The Sumerians — Fall of the First Cities

In the year 1625, an Italian nobleman named Pietro della Valle went on a tour of the Middle East. Della Valle was a prolific traveller. He journeyed around Asia, North Africa, and even India. He married an Assyrian Christian princess in Damascus, and now the two of them traveled together, journeying by horseback and camel, accompanied by local guides. At this time, travel in this region couldn't have been more dangerous. The Ottoman and Persian Empires were at war, fighting over who would rule in Baghdad, and meanwhile, local bandits took advantage of the chaos to prey on travelers. In those days, lions even roamed in these hills. Due to these various dangers, Della Valle's guides were constantly on edge. It was June the 18th, 1625, when they spotted a distant group of tribesmen on the horizon. Their guides decided that they might be in danger, and began to search for a place to hide. In the distance, they spotted the looming mass of a series of enormous ruins, as Della Valle later wrote in his memoirs. Being suspicious to some Arabian vagrants or vagabonds, for more security we removed a mile further, and took up our station under a little hill near some ruins of buildings which we saw from far away. Della Valle’s group stayed in those ruins for several nights while their guides negotiated with the local ruler, asking for safe passage. During the day, under the baking Iraqi sun, Della Valle passed his time by walking among those monumental ruins. Our removal hence being still deferred, I went in the forenoon to take a more diligent view of the ruins of the above said ancient building. What it had been, I could not understand, but I had found it to have been built with very good bricks, most of which were stamped with certain unknown letters which appeared very ancient. I observed that they had been cemented together not with lime, but with bitumen or pitch. Della Valle was fascinated by the broken fragments of writing that littered the ground of this ruined place. He explored further and wrote down some of the symbols that he saw again and again stamped into the stones and pieces of clay brick. Surveying the ruins again, I found on the ground some pieces of black marble, hard and fine, engraven with the same letters as the bricks which seemed to me to be a kind of seal. Amongst other symbols which I discovered in that short time, two I found in many places. One was like a pyramid, and the other resembled a star of eight points. Della Valle and his wife didn't know it, but they had stumbled across the ruins of Ur, a city that had formed the center of one of mankind's first civilizations. This society was known as Sumer, and it was where so much of the world we know today first began. Eventually, negotiations with the local leader fell apart, and Della Valle's guides no longer felt safe camped out there in the ruins. They departed in the dead of night and fled to safety across the desert. In Della Valle’s bags were a few of the clay tablets that he had found scattered around the ruins of Ur. These would be the first examples ever seen in Europe of a language that had been dead and forgotten for thousands of years. All the way home, Della Valle must have turned those tablets over in his hands, gazed at their mysterious ancient symbols. He must have wondered to himself, who had built those enormous mounds of brick and earth, all alone out there in the middle of the desert? What did the symbols on those broken pieces of clay mean, and if such a great city had once stood there, what in all the world could have happened to it? My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall, and what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to go back to the very beginning and look at a society that is one of the candidates for the first-ever technological human civilization. These are the people of Sumer who we call the Sumerians. I want to show how, over the course of millennia, the Sumerians would build a society that would form the blueprint for all that followed after. I want to show how they rose to invent writing, mathematics, and the wheel, and built the largest cities that humanity had ever seen. I want to explore what happened to cause their final and devastating collapse. In the highlands of Southeastern Turkey, a range of snow-topped limestone peaks rise over 3,000 meters above the flat plains beneath. These are the Taurus mountains. The mountains of Turkey rise so sharply that rain clouds find it difficult to pass over them. Instead, these clouds pool in their hollows and valleys, and give these hills an exceptionally high rate of annual rainfall. In spring and summer, the warm air means that the clouds are even denser, and violent thunderstorms rock these mountains, too, echoing of the stones of the valleys. As a result, this is a landscape shaped by water. The steep sides of the Taurus mountains have been eroded to form streams and waterfalls, while underground rivers have cut into the rock and hollowed out some of the largest caves in Asia. Just as it has shaped the rocks, water has also shaped the beliefs of this region's people. The name of these mountains, Taurus, comes from the Latin word for bull, and the reason for this isn't hard to see. Temples have been unearthed all across these mountains, decorated with terracotta statues of bulls. Since ancient times, the people who lived here worshipped the storm god Teshub. They believed he rode on the back of a bull, perhaps because the sound of the thunderstorms reminded them of the thumping of enormous hooves. Accompanied with the cracking and booming of these thunderstorms, these heavy spring rains drain into streams, and join rivers already flowing down from the snowy mountain passes of Armenia. Soon, these small rivers join together and flow down from the mountains and out onto the wide, flat plains beneath in two great majestic watercourses that run together in near parallel for nearly 2,000 kilometers. The vast floodplain of these rivers is today the land we call Iraq. In Arabic, this area is called Bilad al-Rafidayn, the land of the two rivers. In the west, it has been known since ancient times by its Greek name, combining the words mesos, or middle, and potamos, or river. Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. These two great waterways are known as the Tigris and the Euphrates. For millennia, these rivers have brought life down into the flat floodplain of Iraq, and the source of that life comes from some of the most lifeless things; the rocks of the mountains themselves. Virtually all rocks are held together with tiny flecks of two different materials called quartz and feldspar. Quartz is a clear, glittering crystal formed from oxygen and silicon, while feldspar is a complex mineral derived from silicon. Together, they make up over 60 percent of the earth's crust, and when rivers cut their roots through the mountain gullies and underground streams, their waters wash over the rocks, and dissolve their soluble parts. But quartz and feldspar don't dissolve in water, and so, these tiny crystals are carried along by the river in a cloud of glittering particles. We call this substance silt. Silt is sometimes known by the more poetic name, rock flower, and its particles are smaller than a grain of sand. But these tiny specks can have an enormous impact. Soil with a high silt content tends to hold water better, and promotes air circulation. For this reason, silty soil forms the perfect habitat for most plants. The rivers Tigris and Euphrates transport vast amounts of silt down into the lowlands of Iraq every year, and as a consequence, this flat stretch of otherwise arid desert has become exceptionally fertile. For the history of this region and the history of all humanity, these tiny particles would prove immensely significant. Other than its rich clay soil, the desert plains of southern Iraq are an inhospitable landscape. In fact, this is perhaps the last place you might expect the first human civilizations to arise. For one thing, the climate of this region is extremely hot and dry. Summer temperatures can reach over 52 degrees centigrade or 126 degrees Fahrenheit. Rainfall is rare, especially in summer. Coupled with the strong winds that blow across these plains, this means that the soil is arid and windswept. Although the seasonal flooding of the rivers brings life to the earth, these floods are also unpredictable. In Egypt, the River Nile flows directly from the Great Lakes of Africa which act as a stabilizing and regulating force. But the Tigris and Euphrates depend on the amount of rain that fell on the mountains of Turkey, Armenia, and Kurdistan, a quantity that varies greatly from year to year. Years of drought can often be followed by years of devastating floods, and during winter, the whole plain is covered with a thick layer of mud. The region of southern Iraq is also poor in natural resources. The land is essentially nothing but a flood plain made of clay and silt. There were no metals to be mined here, and virtually no stone. Because of all these challenges, it took early humans a long time to reach this hostile environment. In the far prehistoric, archaic humans like Homo Erectus vied for survival in the upper reaches of the rivers. Archaeologists have found stone axes and other artifacts dating back to nearly half a million years ago. But the river lands of southern Iraq weren't suitable for this hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But about 13,000 years ago, things began to change. The first nomadic hunter-gatherers began to settle down in permanent villages. These early innovators had noticed something interesting; they saw that when they threw away the discarded seeds of edible plants, that same plant would later sprout out of their rubbish dumps. This gave them an idea. They realized that if you buried plant seeds in the earth, fed them and watered them, more of the same plants would grow. These were some of the first farmers, and once they found a good patch of land, they quite understandably didn't want to move. They soon built houses nearby, and storehouses to keep food through the winter. They banded together into larger communities in order to divide the labor of farming and to protect their grain should anyone else try to take it. They learned how to take the clay from the ground and shape it into pots, but they were still limited to areas where t --- arshy swamps to a green patchwork of farmland. Many historians have argued that it was the digging of these canals and watercourses that originally led to the greater social organization we see during the Sumerian period. These extensive systems of water management needed careful planning, engineering expertise, and mathematical calculations. Work teams needed to be organized, and paid in food and beer. Foremen and overseers needed to be appointed, and all of this led to a kind of early bureaucracy that gave rise to the first true states. In the 1930s, historian Arnold Toynbee famously argued that it was just these environmental challenges in southern Iraq that created the conditions in which civilization could be created. The desiccation of the region impelled the fathers of the Sumeric civilization to come to grips with the jungle swamp of the lower valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, and to transform it. The ordeal through which the fathers of the Sumeric civilization passed is commemorated in Sumeric legend. The slaying of the dragon Tiamat by the god Marduk and the creation of the world out of her mortal remains signifies the subjugation of the primeval wilderness and the creation of the land by the canalization of the waters and the draining of the soil. The tough semi-desert landscape created what he called a ‘stimulus and response effect’ in these early people. Toynbee argues that in conditions that are too comfortable, people have little need of increased social organization or technological development. In conditions that are too harsh, society finds it impossible to develop. He argues that it's in environments such as southern Iraq, where the challenges are numerous but not overwhelming, that a cradle of civilization can occur. According to Sumerian texts, the first city in the region was the city of Eridu. One controversial document known as the Sumerian King List describes Eridu as the place where the god Enki first decided that a king should rule. When kingship from heaven was lowered, the kingship was in Eridu. In Eridu, Alulim became king. He ruled for 28,800 years. Alalngar ruled for 36,000 years. For obvious reasons, many historians have questioned the reliability of this source. Some have even gone so far as to call it a piece of utter fiction, or a later piece of propaganda designed to legitimize a usurper to the throne. But the King List does tell us how the Sumerians, of at least one point, thought of their history, and many have argued that Eridu may well have been the world's first city. Eridu was founded around the year 5400 BC. That's nearly seven and a half millennia ago. At this time, populations of woolly mammoths, survivors of the end of the ice age, still roamed in remote parts of the world. Eridu was populated by Sumerian speakers, and soon it would make up just one of a whole constellation of small cities that dotted the landscape of southern Iraq. These independent city-states were centered around their temples, and ruled by priest kings known as the Ensi. Records show that these Ensi were often assisted by a council of elders which included both men and women. Most of the largest cities in this period were probably no bigger than about 10,000 people. The borders of these city states were defined by the courses of canals and specially-created boundary stones, carved monuments left jutting out of the earth to mark the line between one territory and another. Slowly, these cities began to eclipse the old Ubaid culture that had preceded them. Art and architecture began to take on the form that we would truly call Sumerian, and technology also began to take huge leaps forward. This first period seems to have been a time of relative peace. There's little evidence of organized warfare or the keeping of professional soldiers in these early cities. Most towns during this period went without walls. One exceptionally ancient Sumerian myth called The Gifts of Inanna seems to capture some of the spirit of this period of transition. It describes technology and the refinements of civilization being handed down by Enki, the king of the gods, to his daughter, the goddess Inanna. She later passes them down to the people of Sumer. Holy Inanna received the craft of the carpenter, the craft of the coppersmith, the craft of the scribe, the craft of the smith, the craft of the leatherworker, the craft of the builder, the craft of the reed worker. Holy Inanna received wisdom, the shepherd's hut, the knowledge to pile up glowing charcoals, the sheepfold. Enki teaches Inanna about family, the proper laws of inheritance, and the art of good judgment. But he also goes on to give her other gifts, some of which show that the darker side of civilization was already beginning to make itself known. Holy Inanna received deceit and the rebel lands. Holy Inanna received heroism, power, wickedness, the plundering of cities, and the making of lamentations. It may be that the ancient Sumerians already recognized, right at the dawn of settled human society, what the scholar Walter Benjamin would one day write, that there is no record of civilization that is not at the same time a record of barbarism. It's true that during this period, the Sumerians began practices that would begin a sorrowful phase of human history. Among them is the use of slave labor. They captured men and women from the hill countries outside their borders, and used their labor to fuel the growth of their own economy. In the last episode, I used the metaphor of the death of stars to talk about the life cycle that empires often pass through, but we might also think about the birth of civilizations in this way. The first stars were born from gas clouds compacted together under the weight of their own gravity into a spinning ball of matter. Under enough pressure, the temperature of the star's core increased and finally, nuclear fusion began. The first stars burst into light. When enough people gather together in one place, that settlement obtains a kind of gravity. It draws other people towards it, and as the size of the settlement increases, so does pressure on its various systems. In some cases, this pressure results in those people being fused together into more complex forms of organization. Sometime around the year 3200 BC, the first stars of these human settlements began to burst into light. That light was the invention of writing. One Sumerian epic poem called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta gives the first known story about the invention of writing. This poem attributes the invention to a king who has to send so many messages that his messenger can't remember them all. Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat the message, the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay. The Sumerians had two things around them in virtually limitless abundance; that's the clay beneath their feet, and the reeds that grew in the marshes and along the banks of the rivers. It's these two resources that combined to form the first human writing. Sumerian scribes would pick up a lump of clay big enough to fit in their hand. In fact, about the size of a modern smartphone. They would take a piece of reed cut into the shape of a wedge, and print it over and over into the clay to form symbols. The distinctive wedge shapes of the reeds give this form of writing its name. We call it cuneiform. The oldest cuneiform clay tablets come from the city of Uruk, and date to the late fourth millennium, probably around the 32nd or 31st centuries. This script originally consisted of pictographs, small pictures designed to depict objects so everyone could understand what they represented. These were first used to keep track of everyday things like rations and supplies. On some of these very early tablets, you can still see very clearly what they mean. A bowl of food is depicted with an eating mouth next to six impressions, and a sheaf of wheat next to five. This indicates that a worker can exchange this tablet for six bowls of food and five sheaths of wheat. Scribes would have had to work fast, copying hundreds of documents throughout their day. Slowly, this pressure meant that the signs had to become simpler and more abstract. Before long, they no longer looked like the objects they described. After the year 3000, the number of symbols was reduced from around 1,500 to about 600, and someone else had the bright idea that each symbol could stand for a certain sound instead of a whole idea. This was the beginning of the first alphabet, but it meant that now only an educated few could understand writing, and soon, a separate class of scribes emerged. The human brain would never be the same again. People could now read the words of kings and scribes who had died hundreds of years before. They could also begin to write down everything that they had learned so it could be remembered, and more importantly, it could be built upon. Partly due to this ability to record knowledge, the technology of Sumer around this time began to take even greater leaps forward. This next period of history would be known as the Period of Uruk. The period is named after the city of Uruk, which by the middle of the 4th millennium BC, had grown into the largest and most powerful city in southern Mesopotamia. One of the key ways that historians mark the shift into the Uruk Period is by observing a dramatic change that occurred around this time in the region's pottery. If you're thinking that the pottery must have got more sophisticated and ornate as technology improved, then you're mistaken. In fact, the ancient pottery of the Ubaid Period was exceptionally beautiful. It was made on a device known as a slow wheel, and painted with distinctive geometrical designs in brown or black. It was a luxury item for the select few. The shift to the Uruk Period saw a great increase in the amount of pottery produced, but the quality fell dramatically. Thanks to a technology known as the fast wheel, clay jars and pots could now be made in great numbers by workmen in intensive workshops. This was the first era of mass production. The booming economy of the Sumerian cities comes to life in their documents. The clay tablets tell us that in the city of Girsu, for instance, fifteen thousand women were employed in the textile Industry. One factory produced eleven hundred tons of flour a year, as well as bread, beer, and linseed oil. This factory employed 134 specialists and 858 skilled workers, of which the vast majority were women. Since there was no currency at this time, workers were paid directly in food and other good --- y, and burned it to the ground. Even by the standards of the time, this seems to have been a shocking act, as one piece of Sumerian poetry recalls with sorrow. Because the man of Umma destroyed the bricks of Lagash, he committed a sin against the city's god. The god will cut off any hand raised against him. May Nidaba, the personal goddess of Lugalzaggesi, make him bear all these sins. After sacking Lagash, Lugalzaggesi’s momentum seems to have been unstoppable. He worked his way north, up the course of the two rivers, and soon, he had conquered all the regions that Lagash had once claimed. One inscription written by him even claims to have conquered all the lands between what he calls the upper and the lower seas, meaning from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean coast. The great god Enlil gave kingship of the land to him, the region from the lower sea through the Tigris and Euphrates, to the upper sea. Thirty-two kings gathered against him, but he defeated them and smote their cities, and prostrated their lords, and destroyed the whole countryside as far as the silver mines. Admittedly, this is probably something of an exaggeration. The Sumerians had never been able to maintain distant colonies or occupy far-off lands for very long. It's more likely that Lugalzaggesi pulled off something like a successful raiding party on the coast, perhaps looting some towns and cities, and bringing treasure back to Uruk. But this was the first time that a Sumerian prince had ever made this claim. For them, this upper sea was the western edge of their entire world, and the idea of a king who might conquer all the lands between the seas began to possess the imaginations of all the kings who came after. But King Lugalzaggesi, like the rulers of Lagash before him, had made the critical mistake of overstretching his resources. This empire was simply too big. Before long, civil wars and rebellions broke out between the various Sumerian cities. In this time of chaos, the other great people of Mesopotamia began to fancy their chances at ruling. These were the people who, up until this moment, had been something of a junior partner in the civilization of southern Iraq. These were the people of Akkad. One man would soon lead them in an outright rebellion against the Sumerian Empire. He would go down in history with a name that in Akkadian means ‘the one true king’. That name was Sargon, and he ushered in the twilight of the Sumerian age. Like many episodes in Sumerian history, the origin story of Sargon of Akkad is one you might find familiar if you were brought up on the stories of the Bible. He was born sometime in the middle of the 24th century BC, and legend has it that as a baby, he was found in a reed basket on the banks of the Tigris. He was found by a gardener who worked in the palace in the city of Kish, and who brought him up as his son. But like the biblical Moses, this foundling child had big ambitions. There seems to have been something special about him. Something about his charming manners meant that he was soon taken on as a cupbearer in the palace, bringing wine to the lords and royalty of the kingdom. This was a position of high honor, and a way for a young man to gain influence at court. The young Sargon must have proven himself in other ways, too. That's because he was soon entrusted with a mission of the utmost secrecy and importance. At this time, Kish was still part of Lugalzaggesi’s Sumerian Empire, stretching over all the lands between the two seas. The Sumerian King Lugalzaggesi was away on a distant campaign, possibly fighting in the lands of Syria or putting down a rebellion in a far-flung province. The young Sargon was given a small band of fighting men and told to travel to the city of Uruk, where Lugalzaggesi kept his royal court. Their plan was to strike the city in a surprise attack, to knock out the capital of this new empire, and free the city of Kish from imperial control. It was a daring plan. The tall city walls of Uruk, immortalized in legend, must have looked daunting to the young Sargon and his men as they readied for their attack. But Lugalzaggesi had taken much of his army with him on campaign, and left few behind to defend his capital. The attack came as a complete surprise. Sargon's men overcame their defenses, poured over their walls, and the defenders fled. Sargon captured the city, and before reinforcements could arrive, he broke down several sections of those famous city walls. It was a deeply symbolic act, and a strike against the might of Lugalzaggesi’s empire. King Lugalzaggesi must have been enraged. He swung around from his distant war- -making and marched back home, gathering all his subject kings to him as he went. Inscriptions record that as many as 50 kings may have marched under his banner, and their task was easy enough; to crush the forces of one small city-state. But Sargon seems to have been one of those characters from history, one of those geniuses like Hannibal or Napoleon, who are able to turn battles in their favor no matter the odds. We don't know how he did it, but in a pitched battle with the whole amassed force of the empire, it was Sargon's army that emerged victorious. Lugalzaggesi was captured, and Sargon marched him through the gates of the Holy city of Nippur wearing a neck stock, a heavy piece of wood clapped around his neck and shoulders like an oxen. This would have been humiliating of course, but here again is where Sargon sets himself apart from other rulers of the time. That's because he seems to have had something of a merciful streak. The old King Lugalzaggesi wasn't killed. Incredibly, he was allowed to continue on as the governor of Uruk, so long as he swore an oath to the high King Sargon. Sargon founded a new city to act as his empire's capital, and he named it Akkad. From there, he would go on to conquer much of what the preceding empires had before, as one inscription beneath a statue in the city of Nippur claims. Sargon, the King of Kish, triumphed in 34 battles over the cities, up to the edge of the sea, and destroyed their walls. He bowed down to the gods, and the gods gave him the upper land up to the cedar forest, and up to the silver mountain. Sargon didn't make the mistakes of his predecessors. At each city he conquered, he made a point of destroying the city's walls, reducing its ability to defend itself, and therefore reducing the likelihood of it rebelling against his rule. He conducted a ceremony to symbolize his mastery over the whole land. He washed his weapons in the waters of both the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea. But once the dust of war had settled, his achievements went on. He made efforts to centralize the empire's administration, and even reformed the dating system. His reforms strengthened the central state and increased the stability of the empire. In many ways, he was something of a progressive and enlightened ruler. But Sargon was also Akkadian, and he was what we today might call a nationalist. Until now, Sumerian had been the official language of royal inscriptions on palaces and temples. But during Sargon's reign, Akkadian began to be used in official inscriptions for the first time. The cuneiform alphabet was now re-engineered to write Akkadian, and Sargon also gave himself the new title, King of Akkad. He appointed only his fellow Akkadians to key positions in the government, and garrisoned Sumerian cities with Akkadian troops to ensure their loyalty. The two people of Mesopotamia who had lived and grown together for millennia, were now beginning to drift apart. Resentment in the southern Sumerian-speaking cities began to reach a boiling point. Sargon ruled for 55 years, and towards the end of his reign, this resentment bubbled over, as one later Babylonian text recalls. In his old age, all the lands revolted against him, and they besieged him in Akkad the city. But he went forth to battle, and defeated them. He knocked them over and destroyed their vast army. For the meantime, it's clear that Sargon's flair for battle kept his empire together, but as the old king weakened, virtually all the southern cities burst out in open rebellion. When Sargon of Akkad died around the year 2284, his two sons had to take over and try to fix the mess he had left behind. The first of these sons was called Rimush. He ruled for nine years and spent most of them in bitter battles to reconquer the rebellious Sumerian cities of the south. He crushed rebellions in Ur, Umma, Lagash, and Adab, and one of the years in which he ruled is even known as ‘the year that Adab was destroyed’. When Rimush died, Sargon's other son, Manishtushu, took over. He seems to have resorted to the kinds of terror tactics that had once made the kings of Lagash so hated. It was Sargon's grandson, a man named Naram-Sin, who would return the empire to its former greatness. He managed to quell the Sumerian rebellion in its southern heartlands, and returned the Empire of Akkad to stability. Naram-Sin didn't rule only by force; it seems he made some effort to reconcile the two intertwined peoples of Mesopotamia, breaking from his grandfather's title, King of Akkad, and ruling under the more diplomatic title King of Sumer and Akkad. But this didn't entirely heal the rift there was even now continuing to grow between these two peoples. Part of the problem was that the Sumerian people were no longer the primary cultural force in the region. For centuries, Akkadian had been gradually replacing Sumerian as a spoken language. Some of this may have been down to the official policies of the Akkadian Empire, discouraging the use of Sumerian in official documents. But it was also affected by the increasingly cosmopolitan makeup of the empire. Sumerian, as we've seen, was a language isolate with a different structure and sound to all the languages around it. But the people who lived in all the surrounding lands spoke languages that were linguistic cousins of Akkadian, all in the Semitic family of languages. They had the same grammar, and even shared sounds and words with Akkadian. Learning Akkadian for them would have been like an English speaker learning French or Spanish, while Sumerian would have been like learning Korean. Akkadian was just easier to learn for these people, and so, it would naturally become the language of trade and commerce. The people of Mesopotamia had been largely bilingual for centuries, but gradually, all Sumerians would have learned to speak Akkadian, and fewer and fewer Akkadians would have needed to learn Sumerian. Slowly, the Sumerian language began to fade. But the days of the Akkadian Empire were also numbered, and th --- ankind's journey into civilization; King of Ur, King of Sumer and Akkad. Even after the fall of the Sumerian Empire, many of its great cities would continue as population centers into the post-Sumerian era. Among these was the great coastal city of Ur, situated at the mouth of the Euphrates, which would rise and fall a number of times over its history. But ultimately, it was the landscape that had given birth to Ur, and it was the landscape that would bring about its demise. Today, if you stand in the ruins of Ur, the sea that once lapped its shores is nowhere to be seen. In fact, early archaeologists were astonished to see the remains of millions of seashells scattered in the sand here on this lonely stretch of desert. As the millennia passed, the continued depositing of silt, along with changes in global sea levels, have combined to push Iraq's gulf coast back to its present position, about 150 kilometers to the south. The Euphrates River that once brought the rich bounties of trade down from the north has also disappeared, its course having changed over the centuries. In fact, around the barren mounds of earth where the city of Ur once stood, there's nothing at all but the lone and level sands of the Iraqi desert, boundless and bare for miles around. Water had always been this city's lifeblood, and the loss of the river and the sea meant the slow death of Ur. People soon left its houses and its streets. They stopped working its fields and maintaining its irrigation canals, and soon, the land dried up and the topsoil blew away in the wind. The priests extinguished the fires that burned in the top chamber of Ur's great ziggurat, and stopped leaving their offerings there to the moon god Sin. The markets closed, and the mud brick buildings of the city began to crumble. The wooden beams of the roofs rotted and fell in. The sands and desert winds rolled through its streets, and the dunes buried its fallen walls. Before long, the greatest city the world had ever known was just a mound of ruins where the occasional desert traveller would pass by, and where the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle would one day shelter with his wife from a threatening group of bandits, and discover the scattered fragments of writing that the Sumerians had left behind in their forgotten language. Somewhere buried in the ruins lay the clay tablets on which the lament for the city's destruction was written. May that storm swoop down no more on your city. May the door be closed on it like the great city gate at night time. Until distant days, other days, future days. In your city reduced to ruin mounds may a lament be made to you. O Nanna, may your restored city be resplendent before you. Following the sacking of Ur around the year 2000 BC, the city of Uruk went into a steep decline, and much of its population fled. Uruk did have another period of flourishing when the later Assyrian Empire rebuilt it as a regional capital. But as the Euphrates River changed its course, Uruk, too, would be completely abandoned. Today, the walls of Uruk, the same walls that are boasted about in the epic of Gilgamesh, are still visible, heaps of ancient brickwork lining the flat, lunar landscape of the desert. But they are still 15 meters tall, encircling the whole city now washed by a tide of broken pottery and bones. The English archaeologist William Loftus was the first European to rediscover the ruins of Uruk. He was impressed with the haunting sight of the vast mounds rising out of the desert, and he later wrote about how the sight affected him. Of all the desolate sights I ever beheld, that of Uruk incomparably surpasses all. The process of decay in all the cities of ancient Sumer, in Nippur, Eridu, Lagash, Ur, and Uruk, would have been gradual but unstoppable. Wind-borne sand and earth would pile up against the walls that still stood, and filled in the streets. Meanwhile, rain water and wind wore down any remaining structures. The sight of these ruins amazed travellers who, like the Italian Della Valle, passed by them and saw their lonely shapes on the horizon. People told stories about what must have happened to those people who built such enormous constructions and then disappeared forever. Echoes of these stories still survive in tales like the Tower of Babel, about a people who built a tower that would reach to the heavens, and who were struck down by god on account of their pride. With their cities lost, the Sumerian people passed out of history. The civilizations who replaced them, who kept their language alive in their temples and still told stories of their kings, would themselves pass into ruin. The knowledge of how to read Sumerian was forgotten entirely, and its history turned to dust. Only their clay tablets remained, buried in the sands of Iraq, fragments containing the voices of a whole people, waiting for archaeologists to discover them and, through arduous and painstaking work, to find out how to read them. These fragments give us little bursts of light, illuminating the dark ocean floor of this most distant past, giving us the records and recipes of the Sumerian people, their music and their prayers, their loves and grief, their triumphs, and their beautiful, sorrowful lamentations for the loss of the world's first cities. It gives us, too, the wistful philosophies of these ancient people, as these lines from the epic of Gilgamesh show. Nobody sees Death, nobody sees the face of Death, nobody hears the voice of Death. Savage Death just cuts mankind down. Sometimes we build a house, sometimes we make a nest, but then brothers divide it upon inheritance. Sometimes there is hostility in the land, but then the river rises and brings flood water. Dragonflies drift on the river, their faces look upon the face of the sun, but then suddenly there is nothing. Sometime around the year 1700 BC, when the last kings of Ur were already a distant memory, somewhere on the other side of the world, on a small rocky island on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, the last woolly mammoth to ever live on earth lay down and died. Sumerian society, in its imperial form, rose, lived out its golden age, and died, outlived by the woolly mammoth. I want to end the episode with an excerpt from that great Sumerian poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh. This section relates an episode that I think is one of the most incredible sequences in any piece of ancient literature. It shows the king Gilgamesh weeping over the loss of his dying friend, and his friend reaches up to him and tells him that he has dreamed of the afterlife, that he has seen what awaits him after death. This passage is a melancholy meditation on loss. It shows all the kings of the earth who have ever ruled, living on in this dark and silent place, their crowns put away forever. As you listen, imagine what it would have felt like to live in the great cities of Ur and Uruk, watching the twilight begin to fall over the Sumerian age. Imagine what it would feel like to see the crops grow weaker every year as the white crust of salt begins to form on the ground, and the city's people go hungry in the streets, wailing year after year for the gods to help them. Imagine how it would have felt to see the armies of the mountain people gathering on the horizon, having to flee the city with your possessions on your back, leaving your home behind forever as the wind rustles through the dying reeds, and the chanting of the priests still goes on in the ziggurat’s tall tower as the sun begins to set over the desert. Listen, my friend. This is the dream I dreamed last night. I stood before an awful being, the somber-faced man-bird. He turned his stare towards me, and he led me away to the palace of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness, to the house from which none who enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no coming back. There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food, and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for covering. They see no light, they sit in darkness. I entered the house of dust, and I saw the kings of the earth, their crowns put away forever; rulers and princes, all who once wore kingly crowns and ruled the world in the days of old. They who had stood in the place of the gods stood now like servants. In the house of dust were high priests and acolytes, priests of the incantation and of ecstasy, and there was Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld, she who keeps the books of the dead. She raised her head; she saw me and spoke, ‘Who has brought this one here?’ Then I awoke like a man drained of blood, who wanders alone in a waste. Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode Rhy Brignell, Jake Barrett-Mills, Shem Jacobs, Nick Bradley, and Emily Johnson. I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me at PaulMMCooper, and if you'd like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well as images, maps, and reading suggestions, you can follow the podcast at Fall_of_Civ_Pod, with underscores separating the words. This podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers on Patreon. You keep me running, you help me cover my costs, and you help keep the podcast ad-free. You also let me dedicate more time to researching, writing, recording, and editing to get the episodes out to you faster, to make them longer, and bring as much life and detail to them as possible. I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider heading on to patreon.com/fallof civilizations_podcast, or just Google Fall of Civilization's Patreon. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N. This episode has touched a number of times on the power and necessity of the written word, a gift that ancient Iraq once gave to the world, and I thought it would be fitting to take a moment here to promote a charity that really needs your help today. Its name is Book Aid. In 2015, the terrorist group ISIS burned over one million books in the library of Iraq's Mosul University. Today, the Book Aid team is trying to rebuild that library, and give the students of Mosul some hope for their future. If you think you can spare anything, please head onto bookaid.org and see how you can help today. For every two pound you give, they can send another book to Mosul's university library. There's also a list of other ways you can help to provide resources, equipment, and even training to bring the gift of the written word back to the place where it first began. For now, goodbye and thanks for listening.