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Portrait of Kubaba (8th century B.C.) Carved Basalt
Kubaba of Kish is the only woman ruler listed on the Sumerian King List (which is exactly what it sounds like– a list of ancient kings of Mesopotamian city states). According to the king list she ruled Kish in the Third Dynasty period (ca. 2500-2330 BC) and was originally a brewer/tavern keeper. One wonders how she rose from alewife to queen, but politics has always featured surprising vicissitudes, and beer had a central sacred place in ancient Mesopotamia anyway.
We know all too little about the history of Kubaba the ruler (although surprising new texts from the dawn of civilization sometimes come to light), however we know slightly more about Kubaba the goddess! Apparently she was successful enough that shrines to her began spreading throughout the fertile crescent and, by the late Hurrian/early Hittite period, worship of Kubaba became widespread (this is the era which that splendid basalt sculpture above is from).
Kubaba the Goddess wears a a cylindrical headdress like the polos (albeit with some fancy flowers, braids, and strange hooks). She holds a pod which scandalized Victorian anthropologists sometimes identified as a pomegranate, but which we can probably safely say is an opium poppy. Some strange fertility and astrological signs drift around her head, but she maintains the stern clear-eyed visage which one might expect from a true pioneer of women in power (or from a hard-headed tavern keeper).
Today’s post is taking us all the way back. We are going to the beginning of civilization ca. 3700–3500 B.C. when the first cities sprang up from the mud of Mesopotamia and the near East. This figurine is one of thousands and thousands which were found in Tell Brak, a vast mound which is what now remains of one of humankind’s first cities—an urban settlement which was built at around the same time as Ur and Sumer (although Tell Brak was in what is now–or recently was– Syria). Tell Brak is the name of the mound of rubbish, dirt, and artifacts where the ancient city once was—the original name of the city is unknown (although the city which sprang up nearby, after the destruction of the first metropolis, was known as Nagar).
The urban inhabitants of Tell Brak loved these evocative little eye statuettes, but sadly we don’t really know what they are either. The best guess is that they were votive statues. Supplicants would leave them at the temple as a sort of offering for the god or goddess. An alternate theory is that they are simplified idols of Inanna–THE goddess of war, sex, and the planet Venus. The wide eyes are thought to betoken adoration or excitement or maybe the attentiveness of the gods. Sometimes there are multiple sets of eyes or smaller eyes beneath a larger pair. Some of the statues had ornamentation or even jewels.
As you have probably surmised from this meandering speculation, we don’t really know what the eye statues symbolized or what reason people made them (although it was almost absolutely certain that they are religious). Whatever their original purpose was, I love them. I can’t think of a more evocative religious artform to come from a nameless early city. The simple haunting lines and wide-eyed knowingness of the unknowable mystery forms is exhilarating. You can practically feel them looking at you out the internet (to say nothing of when you are in an abandoned corner of the Met with other objects from 6,000 years ago…or on some mud hill in Syria). Ferrebeekeeper has long been fascinated by the art of the first cities…and by cities in general. I am going to be writing more about urban culture and meaning…and I will be featuring more art. So keep your eyes open!
Neo-Assyrian Shock Troops
The Assyrians were one of the great palace civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia. As one of the first known civilizations, their culture came of age along the upper Tigris River in tandem with Sumer, Ur, and Babylon (Semitic kingdom states which blossomed along the pattern of ancient Eridu). The old Assyrian empire was an early Bronze Age empire which lasted from 2025 BC-1393 BC. The Middle Assyrians were united under a series of politically powerful king priests and flourished until the great Bronze Age Collapse—a century of chaos and horror which lasted from 1055–936 BC. After this cataclysm, the shattered remnants of Assyrian society rebuilt along the same lines—but now they had a technological breakthrough—iron. With strong political leadership they were well-positioned to utilize this innovation, and the Iron Age Neo-Assyrians were charioteers and conquerors. Their armies set about building the greatest empire the world had ever known based around iron, axels, horses, and ruthless political hegemony.
Neo-Assyrian Gypsum wall panel relief showing Ashurnasirpal II hunting lions, 865BC – 860 BC.
Into this picture came Ashurnasirpal II, who ascended the Assyrian throne in 883 BC. Ashurnasirpal II was a great builder, thinker, and a reformer. He moved the capital of the empire from Assur to Nimrud and erected a series of new walled cities. He collected zoological and botanical specimens from all around the known world in hopes of furthering agriculture and fostering a deeper understanding of living things (presumably). Alas, he was also a political theorist and he realized he could utilize horrifying violence as a political tool. He reasoned that if he tortured and killed the entire population of one rebel city, other cities would not rebel (a theory which pretty much worked after the first vivid demonstration). History remembers him as a ghastly butcher, but he was also famed in his day as a mighty conqueror and an innovator.
Bas relief from the palace of King Sennacherib: Assyrian soldiers flay the captives of the conquered city of Lachish in 701 BC.
Anyway, the Neo Assyrians in general, and Ashurnasirpal II in particular feature in this week’s blog because they wanted their violence to be as gruesome as possible. Threats and executions worked best if people were truly & utterly terrified. Far beyond merely killing their enemies, the Neo-Assyrians needed to kill them slowly, painfully, and with real flair. Their favorite methods for accomplishing this were spitting and burning (which is how they are remembered in the Bible). However their most hated enemies were flayed alive—which we know because we have pictorial evidence in the form of horrible bas reliefs. Not only that, we have a direct quote from Ashurnasirpal II, who ponderously (but chillingly) said:
I have made a pillar facing the city gate, and have flayed all the rebel leaders; I have clad the pillar in the flayed skins. I let the leaders of the conquered cities be flayed, and clad the city walls with their skins. The captives I have killed by the sword and flung on the dung heap, the little boys and girls were burnt.
It is not exactly an idealistic political statement, but it has a real visceral power. And it did have real power: the Neo-Assyrians conquered the rest of Mesopotamia, and then the Near-East, and then Egypt itself. They kept on moving using fast chariots to sweep away armies and terror to keep control. However, like so many conquerors they were trapped by their lifestyle. The Assyrian kingpriest’s power came from building great temples to the Assyrian gods, he accomplished this with booty from conquest. When the conquest stopped the whole nightmarish system came tumbling down, and the enemies of Neo-Assyria quickly learned ways to defeat chariot armies. By the 7th century the victories began to dry up, and the empire collapsed in 627 BC. Today the Neo-Assyrians are remembered, not as cutting edge innovators, but as monsters—the first masters of the blitzkrieg and of mass terror sponsored by the state.
Eridu as envisioned by Balage Balogh
Although different people have advanced alternate claims (and new evidence continues to come from archaeological sites around the world), one of the first cities to rise up from the mud was the Mesopotamian city state Eridu. Located in what was then a fertile estuary where the Euphrates emptied into the Persian Gulf, Eridu seems to have been founded circa 5400 BC by the confluence of three extremely different tribes each of which relied on a different ecosystem. According to Gwendolyn Leick, as paraphrased by the Museum of Knowledge:
The oldest agrarian settlement seems to have been based upon intensive subsistence irrigation agriculture derived from the Samarra culture to the north, characterized by the building of canals, and mud-brick buildings. The fisher-hunter cultures of the Arabian littoral…may have been the original Sumerians. They seem to have dwelt in reed huts. The third culture that contributed to the building of Eridu was the nomadic Semitic pastoralists of herds of sheep and goats living in tents in semi-desert areas.
Somehow these three groups blended together and created the first city. Eridu was built along a pattern which became typical for Sumerian city states: a large central ziggurat of mudbrick was surrounded by a warren of mudbrick houses. The temple was sacred to Enki, the wise god of the abzu (the freshwater marsh). Enki was the principal god for a reason: it was the fresh water from the abzu which filled the irrigation ditches and made cultivation of newly domesticated grains possible. In 4000 BC Eridu had about four thousand inhabitants. If you wanted to buy goods at a marketplace, drink beer in a tavern, see a building larger than one story, or walk down an alley at night it was probably the only place on earth you could do so. By 3700 B.C Eridu’s population had grown to approximately ten thousand inhabitants.
The Statue of Enki Sails from Eridu (also painted by the remarkable Balage Balogh)
Thereafter, Eridu was swiftly eclipsed by Uruk to the northwest which was founded by the same blend of people. The citizens of Uruk looked to Eridu for their template (in fact Sumerian mythology features a story in which Inanna, the harlot goddess of Uruk was forced to visit Eridu’s god Enki in order to obtain the gifts of civilization). Uruk became the first city to boast more than 50,000 people. It featured the first monumental architecture, the first writing, the first full-time bureaucrats, and the first professional soldiers. It was the first civilization.
As the other city states of ancient Mesopotamia grew and prospered, Eridu, began to wither. The once fertile soil lost its vigor and became salty after centuries of irrigation. Farmers switched to salt-resistant barley but then even that failed. Wars and strife swept over the region as kings and their armies vied for supremacy. By 2050 the region was depopulated. Neo-Babylonians built a purely ceremonial temple there to honor Eridu’s legacy as the first city and the birthplace of civilization, but by the 6th century BC, even that was abandoned forever.
Eridu Today
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