Tag: Mesopotamia

Wearing amulets was another part of protective magic, and such amulets often portrayed the spirit they were supposed to ward off. For instance, Pazuzu, the king of the wind demons, would be depicted as a creature with a bird’s chest and talons, holding a thunderbolt, and Lamashtu, who preyed on pregnant women, as a hybrid of a donkey, lion, and bird. Amulets could protect a traveler in hostile territory inhabited by demons, such as the desert, or keep disease away from a house during an epidemic. In the Mesopotamian world much was unpredictable, and magic tilted the balance just a little in people’s favor.

— A History of Magic, Witchcraft, and the Occult, Magic All Around

The Mesopotamians believed that objects had an animate quality and could act as the receptacles of enormous magical power, helping to ward off evil spirits and thwart their actions, or gain the favor of a god needed to drive them away.

Royal palaces were guarded by monumental statues of lamassu, winged creatures with the head of a man and the body of a bull or lion, which blocked and supported gateways, corridors, and the entrances to throne rooms. These thresholds were seen as particularly vulnerable to infiltration from the underworld by demons such as Rabisu, “the crouching one.” Poorer people placed figurines of gods or hybrid creatures such as fish-men with pointed hats and scaly skins under doorways or windows….

— A History of Magic, Witchcraft, and the Occult, Magic All Around

Personal misfortune or sickness was often blamed on witches or demons. Witches were also thought to secretly put curses on people. Priests developed rituals to counteract malign influences and collected them in nine Maqlu tablets, first compiled around 1600 BCE. They were passed down through generations of ashipu for about the next thousand years. A collection of 100 incantations, across eight of the tablets, enabled the ashipu to identify and tame evil magic; the last tablet gives instructions for a ritual to banish a curse, which involved burning a figurine of the witch responsible. Exorcists often doubled as doctors, and another tablet contains a spell calling on Gula, the goddess of health, to drive out the ghost making a patient ill.

— A History of Magic, Witchcraft and the Occult, Chapter 2

Beneath the official pantheon, including the likes of Enlil, the Assyrian sky god, and Ea, the god of wisdom, was a layer of demons, such as Lamashtu, who threatened pregnant women, and Namtaru, the plague-demon, who needed to be mollified. Natural phenomena such as floods and lightning, or epidemic diseases, were not scientifically understood despite Mesopotamian advances, and so people at all levels of society preferred supernatural explanations. Disasters were believed to be caused by mamitu (curses) laid by witches, by victims committing offenses (sometimes unknowingly) against the gods, or through unintentionally ignoring divine signs. Kings guarded against these occurrences by consulting temple priests, in particular ashipu (exorcists), who performed magical rituals, and baru, who interpreted omens. Palace archives were stocked with collections of clay cuneiform tablets containing spells, incantations, and omens. Huge numbers have been recovered from the palace library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. Ordinary people also called on the services of ashipu to cast protective spells, and used amulets and enchanted figurines to dispel evil spirits.

— A History of Magic, Witchcraft and the Occult, Chapter 2

This first civilization came to be known as Sumer. By about the year 3000 [B.C.E.], a city called Uruk near the mouth of the Euphrates River, just inland of the head of the Persian Gulf, had eighty thousand residents. A thousand years later Iraq, the land along the Euphrates and its sister stream, the Tigris, would be named for this early metropolis of Uruk. Sharing the land of Sumer, about the size of [modern] Belgium, with a dozen other city-states, Uruk was not always the foremost among its rivals in the land. But for most of its existence, spanning the two millennia of the Sumerian world, Uruk was the greatest city on earth.

— Land Between The Rivers, Prologue

A dozen (small) cities in such a small area. Every square meter of arable land was claimed and constantly fought over. I do not see much of this in fantasy roleplaying campaigns.

Another factor that strengthened the unity of the early village was the temple and its service. The immigrants from the north either brought with them or developed not long after their arrival an abiding faith in one special deity as the protector of their settlement, and with the building of their first houses they also erected a home for their divinity. For example, underlying the ruins of Eridu, one of Sumer’s most venerated cities, archeologists unearthed a mud-brick temple built on virgin soil by the original Ubaidian inhabitants. It was a small rectangular shrine, about 15 feet long, and its furnishings consisted of nothing more than a crude altar and an offering table. But as the villages prospered through agriculture and expanded into sizable towns, such humble shrines were enlarged into elaborate structures each set atop a lofty mud-brick platform, a prototype of the future ziggurat, or temple-tower. Each temple served an entire community, rather than an individual family or clan, and thus generated and intensified local patriotism, pride and effort.

Nor was the temple merely an edifice of lifeless brick and mortar; it was a holy place that had to be tended and cared for every day, year in and year out. Hymns and prayers had to be composed, formalized and recited; rites and rituals had to be performed; sacred festivals had to be celebrated. And so a specialized priesthood came into being, starting no doubt with the selection of one or two individuals noted for their learning and spiritual powers and proliferating in number and function over the centuries. In the course of time the temple and its priestly coterie naturally became the intellectual center of each community, and it is therefore not surprising that it was in the temple that writing was later invented and developed.

— Cradle of Civilization, pp. 33-34

The Sumerians invented kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law, and war. They gave the West its founding stories: the opposition of darkness and light at the Beginning; the Flood, with its ark and dove and surviving patriarch; the tower of Babel; the distant ancestors of Odysseus and Hercules. The Sumerians established the outlines of our political, legal, and temporal structures too, with the first kings and assemblies, the first written laws, the first legal contracts, and the sexagesimal system of counting that regulates the hours and seconds of our days.

The Sumerians wrote the first epics and constructed the first monumental buildings. They invented the wheel, the sailing boat, the dome, and the arch. They were the first people to cast, rivet, and solder metals. They were the first to develop mathematics, calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle two thousand years before Pythagoras and enabling extraordinary achievements in civil engineering. Compiling methodical lists of plants and animals, the Sumerians were the first people to apply rational order to our knowledge of the natural world.

The Sumerians wrote down almost everything they knew, much of it on disposable clay tablets that have survived the millennia. Some thirty-nine centuries after the last of the Sumerians died, another inventive and curious people, the Victorians of the nineteenth century [C.E.], initiated a remarkable period of foreign exploration in Iraq. Thanks to this colorful and dramatic intellectual adventure, which began in the 1840s, today we can follow the course of Sumerian lawsuits, track Sumerian inventories, and study the terms of Sumerian marriages, wills, and loans. We read the overtures of Sumer’s diplomats. We follow in detail the provisioning of Sumer’s armies and the triumphs or disasters of their expeditions. We know intimately the pleadings of Sumerian students for more money from their fathers, and the pleadings of their fathers for more diligence from their sons. We track the transactions of Sumerian merchants in copper or onions. We admire the complex and perfect calculations of Sumerian engineers.

— Land Between The Rivers, Prologue

The eighty thousand people living in Uruk by 3000 [B.C.E.] sheltered behind walls that were forty feet high and six miles long. Archaeologists estimate these to have cost over five million man-hours to build. The fourth-millennium city occupied about 1.7 square miles, a little bit less than imperial Rome at its peak (2.1 square miles) and larger than classical Athens.

— Land Between The Rivers, Prologue

A city wall was made of whatever local material best served the purpose. In Sumeria and Babylonia, there is practically no stone or hardwood. In fact, the most abundant natural resource of these lands is mud. Hence, in Mesopotamia, walls were made of clayey mud. At first the mud was simply scooped up and piled in handfuls. Then it was found that a neater, straighter wall, without visible weak spots to invite attack, could be made by molding the clay into bricks and making the wall of these….

Where stone was to be had, city walls were made of stone—preferably the largest stones that could be moved with the techniques of the time. Even before mortar was invented, men could build a good, solid wall of small stones, which would stand up to the weather better than a wall of mud brick. But then, all an enemy had to do was to pry out a few stones with his spear, and down came a whole section of the wall.

Therefore, many early fortifiers made their walls of very large stones. They trimmed the stones to fit roughly together and stopped up the chinks by pounding in small stones. The sheer weight of the large stones kept the foe from pulling them out, especially if the defenders on top of the wall were raining missiles upon him. Such walls are called “cyclopean” because the ancient Greeks, seeing the ruins of rough walls made of huge stones, built several centuries earlier, thought that the large stones must have been put in place by the mythical one-eyed giants called Kyklopes.

To protect a city, any wall had to be at least 30 feet high and 15 feet thick. If the wall were much lower than this, a numerous enemy could overrun it with scaling ladders. And if the wall were too narrow on top, the defenders could not move along it fast enough to gather at threatened points.

A wall meant more safety, and greater safety fostered the growth of population, partly by natural increase and partly by immigration. As populations waxed, the crowding that ensued made it necessary to use the space inside the wall more efficiently. Therefore, in lands where round houses of stone or clay had prevailed, the round house gave way to the rectangular house; for an oblong house could occupy the whole of a small rectangular lot, whereas a circular house left wasted space at the corners….

— Great Cities of the Ancient World, Chapter 1

The earliest cities were probably independent political units of the kind the Greeks called a polis, which we awkwardly translate as “city-state.” Although this kind of polity nourished for thousands of years and gave the world many of its most creative minds, it has now almost wholly vanished.

The polis ruled enough land around it to feed its folk and, whether republic or monarchy, ran its affairs as an independent nation. Every native dweller regarded himself as a citizen of Larsa, or Tyre, or Athens, or Rome as the case might be and looked upon everyone else as a foreigner. He would fight like a fiend to defend his city but would seldom join forces with the people of another polis for defense against a common foe. Since groups of city-states were always divided among themselves by murderous hatreds, a strong outsider was likely to conquer them sooner or later, one by one.

The first cities were organized along the same lines as the peasant societies whence they had sprung. People were grouped into families, clans, and tribes, and each tribe had its own section of the city. Usually the city had a king, who might be a high priest who left the fighting to someone else or who might be a general who left religion to someone else. Or he might combine the military and religious functions.

Power shifted back and forth among the leading groups: the king and his supporters; the senate, a gathering of the heads of the richest families; the priesthood; and the assembly, a gathering of all the armed men. Poor men, women, and slaves, having neither wealth, supernatural powers, nor armed might, did not count for much. Sometimes the senate got rid of the king, or at least reduced him to purely ritual functions, and ran the resulting “republic” to suit itself.

Government was rather loose and informal. No ruler could afford to be very tyrannical, because it was too easy for his subjects to flee to a neighboring polis. The earliest kings dressed and lived much like their subjects. A visitor to a small polis was not surprised to find His Majesty thatching or painting his own palace, while the queen wove him a royal robe on her own loom and screamed at the royal children when they got out of hand.

When a polis grew large and powerful, its government usually became more autocratic and centralized. Then the king might set out to conquer his neighbors. In Iraq, for nearly 2,000 years, one ambitious king after another founded a short-lived empire. Such conquerors had an advantage peculiar to Iraq, which is mostly semi-desert and needs irrigation to flourish.

In early Sumerian times, irrigation was on a small scale; each polis dug its own canals regardless of what its neighbor was doing. When kings conquered large empires, however, they put all the canals under one management, because this was more efficient and enabled the land to support more people. This larger taxable population furnished the king with additional wealth and power and made it easier for him to extend his conquests still further. Since circumstances favored large-scale organization, as fast as one of these watershed empires fell, another arose in its place.

— Great Cities of the Ancient World, Chapter 1

Insatiable in their lust for knowledge, the practitioners of magic yearned to see beyond the tangible world, to learn the secret laws that governed the fates of souls and nations. In every age, scholars sought to piece together fragments of these hidden truths, and to grant themselves a kind of immortality by preserving their hard-won discoveries for adepts as yet unborn.

Their messages took different forms. Fragile baked-clay tablets bore cuneiform impressions made with reed pens when the clay was new and soft. Carved hieroglyphic charms were sealed in the changeless air of Pharaohs’ underground tombs. Shreds of papyrus lay deep under hot sands that over the centuries crept whispering away, revealing the scrolls finally to the eyes of mystified herdsmen. Tall sentinel stones inscribed with spidery runes wept with the gentle rain that soaked the hillsides where they stood. Heavy volumes with black-lettered pages were chained out of sight in monastic libraries. Encapsulated in silent characters, the words waited, charged with arcane powers.

To those adventurers who would crack their codes, the chroniclers passed on a caveat: The secrets of the universe were not lightly disclosed, any unworthy soul who probed too deep risked an unspeakable fate. Yet the lure of knowledge often overcame the dictates of caution.

— The Secret Arts, Chapter 1

Ancient peoples were deeply religious. In the Bronze Age, for example, Hittite and Egyptian accounts regularly give the gods a role in military campaigns. No Hittite scribe would think of recording a victory without thanking the gods for having marched in front of the army and thereby having granted the king success. No ambassador would swear to abide by a treaty unless an assembly of the various gods had witnessed it. In his poem about the battle of Qadesh (1274 [B.C.E.]), Pharaoh Rameses II declares that the god Amun spoke to him and sent him forward.

Even in the rationalistic heyday of classical Greece—and later—gods and heroes were commonly seen in the heat of battle. Sometimes their mere presence provided encouragement to the soldiers. At other times, divinities gave specific military advice. And sometimes they even fought! At the decisive battles of Marathon (490 [B.C.E.]), Salamis (480 [B.C.E.]), Aegospotami (405 [B.C.E.]), and Leuctra (371 [B.C.E.]), for example, contemporaries thought the gods and heroes took part.

— The Trojan War, pp. 74-75

The feudal system of the Parthians had a Scythian as well as an Achaemenid background, and roughly resembled feudalism as developed in Europe during the “Dark Ages.” Society was headed by seven powerful clans. This upper stratum supported a petty aristocracy of varied socio-economic status who, together with their retainers, enjoyed status well above the peasants and serfs who were native Persians. Loyalty was strongest between the great clan leaders and their small vassals. The king, as a member of one of the clans, could usually command complete loyalty from his own clan and its vassals, less from other Parthians.

— Rome’s Enemies 3, p. 6

The Mesopotamian civilization was based on cities. From the earliest phases there were at least a dozen large population centers. They ranged from in size from 40-50 hectares to the colossal 450 hectares occupied by Uruk in the early third millennium [B.C.E.]. They were surrounded by often massive city walls, enclosed heavily built-up areas of streets and houses and large centrally placed public buildings, usually in their own separate enclosures.

The public buildings fall into two main categories, temples and palaces, which represent two major institutions. The buildings were truly monumental. The temple was the first institution of the two. Temples varied in form but generally shared a number of features. They were usually set in an enclosure, were often elaborately decorated in a variety of techniques, and frequently were built on an elevated platform. By the later third millennium [B.C.E.], the temple on its platform had developed into the true ziggurat or staged temple tower for which Mesopotamia is famous.

The Mesopotamian temple was not simply the religious center of the city, it was the economic and administrative center. The temple was run as a household with the god or goddess at its head; every citizen belonged to a temple and was regarded as one of the people of the god or goddess. The temple community comprised food-producers, officials, priests, merchants, craftsmen, and people involved in running the temple establishment itself (bakers, brewers, gardners, etc., and a considerable number of slaves). The temple was itself a major landowner, and it served as a center for the accumulation and redistribution of most of the food produce of the land. It was also a center for the concentration and redistribution of raw materials from foreign trade. Equally important, it was a center for the concentration and organization of labor, which made possible large-scale works beyond the scope of small communities, such as the building of the temples themselves and the construction and maintenance of the irrigation canals.

— The Making Of Civilization, p. 12-13