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

wayward material into orderly groupings, thus creating “books”—in actuality, uniform series of tablets—of continuous narrative, episodic and sometimes intergenerational.
    Sometimes too orderly. The Sumerian grouping of the narratives of their kings—the so-called King List—is completely useless to modern historians. These thumbnail sketches of each reign are arranged according to principles of symmetry and numerology to please the eye and ring satisfyingly on the ear, but without the least regard for what may in fact have occurred in Sumerian history. Some of the kings are said to rule for thousands of years, others for mere centuries; and recent studies, comparing these lists with other ancient records, have found that kings whose reigns are listed in sequence were actually contemporaries or near contemporaries, ruling neighboring Sumerian city-states.
    The purposes of a modern historian would indeed have had no meaning in Sumer, for Sumerians—paradoxically, since they invented writing, the instrument that makes historypossible—had no sense of history. The city-states had been founded by gods in time immemorial; and it was the gods who had given theSumerians, “the black-headed people” (as they called themselves), all the tools and weapons and marvelous inventions that
we
know were the products of their own ingenuity. “Development” and “evolution”—words of such importance to us—would have meant little in the timeless culture of Sumer, where everything that was—their city, their fields, their herds, their plows—had always been.
    Even their stories miss a sense of development: they begin in the middle and end in the middle. They lack the relentless necessity that we associate with storytelling, from which we demand a beginning, a middle, an end: a shape. When reading a book or watching a movie that seems to wander without direction, we ask impatiently, “Where is this going?” But all Sumerian stories are shaggy-dog stories, sounding sometimes like the patter of small children who imitate the jokes they have heard from older children without realizing that there has to be a punchline. When perusing Sumerian literature, the modern reader is often left waiting for the punchline. Despite this, the tales of ancient Sumer are full of pleasure for us, both because of their archaic strangeness and because of the occasional mirror-moments in which we are startled to glimpse something of ourselves: an image or emotion that we have in common with this people of the dim past.
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    T heSumerian work that has left the greatest impress on contemporary imagination is the
Epic of Gilgamesh
, the story of a legendary hero who probably flourished toward the middle of the third millennium B.C. as king of Uruk, the very city where writing was likely invented. He may have been of Semitic, rather than Sumerian, stock because, at least according to one translation of the notoriously unreliable King List, Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh’s father and king before him, “was a nomad.” If so, the nomadic minstrels would have had much reason to celebrate his exploits; and Gilgamesh’s kingship would represent an early power grab by the wandering Semitic tribes, who by millennium’s end would wrest power throughout Sumer and establish their languages at the expense of Sumerian. Sumerian, a language for which no cognate tongues have been found, was replaced early in the second millennium by Akkadian (or Old Babylonian) as the
lingua franca
of Mesopotamia, after which Sumerian lived on only as a literary language employed by learned scribes for special documents. But the new Semitic rulers took up not only cuneiform writing but the mythology and beliefs of their Sumerian predecessors in seamless continuity, which is why we have found stories of Gilgamesh not only in Sumerian but in Akkadian and other ancient languages.
    The
Epic
opens on a charming description of ancient Uruk, with the poet acting as tour guide to a