A few years ago, curious as to exactly how closely we are related to our ancestors, and seeking a way to show what I thought would be a close relationship, I picked an arbitrary date of 4,000 years BCE, thinking that might be around the time of Hammurabi. I was wrong – he was much later, i.e., around 1750 BCE. Nevertheless, I ploughed ahead, and assumed a possible lifetime of 60 years. Hammurabi himself lived to about age 60. So now I was set, and I made a fantastic discovery.
Adding 2,000 AD to 4,000 BCE, which equals 6,000 years, I divided that number by 60 year lifetimes and the result was: 100 back to back 60 year lifetimes between us and whoever was around in 4,000 BCE. Try it yourself. It’s rather amazing how close you actually are to historic figures. At the time I did this, I was about 180 years away from Daniel Boone. Which is interesting, since some of the figures on my father’s side hail from rural Kentucky. In other words, I knew my grandmother who might have known her grandmother who could have come west with Daniel Boone if she hadn't been in Norway at the time.
Kashim of Ur, however, is about 83/60-year lifetimes distant from me. Kashim lived about the year 3,000 BCE. He was a controller of the barley warehouse for the temple of Innana. Specifically, he was in charge of the ingredients that went into the brewing of beer, which seems to have been to the ancient world of the near east what both wine and beer became in Europe centuries later – a safe way to consume water and to use in religious rituals.
I know about Kashim because he is the first person named and described in Amanda H. Podany’s marvelous book, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings. A New History of the Ancient Near East. In the early pages we will also meet three women named Zum, Igi-Gar, and Emete, who were weaving supervisors at Girsu, a capital city of Lagash which was eventually consumed by Ur. These women were supervising teams of women weaving wool and linen, mostly for the royal families or perhaps for priests and priestesses. They were paid in barley, which was coin of the realm for its time. Their names are known from lists made keeping track of who worked where and how much they were paid.
Kitushdu, was an Urish scribe whose only claim to notice is a little piece of clay bearing the impression of his seal. An inscription in honor of the princess for whom he worked, it reads as follows:
Enheduana, daughter of Sargon – Kitushdu, the scribe, her servant
As for Sargon himself, his legend reads like this:
My mother was a high priestess, I did not know my father.
My mother, the high priestess, conceived me, she bore me in secret.
She placed me in a reed basket, she sealed my hatch with pitch,
She left me to the river, whence I could not come up.
The river carried me off, it brought me to Aqqi, drawer of water.
Aqqi, drawer of water, brought me up as he dipped his bucket.
Aqqi drawer of water raised me as his adopted son
Aqqi drawer of water set me to his orchard work.
Sound familiar?
If it does, know that this legend was copied over and over again by students in scribal schools during what we sometimes think of as prehistory. Archaeologists have uncovered a few of these schools.
Elletum was a scribal student in Nippur during the reign of Hammurabi. Nearly 4,000 tablets have been excavated from a site named House F that has been determined to have been the home of a master scribe, where Elletum went to school. He is the only student to have signed one of the hundreds of school tablets found. One (unnamed) graduate of one of these schools wrote later:
When I arose early in the morning, I faced my mother and said to her, ‘Give me my lunch. I want to go to school.’ My mother gave me two rolls and I set out.
The curriculum apparently began with lists of names, during which time the student learned to form the letters in cuneiform with a special stylus. They memorized multiplication tables. They copied essays of former students, legal documents, and proverbs. Elletum’s name appears on some of these as well. Advanced training went on to copying hymns and old stories, many excerpts from Sumerian literary works, whereby much of the culture of this ancient world has come down to us.
Cuneiform as a form of writing in the various languages of the time, Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Egyptian, lasted until into the 3rd and 4th centuries BCE. Some of the last examples. have been found in the city of Uruk where it had all begun several thousand years before. Writing, with a pen and ink, on papyrus or parchment took the place of a stylus on clay tablets as the Persians and then the Greeks became the western masters of the universe. But papyrus and parchment are subject to destruction by fire, water, insects, and other wasting materials as the years pass. Only clay tablets baked in kilns, perhaps later baked in the fires that consumed the civilizations the produced them, give us stories in the original hands of the scribes who wrote them down or copied them for us to read. They are the most original of original texts, and we owe a debt of thanks to the few whose names we discover are the scholars who gave them to us. Written, so to speak, in stone.