The pyramid of Ur is old and survived for thousands of years. Its most recent inhabitants, far in our own past, would also have been aware of their own history stretching back thousands of years. In fact, as Moudhy Al-Rashid says:
History, memory and antiquity were important in ancient Mesopotamia and it was not unusual - or even problematic - to blend history and myth. The older a thing or person or event was, the more important it was. Kings regularly sought to root their royal activities and even identities in bygone ages. The Sumerian King List, as a record stretching into a past so distant no sources even survive to corrobaorate it, allowed later kings to associate themselves with such a long list of greatness. The people who wrote the list were attempting the very same thign I am in this book - a history of their ancient past.
The centrality of history, and myth to the Mesopotamian view of themselves is what makes the idea of an ancient musuem so intriguing. So in her exploration of ancient Mesopotamia, Al-Rashid takes the objects found in the "museum" and discusses them in detail to interogate both the ancient history and what history means to us. Its an entertaining exploration of a part of history that I knew little about.
Part of what makes this point in history so fascinating is that it is so well documented. This is, in no small part, due to the myriad of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing. These tablets document everything from orders by shopkeepers to instructions to the king's personnel. There are also letters between sisters, tables of school children who are practising their letters, together with sketches of their teachers. With these, sometimes very dull and sometimes very moving, documents we see both how the people of the region organised their economies and the things they were interested in. Al-Rashid's expertise is these cuneiform tablets and her enthusiasm shines through. Sadly there are no pictures of the tablets she discuses, so its hard to imagine them. But Al-Rashid's descriptions of the tablets, and crucially, the evolution of the writing form is detailed. This is how we begin to see these objects as parts of an evolving history that has shaped our own.
But in describing the objects and tablets Al-Rashid gives us further insights. The history of the past, as the "king lists" suggest is often the history of a wealthy few. But Al-Rashid digs through this to try and draw out more about who made up the majority of society, and how they lived and worked. She writes:
Some of the earliest cuneiform texts from two of the oldest Mesopotamian cities, Uruk and Jemdet Nasr, record lists of workers whose sexes were labelled in the same way as those of cattle using signs that resembled genitalia. They were counted and accounted for like animals.... Other qualifications also appeared alongside people's names, including the combinations of the signs for 'head' and 'rope' to refer to a person led by a noose, and one sign that simply means 'yoke'.
The wealth of places like Ur and its palaces rested on the hard, and often forced, labour of tens of thousands of workers. As Al-Rashid says these people are barely recorded and remembered apart from a few passing cuneiform references. The rich however are memorialised, and "took their stories into death, along with their many privileges, proppsed up by an economic system that concentrated wealth, for the most part, in the hands of palaces and temples for partial redistribution to a wider population of dependents."
Indeed for those at the bottom of Mesopotamian society somethings were horrific. Some cuneiform records record how parents were forced to sell their own children, even babes in arms, into slavery. Al-Rashid is careful to explore the way the ancient texts demonstrate the reality of the past's class societies:
Cuneiform preserves the stories of people whose work in many ways made life in ancient Mesopotamia possible. The agricultural labrouers who harveted grain, factory workers who made textiles, and the runaway slaves (and perhaps even their bounty hunters) live on in the tiny triangles from ancient Mesopotamia and provide a glimpse of what life might have been life for those whose stories were wtitten down by and for others.
It is unusual to find a book about the ancient past that takes serious questions of class, gender and power. Mesopotamia was a system that produced great wealth, but we rarely hear about those who created it. As Brecht wrote so memorably:
Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?
Al-Rashid's book does its best to rescue those forgotten lives and place them in the context of their wider world. Its a great book whose only fault in my view is that it lacks a map and any illustrations. A few pictures of the objects described, and a few images of cuneiform tables and their translations would have made all the difference. But don't let this stop you getting a copy and devouring it.
Related Reviews
Scott - Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
Mithen - Thirst: Water & Power in the Ancient World
McAnany & Yoffee - Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire
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