A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD
BY
H. G. WELLS
15.SUMERIA, EARLY EGYPT AND WRITING
The old world is a wider, more varied stage than the new. By 6000 or 7000 B.C. there were already quasi-civilized communities almost at the Peruvian level, appearing in various fertile regions of Asia and in the Nile valley. At that time north Persia and western Turkestan and south Arabia were all more fertile than they are now, and there are traces of very early communities in these regions. It is in lower Mesopotamia however and in Egypt that there first appear cities, temples, systematic irrigation, and evidences of a social organization rising above the level of a mere barbaric village-town. In those days the Euphrates and Tigris flowed by separate mouths into the Persian Gulf, and it was in the country between them that the Sumerians built their first cities. About the same time, for chronology is still vague, the great history of Egypt was beginning.
These Sumerians appear to have been a brownish people with prominent
noses. They employed a sort of writing that has been deciphered, and
their language is now known. They had discovered the use of bronze and
they built great tower-like temples of sun-dried brick. The clay of
this country is very fine; they used it to write upon, and so it is
that their inscriptions have been preserved to us. They had cattle,
sheep, goats and asses, but no horses. They fought on foot, in close
formation, carrying spears and shields of skin. Their clothing was of
wool and they shaved their heads.
Each of the Sumerian cities seems generally to have been an independent
state with a god of its own and priests of its own. But sometimes one
city would establish an ascendancy over others and exact tribute from
their population. A very ancient inscription at Nippur records the
“empire,” the first recorded empire, of the Sumerian city of Erech.
Its god and its priest-king claimed an authority from the Persian Gulf
to the Red Sea.
BRICK OF HAMMURABI, KING OF BABYLON ABOUT 2200 B.C.
BRICK OF HAMMURABI, KING OF BABYLON ABOUT 2200 B.C.
Note the cuneiform characters of the inscription, which records the
building of a temple to a Sun God
At first writing was merely an abbreviated method of pictorial record.
Even before Neolithic times men were beginning to write. The Azilian
rock pictures to which we have already referred show the beginning of
the process. Many of them record hunts and expeditions, and in most of
these the human figures are plainly drawn. But in some the painter
would not bother with head and limbs; he just indicated men by a
vertical and one or two transverse strokes. From this to a
conventional condensed picture writing was an easy transition. In
Sumeria, where the writing was done on clay with a stick, the dabs of
the characters soon became unrecognizably unlike the things they stood
for, but in Egypt where men painted on walls and on strips of the
papyrus reed (the first paper) the likeness to the thing imitated
remained. From the fact that the wooden styles used in Sumeria made
wedge-shaped marks, the Sumerian writing is called cuneiform (=
wedge-shaped).
EBONY CYLINDER SEALS OF FIRST EGYPTIAN DYNASTY
EBONY CYLINDER SEALS OF FIRST EGYPTIAN DYNASTY
Recovered from the Tombs at Abydos in 1921 by the British School of
Archæology. They give evidence of early form of block printing
An important step towards writing was made when pictures were used to
indicate not the thing represented but some similar thing. In the
rebus dear to children of a suitable age, this is still done to-day.
We draw a camp with tents and a bell, and the child is delighted to
guess that this is the Scotch name Campbell. The Sumerian language was
a language made up of accumulated syllables rather like some
contemporary Amerindian languages, and it lent itself very readily to
this syllabic method of writing words expressing ideas that could not
be conveyed by pictures directly. Egyptian writing underwent parallel
developments. Later on, when foreign peoples with less distinctly
syllabled methods of speech were to learn and use these picture scripts
they were to make those further modifications and simplifications that
developed at last into alphabetical writing. All the true alphabets of
the later world derived from a mixture of the Sumerian cuneiform and
the Egyptian hieroglyphic (priest writing). Later in China there was
to develop a conventionalized picture writing, but in China it never
got to the alphabetical stage.
The invention of writing was of very great importance in the
development of human societies. It put agreements, laws, commandments
on record. It made the growth of states larger than the old city
states possible. It made a continuous historical consciousness
possible. The command of the priest or king and his seal could go far
beyond his sight and voice and could survive his death. It is
interesting to note that in ancient Sumeria seals were greatly used. A
king or a nobleman or a merchant would have his seal often very
artistically carved, and would impress it on any clay document he
wished to authorize. So close had civilization got to printing six
thousand years ago. Then the clay was dried hard and became permanent.
For the reader must remember that in the land of Mesopotamia for
countless years, letters, records and accounts were all written on
comparatively indestructible tiles. To that fact we owe a great wealth
of recovered knowledge.
Bronze, copper, gold, silver and, as a precious rarity, meteoric iron
were known in both Sumeria and Egypt at a very early stage.
Daily life in those first city lands of the old world must have been
very similar in both Egypt and Sumeria. And except for the asses and
cattle in the streets it must have been not unlike the life in the Maya
cities of America three or four thousand years later. Most of the
people in peace time were busy with irrigation and cultivation—except
on days of religious festivity. They had no money and no need for it.
They managed their small occasional trades by barter. The princes and
rulers who alone had more than a few possessions used gold and silver
bars and precious stones for any incidental act of trade. The temple
dominated life; in Sumeria it was a great towering temple that went up
to a roof from which the stars were observed; in Egypt it was a massive
building with only a ground floor. In Sumeria the priest ruler was the
greatest, most splendid of beings. In Egypt however there was one who
was raised above the priests; he was the living incarnation of the
chief god of the land, the Pharaoh, the god king.
There were few changes in the world in those days; men’s days were
sunny, toilsome and conventional. Few strangers came into the land and
such as did fared uncomfortably. The priest directed life according to
immemorial rules and watched the stars for seed time and marked the
omens of the sacrifices and interpreted the warnings of dreams. Men
worked and loved and died, not unhappily, forgetful of the savage past
of their race and heedless of its future. Sometimes the ruler was
benign. Such was Pepi II, who reigned in Egypt for ninety years.
Sometimes he was ambitious and took men’s sons to be soldiers and sent
them against neighbouring city states to war and plunder, or he made
them toil to build great buildings. Such were Cheops and Chephren and
Mycerinus, who built those vast sepulchral piles, the pyramids at
Gizeh. The largest of these is 450 feet high and the weight of stone in
it is 4,883,000 tons. All this was brought down the Nile in boats and
lugged into place chiefly by human muscle. Its erection must have
exhausted Egypt more than a great war would have done.