History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-nine Firsts in Recorded History

reply to post by SLAYER69


I think you overlooked "Chapter 8 Law Codes: The First "Moses"

Originally posted by Byrd
Actually, the archeological evidence points to it being a great flood on the Euphrates/Tigris river and the original ORIGINAL text doesn't talk about the whole world being flooded but rather one that wiped out a large area. The survivors come to land and go into a town where they have to rebuild their lives in a new area.

I had to quote the entire reply.

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Bird this is exactly what I've been writing threads on. I don't believe in a "World Wide flood" I hope you know that. I've always maintained a stance that there were large regional floods where the people had to pack up and either head inland or up to higher ground during the last of the ice age melt off

In the above animation watch what happens to the Persian Gulf region in the last 10,000 years. If the article is correct something major happened around 8,000 years ago or 6,000 BC so now we are getting close to the birth of their civilization. It wouldn't surprise me if the "Biblical Flood Story" which was later borrowed from may have gotten some of the FACTS wrong etc.

Originally posted by Swills
reply to post by SLAYER69

 

I think you overlooked "Chapter 8 Law Codes: The First "Moses"

Yeah I read it. I was pointing out the laws were different for the poor. They were protected against the rich and powerful. Seems they could teach us a thing or two.

reply to post by SLAYER69


it got worse however, so eventually the babylonians ended up with something similar to the hebrew year of jubilee, where every 40 years everyone was forgiven their debts, so that the rich and powerful didn't end up owning all the land and wealth. lands were returned to the people who lost them to indebtedness, slaves were set free, etc and in this way, they kept the rich happily involved in the accumulation of (new) wealth and the poor happy that their children would not end up homeless. too bad the year of jubilee seems to only apply to the rich guys these days.

Originally posted by SLAYER69

Originally posted by Swills
reply to post by SLAYER69

 

I think you overlooked "Chapter 8 Law Codes: The First "Moses"

Yeah I read it. I was pointing out the laws were different for the poor. They were protected against the rich and powerful. Seems they could teach us a thing or two.

I'm sorry I thought you wee pointing out that Hammurbi was the oldest source for written codes/law. We can learn & thing or 2 from the past. It took a noble ruler to want to to protect the poor & helpless from the fat cats

Good post!

Do you know if the book comes in kindle format? Heard of lot of Sumerians from the show Ancient Aliens. although the show had no substantial evidence, it was still thought provoking. Now i can read about these Sumerians, have more knowledge and not get left behind guys like "slayer69" and "undo"

reply to post by Swills


hey, i think i've forgotten so much about the sumerians that i can contribute on a level with slayer and byrd good posts btw
re law givers this fellow hasn't been mentioned yet, this fellow was "laying down the law" before Ur-Nammu:

Gudea of Lagash
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[note the way his hands are clasped: this is how the sumerians prayed, those that were able to had statue-doubles of themselves made to pray for them when they were otherwise occupied]

Sumerian Statues

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Gudea was a ruler (ensi) of the state of Lagash in Southern Mesopotamia who ruled ca. 2144 - 2124 BC. He probably did not come from the city, but had married Ninalla, daughter of the ruler Urbaba (2164 - 2144 BC) of Lagash, thus gaining entrance to the royal house of Lagash. He was succeeded by his son Ur-Ningirsu.
***
The social reforms instituted during Gudea’s rulership, which included the cancellation of debts and allowing women to own family land, may have been honest reform or a return to old Lagašite custom.

His era was especially one of artistic development. But it was Ningirsu who received the majority of Gudea’s attention. Ningirsu the war god, for whom Gudea built maces, spears, and axes, all appropriately named for the destructive power of Ningirsu—enormous and gilt. However, the devotion for Ningirsu was especially inspired by the fact that this was Gudea's personal god and that Ningirsu was since ancient times the main god of the Laga#e region (together with his spouse Ba'u or Baba).

In matters of trade, Lagash under Gudea had extensive commercial communications with distant realms. According to his own records, Gudea brought cedars from the Amanus and Lebanon mountains in Syria, diorite from eastern Arabia, copper and gold from central and southern Arabia and from Sinai, while his armies were engaged in battles in Elam on the east.

Cylinder A, written after the life of Gudea, paints an attractive picture of southern Mesopotamia during the Lagaš supremacy. In it, “The Elamites came to him from Elam… loaded with wood on their shoulders… in order to build Ningirsu’s House” (p. 78), the general tone being one of brotherly love in an area that has known only regional conflict and rebellion.

However, the common intimation that Gudea was a peaceful ruler (as made by Edzard), who funded his projects through trade, ignores the attention paid to Ningirsu, as well as the martial nature of Southern Mesopotamia in general. While Gudea was not likely an autocrat who ruled over all of Southern Mesopotamia, this part of the world was full of religious fervor and universal conflict.

Gudea built more than the House of Ningirsu, he restored tradition to Lagaš. His use of the title ‘ensi’, when he obviously held enough political influence, both in Lagaš and in the region, to justify ‘lugal’, demonstrates the same political tact as his emphasis on the power of the divine.

And it worked. Ur-Ningirsu II, the next ruler of Lagaš, took as his title, “Ur-Ningirsu, ruler of Lagaš, son of Gudea, ruler of Lagaš, who had built Ningirsu’s house” (p. 183). The dynasty was led by Gudea.

***
Gudea's appearance is recognizable today because he had numerous statues or idols, depicting him with unprecedented, lifelike realism, placed in temples throughout Sumer. Gudea took advantage of artistic development because he evidently wanted posterity to know what he looked like. And in that he has succeeded—a feat available to him as royalty, but not to the common people who could not afford to have statues engraved of themselves.

Gudea, following Sargon, was one of the first rulers to claim divinity for himself, or have it claimed for him after his death. Some of his exploits were later added to the Gilgamesh epic (N.K. Sandars, 1972, The Epic of Gilgamesh).

Following Gudea, the influence of Lagaš declined, until it suffered a military defeat by Ur-Nammu, whose Third Dynasty of Ur then became the reigning power in Southern Mesopotamia.

realhistoryww.com...

realhistoryww.com...

Gudea rose -- it was sleep; he shuddered -- it was a dream. Accepting Ning~irsu's words, he went to perform extispicy on a white kid. He performed it on the kid and his omen was favourable. Ning~irsu's intention became as clear as daylight to Gudea.

He is wise, and able too to realise things. The ruler gave instructions to his city as to one man. The land of Lagaš became of one accord for him, like children of one mother. He opened manacles, removed fetters; established ……, rejected legal complaints, and locked up those guilty of capital offences (instead of executing them).

He undid the tongue of the goad and the whip, replacing them with wool from lamb-bearing sheep. No mother shouted at her child. No child answered its mother back. No slave who …… was hit on the head by his master, no misbehaving slave girl was slapped on the face by her mistress. Nobody could make the ruler building the E-ninnu, Gudea, let fall a chance utterance. The ruler cleansed the city, he let purifying fire loose over it. He expelled the persons ritually unclean, unpleasant to look at, and …… from the city.

The citizens were purifying an area of 24 iku for him, they were cleansing that area for him. He put juniper, the mountains' pure plant, onto the fire and raised smoke with cedar resin, the scent of gods. For him the day was for praying, and the night passed for him in supplications. In order to build the house of Ning~irsu, the Anuna gods of the land of Lagaš stood by Gudea in prayer and supplication, and all this made the true shepherd Gudea extremely happy.

www.humanistictexts.org...

Praise of Gudea

9 I had debts remitted and "washed all hands."

For seven days no grain was ground.

The slave-woman was allowed to be equal to her mistress,

the slave was allowed to walk side by side with his master.

In my city the one unclean to someone

was permitted to sleep outside.

10 I paid attention to the justice ordained by Nanse and Ningirsu;

I did not expose the orphan to the wealthy person

nor did I expose the widow to the influential one.

In a house having no male child

I let the daughter become its heir.

11 He purified the holy city and encircled it with fires . . . He collected clay in a very pure place; in a pure place he made silt into the bricks and put the bricks into the mould. He followed the rites in all their splendor: he purified the foundations of the temple, surrounded it with fires, anointed the platforms with an aromatic balm . . .

From Elam came the Elamites, from Susa the Susians. Magan and Muluhha collected timber from their mountains . . . and Gudea brought them together inf his town Girsu.

Gudea, the great en-priest ooof Ningirsu, made a path into the Cedar mountains which nobody had entered before; he cut its cedars with great axes . . .like giant snakes, cedars were floating down the water (river) . . .

In the quarries that nobdoy had entered before, Gudea,, the great en-priest of Ningirsu, made a path and then the stones were delivered in large blocks . . . Many other precious metals were carried to the ensi. From the Copper mountinas of Kimash . . . its mountains as dust . . . For Gudea, the mined silver from its mountains, delivered red stone from Meluhha in great amount . . .

hmmm...having looked up all this i see that Ur-Nammu holds the oldest surviving legal code but what we do know of Gudea implies that there were laws [legal codes] in existance before him.

not to mention the formulaic similarity in the way hey were praised.

you'll notice when people don't really want to embrace the sumerians themselves (guess that's just too controversial), they end up talking about every culture that came after, in the area, EXCEPT the sumerians. then they just call them sumerian. sumer ended at the onset of the black sea flood.

sumerian, circa 4000 BC
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sumerian, circa 4000 BC
oi.uchicago.edu...

sumerian, circa 4000 BC
oi.uchicago.edu...

not a sumerian, circa 1900 BC
oi.uchicago.edu...

reply to post by DerepentLEstranger


i think gudea wouldn't qualify as sumerian. more like akkadian, maybe even early babylonian.
nimrod time frame, or thereabouts. "Baba", now there's an interesting name. Wonder if it's etymologically related to Isis and Inana.

reply to post by DerepentLEstranger


Awesome post! That's what I like to see, more info on Sumer, and all things ancient, being shared in this thread.

Outstanding everyone

reply to post by Swills


It's ironic that I just finished reading this book two days ago.

I'm afraid the good old professor missed the point.

He talkes at length about myths, poems etc, but NOWHERE does he talk about where the Sumerians came from. Aka, what someone just clicked their fingers and POOF, they arrived.

Samuel Kramer is obviously a very educated man, and has studied the cuniform clay tablets for many years, BUT, his is part of what I call "The Cabalistic Academia".

In other words he wont step over the line and admit that the Sumarians were a created race.

Originally posted by downunderET
reply to post by Swills

 

It's ironic that I just finished reading this book two days ago.

I'm afraid the good old professor missed the point.

He talkes at length about myths, poems etc, but NOWHERE does he talk about where the Sumerians came from. Aka, what someone just clicked their fingers and POOF, they arrived.

Samuel Kramer is obviously a very educated man, and has studied the cuniform clay tablets for many years, BUT, his is part of what I call "The Cabalistic Academia".

In other words he wont step over the line and admit that the Sumarians were a created race.

Thats the great mystery! Where did they come from? Now while this one book of his doesn't answer the question, that's okay because that wasn't the point of this one book of his.

he does say that enki arrives via the abzu built in the sea. he raises his already constructed city up from the abyss (the abzu) and floats it over the water like a lofty mountain. assyriologists claim the abzu is a reference to underground springs/rivers of water, but if that were so, how'd one of them get on the bottom of the sea? at that point the argument is that it's just mythology anyway,, and that's that. dust off hands, throw away something like 4000 years of ancient history.

Originally posted by SLAYER69
I feel they could teach us a thing or two...

Code of Hammurabi

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Code of Hammurabi Legal System
King Hammurabi is remembered for his 'Code' or collection of laws. It was modelled on existing laws, but this was the largest law code assembled. The Code has 282 provisions which dealt with many aspects of life, including family rights, trade, slavery, tariffs, taxes, prices and wages. The Code tells us much about Babylonian society.

The Code of Hammurabi is inscribed on a stone slab over 2 metres (6ft) high. At the top, the King is shown receiving laws from the Babylonian sun god, Shamash. The laws are not the same for rich and poor, but the weak were given some protection against the tyranny of the strong. The Code was not the only law code in Mesopotamia, but the only one written in stone.

Slayer,

I'm surprised you passed on the opportunity to note that the stone slab referred to in your source is diorite.

That always fires up the fringies!

Anyway, Hammurabi was Babylonian, not Sumerian.

Just nit-picking, I know.

Well, not really...

Harte

they were predated by some 6,500 years by the folks at gobekli tepe

the article even mentions the book in the OP's post


link to article

Childe, like most researchers today, believed that the revolution first occurred in the Fertile Crescent, the arc of land that curves northeast from Gaza into southern Turkey and then sweeps southeast into Iraq. Bounded on the south by the harsh Syrian Desert and on the north by the mountains of Turkey, the crescent is a band of temperate climate between inhospitable extremes. Its eastern terminus is the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in southern Iraq—the site of a realm known as Sumer, which dates back to about 4000 B.C. In Childe's day most researchers agreed that Sumer represented the beginning of civilization. Archaeologist Samuel Noah Kramer summed up that view in the 1950s in his book History Begins at Sumer. Yet even before Kramer finished writing, the picture was being revised at the opposite, western end of the Fertile Crescent. In the Levant—the area that today encompasses Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Jordan, and western Syria—archaeologists had discovered settlements dating as far back as 13,000 B.C. Known as Natufian villages (the name comes from the first of these sites to be found), they sprang up across the Levant as the Ice Age was drawing to a close, ushering in a time when the region's climate became relatively warm and wet.

I've read that their own myths state that they originated in Dilmun.

Dilmun, sometimes described as "the place where the sun rises" and "the Land of the Living", is the scene of some versions of the Sumerian creation myth, and the place where the deified Sumerian hero of the flood, Utnapishtim (Ziusudra), was taken by the gods to live forever.

Dilmun is also described in the epic story of Enki and Ninhursag as the site at which the Creation occurred. Ninlil, the Sumerian goddess of air and south wind had her home in Dilmun. It is also featured in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

However, in the early epic "Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta", the main events, which center on Enmerkar's construction of the ziggurats in Uruk and Eridu, are described as taking place in a world "before Dilmun had yet been settled".

As of 2008, archaeology has failed to find a site in existence from 3300 BC (Uruk IV) to 556 BC (Neo-Babylonian Era) when Dilmun (Telmun) appears in texts. Despite the scholarly consensus that Dilmun encompasses three locations: (1) the eastern littoral of Arabia from the vicinity of modern Kuwait to Bahrain; (2) the island of Bahrain; (3) the island of Failaka east of Kuwait, the earliest known site is Qal'at al-Bahrain which is dated no earlier than c. 2200 BC according to Flemming Hojlund. Failaka was settled after 2000 BC following a drop in sea level according to Daniel Potts and Harriet Crawford. No settlements exist in the Arabian littoral 3300-2000 BC according to Hojlund. Thus, despite Dilmun's appearance in ancient texts dating from 3300-2300 BC archaeologists have failed to find a site for Dilmun dating to this period. Hymns regarding the Sumerian god Enki of Eridu in Sumer speak of his assaulting and deflowering Dilmun's maidens as they stand by a river bank, he reaching out of nearby marsh to clasp them to his bosom. Of Bahrain, Failaka, and the eastern littoral of Arabia, none possess marshes and a riverbank. Dilmun, furthermore, is said to lie "in the east where the sun rises," a situation that does not apply to the eastern Arabian littoral, Failaka or Bahrain, all of which lie south of Sumer and Eridu.

Howard-Carter (1987) realizing that these three locations possess no archaeological evidence of a settlement dating 3300-2300 BC, has proposed that Dilmun of this era might be a still unidentified tell near the Shat al-Arab between modern-day Qurnah and Basra in modern day Iraq.[6] In favor of Howard-Carter's proposal, she noted that this area does lie to the east of Sumer ("where the sun rises"), and the riverbank where Dilmun's maidens would have been accosted aligns with the Shat al-Arab which is in the midst of marshes. The "mouth of the rivers" where Dilmun was said to lie is for her the union of the Tigris and Euphrates at Qurnah.

Source: Wiki

Harte

reply to post by undo


they're sorta easy to get confused, i suppose

The term "Sumerian" is the common name given to the ancient non-Semitic inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia, Sumer, by the Semitic Akkadians. The Sumerians referred to themselves as ùĝ saĝ gíg-ga, phonetically uŋ saŋ giga, literally meaning "the black-headed people".[3] The Akkadian word Shumer may represent the geographical name in dialect, but the phonological development leading to the Akkadian term šumerû is uncertain.[2][4] Biblical Shinar, Egyptian Sngr and Hittite Šanhar(a) could be western variants of Shumer.[4])

2nd Dynasty of Lagash
Gudea of Lagash
Main article: Lagash

ca. 2093–2046 BC (short chronology)

Following the downfall of the Akkadian Empire at the hands of Gutians, another native Sumerian ruler, Gudea of Lagash, rose to local prominence and continued the practices of the Sargonid kings' claims to divinity. Like the previous Lagash dynasty, Gudea and his descendents also promoted artistic development and left a large number of archaeological artifacts. After the fall of their empire, the Akkadians themselves essentially coalesced into two states; Babylon in the south and Assyria in the north of Mesopotamia.

wikisource

reply to post by Harte


i seem to recall reading somewhere about India or thereabouts
being a possible location for Dilmun.

hopes it wasn't in one of Sitchin's books

reply to post by Byrd


Byrd, could you provde some linkage to a source for that story? You have piqued my interest (which isn't all that uncommon).

I hope there is more rain in your neck of Texas than mine.