Mary Lucy Wood<\/b><\/p>\n
[Mary Lucy Wood was educated in Florida, did graduate work at Columbia University and spent a year doing historical research in Uruguay and Argentina where her interest in archaeology was sparked by the discovery of Inca bones in Peru.]<\/i><\/p>\n
According to Genesis 11:2 the Tower of Babel was built in the land of Shinar. Many scholars believe that this is a reference to the ancient land of Sumer. In this article, Mary Wood describes how scholars are gradually unlocking the mysteries of this long-lost kingdom. \u2014 Ed<\/i>.<\/p>\n
At 82, Samuel Noah Kramer, a scholar who describes himself as a man who \u201cknows mostest about the leastest,\u201d is still engaged in what he calls \u201cthe universal question for origins.\u201d For Dr. Kramer, now Professor Emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, that quest has meant 52 years devoted to the translation of man\u2019s first written records: the clay tablets on which the people called the Sumerians inscribed the wedge-shaped writing known as cuneiform about 3, 500 years ago.<\/p>\n
According to archaeology, the Sumerians, who called themselves the \u201cblackheaded people,\u201d were among the first civilizations. Nomads, migrating from some place still unknown, they settled near <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 8:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1979) p. 70<\/p>\n
Samuel Noah Kramer with his beloved tablets<\/i><\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n
and between the two great rivers of Mesopotamia \u2014 the Tigris and the Euphrates \u2014 about the 35th century B.C., and began to develop the fundamentals of civilization. They systematized agriculture, developed irrigation, constructed the first wagon wheel and the potters\u2019 wheel, a great technological breakthrough, experimented with a form of democracy, built cities and \u2014 Professor Kramer\u2019s lifelong studies show \u2014 wrote poetry and literature that in the West still echo through the pages of the Bible.<\/p>\n
Over the millennia, however, Sumer vanished, as did its successors, Babylon and Assyria. Abandoned, and gradually covered by the earth, Sumer disappeared and was forgotten for over 2, 000 years, its cities and culture buried in mounds of earth looming up from the muddy flatlands of the \u201cland between the rivers,\u201d in what is now southeastern Iraq. But then, about 140 years ago, the first of the great Middle East archaeologists began to dig into those mounds, called \u201ctells\u201d, found artifacts and gradually \u2014 as they uncovered temples, monuments, tombs, sculpture, ornaments, tools and finely worked gold \u2014 drew a profile of a complete, hitherto unknown, <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 8:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1979) p. 71<\/p>\n
civilization. More important, they also unearthed quantities of clay tablets, inscribed with the earliest known system of writing, one of the pivotal achievements of mankind.<\/p>\n
In archaeology such discoveries are the stuff of legends. But they are also just a beginning. For until they are deciphered, such finds as the tablets recently unearthed at Ebla in Syria are relatively useless. The discovery of cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia, therefore, was just a first step. Still to come was the decipherment and translation of the script early workmen called \u201ca bird\u2019s footprints\u201d by men like George Grotefend, Henry Rawlinson and George Smith and, in this century, Samuel Noah Kramer \u2014 a Sumerologist.<\/p>\n
A Sumerologist is, obviously, a specialist. Indeed, as Dr. Kramer himself says in the introduction to his book History Begins at Sumer,<\/i> he is \u201cone of the narrowest of specialists…\u201d Yet the work of the Sumerologists involves them in all aspects of that ancient culture \u2014 business transactions, codes of law, home remedies, hymns, battles, mythology and poetry \u2014 all impressed in wet clay by the scribes of Sumer nearly five thousand years ago.<\/p>\n
Writing, Dr. Kramer says, was developed when \u201cthe need arose to record business transactions or at least to tally inventories and lists of gifts brought to the temples as offerings.\u201d First attempts were pictographic, simple line drawings of such objects as an ear of barley, a bird, an ass head, a star for \u201cheaven\u201d or a bowl of food \u2014 with action represented by, for example, a drawing of a foot for \u201cwalking\u201d or a head and mouth for \u201ceating.\u201d<\/p>\n
Through the centuries, however, the Sumerians reduced the pictures to simple wedge-shaped symbols \u2014 the cuneiform signs \u2014 made by the end of a reed stylus pressed into wet clay, and by the second half of the third millennium B.C., Dr. Kramer says, \u201cSumerian writing technique had become sufficiently plastic and flexible to express without difficulty the most complicated historical and literary compositions, many of which had been handed down by the oral tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Dr. Kramer it was the Sumerian literary compositions that drew him deeply into Sumerology in 1930 and that still, 49 years later, absorb his attention and time. Although he has retired from teaching \u2014 to a comfortable house in Philadelphia, filled with art from around the world collected by his wife \u2014 Professor Kramer is still slim and vigorous, still writes, lectures and travels and this spring will publish still another book on Sumer: From the Poetry of<\/i> <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 8:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1979) p. 72<\/p>\n
Cuneiform inscriptions, like this one, in Istanbul\u2019s Museum of the Ancient Orient, became the life\u2019s work of Samuel Noah Kramer, today dean of American Sumerologists<\/i><\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 8:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1979) p. 73<\/p>\n
Sumer<\/i>. And in spite of an occasional wry comment about himself as the \u201cpinpoint historian\u201d or the \u201cToynbee in reverse,\u201d Professor Kramer, in discussing his research into Sumerian language and literature, discloses a curiosity of enormous proportions, and a diligence not often equaled.<\/p>\n
Samuel Noah Kramer began his personal journey to Sumer when he came to the University of Pennsylvania as a graduate student in 1927 and as part of the program for a doctor\u2019s degree in Assyriology began to read cuneiform. Then, in 1930, he participated in two digs in Iraq. The first was at Tell Billah in the north, near modern Mosul. Here no tablets were found despite considerable effort, and Kramer, whose whole purpose in being there was to decipher tablet inscriptions, began to regard himself as useless. His unhappiness was compounded when he came down with an acute attack of appendicitis so severe that there was no time to move him to Baghdad. Instead he was taken to a two-room hospital nearby where the doctor in charge, working with limited equipment, saved his life. A souvenir of the event was a scar running virtually the entire length of his stomach. Apparently the operation was longer and more complicated than normal and the doctor, with justifiable pride, displayed the appendix rather like a trophy.<\/p>\n
After a month of slow recovery, Dr. Kramer was asked to go south to a second excavation being carried out at Tell Fara, on the site of ancient Shuruppak. The careful work turned up a quantity of tablets, many in groups, probably where a school had been, or where the clay \u201cbooks,\u201d no longer needed, had been used as filler in clay walls. Some of these were brought back to the museum for study. \u201cIt was at this point that I began to be curious about the literary tablets that occasionally came to light,\u201d explained Professor Kramer.<\/p>\n
His curiosity, however, could not be satisfied right away as, shortly after his return from Iraq, he was invited to Chicago to help in the compilation of an Assyrian dictionary. \u201cI went to work on the dictionary in 1932, at the Oriental Institute, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, where one of the editors was Arno Poebel, a leading Sumerologist of the day who taught me to read Sumerian.\u201d<\/p>\n
Four years later, he got the chance to develop his interest in the cuneiform literary texts when he won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Istanbul to investigate some of what are <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 8:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1979) p. 74<\/p>\n
called the Nippur tablets. \u201cConsiderably before my time,\u201d Professor Kramer explained, \u201cbetween 1898 and 1900, the university sent expeditions to excavate the ancient city of Nippur in Iraq, then under Turkish control. There the archaeologists found some 50,000 clay tablets bearing cuneiform writing. Half were sent to Istanbul to the Museum of the Ancient Orient, and half to Philadelphia, to the University of Pennsylvania Museum.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the time the trip to Istanbul became possible, Sam Kramer had married a pretty University of Chicago graduate student, Millie Tokarsky, and had two children, Daniel and Judy. They traveled to Turkey by freighter \u201cand half the passengers aboard were the four Kramers,\u201d Millie recalls.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery morning I washed the family\u2019s clothes by hand and sterilized baby bottles. We had a playpen on deck and a red coaster wagon to convey the children around towns when we could go ashore.\u201d<\/p>\n
The crew taught Judy, age one, to walk, coaxing her back and forth on deck. \u201cShe was,\u201d says Millie Kramer, \u201cthe belle of the ship.\u201d The trip was uneventful except for a tense moment in the Strait of Gibraltar. The Spanish Civil War was raging and Franco\u2019s men searched the freighter for weapons they suspected were being smuggled to Loyalists. None were found.<\/p>\n
In Istanbul at the Museum of the Ancient Orient, Kramer set to work piecing together approximately 200 of the cuneiform literary texts written in the Sumerian language \u2014 as distinct from, say, the Assyrian language, which was also written in cuneiform but was nevertheless a separate language.<\/p>\n
It was not, Kramer smiled, an easy task; on the contrary, copying was painstaking, eye-straining, dusty work. With many of the baked clay tablets broken or cracked and the inscriptions half obliterated, efforts to translate them were frustrating, particularly when Dr. Kramer realized that many tablets were fragments of larger pieces which could be anywhere: in London or Berlin or Baghdad or Philadelphia, or possibly lost forever. But the efforts did lead to one fascinating discovery: a poetic essay on suffering, in Sumerian cuneiform, that bore a startling resemblance to the Bible\u2019s Book of Job.<\/p>\n
Early in this century two fragments from tablets in the Nippur collection in Philadelphia had been published, both dealing with the theme of human suffering. Now, in Istanbul, Kramer recognized and <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 8:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1979) p. 75<\/p>\n
Sumerologist copies out cuneiform text in Istanbul<\/i><\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n
copied two additional fragments belonging to the same essay. It was an exciting discovery but it was not the only one. Later, after he had returned to Philadelphia and joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, he also identified the fifth and sixth fragments of the same essay; in fact, he and an assistant were startled to discover, the two pieces in Istanbul had been broken off the very tablets they were examining in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
Altogether, the six fragments yielded a poetic essay of some 139 lines, the first ever found on suffering and submission, very like the Book of Job, but written more than 2, 000 years before the compilation of the Old Testament. As described by Professor Kramer in History Begins at Sumer,<\/i> the Sumerian version of the Job story does seem to parallel the Biblical version.<\/p>\n
In the essay, the sufferer is a man who had been wealthy and good, blessed with family and friends, until one day sickness and adversity overwhelm him. He refuses to accuse his god or condemn him for allowing such evil; instead, he humbles himself and with tears offers prayer and supplication. As a reward for such devotion, the god heeds the prayer, delivers the man from suffering, and restores his well-being.<\/p>\n
The Job contribution, furthermore, was not Professor Kramer\u2019s only addition to Sumerology. In 1952, again working in Istanbul\u2019s Museum of the Ancient Orient, he also \u2014 on a tip from another cuneiform scholar \u2014 translated a tablet that turned out to be part of the Ur-Nammu code of law \u2014 which antedates the famous Code of Hammurabi by about 300 years.<\/p>\n
Earlier, in 1947, one of Kramer\u2019s assistants had discovered a tablet in the Nippur Collection of the University Museum inscribed <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 8:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1979) p. 76<\/p>\n
with a law code promulgated by the king Lipit-Ishtar which antedated Hammurabi\u2019s code by 150 years. In 1948, Taha Baqir, a former student of Professor Kramer\u2019s and then curator of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, announced the excavation of two tablets inscribed with a still earlier code, but written about a century later than the Ur-Nammu Code discovered in Istanbul.<\/p>\n
In this important discovery, as Professor Kramer points out, luck played a significant role. \u201cIn all probability I would have missed the Ur-Nammu tablet altogether had it not been for an opportune letter from F.R. Kraus, professor of cuneiform studies at the University of Leiden in Holland. He mentioned \u2018tablet number 3191\u2019 in Istanbul which he had noticed when serving as curator there. I sent for the tablet, and after days of hard work, I realized that what I held in my hand was a copy of the oldest law code as yet known to man.\u201d<\/p>\n
His translation, Professor Kramer explained, included five of 25 known laws dating to the third dynasty of Ur \u2014 one of Sumer\u2019s ancient city states \u2014 which ruled about 2050 B.C., some 300 years before King Hammurabi ruled Babylon. They cover divorce, perjury and adultery, and in some ways penalties were lighter than the \u201ceye for an eye\u201d retribution mentioned in the Old Testament; fines, for example, were specified for some offenses instead of corporal punishment.<\/p>\n
In 1965, two new fragments of the Ur-Nammu law code were recognized among the tablets excavated by Leonard Woolley at Ur. These added 39 new laws, many of which are unfortunately fragmentary.<\/p>\n
The constant comparisons of Sumerian literature with the Bible, <\/p>\n
Pieces of the 4,000-year-old Lipit-Ishtar law code<\/i><\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 8:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1979) p. 77<\/p>\n
Professor Kramer says, are by no means accidental. Sumerologists are fascinated by the apparent links between Sumerian literature and Old Testament stories. The story of Dilmun, for example, is seen by Sumerology as paralleling the story of Adam and Eve.<\/p>\n
According to the Sumerologists, Dilmun was a \u201cpure,\u201d \u201cclean\u201d and \u201cbright\u201d place, in which neither sickness nor death contaminated the fruit-filled garden where the great earth-mother Ninhursag had caused eight divine plants to grow. But then, the story goes on, Enki \u2014 usually a wise god \u2014 comes along and innocently eats them all, and Ninhursag abandons him until, through intervention of a council of gods, she relents.<\/p>\n
As with the story of Job, the parallels with Adam and Eve seem clear: a garden, a forbidden plant and punishment for eating it.<\/p>\n
Another Biblical story with possible antecedents in Sumerian literature is the story of the Flood as translated from one of the Nippur tablets by Arno Poebel in 1914. Although many lines were missing, those that were legible gave strong evidence of being the earliest story of the Deluge yet found.<\/p>\n
This account tells of Ziusudra, a pious, god-fearing king, who is instructed by the gods to build a giant boat to save himself, and presumably others, because \u201ca flood will sweep over the cult centers; to destroy the seed of mankind… is the decision… of the gods.\u201d A long break in the text prevents our knowing precisely what action followed, until these lines become legible:<\/p>\n
All the windstorms, exceedingly powerful, attacked as one,<\/i><\/p>\n
At the same time, the flood sweeps over the cult centers<\/i>.<\/p>\n
After, for seven days and seven nights,<\/i><\/p>\n
The flood had swept over the land,<\/i><\/p>\n
And the huge boat had been tossed about by the windstorms on the great waters,<\/i><\/p>\n
Utu (sun-god) came forth, who sheds light on heaven and earth,<\/i><\/p>\n
Ziusudra opened a window on the huge boat,<\/i><\/p>\n
The hero Utu brought his rays into the giant boat<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Ziusudra, the king,<\/i><\/p>\n
Prostrated himself before Utu,<\/i><\/p>\n
The king kills an ox, slaughters a sheep<\/i>.<\/p>\n
As that translation suggests, Sumerian mythology contained tantalizing bits of information that have been repeated in the Bible, and, in some instances, verified by science. But from the same translation it is clear that Sumerian mythology was also literature \u2014 at <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 8:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1979) p. 78<\/p>\n
A six-sided cuneiform tablet in the Istanbul museum<\/i><\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n
least as translated by Professor Kramer.<\/p>\n
In the story of Job, for example, the Kramer translation was rich and rhythmic:<\/p>\n
The righteous words…his god accepted<\/i>.<\/p>\n
The words which the man prayerfully confessed pleased the … god<\/i>.<\/p>\n
And his god withdrew his hand from the evil word.. which oppresses the heart.<\/i>..<\/p>\n
The encompassing sickness-demon, which had spread wide its wings, he swept away<\/i>.<\/p>\n
The evil fate which had been decreed for him in accordance with his sentence,<\/i><\/p>\n
He turned aside<\/i><\/p>\n
He turned the man\u2019s suffering into joy<\/i><\/p>\n
Set by him the kindly genii as watch and guardian<\/i><\/p>\n
Gave him … angels with gracious mien<\/i>.<\/p>\n
And that is but one example. Dr. Kramer\u2019s numerous and varied <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 8:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1979) p. 79<\/p>\n
writings on the Sumerians are filled with lyrical and significant stories, essays and proverbs \u2014 many as appropriate today as they were 5, 000 years ago:<\/p>\n
A restless woman in the house<\/i><\/p>\n
Adds ache to pain<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Who possesses much silver may be happy,<\/i><\/p>\n
Who possesses much barley may be happy,<\/i><\/p>\n
But who has nothing at all can sleep<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Friendship lasts a day,<\/i><\/p>\n
Kinship endures forever<\/i>.<\/p>\n
There are also in Dr. Kramer\u2019s translations vignettes of everyday life that suggest how the average Sumerian thought or reasoned, how he worked his way through the big questions asked by human beings of all times, or faced a typical day\u2019s dilemmas. One schoolboy solution to an age-old problem sounds rather modern:<\/p>\n
I recited my tablet, ate my lunch, prepared my (new) tablet, wrote it, finished it<\/i>.<\/p>\n
But the teacher says: \u201cYour hand (copy) is not satisfactory,\u201d and canes him. That night the boy suggests at home that his parents invite the teacher to dine. They do, and present him gifts as well. Mollified by such generosity, the teacher says:<\/p>\n
Young man, because you did not neglect my word, did not forsake it, may you reach the pinnacle of the scribal art, may you achieve it completely… You have carried out well the school\u2019s activities, you have become a man of learning<\/i>.<\/p>\n
This vignette, it seems, was a popular story; 21 copies in various <\/p>\n
A property list from Nippur and a receipt for grain<\/i><\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 8:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1979) p. 80<\/p>\n
states of preservation had been found in various collections when Dr. Kramer found missing pieces of the first fragmented translation and completed it. Another translation that will strike a chord in an America rebelling against high taxes and costly government was made of a tablet from Lagash, a city of 4, 500 years ago. It listed the abuses of the corrupt administration:<\/p>\n
… the inspector of the boatmen seized the boats. The cattle inspector seized the large cattle, seized the small cattle. The fisheries inspector seized the fisheries<\/i>.<\/p>\n
The writer, in Kramer\u2019s translation, then goes on to say that when a sheep was brought to the palace for shearing the owner had to pay five shekels if the wool was white. When a man divorced his wife, the ishakku,<\/i> or local governor, received five shekels and his vizier took another. Furthermore, \u201cthe oxen of the gods plowed the ishakku\u2019s<\/i> onion patches,\u201d meaning that the temple equipment was used for the governor\u2019s own benefit, and the ishakku<\/i> had planted his personal onion and cucumber patch \u201cin the god\u2019s best fields.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then \u201cthere were the tax collectors,\u201d as the historian observed. Even after death, officials could claim quantities of a man\u2019s barley, bread, beer, even furnishings. Matters were at low ebb in Lagash until, at last, a good man \u2014 Urukagina by name \u2014 came to power, an honest, god-fearing ruler who threw out the corrupt administrators, righted wrongs, ended unjust treatment of the poor, and rid the city of thieves, usurers and murderers.<\/p>\n
Even these lively accounts barely scratch the surface; only a relatively small number of the Sumerian tablets have been studied in detail. But much of what has been learned about Sumeria is the work of Samuel Kramer. As put by two professors at the University Museum in Philadelphia, who are compiling a dictionary of the Sumerian language. \u201cHe reconstructed the whole of Sumerian literature. We build on him.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Reprinted from Aramco World Magazine,<\/i> September-October, 1978, pp. 18-21.)<\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 8:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1979) p. 81<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mary Lucy Wood [Mary Lucy Wood was educated in Florida, did graduate work at Columbia University and spent a year doing historical research in Uruguay and Argentina where her interest in archaeology was sparked by the discovery of Inca bones in Peru.] According to Genesis 11:2 the Tower of Babel was built in the land … Continue reading “KRAMER
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