dangin's book was for political history and religion. Based on a painstaking, thorough, comprehensive and meticulous study of Sumerian texts, both bilingual and monolingual, from all periods of the “classical” language of the 3rd millennium BC. e. up to the late “literary” Sumerian language of the 1st millennium BC. e. (translations of the inscriptions from the 1st to the 35th appendices are mainly based on these studies), Pöbel's Grammar is distinguished by its solid logic in identifying the fundamental principles and rules of Sumerian grammar, illustrating them to the point and, if possible, as completely as possible. The result of independent research by Pöbel, as well as other scientists, especially Adam Falkenstein and Thorkild Jacobsen, was a number of additions and clarifications, and future research in due time will undoubtedly result in modifications of some provisions of the Grammar. But on the whole, Pöbel's work has stood the test of time and, despite his constant passion for not always justified changes in terminology and nomenclature, will long remain the cornerstone of all constructive efforts in the field of Sumerian grammar.

Pöbel's grammar, however, is written from a logical rather than pedagogical perspective, so it cannot be used by beginners who would like to learn the Sumerian language on their own. A small book that is quite suitable for this purpose is “A Book for Reading in the Sumerian Language” by S.J. Gadda; however, it was first published in 1924 and urgently requires a modern edition. Another pedagogically useful grammar is Anton Deimel's Sumerian Grammar, republished in 1939, although it suffers greatly from an artificial approach to the problems of translating Sumerian texts. In the field of lexicography, the Sumerian Lexicon by the same author, based mainly on a compilation of the works of Brunnow and other authors, is indispensable for students, although it must be used very critically and discriminately. The most promising fundamental work on lexicography currently in preparation is “Materials on the Sumerian Lexicon: Dictionary and Reference Tables” by Benno Landsberger, head of the Assyriologists. Eight volumes, comprising the most up-to-date selections of the latest syllabaries, dictionaries and lexical bilingual reference books, as well as their Sumerian primary sources, have already appeared under the patronage of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, an institution to which cuneiform scholars are very grateful for their tutelage of research in Sumerology during the last fifty years .

Let us leave Sumerian linguistic research and turn again to archeology in order to briefly summarize the results of some of the most important excavations on Sumerian settlements, so auspiciously begun by Lagash and Nippur. In 1902–1903 A German expedition led by Robert Koldewey worked in Fara, ancient Shuruppak, the homeland of the hero of the flood legend, Ziusudra, and discovered a large number of administrative, economic and lexical texts dating back to the 25th century. BC e.; thus they are older than the Ur-Nansh dynasty inscriptions found at Lagash. Economic texts included the sale of houses and lands, which pointed to the existence of private property in Sumer, a feature of Sumerian life that had long been a source of contention among Orientalists. Lexical texts from Fara were also of particular value for the history of civilization, since they pointed to the existence of Sumerian schools already in the 25th century. BC e., and possibly earlier. Archaeologists also discovered a number of private and public buildings, tombs, a huge number of vases made of stone, metal and terracotta and many cylinder seals. In 1930, an expedition from the University of Pennsylvania led by Eric Schmidt returned to Fara, but the new finds were no different from those that had appeared 30 years earlier. I, then young and inexperienced, was lucky enough to be an epigraphist on this expedition. The texts of many tablets from Fara were studied and published by Anton Deimelm and the French Sumerologist R. Gestin.

In 1903, an expedition from the University of Chicago led by E.J. Banks conducted excavations in Bismaya, at the site of the capital of Lugallannemundu called Adab. Here, too, a large number of ancient tablets were found, similar in form and content to those found at Fara. Banks also excavated the remains of several temples and palaces, numerous written votives, and a statue called Lugaldalu dating back to around 2400 BC. e. The main publication with the results of this expedition was a volume of the Institute of Oriental Studies, containing texts copied by D.D. Lakenbill, which are of particular value for the history of Sumer during the era of Sargon and the pre-Sargon period.

From 1912 to 1914, a French expedition led by the outstanding cuneiform scholar Henri de Genouillac carried out excavations in Kish, the city that was the first to be granted a kingdom after the flood. The First World War put an end to this work, but in 1923 an Anglo-American expedition, led by another famous cuneiform specialist, Stephen Langdon, returned to Kish and worked there for ten consecutive seasons. Archaeologists have uncovered several monumental buildings, ziggurats, cemeteries and found many tablets. A number of publications were published by the Field Museum on archaeological materials and by the University of Oxford on epigraphic materials. A small contingent of Kish's expedition also carried out quick work at the nearby site of Yemdet Nasr, on a hill that concealed the ruins of a city whose ancient name is still unknown. During these rather minor excavations in a small area, archaeologists were lucky enough to discover several hundred tablets and fragments with signs of a semi-pictographic nature. The tablets dated back to around 2800 BC. e. and thus turned out to be the earliest Sumerian writings found at that time, presented in sufficient volume. These tablets, copied and published by Stephen Langdon, marked a turning point in Sumerian epigraphic research.

We came to a place called Warqa by the modern Arabs and Uruk by the ancient Sumerians and Akkadians. This is the biblical Erech, and today the most systematic and scientific excavations are being carried out here, which can rightfully be called fundamental for, so to speak, “stratigraphic” studies of the history and culture of Sumer.

Systematic excavations were first started here by a German expedition led by Julius Jordan. After the inevitable break caused by the First World War, the expedition returned there in 1928 and continued work until the Second World War. During this period, the expedition staff included many distinguished epigraphists, including Adam Falkenstein, a prolific and prominent scholar in the field of Sumerology for the past thirty years. It was the Jericho expedition that created something like a comparative dating of all Sumerian finds, digging a hole about 20 meters deep in a certain area, descending to virgin soils and carefully studying and sorting finds from numerous layers and periods, starting with the earliest settlements and ending with the mid-3rd century. millennium BC e. The oldest Sumerian monumental structures dating back to around 3000 BC were exposed. e. Among the numerous smaller finds is an almost meter-high alabaster vase decorated with cult scenes, very characteristic of early Sumerian rites and ritual; a life-size marble female head was also found, dating back to around 2800 BC. e., is evidence that early Sumerian sculpture as a whole reached unprecedented creative heights. More than a thousand pictographic tablets were discovered in one of the early temple buildings, making it possible to trace the cuneiform writing system back through the centuries, right down to its earliest stages. Many of these tablets have been published in a lavish volume prepared with great care by Adam Falkenstein after detailed research. In 1954, the German expedition returned to Erech and continued to carry out a careful and methodical excavation that will undoubtedly bring Erech - the city of the great Sumerian heroes - the glory of the cornerstone of Mesopotamian archeology in all its aspects: architecture, art, history, religion and epigraphy.

From the biblical Erech we move to the biblical Ur, or Urim, as the Sumerians themselves called it, a city in which excavations were carried out from 1922 to 1934 with the skill, accuracy and imagination of Sir Leonard Woolley. Woolley returned more than once to describe his discovery at Ur, both for professionals and amateur amateurs, but we will mention here only his last work, 1954, Excavations at Ur. Thanks to him, the words “tombs”, “ziggurats” and “flood” become almost everyday. Less known, but no less significant, is the scientific contribution of the epigraphists of the expedition, Gadd, Leon Legrain, E. Burrows, who copied, studied and published the main body of written documents found in Ur, documents that shed new light on the history, economy, culture of not only Ur, but also Sumer as a whole.

Near Ur, just four miles to the north, is a sloping hill known as El Obeid, which, despite its size, played a significant role in Mesopotamian archaeology. First explored by H.R. Hall, an employee of the British Museum, in 1919, and later methodically opened by Leonard Woolley, it turned out to be part of a prehistoric mound containing evidence of the presence of the first immigrants to the area. These people, codenamed Obeids (from the name of the El Obeid hill), produced and used special monochrome-colored objects and objects made of flint and obsidian, which were later discovered in the deepest layers of several Mesopotamian excavations. Woolley also discovered here a small temple to the goddess Ninhursag, which, in addition to providing a visual representation of what a small provincial temple was like in the mid-3rd millennium, proved beyond doubt that the so-called First Dynasty of Ur, perceived by most scholars as legendary, actually existed; this discovery thus helped to reframe the almost universal skepticism regarding the all-important King List, which in turn provided a clearer picture of Sumerian political history.

At the extreme northeastern point of Sumer, east of the Tigris and some distance from the beaten path by the standards of Sumerology, lie several hills that attracted the attention of Henry Frankfort, one of the world's most famous archaeologists, a thoughtful art historian and a philosophically oriented scientist, whose timeless death was an irreparable loss for oriental studies. Between 1930 and 1936 he carried out careful, methodical excavations of the hills of Asmar, Hafaya and Agrab and unearthed temples, palaces and private houses, tablets, cylinder seals and a most impressive series of sculptures, some dating back to 2700 BC. e. - only about a century younger than the famous head of Erech. Among Frankfort's employees were Piñas Delugas, an archaeologist of great experience, now director of the museum at the Institute of Oriental Studies; Seton Lloyd, who became an adviser to the Iraqi Antiquities Authority and was involved in excavating the largest number of Sumerian sites of any living archaeologist; Thorkild Jacobsen, a scientist of rare talent, equally versed in archeology and epigraphy. The results of these excavations appear periodically in a series of excellent publications by the Institute of Oriental Studies, which are remarkable for their detailed and superbly illustrated material on architecture, art and writing.

From 1933 to 1956, the Louvre Expedition, interrupted only once during the Second World War, led by André Parrot, the archaeologist who in a sense turned the last page of the book on Lagash, carried out excavations in Marie, a city located in the middle reaches of the Euphrates, to west of the territory considered directly Sumerian. And the results were incredible and unexpected. There is a city there, the population of which from the earliest times to the present day has been Semites, judging by the fact that all the tablets found in Mari are of Akkadian origin; Nevertheless, culturally the city is difficult to distinguish from Sumerian: the same type of temples, ziggurats, sculpture, inlay, even on the figurine of the singer is scratched the truly Sumerian name Ur-Nansh, the same name that was borne by the founder of the oldest known Lagash dynasty. The leading epigraphist of the Louvre expedition was the Belgian scientist, cuneiform specialist, Georges Dossin, who, together with Parrot, published a particularly significant multi-volume volume on the written monuments of Marie; Many French and Belgian scientists are also involved in this project. Once again the French, with Lagache and Marie to their credit, have the upper hand in the archeology and exploration of Mesopotamia.

During the war years, when foreign expeditions were irrelevant and practically impossible, the Iraqi Antiquities Authority, which from a small collection has grown into an excellent representation of archaeologists, epigraphists, recorders and restorers and which maintains the archeology of Mesopotamia at a good scientific level, equipped three independent expeditions, timely and important to study Sumer. In Uker Hill, the remains of a city whose ancient name is still unknown, an expedition led by Fuad Safar discovered in the period 1940–1941. the first known Sumerian temple to have paintings, colored frescoes covering the interior walls and altar. Several Obeid houses and a number of archaic tablets were also found. At Tell Harmal, a small hill about six miles east of Baghdad, Taxa Baqir, then director of the Iraqi Museum, excavated from 1945 to 1949 and, to the surprise of scholars around the world, found more than two thousand tablets, including which contained perfectly preserved “textbooks” on vocabulary and mathematics, as well as a temple. And in the southern tip of Sumer, in ancient Eridu, the abode of Enki, the Sumerian god of wisdom, Fuad Safar conducted excavations in 1946–1949, discovering there the oldest Obeid pottery, a cemetery and two palaces from the mid-3rd millennium BC. e. The Temple of Enki made it possible to trace the history of the creation of temple buildings from the earliest construction phase, approximately 4000 BC. e. Sadly, not a single tablet was found in Eridu - a strange circumstance for a city where the supreme deity was the god of wisdom.

In the post-war years, only two major foreign excavation expeditions took place in Sumer. The Germans returned to Erech. The Americans, through the efforts of mainly Thorkild Jacobsen, headed to Nippur and over the following seasons cleared the temple of Enlil, along the way they uncovered more than a thousand tablets and fragments (about five hundred of them literary works) and began clearing the temple of the goddess Inanna. But the future of Sumerian archeology in Iraq is now concentrated in the hands of the Iraqis themselves, and there is every reason to believe that Iraqi scientists and archaeologists will not back down and neglect the history of their distant ancestors, who did so much not only for Iraq, but for humanity as a whole.

This concludes our brief overview of the history of decipherment and archeology associated with Sumer and the Sumerians. Before turning to the history of Sumer, the subject of our next chapter, the reader should at least have a basic understanding of the problem that most concerns Near Eastern archaeologists and historians: the problem of chronology. This question could not be resolved using the carbon dating method; due to purely physical and mechanical factors, the results of this method often turned out to be ambiguous and misleading, not to mention that in the case of Lower Mesopotamia the margin of error is too high to rest on.

In general, the original dates assigned to Sumerian rulers and monuments have been grossly inflated. To some extent, this was due to the understandable tendency of archaeologists to claim the great antiquity of their finds. But this was mainly due to the available sources, especially several dynastic lists compiled by the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians themselves; they were often perceived as a chronological list of dynasties of rulers who are now known from other sources to be contemporaries in whole or in part. Since there is still no consensus on this matter, dating for Sumer is now greatly underestimated compared to earlier historical monographs and popular publications, sometimes by half a thousand years.

Two key dates for Sumerian chronology are the end of the Third Dynasty of Ur, when the Sumerians lost their political dominance in Mesopotamia, and the beginning of the reign of Hammurabi in Babylon, when, despite all efforts, the Sumerians ceased to be a single political, ethnic and linguistic entity. The latest date, as is now generally accepted, is approximately 1750 BC. e. with an error of fifty years. As to the time interval between this date and the end of the Third Dynasty of Ur, there are many written originals to reasonably state that it was approximately 195 years. Thus, the end of the Third Dynasty of Ur can be dated to 1945 BC. e. give or take fifty years. Counting back from this date and relying on a sufficient amount of historical information, chronological tables and synchronic evidence of various kinds, we come to approximately 2500 BC. e., to a ruler named Mesilim. Moreover, the entire chronology is entirely dependent on archaeological, stratigraphic and ethnographic interventions and inferences of various kinds, as well as carbon tests, which, as already stated, have not proven to be the decisive and definitive method of assessment as intended.

Centuries passed. And each of them left man-made traces on the land of Mesopotamia. They are in the cuneiform writing of “clay books”, in ruined palaces, the remains of the walls of fortress-cities, and religious temples.

Centuries passed. And Mother Earth reliably hid the traces of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia in the hills. These hills, like wrinkles of historical memory, appeared before many generations of oriental researchers. The hills are the guardians of the memory of thousands of years: Muqayyar, Al-Uhaimir, Warqa and many others. Gradually, the secrets kept in them became known, first to scientists, and then to a wide circle of readers. In them, archaeologists and scientists found evidence of a distant civilization; from clay tablets they learned how the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia lived, about their worries, sorrows and joys, about the daily struggle for their daily bread, how they worked, had fun and spent their free time, if any. Huge mounds kept in their “womb” evidence of the memory of legends, myths, epics of the Sumerians, their literature, which had the widest influence on the compilers of the Bible and which some try to present only as the work of one ancient Jewish people, and others as a gift from heaven , creations of the Almighty.

Excavations of these mounds in the south of Mesopotamia began in the 12th century. Europeans continued this work in the 17th century.

Beginning of the 17th century. The Italian traveler Pietro della Valle reached the southern part of Mesopotamia. In front of him was a hill, then unknown. Later the Arabs began to call him Muqayyar. Pietro della Valle did not yet know that the remains of the biblical city of Ur were hidden under this hill. The 17th and 18th centuries pass.

In 1818, the English artist Robert C. Porter sketched the ruins at the excavations of Al-Uhaimir Hill. The artist had no idea that his drawings contained the remains of the Sumerian city of Kish.

In 1885, the English scientist and traveler J. Frazer, together with his compatriot doctor J. Ross, explored Varku Hill, Johi and Mukaiyar Hill.

Messages from travelers and scientists about hills - guardians of the secrets of antiquity - aroused the burning interest of Europeans.

In the second half of the 19th century, the French archaeologist E. de Sarzec found the ancient Sumerian city of Lagash in the town of Tell and the remains of the material culture of this city of Sumer. Among the finds, works of art and numerous clay tablets with wedge-shaped texts stand out.

At the beginning of the 20th century, scientists found and excavated the largest city of ancient Sumer - Ur. In this city, scientists discovered two tombs - as it later turned out, the Ur king Meskalamdug and Queen Shubad, who lived in the 2nd millennium BC. e. A major Soviet ancient orientalist, Professor V. Avdiev, wrote that “... a large number of highly artistic jewelry items were discovered in them, in particular, a wooden harp decorated with gold, silver, lapis lazuli and a golden bull’s head, a richly ornamented checkers board, a silver a model of a boat with oars, numerous decorations, vessels, weapons and a whole range of other objects made of gold and silver and richly decorated. A large part of the city dating back to the reign of Rimsin (XVII century BC) was carefully excavated and completely examined. A number of streets, alleys, and squares with the remains of numerous buildings were discovered here, which gave a vivid picture of the life of the ancient Sumerian city. A large number of cuneiform documents dating mainly to the time of Rimsin were found in the southeastern part of the city.

In 1912, a German archaeological expedition began work in the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk. It was headed by the scientist Yu. Jordan. Intensive and full of hard work lasted six months. The First World War was approaching. Relations between the states became tense, and archaeologists were forced to interrupt their successful search. Over the course of six months, they discovered several temples, household items, art, and culture in this city.

Only in 1928 did they resume their work, which lasted 11 seasons. And again the war - the Second World War - did not allow the archaeological excavations to be completed.

This time, the biggest success was a huge temple dedicated to the main god of the Sumerian pantheon, the sky god Anu. Then the "white temple" dating back to 2800 BC was discovered. e., and the temple of the goddess Nanna, which existed before the beginning of our era. This is how the famous Polish Sumerologist M. Belitsky wrote about these excavations in the book “The Forgotten World of the Sumerians”: “The earth revealed to scientists the secret of powerful city defensive walls of the first half of the 3rd millennium. Here, in Uruk, the most ancient tablets known to us with a pattern were found writing, flat and cylindrical seals, as well as, in less deep layers, tablets of a later time, seals and rollers covered with inscriptions, various signs, and much more. The surviving stones of the side walls told scientists about the colossal scope of the construction work of the rulers of the third dynasty of Ur. Among the numerous utensils, the famous sacrificial alabaster vase with three rows of bas-reliefs was found. Under the weight of the collapsed building, it split into fifteen parts.

Researchers believe that the vase was damaged in ancient times and that Sumerian craftsmen many thousands of years ago collected its fragments and fastened them with copper hoops. There was no shortage of small objects - figurines of animals and birds, products made of clay and stone, as well as metal. However, the most valuable find - even in comparison with the alabaster vase and ancient seals - turned out to be an amazingly beautiful marble female head."

In 1889, an American expedition led by J. Peters and G. Gilprecht began work at the supposed location of the ancient Sumerian city of Nippur. In addition to them, the expedition included H. Haynes - a photographer, a business executive - and three more archaeologists. There were several hills in the excavation area of ​​the city of Nippur. Archaeologists numbered them and started from hill No. 1. In it they found the ruins of the royal palace; in hill No. 5 they discovered a whole library of “clay books.” But at this time, inter-tribal fighting among the Arabs unexpectedly broke out. And the archaeologists were forced to leave the excavation site.

Only a year later, two from the former group, J. Peters and H. Haynes, decided to return to Mesopotamia. This time, archaeologists discovered and carefully examined a ziggurat (a stepped tower for religious purposes), and in Hill No. 10 they found a temple and 2 thousand “clay books.”

Americans came here several times and each time they found something new. Among the finds were more than 20 thousand “clay books”. As it turned out, the Sumerian city of Nippur was located here in ancient times.

In 1948, after a long break, American archaeologists returned to Nippur. This time they found ancient religious figurines, court records, and tablets with economic records. Later, in 1961, an American expedition found in one place, called a “treasure,” more than 50 figurines, from which it was possible to determine the religious traditions of the local population - the Sumerians.

Archaeologists from different countries also paid attention to other areas of Mesopotamia. Among them were the Al-Ukhaymir hills, which were visited by the English clerk J. Buckingham in 1816. He expressed his assumptions to the artist R. Porter that ancient Babylon, the capital of Babylonia, was located on this site. R. Porter went to the indicated place and easily found “clay books” in the hills, fragments of an alabaster slab covered with cuneiform, and part of the stele of the Babylonian king Hammurabi.

R. Porter was a talented artist, and we owe to his brushes the paintings and sketches that he left behind of these ancient hills and views dating back to that distant time. His sketches were kept in a number of museums in England and in private collections, introduced Europeans to the Ancient Mesopotamia and paved the way for further archaeological excavations of the city of Kish, the treasures of which were hidden for centuries by the Al-Ukhaymir hill. Years passed before archaeologists began systematic excavations.

This was started by the French archaeologists F. Fresnel and J. Oppert. They worked here for only seven days, but discovered a brick pavement from the era of Nebuchadnezzar II, numerous household items, culture, and art. The expedition was subject to frequent attacks by Bedouin Arabs and stopped excavations.

The longest expedition, lasting ten seasons, was the 1923 expedition of US archaeologists led by Langdon and McKay.

M. Belitsky wrote that “the focus of all ten expeditions organized by this group was the eastern hill with ruins dating back to ancient times. During excavations on hill “A”, a famous palace made of flat-convex brick was discovered, presumably built During the reign of King Mesilim, the palace was well preserved. Archaeologists were able to accurately reproduce its plan. Fragments of staircases, numerous halls and rooms of various significance, as well as frescoes and reliefs were found in the ruins. The palace was probably destroyed. abandoned by the inhabitants in the early dynastic period and never rebuilt. The burials also date back to the same time: perhaps the ruins (or the empty palace) were used as a cemetery. Many different objects were discovered in the tombs: copper tools, jewelry made of pearls, gold, etc. silver, seals made of limestone, spar, lapis lazuli and red ironstone.

In one of the burials, archaeologists found a clay model of a two-wheeled cart, and in several others - ostrich eggs. Interesting material was provided by excavations of the western hill, where a so-called cemetery with tombs reminiscent in design of the tombs of Ur was discovered. In some of them traces of collective burials were found. In the deeper layers, clay products characteristic of the Jem-det-Hacpa era were found."

Great success fell to the lot of the English archaeologist D. Taylor, who began digging in Mukaiyar, the city we talked about above. He, like other archaeologists who worked on this hill, was haunted by sandstorms, the drying heat of the desert, and fine sand that got into his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. He seemed to be omnipresent. Strong desert winds sometimes helped archaeologists. For example, on one side of the hill the wind blew away a sand layer, and D. Taylor saw the walls of destroyed buildings. Belitsky wrote in this regard: “There could be no doubt - in front of him was a huge city, immersed in a deep, eternal sleep, a city that he had to wake up. Where to start the search? An experienced eye from many hills chooses one, located in the northern part of this area. Its outlines resemble a three-story building, and the third floor, as it is easy to see, is shifted by 5-6 meters in relation to the second. Even the columns and stairs running along the slope are visible. Remnants of walls are gradually emerging. , columns, stairs. Presumably, a huge palace “hall” once towered above the third floor. First of all, Taylor is trying to find inscriptions about who built this temple. The Babylonians usually placed such inscriptions on the outer corners of the walls. And he finds all four. In front of him is the temple of the god Nanna of the city of Ur. The news soon spread throughout the world: the biblical Ur was found. These were the years of the greatest archaeological discoveries, when people seemed to have become accustomed to sensations. But such a message was difficult to believe. From the inscriptions it also followed that the temple was restored to the glory of the moon god Nanna by the Babylonian king Nabonidus, that its construction began by King Ur-Nanna and his son King Shulga, that in the years preceding the reign of Nabonidus, many kings built the “house of Nanna - Sin”.

When the walls of the ziggurat were opened, Taylor decided to dig a deep shaft all the way to the foundation. These excavations to the very “bottom” helped to find several jars with “clay books”. Each “book” was in a clay envelope to protect it from shock. The contents of the “books” told archaeologists about the glorious past of this city, its history, construction work, correspondence between local kings and foreign rulers.

Everything was significant. But suddenly interest in Ur disappeared as unexpectedly as it had arisen. Archaeologists returned here only in 1918. The group was led by R. Campbell-Thompson.

In 1919 he was replaced by the Englishman G. Hall. Before he had time to finish his research, the explorer L. Woolley arrived in ancient Ur with his expedition, spending 12 seasons here.

The British did not want to give their initiative to anyone. The point was that in the last century and in the 20th, all museums in the world sought to obtain antiquities of Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria that were unique in their value.

This especially applies to the 19th century. M. Belitsky noted that in this regard, “governments and state museums conducting scientific research willingly subsidized archaeological expeditions. Diplomats, military men and company employees rushed for treasures; they managed to collect a certain number of historical monuments and documents. However, this excitement caused considerable harm science, because the participants of the expeditions were mainly busy searching for objects that could impress the public. The nature of the search in that period, the barbaric treatment of invaluable archaeological material, the weakness of archeology as a science, the lack of specialists and developed research methods - all this can be done. explain the many gaps that exist in our knowledge of the Sumerians."

But all this was only a certain prelude to the discoveries of other cities, to the finds of unique antiquities of Sumer. These discoveries were made by archaeological specialists, as well as diplomats, architects and simply travelers; they allowed us to take a closer look at past centuries of human history and expand our ideas about the world of Ancient Mesopotamia.

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Ur is one of the oldest Sumerian city-states of the ancient southern Mesopotamia (Mesopotamia), existed from the 4th millennium to the 4th century BC. e. Ur was located in southern Babylonia, south of modern Tell el-Muqayyar in Iraq, near Nasiriyah, on the west bank of the Euphrates River. One of the first Europeans to visit the mound above the city was the Italian Pietro della Valle in 1625, who discovered bricks with cuneiform writing here.

The first excavations of Ur were carried out in 1854 by D. Taylor, an employee of the British consulate in Basra, for the British Museum. The ruins of the temple of the local god Sin were discovered, as well as interesting necropolises, with burials either in round coffins, or under brick vaults, or in clay vessels. In 1918, R. Campbell-Thompson conducted excavations in Ur, and in 1919−22. — G. R. Hall

The most extensive excavations of the city began in 1922 under the direction of Sir Leonard Woolley. 42-year-old Woolley led a joint American-English expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, which received significant funds for the excavations of Ur. Woolley dug there for thirteen years, employing up to 400 workers. But the city turned out to be so large and the cultural layer so deep that the expedition was able to excavate only a small part of the hill during this time, and reached the lower layers in a tiny area. The excavation site was a very deep pit tapering downward. Among Woolley's discoveries, which thundered throughout the world, are the tomb of Queen Shubad, the standard of war and peace with the oldest images of war chariots, and the first stringed musical instruments known to scientists. Most of the exhibits went to the British Museum. Also, under the leadership of Woolley, the majestic ziggurat at Ur was freed from thousands of years of drift.

The most numerous and interesting monuments uncovered by excavations date back to the reign of the I and III dynasties of Ur. The reign of the First Dynasty (XXV century BC) dates back to 16 royal tombs, in which numerous examples of luxurious utensils made of gold, silver, alabaster, lapis lazuli, obsidian and other materials were found, sometimes using mosaic techniques .

2 Lagash

In 1877, French Vice-Consul Ernest de Sarzec arrived in the Iraqi city of Basra. Like many other diplomats of that time working in the Middle East, he was passionately interested in antiquities and devoted all his free time to exploring the near and far surroundings of Basra. From the local population, he heard stories about bricks with strange signs that were often found in the Tello tract, located north of Basra.

Arriving at the site, Sarzek began excavations. They continued for several years and were crowned with success. Under a whole complex of sloughed clay hills, Sarzek discovered the ruins of Lagash, and most importantly, a huge, well-systematized archive, consisting of more than 20 thousand cuneiform tablets that had lain in the ground for almost four millennia.

As it turned out, Lagash was in many ways atypical for the cities of Sumer: it was a cluster of settlements surrounding the previously established main core of the city. A whole gallery of sculptures of the city's rulers was discovered in Lagash, including the now famous group of sculptural portraits of the ruler Gudea. From the inscriptions carved on them and from the texts of clay tablets, scientists learned the names of dozens of kings and other prominent people of that time who lived in the 3rd millennium BC. e.

In 1903, French archaeologist Gaston Croy continued excavations at Lagash. In 1929-1931, Henri de Genillac worked here, and then Andre Parrot for two more years.

3 Nippur

Nippur is one of the oldest cities of Sumer, located on the Euphrates, south of the branch of the Iturungal tributary. Nippur was a sacred city for the ancient Sumerians; there was a temple of the main god of the Sumerians, Enlil.

In 1889, an American expedition led by J. Peters and G. Gilprecht began work at the proposed location of Nippur. In addition to them, the expedition included H. Haynes - a photographer, a business executive - and three more archaeologists. There were several hills in the excavation area of ​​the city of Nippur. Archaeologists numbered them and started from hill No. 1. In it they found the ruins of the royal palace, in hill No. 5 they found a whole library of “clay books.” But at this time, inter-tribal fighting among the Arabs unexpectedly broke out. And the archaeologists were forced to leave the excavation site.

Only a year later, two from the former group, J. Peters and H. Haynes, decided to return to Mesopotamia. This time, archaeologists discovered and carefully examined the ziggurat, and in hill No. 10 they found a temple and 2 thousand “clay books.”

In 1948, after a long break, American archaeologists returned to Nippur. This time they found ancient religious figurines, court records, and tablets with economic records. Later, in 1961, an American expedition found in one place, called the “treasure,” more than 50 figurines, from which the religious traditions of the local population could be determined.

4 Eridu

Eridu is one of the oldest cities in Sumer. According to Sumerian mythology, this is the very first city on Earth. The first archaeological work in Eris was carried out in 1855 by John Taylor. He outlined a vast pentagonal platform, surrounded by a brick wall and equipped with a staircase, in the middle of which there are the remains of a multi-story tower.

Further series of excavations followed in 1918–1920 and 1946–1949, organized by the Iraqi Department of Antiquities. R. Campbell Thompson, Fuad Safar and Seton Lloyd took part in the expeditions. Archaeologists were attracted by the legend that Eridu existed before the flood. It turned out that the earliest of the open temples was built at the turn of the 5th millennium BC. e.

During the excavations, a ziggurat was discovered, mud houses and public buildings were discovered, as well as the ruins of the foundations of repeatedly erected temples, built on the site of earlier sanctuaries on platforms in the form of rectangular rooms (they were built from mud bricks), including a temple (the size of room) of the first settlers and the temple of Ea with the remains of sacrifices - fish bones. The remains of the royal palace were also discovered. In the discovered necropolis of Eridu of Ubeid times, there were about 1000 graves made of adobe with funeral equipment, food, and utensils. Religious objects, ceramics, tools, etc. were also found.

Temples at the site of shrine worship were recreated and rebuilt over the centuries. Archaeologists outlined 18 horizons and identified 12 temples, which were regularly rebuilt and restored in the same place.

5 Borsippa

Borsippa is a Sumerian city located 20 km southwest of Babylon. Borsippa is famous for the remains of a large ziggurat, the height of which even today is about 50 meters, which has long been mistaken for the famous Tower of Babel.

The first excavations of the Borsippa ziggurat began in the mid-19th century by Henry Ravlinson. In 1901-1902, Robert Koldewey conducted excavations there. In 1980, Austrian excavations began in Borsippa, which concentrated on the study of the Temple of Ezida and the ziggurat. Work was interrupted during the Iraq wars, but was resumed again and again. During the excavations, many legal tablets and a number of literary and astronomical texts were found. They belong mainly to the later periods, beginning with the Chaldean dynasty.

100 Greats Series: One Hundred Great Treasures

NADEZHDA ALEKSEEVNA IONINA

GOLDEN GOAT FROM URA

In the 3rd millennium BC, the Sumerian city of Ur was one of the largest centers of civilization, which was located on the territory of modern Iraq. In its heyday, Ur was a populous city with magnificent temples, palaces, squares and public buildings, and its inhabitants (both men and women) loved to adorn themselves with jewelry.

Archaeological excavations began there in the 1920s. The joint expedition of employees of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania was led by the English archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who devoted more than five years to the study of this area.

Over the course of many centuries, countless priceless works of art and treasures were stolen from the tombs of Ur, and yet the expedition of L. Woolley managed to find two tombs that were not disturbed by robbers, the finds of which created a sensation in the world. An unexpected and striking picture of a complex funeral ritual appeared before the eyes of the expedition members.

In the corner of a huge pit (about 10 meters deep) a stone crypt was built in which the body of the deceased ruler was placed. Several close associates remained with him, who were also killed before being placed in the crypt. Then, to the bottom of a huge tomb covered with mats, along an inclined slope, those who voluntarily went with the late king to the afterlife descended: the priests who led the entire funeral ritual, military leaders with insignia, ladies from the court harem - in luxurious clothes and precious headdresses, servants, musicians, slaves...

Following them came carts drawn by donkeys or oxen, and bringing up the rear were warriors who stood guard at the entrance to the tomb. All participants in the funeral procession took the places reserved for them at the bottom of the grave ditch, and after the final sacred rite, each drank a cup of deadly drink and plunged into eternal sleep.

As a result of numerous excavations, gold and silver figurines, dishes, weapons and inlaid jewelry were recovered from one of the tombs. Products made of precious metals found in the tombs of the rulers of Ur testify to the high skill of Sumerian jewelers back in the middle of the 20th century BC. By this time, the craftsmen of the Southern Mesopotamia had already perfectly mastered the technique of processing gold and silver, knew how to make alloys from them, mint, forge and inlay them with colored stones, decorate them with grain and the finest filigree lace.

Precious metals were brought here by caravans from Iran, Asia Minor, and the Armenian Highlands, and lapis lazuli from the Badakhshan deposit in the Pamirs. Sumerian jewelers had a great sense of the natural characteristics of the material and brought out its beauty in their products with great taste.

One of the masterpieces of Sumerian jewelry is a figurine depicting a goat standing on its hind legs near a sacred tree. With his front legs he rests against a tree trunk, and his entire figure reaches fifty centimeters in height.

There were two such figurines, and they were found in the most grandiose tomb in the entire necropolis of Ur. One of the figurines is now on display in the British National Museum, the other is kept in the University Museum of Philadelphia. Scientists believe that these golden goats symbolize some very ancient myth, the content of which has not reached us, but at one time it was apparently widely known.

Goat figurines supported a special table for sacrifices. Inside, the goat has a wooden base coated with a layer of bitumen, on top of which the outer shell was then applied. The head, body and legs of the goat are bound with gold leaf, inlaid with lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl. In this way, the ancient masters highlighted his protruding shoulder blades, as well as his eyes, beard and twisted horns. The goat's belly is made of silver plate, and all other details are skillfully made, for example, the threads of wool on the back and sides are cut from small engraved pieces of shells stuck into bitumen.

The stand of the figurine itself is decorated with silver stripes and red and pink mosaics. The golden tree, to which the goat's front hooves are chained with silver chains, raises high its curved branches with graceful flowers and leaves. The color harmony of shining gold, beloved by Sumerian artists, with the cold shimmer of blue lapis lazuli and the delicate tints of mother-of-pearl creates a bright decorative effect. But this is how the golden goat from Ur, badly damaged by centuries of interruption in the ground, began to look only after the scrupulous work of restorers.

But Ashur is not yet a real desert, and the full-flowing Tigris flows right under the remains of its walls! What can we say about the south of Mesopotamia, where the ancient centers of Mesopotamian civilization were located - the cities of the Sumerians.
And here we move on to the third episode of the German archaeological epic in Iraq - the excavations of one of the earliest Sumerian cities - Uruk (Varka). Work began in 1912, but was soon interrupted by the First World War. Only 14 years later did German archaeologists return here, and, apart from the break for World War II (1939–1946), they are still digging for local antiquities. At different times this expedition was led by different people. Among them we can mention the names of Julius Jordan, Konrad Preiser, Wilhelm Kensch, Julius Lenzmann.
Already the first trenches laid on the tell of Varka yielded cuneiform tablets with the name of the buried city - U Ruki. The Bible calls it Erech, mentioning it immediately after Babylon. The ancient Greeks knew about Erech, calling it Orkhon. Then this name disappeared from history. In the 3rd century. n. e. Uruk was abandoned by its inhabitants and was never reborn.
What did the long-term excavations of the German expedition in Uruka give to science? They, first of all, showed that Uruk was the city where the most significant event in the history of human culture took place - on Uruk soil, for the first time, a threshold emerged through which people stepped from the darkness of centuries of the preliterate period into a life illuminated by the light of writing. Indeed, it was in Uruk at the end of the 4th millennium BC. e. Cuneiform archaic writing (a proto-literate period in the history of Mesopotamia) appeared for the first time. However, all these years, the Germans were digging only a few temple complexes in the very center of the city - complexes of sanctuaries of the gods Anu (god of the sky) and Inanna-Ishtar (goddess of love and fertility), leaving aside the residential areas and fortifications of Uruk. Nevertheless, the multi-meter layers of buildings in the studied area and the objects they contained allowed scientists to trace the first stages of the emergence of the Sumerian civilization: religious architecture, cylindrical carved seals, stone vessels with relief images, the marble head of the goddess Inanna, etc., etc. In addition, we should recall the terrible natural and climatic conditions of the south of Mesopotamia - a flat, sun-scorched plain.

Excavations at Ur (Leonard Wooddy)

However, the English archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley experienced all these “delights” of local life in full. Over the course of 12 long field seasons, each of which lasted 5–6 months, he excavated the southernmost Sumerian city - Ur, located near the modern Iraqi city of Nasiriya on the Euphrates. Ur stands out noticeably even against the background of other famous Sumerian cities. To begin with, it existed for an unusually long time - from the first Sumerian kings (beginning of the 3rd millennium BC) to the era of Darius and Alexander the Great. Neither countless enemy invasions nor natural disasters could force its inhabitants to leave their home for centuries. But what the hordes of conquerors failed to do, nature did. The Euphrates suddenly changed its course and went almost 16 kilometers east of the city walls. It was impossible to live even a day on this hot plain without water. And the brilliant city turned into a cluster of featureless hills, painted in the gray-yellow colors of the desert. Over time, its location was forgotten. Until quite recently, our information about Ur was limited to only a few vague quotations from the Bible and Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform texts created many centuries after the collapse of the Sumerian civilization. We know, for example, from later inscriptions that in the 18th century. BC e. The Babylonian king Hammurabi subjected the rebel city to a horrific defeat. Apparently, it was at this time that the biblical patriarch Abraham and his family left the defeated Ur. Since then, even the Bible no longer mentions Ur. The city had to be found again in the 19th century. In 1854 D.E. Taylor, the English consul in Basra, was the first to establish: a cluster of ruins, known among local Bedouins as Tell al-Mukkayir (“Resin Hill”), was ancient Ur, which was confirmed by cuneiform clay tablets found here. However, extensive excavations at the site could only begin many years later.
In 1922, the Englishman Leonard Woolley began to carry out this task. Excavations were carried out here for twelve years. The archaeologist managed to achieve a lot. Lush palace ensembles, massive temple walls, a stepped ziggurat tower and, finally, royal burials of fantastic wealth appeared from the depths of the earth with enviable consistency. But, perhaps, the most important thing is that Woolley finally managed, unlike his other colleagues, to break away from the attractive religious and administrative center of the settlement and begin to study residential urban areas. Therefore, there is every reason to believe that only after the work of Leonard Woolley in the city of Ure did the ancient Sumerian civilization appear before the eyes of mankind in all its splendor and grandeur.
Almost in the same years (20-40s of the 20th century), the Frenchman Andre Parrot conducted excavations in Mari (Syria), the Americans - in Nippur, Nuzi and Tepe-Gavre, the British - in Nineveh, Ubeid, Arpaciya and, together with the Americans - in Kish and Jemdet Nasr, and the Germans continued to methodically study the center of U ruk. This was the "golden age" of Mesopotamian archaeology.
One after another, the large and small tells of Mesopotamia, after excavations, revealed their secrets to people. Fragment by fragment, the main stages of the richest and longest Mesopotamian history were revealed. Gradually, scientists realized that behind the shiny façade of Sumerian-Akkadian culture were hidden some earlier and more modest predecessors.

Ill. 14. L. Woolley

At the origins of Mesopotamian civilization

Just some 40–50 years ago, almost all reputable scientific monographs and articles on the archeology of Mesopotamia remained completely silent about the initial stages of the pre-Sumerian, preliterate history of Iraq and Syria. Archaeological work has traditionally been carried out mainly in the south of the country, on the Mesopotamian plain, that is, where the oldest finds, if any, were buried under thick alluvial deposits. Following the logic of the reasoning of geographers, botanists and zoologists, the origins of early cultures with agricultural and livestock farming had to be sought in the north of the region, in the mountainous and foothill regions.
Archaeologists have long ignored Northern Mesopotamia. But it was there, in the mountains and foothills of Zagros, Taurus and Sinjar, that the wild ancestors of wheat and barley grew, and wild goats, the ancestors of later domesticated sheep and goats, grazed in the free meadows. And so, after the Second World War, in the 50s, scientists began to study these forgotten lands. First of all, they were attracted by traces of the habitation of human communities that were at the stage of transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic, that is, groups with the beginnings of agriculture and cattle breeding, but still within the boundaries of a hunting-gathering economy. In northern Iraq, in the mountains of Kurdistan, American archaeologists Robert Braidwood and Ralph Solecki began intensive surveys of the most promising areas. And so Solecki, after the sensational discoveries of Neanderthal burials in the Shanidar cave, discovered an open site not far from the entrance to this very cave - Zevi-Chemi-Shanidar. It belonged, according to radiocarbon dating, to approximately the 9th millennium BC. e. The researcher drew attention to the extraordinary abundance of animal bones in the site layer - laboratory analysis showed that the vast majority of them belonged to sheep. Moreover, three-fifths of all individuals were under one year old. This indicated that the sheep were already domesticated: young lambs were slaughtered so that the queens could be milked. Stone tools from Zevi-Chemi-Shanidar are also of great interest: rough stone grain grinders, ground axes, sickles in the form of flint knife-like insert plates attached to a bone handle with bitumen or resin. We do not know which cereal plants the inhabitants of the site used to reap with these sickles. It is also unknown whether these cereals were wild or cultivated. Nevertheless, the first steps in the formation of a new productive economy of the agricultural-pastoral type are presented here quite well.
Even more important were the results of many years of work by a large archaeological and botanical expedition led by Robert Braidwood (USA) in Iraqi Kurdistan (the so-called “Iraq-Jarmo” project). For the first time in the history of Middle Eastern archaeology, geologists, zoologists, botanists and climatologists, together with archaeologists, undertook a comprehensive study of the natural environment surrounding local primitive man. Their discoveries led to the conclusion that the ecology of that time was not significantly different from the modern one. Of particular importance for the further development of Mesopotamian archeology were the excavations of R. Braidwood's expedition at two archaeological sites in Iraqi Kurdistan - in Karim Shahir and Jarmo. The ancient settlement of Karim Shahir is located north of the town of Chamchamal in the Kirkuk Governorate. It was not possible to determine its exact time. But judging by the analogies with finds from the very early layers of Jericho (Palestine), Karim-Shahir dates back to the Mesolithic period (9th millennium BC) and, although open, is a temporary, seasonal site. The main sources of food for local residents were hunting, gathering and fishing. The presence of sickles with flint inserts and coarse grain grinders in the site layer cannot serve as a decisive argument in favor of the emergence of agriculture. The presence of such tools indicates only the processing of cereals, but not their cultivation.

Ill. 15. Foreman of Iraqi workers Khalaf Jasim with a figurine he found

Ill. 16. Figurine-bottle of the goddess of fertility. Halaf culture, Yarym Tepe 2. V millennium BC. e.

Among the new technical achievements of the inhabitants of Karim Shahir is the appearance of polished stone axes and rough clay figurines. This monument is the threshold from which the “Neolithic revolution” began in Mesopotamia, that is, the transition to agriculture and cattle breeding as the basis of the economy. And clear traces of its higher stage are shown to us by another settlement - Jarmo in Kurdistan, dating back to the beginning of the 7th millennium BC. e. It was studied by R. Braidwood in 1949–1952. According to him, Jarmo entirely falls under the category of “primary, truly settled agricultural communities of Zagros.” The settlement itself covers an area of ​​about 1.2 hectares, consists of adobe above-ground houses and is located on the ledge of a mountain plateau, overhanging a deep gorge. The thickness of the cultural layer reaches 7.6 m. Fragments of ceramics are found only in the upper third of the almost eight-meter thickness of the hill. The assumption of the existence of developed agriculture in Jarmo is based not so much on the finds of stone tools for harvesting and grinding cereals, but on the discovery of grains of cultivated plants there, including Emmer’s wheat and two-row barley.

Ill. 17. Female figurine (“goddess of fertility”). Tell Halaf, Syria. V millennium BC e.

New ways of obtaining food left quite a lot of free time for the residents of Jarmo for other things. It is significant that at this time stone and clay tiles for some kind of game appeared, as well as cult clay figurines of women and various animals, which indicates the beginning of the flowering of the art of the Neolithic tribes of Northern Mesopotamia.

Ill. 18. Ceramic stoves after cleaning. Halaf culture, Yarym Tepe 2. V millennium BC. e.

“A decisive milestone,” notes I.M. Dyakonov, “the creation of an economy of reproduction of the product has been completed, and although it is still slow, the process of comprehensive use of the opened prospects is beginning.” And one of its most striking manifestations was the wide access of the highlanders of Zagros and Sinjar to the vastness of the Mesopotamian plain. Intensive development of new fertile lands began, which noticeably accelerated the entire course of cultural development of local agricultural and pastoral communities and brought them very close to the threshold of civilization.
And it is not at all by chance that only after scientists realized the importance of the northern regions of Mesopotamia for understanding the origins of the local civilization, serious field research began there in the north and the most important discoveries immediately followed.
In 1942–1945 English archaeologist Seton Lloyd and Iraqi archaeologist Fuad Safar excavated Tell Hassuna, 25 km south of Mosul, which hid inside the remains of a village of farmers and herders of the 6th millennium BC. e. This first explored monument gave the name to the entire sedentary early agricultural culture of Northern Mesopotamia - Hassun. Its creators made crude but practical ceramics, stylized female figurines (fertility cult), and built rectangular above-ground dwellings from blocks of clay mixed with straw. “The way of life of the first settlers of Hassuna,” writes the German scientist B. Brentjes, “makes it clear why their culture quickly spread over hundreds of kilometers. Probably, as a result of centuries of cultivation, the soil in the mountains was depleted or the population increased so much that people were forced to leave their country and go in search of new lands. Where they liked pastures and arable land and where there were no enemies, they remained to live. Otherwise, having collected the harvest, we moved on...”
So, it was the Hassun tribes who began the widespread development of the Mesopotamian plain. But as we moved south, rain-fed (non-irrigated) agriculture began to experience serious disruptions. And in Tell es-Sawwan (“Flint Hill”), located on the right bank of the Tigris, 11 km south of Samarra, in the 60s of the 20th century. Archaeologists from the Iraqi Department of Antiquities discovered a large settlement of 2.5 hectares, fortified by a deep ditch and a high adobe wall, which arose in 5600 BC. e. Two buildings were excavated inside the walls: one (“House No. 1”) had two floors and 14 rooms, the second was even larger. Part of “House No. 1” was occupied by a temple of four rooms. Among the most numerous finds are figurines of men and women made of clay and alabaster. But the most important thing is that among the cereals found there are types of wheat and barley, the cultivation of which is possible only with artificial irrigation. This means that the simplest forms of irrigation appeared in Mesopotamia already in the 6th millennium BC. e. Important results were also brought by long-term studies of the Hassun village of Yarym Tepe 1 in the Sinjar Valley by Russian archaeologists (1969–1976).
At the beginning of the 5th millennium BC. e. The Hassun culture is replaced (or supplanted) in the north of Mesopotamia by the newcomer Halaf culture. And although Halaf ceramics were first discovered quite by accident in Syria back in the 30s, targeted study of this culture began only in the 50s-70s, when American and English archaeologists explored such interesting Halaf monuments as Arpaciya and Tepe Gawra in the area Mosul, and a Russian expedition excavated the Khalaf tell Yarym-Tepe 2 over a wide area and the entire thickness of a 7-meter cultural layer (in 1969–1976). The Halafans created the most elegant and varied ceramics in shape, decorated with magnificent paintings. Round architecture (“tholos”) – residential and cultic, developed religious ideology with the image of the mother goddess (fertility cult), agriculture and cattle breeding as the basis of the economy characterize the main features of this culture.

Ill. 19. Round residential building of the Halaf culture. Yarym-Tepe 2.5 thousand BC e.

Somewhere at the end of the 6th - beginning of the 5th millennium BC. e. some North Mesopotamian tribes reached the very south of the plain and reached the shores of the Persian Gulf. Seton Lloyd and Fuad Safar, during excavations at the site of Abu Shahrain (the ancient city of Eredu) in the early 50s, discovered that its lowest layers contained ceramics very similar to the late Hassun and dating back to the end of the 6th - beginning of the 5th millennium BC. e.
The chain of pre-Sumerian early agricultural cultures is completed by the so-called Ubeid culture (second half of the 5th - mid-4th millennium BC). It was first discovered in tell El-Ubaid near ancient Ur in Southern Iraq. At the end of the 20s. English archaeologists worked there. While exploring this tell, they discovered unfamiliar painted pottery under the remains of a Sumerian temple - dark green shards fired almost to a glassy state, decorated with clear geometric designs applied in dark brown and black paint. Later, under the silt deposits, it was possible to uncover the reed huts of the first inhabitants of the village with exactly the same painted dishes. Thus, another unknown culture appeared in the archaeological chronicle of Mesopotamia, which, in its chronological position, immediately preceded the great Sumerian civilization.
In 1940, Iraqi specialists excavated an Ubaid village in Tell Uqair near Baghdad. Here, solid adobe houses made of rectangular mud bricks with walls almost a meter high have been discovered, and a fairly wide street has been cleared. The basis of the economy of the local residents was agriculture, cattle breeding and fishing (clay models of boats, stone weights for nets and bones of large fish were found). The Ubaid culture (its origin remains unknown) quickly spread throughout Mesopotamia, displacing (or destroying) the magnificent Halaf culture in the north.

Discoveries continue

As for the monuments of the Sumerian era, after World War II the Germans continued excavations in Uruku, the Americans in Nippur and Kish, the British (M. Mallone) again began excavations at Nimrud.

Ill. 20. Finds of Halaf culture from the settlement of Yarym-Tepe 2
a) alabaster cup,
b) painted clay spherical vessel,
c) a fragment of ceramics depicting gazelles

Even more intensive research by archaeologists unfolded throughout Mesopotamia in the 60-70s. XX century At the same time, the list of countries participating in this grandiose archaeological epic has also expanded noticeably: Italy, Japan, Denmark and Russia have joined the traditional participants - England, France, Germany and the USA. Hundreds of different monuments from all eras were excavated: from cave sites of primitive man in the mountains of Kurdistan to huge cities of the 1st millennium BC. e. such as Nineveh and Babylon (Iraqi Antiquities Directorate). However, already the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–1989. greatly reduced both the number of foreign expeditions in Iraq and the scope of their research activity. The final blow to the archaeological study of the country with the participation of foreigners was dealt by the operation of the Americans and their allies in 1991 - Desert Storm. In addition, during the aerial bombardment, many world-famous ancient monuments were severely damaged - for example, the famous ziggurat of Ur-Nammu in Ur, built in the 3rd millennium BC. e.
Nevertheless, Iraqi scientists continued to conduct archaeological study of their country, as far as possible, even during these difficult years. And I want to tell you about one of their remarkable discoveries here. In 1988, archaeologist Muzahim Mahmud Hussein, during excavations in Nimrud in an underground crypt under the floors of the palace of Ashurnazirpal II, discovered the stone sarcophagi of two Assyrian queens, where, in addition to the remains of the highest persons themselves, there were 20 kg of gold jewelry of the finest work - earrings, rings, necklaces, bracelets, pins, etc. Based on the cuneiform inscriptions on the sarcophagi, it was possible to restore the names of the noble deceased: Atalia - the wife of King Sargon II (721-705 BC) and Yabai - the wife of Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC) n. e.). Thus, the countless treasures of the Assyrian rulers are not a legend, not a fiction, but a reality.

Chapter 3 At the origins of the first civilization of the planet

History begins in Sumer

Back in the 9th–8th millennium BC. e. Iraq became the scene of the "Neolithic Revolution" - the most important of all revolutions in human history. In the foothills of Kurdistan, moistened every winter by rains from the Mediterranean Sea, man ceased to be a wandering hunter, dependent on the vagaries of nature, and turned into a farmer, tied to a small piece of land, from which he now received basic food products. He built himself a home from clay and invented new types of tools. Herds of domesticated sheep, goats and cattle provided him with a constant and easily accessible source of meat, milk, wool and leather. Each large family probably built its own house, cultivated its own field, and tended its own herd of domestic animals. And several families, united together, formed a village - the embryo of a social organization in the form of a rural community.
Later there were other “revolutions”: metal replaced stone, villages grew into cities, cities united (often against their will) into kingdoms, and kingdoms into empires. But life itself, the work of a person tied to mother earth and dependent on the seasonal cycles of nature, has not changed here from those ancient times almost to the present day.
5,000 years before the birth of Christ, the foothills of Zagros and Sinjar in northern Iraq were inhabited by Neolithic farmers and herders living in small villages and using tools dating back to the Stone Age. However, already two thousand years later, the “era of history” begins in Mesopotamia, but it begins at the other end of the great Mesopotamian plain - in the southern part of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, in Sumer. “History begins in Sumer,” the famous American orientalist Samuel Kramer once said, later putting this phrase in the title of one of his best popular science books. And this is the true truth. The bright light of written tradition (the appearance of cuneiform), which suddenly broke out between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers more than 50 centuries ago, brought to us from the darkness of millennia evidence of the life and deeds of one of the greatest peoples of antiquity - the Sumerians.

O Sumer, the great land among all the lands of the Universe, flooded with unfading light, defining divine laws for all peoples from sunrise to sunset!.. -

a Sumerian poet once exclaimed, reflecting in poetic form the fact of the indisputable cultural and military superiority of the inhabitants of Southern Mesopotamia over their closest neighbors.
In reality, Sumer is a very small country. Its area is slightly smaller than modern Belgium. All life was concentrated here around rivers and canals. Therefore, the “cradle of civilization” was a long and narrow strip of land stretching from the latitude of Baghdad to the putrid swamps on the shores of the Persian Gulf. This territory was divided among several Sumerian city-states.
“Soon after 3000 BC. e. - notes the famous English archaeologist G. Child, - the oldest written documents give us a picture of the social and economic organization of Sumer... The country was divided between 15 city-states, each of which was politically autonomous, but they all had a common material culture, religion, language and all were largely interconnected economically.”
During the Early Dynastic period (it begins around 2800 BC), cuneiform tablets mention 13 such cities, more or less accurately tied to the modern geographical map: Sippar, Kish, Akshak, Larak, Nippur, Adab, Umma, Lagash, Bad Tibira, Uruk, Larsa, Ur and Eredu. Formally, the “master”, the lord of each Sumerian city, was a god who ruled through a leader who, in addition to political and administrative duties, also performed a number of important religious duties. Agriculture, based on artificial irrigation, provided enough food to feed those people who did not directly create it: priests, officials, scribes, artisans, traders and professional warriors from the ruler’s squad.
Writing was widely used - in the form of cuneiform on clay tablets; architecture (monumental temple buildings, palaces), sculpture and metal processing were developed. Trade caravans regularly traveled far from the Mesopotamian oasis, heading to the mountainous regions for timber, copper and tin ingots, hard stones, precious metals and other goods so necessary for the normal life of the newly emerging Sumerian city-states.
Religion, which reigned supreme in both public and private life, developed a complex pantheon of gods headed by the supreme deity, Enlil (the god of air). In the early era, the entire economic life of the city-state was centered around the temple of the patron god of a given territorial community.
This is, in general terms, the picture of Sumerian civilization at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. e. Is it any wonder, therefore, that those 20 centuries (5000–3000 BC), which witnessed the birth and formation of this civilization, are of exceptional interest to us.
The history of the transition from the Neolithic to civilization cannot be told in full detail, since our information about this process is still extremely scarce and fragmentary. But at least we now know that it definitely took place within Iraq itself. Extensive archaeological research of the 50-80s. refuted the old theory according to which the Sumerian civilization initially arose in some distant and mysterious country and only then was brought to Mesopotamia in a fully developed form. We are now able to trace the development of many of its elements over many centuries. And if some features of civilization were indeed brought from outside, through foreign invasions or foreign cultural influences, others had such deep roots in the Iraqi past that we can call them local. Probably, like all other ancient civilizations, Sumerian was the product of a fusion of very different cultural streams and traits. It is known that the two main ethnic groups, sharply different from each other in language - the Sumerians and Akkadian-Semites - lived in Mesopotamia side by side at the beginning of the historical era (at the turn of the 4th and 3rd millennium BC). Although we cannot yet say with certainty exactly when they appeared on the Mesopotamian scene and what role each of these peoples played in the formation of local civilization. Alas, the only source for solving our problems in searching for the origins of Sumerian culture in pre-Sumerian times remains archaeological finds. But they are practically useless in reconstructing political events and movements of various tribes and peoples.