The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels Read Free

their divine right to whatever is valuable, especially the land.
    Thanks to the work of pioneering archaeologists, who have dug up many Sumerian cities during this century and painstakingly translated their abundant clay treasures, there is much we now know of Sumer, the world’s first civilization. Sumerian techniques of farming and husbandry were extraordinarily sophisticated (the Sumerians had two hundred words just for varieties of sheep); their mathematics enabled them to do square roots and cube roots and to calculate accurately the size of a field or a building and to excavate or enlarge a canal. Their medicine was practical, not magical, and their pharmacopoeias prescribed remedies for everything from battle wounds tovenereal disease (called “a disease of the
tun
and the
nu”
—and though the experts tell us they cannot be sure of the meaning of these two words, the layman will have little trouble identifying them).
    We even know much about Sumerian imagination. Manuals of instruction were often written in the name of a god: a manual on farming (a perennial best-seller, since copies of it have turned up everywhere in the Sumerian ruins) claims to be authored by the god Ninurta, “trustworthy farmer of Enlil”—the great god of the Sumerian pantheon. The human farmer is advised to watch carefully over his crop and to take all precautions, both human and superhuman: “After the sprout has broken through the ground” he is to scare off the flying birds, but he is also to pray to Ninkilim, goddess of field mice, so that she will keep her sharp-toothed little subjects away from the growing grain. Even theprocess of brewing (theSumerians were great beer drinkers) had a sponsoring divinity, Ninkasi, a goddess born of “sparkling-fresh water,” whose name means “the lady who fills the mouth.” On this subject the Sumerians would wax poetic: Ninkasi was brewer to the gods themselves, she who “bakes with lofty shovel the sprouted barley,” who “mixes the
bappir-malt
with sweet aromatics,” who “pours the fragrant beer in the
lahtan-vessel
which is like the Tigris and Euphrates joined!”
    We mustn’t take too seriously every mention of the gods in the Sumerian tablets, any more than we take seriously the pious invocation of our own God by today’s public figures. The Sumerians were practical, down-to-earth businessmen, more interested in calculating the extent of their fields and the capacity of their warehouses than they were in anything else. But this does not mean that they had no worldview beyond the steady acquisition of possessions.
    The worldview of a people, though normally left unspoken in the daily business of buying and selling and counting shekels, is to be found in a culture’s stories, myths, and rituals, which, if studied aright, inevitably yield insight into the deepest concerns of a people by unveiling the invisible fears and desires inscribed on human hearts. The stories of Sumer, as resurrected from its plain clay tablets, possess a burnished splendor that cannot but affect contemporary readers, giving us flickering glimpses into the childhood of human imagination. Virtually all the tablets are damaged, leaving us with holes in every narrative. But many of the stories exist in several versions (so that the holes in one version can sometimesbe filled in with passages from another) and even in different languages, allowing us to reconstruct, at least partially, a process of dynamic development that took place over many centuries. For the process of Sumerian storytelling itself we may be partly indebted to the wandering Semitic tribes, who, being illiterate, possessed the inexhaustible narrative memory of illiterate peoples and sometimes earned their keep by telling stories to the settled folk. These tales, whether from nomadic minstrels or from the oral traditions of the city-dwellers themselves, were eventually written down by Sumerian scribes, who did their best to categorize the